The Vanishing of Malaysian Flight 370 – What Really Happened
It’s March 8th, 2014, almost 12:20 AM. 25-year-old Firman Chandra Siregar stands in the bustling terminal of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, clutching the boarding pass for Malaysian Flight 370. As he bids farewell to his mother, he embarks on a flight to Beijing where a new job awaits him.
Little does he know that he is joining another 226 passengers and 12 crew members in what will be known as aviation’s greatest disappearance mystery.
The Malaysian Flight 370: will we ever find out what really happened?
The clock slowly moves towards 12:40 AM Malaysian local time.
The Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 is going through its final checks before taking off. The 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board are preparing for what should be a routine, night flight to Beijing. They are expected to land in China’s capital at 06:30 local time.
Commanding the aircraft is seasoned 53-year-old father of three, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, with 27-year-old Fariq Hamid Ahmad, who has just qualified to co-pilot the 777.
At 12:41 AM local time, the Boeing 777-200 lifts off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The night sky is clear, and every tracking system is up and running.
According to its flight plan, the plane is set to travel northeast, passing over the Malaysian Peninsula before continuing above the South China Sea.
01:01 – 01:19 AM: Nothing unusual
By 01:01 AM, the aircraft settles into its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet (or 10,700 meters). Pilots and cabin crew go through their usual checks, as Captain Zaharie makes its routine report to air traffic support:
“Malaysian 370, maintaining level 350”
Back in the cabin, the passengers drift off, watching their favorite shows, preparing for a long night flight.
What they are not aware of is that at 01:07, the Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) sends its last transmission.
ACARS is the aircraft’s onboard computer that collects and sends loads of data about the plane and pilot’s performance to the airline , engine manufacturer, and other authorized parties, via satellite.
Tonight, it has mysteriously stopped working.
You see, turning off the ACARS using the “usual switch” sends a message to the ground saying it has been turned off intentionally. No such message happened that night.
So, the person who turned it off knew this. They had to first cut off the electrical generators powering a series of aircraft systems, including the satcom. Then, they had to go through the flight computer menu and disable a couple of SATCOM and communication systems.
It’s now 01:19 AM, and the Malaysian traffic control tells Flight 370 to contact the Vietnamese airspace. The cockpit of the 370 responds:
“Good night, Malaysian Flight three seven zero”
Nothing unusual here. This is a standard farewell that the aircraft pilots say to air traffic control, as they leave Malaysian space and enter Vietnamese airspace.
However, this was the last we’ve ever heard of the Malaysian Flight 370.
01:19 AM – 02:00 AM: Something is amiss with Malaysian Flight 370
At 01:19 AM, the plane’s transponder – the device that communicates altitude, speed, and flight number to radar – goes dark. It’s switched off just as Flight 370 crosses into Vietnamese airspace over the South China Sea.
But wait?! How can we be sure that the transponder is switched off, and not malfunctioning?! Well, imagine the transponder switch as a rotating knob that has 3 settings – fully on, altitude off (where plane position is transmitted, but not altitude), and fully off. For a split second, as the switch was rotated from fully on to fully off, it rested on the “altitude off” state, meaning it sent one signal only with position, and zero altitude.
But no one really notices this small detail during that night.
It is now approximately 01:20 AM, and the Boeing 777-200 has just disappeared from air traffic control screens in Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and everywhere else in the world. The triple seven is now just a mere blip with no identity, flying solo on the big dark sky.
The only way the plane can now be detected is through primary radar – which is the most basic type of radio.
Unlike transponder signals which provide identity and other data of the flying object – primary radar simply sends out radio waves and listens for any reflection off an aircraft.
At 01:30 AM military and civilian radars record Flight 370 veering off its planned route — first southwest over the Malay Peninsula, then northwest over the Strait of Malacca.
Civilian radar in Subang loses it altogether somewhere above the Gulf of Thailand.
Where is Malaysian Flight 370 ?
At 01:39, the Vietnamese airspace control center grows worried as Flight 370 hasn’t made contact yet, and they cannot see it on their screen. The controllers reach out to nearby aircrafts, asking if anyone can pick up a signal from the Malaysian Airlines plane—even broadcasting on the international distress frequency. No sign of Flight 370.
They contact Kuala Lumpur’s flight control center to ask if the plane has turned back. Malaysian controllers confirm that it has not.
Both Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace flight controllers intensify their attempts to establish radio contact with the missing plane. But that’s a little too late, don’t you think?
According to Air Traffic Management documentation, flight controllers are supposed to report if an airplane takes more than 5 minutes to make contact. They surely did not abide by those rules that night. At around 02:00 AM, the Kuala Lumpur flight control center telephones Malaysian Airlines telling them that they could not make contact with their airplane.
02:00 – 03:30 AM: Where did it go?
Unknown to them, at 02:15 AM, Malaysian military radars briefly detect Flight 370 over the small island of Perak in the Strait of Malacca—now hundreds of miles off-course.
The Malaysian military radar then loses contact with the plane over the Andaman Sea.
But when the Malaysian Airlines staff check their tracking map, they see Flight MH370 drifting over Cambodia airspace. So they send an ACARS text message to the cockpit of Flight 370, urging them to report back to Ho Chi Ming.
After firing off an ACARS, the Malaysian Airlines staff expect a prompt response or a brief acknowledgement that everything is fine. Yet, moments tick by without a reply, and the worry deepens, as the mystery around Flight MH370 only grows.
Everyone is confused. Malaysian Airlines operation staff tell Kuala Lumpur control that Flight 370 is in Cambodian airspace, but according to Vietnamese controllers, Flight 370 is not supposed to enter Cambodian airspace, it’s supposed to fly over Vietnam. Moreover, Cambodian flight controllers cannot find any sign of Flight 370 on their radar.
So where is this plane? Is it over Cambodia, Vietnam or Malaysia? Nobody knows, and as minutes tick by, the situation becomes more and more serious.
Flight 370 is thousands of miles away
In the meantime, somewhere over the Indian Ocean, and far above the Earth – a British-made satellite operated by a company named Inmarsat- silently watches over the world, hovering in a geostationary orbit. This means that the satellite travels in sync with the Earth’s rotation to gather data of aircrafts passing underneath.
On this particular night, the satellite makes multiple handshakes with Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, from 02:25 onwards. Even though the Boeing 777 has vanished from civilian radar, its satellite link is still active. So, every time the Inmarsat satellite pings, the plane’s system answers back with a tiny burst of data.
Meanwhile, some 2,500 miles to the northeast, back in the Malaysia Airlines operations center in Kuala Lumpur, there’s a weird kind of confusion and urgency. The staff stare at their monitors, unable to fathom how a Boeing 777 – equipped with modern tracking systems – can simply vanish.
Phone lines buzz, radar data is checked over and over again, as anxious voices fill the room. At 02:38, they send another ACARS message, and another, but no answer from the cockpit. What can possibly happen to the triple 7? Did it experience a massive electrical failure and it’s flying blindly over Southeast Asia, or maybe it landed somewhere in Cambodia?
Finally, they decide to call the plane over the Satcom, but no one answers. They are still trying to locate the plane over Cambodia, having no idea that Flight 370 is currently flying over the big, vast Indian Ocean, in the opposite direction.
03:30 – 06:30 AM: Alarming confusion
At around 03:30 AM Malaysian Airlines realize that the position updates they are getting from their tracking systems are merely some projections of where the flight might be, and not live position updates.
Their tracking system was just calculating where Flight 370 could be based on its last confirmed position – which was over the South China Sea- and since it had no fresh data from the aircraft, the software just continued calculating the flight position along the same path, suggesting the plane is over Cambodian airspace.
Meanwhile, unknown to them, their missing plane is now making another handshake with the Inmarsat satellite, high above the Indian Ocean.
Back at Malaysian Airlines headquarters, they call the Chinese air traffic controllers, hoping that the plane is still on its route, but it has suffered some major communication or electrical failures. By this point, Flight 370 should be in Chinese airspace. But the Chinese counterparts can’t find it either.
It’s now 03:45 AM, and they declare “code red” – which is like sounding the alarm that Flight 370 has vanished under highly unusual circumstances.
Over the next hours, Malaysian Airlines keep trying to make contact with the missing plane, but to no avail.
Hours tick by, the sun begins to rise, and it is now 06:30, the time the MH370 is supposed to touch down in Beijing.
06:30 – 07:30 AM: Malaysian Flight 370 is delayed
In Beijing, families and friends gather at the arrival gate, waiting for the familiar faces to appear through the gates. Yet, the flight information board remains stuck on “Delayed”, offering no explanation.
Unknown to the families and friends waiting at the airport, search and rescue teams spread out across the South China Sea, expecting to find the wreckage of a downed Boeing 777. Little do they know that the aircraft is still up in the air, only thousands of miles to the south.
At 07:13 AM, Malaysia Airlines make another satellite phone call to the cockpit of Flight 370, but the line remains silent.
Finally, at 07:24 AM local time, Malaysia Airlines publicly announces the disappearance of Flight 370. They vow to work hand in hand with search and rescue teams and authorities to trace the missing Triple-7.
The news break out around the world
It is a little after 07:00 in Kuala Lumpur, as Herlina Panjaitan sips her morning coffee.
She expects a call from her son, the 25-year-old Firman Chandra Siregar, who left for Beijing the night before. Usually, he’s quick to let her know he’s landed safely. But this morning, the phone is silent. Slightly worried, Herlina starts her day, doing the morning chores around the house.
Finally, the phone rings, but it’s her daughter’s voice coming from halfway across the world in Mexico. She works at the Indonesian embassy and has just heard the news – Flight MH370 has lost contact with air traffic control and it’s nowhere to be found.
Alarmed, Panjaitan wastes no time. She rushes to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, where crowds of worried relatives from all over Malaysia gather, demanding information. Airline officials brace themselves to deliver the only fact they have – the plane is missing.
Imagine being in Panjaitan’s shoes. You kissed your son goodbye the night before. He was excited, going to Beijing to start a new job. Then the next morning, you wake up with a phone call telling you the plane your son was on just disappeared. How can a Boeing 777-200, a 210-ft long modern airliner just go missing? Just how?
Desperate, Panjaitan dials her son’s mobile phone again and again. One time, the line rings – but no one answers.
07:30 – 08:20 AM: Malaysian Flight 370 is still in the air
Whether Herlina Panjaitan was just dreaming when hearing her son’s phone ringing, or she was telling the truth, we will never know. However, what we now know for sure is that at 08:00 AM, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 was still in the air, making its way south over the Indian Ocean.
At 08:19 AM, the Inmarsat satellite made its last handshake with the airplane deep into the Southern Indian Ocean, but no one knew that on March 8th 2014.
8-14th March: The Search begins
And so begins one of the most expensive search efforts in aviation history.
From 8th to 9th March, dozens of ships and aircraft from several nations around the world, including Malaysia, Vietnam, China and the United States, started combing the waters of the South China Sea, near the Gulf of Thailand, since this was the last known position of the aircraft before it had gone dark.
On 12th March, finally, the Malaysian military disclosed information about Flight 370.
Their military radar records showed that, within minutes of Flight MH370 losing contact with the ground, the aircraft veered off its northeast track, crossed back over the Malaysian peninsula, then executed another turn near the Island of Penang, and continued northwest until it slipped beyond radar coverage somewhere over the Strait of Malacca.
So the search widened in that direction.
Asleep at the wheel?
One might ask – why didn’t the Malaysian military intercept this unidentified object flying across their airspace in the dead of night? Was no one watching the radars on that fateful night?
Part of the answer lies in how military radars are often used. During peacetime, a country’s air defense might not be running at full vigilance unless there’s reason to believe a threat is imminent. The Malaysian military might have seen an unexpected “blip” on their radars, but assumed it was a civilian flight on an unusual route – especially if no hostile action had been reported that day/week, and the aircraft was flying at a cruising altitude and speed typical of commercial planes.
Curiously enough, it seems as if Flight 370 purposely navigated on the boundary between Thai and Malaysian airspace that night, like someone was trying to pass unnoticed thinking that radar operators on each side may believe the other nation was tracking it.
Coming back to the search efforts, by 14th March, satellite data and preliminary analysis fuel speculations that the plane should be anywhere around the Strait of Malacca, the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal.
15 – 24th March: The Inmarsat Data is Revealed
A week into the search, not much is known about the mysterious disappearance of the Triple-7. While families wait in tense silence, Malaysian authorities – together with international agencies – start looking at all available satellite communication records.
That’s when they reach out to Inmarsat, the British satellite communications company whose geostationary satellite covered the region where military radars lost Flight 370.
Investigators find that not long after Flight MH370 slips off civilian radar, the aircraft’s SATCOM link drops off the grid, only to re-establish itself at around 02:25 AM. This reactivation suggests that power to the satcom unit was restored, or it was manually turned on. At that time, radar data indicates the plane was over or near the Strait of Malacca, not yet far out over the southern Indian Ocean.
The handshakes that the MH370 starts sending out hourly to the high-altitude Inmarsat satellite aren’t voice transmissions or full data packets; they’re more like digital nudges, confirming the system is powered and searching for a signal.
Each handshake carried a timestamp. As the engineers studied these pings, they noticed something remarkable. The time delays gave them a rough measure of distance—the longer the echo took, the further away the plane must be.
Moreover, each ping bore a slight shift in frequency. This change told them the plane was moving toward the south, into a remote and unforgiving stretch of the Indian Ocean.
Without those satellite handshakes, the disappearance of Flight 370 would have been an even greater mystery, with virtually no clues pointing to the southern Indian Ocean.
More official news about Flight 370 come out
On 24th March, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak officially announced that Flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean, far off the western coast of Australia, in a location so remote that survival was extremely unlikely.
Protests and demands for answers erupt in Beijing and Kuala Lumpur from the families of those onboard.
Late March – December 2014: Australian government takes over
The search grid moves to roughly 2,500 km (1,500 mi) southwest of Perth, Australia, and the mission officially transitions from search and rescue to search and recovery, acknowledging the likelihood of no survivors.
In early April, search efforts focused on monitoring the ocean bed for any acoustic signals that could beacon from MH370’s underwater location. They picked up several faint pings that they believed were from the aircraft’s flight recorder.
Excited, they launched robotic submarines to search the ocean’s floor, hoping they could recover debris from the source of the pings. However, the submarines found no debris, and the pings were later found to be from a faulty cable.
In June 2014, Australian authorities released a preliminary report suggesting that MH370 may have flown on autopilot after a catastrophic event incapacitated the crew – possibly an oxygen starvation.
2015 – The first physical evidence surfaces
In July 2015, a right-wing flaperon washes ashore The Reunion Island, east of Madagascar. Investigators confirm it belongs to a Boeing 777, and later they verify it’s from Flight 370. In the following months, France conducts an air and sea sweep around Reunion, but no additional MH370 items are found.
2016-2017: Further debris from Malaysian Flight 370
Further debris turn up along the coastlines of Mozambique, Tanzania, South Africa, Madagascar and Mauritius, adding up to a total of 27 fragments. Out of these 27, 17 are considered “likely” from MH370, with only 3 confirmed beyond doubt.
Some of these pieces are from the cabin interior, showing without a doubt that the plane broke apart on impact.
A report from New York magazine reveals that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah has used his personal flight simulator at home to practice a route over the southern Indian Ocean less than a month before the MH370’s flight – a detail that led many people to believe the disappearance was a grim suicide.
On January 2017, after scouring over 120,000 square km (46, 000 square miles) of seabed at a cost of $150 million, officials from Malaysia, China, and Australia suspend the search, stating that they will only resume it if “new evidence” emerges.
2018: Final report
In July 2018, authorities issued their final investigation report on the Flight 370 disappearance. They report “mechanical failure” as extremely unlikely, as the flight path was almost certainly the result of manual inputs – suggesting possible foul play from the captain or First officer.
So what exactly happened to Malaysian Flight 370
Speculation has run wild from theories of hijacking to the disturbing possibility of pilot suicide. While some argue that a technical failure left the plane drifting on autopilot, the data tells a different tale – the airline was deliberately steered off its flight plan by manual input.
Whispers of hijacking, terrorist involvement or even someone remote-controlling the airplane are fueled by the fact that someone with access to the cockpit intentionally switched off the ACARS and transponders. Yet no terrorist group has ever claimed responsibility for the incident.
There’s also the idea that the plane could have been intercepted and shot down by military forces, but that couldn’t have gone unnoticed – missile damage or shrapnel should have been found.
And then some suggest that the crew were incapacitated by a sudden depressurization of the cabin….While it does carry some weight, this theory crumbles when you consider that the communication systems were turned off manually and the aircraft veered off course under deliberate control.
All roads seem to point to one grim possibility – a calculated act of one of the pilots. But investigators did not find anything unusual about Captain Zaharie Ahman Shah – a 53-year-old father of three – except one intriguing detail – he had practiced the same flight on his home simulator a few weeks before the incident. Could he have incapacitated his co-pilot and crew by deliberately depressurizing the cabin, then flown the plane deep into the Indian Ocean territory, leaving it on autopilot until it ran out of fuel, knowing that the search teams would never find it in the vast, remote waters? And if so, what motive could drive such an act?
Perhaps we’ll finally find out, as the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is set to resume in 2025, more than 11 years after that fateful night.