Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

On March 8, 2014, a Malaysia Airlines flight seemingly disappeared in mid-air, and still has not been found. The plane was traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members. The flight had 14 nationalities of people with the oldest person on the flight being 76 and the youngest only 23 months old, and four people had missed the flight. Two pilots flew the plane, the captain being Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who was 53 years old, and who had been flying with Malaysian airlines since 1981.

The plane departed at 12:40 a.m. from Kuala Lumpur and was due to land at 6:40 a.m. in Beijing. The plane was due to fly north over the Gulf of Thailand and Vietnam. A flight of this duration would require 82,000 pounds of jet fuel, however, MH370 had 108,000 pounds, enough to get them 2 more hours of flight. At 1:20 a.m., captain Shah made the last ever transmission from this flight stating, "Goodnight Malaysian 3-7-0." A few minutes after this transmission, the plane shut everything down, and this was recorded as the time that the plane disappeared. After this, the plane made a turn abnormal to its original route, and headed west. It flew across the peninsula Malaysia turning south of Penang and then headed towards the Indian ocean. The plane then sent out a final automated satellite communication at 8:00 a.m. What this proves is that the flight was in the air about 7 1/2 hours after it departed.

It is believed that this is when the plane crashed into the deep southern Indian ocean, however, many theories and much evidence suggest otherwise. To start off the poor handling of the situation, Vietnamese air traffic controllers failed to question the disappearance for 12 minutes after the last ping was sent out. Then, it took 5 hours and 13 minutes after the planes last communication for Kuala Lumpur send out their first distress signal-and another 5 hours after that for search flights to go and look for the missing plane.

After this, officials from the Malaysian Airlines and the government were all very suspicious and unhelpful to those wondering about their loved ones. The airlines released false information regarding the flight and military air traffic controllers "apparently" saw the flight off course, and did not report it. A search and rescue mission was launched in Southeast Asia soon after the plane's disappearance, and a week later the search was moved to the southern Indian ocean, which surmounted to the largest aviation search in history. 19 vessels and 345 military aircraft units were searching 45 million kilometers squared radius. Also searched was about 1,800 kilometers of the seafloor off of Perth, Australia.

By March 30, the Australian government had launched the "Joint Agency Coordination Center" which included Chinese, Australian and Malaysian governments, in hopes of finding MH370. In January of 2015, the Malaysian government released an official statement declaring the disappearance an accident, and then in January of 2017, the official search for the flight had stopped with nothing to show for it besides a few pieces of debris confirmed to be from the flight, off of the coast of South Africa. In January of 2018, a private U.S. company "Ocean Infinity" decided to perform their own search which concluded on June 9, also with nothing to be found.

As for the black box, an indestructible object on each plane that is responsible for flight data, recordings, and location pings, should have been sending out pulses, every second, for thirty days after a potential crash, but instead, was never found or recorded to have been used in the search for Malaysian Airlines flight 370.

Some background into some "theories" includes the idea that this disappearance was deliberately carried out by captain Shah, who less than a month before the crash, had practiced the route on his at-home flight simulator, and recordings of the unexpected change of flight route were found in his computer data, along with other flights with unexpected and irregular outcomes than planned. This was not regarded as typical use of the flight simulators, and therefore, suspicious. Penang, Shah's hometown, was also where the flight was recorded to hover around briefly before its disappearance, and it is believed that he flew over it one last time before ultimately deciding to take the plane down. A few weeks before the flight, Shah also was recorded as behaving differently with his family and causing a rupture in his marriage; a possible cause or "want" to crash the plane.

Another important factor that goes into the mystery of Malaysian flight 370 is the people who were on the plane, and potentially why they would need to disappear. Reported to be on the plane, but kept secret and unknown with very little trackable information to the public includes highly-ranked officials from foreign countries that were in possession of top-secret and "life-changing" information that leaders of other countries did not want to get out, and therefore, planned to crash the plane, leaving all the other passengers merely as collateral damage. This likely scenario has been covered up and hidden from the public eye to hide the harm that these governments imposed on innocent civilians, but overall, comes with groundbreaking evidence that the MH370 disappearance was planned. Some sources have even reported that remains of the flight have been found on the islands of Madagascar, but then again, the debris was ignored, covered up, and not mentioned to majority of the public. Heavy research and inside sources hold the answer to this mystery, but the likeliness of families ever getting their deserved answers is slim.