Twelve years on, a Boeing 777 with 239 people aboard is still missing. Not missing in the sense that nobody knows exactly where the wreck lies — missing in the sense that the largest and most expensive underwater search in history has now covered well over two hundred thousand square kilometres of seabed and found nothing.

What follows is what is actually known, what is inferred, and what remains genuinely open. It is a shorter list than the speculation suggests, and it ends with a search that is still running.

What is established

The aircraft left Kuala Lumpur at 00:42 local with fuel for seven and a half hours. The ACARS datalink stopped reporting at 01:06. Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah signed off with air traffic control at 01:19:30, and the transponder ceased at 01:21:13 as the flight approached the handover point between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace.

Malaysian military primary radar then tracked an aircraft turning right, then left, and flying back across the Malay Peninsula between roughly 31,000 and 33,000 feet. It passed Penang at 01:52 and continued up an airway over the Andaman Sea. Radar lost it at 02:22.

The satellite data is the part that made any search possible at all. The aircraft’s satellite terminal lost power at some point and logged back on at 02:25 — after radar coverage had ended. For the next six hours it answered hourly interrogations from an Inmarsat satellite. These were not position reports. They were handshakes, and the timing and frequency of each one constrains how far the aircraft was from the satellite.

Plot those constraints and you get an arc across the southern Indian Ocean. The final ground-initiated handshake was at 08:10. At 08:19:29 the aircraft itself sent a log-on request — consistent with power being restored after fuel exhaustion — and at 08:19:37 it was acknowledged. That is the last data of any kind. At 09:15 there was no response.

The debris

The first piece turned up on a beach on Réunion on 29 July 2015: a right flaperon, linked to 9M-MRO with certainty by French investigators that September. An outboard flap section found on Pemba Island was confirmed by Malaysia in September 2016.

Precision matters here, because coverage tends to blur it. By October 2017 twenty pieces had been recovered from western Indian Ocean shorelines. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau graded eighteen of them as very likely or almost certain to have come from MH370, and the remaining two as probably from the aircraft. Only a handful were matched by part or serial number.

The drift patterns are consistent with an origin in the southern Indian Ocean. That is corroboration of the arc, not a position.

Three explanations, and what supports them

Deliberate diversion. The strongest circumstantial thread. Malaysian police seized the captain’s home flight simulator and found, among more than 2,700 coordinates that were mostly game defaults, seven manually programmed waypoints in a file dated 3 February 2014 which, joined together, form a path from Kuala Lumpur to the southern Indian Ocean. The ATSB noted a simulated session ending in fuel exhaustion south-west of Cape Leeuwin — while stating that the simulated track was not consistent with the tracks modelled from the satellite data. The Malaysian report concluded there were no unusual activities beyond game-related simulation, and found no psychological or behavioural indicators in any crew member.

Hypoxia and a ghost flight. Attractive because it explains a long straight cruise and no communication. It was the profile ATSB used to define the search area in 2014. But the final descent rates derived from the last satellite data were between 13,800 and 25,300 feet per minute, which ruled out a controlled unpowered glide — and the Malaysian investigation found no evidence that incapacitation affected crew performance.

Fire or mechanical failure. The cargo included 221 kg of lithium-ion batteries. No fire damage was found on any recovered debris, and investigators could identify no plausible failure sequence that fits the flight path. They were also careful to say that the same absence of evidence prevented them from eliminating it.

A pilot’s walk through the evidence and the competing explanations.

What the official reports refused to say

The Malaysian safety investigation report ran to nearly 500 pages plus some 1,500 pages of appendices when it was released on 30 July 2018. It established that the turn-back was manual and that the communications systems were disabled manually. Then it stopped.

It added that there was no evidence the aircraft was flown by anyone other than the designated crew — while explicitly declining to exclude the possibility of intervention by a third party. Both halves of that sentence are doing deliberate work.

The ATSB’s own final operational report, published in October 2017, narrowed the likely site to under 25,000 square kilometres and eliminated 120,000 square kilometres with high confidence. Its opening page contains the most quoted line of the whole affair.

Trailer for the Netflix series on the disappearance — useful as a measure of how the case has been popularised.

The search is running again

The story did not end in 2018, which is where most accounts leave it.

The Australian-led underwater search covered 120,000 square kilometres before being suspended in January 2017, at a cost of about 155 million dollars. Ocean Infinity then searched more than 112,000 square kilometres in 2018 on a no-find-no-fee basis, and stopped in May that year.

In March 2025 Malaysia signed a new no-find-no-fee contract with Ocean Infinity worth up to 70 million dollars, covering a 15,000 square kilometre priority area. The first phase lasted four days in late March 2025 before weather and competing commitments intervened. A second phase ran from 31 December 2025 to 23 January 2026.

On 8 March 2026 — the twelfth anniversary — Malaysia’s investigation bureau reported that 28 operational search days across both phases had surveyed roughly 7,571 square kilometres, and that nothing found so far confirms the location of the wreckage.

In June 2026 the Malaysian cabinet extended the contract by a year, to 30 June 2027, covering the remaining 7,428 square kilometres of the priority area. Sea conditions mean work is not expected to resume before November.

So the position as of this month is precise and unsatisfying. The arc holds. The debris fits. Roughly half the priority zone has been swept. And a 777 with 239 people aboard is still, twelve years later, somewhere on the floor of the Indian Ocean.

A documentary account of the decade-long search.

Sources: Malaysian ICAO Annex 13 Safety Investigation Report (2018), ATSB The Operational Search for MH370 (2017), Ocean Infinity, Malaysian Ministry of Transport, Aviation Safety Network