# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The pilot was 53-year-old French Polynesian Michel Santeurenne. Air Moorea flights generally only required a single pilot, and on 9 August Santeurenne was flying the short hop without any other crewmembers. He had completed over 3,500 hours of flight time, including 110 hours for Air Moorea since 14 May 2007.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Trans-Colorado Airlines Flight 2286 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Trans-Colorado Airlines Flight 2286 (operating as Continental Express Flight 2286) was a scheduled domestic passenger flight from Denver, Colorado, to Durango, Colorado, operated for Continental Express by Trans-Colorado Airlines.:v On January 19, 1988, Flight 2286 crashed onto terrain near Bayfield, Colorado, while on approach to Durango-La Plata County Airport.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Linate Airport disaster occurred on 8 October 2001 at Linate Airport in Milan, Italy, when Scandinavian Airlines Flight 686, a McDonnell Douglas MD-87 airliner carrying 110 people bound for Copenhagen, Denmark, collided on take-off with a Cessna Citation CJ2 business jet carrying four people bound for Paris, France.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Air Midwest Flight 5481, operating as US Airways Express Flight 5481, was a flight from Charlotte/Douglas International Airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States to Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport near the cities of Greenville, South Carolina and Spartanburg, South Carolina; on January 8, 2003 a Beechcraft 1900D operated by Air Midwest as US Airways Express (under a franchise agreement used for the route) stalled after take-off, crashed into a US Airways hangar and burst into flames 37 seconds after leaving Charlotte/Douglas International Airport.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Turkish Airlines Flight 6491 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Turkish Airlines Flight 6491 (TK6491/THY6491) was a scheduled international cargo flight operated by ACT Airlines, on behalf of Turkish Cargo, from Hong Kong to Istanbul via Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. On 16 January 2017, the Boeing 747-400F flying this route crashed during landing at its scheduled stopover at Manas International Airport in Bishkek.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 1996 Air Africa crash occurred on 8 January when an overloaded Air Africa Antonov An-32B aircraft, wet leased from Moscow Airways and bound for Kahemba Airport, overshot the runway at N'Dolo Airport in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo after failing to take off and plowed into Kinshasa's Simbazikita street market.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
American Airlines Flight 1420 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
American Airlines Flight 1420 was a flight from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) to Little Rock National Airport in the United States. On June 1, 1999, the McDonnell Douglas MD-82 operating for Flight 1420 overran the runway upon landing in Little Rock and crashed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pakistan International Airlines Flight 268 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pakistan International Airlines Flight 268 was an Airbus A300, registration AP-BCP, which crashed on approach to Kathmandu's Tribhuvan International Airport on 28 September 1992. All 167 on board were killed. It is the 100th aviation disaster with more than 100 fatalities and the deadliest aviation crash to occur on Nepalese soil.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pakistan International Airlines Flight 661 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pakistan International Airlines Flight 661 (PK661/PIA661) was a domestic passenger flight from Chitral to Islamabad that crashed near Havelian on 7 December 2016. There were forty-two passengers (including two sky marshals and one aircraft engineer) and five crew aboard the aircraft, an ATR 42-500 operated by Pakistan International Airlines.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Spanair Flight 5022 (JK5022) was a scheduled domestic passenger flight from Barcelona-El Prat Airport to Gran Canaria Airport, Spain, via Madrid Barajas Airport that crashed just after take-off from runway 36L at Madrid Airport at 14:24 CEST (12:24 UTC) on 20 August 2008. The aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas MD-82, registration EC-HFP.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Mandala Airlines Flight 91 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight that originated from Polonia International Airport in Medan, Indonesia to Ngurah Rai International Airport in Denpasar via 4 Airports in Indonesia. On 5 September 2005 (10:15 a.m. UTC+7), the flight crashed into a heavily populated residential area seconds after taking off in Medan.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Chalk's Ocean Airways Flight 101 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Chalk's Ocean Airways Flight 101 was an aircraft crash that occurred off Miami Beach, Florida, in the United States on December 19, 2005.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 was a scheduled flight from Los Angeles, California, to San Francisco. On December 7, 1987, the British Aerospace 146-200A, registration N350PS, crashed in Cayucos, California, as a result of a murder-suicide by one of the passengers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Air Canada Flight 143 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight between Montreal and Edmonton that ran out of fuel on July 23, 1983 at an altitude of 12,500 metres (41,000 ft), midway through the flight.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
JAT Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367 was a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 aircraft (registration YU-AHT) which exploded shortly after overflying NDB Hermsdorf, East Germany, while en route from Stockholm to Belgrade on 26 January 1972. The aircraft, piloted by captain Ludvik Razdrih, broke into two pieces and spun out of control, crashing near the village of Srbská Kamenice in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
1999 South Dakota Learjet crash - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On October 25, 1999, a chartered Learjet 35 was scheduled to fly from Orlando, Florida, to Dallas, Texas. Early in the flight, the aircraft, which was climbing to its assigned altitude on autopilot, quickly lost cabin pressure and all on board were incapacitated due to hypoxia - a lack of oxygen.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Asiana Airlines Flight 214 was a scheduled transpacific passenger flight from Incheon International Airport near Seoul, South Korea, to San Francisco International Airport (SFO) in the United States. On the morning of Saturday, July 6, 2013, the Boeing 777-200ER crashed on final approach into SFO.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The aircraft operating Flight 1951 was a 7-year-old Next Generation Boeing 737-800 series model 8F2 with registration TC-JGE, named " Tekirdağ". The model −8F2 denotes the configuration of the 737-800 built for use by Turkish Airlines. They had 51 aircraft of this model in service at the time of the crash.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Flash Airlines Flight 604 was a charter flight operated by Egyptian charter company Flash Airlines. On 3 January 2004, the Boeing 737-300 crashed into the Red Sea shortly after takeoff from Sharm El Sheikh International Airport, killing all 135 passengers, most of them French tourists, and all 13 crew members.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
EgyptAir Flight 990 ( MS990/ MSR990) was a regularly scheduled flight from Los Angeles International Airport, United States, to Cairo International Airport, Egypt, with a stop at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York City.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Flying Tiger Line Flight 739 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Flying Tiger Line Flight 739 was a Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation propliner chartered by the United States military that disappeared on March 16, 1962, over the Western Pacific Ocean. The aircraft was transporting 93 U.S. soldiers and 3 South Vietnamese from Travis Air Force Base, California to Saigon, Vietnam.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Adam Air Flight 574 ( KI574 or DHI574) was a scheduled domestic passenger flight operated by Adam Air between the Indonesian cities of Surabaya and Manado that crashed into the Makassar Strait near Polewali in Sulawesi on 1 January 2007.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
British Airways Flight 9, sometimes referred to by its callsign Speedbird 9 or as the Jakarta incident, was a scheduled British Airways flight from London Heathrow to Auckland, with stops in Bombay, Madras, Kuala Lumpur, Perth, and Melbourne.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On March 5, 1963, country music stars Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas, and Hawkshaw Hawkins were killed in an airplane crash near Camden, Tennessee, United States, along with the pilot Randy Hughes. The accident occurred as the three artists were returning home to Nashville, Tennessee, after performing in Kansas City, Missouri.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
John F. Kennedy Jr. plane crash - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On the evening of July 16, 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr. piloted a Piper Saratoga to attend the wedding of his cousin, Rory, to Mark Bailey. The plane also carried Kennedy's wife, Carolyn Bessette, and sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette. Kennedy had purchased his plane three months before the crash.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
9M-MRD, the aircraft involved, seen in 2011

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 ( MH370/ MAS370) was an international passenger flight operated by Malaysia Airlines that disappeared from radar on 8 March 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia to its planned destination, Beijing Capital International Airport in China. It has not been determined what caused its disappearance.

The crew of the Boeing 777-200ER, with registration mark 9M-MRO, last communicated with air traffic control (ATC) around 38 minutes after takeoff when the flight was over the South China Sea. The aircraft was lost from ATC's secondary surveillance radar screens minutes later, but was tracked by the Malaysian military's primary radar system for another hour, deviating westward from its planned flight path, crossing the Malay Peninsula and Andaman Sea. It left radar range 200 nautical miles (370 km; 230 mi) northwest of Penang Island in northwestern Peninsular Malaysia.

With all 227 passengers and 12 crew aboard presumed dead, the disappearance of Flight 370 was the deadliest incident involving a Boeing 777, the deadliest of 2014, and the deadliest in Malaysia Airlines' history until it was surpassed in all three regards by Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down while flying over Ukraine four months later on 17 July 2014.

The search for the missing airplane 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 traveled far southward over the southern Indian Ocean. The lack of official information in the days immediately after the disappearance prompted fierce criticism from the Chinese public, particularly from relatives of the passengers, as most people on board Flight 370 were of Chinese origin. Several pieces of debris washed ashore in the western Indian Ocean during 2015 and 2016; many of these were confirmed to have originated from Flight 370.

After a three-year search across 120,000 km ² (46,000 sq mi) of ocean failed to locate the aircraft, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre heading the operation suspended its activities in January 2017. A second search launched in January 2018 by private contractor Ocean Infinity also ended without success after six months.

Relying mostly on analysis of data from the Inmarsat satellite with which the aircraft last communicated, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) proposed initially that a hypoxia event was the most likely cause given the available evidence, although no consensus has been reached concerning this theory among investigators. At various stages of the investigation, possible hijacking scenarios were considered, including crew involvement, and suspicion of the airplane's cargo manifest; many disappearance theories regarding the flight have also been reported by the media.

The Malaysian Ministry of Transport's final report from July 2018 was inconclusive. It highlighted Malaysian ATC's failures to attempt to communicate with the aircraft shortly after its disappearance. In the absence of a definitive cause of disappearance, air transport industry safety recommendations and regulations citing Flight 370 have been implemented to prevent a repetition of the circumstances associated with the loss. These include increased battery life on underwater locator beacons, lengthening of recording times on flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders, and new standards for aircraft position reporting over open ocean. Malaysia had supported 58% of the total cost, Australia 32%, and China 10%.

The aircraft, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines, last made voice contact with ATC at 01:19 MYT, 8 March (17:19 UTC, 7 March) when it was over the South China Sea, less than an hour after takeoff. It disappeared from ATC radar screens at 01:22 MYT, but was still tracked on military radar as it turned sharply away from its original northeastern course to head west and cross the Malay Peninsula, continuing that course until leaving the range of the military radar at 02:22 while over the Andaman Sea, 200 nautical miles (370 km; 230 mi) northwest of Penang Island in northwestern Malaysia.

The multinational search effort for the aircraft, which was to become the most expensive aviation search in history, began in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, where the aircraft's signal was last detected on secondary surveillance radar, and was soon extended to the Strait of Malacca and Andaman Sea. Analysis of satellite communications between the aircraft and Inmarsat's satellite communications network concluded that the flight continued until at least 08:19 and flew south into the southern Indian Ocean, although the precise location cannot be determined. Australia assumed charge of the search on 17 March, when the search effort began to emphasise the southern Indian Ocean. On 24 March, the Malaysian government noted that the final location determined by the satellite communication was far from any possible landing sites, and concluded, "Flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean."

From October 2016 to January 2017, a comprehensive survey of 120,000 km ² (46,000 sq mi) of sea floor about 1,800 km (1,100 mi; 970 nmi) southwest of Perth, Western Australia, yielded no evidence of the aircraft. Several pieces of marine debris found on the coast of Africa and on Indian Ocean islands off the coast of Africa-the first of which was discovered on 29 July 2015 on Réunion -have been confirmed as pieces of Flight 370. The bulk of the aircraft has not been located, prompting many theories about its disappearance.

In January 2018, a search by private US marine exploration company Ocean Infinity began in the search zone around , the most likely crash site according to the drift study published in 2017. In a previous search attempt, Malaysia had established a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) to investigate the incident, working with foreign aviation authorities and experts. Malaysia released a final report concerning Flight 370 in October 2017. Neither the crew nor the aircraft's communication systems relayed a distress signal, indications of bad weather, or technical problems before the aircraft vanished. Two passengers travelling on stolen passports were investigated, but eliminated as suspects. Malaysian police identified the captain as the prime suspect if human intervention was the cause of the disappearance, after clearing all others on the flight of suspicion over possible motives. Power was lost to the aircraft's satellite data unit (SDU) at some point between 01:07 and 02:03; the SDU logged onto Inmarsat's satellite communication network at 02:25, which was three minutes after the aircraft had left the range of radar. Based on analysis of the satellite communications, the aircraft was postulated to have turned south after passing north of Sumatra and then to have flown for six hours with little deviation in its track, ending when its fuel was exhausted.

With the presumed loss of all 239 lives on board, Flight 370 is the second-deadliest incident involving a Boeing 777 and the second-deadliest incident of Malaysia Airlines' history, second to Flight 17 in both categories. Malaysia Airlines was struggling financially, a problem that was exacerbated by a decrease of ticket sales after the disappearance of Flight 370 and the downing of Flight 17; the airline was renationalised by the end of 2014. The Malaysian government received significant criticism, especially from China, for failing to disclose information promptly during the early weeks of the search. Flight 370's disappearance brought to public attention the limits of aircraft tracking and flight recorders, including the limited battery life of underwater locator beacons (an issue that had been raised about four years earlier following the loss of Air France Flight 447, but had never been resolved). In response to Flight 370's disappearance, the International Civil Aviation Organization adopted new standards for aircraft position reporting over open ocean, extended recording time for cockpit voice recorders, and, starting from 2020, new aircraft designs have been required to have a means of recovering the flight recorders, or the information they contain, before they sink into the water.

Flight 370 was operated with a Boeing 777-2H6ER, serial number 28420, registration 9M-MRO. It was the 404th Boeing 777 produced, first flown on 14 May 2002, and was delivered new to Malaysia Airlines on 31 May 2002. The aircraft was powered by two Rolls-Royce Trent 892 engines and configured to carry 282 passengers in total capacity. It had accumulated 53,471.6 hours and 7,526 cycles (takeoffs and landings) in service and had not previously been involved in any major incidents, though a minor incident while taxiing at Shanghai Pudong International Airport in August 2012 resulted in a broken wing tip. Its last maintenance "A check" was carried out on 23 February 2014. The aircraft was in compliance with all applicable Airworthiness Directives for the airframe and engines. A replenishment of the crew member oxygen system was performed on 7 March 2014, a routine maintenance task; an examination of this procedure found nothing unusual. Ten years after MH370's disappearance, however, leaked documents have shown that MH370 was given supplemental fuel and crew member oxygen supplies just before takeoff.

The Boeing 777 was introduced in 1994 and has an excellent safety record. Since its first commercial flight in June 1995, the type has suffered only seven other hull losses: the crash of British Airways Flight 38 in 2008; a cockpit fire in a parked EgyptAir Flight 667 at Cairo International Airport in 2011; the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 in 2013, in which three people died; Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard in July 2014; Emirates Flight 521, which crashed and burned out while landing at Dubai International Airport in August 2016; and in November 2017, the seventh Boeing 777 hull loss occurred when a Singapore Airlines 777-200ER was written off after catching fire and burning out at Singapore Changi Airport.

The aircraft was carrying 12 Malaysian crew members and 227 passengers from 14 different nations. On the day of the disappearance, Malaysia Airlines released the names and nationalities of the passengers and crew, based on the flight manifest. The passenger list was later modified to include two Iranian passengers travelling on stolen Austrian and Italian passports.

All 12 crew members-two pilots and 10 cabin crew-were Malaysian citizens.

The pilot in command was 53-year-old Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah from Penang. He joined Malaysia Airlines as a cadet pilot in 1981, and after training and receiving his commercial pilot's licence, he became a second officer with the airline in 1983. He was promoted to captain of Boeing 737-400 airliners in 1991, captain of Airbus A330-300 in 1996, and captain of Boeing 777-200 in 1998. He had been a type-rating instructor and a type-rating examiner since 2007. Zaharie had a total of 18,365 hours of flying experience.

The co-pilot was 27-year-old First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid. He joined Malaysia Airlines as a cadet pilot in 2007; after becoming a second officer of Boeing 737-400 airliners, he was promoted to first officer of the Boeing 737-400 in 2010 and then transitioned to the Airbus A330-300 in 2012. In November 2013, he began training as first officer of Boeing 777-200 aircraft. Flight 370 was his final training flight, and he was scheduled to be examined on his next flight. Fariq had accumulated 2,763 hours of flying experience.

Of the 227 passengers, 153 were Chinese citizens, including a group of 19 artists with six family members and four staff returning from a calligraphy exhibition of their work in Kuala Lumpur; 38 passengers were Malaysian. The remaining passengers were from 12 different countries. Twenty passengers, 12 of whom were from Malaysia and eight from China, were employees of Freescale Semiconductor.

Through a 2007 agreement with Malaysia Airlines, Tzu Chi (an international Buddhist organisation) immediately sent specially trained teams to Beijing and Malaysia to give emotional assistance to passengers' families. The airline also sent its own team of caregivers and volunteers and agreed to bear the expense of bringing family members of the passengers to Kuala Lumpur and providing them with accommodation, medical care, and counselling. Altogether, 115 family members of the Chinese passengers flew to Kuala Lumpur. Some other family members chose to remain in China, fearing they would feel too isolated in Malaysia.

Flight and disappearance

Known flight path taken by Flight 370 (red), derived from primary (military) and secondary (ATC) radar data

Flight 370 was a scheduled flight in the early morning of Saturday, 8 March 2014, from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China. It was one of two daily flights operated by Malaysia Airlines from its hub at Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) to Beijing Capital International Airport-scheduled to depart at 00:35 local time (MYT; UTC+08:00) and arrive at 06:30 local time (CST; UTC+08:00). On board were two pilots, 10 cabin crew, 227 passengers, and 14,296 kg (31,517 lb) of cargo.

The planned flight duration was 5 hours and 34 minutes, which would consume an estimated 37,200 kg (82,000 lb) of jet fuel. The aircraft carried 49,100 kilograms (108,200 lb) of fuel, including reserves, allowing an endurance of 7 hours and 31 minutes. The extra fuel was enough to divert to alternate airports- Jinan Yaoqiang International Airport and Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport -which would require 4,800 kg (10,600 lb) or 10,700 kg (23,600 lb), respectively, to reach from Beijing.

At 00:42 MYT, Flight 370 took off from runway 32R, and was cleared by air traffic control (ATC) to climb to flight level 180-approximately 18,000 feet (5,500 m)-on a direct path to navigational waypoint IGARI (located at ). Voice analysis has determined that the first officer communicated with ATC while the flight was on the ground and that the Captain communicated with ATC after departure. Shortly after departure, the flight was transferred from the airport's ATC to "Lumpur Radar" air traffic control on frequency 132.6 MHz. ATC over peninsular Malaysia and adjacent waters is provided by the Kuala Lumpur Area Control Centre (ACC); Lumpur Radar is the name of the frequency used for en route air traffic. At 00:46, Lumpur Radar cleared Flight 370 to flight level 350-approximately 35,000 ft (10,700 m). At 01:01, Flight 370's crew reported to Lumpur Radar that they had reached flight level 350, which they confirmed again at 01:08.

The aircraft's final transmission was an automated position report, sent using the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) protocol at 01:06 MYT. Among the data provided in this message was the total fuel remaining: 43,800 kg (96,600 lb). The last verbal signal to air traffic control occurred at 01:19:30, when Captain Zaharie acknowledged a transition from Lumpur Radar to Ho Chi Minh ACC:

Lumpur Radar: "Malaysian three seven zero, contact Ho Chi Minh one two zero decimal nine. Good night."
Flight 370: "Good night. Malaysian three seven zero."

The crew was expected to signal ATC in Ho Chi Minh City as the aircraft passed into Vietnamese airspace, just north of the point where contact was lost. The captain of another aircraft attempted to contact the crew of Flight 370 shortly after 01:30, using the international air distress frequency, to relay Vietnamese air traffic control's request for the crew to contact them; the captain said he was able to establish communication, but heard only "mumbling" and static. Calls made to Flight 370's cockpit at 02:39 and 07:13 were unanswered, but acknowledged by the aircraft's satellite data unit.

At 01:20:31 MYT, Flight 370 was observed on radar at the Kuala Lumpur ACC as it passed the navigational waypoint IGARI () in the Gulf of Thailand; five seconds later, the Mode-S symbol disappeared from radar screens. At 01:21:13, Flight 370 disappeared from the radar screen at Kuala Lumpur ACC and was lost at about the same time on radar at Ho Chi Minh ACC, which reported that the aircraft was at the nearby waypoint BITOD. Air traffic control uses secondary radar, which relies on a signal emitted by a transponder on each aircraft; therefore, the ADS-B transponder was no longer functioning on Flight 370 after 01:21. The final transponder data indicated that the aircraft was flying at its assigned cruise altitude of flight level 350 and was travelling at 471 knots (872 km/h; 542 mph) true airspeed. There were few clouds around this point, and no rain or lightning nearby. Later analysis estimated that Flight 370 had 41,500 kg (91,500 lb) of fuel when it disappeared from secondary radar.

At the time that the transponder stopped functioning, the Malaysian military's primary radar showed Flight 370 turning right, but then beginning a left turn to a southwesterly direction. From 01:30:35 until 01:35, military radar showed Flight 370 at 35,700 ft (10,900 m) on a 231° magnetic heading, with a ground speed of 496 knots (919 km/h; 571 mph). Flight 370 continued across the Malay Peninsula, fluctuating between 31,000 and 33,000 ft (9,400 and 10,100 m) in altitude. A civilian primary radar at Sultan Ismail Petra Airport with a 60 nmi (110 km; 69 mi) range made four detections of an unidentified aircraft between 01:30:37 and 01:52:35; the tracks of the unidentified aircraft are "consistent with those of the military data". At 01:52, Flight 370 was detected passing just south of the island of Penang. From there, the aircraft flew across the Strait of Malacca, passing close to the waypoint VAMPI, and Pulau Perak at 02:03, after which it flew along air route N571 to waypoints MEKAR, NILAM, and possibly IGOGU. The last known radar detection, from a point near the limits of Malaysian military radar, was at 02:22, 10 nmi (19 km; 12 mi) after passing waypoint MEKAR (which is 237 nmi (439 km; 273 mi) from Penang) and 247.3 nmi (458.0 km; 284.6 mi) northwest of Penang airport at an altitude of 29,500 ft (9,000 m).

Countries were reluctant to release information collected from military radar because of sensitivity about revealing their capabilities. Indonesia has an early-warning radar system, but its ATC radar did not register any aircraft with the transponder code used by Flight 370, despite the aircraft possibly having flown near, or over, the northern tip of Sumatra. Indonesian military radar tracked Flight 370 earlier when en route to waypoint IGARI before the transponder is thought to have been turned off, but did not provide information on whether it was detected afterwards. Thailand and Vietnam also detected Flight 370 on radar before the transponder stopped working. The radar position symbols for the transponder code used by Flight 370 vanished after the transponder is thought to have been turned off. Vietnam's deputy minister of transport Pham Quy Tieu stated that Vietnam had noticed MH370 turning back toward the west and that its operators had twice informed Malaysian authorities the same day on 8 March. Thai military radar detected an aircraft that might have been Flight 370, but it is not known at what time the last radar contact was made, and the signal did not include identifying data. Also, the flight was not detected by Australia's conventional system or its long-range JORN over-the-horizon radar system, which has an official range of 3,000 km (1,900 mi); the latter was not in operation on the night of the disappearance.

At 02:25 MYT, the aircraft's satellite communication system sent a "log-on request" message-the first message since the ACARS transmission at 01:07-which was relayed by satellite to a ground station, both operated by satellite telecommunications company Inmarsat. After logging on to the network, the satellite data unit aboard the aircraft responded to hourly status requests from Inmarsat and two ground-to-aircraft telephone calls, at 02:39 and 07:13, both unanswered by the cockpit. The final status request and aircraft acknowledgement occurred at 08:10, about 1 hour and 40 minutes after the flight was scheduled to arrive in Beijing. The aircraft sent a log-on request at 08:19:29, which was followed, after a response from the ground station, by a "log-on acknowledgement" message at 08:19:37. The log-on acknowledgement is the last piece of data received from Flight 370. The aircraft did not respond to a status request from Inmarsat at 09:15.

Flight Information Regions in the vicinity of where Flight 370 disappeared from secondary radar. Kuala Lumpur ACC provides ATC services for two routes, located within FIR Singapore, between Malaysia and Vietnam. (Air routes are depicted as roughly 5 nmi / 8-10 km wide, but vary in width, with some as wide as 20 nmi / 35-40 km.)

At 01:38 MYT, Ho Chi Minh Area Control Centre (ACC) contacted Kuala Lumpur Area Control Centre to query the whereabouts of Flight 370 and informed Kuala Lumpur that ACC had not established verbal communication with Flight 370, which was last detected by radar at waypoint BITOD. The two centres exchanged four more calls during the next 20 minutes with no new information.

At 02:03, Kuala Lumpur ACC relayed to Ho Chi Minh ACC information received from Malaysia Airlines' operations centre that Flight 370 was in Cambodian airspace. Ho Chi Minh ACC contacted Kuala Lumpur ACC twice in the following eight minutes asking for confirmation that Flight 370 was in Cambodian airspace. At 02:15, the watch supervisor at Kuala Lumpur ACC queried Malaysia Airlines' operations centre, which said that it could exchange signals with Flight 370 and that Flight 370 was in Cambodian airspace. Kuala Lumpur ACC contacted Ho Chi Minh ACC to ask whether the planned flight path for Flight 370 passed through Cambodian airspace. Ho Chi Minh ACC responded that Flight 370 was not supposed to enter Cambodian airspace and that they had already contacted Phnom Penh ACC (which controls Cambodian airspace), which had no communication with Flight 370. Kuala Lumpur ACC contacted Malaysia Airlines' operations centre at 02:34, inquiring about the communication status with Flight 370, and were informed that Flight 370 was in a normal condition based on a signal download and that it was located at . Later, another Malaysia Airlines aircraft (Flight 386 bound for Shanghai) attempted, at the request of Ho Chi Minh ACC, to contact Flight 370 on the Lumpur Radar frequency - the frequency on which Flight 370 last made contact with Malaysian air traffic control - and on emergency frequencies. The attempt was unsuccessful.

At 03:30, Malaysia Airlines' operations centre informed Kuala Lumpur ACC that the locations it had provided earlier were "based on flight projection and not reliable for aircraft positioning." Over the next hour, Kuala Lumpur ACC contacted Ho Chi Minh ACC asking whether they had signaled Chinese air traffic control. At 05:09, Singapore ACC was queried for information about Flight 370. At 05:20, an undisclosed official contacted Kuala Lumpur ACC requesting information about Flight 370; he opined that, based on known information, "MH370 never left Malaysian airspace."

The watch supervisor at Kuala Lumpur ACC activated the Kuala Lumpur Aeronautical Rescue Coordination Centre (ARCC) at 05:30, more than four hours after communication was lost with Flight 370. The ARCC is a command post at an Area Control Centre that coordinates search-and-rescue activities when an aircraft is lost.

Malaysia Airlines issued a media statement at 07:24 MYT, one hour after the scheduled arrival time of the flight at Beijing, stating that communication with the flight had been lost by Malaysian ATC at 02:40 and that the government had initiated search-and-rescue operations; the time when contact was lost was later corrected to 01:21. Neither the crew nor the aircraft's communication systems relayed a distress signal, indications of bad weather, or technical problems before the aircraft vanished from radar screens.

On 24 March, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak appeared before media at 22:00 local time to give a statement regarding Flight 370, during which he announced that he had been briefed by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch that it and Inmarsat (the satellite data provider) had concluded that the airliner's last position before it disappeared was in the southern Indian Ocean. As no places exist where it could have landed, the aircraft must therefore have crashed into the sea.

Just before Najib spoke at 22:00 MYT, an emergency meeting was called in Beijing for relatives of Flight 370 passengers. Malaysia Airlines announced that Flight 370 was assumed lost with no survivors. It notified most of the families in person or via telephone, and some received an SMS (in English and Chinese) informing them that the aircraft likely had crashed with no survivors.

On 29 January 2015, the director general of the Department of Civil Aviation Malaysia, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, announced that the status of Flight 370 would be changed to an "accident", in accordance with the Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation, and that all passengers and crew are presumed to have lost their lives.

If the official assumption is confirmed, Flight 370 was, at the time of its disappearance, the deadliest aviation incident in the history of Malaysian Airlines, surpassing the 1977 hijacking and crash of Malaysian Airline System Flight 653 that killed all 100 passengers and crew aboard, and the deadliest involving a Boeing 777, surpassing Asiana Airlines Flight 214 (three fatalities). In both of those categories, Flight 370 was surpassed 131 days later by Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, another Boeing 777-200ER, which was shot down on 17 July 2014, killing all 298 people aboard.

The news media reported several sightings of an aircraft fitting the description of the missing Boeing 777. For example, on 19 March 2014, CNN reported that witnesses including fishermen, an oil rig worker, and people on the Kuda Huvadhoo atoll in the Maldives saw the missing airliner. A fisherman claimed to have seen an unusually low-flying aircraft off the coast of Kota Bharu, while an oil-rig worker 186 miles (299 km) southeast of Vung Tau claimed he saw a "burning object" in the sky that morning, a claim credible enough for the Vietnamese authorities to send a search-and-rescue mission, and Indonesian fishermen reported witnessing an aircraft crash near the Malacca Straits. Three months later, The Daily Telegraph reported that a British woman sailing in the Indian Ocean claimed to have seen an aircraft on fire.

ADV Ocean Shield deploys the Bluefin-21 autonomous underwater vehicle, which conducted the seafloor sonar survey from 14 April to 28 May 2014

A search-and-rescue effort was launched in southeast Asia soon after the disappearance of Flight 370. Following the initial analysis of communications between the aircraft and a satellite, the surface search was moved to the southern Indian Ocean one week after the aircraft's disappearance. Between 18 March and 28 April, 19 vessels and 345 sorties by military aircraft searched over 4,600,000 km ² (1,800,000 sq mi). The final phase of the search was a bathymetric survey and sonar search of the sea floor, about 1,800 kilometres (970 nmi; 1,100 mi) southwest of Perth, Western Australia. With effect from 30 March 2014, the search was coordinated by the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC), an Australian government agency that was established specifically to manage the effort to locate and recover Flight 370, and which primarily involved the Malaysian, Chinese, and Australian governments.

A P-8 Poseidon patrol aircraft of the US Navy departs Perth Airport to search for Flight 370, 22 March 2014

On 17 January 2017, the official search for Flight 370-which had proven to be the most expensive search operation in aviation history-was suspended after yielding no evidence of the aircraft other than some marine debris on the coast of Africa. The final ATSB report, published on 3 October 2017, stated that the underwater search for the aircraft, as of 30 June 2017, had cost a total of US$155 million (~$190 million in 2023). The underwater search accounted for 86% of this amount, bathymetry 10%, and programme management 4%. Malaysia had supported 58% of the total cost, Australia 32%, and China 10%. The report also concluded that the location where the aircraft went down had been narrowed to an area of 25,000 km ² (9,700 sq mi) by using satellite images and debris drift analysis.

In January 2018, the private American marine-exploration company Ocean Infinity resumed the search for MH370 in the narrowed 25,000 km ² area, using the Norwegian ship Seabed Constructor. The search area was significantly extended during the course of the search, and by the end of May 2018, the vessel had searched a total area of more than 112,000 km ² (43,000 sq mi) using eight autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The contract with the Malaysian government ended soon afterward, and the search was concluded without success on 9 June 2018.

The Kuala Lumpur Aeronautical Rescue Coordination Centre (ARCC) was activated at 05:30 MYT-four hours after communication was lost with the aircraft-to coordinate search and rescue efforts. Search efforts began in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea. On the second day of the search, Malaysian officials said that radar recordings indicated that Flight 370 may have turned around before vanishing from radar screens; the search zone was expanded to include part of the Strait of Malacca. On 12 March, the chief of the Royal Malaysian Air Force announced that an unidentified aircraft-believed to be Flight 370-had travelled across the Malay peninsula and was last sighted on military radar 370 km (200 nmi; 230 mi) northwest of the island of Penang; search efforts were subsequently increased in the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal.

The shifting search zones for Flight 370 in the Southern Indian Ocean. The inset shows the path taken by the vessel ADV Ocean Shield operating a towed pinger locator, acoustic detections, and the sonar search. The underwater phase (both the wide area search and priority area) is shown in pink.

The emphasis of the search was shifted to the southern Indian Ocean west of Australia and within Australia's aeronautical and maritime Search and Rescue regions that extend to 75°E longitude. Accordingly, on 17 March, Australia agreed to manage the search in the southern locus from Sumatra to the southern Indian Ocean.

From 18 to 27 March 2014, the search effort focused on a 315,000 km ² (122,000 sq mi) area about 2,600 km (1,400 nmi; 1,600 mi) southwest of Perth. The search area, which Australian prime minister Tony Abbott called "as close to nowhere as it's possible to be", is renowned for its strong winds, inhospitable climate, hostile seas, and deep ocean floors. Satellite imagery of the region was analysed; several objects of interest and two possible debris fields were identified on images made between 16 and 26 March. None of these possible objects were found by aircraft or ships.

Revised estimates of the radar track and the aircraft's remaining fuel led to a move of the search 1,100 km (590 nmi; 680 mi) northeast of the previous area on 28 March, which was followed by another shift on 4 April. Between 2 and 17 April, an effort was made to detect the underwater locator beacons (ULBs, informally known as "pingers") attached to the aircraft's flight recorders, because the beacons' batteries were expected to expire around 7 April. Australian naval cutter ADV Ocean Shield, equipped with a towed pinger locator (TPL), joined China's , equipped with a hand-held hydrophone, and the Royal Navy's HMS Echo, equipped with a hull-mounted hydrophone, in the search. Operators considered the effort to have little chance of success given the vast search area and the fact that a TPL can only search up to 130 km ² (50 sq mi) per day.

Between 4 and 8 April, several acoustic detections were made that were close to the frequency and rhythm of the sound emitted by the flight recorders' ULBs; analysis of the acoustic detections determined that, although unlikely, the detections could have come from a damaged ULB. A sonar search of the seafloor near the detections was carried out between 14 April and 28 May but yielded no sign of Flight 370. In a March 2015 report, it was revealed that the battery of the ULB attached to Flight 370's flight data recorder may have expired in December 2012 and thus may not have been as capable of sending signals as would an unexpired battery.

In late June 2014, details of the next phase of the search were announced; officials have called this phase the "underwater search" despite the previous seafloor sonar survey. Continued refinement of the analysis of Flight 370's satellite communications identified a "wide area search" along the "7th arc" where Flight 370 was located when it last communicated with the satellite. The priority search area was in the southern extent of the wide area search. Some of the equipment used for the underwater search is most effective when towed 200 m (650 ft) above the seafloor at the end of a 9.7 km (6 mi) cable. Available bathymetric data for this region was of poor resolution, thus necessitating a bathymetric survey of the search area before the underwater phase began. Commencing in May, the survey charted around 208,000 km ² (80,000 sq mi) of seafloor until 17 December 2014, when it was suspended so that the ship conducting the survey could be mobilised in the underwater search.

The governments of Malaysia, China, and Australia made a joint commitment to thoroughly search 120,000 km ² (46,000 sq mi) of seafloor. This phase of the search, which began on 6 October 2014, used three vessels equipped with towed deep-water vehicles that use side-scan sonar, multi-beam echo sounders, and video cameras to locate and identify aircraft debris. A fourth vessel participated in the search between January and May 2015, using an AUV to search areas that could not be effectively searched using equipment on the other vessels. Following the discovery of the flaperon on Réunion, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) reviewed its drift calculations for debris from the aircraft and, according to the JACC, was satisfied that the search area was still the most likely crash site. Reverse drift modelling of the debris, to determine its origin after 16 months, also supported the underwater search area, although this method is very imprecise over long periods. On 17 January 2017, the three countries jointly announced the suspension of the search for Flight 370.

On 17 October 2017, Dutch-based Fugro and American company Ocean Infinity offered to resume the search for the aircraft. In January 2018, Ocean Infinity announced that it was planning to resume the search in the narrowed 25,000 km ² (9,700 sq mi) area. The search attempt was approved by the Malaysian government, provided that payment would be made only if the wreckage were found. Ocean Infinity chartered the Norwegian ship Seabed Constructor to perform the search.

In late January, it was reported that the AIS tracking system had detected the vessel reaching the search zone on 21 January. The vessel then started moving to , the most likely crash site according to the drift study by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The planned search area of "site 1", where the search began, was 33,012 km ² (12,746 sq mi), while the extended search area covered a further 48,500 km ² (18,700 sq mi). In April, a report by Ocean Infinity revealed that "site 4", farther northeast along the 7th arc, had been added to the search plan. By the end of May 2018, the vessel had searched a total area of over 112,000 km ² (43,000 sq mi), using eight AUVs; all areas of "site 1" (including areas beyond that originally planned for "site 1"), "site 2", and "site 3" had been searched. The final phase of the search was conducted in "site 4" in May 2018, "before the weather limits Ocean Infinity's ability to continue working this year." Malaysia's new transport minister Loke Siew Fook announced on 23 May 2018 that the search for MH370 would conclude at the end of the month. Ocean Infinity confirmed on 31 May that its contract with the Malaysian government had ended, and it was reported on 9 June 2018 that the Ocean Infinity search had come to an end. Ocean-floor mapping data collected during the search have been donated to the Nippon Foundation- GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project, to be incorporated into the global map of the ocean floor.

In March 2019, in the wake of the fifth anniversary of the disappearance, the Malaysian government stated that it was willing to look at any "credible leads or specific proposals" regarding a new search. Ocean Infinity stated that it was ready to resume the search on the same no-find, no-fee basis, believing that it would benefit from the experience that it had gained from its search for the wreck of Argentinian submarine ARA San Juan and bulk carrier ship Stellar Daisy. Ocean Infinity believed that the most probable location was still somewhere along the 7th arc around the area identified previously and upon which its 2018 search was based.

In March 2022, Ocean Infinity committed to resuming its search in 2023 or 2024, pending approval by the Malaysian government. In 2023, Ocean Infinity was reviewing data from their previous 2018 search to ensure nothing was missed. CEO Oliver Plunkett hoped to resume the search in the summer of 2023 using Ocean Infinity's new Armada vessel. The transportation minister of Malaysia, Wee Ka Siong, requested credible new evidence from Ocean Infinity in order to resume the search, which Plunkett is allegedly in possession of. Claims of yet-to-be-identified new evidence has incited victims' families to further push for another search.

By October 2017, 20 pieces of debris believed to be from 9M-MRO had been recovered from beaches in the western Indian Ocean; 18 of the items were "identified as being very likely or almost certain to originate from MH370", while the other two were "assessed as probably from the accident aircraft." On 16 August 2017, the ATSB released two reports: the analysis of satellite imagery collected on 23 March 2014, two weeks after MH370 disappeared, classifying 12 objects in the ocean as "probably man-made"; and a drift study of the recovered objects by the CSIRO, identifying the crash area "with unprecedented precision and certainty" at , northeast of the main 120,000 km ² (46,000 sq mi) underwater search zone.

The first item of debris to be positively identified as originating from Flight 370 was the right flaperon (a trailing edge control surface). It was discovered in late July 2015 on a beach in Saint-André, Réunion, an island in the western Indian Ocean, about 4,000 km (2,200 nmi; 2,500 mi) west of the underwater search area. The item was transported from Réunion (an overseas department of France) to Toulouse, where it was examined by France's civil aviation accident investigation agency, the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA), and a French defence ministry laboratory. Malaysia sent its own investigators to both Réunion and Toulouse. On 3 September 2015, French officials announced that serial numbers found on internal components of the flaperon linked it "with certainty" to Flight 370. These serial numbers were retrieved using a borescope.

In August 2015, France carried out an aerial search for possible marine debris around the island, covering an area of 120 by 40 km (75 by 25 mi) along the east coast of Réunion. Foot patrols were also planned to search for debris along the beaches. Malaysia asked authorities in neighbouring states to be on the alert for marine debris that might have come from an aircraft. On 14 August, it was announced that no debris that could be traced to Flight 370 had been found at sea off Réunion, but that some items had been found on land. Air and sea searches for debris ended on 17 August.

The flaperon was covered in Lepas anatifera barnacles, which grow in certain patterns and only while underwater. Researchers have analysed the barnacles on the flaperon in an attempt to deduce its path to Réunion.

In late February 2016, an object bearing a stencilled label of "NO STEP" was found off the coast of Mozambique; early photographic analysis suggested that it could have come from the aircraft's horizontal stabiliser or from the leading edges of the wings. The part was found by Blaine Gibson on a sandbank in the Bazaruto Archipelago off the coast of Vilanculos in southern Mozambique, around 2,000 km (1,200 mi) southwest of where the flaperon had been found the previous July. The fragment was sent to Australia, where experts identified it as almost certainly a horizontal stabiliser panel from 9M-MRO.

The locations where the objects were found are consistent with the drift model performed by CSIRO, further corroborating that the parts could have come from Flight 370.

On 7 March 2016, more debris, possibly from the aircraft, was found on the island of Réunion. Ab Aziz Kaprawi, Malaysia's deputy transport minister, said that "an unidentified grey item with a blue border" might be linked to Flight 370. Both Malaysian and Australian authorities, coordinating the search in the South Indian Ocean, sent teams to verify whether the debris was from the missing aircraft.

On 21 March 2016, South African archaeologist Neels Kruger found a grey piece of debris on a beach near Mossel Bay, South Africa, that had an unmistakable partial logo of Rolls-Royce, the manufacturer of the missing aircraft's engines. The Malaysian ministry of transport acknowledged that the piece could be that of an engine cowling. An additional piece of possible debris, suggested to have come from the interior of the aircraft, was found on the island of Rodrigues, Mauritius, in late March. On 11 May 2016, Australian authorities determined that the two pieces of debris were "almost certainly" from Flight 370.

On 24 June 2016, Australian transport minister Darren Chester said that a piece of aircraft debris had been found on Pemba Island, off the coast of Tanzania. It was handed over to the authorities so that experts from Malaysia could determine its origin. On 20 July, the Australian government released photographs of the piece, which was believed to be an outboard flap from one of the aircraft's wings. Malaysia's transport ministry confirmed on 15 September that the debris was indeed from the missing aircraft.

On 21 November 2016, families of the victims announced that they would carry out a search for debris in December on the island of Madagascar. On 30 November 2018, five pieces of debris recovered between December 2016 and August 2018 on the Malagasy coast, and believed by victims' relatives to be from MH370, were handed to Malaysian transport minister Anthony Loke.

Texas A&M University mathematics professor Goong Chen has argued that the plane may have entered the sea vertically; any other angle of entry would make the aircraft splinter into many pieces, which would have been found already.

Malaysia quickly assembled a Joint Investigation Team (JIT), consisting of specialists from Malaysia, China, the United Kingdom, the United States, and France, which was led in accordance with ICAO standards by "an independent investigator in charge". The team consisted of an airworthiness group, an operations group, and a medical and human factors group. The airworthiness group were tasked with examining issues relating to maintenance records, structures, and systems of the aircraft; the operations group were to review the flight recorders, operations, and meteorology; and the medical and human factors group would investigate psychological, pathological, and survival factors. Malaysia also announced, on 6 April 2014, that it had set up three ministerial committees: a Next of Kin Committee, a committee to organise the formation of the JIT, and a committee responsible for the Malaysian assets deployed in the search effort. The criminal investigation was led by the Royal Malaysia Police, assisted by Interpol and other relevant international law enforcement authorities.

On 17 March, Australia took control of co-ordinating the search, rescue, and recovery operations. For the next six weeks, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) and ATSB worked to determine the search area, correlating information with the JIT and other government and academic sources, while the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) coordinated the search efforts. Following the fourth phase of the search, the ATSB took responsibility for defining the search area. In May, a search strategy working group was established by the ATSB to determine the most likely position of the aircraft at the 00:19 UTC (08:19 MYT) satellite transmission. The working group included aircraft and satellite experts from: Air Accidents Investigation Branch (UK), Boeing (US), Defence Science and Technology Group (Australia), Department of Civil Aviation (Malaysia), Inmarsat (UK), National Transportation Safety Board (US), and Thales (France).

As of October 2018, France was the only country that was continuing the investigation (by means of its Air Transport Gendarmerie), with the intention of verifying all of the technical data transmitted, particularly those provided by Inmarsat.

Two interim reports were issued in 8 March 2015, and March 2016. They contained factual information about the plane but no analysis. The final report from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, published on 3 October 2017, was 440 pages and called for planes to be equipped with more precise flight tracking technology. The final report from the Malaysian Ministry of Transport, was 1,500 pages, released on 30 July 2018. It confirmed that the plane was manually turned around, taking it off its normal flight path just after 1am, "either by the pilot or a third party" and that the plane was missing for twenty minutes before anyone was alerted. Following these accounts of air traffic control failings, the Chairman of the Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, resigned on 31 July 2018.

The communications between Flight 370 and the satellite communication network operated by Inmarsat, which were relayed by the Inmarsat-3 F1 satellite, provide the only significant clues to the location of Flight 370 after disappearing from Malaysian military radar at 02:22 MYT. These communications have also been used to infer possible in-flight events. The investigative team was challenged with reconstructing the flight path of Flight 370 from a limited set of transmissions with no explicit information about the aircraft's location, heading, or speed.

A depiction of an Inmarsat-3 series satellite. Flight 370 was in contact with Inmarsat-3 F1 (also known as "IOR" for Indian Ocean Region).

Aeronautical satellite communication (SATCOM) systems are used to transmit messages sent from the aircraft cockpit, as well as automated data signals from onboard equipment, using the ACARS communications protocol. SATCOM may also be used for the transmission of FANS and ATN messages, and for providing voice, fax and data links using other protocols. The aircraft uses a satellite data unit (SDU) to send and receive signals over the satellite communications network; this operates independently from the other onboard systems that communicate via SATCOM, mostly using the ACARS protocol. Signals from the SDU are transmitted to a communications satellite, which amplifies the signal and changes its frequency before relaying it to a ground station, where the signal is processed and, if applicable, routed to its intended destination (e.g. Malaysia Airlines' operations centre); signals are sent from the ground to the aircraft in reverse order.

When the SDU is first powered on, it attempts to connect with the Inmarsat network by transmitting a log-on request, which is acknowledged by the ground station. This is partly to determine whether the SDU belongs to an active service subscriber, and also to identify which satellite should be used for transmitting messages to the SDU. After connecting, if no further contact has been received from the data terminal (the SDU) for one hour, the ground station transmits a "log-on interrogation" message, commonly referred to as a "ping"; if the terminal is active, it will respond to the ping automatically. The entire process of interrogating the terminal is referred to as a " handshake".

Although the ACARS data link on Flight 370 stopped functioning between 01:07 and 02:03 MYT (most likely around the same time the plane lost contact by secondary radar), the SDU remained operative. After last contact by primary radar west of Malaysia, the following events were recorded in the log of Inmarsat's ground station at Perth, Western Australia (all times are MYT/UTC+8):

02:25:27 - First handshake ("log-on request" initiated by aircraft)

02:39:52 - Ground to aircraft telephone call, acknowledged by SDU, unanswered

03:41:00 - Second handshake (initiated by ground station)

04:41:02 - Third handshake (initiated by ground station)

05:41:24 - Fourth handshake (initiated by ground station)

06:41:19 - Fifth handshake (initiated by ground station)

07:13:58 - Ground to aircraft telephone call, acknowledged by SDU, unanswered

08:10:58 - Sixth handshake (initiated by ground station)

08:19:29 - Seventh handshake (initiated by aircraft); widely reported as a "partial handshake'", consisting of the following two transmissions:

08:19:29.416 - "log-on request" message transmitted by aircraft (seventh "partial" handshake)

08:19:37.443 - "log-on acknowledge" message transmitted by aircraft (last transmission received from Flight 370)

The aircraft did not respond to a ping at 09:15.

A few inferences can be made from the satellite communications. The first is that the aircraft remained operational until at least 08:19 MYT-seven hours after final contact was made with air traffic control over the South China Sea. The varying burst frequency offset (BFO) values indicate the aircraft was moving at speed. The aircraft's SDU needs location and track information to keep its antenna pointed towards the satellite, so it can also be inferred that the aircraft's navigation system was operational.

Since the aircraft did not respond to a ping at 09:15, it can be concluded that at some point between 08:19 and 09:15, the aircraft lost the ability to communicate with the ground station. The log-on message sent from the aircraft at 08:19:29 was "log-on request"; there are only a few reasons the SDU would transmit this request, such as a power interruption, software failure, loss of critical systems providing input to the SDU, or a loss of the link due to the aircraft's attitude. Investigators consider the most likely reason to be that it was sent during power-up after an electrical outage.

At 08:19, the aircraft had been airborne for 7 hours and 38 minutes; the typical Kuala Lumpur-Beijing flight is 5 hours, so fuel exhaustion was likely. In the event of fuel exhaustion and engine flame-out, which would eliminate power to the SDU, the aircraft's ram air turbine (RAT) would deploy, providing power to some instruments and flight controls, including the SDU. Approximately 90 seconds after the 02:25 handshake-also a log-on request-communications from the aircraft's in-flight entertainment system were recorded in the ground station log. Similar messages would be expected following the 08:19 handshake, but none were received, supporting the fuel-exhaustion scenario.

A heat map indicating the probable location of missing Flight 370 based on a Bayesian analysis of possible flight paths by Australia's Defence Science and Technology Group[236]

Two parameters associated with these transmissions that were recorded in a log at the ground station were key to the investigation:

Burst time offset (BTO) - the time difference between when a signal is sent from the ground station and when the response is received. This measure is proportional to twice the distance from the ground station via the satellite to the aircraft and includes the time that the SDU takes between receiving and responding to the message and time between reception and processing at the ground station. This measure was analysed to determine the distance between the satellite and the aircraft at the time each of the seven handshakes occurred, and thereby defining seven circles on the Earth's surface the points on whose circumference are equidistant from the satellite at the calculated distance. Those circles were then reduced to arcs by eliminating those parts of each circle that lay outside the aircraft's range.

Burst frequency offset (BFO) - the difference between the expected and received frequency of transmissions. The difference is caused by Doppler shifts as the signals travelled from the aircraft to the satellite to the ground station; the frequency translations made in the satellite and at the ground station; a small, constant error (bias) in the SDU that results from drift and ageing; and compensation applied by the SDU to counter the Doppler shift on the uplink. This measure was analysed to determine the aircraft's speed and heading, but multiple combinations of speed and heading can be valid solutions.

By combining the distance between the aircraft and satellite, speed, and heading with aircraft performance constraints (e.g. fuel consumption, possible speeds and altitudes), investigators generated candidate paths that were analysed separately by two methods. The first assumed the aircraft was flying on one of the three autopilot modes (two are further affected by whether the navigation system used magnetic north or true north as a reference), calculated the BTO and BFO values along these routes, and compared them with the values recorded from Flight 370. The second method generated paths which had the aircraft's speed and heading adjusted at the time of each handshake to minimise the difference between the calculated BFO of the path and the values recorded from Flight 370. A probability distribution for each method at the BTO arc of the sixth handshake of the two methods was created and then compared; 80% of the highest probability paths for both analyses combined intersect the BTO arc of the sixth handshake between 32.5°S and 38.1°S, which can be extrapolated to 33.5°S and 38.3°S along the BTO arc of the seventh handshake.

In May 2024, researchers at Cardiff University raised questions about the official location and the time of the impact, in Scientific Reports. Dr Usama Kadri stated that hydrophone data relating to MH370's crash identified "only a single, relatively weak signal" within the time frame and location of the official search, unlike the "clear pressure signals" shown in previous accidents' data with such impact. He also noted that, "it is implausible to imagine that a significant crash of an aircraft on the ocean surface would fail to generate a discernible pressure signature," suggesting that controlled explosion experiments could "almost pinpoint" the aircraft's location, or possibly raise the need to reassess the time frame or location currently established.

Malaysian police searched the homes of the pilots and seized financial records for all 12 crew members. The preliminary report issued by Malaysia in March 2015 stated that there was "no evidence of recent or imminent significant financial transactions carried out" by any of the pilots or crew, and that analysis of the behaviour of the pilots on CCTV showed "no significant behavioural changes".

However, US officials believe the most likely explanation to be that someone in the cockpit of Flight 370 re-programmed the aircraft's autopilot to travel south across the Indian Ocean. Media reports claimed that Malaysian police had identified Captain Zaharie as the prime suspect, if human intervention were eventually proven to be the cause of Flight 370's disappearance. In 2020, Tony Abbott, the Prime Minister of Australia when MH370 disappeared, disclosed in a Sky News documentary: "My very clear understanding, from the very top levels of the Malaysian government, is that from very, very early on, they thought it was murder-suicide by the pilot."

The murder/suicide theory is consistent with the suggestion, by retired British aviation engineer Richard Godfrey, that the flight path of the aircraft could be plotted by analysis of the disruption to Weak Signal Propagation Reporter (WSPR) signals on the day in question. It was reported, in March 2024, that scientists at the University of Liverpool were undertaking a major new study to verify how viable the technology is, and what this could mean for locating the aircraft. However the creator of WSPR, Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr., has stated: "I do not believe that historical data from the WSPR network can provide any information useful for aircraft tracking". Specifically relating to MH370, Taylor stated: "It's crazy to think that historical WSPR data could be used to track the course of ill-fated flight MH370. Or, for that matter, any other aircraft flight".

Pilot's flight simulator

In 2016, New York magazine wrote that a confidential document from the Malaysian police investigation showed an FBI analysis of the flight simulator's computer hard drive found a route on Captain Zaharie's home flight simulator that closely matched the projected flight over the Indian Ocean and that this evidence had been withheld from the publicly released investigative report. New York wrote as follows:

New York has obtained a confidential document from the Malaysian police investigation into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that shows that the plane's captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, conducted a simulated flight deep into the remote southern Indian Ocean less than a month before the plane vanished under uncannily similar circumstances. The revelation, which Malaysia withheld from a lengthy public report on the investigation, is the strongest evidence yet that Zaharie made off with the plane in a premeditated act of mass murder-suicide.

[...] The newly unveiled documents [...] suggest Malaysian officials have suppressed at least one key piece of incriminating information. This is not entirely surprising: There is a history in aircraft investigations of national safety boards refusing to believe that their pilots could have intentionally crashed an aircraft full of passengers.

The FBI's findings about the flight simulation were confirmed by the ATSB. News of the simulation was also confirmed by the Malaysian government, but reported as "nothing sinister".

The SATCOM link functioned normally from pre-flight (beginning at 00:00 MYT) until it responded to a ground-to-air ACARS message with an acknowledge message at 01:07. At some time between 01:07 and 02:03, power was lost to the Satellite Data Unit (SDU). The final report stated "it is likely that the loss of communication prior to the diversion is due to the systems being manually turned off or power interrupted to them." Malaysian Prime Minister, Najib Razak, said it was clear that the radar transponders and the flight data transmission system were turned off deliberately by someone trying to hide the plane's position and heading. At 02:25, the aircraft's SDU rebooted itself and sent a log-on request.

United States and Malaysian officials reviewed the backgrounds of every passenger named on the manifest. One passenger, who worked as a flight engineer for a Swiss jet charter company, was briefly under suspicion as a potential hijacker because he was thought to have the relevant "aviation skills".

Two men were found to have boarded Flight 370 with stolen passports, which raised suspicion in the immediate aftermath of its disappearance. The passports, one Austrian and one Italian, had been reported stolen in Thailand within the preceding two years. The two passengers were later identified as Iranian men, one aged 19 and the other 29, who had entered Malaysia on 28 February using valid Iranian passports. They were believed to be asylum seekers, and the Secretary General of Interpol later stated that the organisation was "inclined to conclude that it was not a terrorist incident".

On 18 March, the Chinese government announced that it had checked all of the Chinese citizens on the aircraft and had ruled out the possibility that any were involved in "destruction or terror attacks".

Flight 370 was carrying 10,806 kg (23,823 lb) of cargo, of which four unit load devices (standardized cargo containers) of mangosteens (a tropical fruit) (total 4,566 kg (10,066 lb)) and 221 kg (487 lb) of lithium-ion batteries were of interest, according to Malaysian investigators.: 103, 107-109  According to the head of Malaysian police, Khalid Abu Bakar, the people who handled the mangosteens and the Chinese importers were questioned to rule out sabotage.

The lithium-ion batteries were contained in a 2,453 kg (5,408 lb) consignment being shipped from Motorola Solutions facilities in Bayan Lepas, Malaysia, to Tianjin, China. They were packaged in accordance with IATA guidelines, but did not go through any additional inspections at Kuala Lumpur International Airport before being loaded onto Flight 370; Lithium-ion batteries can cause intense fires if they overheat and ignite, which has occurred on other flights, and has led to strict regulations on transport aircraft.

An analysis by the ATSB comparing the evidence available for Flight 370 with three categories of accidents-an in-flight upset (e.g., stall), a glide event (e.g., engine failure, fuel exhaustion), and an unresponsive crew or hypoxia event-concluded that an unresponsive crew or hypoxia event "best fit the available evidence" for the five-hour period of the flight as it travelled south over the Indian Ocean without communication or significant deviations in its track, likely on autopilot. No consensus exists among investigators on the unresponsive crew or hypoxia theory. If no control inputs were made following flameout and the disengagement of autopilot, the aircraft would likely have entered a spiral dive and entered the ocean within 20 nmi (37 km; 23 mi) of the flameout and disengagement of autopilot.

The analysis of the flaperon showed that the landing flaps were not extended, supporting the spiral dive at high speed theory. In May 2018, the ATSB again asserted that the flight was not in control when it crashed, its spokesperson adding that "We have quite a bit of data to tell us that the aircraft, if it was being controlled at the end, it wasn't very successfully being controlled."

Malaysia's acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, who was also the country's Defence Minister (until May 2018), denied the existence of problems between the participating countries, but academics explained that because of regional conflicts, there were genuine trust issues involved in co-operation and sharing intelligence, and that these were hampering the search. International relations experts suggested that entrenched rivalries over sovereignty, security, intelligence, and national interests made meaningful multilateral co-operation very difficult. A Chinese academic made the observation that the parties were searching independently, and it was therefore not a multilateral search effort. The Guardian newspaper noted the Vietnamese permission given for Chinese aircraft to overfly its airspace as a positive sign of co-operation. Vietnam temporarily scaled back its search operations after the country's Deputy Transport Minister cited a lack of communication from Malaysian officials despite requests for more information. China, through the official Xinhua News Agency, urged the Malaysian government to take charge and conduct the operation with greater transparency, a point echoed by the Chinese Foreign Ministry days later.

Malaysia had initially declined to release raw data from its military radar, deeming the information "too sensitive", but later acceded. Defence experts suggested that giving others access to radar information could be sensitive on a military level, for example: "The rate at which they can take the picture can also reveal how good the radar system is." One suggested that some countries could already have had radar data on the aircraft, but were reluctant to share any information that could potentially reveal their defence capabilities and compromise their own security. Similarly, submarines patrolling the South China Sea might have information in the event of a water impact, and sharing such information could reveal their locations and listening capabilities.

Criticism was also levelled at the delay of the search efforts. On 11 March 2014, three days after the aircraft disappeared, British satellite company Inmarsat (or its partner, SITA) had provided officials with data suggesting that the aircraft was nowhere near the areas in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea being searched at the time, and that it may have diverted its course through a southern or northern corridor. This information was not acknowledged publicly until it was released by the Malaysian Prime Minister in a press conference on 15 March. Explaining why information about satellite signals had not been made available earlier, Malaysia Airlines stated that the raw satellite signals needed to be verified and analysed "so that their significance could be properly understood" before it could publicly confirm their existence. Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin claimed that Malaysian and US investigators had immediately discussed the Inmarsat data upon receipt on 12 March, and that they had agreed to send the data to the US for further processing on two separate occasions. Data analysis was completed on 14 March, by which time the AAIB had independently arrived at the same conclusion.

In June 2014, relatives of passengers on Flight 370 began a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to raise US$100,000 (~$128,704 in 2023)-with an ultimate goal of raising US$5 million-as a reward to encourage anyone with knowledge of the location of Flight 370, or the cause of its disappearance, to reveal what they knew. The campaign, which ended on 8 August 2014, raised US$100,516 from 1,007 contributors.

A month after the disappearance, Malaysia Airlines' chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya acknowledged that ticket sales had declined but failed to provide specific details. This may have partially resulted from the suspension of the airline's advertising campaigns following the disappearance. Ahmad stated in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the airline's "primary focus...is that we do take care of the families in terms of their emotional needs and also their financial needs. It is important that we provide answers for them. It is important that the world has answers, as well." In further remarks, Ahmad said he was not sure when the airline could start repairing its image, but that the airline was adequately insured to cover the financial loss stemming from Flight 370's disappearance. In China, where the majority of passengers were from, bookings on Malaysia Airlines were down 60% in March.

Malaysia Airlines retired the MH370 flight number and replaced it with MH318 (Flight 318) beginning 14 March 2014. This follows a common practice among airlines to redesignate flights after notorious accidents. As of October 2023, Malaysia Airlines still operates the Kuala Lumpur - Beijing route as MH318, however the airline now flies into Beijing Daxing rather than Beijing Capital.

Malaysia Airlines was given US$110 million (~$139 million in 2023) from insurers in March 2014 to cover initial payments to passengers' families and the search effort. In May, remarks from lead reinsurer of the flight, Allianz, indicated the insured market loss on Flight 370, including the search, was about US$350 million.

In 2017, Malaysia Airlines announced that they are the first airline to sign up for a new service that would track its airplanes anywhere in the world using orbiting satellites.

At the time of Flight 370's disappearance, Malaysia Airlines was struggling to cut costs to compete with a wave of new, low-cost carriers in the region. In the previous three years, Malaysia Airlines had booked losses of: RM 1.17 billion (US$356 million) in 2013, RM433 million in 2012, and RM2.5 billion in 2011. Malaysia Airlines lost RM443.4 million (US$137.4 million) in the first quarter of 2014 (January-March). The second quarter-the first full quarter in the aftermath of Flight 370's disappearance-saw a loss of RM307.04 million (US$97.6 million), representing a 75% increase over losses from the second quarter of 2013. Industry analysts expected Malaysia Airlines to lose further market share and face a challenging environment to stand out from competitors while addressing its financial plight. The company's stock, down as much as 20% following the disappearance of Flight 370, had fallen 80% over the previous five years, in contrast to a rise in the Malaysian stock market of about 80% over the same period.

Many analysts and the media suggested that Malaysia Airlines would need to rebrand and repair its image and require government assistance to return to profitability. The loss of Flight 17 in July greatly exacerbated Malaysia Airline's financial problems. The combined effect on consumer confidence of the loss of Flight 370 and Flight 17, and the airline's poor financial performance, led Khazanah Nasional-the majority shareholder (69.37%) and a Malaysian state-run investment arm-to announce on 8 August its plan to purchase the remainder of the airline, thereby renationalising it. Malaysia Airlines renationalised on 1 September 2015.

Compensation for passengers' next of kin

Lack of evidence in determining the cause of Flight 370's disappearance, as well as the absence of any physical confirmation that the airplane crashed, raises many issues regarding responsibility for the accident and the payments made by insurance agencies. Under the Montreal Convention, it is the carrier's responsibility to prove lack of fault in an accident and each passenger's next of kin are automatically entitled, regardless of fault, to a payment of approximately US$175,000 from the airline's insurance company-amounting to a total of almost US$40 million for the 227 passengers on board.

Soon after the disappearance of Flight 370, Malaysia Airlines offered condolence payments to families of the passengers. In China, the families were offered ¥31,000 (approx. US$5,000) "comfort money", but some rejected the offer. It was also reported that Malaysian relatives received only $2,000. In June 2014, Malaysia's deputy Foreign Minister Hamzah Zainuddin said that families of seven passengers received $50,000 advance compensation from Malaysia Airlines, but that full payout would come after the aircraft was found, or officially declared lost (which later occurred in January 2015).

The Malaysian Prime Minister, Najib Razak, responded to criticism of his government in an opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal in which he acknowledged mistakes had been made, and said time would show that Malaysia had done its best, had helped co-ordinate the search, and would continue to provide support. Najib went on to emphasise the need for the aviation industry to "not only learn the lessons of MH370 but implement them," saying in closing that "the world learned from Air France Flight 447 but didn't act. The same mistake must not be made again."

Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim criticised the Malaysian government regarding its response to Flight 370's disappearance and the military's response when Flight 370 turned back over the Malay Peninsula; he called for an international committee to take charge of the investigation "to save the image of the country and to save the country." Malaysian authorities have accused Anwar-who was jailed on contentious charges the day before Flight 370 disappeared-of politicising the crisis. Flight 370's captain was a supporter of Anwar, and the two men were acquainted.

Questioned about why Malaysia did not scramble fighter jets to intercept the aircraft as it tracked back across the Malay Peninsula, acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin noted that it was deemed a commercial aircraft and was not hostile, remarking: "If you're not going to shoot it down, what's the point of sending [a fighter jet] up?" According to former air force pilot major Ahmad Zaidi of RMAF Butterworth, no pilot stays on the base during the night, so the aircraft could not have been intercepted.

The response to the crisis and lack of transparency in the response brought attention to the state of media in Malaysia. After decades of tight media control, during which government officials were accustomed to passing over issues without scrutiny or accountability, Malaysia was suddenly thrust into the spotlight of the global media and unable to adjust to demands for transparency.

On 8 March 2020, six years after the disappearance, two memorial events were held to mark the anniversary. Families of MH370 passengers called for a new search for the flight in a bid to seek closure. Malaysia's former Transport Minister Anthony Loke had attended one of the events, expressing regret at being unable to table the compensation documents at the Cabinet level as per his original intent. The families hoped that the new Transport Minister Wee Ka Siong could expedite the compensation matters.

Malaysia's transport ministry secretary-general, Datuk Isham Ishak, stated that he had already submitted a request to meet the Prime Minister ( Muhyiddin Yassin) the following week of 15 to 22 March so that he could present the paper on compensation for the families of MH370 victims, and that the ministry would also continue to seek support from the new government to resume the search for the missing aircraft.

Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Xie Hangsheng reacted sceptically to the conclusion by the Malaysian government that the aircraft had gone down with no survivors, demanding on 24 March 2014 "all the relevant information and evidence about the satellite data analysis", and said that the Malaysian government must "finish all the work including search and rescue." The following day, Chinese president Xi Jinping sent a special envoy to Kuala Lumpur to consult with the Malaysian government over the missing aircraft.

In the days following the disappearance of Flight 370, relatives of those on board became increasingly frustrated at the lack of news. On 25 March 2014, around two hundred family members of the Chinese passengers protested outside the Malaysian embassy in Beijing. Relatives who had arrived in Kuala Lumpur after the announcement continued with their protest, accusing Malaysia of hiding the truth and harbouring a murderer. They also wanted an apology from the Malaysian government for its poor initial handling of the disaster and its "premature" conclusion of total loss, drawn without any physical evidence. An op-ed in state media outlet China Daily said that Malaysia was not wholly to be blamed for its poor handling of such a "bizarre" and "unprecedented crisis," and appealed to the Chinese relatives not to allow emotions to prevail over evidence and rationality.

The Chinese ambassador to Malaysia defended the Malaysian government's response, stating that the "radical and irresponsible opinions [of the relatives] do not represent the views of Chinese people and the Chinese government". The ambassador also strongly criticised Western media for having "published false news, stoked conflict and even spread rumours" to the detriment of relatives and of Sino-Malaysian relations. On the other hand, a US Department of Defense official criticised China for what he perceived as providing apparently false leads that detracted from the search effort and wasted time and resources.

In July 2019, Beijing-based family members of some MH370 victims received notice from Malaysia Airlines that from July 2019 onwards, MAS would discontinue the "Meet the Families" discussion sessions in Beijing, China. This came after around 50 sessions had taken place.

Some Chinese citizens boycotted all things Malaysian, including holidays and singers, in protest of Malaysia's handling of the Flight 370 investigation. Bookings on Malaysia Airlines from China, where the majority of passengers were from, were down 60% in March. In late March, several major Chinese ticketing agencies- eLong, LY.com, Qunar, and Mango-discontinued the sale of airline tickets to Malaysia and several large Chinese travel agencies reported a 50% drop in tourists compared to the same period the year before. China was the third-largest source of visitors to Malaysia prior to Flight 370's disappearance, accounting for 1.79 million tourists in 2013. One market analyst predicted a 20-40% drop in Chinese tourists to Malaysia, resulting in a loss of 4-8 billion yuan (RM2.1-4.2 billion; US$0.65-1.3 billion).

The boycotts were largely led or supported by celebrities. Film star Chen Kun posted a message to Weibo-where he had 70 million followers-stating that he would be boycotting Malaysia until its government told the truth. The post was shared over 70,000 times and drew over 30,000 comments. More than 337,000 people retweeted a tweet from TV host Meng Fei which said that he would join the boycott.

China and Malaysia had previously nominated 2014 to be the " Malaysia-China Friendship Year" to celebrate 40 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

The fact that a modern aircraft could disappear in a digitally connected world was met with surprise and disbelief by the public. While changes in the aviation industry often take years to be implemented, airlines and air transport authorities responded swiftly to take action on several measures to reduce the likelihood of a similar incident.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA)-an industry trade organisation representing more than 240 airlines (accounting for 84% of global air traffic)-and the ICAO began working on implementing new measures to track aircraft in flight in real time. The IATA created a task force (which included several outside stakeholders) to define a minimal set of requirements that any tracking system must meet, allowing airlines to decide the best solution to track their aircraft. The IATA's task force planned to come up with several short-, medium-, and long-term solutions to ensure that information is provided in a timely manner to support search, rescue, and recovery activities in the wake of an aircraft accident. The task force was expected to provide a report to the ICAO on 30 September 2014, but announced on that date that the report would be delayed, citing the need for further clarification on some issues. In December 2014, the IATA task force recommended that, within 12 months, airlines track commercial aircraft in no longer than 15-minute intervals. The IATA itself did not support the deadline, which it believed could not be met by all airlines, but the proposed standard had the support of the ICAO. Although the ICAO can set standards, it has no legal authority, and such standards must be adopted by member states.

In May 2014, Inmarsat said that it would offer its tracking service for free to all aircraft equipped with an Inmarsat satellite connection (which includes the vast majority of commercial airliners). Inmarsat also changed the time period for handshakes with its terminals from one hour to 15 minutes.

There was a call for automated transponders after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001; no changes were made because aviation experts preferred flexible control, in case of malfunctions or electrical emergencies. In the aftermath of Flight 370's disappearance, the air transport industry was still resistant to the installation of automated transponders, which would likely entail significant costs. Pilots also criticised changes of this kind, insisting on the need to cut power to equipment in the event of a fire. Nonetheless, new types of tamper-proof circuit breakers were being considered.

Detection of the acoustic signal from the ULBs must be made below the thermocline and within a maximum range, under nominal conditions, of 2,000-3,000 m (6,600-9,800 ft). With a ULB battery life of 30-40 days, searching for the important flight recorders is very difficult without precise coordinates of the location at which the aircraft entered the water.

The intensive and urgent search for the flight recorders in early April 2014, due to the 30-day battery life of the underwater locator beacons (ULBs) (or "pingers") attached to them, drew attention to their inherent limitations. The maximum distance from the ULBs at which the signal can be detected is normally 2,000-3,000 m (6,600-9,800 ft), or 4,500 m (14,800 ft) under favourable conditions. Even if the flight recorders are located, the cockpit voice recorder memory has the capacity to store only two hours of data, continuously recording over the oldest data. This storage capacity complies with regulations, which take account of the fact that it is usually only the data recordings from the last section of a flight that are needed to determine the cause of an accident. However, the events that led to Flight 370 diverting from its course, before disappearing, took place more than two hours before the flight ended. Given these shortcomings, and the importance of the data stored on flight recorders, Flight 370 has brought to attention new technologies that enable data streaming to the ground.

A call to increase the battery life of ULBs was made following the unsuccessful initial search in 2009 for the flight recorders on Air France Flight 447, which were not located until 2011. A formal recommendation that the ULB design be upgraded to offer a longer battery life, or to make the recorders ejectable, had been included in the final report of the board of inquiry into the loss of South African Airways Flight 295 over the Indian Ocean in 1987, but it was not until 2014 that the ICAO made such a recommendation, with implementation required by 2018. The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) issued new regulations that require the transmitting time of ULBs fitted to aircraft flight recorders to be increased from 30 to 90 days, to be implemented by 1 January 2020. The agency has also proposed that a new underwater locator beacon with a greater range of transmission should be fitted to aircraft that fly over oceans. In June 2015, Dukane, a manufacturer of underwater locator beacons, began selling beacons with a 90-day battery life.

In March 2016, the ICAO adopted several amendments to the Chicago Convention in order to address issues raised by the disappearance of Flight 370. These affected aircraft manufactured after 2020, requiring cockpit voice recorders to record at least 25 hours of data, to ensure that all phases of a flight are recorded. Aircraft designs approved after 2020 must incorporate a means of recovering the flight recorders, or the information contained on them, before the recorders sink below the water. This provision is performance-based so that it can be accomplished by different techniques, such as streaming flight recorder data from a stricken aircraft, or using flight recorders that eject from the aircraft and float on the surface of the water. The new regulations do not require modifications to be made to existing aircraft.

In January 2015, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board cited Flight 370 and Air France Flight 447 when it issued eight safety recommendations related to locating aircraft wreckage in remote or underwater locations, and repeated recommendations for a crash-protected cockpit image recorder and tamper-resistant flight recorders and transponders.

The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been described as "one of the biggest mysteries in modern aviation history".

Several documentaries have been produced about the flight. The Smithsonian Channel aired a one-hour documentary on 6 April 2014, titled Malaysia 370: The Plane That Vanished, and the Discovery Channel broadcast a one-hour documentary about Flight 370 on 16 April 2014, titled Flight 370: The Missing Links.

On 17 June 2014, an episode of the television documentary series , titled "Where Is Flight MH370?" was broadcast on BBC Two. The programme, narrated by Amanda Drew, documents how the aircraft disappeared, what experts believe to have happened to it, and how the search has unfolded. It also examines new technologies, such as flight recorder streaming and automatic dependent surveillance - broadcast (ADS-B), which may help prevent similar disappearances in the future. The programme concludes by noting that Ocean Shield had spent two months searching 850 km ² (330 sq mi) of ocean, but that it had searched far to the north of the Inmarsat "hotspot" on the final arc, at approximately 28 degrees south, where the aircraft was most likely to have crashed. On 8 October 2014, a modified version of the Horizon programme was broadcast in the U.S. by PBS as an episode of , titled "Why Planes Vanish", with a different narrator.

The aviation disaster documentary television series (also known as Air Crash Investigation and Air Emergency) produced an episode on the disaster, titled " What Happened to Malaysian 370?". The episode aired in the UK on 8 March 2015, the first anniversary of Flight 370's disappearance. In August 2018, the television series Drain the Oceans, which airs on the National Geographic channel, highlighted the disaster, the methods used in the search, and the potential discoveries.

Panoply made a podcast story loosely based on the disappearance of MH370, called "Passenger List". Kelly Marie Tran played the lead character.

Jeff Rake, creator of the NBC show , said that after he had pitched his idea for the show without any success, the MH370 disappearance led to the TV network's sudden interest.

The first work of fiction about the incident was MH370: A Novella, by New Zealand author Scott Maka.

In 2022, a three-part documentary series, titled MH370: The Lost Flight, was released.

On the ninth anniversary of the flight's disappearance, 8 March 2023, a three-part docuseries, MH370: The Plane That Disappeared premiered on Netflix.

In 2023, American comedian Jocelyn Chia was investigated by Malaysian police for breaching Malaysian laws relating to incitement and offensive online content, after making a joke about the flight at Comedy Cellar in New York City. Acryl Sani Abdullah Sani, chief of the Malaysian police, said an application would be filed to Interpol to find Chia's "full identity" and "latest location". A video of her stand-up performance was removed from TikTok for violating the platform's hate speech guidelines. The Singaporean ambassador to Malaysia stated that Chia (who grew up in Singapore) did not speak for Singaporeans. Vivian Balakrishnan, Singaporean Foreign Minister, called Chia's joke "horrendous statements". Chia stood by the joke, stating that it was being "taken out of context" and had been performed over 100 times without complaints before.

1. MH is the ^ IATA designator and MAS is the ICAO airline designator. The flight was also marketed as China Southern Airlines Flight 748 (CZ748/CSN748) through a codeshare agreement.

2. The aircraft is a Boeing 777-200ER (for Extended Range) model; Boeing assigns a ^ unique customer code for each company that buys one of its aircraft, which replaces part of the model number at the time the aircraft is built. The code for Malaysia Airlines is "H6", hence "777-2H6ER".

3. ^ The manifest initially released by Malaysia Airlines listed an Austrian and an Italian. These were subsequently identified as two Iranian nationals who boarded Flight 370 using stolen passports.

4. Responsibility for air traffic control is partitioned geographically, by international agreements, into ^ flight information regions (FIRs). Although the airspace at the point where Flight 370 was lost is part of the Singapore FIR, the Kuala Lumpur ACC had been delegated responsibility to provide air traffic control services to aircraft in that part of its FIR.

5. The interim report released by Malaysia during March 2015 states: "All the primary aircraft targets that were recorded by the DCA radar are consistent with those of the military data that were made available to the Investigation Team." The report does not ^ explicitly state that the unidentified aircraft was Flight 370.

6. The 7th arc is a line on the map of possible positions where the aircraft went down due to fuel exhaustion. It corresponds to the seventh and final handshake with the tracking satellite at 08:19.

7. ^ The agency's name changed on 1 July 2015. It was previously known as the Defence Science and Technology Organisation.

8. ^ The timing of the log-on interrogation message is determined by an inactivity timer, which was set to one hour at the time of Flight 370's disappearance (it was later reduced to 15 minutes).

9. Information released and reported publicly about SATCOM transmissions from Flight 370 have been inconsistent, especially the use of the terms "ping" and "handshake". It was initially reported as six "handshakes" or "pings" with one "partial handshake or ping" sent at 00:19 UTC by Flight 370, unprovoked by the ground station. The events listed may consist of several "transmissions" between the aircraft and ground station over the course of a few seconds. A readable copy of the ground station log of transmissions to and from Flight 370 is available ^ online

10. Examples: ^
* Malaysia Airlines' chief executive, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, initially said air traffic control was in contact with the aircraft two hours into the flight, when in fact the last contact with air traffic control was less than an hour after takeoff.
* Malaysian authorities initially reported that four passengers used stolen passports to board the aircraft before settling on two: one Italian and one Austrian.
* Malaysia abruptly widened the search area to the west on 9 March, and only later explained that military radar had detected the aircraft turning back. This was later formally denied by Rodzali Daud.
* Malaysian authorities visited the homes of pilot Zaharie and co-pilot Fariq on 15 March, during which they took away a flight simulator belonging to Zaharie. Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said this was the first police visit to those homes. On 17 March, the government contradicted this by saying police first visited the pilots' homes on the day following the flight's disappearance, although this had been previously denied.
* On 16 March, Malaysia's acting transport minister contradicted the prime minister's account on the timing of the final data and communications received. Najib Razak had said that the ACARS system was switched off at 01:07. On 17 March, Malaysian officials said that the system was switched off sometime between 01:07, time of the last ACARS transmission, and 01:37, time of the next expected transmission.
* Three days after saying that the aircraft was not transporting anything hazardous, Malaysia Airlines' chief executive Ahmad said that potentially dangerous lithium batteries were on board.
* MAS chief executive initially claimed that the last voice communication from the aircraft was, "all right, good night", with the lack of a call sign fuelling speculation that the flight may have been hijacked. Three weeks later Malaysian authorities published the transcript that indicated the last words were "Good night Malaysian three seven zero".

11. The exact amount of this compensation is 113,100 ^ special drawing rights. Using the official exchange rates on 16 July 2014, this is worth approximately: RM557,000; ¥1,073,000; US$174,000; €129,000; or £102,000.

12. In March 2014, a petition for ^ discovery was filed in a US court by a law firm, not representing relatives of families, against Boeing and Malaysia Airlines. It sought to obtain the names of manufacturers of aircraft parts along with maintenance records. It was reported in the media as a lawsuit or that Malaysia Airlines was being sued.

13. ^ Regulations required ULBs to transmit a minimum of 30 days. The ULBs on the flight recorders on Flight 370 had a minimum 30-day battery life after immersion. The ULB manufacturer predicted the maximum battery life was 40 days after immersion.

1. ^ "New missing Malaysian plane MH370 search area announced". BBC News. 26 June 2014. Archived from the original on 8 July 2014. The search for the missing airliner is already among most expensive in aviation history.

2. ^ Pearlman, Jonathan (29 May 2014). "MH370 search becomes most expensive aviation hunt in history, yet still no clues". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 10 January 2022.

3. ^ 浦东机场滑行跑道内东航马航两飞机剐蹭 [Two planes of Eastern Airlines Malaysia Airlines in the taxiway of Pudong Airport] (in Chinese). Xinhua News Agency. 10 August 2012. Archived from the original on 24 March 2014.

4. ^ Dunne, John (8 March 2024). "'Extra fuel' twist in missing flight MH370 riddle". Evening Standard.

5. ^ "MH370 Passenger Manifest" (PDF) (Press release). Malaysia Airlines. 8 March 2014. Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 March 2014.

6. ^ "Malaysia Airlines 2Q loss widens. Restructuring is imminent but outlook remains bleak". CAPA Centre For Aviation. 28 August 2014. The only significant cut MAS implemented in 2Q2014 was on the Beijing route, which is now served with one daily flight. (MH370 was one of two daily flights MAS had operated to Beijing.)

7. ^ "How could Australian radar miss flight MH370?". Special Broadcasting Service. 26 March 2014. Archived from the original on 19 March 2017.

8. ^ "JORN FAQ" (PDF). airforce.gov.au. 26 May 2016. p. 4. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 September 2016. Based on the time of day that MH370 disappeared, and in the context of peacetime tasking, JORN was not operational at the time of the aircraft's disappearance.

9. ^ "Malaysia Airlines flight MH370: Distraught families told by text message to assume 'beyond doubt no one survived'". The Independent. 24 March 2014.

10. ^ Pearlman, Jonathan (3 June 2014). "Malaysia Airlines plane search: British yachtswoman 'saw MH370 on fire'". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 10 January 2022.

11. "US company resumes search for missing flight MH370". The Telegraph. Associated Press. 7 January 2018. ISSN 0307-1235. Archived from the original on 10 January 2022.

12. ^ Kelly, Cait (7 March 2023). "Families of MH370 victims' push for another search as technology firm says it has new evidence". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on 31 March 2023.

13. ^ 'The search must go on': Malaysian government 'committed' to finding MH370, archived from the original on 4 March 2024

14. ^ Liow, Tiong Lai (22 March 2016). "New Debris Located in South Africa" (Media statement). Ministry of Transport (Malaysia). Archived from the original on 4 November 2018.

15. ^ Palin, Megan (1 December 2018). "'Massive breakthrough': Flight MH370 'crashed violently'". Cairns Post.

16. Prime Minister's Department (Malaysia) (25 March 2014). "Information provided to MH370 investigation by UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB)". Department of Civil Aviation Malaysia. Archived from the original on 6 April 2014.

17. ^ Ashton, Chris; Bruce, Alan Shuster; Colledge, Gary; Dickinson, Mark (14 September 2014). "The Search for MH370". The Journal of Navigation. 68: 1-22. doi:10.1017/S037346331400068X.

18. ^ Kadri, Usama (2 May 2024). "Underwater acoustic analysis reveals unique pressure signals associated with aircraft crashes in the sea: revisiting MH370". Scientific Reports. 14 (1): 10102. Bibcode:2024NatSR..1410102K. doi:10.1038/s41598-024-60529-1. ISSN 2045-2322. PMC . PMID 38698079.

19. ^ Dehghan, Saeed Kamali (11 March 2014). "Iranians travelling on flight MH370 on forged passports 'not linked to terror'". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 30 March 2014.

20. ^ Mader, Ian (18 March 2014). "MH370: Further confusion over timing of last words". . MediaWorks New Zealand. Archived from the original on 9 April 2014.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 ( MH370/ MAS370) was an international passenger flight operated by Malaysia Airlines that disappeared from radar on 8 March 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia to its planned destination, Beijing Capital International Airport in China. It has not been determined what caused its disappearance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
1976 Zagreb mid-air collision - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On 10 September 1976, British Airways Flight 476, a Hawker Siddeley Trident en route from London to Istanbul, collided mid-air near Zagreb, Yugoslavia (modern-day Croatia), with Inex-Adria Aviopromet Flight 550, a Douglas DC-9 en route from Split, Yugoslavia, to Cologne, West Germany.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
British Airways Flight 38 ( call sign Speedbird 38 ) is a scheduled flight operated by British Airways from Beijing, China to London, United Kingdom. On January 17, 2008, at 12:42 local time, the Boeing 777 used for the flight, having completed the 8,100-kilometre (4,400 nmi; 5,000 mi) trip, crashed just short of the runway at its destination.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
National Airlines Flight 102 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
National Airlines Flight 102 was a cargo flight operated by National Airlines between the British military base Camp Bastion in Afghanistan and Al Maktoum Airport in Dubai, with a refueling stop at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan. On 29 April 2013, the Boeing 747-400 operating the flight crashed moments after taking off from Bagram, killing all seven people on board.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
United Airlines Flight 232 was a DC-10, registered as N1819U, that crash-landed at Sioux City, Iowa on July 19, 1989 after suffering catastrophic failure of its tail-mounted engine, which led to the loss of many flight controls. The flight was en route from Stapleton International Airport in Denver, Colorado to O'Hare International Airport in Chicago.

# data[].attributes.body
Air France 296

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Air France Flight 296 was a chartered flight of a new Airbus A320-111 operated by Air France. On 26 June 1988, it crashed while making a low pass over Mulhouse-Habsheim Airport ( ICAO airport tcode LFGB) as part of the Habsheim Air Show.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The aircraft operating flight 185 was a Boeing 737-300 with manufacturer serial number 28556, registered as 9V-TRF and was powered by two CFM56-3B2 engines. Having completed its maiden flight in January 1997, the aircraft was delivered to SilkAir in February 1997, 10 months before the crash.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The aircraft was a Boeing 727-200 Advanced, registration , a three-engine narrow-body jet aircraft. It was delivered to Delta Air Lines in November 1973, and was the 992nd Boeing 727 to be manufactured. The aircraft was powered by three Pratt & Whitney JT8D-15 turbofan engines.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907 ( ICAO: GLO 1907) was a Boeing 737-8EH, registration PR-GTD, on a scheduled domestic passenger flight from Manaus, Brazil, to Rio de Janeiro. On 29 September 2006, at 16:56 BRT, it collided in midair with an Embraer Legacy 600 business jet over the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
1979 Dniprodzerzhynsk mid-air collision - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 1979 Dniprodzerzhynsk mid-air collision occurred on 11 August 1979 over the Ukrainian SSR, near the city formerly named Dniprodzerzhynsk. The aircraft involved were both Tupolev Tu-134A's on scheduled domestic passenger flights, operated by Aeroflot.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
USAir Flight 427 was a scheduled flight from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport to Pittsburgh International Airport, with a final destination of West Palm Beach, Florida. On Thursday, September 8, 1994, the Boeing 737 flying this route crashed while approaching runway 28R of Pittsburgh International Airport, located in Findlay Township, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, which at the time was the largest hub for the airline.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lokomotiv Yaroslavl plane crash - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Lokomotiv Yaroslavl plane crash occurred on 7 September 2011 when Yak-Service's Flight 9633, a Yakovlev Yak-42 charter flight carrying the players and coaching staff of the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl professional ice hockey team, crashed near the Russian city of Yaroslavl.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
2010 Polish Air Force Tu-154 crash - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On 10 April 2010, a Tupolev Tu-154 aircraft of the Polish Air Force crashed near the city of Smolensk, Russia, killing all 96 people on board.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Garuda Indonesia Flight 152 was a scheduled domestic Indonesian passenger flight from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Jakarta to Polonia International Airport in Medan, North Sumatra, operated by Garuda Indonesia using an Airbus A300B4 registered PK-GAI.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Air India Flight 855 was a scheduled passenger flight that crashed during the evening of New Year's Day 1978 about 3 km (1.9 mi) off the coast of Bandra, Mumbai. All 213 passengers and crew on board were killed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
TransAsia Airways Flight 235 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
TransAsia Airways Flight 235 ( GE235/ TNA235) was a domestic flight that crashed into the Keelung River on 4 February 2015, shortly after takeoff from Taipei Songshan Airport, 5.4 km (3.4 mi) to the west of Songshan in Taiwan.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Crossair Flight 498 was a commuter flight from Zurich, Switzerland, to Dresden, Germany, that crashed two minutes after takeoff in the Swiss municipality of Niederhasli on 10 January 2000. The seven passengers and three crew members aboard the two- turboprop engine Saab 340B aircraft all died on impact.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
LaMia Flight 2933 (LMI2933) was a charter flight of an Avro RJ85, operated by LaMia, that on 28 November 2016 crashed near Medellín, Colombia, killing 71 of 77 people on board. The aircraft was transporting the Brazilian Chapecoense football squad's 22 players, 23 coaching and other staff, 2 guests and 21 journalists from Viru Viru International Airport in , Bolivia, to José María Córdova International Airport, Colombia.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Southern Airways Flight 932 was a chartered Southern Airways Douglas DC-9 domestic United States commercial jet flight from Stallings Field (ISO) in Kinston, North Carolina, to Huntington Tri-State Airport/Milton J. Ferguson Field (HTS) in Ceredo, West Virginia. At 7:36 p.m.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 1967 Hendersonville mid-air collision occurred when a Piedmont Airlines Boeing 727-22 and a twin-engine Cessna 310 collided on July 19, 1967 over Hendersonville, North Carolina, USA. Both aircraft were destroyed and all passengers and crew were killed, including John T. McNaughton, an advisor to Robert McNamara.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
US Airways Flight 1549 was a regularly scheduled US Airways flight from New York City ( LaGuardia Airport), to Charlotte and Seattle, in the United States. On January 15, 2009, the Airbus A320 serving the flight struck a flock of birds shortly after take-off from LaGuardia, losing all engine power. Given their position in relation to the available airports and their low altitude, pilots Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles decided to glide the plane to ditching in the Hudson River off Midtown Manhattan. All 155 people on board were rescued by nearby boats, with only a few serious injuries.

The media quickly dubbed this water landing of a powerless jetliner with no deaths "the Miracle on the Hudson" and a National Transportation Safety Board official described it as "the most successful ditching in aviation history". Though the Board found the ditching could have been avoided by returning to LaGuardia, it affirmed the ditching as providing the highest probability of survival, given the circumstances.

The pilots and flight attendants were awarded the Master's Medal of the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators in recognition of their "heroic and unique aviation achievement". The incident was dramatized in the 2016 film Sully, starring Tom Hanks as Sullenberger.

On January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 with call sign "Cactus 1549" was scheduled to fly from New York City's LaGuardia Airport (LGA) to Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT) in Charlotte, North Carolina, with direct onward service to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. The aircraft was an Airbus A320-214 powered by two CFM International CFM56-5B4/P turbofan engines.

The captain and pilot in command was 57-year-old Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger, a former fighter pilot who had been an airline pilot since leaving the United States Air Force in 1980. At the time, he had logged 19,663 total flight hours, including 4,765 in an A320; he was also a glider pilot and expert on aviation safety. First officer Jeffrey Skiles, aged 49, had accrued 20,727 career flight hours, including 37 in an A320, but this was his first A320 assignment as pilot flying. There were 150 passengers and three flight attendants on board.

The flight was cleared for takeoff to the northeast from LaGuardia's Runway 4 at 3:24:56 pm Eastern Standard Time (20:24:56 UTC). With Skiles in control, the crew made its first report after becoming airborne at 3:25:51 as being at 700 feet (210 m) and climbing.

The weather at 2:51 p.m. was 10 miles (16 km) visibility with broken clouds at 3,700 feet (1,100 m), wind 8 knots (9.2 mph; 15 km/h) from 290°; an hour later it was few clouds at 4,200 feet (1,300 m), wind 9 knots (10 mph; 17 km/h) from 310°. At 3:26:37, Sullenberger remarked to Skiles, "What a view of the Hudson today."

At 3:27:11, during climbout, the plane struck a flock of Canada geese at an altitude of 2,818 feet (859 m) about 4.5 miles (7.2 km) north-northwest of LaGuardia. The pilots' view was filled with the large birds; passengers and crew heard very loud bangs and saw flames from the engines, followed by silence and an odor of fuel.

Realizing that both engines had shut down, Sullenberger took control while Skiles worked the checklist for engine restart. The aircraft slowed but continued to climb for a further 19 seconds, reaching about 3,060 feet (930 m) at an airspeed of about 185 knots (213 mph; 343 km/h), then began a glide descent, accelerating to 210 knots (240 mph; 390 km/h) at 3:28:10 as it descended through 1,650 feet (500 m).

At 3:27:33, Sullenberger radioed a mayday call to New York Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON): "... this is Cactus fifteen thirty nine [ sic - correct call sign was Cactus 1549], hit birds. We've lost thrust on both engines. We're turning back towards LaGuardia". Air traffic controller Patrick Harten told LaGuardia's tower to hold all departures, and directed Sullenberger back to Runway 31. Sullenberger responded, "Unable".

Sullenberger asked controllers for landing options in New Jersey, mentioning Teterboro Airport. Permission was given for Teterboro's Runway 1, Sullenberger initially responded "Yes", but then: "We can't do it ... We're gonna be in the Hudson". The aircraft passed less than 900 feet (270 m) above the George Washington Bridge. Sullenberger commanded over the cabin address system to " brace for impact" and the flight attendants relayed the command to passengers. Meanwhile, air traffic controllers asked the Coast Guard to caution vessels in the Hudson and ask them to prepare to help with the rescue.

About ninety seconds later, at 3:31 pm, the plane made an unpowered ditching, descending southwards at about 125 knots (140 mph; 230 km/h) into the middle of the North River section of the Hudson tidal estuary, at on the New York side of the state line, roughly opposite West 50th Street (near the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum) in Manhattan and Port Imperial in Weehawken, New Jersey. Flight attendants compared the ditching to a "hard landing" with "one impact, no bounce, then a gradual deceleration". The ebb tide then began to take the plane southward.

Sullenberger opened the cockpit door and gave the order to evacuate. The crew began evacuating the passengers through the four overwing window exits and into an inflatable slide/raft deployed from the front right passenger door (the front left slide failed to operate, so the manual inflation handle was pulled). The evacuation was made more difficult by the fact that someone opened the rear left door, allowing more water to enter the plane; whether this was a flight attendant or a passenger is disputed. Water was also entering through a hole in the fuselage and through cargo doors that had come open, so as the water rose the attendant urged passengers to move forward by climbing over seats. One passenger was in a wheelchair. Finally, Sullenberger walked the cabin twice to confirm it was empty.

The air and water temperatures were about 19 °F (−7 °C) and 41 °F (5 °C), respectively. Some evacuees waited for rescue knee-deep in water on the partially submerged slides, some wearing life vests. Others stood on the wings or, fearing an explosion, swam away from the plane. One passenger, after helping with the evacuation, found the wing so crowded that he jumped into the river and swam to a boat.

Two NY Waterway ferries arrived within minutes and began taking people aboard using a Jason's cradle; numerous other boats, including from the U.S. Coast Guard, were quickly on scene as well. Sullenberger advised the ferry crews to rescue those on the wings first, as they were in more jeopardy than those on the slides, which detached to become life rafts. The last person was taken from the plane at 3:55 pm.

About 140 New York City firefighters responded to nearby docks, as did police, helicopters, and various vessels and divers. Other agencies provided medical help on the Weehawken side of the river, where most passengers were taken.

Passengers and crew sustained 95 minor and five serious injuries, including a deep laceration in the leg of one of the flight attendants. 78 people received medical treatment, mostly for minor injuries and hypothermia; 24 passengers and two rescuers were treated at hospitals, with two passengers kept overnight. Eye damage from jet fuel caused one passenger to need glasses. No pets were being carried on the flight.

Each passenger later received a letter of apology, $5,000 in compensation for lost baggage (and $5,000 more if they could demonstrate larger losses), and refund of their ticket price. In May 2009, they received any belongings that had been recovered. Passengers also reported offers of $10,000 each in return for agreeing not to sue US Airways.

Many passengers and rescuers later experienced post-traumatic stress symptoms such as sleeplessness, flashbacks, and panic attacks; some began an email support group. Patrick Harten, the controller who had worked the flight, said that "the hardest, most traumatic part of the entire event was when it was over", and that he was "gripped by raw moments of shock and grief".

In an effort to prevent similar accidents, officials captured and gassed 1,235 Canada geese at 17 locations across New York City in mid-2009 and coated 1,739 goose eggs with oil to smother the developing goslings. As of 2017, 70,000 birds had been intentionally killed in New York City as a result of the ditching.

N106US, the accident aircraft, was purchased by the Carolinas Aviation Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, where it (and the plane's engines) were put on display.

The partially submerged plane was towed downstream and moored to a pier near the World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan, roughly 4 miles (6 km) from the ditching location. On January 17 the aircraft was taken by barge to New Jersey. The left engine, which had been detached from the aircraft by the ditching, was recovered from the riverbed on January 23.

The initial National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) evaluation that the plane had lost thrust after a bird strike was confirmed by analysis of the cockpit voice and flight data recorders.

It was found in the investigation that two days before the accident, the aircraft had experienced a compressor stall on the right engine, but the engine had restarted and the flight completed. A faulty temperature sensor was found to be the cause of the compressor stall. This sensor had been replaced and the inspection also verified the engine had not been damaged in that incident.

On January 21, the NTSB found evidence of damage from a soft-body impact in the right engine along with organic debris including a feather. The left engine also showed soft-body impacts, with "dents on both the spinner and inlet lip of the engine cowling. Five booster inlet guide vanes are fractured and eight outlet guide vanes are missing." Both engines, missing large portions of their housings, were sent to the manufacturer for examination. On January 31, the plane was moved to Kearny, New Jersey. The bird remains were later identified by DNA testing to be Canada geese, which typically weigh more than engines are designed to withstand ingesting.

Since the plane had been assembled in France, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA; the European counterpart of the FAA) and the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA; the French counterpart of the NTSB) joined the investigation, with technical assistance from Airbus and GE Aviation/Snecma, respectively the manufacturers of the airframe and the engines.

The NTSB used flight simulators to test the possibility that the flight could have returned safely to LaGuardia or diverted to Teterboro; only seven of the 13 simulated returns to La Guardia succeeded, and only one of the two to Teterboro. Furthermore, the NTSB report called these simulations unrealistic: "The immediate turn made by the pilots during the simulations did not reflect or account for real-world considerations, such as the time delay required to recognize the bird strike and decide on a course of action." A further simulation, in which a 35-second delay was inserted to allow for those, crashed. In testimony before the NTSB, Sullenberger maintained that there had been no time to bring the plane to any airport and that attempting to do so would likely have killed those onboard and more on the ground.

The Board ultimately ruled that Sullenberger had made the correct decision, reasoning that the checklist for dual-engine failure is designed for higher altitudes when pilots have more time to deal with the situation, and that while simulations showed that the plane might have just barely made it back to LaGuardia, those scenarios assumed an instant decision to do so, with no time allowed for assessing the situation.

On May 4, 2010, the NTSB issued its final report, which identified the probable cause as "the ingestion of large birds into each engine, which resulted in an almost total loss of thrust in both engines". The final report credited the outcome to four factors: good decision-making and teamwork by the cockpit crew (including decisions to immediately turn on the APU and to ditch in the Hudson); that the A320 is certified for extended overwater operation (and hence carried life vests and additional raft/slides) even though not required for that route; the performance of the flight crew during the evacuation; and the proximity of working vessels to the ditching site. Contributing factors were good visibility and fast response times from the ferry operators and emergency responders. The report made 34 recommendations, including that engines be tested for resistance to bird strikes at low speeds; development of checklists for dual-engine failures at low altitude, and changes to checklist design in general "to minimize the risk of flight crewmembers becoming stuck in an inappropriate checklist or portion of a checklist"; improved pilot training for water landings; provision of life vests on all flights regardless of route, and changes to the locations of vests and other emergency equipment; research into improved wildlife management, and technical innovations on aircraft, to reduce bird strikes; research into possible changes in passenger brace positions; and research into "methods of overcoming passengers' inattention" during preflight safety briefings.

Author and pilot William Langewiesche asserted that insufficient credit was given to the A320's fly-by-wire design, by which the pilot uses a side-stick to make control inputs to the flight control computers. The computers then impose adjustments and limits of their own to keep the plane stable, which the pilot cannot override even in an emergency. This design allowed the pilots of Flight 1549 to concentrate on engine restart and deciding the course, without the burden of manually adjusting the glidepath to reduce the plane's rate of descent. However, Sullenberger said that these computer-imposed limits also prevented him from achieving the optimal landing flare for the ditching, which would have softened the impact.

The reactions of all members of the crew, the split second decision making and the handling of this emergency and evacuation was "text book" and an example to us all. To have safely executed this emergency ditching and evacuation, with the loss of no lives, is a heroic and unique aviation achievement.

-Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators citation

An NTSB board member called the ditching "the most successful... in aviation history. These people knew what they were supposed to do and they did it and as a result, no lives were lost."[better source needed ] New York State Governor David Paterson called the incident "a Miracle on the Hudson". U.S. President George W. Bush said he was "inspired by the skill and heroism of the flight crew," and praised the emergency responders and volunteers. President-elect Barack Obama said that everyone was proud of Sullenberger's "heroic and graceful job in landing the damaged aircraft". He thanked the crew, whom he invited to his inauguration five days later.

The Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators awarded the crew the rarely bestowed Master's Medal on January 22, 2009, for outstanding aviation achievement, at the discretion of the Master of the Guild. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg presented the crew with the Keys to the City, and Sullenberger with a replacement copy of a library book lost on the flight, Sidney Dekker's Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability. Rescuers received Certificates of Honor.

The crew received a standing ovation at the Super Bowl XLIII on February 1, 2009, and Sullenberger threw the ceremonial first pitch of the 2009 Major League Baseball season for the San Francisco Giants. His Giants jersey was inscribed with the name "Sully" and the number 155 - the count of people aboard the plane.

On July 28, passengers Dave Sanderson and Barry Leonard organized a thank-you luncheon for emergency responders from Hudson County, New Jersey, on the shores of Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen, New Jersey, where 57 passengers had been brought following their rescue. Present were members of the U.S. Coast Guard, North Hudson Regional Fire and Rescue, NY Waterway Ferries, the American Red Cross, Weehawken Volunteer First Aid, the Weehawken Police Department, West New York E.M.S., North Bergen E.M.S., the Hudson County Office of Emergency Management, the New Jersey E.M.S. Task Force, the Guttenberg Police Department, McCabe Ambulance, the Harrison Police Department, and doctors and nurses who treated survivors.

Sullenberger was named Grand Marshal for the 2010 Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California.

In August 2010, aeronautical chart publisher Jeppesen issued a humorous approach plate titled "Hudson Miracle APCH," dedicated to the five crew of Flight 1549 and annotated "Presented with Pride and Gratitude from your friends at Jeppesen".

Sullenberger retired on March 3, 2010, after thirty years with US Airways and its predecessor, Pacific Southwest Airlines. At the end of his final flight he was reunited with Skiles and a number of the passengers from Flight 1549.

In 2013, the entire crew was inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame at the San Diego Air & Space Museum.

Sullenberger's 2009 memoir, Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters, was adapted into the feature film , directed by Clint Eastwood. It starred Tom Hanks as Sullenberger and Aaron Eckhart as co-pilot Jeff Skiles. It was released by Warner Bros. on September 9, 2016.

It was featured in an episode of the TV show with the title "Hudson River Runway"; the episode is from season 10, episode 5.

It is featured in season 1, episode 1, of the TV show Why Planes Crash.

"Information on the accident that occurred in New York on January 15, 2009". bea.aero. Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety. January 16, 2009. Archived from the original on July 21, 2011.

Krūms, Jānis (January 15, 2009). "There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy". .

"US Airways 1549 (AWE1549), January 15, 2009". faa.gov. Federal Aviation Administration. March 2, 2009.

"Flight 1549 Alternate Audio, Multi-Perspective Composite Animation". . exosphere3d. November 12, 2009. Archived from the original on December 15, 2021.

"Cactus Flight 1549 Accident Reconstruction (US Airways Animation)". Exosphere3D.

"Analysis of Training for Emergency Water Landings Questions Assumptions, Inconsistencies" (PDF). Cabin Crew Safety. The Flight Safety Foundation. 33 (6). November-December 1998.

"Stress, Behavior, Training and Safety (in Emergency Evacuation)" (PDF). Cabin Crew Safety. The Flight Safety Foundation. 25 (3). May-June 1990.

Corrigan, Douglas (April 2011). "The Demise of the Airline Pilot". Culture Wars.

"'The Miracle on the Hudson' Teaser". . Process Pictures, LLC. 2012.

"Hudson Miracle Approach Chart". jeppesen.com. Jeppesen.

Gould, Joe (January 17, 2009). "Stayed high & dry on my trip to N.C." Daily News. New York.

Twitter Moment - Sullenberger's recollections, ten years on

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
US Airways Flight 1549 was a regularly scheduled US Airways flight from New York City ( LaGuardia Airport), to Charlotte and Seattle, in the United States. On January 15, 2009, the Airbus A320 serving the flight struck a flock of birds shortly after take-off from LaGuardia, losing all engine power.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Southern Airways Flight 242 was a DC-9-31 jet, registered N1335U, that executed a forced landing on a highway in New Hope, Paulding County, Georgia, United States after suffering hail damage and losing thrust on both engines in a severe thunderstorm on April 4, 1977.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Kegworth air disaster occurred when a Boeing 737-400 crashed on to the embankment of the M1 motorway near Kegworth, Leicestershire, England, while attempting to make an emergency landing at East Midlands Airport on 8 January 1989.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The aircraft was registered in Australia as VH-OQA, and named Nancy Bird Walton , Qantas' first A380. The failure occurred over Batam Island, Indonesia, on Flight 32 from Heathrow Airport to Sydney Airport, four minutes after taking off from Changi for the second leg of the flight.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
West Caribbean Airways Flight 708 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
West Caribbean Airways Flight 708 was a West Caribbean Airways charter flight which crashed in a mountainous region in northwest Venezuela in the early hours of Tuesday, 16 August 2005, killing all 160 passengers and crew on board.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Alaska Airlines Flight 261 was a scheduled international passenger flight on January 31, 2000, from Lic. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz International Airport in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico, to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in Seattle, Washington, United States, with an intermediate stop at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, California.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 1986, an American Trans Air McDonnell Douglas DC-10 being serviced at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport had been destroyed on the ground by a fire caused by chemical oxygen generators.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Air China Flight 129 (CCA129/CA129) was a scheduled international passenger flight, operated by People's Republic of China's flag carrier Air China, from Beijing Capital International Airport, Beijing, People's Republic of China to Gimhae International Airport, Busan, South Korea.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 was a chartered flight carrying 45 people, including a rugby union team, their friends, family, and associates, that crashed in the remote Andes in early spring (Southern Hemisphere) on 13 October 1972, in extremely heavy snowpack -34.765 degrees latitude south of the equator, in an incident known as the Andes flight disaster and, in the Hispanic world and South America, as the Miracle of the Andes ( El Milagro de los Andes).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
American Airlines Flight 965 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
American Airlines Flight 965 was a regularly scheduled flight from Miami International Airport in Miami, Florida, to Alfonso Bonilla Aragón International Airport in Cali, Colombia. On December 20, 1995, the Boeing 757-200 flying this route ( registration N651AA) crashed into a mountain in Buga, Colombia, killing 151 out of the 155 passengers and all eight crew members.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Birgenair Flight 301 was a flight chartered by Turkish-managed Birgenair partner Alas Nacionales from Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic to Frankfurt, Germany, via Gander, Canada, and Berlin, Germany. On 6 February 1996, the Boeing 757-225 operating the route crashed shortly after take-off from Puerto Plata's Gregorio Luperón International Airport.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Aeroperú Flight 603 was a scheduled flight from Miami International Airport in Miami, Florida (KMIA) to Comodoro Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport in Santiago, Chile (SCEL), with stopover in Peru. On 2 October 1996, the aircraft flying the final leg of the flight crashed, killing all 70 people aboard.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 529 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 529 ( Callsign: ACEY 529) was an Embraer EMB 120 Brasilia aircraft that crashed near Carrollton, Georgia on August 21, 1995. Nine of the 29 passengers and crew on board were killed as a result of the accident.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Aero Caribbean Flight 883 was an domestic scheduled passenger flight from Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, to Havana, Cuba . On 4 November 2010, the Aero Caribbean ATR-72-212 operating the route crashed in the central Cuban province of Sancti Spíritus, killing all 61 passengers and 7 crew members aboard.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
American Eagle Flight 4184 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight from Indianapolis, Indiana to Chicago, Illinois, United States. On October 31, 1994, the performing this route flew into severe icing conditions, lost control and crashed into a field. All 68 people aboard were killed in the high speed impact.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Comair Flight 3272 was a Comair flight on January 9, 1997, from Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport to Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport. While on approach for landing, the aircraft, an Embraer EMB 120 Brasilia, crashed nose-down 18 miles short of the airport at 15:54 local time ( EST).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Northwest Airlines Flight 255 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Northwest Airlines Flight 255, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82, crashed shortly after takeoff from Detroit Metropolitan Airport on August 16, 1987, at about 8:46 p.m. EDT (00:46 UTC August 17), killing all six crew members and 148 of its 149 passengers, along with two people on the ground.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Northwest Airlink Flight 5719 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Northwest Airlink Flight 5719 was a flight from Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport to International Falls Airport in International Falls, Minnesota with a scheduled intermediate stop at Chisholm-Hibbing Airport in Hibbing, Minnesota.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 2311 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 2311 was a regularly scheduled commuter flight from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to Glynco Jetport (since renamed Brunswick Golden Isles Airport) in Brunswick, Georgia on April 5, 1991. The flight, operated using a twin- turboprop Embraer EMB 120 Brasilia, crashed just north of Brunswick while approaching the airport for landing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Iran Air Flight 655 was a scheduled civilian passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai. On 3 July 1988, the aircraft operating on this route was shot down by the United States Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes under the command of William C. Rogers III.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pan Am Flight 103 was a regularly scheduled Pan Am transatlantic flight from Frankfurt to Detroit via London and New York. On 21 December 1988, N739PA, the aircraft operating the transatlantic leg of the route, was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew in what became known as the Lockerbie bombing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Air Canada Flight 797 was an international passenger flight operating from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport to Montréal-Dorval International Airport, with an intermediate stop at Toronto Pearson International Airport. On 2 June 1983, the McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 operating the service developed an in-flight fire behind the lavatory that spread between the outer skin and the inner decor panels, filling the plane with toxic smoke. The spreading fire also burned through crucial electrical cables that disabled most of the instrumentation in the cockpit, forcing the plane to divert to Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. Ninety seconds after the plane landed and the doors were opened, the heat of the fire and fresh oxygen from the open exit doors created flashover conditions, and the plane's interior immediately became engulfed in flames, killing 23 passengers who had yet to evacuate the aircraft.

The accident became a watershed for global aviation regulations, which were changed in the aftermath of the accident to make aircraft safer. New requirements to install smoke detectors in lavatories, strip lights marking paths to exit doors, and increased firefighting training and equipment for crew became standard across the industry, while regulations regarding evacuation were also updated. Since the accident, it has become mandatory for aircraft manufacturers to prove their aircraft could be evacuated within 90 seconds of the commencement of an evacuation, and passengers seated in overwing exits are now instructed to assist in an emergency situation.

At 16:25 Eastern Daylight Time on 2 June 1983, Flight 797 took off from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. The flight was a regularly scheduled passenger flight operated by Air Canada using a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 ( aircraft registration C-FTLU). The flight was scheduled to make a stop at Toronto International Airport, ultimately bound for Montreal's Dorval Airport.

While flying over Louisville, Kentucky, an in-flight fire started in or around the rear lavatory of the aircraft. The pilots heard a popping sound around 18:51, during dinner service, and discovered that the lavatory's circuit breakers had tripped. The captain's initial attempt to reset the circuit breakers was unsuccessful. It was not uncommon for a plane's lavatory circuits to pop occasionally, precipitated by a large number of passengers using the toilet after eating, so Cameron waited around eight minutes to give the tripped circuits time to cool down before attempting to reset them again at 18:59. The captain observed that the circuit breakers popped back out as he pushed them.

Benetti saw no flames, but did see curls of thick black smoke coming out from the seams around the walls of the lavatory. While Benetti sprayed the interior of the lavatory with a CO ₂ fire extinguisher, Kayama moved passengers on the sparsely-populated flight forward, and opened air vents to let more fresh air into the cabin. Kayama also went to the cockpit, and at 19:02, informed the flight crew of a "fire in the washroom". Captain Cameron put on his oxygen mask and ordered first officer Ouimet to go back and investigate.

Ouimet found that thick smoke was filling the last three to four rows of seats, and he could not reach the aft lavatory. Benetti informed Ouimet that he did not see the source of the fire, but had doused the lavatory with fire retardant. Because smoking was not banned at the time, a regular cause of aircraft lavatory fires was disposal of cigarettes in the lavatory trash bin by passengers smoking in the lavatories,[citation needed ] but Benetti told Ouimet that he did not believe the fire was in the trash bin.

At 19:06, while Ouimet was out of the cockpit, Benetti again told Cameron that he thought the smoke was clearing. The captain, still believing the fire was in the lavatory trash bin, had not started descending because he expected the fire would be put out. Shortly after, the "master caution" light in the cockpit illuminated, indicating a loss of main bus electrical power. The captain called the air traffic controller (ATC) in Indianapolis, Indiana, and notified them that Flight 797 had an "electrical problem." Flight 797's transponder signal then disappeared from ATC radar displays; ATC was able to monitor the flight by switching to primary radar tracking.

Just after Ouimet returned to the cockpit, the cockpit "master warning" light lit up, warning the pilots of a loss of emergency electrical power. Cameron ordered Ouimet to switch to battery power, but the loss of main and emergency electrical power caused some electrical systems to fail, including power for the horizontal stabilizer. This caused the stabilizer to be stuck in the cruising position. This made controlling the plane's descent extremely difficult and required great physical exertion from the pilot and first officer. In addition, both flight recorders stopped recording at this point.

At 19:08, Cameron began an emergency descent and declared "mayday, mayday, mayday" to Indianapolis ATC. Controllers granted Flight 797 clearance to descend for an emergency landing at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport in Boone County, Kentucky, near Cincinnati, Ohio. Because the loss of electrical power had impaired some flight instruments, controllers had to direct Flight 797 to the airport using a "no gyro" approach, with the controller observing Flight 797 on radar and directing the flight to make turns based on radar position and heading.

Smoke filled the passenger cabin and entered the cockpit as the plane descended. The PA system also failed, leaving the flight attendants unable to communicate efficiently with the passengers. Nevertheless, attendants were able to move all passengers forward of row 13, and to instruct passengers sitting in exit rows on how to open the doors, a practice that was not standard on commercial airline flights at the time.

At 19:20, Cameron and Ouimet made an extremely difficult landing at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. Four tires blew out during the landing. Once the plane came to a stop, Chief Flight Attendant Sergio Benneti was the first to open the front door of the aircraft, and escaped out that way. The pilots quickly shut the airplane down. The overwing and forward aircraft doors were opened, and slides at the front doors were deployed. 18 passengers and all three flight attendants were able to evacuate using these exits. Opening the doors also caused an influx of air that fueled the fire.

The pilots were unable to go back into the passenger cabin due to the smoke and heat. Ouimet escaped through the co-pilot's emergency window shortly after the plane landed, but Cameron, who was exhausted from trying to keep the plane under control, was unable to move. Firefighters doused Cameron in firefighting foam through Ouimet's window, shocking him back to consciousness; Cameron was then able to open the pilot's emergency escape window and drop to the ground, where he was dragged to safety by Ouimet. Cameron was the last person to make it out of the plane alive.

Less than 90 seconds after touchdown, the interior of the plane flashed over and ignited, killing the remaining 23 passengers on board. The passengers trapped inside the plane died from smoke inhalation and burns from the flash fire. Of the 18 surviving passengers, three received serious injuries, 13 received minor injuries, and two were uninjured. None of the five crew members sustained any injuries. Dianne Fadley, a survivor, remarked: "it was almost like anybody who got out had nothing wrong... You made it and you were completely fine, or you didn't make it."

The fire completely destroyed the aircraft. It was noted the unlimited oxygen from the atmosphere fueled the hungry fire, and it ignited with the force of an explosion.[citation needed ]

Twenty-one Canadians and two Americans died. Many of the victims' bodies were burned beyond recognition. Almost all of the victims were in the forward half of the aircraft between the wings and the cockpit. Some victims were found in the aisle, while others were still in their seats. Two victims were in the back of the aircraft, even though the passengers were moved forward after the fire had been detected; the disoriented passengers moved beyond the overwing exits and succumbed. Blood samples from the bodies revealed high levels of cyanide, fluoride, and carbon monoxide, chemicals produced by the burning plane.

Because the accident occurred in the United States, it was investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

Although the fuselage was nearly destroyed by the intensity of the fire, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) were still in good condition and produced vital data for the NTSB investigation. On the CVR, NTSB investigators heard eight sounds of electrical arcing beginning at 18:48. The arcing sounds repeated each time the crew tried to reset the lavatory circuit breakers. Both pilots testified that they did not hear any arcing, and the NTSB concluded that these sounds would be inaudible to the flight crew. Although a number of wires in the lavatory section were later found with insulation stripped away, NTSB investigators were unable to determine whether this insulation damage was the cause of the fire or was caused by the fire.

This particular DC-9 had experienced a number of problems over the months leading up to the incident; 76 maintenance reports had been filed in the plane's logs in the previous year, and the CVR records Cameron telling Ouimet to "put [the tripping breakers] in the book there" when the breakers fail to respond to the first reset attempt at 18:52. Cameron attempted once more to reset the breakers at 18:59. The CVR records arcing sounds followed by the popping sound of the breakers continuing to trip again after each reset over the next 60 seconds. Nearly four years earlier, on 17 September 1979, the plane, then serving as Air Canada Flight 680 (Boston, Massachusetts, to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia), had suffered an explosive decompression in the rear bulkhead that required rebuilding the tail section and replacing or splicing most of the wiring and hydraulic lines in the back of the plane; Cameron later noted that the Air Canada maintenance crew "did a heck of a job getting everything put back together" after the decompression incident. Investigators were unable to find signs of arcing in any of the wire splices from the repairs done four years earlier, though much of the wiring in the rear of the plane was severely damaged or destroyed by the fire itself.

Newspapers and other media criticized the actions taken by the crew and said that the pilots took too long to initiate an emergency descent. The NTSB report was especially critical of Cameron for not asking about the exact nature of the fire and not immediately initiating emergency descent when the fire was first reported. Cameron admitted in a press conference following the issuance of the NTSB report that he assumed the problem was a garbage bin fire, a common cause of lavatory fires when smoking was still allowed on flights.[citation needed ] "All I know was that I did the best I could," Cameron later said. "I'm very sorry the people that didn't get off, didn't get off, because we spent a lot of time and effort getting them there."

After the NTSB issued its report, a number of commercial pilots and airline personnel petitioned the NTSB to revise its report. In addition, first officer Ouimet sent the NTSB a detailed defense of the crew's actions, including the decision to land in Cincinnati instead of Standiford Field Airport in Louisville, Kentucky, the airport closest to Flight 797 when the crew first declared an emergency. Ouimet stated that Louisville was too close to be able to descend from cruising altitude to an emergency landing safely, and even landing in Cincinnati was a questionable proposition given Cameron's difficulties in controlling the plane.

In January 1986, after reviewing Ouimet's missive and re-evaluating the available data, the NTSB issued a revised version of its accident report. The revised report included Ouimet's explanation of the landing decision. The report was still critical of Cameron's decision not to inquire about the fire itself. However, in its revised report, the NTSB revised its probable cause finding to describe the fire reports given to Cameron as "misleading" instead of merely "conflicting" information. The NTSB also removed the word "delayed" from its description of the pilots' decision to descend, instead listing the "time taken to evaluate the nature of the fire and to decide to initiate an emergency descent" as a contributing factor.

The crew of Flight 797 were later honored by multiple Canadian aviation organizations for their heroic actions in landing the plane safely. Cameron died from complications of Parkinson's disease on 3 December 2016 in Ottawa, aged 84.

As a result of this accident and other incidents of in-flight fires on passenger aircraft, the NTSB issued several recommendations to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), including:

Safety Recommendation A-83-70, which asked the FAA to expedite actions to require smoke detectors in lavatories;

Safety Recommendation A-83-71, which asked the FAA to require the installation of automatic fire extinguishers adjacent to and in lavatory waste receptacles;

Strong recommendation that all US-based air carriers review their fire training and evaluation procedures; procedures were to be shortened and focused on taking "aggressive actions" to determine the source and severity of suspected cabin fires while finding the shortest and safest possible emergency descents, including landing or ditching;

Strong suggestion that passenger instruction in how to open emergency exits become standard practice within the airline industry.

Strong recommendation for expedited FAA rule changes mandating that all US-based air carriers install (or improve existing) in-cabin fire safety enhancements, including (but not limited to):

Fire-blocking seat materials to limit both the spread of fire and the generation of toxic chemicals through ignition;

Emergency track lighting at or near the floor, strong enough to cut through heavy fuel fire smoke;

Raised markings on overhead bins indicating the location of exit rows to aid passengers in locating these rows in case of passenger visual impairment (either pre-existing or caused by emergency conditions);

Hand-held fire extinguishers using advanced technology extinguishing agents such as Halon.

George Curtis Mathes Jr., 54, head of his namesake Curtis Mathes Corporation, a firm that made premium television sets. He had moved to Toronto a few years earlier, but kept his company in the Dallas area. He was killed in the fire.

Stan Rogers, Canadian folk singer, aged 33, was also a victim on the flight. Rogers is known for songs such as "Northwest Passage", "The Mary Ellen Carter" and "Barrett's Privateers". He was going home on Flight 797 after attending the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. He died of smoke inhalation.

Glen W. Davis, Canadian millionaire (aged 42), survived the accident and became a philanthropist, helping the environment and wildlife. Davis stated that the accident contributed to his decision. Davis was shot and killed in 2007, aged 66.

After this incident, Air Canada sold the right wing of this DC-9 aircraft to Ozark Air Lines to repair a damaged airplane. On 20 December 1983 Ozark Air Lines Flight 650, served by a DC-9 with tail number N994Z, had hit a snow plow in Sioux Falls, killing the snow plow operator and separating the right wing from the aircraft. A wing from C-FTLU was used to replace the one separated on N994Z after the incident. The aircraft was later sold to Republic Airlines, and acquired by Northwest Airlines after Republic merged with Northwest. As of 2012, N994Z was sold for scrap to Evergreen after being assigned to Delta Air Lines, which now owns Northwest Airlines.

Air Canada still uses flight number 797, although it now operates from Montréal-Trudeau International Airport to Los Angeles International Airport with the Airbus A320.

The Discovery Channel Canada / National Geographic TV series (also called Air Crash Investigation, Air Emergency, and Air Disasters (Smithsonian Channel)) featured the accident in a 2007 episode titled Fire Fight which included interviews with survivors and accident investigators and a dramatic recreation of the flight.

This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the National Transportation Safety Board.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Air Canada Flight 797 was an international passenger flight operating from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport to Montréal-Dorval International Airport, with an intermediate stop at Toronto Pearson International Airport. On 2 June 1983, the McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 operating the service developed an in-flight fire behind the lavatory that spread between the outer skin and the inner decor panels, filling the plane with toxic smoke.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
BOAC Flight 781 was a de Havilland Comet passenger jet operated by British Overseas Airways Corporation that on 10 January 1954 crashed into the sea near Elba Island, off the Italian coast, after suffering an explosive decompression at altitude. All 35 people on board were killed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
BOAC Flight 911 (callsign 'Speedbird 911') was a round-the-world flight operated by British Overseas Airways Corporation that crashed near Mount Fuji in Japan on 5 March 1966, with the loss of all 113 passengers and 11 crew members. The Boeing 707 jetliner involved disintegrated mid-air shortly after departing from Tokyo, as a result of an encounter with severe clear-air turbulence.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With 203 fatalities, this was the deadliest air disaster of 1998 until Swissair Flight 111 crashed off the eastern coast of Canada on 2 September, killing 229 people. It remains the deadliest aviation accident on Taiwanese soil and the fifth-deadliest involving an Airbus A300.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Flight 801 was normally flown by an Airbus A300; since Korean Air had scheduled the August 5-6 flight to transport Guamanian athletes to the South Pacific Mini Games in American Samoa, the airline designated HL7468, a 12-year-old Boeing 747-300 delivered to Korean Air on December 12, 1984, to fly the route that night.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Iberia Airlines Flight 610 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight from Madrid to Bilbao, Spain. On 19 February 1985, a Boeing 727-200 operating the flight crashed into a television antenna on the summit of Mount Oiz in Biscay near Bilbao. All 141 passengers and 7 crew on board died.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
British Airtours Flight 28M was an international passenger flight, originating from Manchester International Airport's Runway 24 in Manchester, England, en route to Corfu International Airport on the Greek island of Corfu. On 22 August 1985, the route was being operated by a Boeing 737-236 registered G-BGJL, when take-off from Manchester Airport was aborted due to an engine failure.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Delta Air Lines Flight 191 was a regularly scheduled Delta Air Lines domestic service from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to Los Angeles with an intermediate stop at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW). On August 2, 1985, the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar operating Flight 191 encountered a microburst while on approach to land at DFW. The aircraft impacted ground over one mile (1.6 km) short of the runway, struck a car near the airport, collided with two water tanks, and disintegrated. The crash killed 137 people and injured 26 others. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that the crash resulted from the flight crew's decision to fly through a thunderstorm, the lack of procedures or training to avoid or escape microbursts, and the lack of hazard information on wind shear.

The aircraft was a Lockheed L-1011-385-1 TriStar ( registration number N726DA). It was delivered to Delta on February 28, 1979, and the airline had operated it continuously since that date. Three Rolls-Royce RB211-22B engines powered the aircraft.

The crew consisted of three flight crew members, and eight cabin crew members. Of the 11 crew members, only three flight attendants survived the crash.

The captain, Edward N. (Ted) Connors Jr., age 57, had been a Delta Air Lines employee since 1954. He qualified to captain the TriStar in 1979 and had passed his proficiency checks. The NTSB report mentioned that past flight crews who had flown with Connors prior to the accident described him as a meticulous pilot who strictly adhered to company policies. The report also stated that Connors "deviated around thunderstorms even if other flights took more direct routes" and "willingly accepted suggestions from his flight crew." Since his qualification in 1979, Connors had passed all eight en route inspections that he had undergone; the NTSB report also notes that he had received "favorable comments" regarding "cockpit discipline and standardization". Connors had logged over 29,300 hours of flight time, 3,000 of which had been in the TriStar.

Flight 191's first officer was Rudolph P. (Rudy) Price Jr., age 42, who had been a Delta Air Lines employee since 1970. Delta captains who flew with Price described him as an "above average first officer" and possessing "excellent knowledge" of the TriStar. Price had logged 6,500 flight hours, including 1,200 in the TriStar. The flight engineer, Nicholas N. (Nick) Nassick, age 43, had been a Delta Air Lines employee since 1976. He had logged 6,500 hours of flight time, including 4,500 in the TriStar. Fellow Delta employees described him as "observant, alert, and professional".

Connors had served with the U.S. Navy from 1950 to 1954 and fought in two tours in the Korean War. Price had served with the U.S. Navy from 1964 to 1970 and fought in four tours in the Vietnam War. Nassick had served with the U.S. Air Force from 1963 to 1976 and fought in four tours in the Vietnam War. The pilots were based in Atlanta, the flight attendants were Miami/Ft. Lauderdale based.[citation needed ]

Of the 152 passengers aboard, 128 were killed in the crash. Twelve of the 24 survivors were seated in a cluster near the tail of the aircraft. The NTSB report lists 126 passenger fatalities rather than 128, but notes that two of the passengers listed as survivors died more than 30 days after the crash, on September 13 and October 4, 1985. Of the dead, 73 originated from the Miami metropolitan area. Of them, 45 were from Broward County, 19 were from Palm Beach County, and 9 were from Dade County. One of the passengers was Don Estridge, known to the world as the father of the IBM PC; he died aboard the flight along with his wife, two IBM summer interns, four IBM employees from the IBM Branch Office in Burbank, California, and six additional family members of IBM employees.

Flight 191 was a regularly scheduled passenger flight from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles, California, with a scheduled stop at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. The flight departed Fort Lauderdale on an instrument flight rules flight plan at 14:10 Central Daylight Time ( UTC−05:00). The flight's dispatch weather forecast for DFW stated a "possibility of widely scattered rain showers and thunderstorms." Another dispatch weather alert warned of "an area of isolated thunderstorms ... over Oklahoma and northern and northeastern Texas." The flight crew reviewed these notices before takeoff.

As the aircraft flew past New Orleans, Louisiana, a weather formation near the Gulf Coast strengthened. The flight crew decided to deviate from the intended route to make the more northerly Blue Ridge arrival to DFW. The flight held for 10-15 minutes over the Texarkana, Arkansas VORTAC. At 17:35, the crew received an Automatic Terminal Information Service (ATIS) broadcast for weather on approach to DFW, and the Fort Worth Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) air traffic controller cleared the flight to the Blue Ridge, Texas VORTAC and instructed the flight to descend to 25,000 feet (7,600 m).

At 17:43:45, the Fort Worth ARTCC controller cleared the flight down to 10,000 feet (3,000 m). The controller suggested they fly a heading of 250° toward the Blue Ridge approach, but Captain Connors replied that the route would take them through a storm cell, stating, "I'd rather not go through it, I'd rather go around it one way or the other." After a brief exchange, the controller gave the flight a new heading. At 17:46:50, the controller cleared the flight direct to Blue Ridge and instructed the flight crew to descend to 9,000 feet (2,700 m). The captain expressed his relief that the controller did not send them on the original trajectory. At 17:51:19, the second officer commented, "Looks like it's raining over Fort Worth." At 17:51:42, the Fort Worth ARTCC controller transferred the flight to DFW Airport Approach Control, which cleared the flight to descend to 7,000 feet (2,100 m). Two minutes later, the controller asked the Delta flight to deviate by 10° and to slow their airspeed to 180 knots (210 mph; 330 km/h). The flight acknowledged the request. As the flight descended, the crew prepared the aircraft for landing. At 17:56:19, the feeder controller cleared the flight down to 5,000 feet (1,500 m). Nine seconds later, the controller announced that rain was north of the airport, and that the airport would be using instrument landing system (ILS) approaches.

At 17:59:47, Price said, "We're gonna get our airplane washed." Around the same time, the captain switched to the arrival radio frequency and informed the approach controller that they were flying at 5,000 feet (1,500 m). The controller replied that the flight should expect to approach Runway 17L (now Runway 17C). At 18:00:36, the approach controller asked an American Airlines flight that was two aircraft ahead of Flight 191, and on the same approach, if they could see the airport. The flight responded, "As soon as we break out of this rain shower we will." At 18:00:51, Flight 191 was instructed to slow to 170 knots (200 mph; 310 km/h) and to turn to heading 270°. Flight 191 was instructed to descend to 3,000 feet (910 m) at 18:01:34. One minute later, the approach controller turned the flight toward Runway 17L and cleared them for an ILS approach at or above 2,300 feet (700 m). Half a minute afterward, the controller asked the flight to reduce their speed to 160 knots (180 mph; 300 km/h), which the flight crew acknowledged. At 18:03:30 the controller advised, "And we're getting some variable winds out there due to a shower ... out there north end of DFW." Several seconds later, an unidentified flight crew member commented, "Stuff is moving in."

Just three miles (4.8 km) ahead of Flight 191, a Learjet 25 was on the same approach to Runway 17L. While on final approach, the Learjet flew through the storm north of the airport and encountered what was later described as "light to moderate turbulence". The Learjet encountered heavy rain and lost all forward visibility, but was able to continue its ILS approach and land safely. When later asked why he did not report weather conditions to the tower, the Learjet's captain testified that he had nothing to report because "the only thing that we encountered was the heavy rain." The tower controller handling landings on Runway 17L saw lightning from the storm cell after the Learjet landed, but before he saw Flight 191 emerge from the storm.

At 18:03:46, the approach controller once again asked Flight 191 to reduce its speed, this time to 150 knots (170 mph), and then handed the flight over to the tower controller. Twelve seconds later, the captain radioed the tower and said, "Tower[:] Delta one ninety one heavy, out here in the rain, feels good." The tower controller advised Flight 191 that the wind was blowing at 5 knots (5.8 mph; 2.6 m/s) with gusts up to 15 knots (17 mph; 7.7 m/s), which the captain acknowledged. The flight crew lowered the landing gear and extended their flaps for landing. At 18:04:18, Price commented, "Lightning coming out of that one. ... Right ahead of us." The captain called out that they were at 1,000 feet (300 m) at 18:05:05. Fourteen seconds later, he cautioned Price to watch his airspeed. At the same time, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) captured the beginning of a sound identified as rain hitting the cockpit. The captain warned Price, "You're gonna lose it all of a sudden, there it is." At 18:05:26, the captain told Price, "Push it up, push it way up." Several seconds later, the CVR recorded the sound of the engines spooling up. Connors then said, "That's it." At 18:05:36, Connors exclaimed, "Hang on to the son of a bitch!" From this point, the aircraft began a descent from which it never recovered. The angle of attack (AOA) was over 30° and began to vary wildly over the next few seconds. The pitch angle began to sink and the aircraft started descending below the glideslope.

At 18:05:44, with the aircraft descending at more than 50 feet per second (15 m/s; 34 mph) the ground proximity warning system (GPWS) began a series of "whoop whoop pull up" audible warnings. The captain responded by declaring " TOGA", aviation shorthand for the order to apply maximum thrust and abort a landing by going around. The first officer responded by pulling up and raising the nose of the aircraft, which slowed but did not stop the plane's descent. At 18:05:52, still descending at a rate around 10 feet per second (3.0 m/s; 6.8 mph), the aircraft's landing gear made contact with a plowed field 6,336 feet (1,931 m) north of the runway and 360 feet (110 m) east of the runway centerline. Remaining structurally intact, Flight 191 remained on the ground while rolling at high speed across the farmland. The main landing gear left shallow depressions in the field that extended for 240 feet (73 m) before disappearing and reappearing a few times as the aircraft approached Texas State Highway 114.

The aircraft struck a highway street light, and its nose gear touched down on the westbound lane of Highway 114, skidding across the road at at least 200 miles per hour (170 kn; 320 km/h). The aircraft's left engine hit a Toyota Celica driven by 28-year-old William Mayberry, killing him instantly. As the aircraft continued south, it hit two more street lights on the eastbound side of the highway and began fragmenting. The left horizontal stabilizer, some engine pieces, portions of the wing control surfaces, and parts of the nose gear came off the aircraft as it continued along the ground. Some witnesses later testified that fire was emerging from the left wing root. Surviving passengers reported that fire began entering the cabin through the left wall while the plane was still moving. A survivor stated that he watched passengers attempt to escape the fire by unbuckling their seatbelt and try to flee, but were sucked out of the plane, while others who stayed caught on fire due to leaking jet fuel. He only survived due to being doused by rain from openings in the plane. The aircraft's motion across open land ended when it crashed into two water tanks on the edge of the airport property; the aircraft grazed one water tank about 1,700 feet (520 m) south of Highway 114, and then struck the second one. As the left-wing and nose struck the water tank, the fuselage rotated counterclockwise and was engulfed in a fireball. The fuselage from the nose rearward to row 34 was destroyed. The tail section emerged from the fireball, skidding backward, and came to rest on its left side before wind gusts rotated it upright.

All airport fire and emergency units were alerted within one minute of the crash. Forty-five seconds after first being alerted, three fire trucks from the airport's fire station No. 3 arrived at the crash and began fighting the fire. Additional units from fire stations No. 1 and No. 2 arrived within five minutes, and despite high wind gusts and heavy rain, the fire was mostly under control within 10 minutes after the alert was sounded.

The first paramedics arrived within five minutes of the crash and immediately established triage stations. In later testimony to NTSB officials, on-site EMTs estimated that without the on-scene triage procedures, at least half of the surviving passengers would have died. Most of the survivors of Flight 191 were located in the aircraft's rear smoking section, which broke free from the main fuselage when the aircraft hit the water tanks. Authorities transported most of the survivors to Parkland Memorial Hospital.

The cockpit and passenger section forward of seat row 34 had been completely fragmented by impact with the water tanks and postcrash fires; all but eight of the occupants in this section were killed. The remainder of the surviving passengers and crew were in the rear cabin and tail section, which separated relatively intact and landed on its side in an open field, and most of these were in the center and right portions of the fuselage from seat row 40 rearwards. Overall, the disintegration of the Tristar was so extensive that the NTSB investigation was quite difficult. Survivors reported that fire broke out in the cabin prior to hitting the tanks and began spreading through the aircraft's interior, which is consistent with the right wing's collision with the light pole and fuel tank ignition. Some of the people in the tail section were unable to free themselves due to injuries, so rescue crews had to extricate them. Most survivors were also soaked with jet fuel, further adding to the difficulty of exiting the wreckage.

Two of the passengers who initially survived the crash died more than 30 days later. On the ground, an airline employee who assisted in rescuing survivors was hospitalized overnight for chest and arm pain. The crash ultimately killed 137 people, including 128 of the 152 passengers and eight of the 11 crew (including all three flight crew members), and the driver of the car.

Delta Air Lines Flight 191 has the second-highest death toll of any aviation accident involving a Lockheed L-1011 anywhere in the world, after Saudia Flight 163.

Numerous public safety agencies responded to the crash, including the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport Department of Public Safety, the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Irving Fire Department, the Irving Police Department, and all available third-watch personnel from the Dallas Police Department's Northwest Patrol Division and the Northeastern Sector of the Fort Worth Police Department's Patrol Division.

After a long investigation, the NTSB deemed the cause of the crash to be attributable to pilot error (for their decision to fly through a thunderstorm), combined with extreme weather phenomena associated with microburst-induced wind shear. The NTSB also determined that a lack of specific training, policies, and procedures for avoiding and escaping low-altitude wind shear was a contributing factor.

The NTSB attributed the accident to lack of the ability to detect microbursts aboard aircraft; the radar equipment aboard aircraft at the time was unable to detect wind changes, only thunderstorms. After the investigation, NASA researchers at Langley Research Center modified a Boeing 737-200 as a testbed for an onboard Doppler weather radar. The resultant airborne wind shear detection and alert system was installed on many commercial airliners in the United States after the Federal Aviation Administration mandated that all commercial aircraft must have on-board wind shear-detection systems.

The NTSB was also critical of the airport for failing to notify emergency services in surrounding municipalities in a timely manner. While the airport's on-site emergency services were notified almost immediately, the DFW Department of Public Safety (DPS) Communications Center did not begin notifying off-site emergency services until nearly 10 minutes after the crash and did not finish its notifications until 45 minutes after the crash. During notifications, DPS also failed to request ambulances from the adjacent communities of Irving, Grapevine, and Hurst; however, Hurst responded with ambulances after personnel at its ambulance company overheard the airport crash report on a radio-frequency scanner. The NTSB concluded that the overall emergency response was effective due to the rapid response of on-airport personnel, but found "several problem areas" which under different circumstances "could affect adversely the medical treatment and survival of accident victims at the airport".

Following the crash and the ensuing NTSB report, DFW's DPS made improvements to its postcrash notification system, including the introduction of an automated voice notification system to reduce notification times. In 1988, following the crash of Delta Air Lines Flight 1141 while taking off from DFW, DPS completed its notification of nearby emergency services in 21 minutes; the NTSB described this as a "significant improvement" over response times after the Delta Flight 191 crash.: 32-33, 81-82  Based on the improved response times, the NTSB issued a Safety Recommendation on January 9, 1990, calling for airport executives nationwide to consider the benefits of using automated voice notification systems for their emergency aid notifications. Pilots were also required to train to react to microbursts and to quickly take evasive action in order to safely land the plane.

The Delta Flight 191 crash resulted in the longest aviation trial in American history, lasting 14 months from 1988 to 1989 and presided over by Federal Judge David Owen Belew Jr. of the Northern District of Texas. The trial featured the first use of computer graphic animation as substantive evidence in federal court; while the use of such animation is now routine, its use in the Flight 191 litigation was novel enough that it became the featured cover story of a 1989 issue of ABA Journal, the magazine of the American Bar Association. Preparing the animated video for trial cost the Department of Justice around $100,000 to $150,000 (equivalent to $220,000 to $330,000 today), and it required nearly two years of work. The court found that both government personnel and the Delta flight crew were negligent, but that Delta was ultimately responsible because its pilots' negligence was the proximate cause of the accident, and the ruling was upheld on appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The crash was the subject of the television movie Fire and Rain.

The Discovery Channel Canada/ National Geographic television series dramatized the crash of Flight 191 in a season-five episode titled "Invisible Killer". The crash had previously been discussed in the Mayday season-one episode "Racing the Storm", which covered the weather-related crash landing of American Airlines Flight 1420.

The crash was featured on an episode of When Weather Changed History and Why Planes Crash on The Weather Channel, and the episode "Deadly Weather" of Survival in the Sky on The Learning Channel.

The crash was mentioned in the feature film .

Working as a reporter for the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel in 1986, future renowned mystery author Michael Connelly and two other reporters conducted extensive interviews of survivors of Delta Flight 191 and wrote an article detailing their experiences during and after the crash. The article explored the topic of survivor guilt and earned Connelly and his co-writers a finalist position for the Pulitzer Prize.

Ten years after the crash, survivors and family members of victims gathered in Florida to recognize the tenth anniversary of the crash. In 2010, 25 years after the accident, a memorial was installed at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport's Founders Plaza in Grapevine.

This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the National Transportation Safety Board.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Delta Air Lines Flight 191 was a regularly scheduled Delta Air Lines domestic service from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to Los Angeles with an intermediate stop at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW). On August 2, 1985, the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar operating Flight 191 encountered a microburst while on approach to land at DFW.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
1986 Cerritos mid-air collision - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 1986 Cerritos midair collision was a plane crash that occurred over the Los Angeles suburb of Cerritos, California, on Sunday, August 31, 1986. It occurred when Aeroméxico Flight 498, a McDonnell-Douglas DC-9, was clipped by N4891F, a Piper PA-28-181 Archer owned by the Kramer family, while descending into Los Angeles International Airport, killing all 67 people on both aircraft and an additional 15 people on the ground.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
American Airlines Flight 587 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
American Airlines Flight 587 was a regularly scheduled passenger flight from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to Las Américas International Airport in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. On November 12, 2001, the Airbus A300B4-605R flying the route crashed shortly after takeoff into the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, a borough of New York City.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Arrow Air Flight 1285 was a McDonnell Douglas DC-8 jetliner that operated as an international charter flight carrying U.S. troops from Cairo, Egypt, to their home base in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, via Cologne, West Germany, and Gander, Canada.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Air France Flight 447 (AF447/AFR447) was a scheduled passenger international flight from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Paris, France, which crashed on 1 June 2009. The Airbus A330, operated by Air France, entered an aerodynamic stall, from which it did not recover and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean at 02:14 UTC, killing all 228 passengers, aircrew and cabin crew aboard the aircraft.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Turkish Airlines Flight 981 was a regularly scheduled flight from Istanbul Yesilköy Airport to London Heathrow Airport with an intermediate stop in Paris at Orly Airport. On 3 March 1974, the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 operating the flight crashed into the Ermenonville Forest, outside Paris, killing all 346 people on board.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Colgan Air Flight 3407, marketed as Continental Connection under a codeshare agreement with Continental Airlines, was a scheduled passenger flight from Newark, New Jersey, to Buffalo, New York, which crashed on February 12, 2009. The aircraft, a Bombardier Dash-8 Q400, entered an aerodynamic stall from which it did not recover and crashed into a house in Clarence Center, New York at 10:17 p.m.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
(日本航空123便 Japan Airlines Flight 123 Nihonkōkū 123 Bin) was a scheduled domestic Japan Airlines passenger flight from Tokyo's Haneda Airport to Osaka International Airport, Japan. On Monday, August 12, 1985, a Boeing 747SR operating this route suffered a sudden decompression 12 minutes into the flight and crashed into two ridges of Mount Takamagahara in Ueno, Gunma Prefecture, 100 kilometres (62 miles) from Tokyo 32 minutes later.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
China Airlines Flight 611 was a regularly scheduled passenger flight from Chiang Kai-shek International Airport (now Taoyuan International Airport) in Taiwan to Hong Kong International Airport in Hong Kong. On 25 May 2002, the Boeing 747-209B operating the route disintegrated in mid-air and crashed into the Taiwan Strait 23 nautical miles (43 km) northeast of the Penghu Islands 20 minutes after takeoff, killing all 225 people on board.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lauda Air Flight 004 was a regularly scheduled international passenger flight between Bangkok, Thailand and Vienna, Austria. On 26 May 1991, the thrust reverser on the No.1 engine of the Boeing 767-300ER operating the flight deployed in flight without being commanded, causing the aircraft to spiral out of control, break up, and crash, killing all 213 passengers and the ten crew members on board.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 ( QZ8501/ AWQ8501) was a scheduled international passenger flight, operated by AirAsia Group affiliate Indonesia AirAsia, from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore. On 28 December 2014, the aircraft operating the route, an Airbus A320-216, registered as PK-AXC, msn: 3648, crashed into the Java Sea during bad weather, killing all 155 passengers and seven crew on board.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Swissair Flight 111 (IATA: SR111, ICAO: SWR111) was a scheduled international passenger flight from New York City, United States, to Geneva, Switzerland. This flight was also a codeshare flight with Delta Air Lines. On 2 September 1998, the McDonnell Douglas MD-11 performing this flight, registration HB-IWF, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean southwest of Halifax International Airport at the entrance to St.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Air India Flight 182 was an Air India flight operating on the Toronto- Montreal- London- Delhi route. On 23 June 1985, the Boeing 747-237B serving the flight (c/n 21473/330, registration VT-EFO, Emperor Kanishka ) was destroyed by a bomb at an altitude of 31,000 feet (9,400 m).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) Flight 182 was a Boeing 727-214 commercial airliner, registration, N533PS that collided with a private Cessna 172 light aircraft, registration, N7711G over San Diego, California, at 9:01 am on Monday, September 25, 1978. It was Pacific Southwest Airlines' first deadly accident.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
American Airlines Flight 191 - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
American Airlines Flight 191 was a regularly scheduled passenger flight operated by American Airlines from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport to Los Angeles International Airport. On May 25, 1979, the McDonnell Douglas DC-10-10 operating this flight crashed just moments after takeoff from Chicago.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
erebus plane crash te901 air new zealand

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Erebus disaster - the story and the facts. About the Mt Erebus plane crash

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Air New Zealand Flight 901 (TE-901) was a scheduled Air New Zealand Antarctic sightseeing flight that operated between 1977 and 1979. The flight would leave Auckland Airport in the morning and spend a few hours flying over the Antarctic continent, before returning to Auckland in the evening via Christchurch.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Aeroflot Flight 593 was a Moscow- Hong Kong passenger service operated by Aeroflot - Russian International Airlines, flown with an Airbus A310-300, that crashed into a mountain range in Kemerovo Oblast, Russia, on 23 March 1994. All 63 passengers and 12 crew members perished in the accident.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
United Airlines Flight 585 was a scheduled passenger flight on March 3, 1991 from Denver to Colorado Springs, Colorado, carrying 20 passengers and 5 crew members on board. The plane experienced a rudder hardover while on final approach to runway 35 at Colorado Springs Municipal Airport, causing the plane to roll over and enter an uncontrolled dive.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
1996 Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision occurred on 12 November 1996 over the village of Charkhi Dadri, to the west of New Delhi, India. The aircraft involved were a Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747-100B en route from Delhi to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and a Kazakhstan Airlines Ilyushin Il-76 en route from Chimkent, Kazakhstan, to Delhi.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On 4 October 1992, El Al Flight 1862, a Boeing 747 cargo aircraft of the state-owned Israeli airline El Al, crashed into the Groeneveen and Klein-Kruitberg flats in the Bijlmermeer (colloquially "Bijlmer") neighbourhood (part of Amsterdam-Zuidoost ) of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. From the location in the Bijlmermeer, the crash is known in Dutch as the Bijlmerramp ( Bijlmer disaster).