The question of when Flight 370 went missing seems to be climbing up the search ladder these days. The famous Malaysian plane disappeared into thin air on March 8, 2014.
The missing aircraft was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members. The disappearance of such a large number of people led to a search that stretched from the Indian Ocean west of Australia to Central Asia.
The mind-boggling nature of Flight 370’s loss is such that it has become one of the most famous missing aircraft in history.
Even nine years after his disappearance, people cannot forget the Boeing 777.
The missing flight took off at 00:41 local time and reached a cruising altitude of 10,700 meters (35,000 ft) at 1:01 a.m.
The Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which broadcast aircraft performance data, sent its last transmission at 1:07 a.m. and then shut down.
The crew’s last voice communication occurred at 01:19. At 01:21, the plane’s transponder, communicating with air traffic control, was turned off just as the plane was about to enter Vietnamese airspace over the South China Sea.
At 01:30, Malaysian military and civilian radar began tracking the aircraft as it turned and flew southwest over the Malay Peninsula and northwest across the Strait of Malacca.
At 02:22 Malaysian military radar lost contact with the aircraft over the Andaman Sea. An Inmarsat satellite in geostationary orbit over the Indian Ocean received signals from Flight 370 every hour, last detecting the aircraft at 8:11 a.m.
Initial searches for the aircraft focused on the South China Sea. After it was determined that Flight 370 had turned west shortly after its transponder was turned off, searches continued to the Strait of Malacca and the Andaman Sea.
On March 15, a week after the plane disappeared, the Boeing plane was found to be all over two arcs, one extending from Java south into the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia and the other extending north across Asia from Vietnam to Turkmenistan. .
On March 24, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that an analysis of the latest signals concluded that the flight had crashed in a remote part of the Indian Ocean 2,500 km (1,500 mi) southwest of Australia.
Such a crash reduced the chances of anyone surviving to zero.
After it was concluded that the plane had crashed, a search for the remains began on April 6, 2014. The remote location of the crash site made it difficult to search for wreckage.
The first piece of debris was not found until July 29, 2015, when the right flaperon was discovered on a beach on the French island of Réunion, about 3,700 km (2,300 mi) west of the Indian Ocean.
Over the next year and a half, another 26 pieces of debris were found on the coasts of Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar and Mauritius.
The governments of Malaysia, Australia and China suspended the search for Flight 370 in January 2017.
