A decade ago on March 8, a Malaysia Airlines flight vanished without a trace, becoming one of aviation’s biggest mysteries.
Investigators still do not know exactly what happened to the plane and its 239 passengers. But Malaysia’s government said Sunday it may renew the hunt for MH370 after an American marine robotics company that tried to find the plane in 2018 proposed a fresh search.
A massive multinational search in the southern Indian Ocean, where the jet is believed to have crashed, found nothing. Apart from some small fragments that later washed ashore, no bodies or wreckage have ever been found.
Here’s what we know about the deadly aviation tragedy.
The Boeing 777 plane disappeared from air control radar 39 minutes after leaving Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing on March 8, 2014.
The pilot sent a last radio call to Kuala Lumpur before leaving Malaysia — “Good Night Malaysian Three Seven Zero” — but failed to check in with air traffic controllers in Ho Chi Minh City when the plane crossed into Vietnam’s airspace.
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Minutes later, the plane’s transponder — a communication system that transmits the plane’s location to air traffic control — shut down. Military radar saw the plane turn around to travel over the Andaman Sea before it vanished, and satellite data showed it continued to fly for hours, possibly until it ran out of fuel. The plane is believed to have crashed in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean.
Theories about what happened on board range from hijacking to a loss of oxygen in the cabin to power failure. But there was no distress call, no ransom demand, nor bad weather or evidence of technical failures. Malaysian safety investigators cleared all on board in a 2018 report, but didn’t rule out “unlawful interference.”
Malaysia’s government has said that someone intentionally severed communications with the ground and diverted the plane.
Continue here: AP
