ON THIS DAY

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March 8, 2014:

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 lost contact and disappeared.

The missing aircraft pictured in December 2011

Flight 370 MH-370 was an international passenger flight operated by Malaysia Airlines flying from Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia to its planned destination, Beijing Capital International Airport in China. The cause of its disappearance has not been determined. It is widely regarded as the greatest mystery in aviation history, and remains the single deadliest case of aircraft disappearance.

The crew of the Boeing 777 last communicated with air traffic control (ATC) around 38 minutes after takeoff when the flight was over the South China Sea. The aircraft was lost from ATC's secondary surveillance radar screens minutes later but was tracked by the Malaysian military's primary radar system for another hour, deviating westward from its planned flight path, crossing the Malay Peninsula and Andaman Sea. It left radar range 200 nautical miles (370 km; 230 mi) northwest of Penang Island in northwestern Peninsular Malaysia.

With all 227 passengers and 12 crew aboard presumed dead, the disappearance of Flight 370 was the deadliest incident involving a Boeing 777, the deadliest of 2014, and the deadliest in Malaysia Airlines' history until it was surpassed in all three regards by Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down by Russian-backed forces while flying over Ukraine four months later on 17 July 2014.

The search for the missing aircraft became the most expensive search in the history of aviation. It focused initially on the South China Sea and Andaman Sea, before analysis of the aircraft's automated communications with an Inmarsat satellite indicated that the plane had travelled far southward over the southern Indian Ocean. Several pieces of debris washed ashore in the western Indian Ocean during 2015 and 2016; many of these were confirmed to have originated from Flight 370.

After a three-year search across 120,000 km2 (46,000 sq mi) of ocean failed to locate the aircraft. A second search launched in January 2018 by private contractor Ocean Infinity also ended without success after six months. It was announced on 26 February 2025 that Ocean Infinity intends to begin searching again.

It has been reported that the plane’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, conducted a simulated flight deep into the remote southern Indian Ocean less than a month before the plane vanished under uncannily similar circumstances. The revelation, which Malaysia withheld from a lengthy public report on the investigation, is the strongest evidence yet that Zaharie made off with the plane in a premeditated act of mass murder-suicide.

MH370 pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

Flight 370's disappearance brought to public attention the limits of aircraft tracking and flight recorders, including the limited battery life of underwater locator beacons (an issue that had been raised about four years earlier following the loss of Air France Flight 447, but had never been resolved). In response to Flight 370's disappearance, the International Civil Aviation Organization adopted new standards for aircraft position reporting over open ocean, extended recording time for cockpit voice recorders, and, starting from 2020, new aircraft designs have been required to have a means of recovering the flight recorders, or the information they contain, before they sink into the water.

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