The implication was that the plane’s captain, Zaharie Ahmen Shah, must have taken the aircraft. It took weeks before the Australian government announced to the public that its scientists had solved the mathematical riddle posed by those transmissions and had calculated the plane’s final resting place in the southern ocean. For the next six hours, the satcom periodically emitted signals that would later offer investigators vague hints of the plane’s trajectory. Then three minutes after leaving radar coverage, its satellite communications system, or satcom, turned back on. Still visible on military radar, it pulled a hard U-turn and flew west toward India.

Then 40 minutes later, the plane went electronically dark and vanished from Air Traffic Control screens.

Everything was normal when it took off from Kuala Lumpur. It’s important that we follow them.Ī distinctive aspect of the flight is that it got progressively weirder as it went along. Far from being a dead end, MH370 still offers multiple leads worth investigating. My hope is that, while the passage of time has lessened the public’s interest in the case, it has also dispelled the fog of wild claims, giving us space to consider the evidence with greater clarity. I dove deep into the evidence for a 2019 book, and then spent several years working with the producers of a three-part Netflix documentary series, which debuts this week. I’ve been following the case obsessively from the beginning, appearing on CNN to talk about it and writing about it in this magazine. It’s disturbing enough that a state-of-the-art airliner can disappear so completely off the face of the earth it’s even more troubling that the authorities, armed with hundreds of millions of dollars to conduct a search and self-proclaimed near certainty about where it must have gone, could fail to locate the 200-foot-long aircraft. The urgency of solving the mystery remains, though. But significant aspects of the case remained unexplained, including the plane’s ultimate resting place, and search officials have long since given up trying to determine what happened. The conventional thinking is that the pilot had decided to commit mass murder-suicide by crashing into a remote corner of the southern Indian Ocean.

None of the 239 passengers and crew were ever seen again. Somewhere over the South China Sea, 40 minutes into the red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, it disappeared from radar screens. Nine years ago, MH370 took off into a clear, moonlit night and flew into the unknown.

The Taking of MH370 by Jeff Wise