Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370/MAS370)[a] was a scheduled international passenger flight that disappeared on Saturday, 8 March 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur International Airport near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing, China. Flight 370 last made voice contact with air traffic control at 01:19 MYT (17:19 UTC, 7 March) when it was over the South China Sea, less than an hour after takeoff, and the aircraft disappeared from air traffic controllers' radar screens at 01:21 MYT (17:21 UTC).[2][3] Malaysian military radar continued to track Flight 370 as it deviated from its planned flight path and crossed the Malay Peninsula; Flight 370 left the range of Malaysian military radar at 02:15 MYT while over the Andaman Sea, 200 nautical miles (370 km; 230 mi) northwest of Penang in northwestern Malaysia.[4] Neither the crew nor the aircraft's communication systems relayed a distress signal, indications of bad weather, or technical problems before the aircraft vanished.[5] The aircraft, a Boeing 777-200ER, was carrying 12 Malaysian crew members and 227 passengers from 15 nations.[6]
A multinational search effort began in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, where the flight's signal was lost on secondary surveillance radar, and was soon[7][8] extended to the Strait of Malacca and Andaman Sea.[9][10][11] Analysis of satellite communications between the aircraft and the Inmarsat satellite communications network concluded that the flight ended in the southern Indian Ocean.[12][13][14] and the focus of the search shifted to the southern part of the Indian Ocean, west of Australia and within its concurrent aeronautical and maritime search and rescue regions; accordingly, Australia took charge of the search effort on 17 March and later established the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) to coordinate the multinational search effort for Flight 370.[15] The current phase of the search is a comprehensive search of the seafloor, which began in October 2014, and is expected to take up to 12 months.[16][17]
Despite being the largest and most expensive search in aviation history,[18][19][20][21] there has been no confirmation of any flight debris,[22] resulting in speculations about its disappearance. On 24 March 2014, the Malaysian government, noting that the final location determined by the satellite communication is far from any possible landing sites, concluded that "flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean."[12][13][14][23]
At the time of its disappearance, and if the presumed loss of all lives aboard is confirmed, Flight 370 would be the deadliest aviation incident in the history of Malaysia Airlines and the deadliest involving a Boeing 777.[24][25] Flight 370 was surpassed in both regards just 131 days later by the unrelated crash of another Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777—Flight 17—that was shot down over Ukraine on 17 July 2014, killing all 298 people aboard
