Unless you’ve been living in a hole for the past month, you undoubtedly have heard something about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, China.
On March 8th 2014, the plane departed from the Malaysian capital and never reached its destination.
As a reddit addict, I’ve combed through all of the posts and have been following the mystery behind Flight 370 intently, so I decided to write a brief summary so you can follow what’s going on with the investigation.
How does a plane carrying 239 people of various nationalities seem to vanish into thin air, especially in this day and age of technology? How is it that roughly 27 countries are searching for the plane, and we are still not entirely sure of its location?
Flight 370 departed Kuala Lumpur a little after 12:30 am, and just over an hour later at 1:30 am, lost contact with controllers. It has been unheard of since.
Interestingly, prior to the loss of contact, the pilots remained “silent.” Nothing was out of the ordinary while they corresponded with controllers. There was no SOS signal, no distress call, and the pilots seemed at ease when doing routine communication.
Since the plane disappeared, many theories have swirled around the Internet and news as to what could have transpired. There was talk of terrorism, a government-cover up, pilot error, pilot suicide, and simply getting off-course.
The terror plot stemmed from the fact that two of the passengers onboard the ill-fated jet used stolen passports, although it was later confirmed that both of the passengers (both of whom came from Iran) were seeking asylum elsewhere.
In the last few days, the Malaysian government confirmed the whereabouts of the plane, saying that it certainly crashed into the Indian Ocean. New satellite images also show about 122 objects floating in the ocean that officials hope could be remains of the aircraft.
What is still unknown, and may never be answered, is why the airplane went down. Officials ran investigations on the pilot and co-pilot and recently found that there was a file deleted off the pilot’s aircraft simulator. Officials are currently leaning towards the idea that those in-charge of the aircraft could be part of the reason that it disappeared.