On March 8, 2014 at 12:41 a.m. Malaysia time, Malaysia Airlines flight 370 — a Boeing 777-200ER registered 9M-MRO — left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people on board. Thirty-eight minutes later, the aircraft's transponder went dark over the South China Sea. Military primary radar then tracked an unidentified return making a hard left turn back across the Malay Peninsula, threading the gap between Malaysian and Thai air defense, before heading up the Strait of Malacca. The aircraft's satellite communications terminal made handshakes with Inmarsat's 3-F1 satellite for seven more hours. The final handshake, at 8:19 a.m., placed the aircraft along an arc somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean roughly 1,600 km west-southwest of Perth, Australia. Three years of surface and seabed search across 120,000 square kilometres found nothing. Thirty-three confirmed pieces of debris, beginning with a flaperon that washed ashore on Réunion in July 2015, are the only physical remains. The 2018 Malaysian Annex 13 report concluded that the aircraft was deliberately diverted but could not say by whom or why.
Assassinations & Disappearances
2014
