Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: 10 Years Of Greatest Aviation Mystery

Travel Edited by Updated: Feb 23, 2024, 4:17 pm
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: 10 Years Of Greatest Aviation Mystery

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: 10 Years Of The Greatest Aviation Mystery (Representative Image)

On March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER of Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which took off at 12:42 am, later vanished from air-traffic control radar screens. There were 239 people on board. The disappearance of flight MH370 still remains modern aviation”s biggest mystery.

The flight disappeared from radar while over the South China Sea. It was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members. The majority of the passengers on board were Chinese, along with 38 Malaysians. According to the Guardian report, the flight approached the end of Malaysian airspace at 1:19 am, and the Malaysian air traffic control radioed to pass the flight off to Ho Chi Minh.  Zaharie Ahmad Shah was the pilot in command, and Fariq Hamid was the first officer on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. It disappeared from radar seconds after it crossed into Vietnamese airspace.

All subsequent attempts to contact the flight failed. “Good night. Malaysian three-seven-zero.” Those words were the last radio transmission from the cockpit of the MH370. Several nations conducted search operations using all the modern technologies they had. However, authorities could not arrive at a conclusion about what happened to flight MH370. In 2018, the search for flight MH370 reportedly ended. According to a CNN report, the initial search was called off in 2017. This came after failing to find any trace of the flight within a 710,000-plus square-kilometer region of the Indian Ocean.

Notably, it was the most expensive search for a missing plane in history. CNN reported that most of the funds were provided by the Malaysian government. The disappearance remains a mystery even after a decade, as there was no Mayday call, no known flight path, and no wreckage. Multiple theories emerged about the disappearance, and they ranged from mechanical failure to pilot suicide.