On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 carrying 239 people on board was supposed to be flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
It was a route that had been flown thousands of times over the years. For the passengers on board and ground staff at the airport, it appeared to be a normal day.
The flight had taken off and was on track for Beijing. Then suddenly the Boeing 777 disappeared from the radar without issuing any distress calls.
Subsequent evidence suggests MH370 continued flying for another seven hours.
There is no plane, little wreckage, and no answers for the families of the 239 people on board.
A decade on, it has become one of aviation’s biggest mysteries.
So what actually happened to MH370? Where did it disappear to, how did it disappear, and why did it disappear?
We take a look at what we know, the working theories behind its disappearance, and how close authorities are to solving one of the world’s baffling mysteries.
What we know about MH370: Timeline
The flight and disappearance
The aircraft took off at 12.42am on 8 March, and was being flown by Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The flight was going as planned, and at 1.19am, just 37 minutes into the flight, the captain acknowledged an instruction from Malaysian air-traffic controllers to transition to Vietnamese airspace, saying: “Goodnight, Malaysian three-seven-zero.”
Those were the last words heard from the aircraft.
A minute later, controllers in Kuala Lumpur noticed the plane passing a waypoint, “Igari”, about a third of the way from the Malaysian coast to Vietnam. Within seconds, MH370 had disappeared from radar screens.
“He did not read back the assigned frequency, which was inconsistent with radio-telephony procedures,” notes the official investigation report.
Malaysian military radar continued to track the plane, which “almost immediately” turned to the left until it was travelling south-west, the opposite direction from its destination in Beijing.
One hour and 10 minutes into the flight, First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid’s cellphone registered with a cell tower below, though no other data was transmitted. Flight 370 then turned towards northwest along the Strait of Malacca.
Transmissions of data pinged to satellites intermittently until 8.19am, a whole seven hours after the last verbal interaction between the pilot and the control centre.
Those pings picked up were two hours after it was scheduled to land in Beijing.
The aircraft was officially logged as missing.
What authorities do know after weeks of analysis following the disappearance is that radar tracking showed the jet had changed course to fly west over the South East Asia peninsula before suddenly turning south over the Indian Ocean.
The official search for MH370
In the hours and days after its disappearance, an official search for MH370 was undertaken.
The official search area for MH370 was 190km radius from its last known position, south of Thổ Chu Island, Thailand, north of Malaysia and south east of Vietnam in the South China Sea.
The area being examined then extended to the Strait of Malacca along the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, with waters both to the east of Malaysia in the Gulf of Thailand, and in the Strait of Malacca along Malaysia’s west coast, being searched.
Numerous sightings of possible debris were made, but no debris from Flight 370 was discovered.
Offshore oil slicks near Vietnam also tested negative for aviation fuel.
In mid-March 2014, Malaysian officials announced that an unidentified aircraft, possibly Flight 370, was last located by military radar at 2.15 in the Andaman Sea, 320km northwest of Penang Island and near the limits of the military radar’s coverage.
Nothing was ever found to be linked to MH370.
Efforts then shifted to the southern Indian Ocean, west of Australia, where they searched thousands of kilometres of ocean.
They conducted surface, underwater locator beacon, and seafloor sonar survey searches. Nothing of relevance was found until debris washed ashore on Africa and tiny islands in the Indian Ocean in 2015.
Fragments of MH370 wreckage found
The first definitive fragments of MH370 wreckage were discovered in July 2015 by searchers scouring the Indian Ocean.
Searchers confirmed three pieces as certainly from the plane, which included the wing flap found in Tanzania in June 2015, a plane wing fragment found in Mauritius, and the flaperon found on Reunion Island.
Other pieces of fragments were also discovered between 2015 and 2016 that were deemed highly likely to have come from MH370.
These included a cabin interior panel in Madagascar, an engine cowling in South Africa, a main cabin interior panel in Mauritius, and a horizontal stabaliser and flap track fairing on beaches in Mozambique.
While some parts were confirmed to be from flight MH370, the plane’s wreckage has yet to be found.
Attention has since turned to why and how it disappeared.
Kiwi father Paul Weeks missing on MH370: Widow speaks out
One of the passengers on board the fateful flight was 37-year-old Kiwi father of two, Paul Weeks.
He was travelling to Mongolia to start a new job as a mechanical engineer when the plane went missing.
His wife Danica was left to raise the couple’s sons Lincoln, 3 at the time, and Jackson, 1.
He was one of two Kiwis on the flight -- the other was Ximin Wang, 50, from Auckland.
Eight years after MH370 disappeared, Weeks’ wife Danica spoke out claiming she believed the incident was murder and not a mechanical fault, which was one of the working theories at the time.
Danica, who has now remarried, said the turning point was analysis from British aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey published late last year.
“I was so staunch about saying it wasn’t the pilot,” she told Sky News.
“But now I have to throw all of that out after nearly eight years (since the disappearance) and three years of searching (for the plane, by the authorities).
“I never believed it was the pilot. Unfortunately, Richard Godfrey has said that he believes with this point that the pilot was in control. And look, it makes sense that we’ve searched for a ghost plane, haven’t found it. So maybe we have to step forward and … search on that basis now.”
Theories on what happened to MH370
Experts were “unable to determine the real cause for the disappearance”, according to a final commission report and the crash location was never confirmed, although parts have washed ashore, mainly on Madagascar.
Since the disappearance, a number of theories have been detailed by authorities and aviation experts, including hijacking, murder-suicide and uncontrolled decompression.
Theory on how it crashed: MH370 slammed into the Indian Ocean
The piece of debris discovered by a Madagascan fisherman suggests whoever was flying the plane purposely tried to destroy the aircraft and sink it with all the passengers on board.
A report published by British engineer Richard Godfrey and self-described American MH370 wreckage hunter Blaine Gibson suggests the washed-up landing gear door was probably penetrated from the inside by the plane’s engines disintegrating on impact.
It makes it highly likely the landing gear was down when the aircraft crashed into the Indian Ocean.
Godfrey and Gibson suggested the airliner crashed quickly and deliberately.
“The fact that the damage was from the interior side to the exterior side ... leads to the conclusion that the landing gear was highly extended on impact, which in turn supports the conclusion that there was an active pilot until the end of the flight,” the report reads.
It added: “The level of damage with fractures on all sides and the extreme force of the penetration right through the debris item leads to the conclusion that the end of the flight was in a high-speed dive designed to ensure the aircraft broke up into as many pieces as possible.
“The crash of MH370 was anything but a soft landing on the ocean.”
They determined the combination of the high-speed impact designed to break the aircraft into multiple pieces and the extended landing gear designed to sink the plane as quickly as possible shows a “clear intent to hide the evidence of the crash”.
Pilots don’t often lower the undercarriage if they need to perform an emergency landing on water. This points authorities into believing it wasn’t an emergency landing gone wrong.
Why it crashed: Mass murder/suicide by pilot
The most high-profile theory is that 53-year-old pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah deliberately crashed the plane.
Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott revealed the “highest levels” of the Malaysian government believed from “very early on” that the MH370 tragedy was a murder-suicide plot.
“My understanding – my very clear understanding – from the very top levels of the Malaysian government is that from very, very early on here they thought it was a murder-suicide by the pilot,” Abbott told Sky News’ MH370: The Untold Story.
“I’m not going to say who said what to whom. But let me reiterate, I want to be absolutely crystal clear, it was understood at the highest levels that this was almost certainly murder-suicide by the pilot.”
This was backed by a report in 2016 that claimed Shah had conducted an exercise on his home flight simulator less than a month before the ill-fated flight that closely matched the path MH37 would take through the Indian Ocean.
This theory was also the conclusion of the first independent study into the disaster by the New Zealand-based air accident investigator, Ewan Wilson.
The Atlantic reported that friends of Shah also said he was “lonely and sad” and suffering from depression in the lead-up to the flight.
He also had reportedly split from his wife Fizah Khan.
Captain Shah was also enraged after his relative Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s opposition leader at the time of the crash in 2014, was convicted of sodomy the day before MH370 disappeared.
Shah was reportedly an avid supporter of Ibrahim, and the pilot’s Facebook account was also labelled a “treasure trove” of political activity and anti-government sentiment.
Leading aviation safety investigator and retired pilot John Cox also said the demise of MH370 was no accident.
Author and journalist Ean Higgins agreed, stating Shah had enough motivation if he wanted to take “drastic action”.
So how did Shah allegedly carry out the alleged mass murder?
A working theory is that he locked his co-pilot out of the cockpit, closed down all communications, depressurised the main cabin, causing passengers on board to die from a lack of oxygen, and disabled the aircraft so it would continue flying until it ran out of petrol.
Catastrophic systems failure caused the plane to crash land in the ocean
One theory is that a catastrophic event such as a fire disabling much of the equipment on board resulted in the pilots turning the plane back towards the Malaysian peninsula in the hope of landing at the nearest airport.
The plane did make a sudden U-turn, a manoeuvre the pilot would not normally make on a routine flight unless confronted with a sudden and desperate emergency.
A fire in a similar aircraft parked at Cairo Airport in 2011 was caused by an issue with the first officer’s oxygen mask tubing.
Law firm Stewarts Law, which has litigated in a series of air disasters, believes the plane crashed after a fire - similar to the blaze on the Cairo airport runway - broke out in the cockpit.
MH370 was hijacked
One theory is that another pilot or passenger hijacked the plane with the intention of landing it before escaping.
However, the belief is that the plan failed and they suffered hypoxia following decompression and died along with the rest of the people on board.
Unofficial researchers identified more than 600 possible runways at which the plane was capable of landing.
The plane’s co-pilot was First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid, who, at 27, was relatively inexperienced, and MH370 was his final training flight.
However, it is not believed he had any motive to down the plane.
Uncontrolled decompression caused all on board to pass out before crash
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said an unresponsive crew or hypoxia event was more likely than an in-flight upset (for example, a stall) or a glide event such as engine failure of fuel exhaustion.
At the time they said an uncontrolled drop in cabin pressure from human error or structural failure could have led to the crew becoming unresponsive, or even dying from hypoxia.
They indicated this theory “best fits” the evidence for the five-hour period in which the plane flew over the Indian Ocean without any communication or wild deviation.
Despite this, experts have not been able to come to a consensus on this theory.
MH370 was shot down
The theory that MH370 was shot down originated from American political commentator Rush Limbaugh, according to CNN.
Others threw weight behind the claim, citing previous events where civilian aircraft had been shot down by military forces.
Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down by the United States in 1988, and KAL 007 by the Soviet Union in 1983.
However, there is no evidence MH370 was shot down.
A Malaysian defence official, Ackbal bin Haji Abdul Samad, said it was “highly not possible” that his country’s air force had shot down the plane.
On December 22, 2014 the former head of Proteus Airlines, Marc Dugain, claimed the plane may have been shot down by US military personnel out of fear of an attack similar to the September 11 attacks on their Navy Base in Diego Garcia.
Other wild MH370 theories
Some other theories include North Korea hijacking the plane and taking it back to the hermit nation because Kim Jong-un wanted it for experimentation, while others speculated a new Bermuda Triangle in Vietnamese waters is to blame.
Desperate family members of missing passengers also reported being able to ring the mobile phones of their loved ones days after the plane had disappeared.
It led to speculation they were still alive somewhere.
It was claimed that some were able to find their relatives on a Chinese instant messenger service, suggesting their phones were still online.
So-called phantom calls led many to assume the flight had not crashed.
However, it was debunked by tech experts who explained that phones that had been switched off don’t always go straight to voicemail, saying it changed depending on the network and location.
10 years on: What is next in the hunt for MH370?
As the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of MH370 passes, authorities have said they’re open to resuming a search for the missing plane.
The Malaysian Government revealed they have recently been approached by US-based marine robotics company Ocean Infinity, who have made a “credible” search proposal.
Malaysian transport minister Anthony Loke revealed the proposal involves a no-find, no-fee offer, meaning it won’t cost Malaysia a cent if nothing is found.
“Meaningful changes have been made to prevent a repeat of this tragedy, but I am also clearly aware that the task remains incomplete,” Loke said, adding that officials will “do everything possible to solve this mystery once and for all”.
“The Ministry of Transport are ready to invite Ocean Infinity to Malaysia to discuss the proposal of a no-find, no-fee proposal,” Loke continued. “We are waiting for Ocean Infinity to provide the suitable dates, and I will meet them any time that they are ready to come to Malaysia.”
Ocean Infinity didn’t reveal whether it has any new information related to the decade-long mystery, but is prepared to take on the task.
“Finding MH370 and bringing some resolution for all connected with the loss of the aircraft has been a constant in our minds since we left the southern Indian Ocean in 2018,” CEO Oliver Plunkett said.
“Since then, we have focused on driving the transformation of operations at sea; innovating with technology and robotics to further advance our ocean search capabilities.
“This search is arguably the most challenging, and indeed pertinent one out there. We’ve been working with many experts, some outside of Ocean Infinity, to continue analysing the data in the hope of narrowing the search area down to one in which success becomes potentially achievable.”
Loke declined to reveal the fee proposed by Ocean Infinity if it finds the plane, as this is subject to negotiation. He said financial cost is not an issue and that he doesn’t foresee any hindrances for the search to proceed if all goes well.
A new search, with new advances in technology, could provide family members of those on board much-needed closure.
“I’m on top of the world,” Jacquita Gomes, whose flight attendant husband was on the plane, said about the announcement at the anniversary event, according to The Independent.
“We have been on a roller coaster for the last 10 years. ... If it is not found, I hope that it will continue with another search.”
