The 8th March 2024 marks the 10th anniversary of the shocking disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

227 passengers and 12 crew members were on board when the Boeing 777 left Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 00.42, embarking on a routine flight to Beijing.

Less than an hour into the journey contact was lost with the aircraft, just as it was entering into Vietnamese air space, above the South China Sea.

An investigation discovered that the plane had inexplicably turned back on itself and military radar concluded that it had eventually headed out into the remote southern Indian Ocean.

The biggest and most expensive search operation ever mounted lasted four years, but failed to find any trace of the missing airliner.

There have been numerous theories put forward as to what happened, including hijacking, or possible hypoxia in the cabin, although the most prominent and logical cause points to an intervention by the captain, who took the aircraft on a suicide route.

The families of those lost have been campaigning almost from day one for answers, but are still no nearer to being able to find closure.  

Change-over at Igari

There was nothing to indicate any issues as the plane set off not long after midnight, on 8 March 2014 on a clear night with good visibility, for a flight that should have been just short of 6 hours in its duration to the Chinese capital, Beijing.

As the aircraft left Malaysian airspace it entered an area referred to as Igari, which is a division between Malaysia and Vietnam airspace, and acts as a point of change over between air traffic controllers.

No acknowledgement of instruction

The Malaysians put out a message that the flight was clear to call Ho Chi Min City – who would be taking over monitoring – and said goodnight.

The plane’s captain, Zaharie Ahmed Shah, responded by saying goodnight back, which has since been picked up as slightly odd, as the normal course of action is to acknowledge the instruction to call ahead, but the captain never made mention of it.

Late reporting of disappearance from screens

Almost immediately the blip representing the aircraft disappeared from Malaysian air traffic control’s screen, but inexplicably they failed to report this to the Airline company for nearly an hour.

Malaysia Airlines tried constantly for the next four hours to make contact, but Flight MH370 had seemingly disappeared.

Plane turned back

Fears of a catastrophic explosion were the first thoughts, as a search and rescue operation was activated; however, no debris was found and the episode became a complete mystery.

That puzzle became even more complicated when military radar were able to confirm that the plane had actually completed a u-turn back over the Malaysian peninsula, and then turned north up the Straight of Malacca.

Further tracking information then revealed that the aircraft had continued flying for more than six hours after its disappearance and incredibly had headed south into the southern Indian Ocean.

It became clear that such a route had to have been undertaken deliberately, so it must have been a hijacking by either a third party, or by the 53-year-old captain, or his co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid.

No suspicious passengers

Of the 227 passengers, 153 were Chinese and 38 were Malaysians. The rest came from the US, Canada, Indonesia, Australia, India, France, New Zealand, Ukraine, Russia, Taiwan, the Netherlands and two were from Iran and it transpired that these were travelling on false passports.

However these turned out to be students simply looking to head to Europe via China and had no links to terror groups.

Flight simulator adds to confusion

As time moved on, the captain came in for more and more suspicion, especially the timing around the swapping of airspace, which indicated pilot knowledge and a wish to conceal the manoeuvre, knowing it would buy some time between authorities.

When police searched the captain’s home they discovered a sophisticated flight simulator with one route programmed to fly over the southern Indian Ocean.

This lead some analysts to surmise that he may well have found an excuse to get his co-pilot out of the cockpit and locked him out, before depressurising the cabin, bringing about hypoxia – lack of oxygen – among the passengers and crew.

Debris begins to wash up

In July 2015, a 2m-long piece of plane debris washed up on a beach in Reunion, off the east coast of Africa. It was the first of more than 20 pieces of the plane found by members of the public, on the African coast and nearby islands in the Indian Ocean.

Blaine Gibson, an ex Australian lawyer who became an independent investigator, was responsible for leading many of the searches and continues to dedicate his time to helping the families.

Government criticised heavily

The Malaysian government has been heavily criticised by those families for what they see as a failure to react quick enough initially, and then focus its searches in the wrong place, before calling them off completely far too soon.

Then when they brought in a private US-based company called Ocean Infinity in 2018, using state-of-the-art underwater drones to scan the seabed, they again abandoned the project after just 138 days.

Hope of a find from new source

Retired British aerospace IT specialist Richard Godfrey, has given the families some hope by declaring he believes he can pinpoint a much smaller search area, by using WSPR tracking technology similar to radar, allowing innovative analysis of short-wave radio test transmissions, made routinely by ham radio enthusiasts.

He says he can see roughly where an aircraft was at a particular time and enables a much more refined flight route to be mapped and then determine a crash location.

Renewed promise

The current transport minister, Anthony Loke was in attendance at a 10th anniversary event in Kuala Lumpur, and made the families a promise that he would do everything possible to find the missing plane.

He announced that he was now discussing with Ocean Infinity the possibility of resuming the search later this year on a no-find, no-fee arrangement.