The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 on March 8, 2014, while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, remains one of the most significant and perplexing mysteries in aviation history. The plane, carrying 239 passengers and crew, vanished from air traffic control screens after its last verbal communication. What followed was a series of highly unusual events, including the plane making an abrupt U-turn and flying for hours in a new, uncommunicated direction. The lack of a mayday call or any sign of a struggle has baffled experts and led to a wide range of theories about what happened in the cockpit.

The most prominent theory, supported by many aviation experts, is that the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, deliberately caused the disappearance. This theory is largely based on the fact that the plane’s transponder and other communication systems were intentionally turned off. Further evidence emerged from a re-examination of the pilot’s home flight simulator, which contained a simulated flight path to a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean, closely matching the final projected route of MH370. This, combined with the fact that the plane executed a complex series of maneuvers to evade radar, points to a deliberate, controlled act by an experienced individual in the cockpit.

Despite the most extensive and expensive deep-sea search in history, a definitive crash site for the main fuselage has never been found. While debris from the aircraft, including a wing flaperon, has washed ashore on the coasts of Reunion, Mozambique, and other Indian Ocean islands, these fragments have only confirmed that the plane went down in that general area. Without the discovery of the black boxes, which contain the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, the full truth of what happened to MH370 is unlikely to be known, leaving the families of those on board and the world to grapple with one of the most enduring mysteries of the modern age.