March 10 marked the tenth anniversary of the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, operated by a Boeing 777 aircraft with 12 Malaysian crew members and 227 passengers of 14 different nationalities on board.
Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12.42 am local time en route to Beijing Capital International Airport, with a scheduled arrival time of 6.30 am local time.
At 1.19 am, while Flight MH370 was over the South China Sea, Malaysian Air Traffic Control (ATC) instructed Flight MH370 to contact Vietnam ATC.
The final voice contact from Flight MH370 was made when its captain replied, "Good night. Malaysian Three Seven Zero."
Two minutes later, the aircraft's ATC transponder stopped functioning, causing it to disappear from Malaysian ATC's secondary radar. Malaysian military radar continued to track the aircraft as it turned left, crossed the Malay Peninsula near the Malaysia-Thailand border, and travelled over the Andaman Sea.
At 2.22 am, the aircraft disappeared from Malaysian military radar, 200 nautical miles northwest of Penang.
At 2.25 am, the aircraft's satellite datalink, which was lost sometime between 01.07 am and 02.03 am, was re-established. Thereafter, the aircraft's satellite data unit (SDU) replied to automated status requests between 03.41 am and 08.10 am, and two unanswered ground-to-aircraft telephone calls.
At 08.19 am, the SDU sent a log-on request message to establish a satellite datalink, followed by the final transmission from Flight MH370 eight seconds later.
Investigators believe the 08.19 am messages were sent between the time of fuel exhaustion and the time the aircraft entered the ocean.
After four hours of communication among several ATC centres, the Kuala Lumpur Aeronautical Rescue Co-ordination Centre was activated at 6.32 am.
At 07.24 am, Malaysia Airlines released a press statement saying contact with Flight MH370 had been lost.
The disappearance of Flight MH370 with all 227 passengers and 12 crew was the deadliest accident involving a Boeing 777 and the deadliest in Malaysia Airlines' history until it was surpassed by Flight MH17, which was shot down over Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing all 238 passengers and 15 crew members.
[caption id="attachment_1070085" align="alignnone" width="1024"] A graphic showing the debris found of missing Malaysia Airlines MH370.Graphic courtesy Ramesh Lutchmedial -[/caption]
The search for the missing plane became the most expensive search in the history of aviation. It focused initially on the South China Sea and Andaman Sea, before a novel analysis of the aircraft's automated communications with an Inmarsat satellite indicated that the plane had travelled far southward over the southern Indian Ocean.
After a three-year search across 46,000 sq miles of ocean failed to find the aircraft, the Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre heading the operation suspended its activities in January 2017.
On August 16, 2017, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) released two repo
