Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Disappearance - Encyclopedia Britannica

Debris discovery

The first piece of debris was not found until July 29, 2015, when the right wing flaperon was discovered on a beach on the French island of Réunion, about 3,700 km (2,300 miles) west of the Indian Ocean area that was being searched by Australian authorities. Over the next year and a half, 26 more pieces of debris were found on the shores of Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar, and Mauritius. Three of the 27 pieces were positively identified as coming from flight 370, and 17 were thought to have likely come from the plane. Two pieces came from the cabin interior, suggesting that the plane had broken up, but whether the plane broke up in the air or on impact with the ocean could not be determined. Study of the Réunion wing flaperon and a piece of the right wing flap found in Tanzania showed that the plane had not undergone a controlled descent; that is, the plane had not been guided to a water landing. Some researchers note that flight 370 could have struck the water vertically, a possibility in which the results of one modeling study conducted before the flaperon’s discovery suggests could explain the dearth of physical evidence. The debris locations were used to narrow the search area in the Indian Ocean, since some possible crash sites would have been unlikely to produce debris that would have drifted to Africa.

Quick Facts Also called: MH370 disappearance (Show more) Date: March 8, 2014 (Show more) Location: Indian Ocean (Show more) See all related content Britannica Quiz Disasters of Historic Proportion

The governments of Malaysia, Australia, and China called off the search for flight 370 in January 2017. An American company, Ocean Infinity, received permission from the Malaysian government to continue searching until May 2017, when the Malaysian Transport ministry announced that it would call off that search. In July 2018 the Malaysian government issued its final report on flight 370’s disappearance. Mechanical malfunction was deemed extremely unlikely, and “the change in flight path likely resulted from manual inputs,” but the investigators could not determine why flight 370 disappeared.