What happened
Just after midnight local time on March 8, 2014, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 227 passengers and 12 crew members. Less than an hour later, over the South China Sea, it disappeared from air traffic control screens. Military radar, however, tracked the plane as it turned back, crossed the Malay Peninsula, and flew out over the Andaman Sea, where at 2:22 a.m. it passed out of range. Analysis of automatic signals exchanged with an Inmarsat satellite indicated that the aircraft continued flying south for several more hours, over the southern Indian Ocean. Since 2015, pieces of the aircraft have been found on the shores of Africa and of islands in the Indian Ocean, including a flaperon on Réunion. Successive underwater searches – in 2014–2017, in 2018, and in 2025–2026 – have not located the wreck.
Witnesses
Air traffic controllers and Malaysian military radar operators; the rest of the route was reconstructed from automatic signals received by an Inmarsat satellite.
Explanations and hypotheses
Malaysia’s 2018 final report did not determine the cause of the disaster. Investigators concluded that the turnback was most likely made under manual control, but they identified neither a perpetrator nor a motive and did not rule out interference by a third party. Most experts agree that the plane went down in the sea after running out of fuel, in the area of the so-called seventh arc in the southern Indian Ocean. Without the wreck and the flight recorders, the cause remains unknown, and for the families of the 239 victims the case is still open.
Unexplained There is no convincing explanation.
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