Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Origin Story

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 departed Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people aboard. At 01:21 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.

Evidence & Claims

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 08:19 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.

Skeptical Explanations

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.