How easy is it to lose a flight? (Picture: Getty)
The idea of losing a plane mid-flight seems almost impossible, but 10 years ago that is exactly what happened.
On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, also known as MH370, disappeared from radars as it flew from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to Beijing, China.
At 1.19am local time, 38 minutes after take-off, co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid radioed Kuala Lumpur air traffic control.
‘All right, good night,’ he said, as the plane passed from Malaysian to Vietnamese airspace.
That was the last time anyone on board was ever heard from.
Two minutes later, the plane’s transponder stopped communicating. It was lost by civilian radar a few minutes later.
The plane failed to check in with Vietnamese air traffic control, and instead made a sharp turn west.
MH370 flight path (Picture: Metro.co.uk)
For another hour, Malaysian military radar continued to track the plane as it headed west over the Strait of Malacca, now hundreds of miles off course.
After leaving radar range 200 nautical miles (230 miles) northwest of Penang Island in northwestern Peninsular Malaysia, MH370 was never seen again.
How are planes tracked in the air?
Nowadays, air travel is easy, and the sky is always full of places transporting us from one place to the next. In fact, there are around 15,000 flights roughly in the sky at any moment in time, according to aviation tracker FlightAware.
But with so many planes bustling through the air, how can radars keep up with them all?
‘Radars work by transmitting pulses of microwave energy, and receiving echoes from aircraft,’ Dr Hugh Griffiths from the school of engineering at University College London tells Metro.co.uk.
He explains that commercial aircraft also use secondary radars, and a wireless communication device, known as a transponder, which is triggered from a radar pulse on the ground which re-transmits, or ‘pings’, the pulse with information about the flight.
‘Tracking an aircraft is done from a combination of those techniques, but both require the aircraft to be within range of the ground radar – a few hundred kilometres.’
Commercial aircrafts send ‘pings’ to let air traffic control know their whereabouts (Picture: Getty/iStockphoto)
All this tracking is done by air traffic controllers.
Radar stands for radio detection and ranging, and it’s a common – and usually effective – method of tracking something.
Nasa uses radar to map the Earth and other planets, as well as satellites and space debris. The military uses radar to detect pulses of enemy aircrafts through short radio waves, and on a local scale, police use it to measure the speed of motorists.
To detect an airplane in flight, a radar turns on its transmitter – a device that produces radio waves with an antenna – and shoots out a short, high intensity burst of high-frequency radio waves, which may just last a microsecond.
Timeline of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappearance
March 8, 2014:
12.41am: Flight MH370 departs Kuala Lumpur International Airport with 227 passengers and a dozen crew members on board.
1.07am: In what would be the plane’s last transmission to air traffic control, all seemed fine on Flight 370’s route to Beijing.
1.21am: The plane’s transponder – which pings electronic messages to radar systems about the plane’s altitude, speed, etc – stops communicating. This is the first sign of trouble.
1.21-1.28am: Plane appears to fly off course.
2.15am: MH370 drops off military radars as it heads west over the Strait of Malacca. Malaysian air traffic controllers raise the alarm half an hour later.
6.30am: MH370 fails to land at Beijing International Airport.
About 11am: Family members of the missing passengers and crew gather in the airport.
March 9-10, 2014: An initial search of the Gulf of Thailand turns up nothing, Investigators shift to an area within a 50-nautical-mile radius of Flight 370’s last known position.
March 15, 2014: Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak, says the plane flew for roughly five or so hours after being veering off – deliberately or otherwise. Police turn their attention to the two co-pilots.
April 30, 2014: After Australia gets involved, a surface search doesn’t find the aircraft. Aussie officials believe the pilot may have become incapacitated and the craft flew on autopilot before crashing.
January 29, 2015: Malaysia formerly declares MH370 an accident.
July 29, 2015: First piece of plane debris – a snapped-off wing, called a flaperon – washes up on Réunion.
December 2015-March 2016: More pieces are recovered, though experts aren’t entirely convinced they’re all from MH370.
January 17, 2017: Australia suspends its main search until more evidence of the plane’s final resting place is found.
March 3, 2024: Breaking a years-long silence, Malaysian officials say they are considering proposals for a new search effort by a US exploration firm.
The radar then turns its transmitter off, and switches on its receiver, so it can listen for an echo.
Radio waves travel at the speed of light, and so can give an accurate distance to or from an airplane, making the disappearance of MH370 all that more mysterious.
Can a plane really be lost?
‘Normally it’s really, really difficult to lose an aircraft,’ Dr Griffth says.
He explains that the location of MH370 was remote and far from any civilisation, which adds to the difficulty in tracking it.
But can an aircraft truly become lost?
‘One shouldn’t speculate unduly, but I’d go so far as to say that if you wanted to ‘lose’ an aircraft, almost certainly what you’d do is wait till you were on the boundary between two air traffic control regions,’ says Dr Griffith.
MH370 made its hairpin turn while passing from Malaysian to Vietnamese airspace.
‘Then you would switch everything off, and point the aircraft towards the most remote, deepest, unpopulated area that you could,’ he adds.
Pieces have been recovered but the plane has never been found (Picture: Metro.co.uk)
Aviation experts speculate that whatever happened, happened quickly. The pilot gave no warning that anything was wrong, but tracking over the ocean, as MH370 was, is harder as radars used in aircrafts need to be relatively close to ping off and echo its location.
An aircraft radar around 100-150 miles from shore does not have the range to communicate its live location, but the crew onboard should ‘check in’ using reporting points through high-frequency radio.
But according to reports at the time, MH370’s transponder that should have communicated with a secondary radar on the ground, was turned off.
In addition, the plane’s ACARS computer (aircraft communications addressing and reporting system) stopped transmitting sometime between 1.07am and 1.37am. This was a significant event, a deliberate act.
Just a few days after MH370 disappeared, London-based satellite firm Inmarsat confirmed on March 14 that, ‘routine, automated signals were registered on the Inmarsat network from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370′.
Eight satellite ‘pings’ were sent by the aircraft as is travelled west over the Indian Ocean. The last came at 8.11am Malaysian time.
That was its final known breath, and 10 years later, the plane remains silent.