The mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

The disappearance of flight MH370 during a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing has led to a decade of unanswered questions for relatives, authorities, and the world.

In March 2014, a Boeing 777 took off in Kuala Lumpur, heading for Beijing, but never reached its destination as it vanished mid-air with hundreds of passengers inside.

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The rare event quickly became an internet obsession. Looking into the disappearance can be complex, as separating facts from conspiracy theories can be tiring.

The obsession was a normal reaction to the unprecedented event. Modern airplanes don't simply disappear mid-air, but the MH370 also did not.

The plane's trajectory has been evident for years. Authorities have a clear image of the minutes before and hours after it disappeared from radars.

The plane disappeared from radars shortly after entering Vietnam's airspace. The pilots never checked in with Ho Chi Min.

However, satellite information from a British private firm tracked what could have been the plane for around six hours after that.

The airplane made a sharp U-turn, crossed over Malaysia again, went around Sumatra (Indonesia), and then turned south and flew over the Indian Ocean until it ran out of fuel.

The satellite and radar information was not conclusive at first because there was no way of knowing the detected object was the MH370... until a piece of the plane washed onto the shore of Reunion, a French island, in 2015.

Authorities have a pretty good image of what happened to the plane, including that it crashed at high speed into the Indian Ocean, where the search teams tried to find it.

That information is enough to understand what happened to the crew and passengers, as Malaysian and international authorities described a few weeks after the plane disappeared.

A crash of that nature would have shattered the plane, leaving no survivors. The 2015 debris in Reunion and more debris found in 2016 in Madagascar also confirmed that.

The plane had 227 passengers, most of whom were from China, but others were from the US, France, or Romania. Five children were also on board. There were 12 crew members.

The debris found on the coast of Madagascar and Reunion was the last solid lead on the search for the plane. The last search for the airplane was suspended in 2018.

Ocean Infinity, a Texas-based marine robotics company, was responsible for that last search under a no-find, no-pay contract with the Malaysian government.

According to The Atlantic, accessing the plane will not provide many answers, much less the "why" everyone is asking. But it would be a chance for families to say goodbye.

According to CBS, on the tenth anniversary of the disappearance, Ocean Infinity stated that they would be open to restarting the search under a similar contract.

Still, the Malaysian government said it would consider it only after new evidence appears. The lack of commitment from local authorities was a constant during the years of search.

According to The Atlantic, Malaysian officials wanted the issue gone from the beginning due to the number of mistakes their officials made in the first hours of the search and the liability of their national airline.

Still, the secrecy only fueled wild conspiracy theories that have circulated the internet, affecting the families of the victims and the investigators involved in the search.

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The ultimate push for those theories came from a 2023 Netflix docuseries that, according to several critics, only served as a platform for far-fetched hypotheses.