Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
A wing flaperon that came ashore on Réunion in July 2015 was matched by serial number to 9M-MRO, the aircraft that left Kuala Lumpur on March 8, 2014, with 239 people aboard. Around 20 more fragments washed up around the western Indian Ocean through 2017. The main wreckage has never been located.
Field Guide Entry
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 departed Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people aboard. At 1:21am local time, while over the South China Sea, the aircraft's transponder stopped transmitting. Military radar later showed the Boeing 777 had turned sharply west, crossing back over the Malay Peninsula and out over the Andaman Sea before disappearing from radar range entirely roughly 250 nautical miles northwest of Penang.
Although radar and voice contact were lost, automated satellite "handshake" pings from the aircraft's systems continued for nearly seven more hours, with the final signal logged at 8:19am local time. Investigators used these pings to calculate a curved "seventh arc" of possible end points across the southern Indian Ocean. A wing component, a flaperon, recovered on Réunion Island in July 2015 was confirmed by serial number to be from the missing aircraft, registration 9M-MRO, and roughly twenty more debris fragments washed up on western Indian Ocean and African shores through 2017, but no wreckage site has ever been located.
Australia's official search agency concluded its analysis pointed to an unpiloted aircraft flying on autopilot until fuel exhaustion, consistent with an incapacitated crew rather than a deliberate landing, though Malaysian, Australian, and Chinese investigators never reached a final, agreed cause. A 2017 drift-pattern study by Australia's national science agency, CSIRO, identified a specific point along the seventh arc, just outside the original search zone, as the most probable crash location, but a search there has never definitively recovered the main wreckage, leaving the underlying cause of the diversion itself unresolved.
Visiting Information
There is no site. The map pin marks a representative point in the southern Indian Ocean, and the search area lies far offshore in some of the deepest water on the planet.
Confirmed debris came ashore on Réunion, Mozambique, Madagascar, Tanzania, and South Africa. The recovered pieces are held by investigators rather than displayed anywhere.
For anyone reading this because they are connected to it, the primary record is the Malaysian investigation team's safety report and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's search reports, both published in full and both freely available.
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