In 2014, while over 850 million travelers successfully reached their destinations by air, 239 people simply vanished from the sky, leaving behind one of aviation’s greatest mysteries.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370) was supposed to be a routine international flight from Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia to Beijing Capital International Airport in China.
On March 8, 2014, the plane took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport and was regularly maintaining communication with ATC (Air Traffic Control) until 38 minutes into the flight, when it disappeared completely from the ATC’s surveillance radar. Instead of maintaining a steady path north, the plane made a sudden, inexplicable bank toward the West. The Malaysian Military’s primary radar tracked the plane as it veered off course, watching as it crossed the peninsula before slipping past the 200-mile range and vanishing into the nighttime darkness of the Indian Ocean.
10 months after the aircraft disappeared, all 239 occupants (Crew and Passengers) were presumed dead. MH370 is the second-deadliest accident involving a Boeing 777 Aircraft, the second-deadliest accident of all time in Malaysian Airlines history, and the second-deadliest airplane crash in 2014. After MH370’s disappearance, a worldwide search was prompted to find the aircraft somewhere in the oceans that surrounded Malaysia. Initial efforts were focused on the South China Sea, but searchers quickly shifted to the Southern Indian Ocean. After ten years of looking, only small parts of the plane have been found on islands across the Indian Ocean, notably when the flaperon of the MH370 washed up on Réunion Island.
Multiple search efforts came up empty-handed, with experts stumped on where the airplane could be. As of now, it is the most expensive search for a missing aircraft of all time, with over 140 million USD put into the search effort. It is also the largest search for an aircraft, with it covering 120,000 square kilometers of the Indian Ocean floor.
The GH Falcon asked some students and teachers around Green Hope about MH370. Mr. Miraguliolo, an AP Government teacher, longtime cross-country coach and former baseball coach, shared his opinion with us about the disappearance. He said that it’s, “Pretty scary to see one (plane) just disappear,” and that, “There could be a place in the world today, with all the technology, that the plane could just disappear.” When asked about what he thought happened to the plane, he responded by saying, “I have no idea what happened.” Miraguliolo also mentioned, “The fact that they couldn’t find the black box (an electronic recording device found on planes),” was especially odd, and that “you can usually find them.” Finally, when asked about the plane’s remains, he said, “I had heard originally that they found pieces, I thought, but then I think it was maybe not true.” Miriguliolo’s last comment on the disappearance was “strange”, and that in today’s world, new radar makes it “almost impossible to disappear”.
The Falcon also spoke with Ryan Vinod, a senior at Green Hope who is currently taking AP Physics C, to get a more scientific perspective on the plane’s disappearance. He said while the plane vanished from radar, it was still “subject to the Doppler effect” through satellite communication. When asked about the technical search, he responded by saying that investigators used Burst Frequency Offset (BFO) to measure the “shift in frequency caused by the relative motion of the aircraft.” Vinod also mentioned the challenges of deep-sea recovery, noting that “underwater pressure and rugged terrain” make the search area nearly impossible to scan properly. Finally, when asked about the plane’s location, he said that while the math narrowed it down to the “7th arc,” the Indian Ocean is “just too vast.” Vinod’s last comment on the disappearance was that it remains a “tragic mystery” where the data provides a lead, but the physical evidence remains out of reach.
The mystery of the MH370 remains at the intersection of human tragedy and the limits of modern technology. Despite the millions of dollars spent and the complex calculations used to find a path through the silence, the 239 lives on board remain part of an unfinished story. The missing wreckage is a reminder that, despite living in an age of constant innovation, there are still mysteries in the world that remain unsolved.
