lpetrich
Contributor
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 - Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It? - The Atlanticon March 8, 2014, 12:42 am MYT, Malaysia local time, Malaysia Airlines flight 370 departed from Kuala Lumpur and headed for Beijing. The Boeing 777-200ER soon reached its assigned cruising altitude of 3500 feet. On board were Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, First Officer Fariq Hamid, 10 flight attendants, and 227 passengers, most of them Chinese, and the rest of a variety of nationalities.
As is common in Malaysia, the Captain was usually referred to by his first name, Zaharie.
On 1:22 MYT, halfway across the South China Sea between Malaysia and Vietnam, the airplane turned southwestward, then northwestward, reaching its last known position at 2:22 MYT between the northern end of Sumatra and southern Thailand. Over the next five hours, the airplane's avionics exchanged brief "handshake" messages with an Immarsat communications satellite, and on 7:37 MYT, it sent its last transmission. It did not respond to an 8:33 MYT transmission from the satellite.
The disappearance of this airplane is one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history. A few pieces of it have washed up on shore, like a piece of it over a year later on Réunion Island a little east of Madagascar. None, however, have been found on the ocean floor, and certainly not the black boxes.
The Atlantic article's author proposes that Zaharie had gone nuts. He was apparently very lonely and sad, and likely clinically depressed. That seems like a bizarre hypothesis, but it has happened with other airline pilots.
But there have been oodles of other speculations and conspiracy theories.
