Ten years ago today, on 8 March 2014, Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur, en-route to Beijing – only to veer wildly off course and vanish, never to be seen or heard from again. There were 239 people on board. How can an aircraft simply disappear without a trace? Even now, no one has any real clue what happened. It is a mystery like no other.
The only indisputable facts are those that have existed from the very beginning. The flight left Kuala Lumpur, travelled north-east and out over the South China Sea, heading for Beijing. The crew last communicated with air traffic control 38 minutes into the flight. Everything seemed normal enough. Minutes later, the aircraft veered dramatically off its planned flight path to head over the southern Indian Ocean. Then it disappeared.
It is not surprising that conspiracy theories are rife when there are so few facts about what actually happened
The disappearance prompted one of the largest multinational searches ever undertaken: more than 105,000 sq km of seafloor in the Indian Ocean was searched but no trace of the aircraft was found.
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