MH370: 10 years on, what we know – and what we don’t – about the vanishing Malaysia Airlines jet

Late at night on 7 March 2014, 227 passengers and a dozen crew members prepared to board a Malaysia AirlinesBoeing 777 at Kuala Lumpur airport. They were expecting to travel overnight to Beijing on a routine flight designated MH370.

That flight number has become shorthand for the deepest mystery in aviation history. The relatives of the victims have endured 10 years of not knowing the fate of their loved ones.

The aircraft took off at 12.42am on 8 March. The flight proceeded normally, and at 1.19am the captain acknowledged an instruction from Malaysian air-traffic controllers to transition to Vietnamese airspace, saying: “Goodnight, Malaysian three-seven-zero.” Those were the last words heard from the aircraft.

One minute later, controllers in Kuala Lumpur observed the aircraft passing a waypoint, “Igari”, about one-third of the way from the Malaysian coast to Vietnam. Within seconds, MH370 had disappeared from radar screens.

Transmissions of technical data (described as “pings”) to satellites continued intermittently from the Boeing 777 until 8.19am – seven hours after the last verbal message and about two hours after the time the plane was scheduled to land in Beijing.

Over the following weeks, painstaking analysis of radar tracking showed the jet had changed course to fly west over the South