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How a plane carrying 239 people disappeared off the radar

Home> Vehicles> Plane news

Published 12:07 12 Mar 2024 GMT

How a plane carrying 239 people disappeared off the radar

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared 10 years ago and has never been found.

Prudence Wade

Prudence Wade

A morbid anniversary happened last week, as we passed the 10-year mark since the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, also known as MH370.

The flight was scheduled to go from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to Beijing, China on 8 March 2014, but took a sharp turn and fell off the radar. It never made it to its destination, in circumstances that have remained mysterious ever since.

The last contact anyone had with the plane came 38 minutes into its flight when someone - presumed to be the co-pilot - radioed Kuala Lumpur air traffic control. All he said was: "All right, good night", because the plane was about to pass out of Malaysian air space.

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Anadolu / Contributor / Getty
Anadolu / Contributor / Getty

It was only a couple of minutes later that the plane's transponder stopped responding, and shortly after this, it veered away from its flight plan.

Instead of continuing north to China, it steered way away, heading west over the Strait of Malacca for around an hour before eventually leaving the range of military radar pings.

The plane, which was carrying 239 passengers and crew, was never seen again, and Malaysian officials later said they believed it probably flew for another few hours before eventually crashing into the sea.

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Extensive searches were carried out for the crash site, but the reality is that it's a needle in a huge haystack - particularly as the plane was flying over such a remote region - and the aircraft has never been found.

Pieces of it may have washed up between 2015 and 2016 in various locations, but experts have long debated whether we can be sure they actually came from MH370.

Mohd Samsul Mohd Said / Contributor / Getty
Mohd Samsul Mohd Said / Contributor / Getty

The simple truth is that we may never know what caused the accident - some observers think it could have involved the pilots becoming incapacitated and the plane autopiloting until crashing, while others have alleged that there might have been a hijacking.

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Addressing questions around these points, Dr Hugh Griffiths from the school of engineering at University College London, told Metro.co.uk: "One shouldn’t speculate unduly, but I’d go so far as to say that if you wanted to 'lose' an aircraft, almost certainly what you’d do is wait till you were on the boundary between two air traffic control regions. Then you would switch everything off, and point the aircraft towards the most remote, deepest, unpopulated area that you could".

At this stage, though, we're unlikely to ever know for sure what caused the disappearance of MH370.

Featured Image Credit: MOHD RASFAN / Stringer / Maxiphoto / Getty
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