This Plane Took Off Into The Clear Skies But Vanished Into Thin Air After 40 Minutes, And It’s Possible We May Never Know What Happened To The People On Board
On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off into clear skies on a routine trip from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and vanished somewhere over the South China Sea about forty minutes after being in the air.
The plane was carrying 227 passengers and a dozen or so crew members, none of whom were ever seen again. The disappearance of MH370 has been deemed the biggest aviation mystery of all time.
Countless theories about what could’ve happened to the aircraft and all 239 people onboard have emerged over the years. Here’s what we know for sure.
MH370 left Malaysian airspace shortly after one o’clock in the morning. The plane was a Boeing 777, the world’s largest twin-engine jet. The last communication that Malaysian air traffic controllers heard from the pilot was when he said “goodnight” at 1:20.
But somewhere between Malaysia and Vietnam, the plane went electronically dark and disappeared from radar screens. When the plane still hadn’t contacted air traffic controllers in Vietnam by 1:30, another pilot attempted to reach out to them. He claimed that when he did, only “mumbling and static” could be heard.
Authorities scrambled to figure out what had happened to the plane, but as time passed, it became less likely that they would receive any clear answers.
It was not until March 10 that officials came across the first clue regarding the flight’s disappearance. Military radar was able to pick up the plane’s trajectory an hour after they lost communication.
The plane had made a U-turn, flying hundreds of miles off course toward India. This meant that the search zone had widened, and efforts to locate the plane became increasingly complicated.
Fortunately, authorities narrowed the field a bit. MH370 had left radar coverage, but its satellite communications system turned back on. It emitted signals that investigators used to trace the plane’s possible location.
New Visuals – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
After weeks of meticulous calculations, it was determined that the plane’s final resting place was southward, deep in the Indian Ocean. They declared that the flight had no survivors.
No sign of the plane was found even after years of searching. But in 2015, a piece of wing from a Boeing 777 was located on a French island called La Reunion, which was approximately 2,500 miles west of the established search area. The serial numbers on the wing matched Flight 370.
In the following months, multiple small pieces of aircraft surfaced. However, none of them could be confirmed to have come from MH370.
It’s chilling that a state-of-the-art aircraft can just be wiped off the face of the earth. And what’s even more alarming is that experts have failed to find a 200-foot-long vehicle despite having millions of dollars at their disposal.
With the lack of any concrete answers, the public engaged in speculation about it. Some reasoned that the pilot had decided to commit mass murder/suicide by flying the plane into the ocean.
Others thought the plane had been infiltrated by international operatives or shot down to prevent it from reaching China.
Whether the plane fell victim to an alien abduction or entered a portal into another dimension, its disappearance remains a mystery that officials can’t seem to solve. And it’s probable that we may never know the cause.
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