Missing Malaysia plane MH370: What we know
17 January 2017
The missing Malaysia Airlines plane, flight
MH370, had 239 people on board and was en
route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8 March
2014 when air traffic control staff lost contact
with it.
The search for the plane eventually focused on a
120,000 sq km area of seabed about 2,000km off the
coast of Perth in the southern Indian Ocean. It has now
been suspended with no trace of the aircraft found
there, and is likely to remain the world's greatest
aviation mystery.
This is what we know.
Watch the video below to find out about the jet's
last known movements.
What happened the day the plane disappeared?
00:41, 8 March 2014 (16:41 GMT, 7 March): Malaysia
Airlines flight MH370 departed from Kuala Lumpur
International Airport and was due to arrive in Beijing at
06:30 (22:30 GMT).
Malaysia Airlines says the plane lost contact less than
an hour after take-off. No distress signal or message
was sent.
01:07: The plane sent its last ACARS transmission - a
service that allows computers aboard the plane to
"talk" to computers on the ground. Some time
afterwards, it was silenced and the expected 01:37
transmission was not sent.
01:19: The last communication between the plane and
Malaysian air traffic control took place about 12
minutes later. At first, the airline said initial
investigations revealed the co-pilot had said "All right,
good night".
However, Malaysian authorities later confirmed
the last words heard from the plane, spoken either
by the pilot or co-pilot, were in fact "Good night
Malaysian three seven zero".
A few minutes later, the plane's transponder, which
communicates with ground radar, was shut down as
the aircraft crossed from Malaysian air traffic control
into Vietnamese airspace over the South China Sea.
01:21: The Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam said the
plane failed to check in as scheduled with air traffic
control in Ho Chi Minh City.
02:15: Malaysian military radar plotted Flight MH370
at a point south of Phuket island in the Strait of
Malacca, west of its last known location. Thai military
radar logs also confirmed that the plane turned west
and then north over the Andaman sea.
In maps accompanying its 1 May report, the Malaysian
government revised the time to be 02:22 and put the
position further west.
02:28 (18:28 GMT, 7 March): After the loss of radar, a
satellite above the Indian Ocean picked up data from
the plane in the form of seven automatic "handshakes"
between the aircraft and a ground station. The first was
at 02:28 local time.
08:11: (00:11 GMT, 8 March) The last full
handshake was at 08:11. This information,
disclosed a week after the plane's
disappearance, suggested the jet was in one of
two flight corridors, one stretching north
between Thailand and Kazakhstan, the other
south between Indonesia and the southern
Indian Ocean.
08:19: However, there is some evidence of a
further "partial handshake" at this time
The search
The plane's planned route would have taken it
north-eastwards, over Cambodia and Vietnam,
and the initial search focused on the South
China Sea, south of Vietnam's Ca Mau
peninsula.
But evidence from a military radar, revealed
later, suggested the plane had suddenly
changed from its northerly course to head
west. So the search, involving dozens of
ships and planes, then switched to the sea
west of Malaysia.
Further evidence revealed on 15 March 2014
by the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak
suggested the jet was deliberately diverted
by someone on board about an hour after
take-off.
After MH370's last communication with a
satellite was disclosed, a week after the plane's
disappearance, the search was expanded
between the plane and a ground station. This
was a request from the aircraft to log on.
Investigators say this is consistent with the
plane's satellite communication equipment
powering up after an outage - such as after
an interruption to its electrical supply.
09:15: This would have been the next
scheduled automatic contact between the
ground station and the plane, but there was no
response from the aircraft.
dramatically to nearly three million square
miles - about 1.5% of the surface of the Earth.
However, from 16 March, tracking data
released by the Malaysian authorities appeared
to confirm that the plane crashed in the Indian
Ocean, south west of Australia, with possible
locations refined following further satellite
analysis.
There were a few false positives along the way.
In early April 2015, Australian and Chinese
vessels using underwater listening
equipment detected ultrasonic signals, which
officials believed could be from the plane's
"black box" flight recorders. The pings
appeared to be the most promising lead so far,
and were used to define the area of a sea-floor
search, conducted by the Bluefin-21
submersible robot.
Nothing was found and it was only in
December 2015 that Australian officials said
they had refined the search area and were
confident they were looking in the right area
for the plane.
In the end, an Australian-led search using
underwater drones and sonar equipment
deployed from specialist ships loaned by
various nations combed a vast 120,000km area
of the Southern Indian Ocean - but turned up
nothing.
Debris discovered
Although the underwater search turned up
nothing, it was along a coastline thousands of
miles away that clues began to wash up on
beaches.
On 29 July 2015, a 2m-long (6ft) piece of plane
debris was found by volunteers cleaning a
beach in St Andre, on the north-eastern coast
of Reunion.
MH370: The key pieces of debris
It was a significant finding that helped
investigators say with more certainty that the
flight most likely made a rapid and
uncontrolled descent into the Indian Ocean.
Who was on board?
The 12 crew members were all Malaysian, led
by pilots Captain Zaharie Ahmed Shah, 53, and
27-year-old co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid.
In December 2016 investigators admitted the
plane was unlikely to be in that search area
and recommended searching further north.
Experts identified a new area of approximately
25,000 sq km to the north of the current search
area that had the "highest probability" of
containing the wreckage. This was the last area
the plane could possibly be located, given
current evidence, the report said.
But Australia ruled out continuing the search
beyond its scheduled end.
On 5 August, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib
Razak announced that investigators had
"conclusively confirmed" the debris was from
the missing plane, a finding confirmed
by French officials.
However, officials said this did not affect their
search plans, as the debris had been carried to
Reunion by ocean currents.
It was the first of more than 20 pieces of
possible debris found by members of the
public, on the African coast and islands in the
Indian Ocean.
In November 2016, a report found the
recovered wing flaps from the plane were not
in the landing position when the plane
went down in the Indian Ocean.
So some bereaved families of those on board
the flight are determined to keep the hunt for
these clues going
There were 227 passengers, including 153
Chinese and 38 Malaysians, according to the
manifest. Seven were children.
Other passengers came from Iran, the US,
Canada, Indonesia, Australia, India, France,
New Zealand, Ukraine, Russia, Taiwan and the
Netherlands.
Two Iranian men were found to be travelling on
false passports. But further investigation
revealed 19-year-old Pouria Nour Mohammad
Mehrdad and Delavar Seyed Mohammadreza,
29, were headed for Europe via Beijing, and
had no apparent links to terrorist groups.
Malaysia Airlines said there were four
passengers who checked in for the flight but
did not show up at the airport.
The family members of those on board were
informed in person, by phone and by text
message on 24 March that the plane had been
lost.

Among the Chinese nationals was a delegation

of 19 prominent artists, who had attended an
exhibition in Kuala Lumpur.