Mystery

Malaysia Airlines: What we know
about flight MH370
15 March 2014 Last updated at 10:55
A Malaysia Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur to
Beijing went missing on the morning of Saturday 8
March (local time) with 239 passengers and crew
on board.
That is all anyone knows for sure about flight
MH370. But there are now increasing signs that
the jet was deliberately diverted by someone on
board about an hour after takeoff.
In a hyper-connected age where we are constantly
tracked , the void feels more like a mystery from an
earlier era of aviation than something happening to
one of the world's biggest airlines flying a busy
route in 2014, and has prompted much
speculation about its fate.
Who was on board?
Muhammad Razahan Zamani (bottom right), 24,
and his wife Norli Akmar Hamid, 33, were on their
honeymoon on the missing flight. The phone is
being held by his stepsister, Arni Marlina
There were 227 passengers, including 153 Chinese
and 38 Malaysians, according to the manifest .
Seven were children. Other passengers came from
Iran, the US, Canada, Indonesia, Australia, India,
France, New Zealand, Ukraine, Russia, Taiwan and
the Netherlands. All 12 crew members were
Malaysian.
Among the Chinese nationals were a delegation of
19 prominent artists who had attended an
exhibition in Kuala Lumpur.
With so many of their nationals aboard, the
Chinese government has been very involved in the
search, expressing barely-concealed frustration
with the lack of progress.
Malaysia Airlines said there were four passengers
who checked in for the flight but did not show up
at the airport.
Malaysia plane: Who were the passengers?
When was the last contact made?
Messages of hope have been left at Kuala Lumpur
airport
Flight MH370 departed from Kuala Lumpur
International Airport at 00:41 on Saturday (16:41
GMT Friday), and was due to arrive in Beijing at
06:30 (22:30 GMT).
Malaysia Airlines says the plane lost contact at
01:30 (17:30 GMT) - about an hour after takeoff.
The last verbal communication with the plane
came at the boundary between Malaysian and
Vietnamese airspace. Told by Malaysia's air traffic
control that the flight was being passed to Ho Chi
Minh control, the reply came back: "OK, roger
that."
No distress signal or message was sent.
In a significant development on 15 March,
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced
that investigators had established that the plane's
automated tracking systems had been turned off
during the early part of the flight.
The Aircraft Communications and Addressing
Reporting System (ACARS) - a digital link with
ground systems - was silenced as the plane
crossed Malaysia's east coast.
Its transponder, which communicates with ground
radar, was shut down as the aircraft crossed from
Malaysian air traffic control into Vietnamese
airspace over the South China Sea, Mr Razak said.
Where did the jet disappear?
The search covers an area the size of Portugal,
including the Malacca Straight and even Andaman
Sea
The plane's planned route would have taken it
north-eastwards, over Cambodia and Vietnam, and
the initial search focused on the South China Sea,
south of Vietnam's Ca Mau peninsula.
The search, involving dozens of ships and planes,
is now focusing on the sea west of Malaysia after
military radar and satellite tracking confirmed the
aircraft changed course, heading in a north-
westerly direction, back over the Malay peninsula
towards the Indian Ocean.
MH370's last communication with a satellite
suggested the jet was in one of two flight
corridors, the Malaysian PM said. One is a
northern corridor between Thailand and
Kazakhstan; the other a southern route between
Indonesia and the southern Indian Ocean.
The timing of the last confirmed communication
with a satellite was 08:11 (00:11 GMT), meaning
that the Boeing continued flying for nearly seven
hours after contact with air traffic control was lost.
Investigators are making further calculations to
establish how far the plane might have flown after
the last point of contact.
Could it have been a terrorist attack?
The plane was deliberately diverted, the Malaysian
PM told a news conference
The change of direction was consistent with
"deliberate action on the plane", the PM told a
news conference.
But he stressed that despite media reports
speculating that the plane was hijacked, all
possibilities were still being investigated.
Nevertheless, the focus of the investigation has
switched to the crew and passengers on board and
police in Malaysia have searched the pilot's home.
Two Iranian men were travelling on stolen
passports - 19-year-old Pouria Nour Mohammad
Mehrdad and Delavar Seyed Mohammadreza, 29.
But officials said the two, believed to be headed
for Europe via Beijing, had no apparent links to
terrorist groups.
However, the presence of two passengers with
stolen passports raised questions about security.
"Quite a few people... do fly, especially in that part
of the world, with improper identification or false
identification," former head of the US air security
agency John Magaw told the BBC.
Have any traces of the plane been found?
Malaysia says the Chinese authorities have
described the release of this image as "a mistake"
There have been a number of reports of possible
wreckage or oil slicks related to the plane but
these have, to date, all proven to be unrelated to
the missing airliner.
On 12 March, grainy satellite images that
purported to show debris in the sea, possibly from
the plane, were released by China's State
Administration of Science. After the dearth of
evidence of the previous days, they were seized
on, but have since been dismissed by the
Malaysian authorities.
"There is nothing. We went there, there is
nothing,'' said acting Malaysian Transport Minister
Hishammuddin Hussein, who added that the
Chinese embassy had said the images were
released by mistake and did not show debris from
the missing plane.
A subsequent air and sea search proved unfruitful.
Vietnam's air traffic management has also said
that an investigation into claims by a New
Zealander working on an oil rig off southern
Vietnam that he spotted a fireball in the sky has
yielded nothing.
Other theories for a crash
A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER taking off
from Narita Airport near Tokyo, Japan, last year
Common factors in plane crashes are poor
weather, pilot error and mechanical failure.
Aside from possible hijacking, the Malaysian
authorities say they are looking at sabotage,
psychological problems among the passengers
and crew and personal problems.
Weather conditions for this flight are said to have
been good and the 53-year-old pilot, who had
more than 18,000 flying hours behind him, had
been employed by the airline since 1981.
Malaysia Airlines has a good safety record and the
jet, a Boeing 777-200ER, is said to be one of the
safest because of its modern technology. One of
the plane's wingtips was clipped in an incident
while taxiing in 2012 but it was repaired and
certified as safe.
Can a modern jet just vanish without trace?
An Air France jet flying from Brazil to France
vanished into the Atlantic Ocean on 1 June 2009,
with the loss of all 228 people on board.
Debris was spotted the following day but it took
nearly two years to locate the flight recorders and
remains of the fuselage , deep on the ocean floor.
The waters off Vietnam and in the Malacca straits
are much shallower.
Aircraft communication and tracking follows a
well-established set of protocols.
Flight recorders, or "black boxes" as they are often
known, emit ultrasonic signals that can be
detected under water. Under good conditions, the
signals can be detected from several hundred
miles away.
But without knowing the trajectory of a plane as it
went down or fully understanding wind and wave
conditions if it crashed into water, searchers
sometimes end up criss-crossing huge areas
looking for relatively small pieces of wreckage, the
Wall Street Journal notes in a things-to-know
piece .