Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Disappearance - Encyclopedia Britannica

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• Introduction & Top Questions
• Disappearance and search
• Debris discovery
• Theories about the aircraft’s disappearance

References & Edit History Quick Facts & Related Topics Images For Students Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappearance summary Quizzes Disasters of Historic Proportion Related Questions

• What happened to Malaysia Airlines flight 370?
• Did they find Malaysia Airlines flight 370?
• Who were the pilots of Malaysia Airlines flight 370?
• What are some theories about Malaysia Airlines flight 370?
• Why was Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 shot down?

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External Websites

• Australian Broadcasting Corporation - Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Timeline of Events
• LiveScience - Facts About Flight 370: Passengers, Crew and Aircraft
• CBS News - Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished 10 years ago today. What have we learned about what happened?
• CNN - Timeline of MH370 disappearance
• Al Jazeera - Ten years after MH370 disappeared, what do we know?
• British Broadcasting Corporation - Missing Malaysia Plane MH370: What We Know

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• Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappearance - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Quick Summary Ask the Chatbot a Question Also known as: MH370 disappearance Written by Erik Gregersen Erik Gregersen is a senior editor at Encyclopaedia Britannica, specializing in the physical sciences and technology. Before joining Britannica in 2007, he worked at the University of Chicago Press on the... Erik Gregersen Fact-checked by Britannica Editors Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree.... Britannica Editors Last updated Dec. 9, 2025 •History Table of Contents Table of Contents Quick Summary Ask the Chatbot a Question Top Questions

What happened to Malaysia Airlines flight 370?

On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Debris found in 2015 indicates that the plane crashed in the Indian Ocean, likely after running out of fuel. Despite extensive searches, the wreckage has never been found, and the cause of the crash remains a mystery. While several theories have been proposed, including mechanical failure, pilot suicide, and hijacking, none have been conclusively proven.

Did they find Malaysia Airlines flight 370?

Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared in 2014, and it has never been found. In 2015 the first piece of debris from the airplane was discovered, the right wing flaperon, which washed ashore on Réunion. 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. The debris locations were used to narrow the search area in the Indian Ocean, but the wreckage was never located.

Who were the pilots of Malaysia Airlines flight 370?

Malaysia Airlines flight 370 had two pilots: Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid. In 2016 it was reported that Shah, on his home flight simulator, had flown over the southern Indian Ocean less than a month before the plane vanished in 2014. The simulated flight closely matched the missing aircraft’s final path. This revelation, in addition to the release of greater information about the pilot’s personal life, lent credence to the notion of a premeditated pilot-induced mass murder-suicide.

What are some theories about Malaysia Airlines flight 370?

After Malaysia Airlines flight 370 went missing in 2014, a number of theories were proposed. One of the most commonly cited explanations is pilot suicide. In 2016 it was reported that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, on his home flight simulator, had flown over the southern Indian Ocean less than a month before the plane vanished. The simulated flight closely matched the missing aircraft’s final path. Claims of domestic issues in Shah’s life also lent credence to the notion of a premeditated pilot-induced mass murder-suicide.

Other theories include hijacking, fire, and mechanic failure. Some have also proposed that the plane was shot down. However, none of these theories have been conclusively proven.

News •

Beijing court orders Malaysia Airlines to pay damages to families of MH370 victims • Dec. 9, 2025, 1:07 AM ET (AP) ...(Show more) What to know about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 as the search resumes • Dec. 4, 2025, 1:49 AM ET (AP) Marine robotics firm will resume deep-sea search for MH370 plane that vanished a decade ago • Dec. 3, 2025, 1:02 PM ET (AP) Show less

Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappearance, disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet on March 8, 2014, during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The disappearance of the Boeing 777 with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board led to a search effort stretching from the Indian Ocean west of Australia to Central Asia. Debris from the aircraft was first found in 2015, but the wreckage has never been located. The perplexing nature of the loss of flight 370 is such that it has become one of history’s most famous missing aircraft.

Disappearance and search

Flight 370 took off at 12:41 am local time and reached a cruising altitude of 10,700 meters (35,000 feet) at 1:01 am. The Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which transmitted data about the aircraft’s performance, sent its last transmission at 1:07 am and was subsequently switched off. The last voice communication from the crew occurred at 1:19 am, and at 1:21 am the plane’s transponder, which communicated with air-traffic control, was switched off, just as the plane was about to enter Vietnamese airspace over the South China Sea. At 1:30 am Malaysian military and civilian radar began tracking the plane as it turned around and then flew southwest over the Malay Peninsula and then northwest over the Strait of Malacca. At 2:22 am Malaysian military radar lost contact with the plane over the Andaman Sea. An Inmarsat satellite in geostationary orbit over the Indian Ocean received hourly signals from flight 370 and last detected the plane at 8:11 am.

Initial searches for the plane concentrated on the South China Sea. After it was determined that flight 370 had turned to the west shortly after the transponder was switched off, search efforts moved to the Strait of Malacca and the Andaman Sea. On March 15, a week after the plane had disappeared, the Inmarsat contact was disclosed. Analysis of the signal could not locate the plane precisely but did determine that the plane might have been anywhere on two arcs, one stretching from Java southward into the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia and the other stretching northward across Asia from Vietnam to Turkmenistan. The search area was then expanded to the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia on the southern arc and Southeast Asia, western China, the Indian subcontinent, and Central Asia on the northern arc. On March 24 Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that, based on analysis of the final signals, Inmarsat and the U.K. Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) had concluded that the flight crashed in a remote part of the Indian Ocean 2,500 km (1,500 miles) southwest of Australia. Thus, it was extremely unlikely that anyone on board survived.

The search for wreckage was hampered by the remote location of the crash site. Beginning on April 6, an Australian ship detected several acoustic pings possibly from the Boeing 777’s flight recorder (or “black box”) about 2,000 km (1,200 miles) northwest of Perth, Western Australia. Further analysis by the AAIB of the Inmarsat data also found a partial signal from the plane at 8:19 am consistent with the location of the acoustic pings, the last of which were heard on April 8. If the signals were from flight 370, the flight recorder was likely at the end of its battery life. Further searches were conducted using a robotic submarine. However, the pings had been spread over a wide area, the submarine found no debris, and tests found that a faulty cable in the acoustic equipment could have produced the pings.

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.