Flight MH370: The Plane That Vanished

Flight MH370 was meant to be an ordinary night flight to Beijing. It carried 227 passengers and 12 crew from 14 nations, with Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 52, in command. The plane cruised at 35,000 feet, smooth and unremarkable, and approached the edge of its home airspace, where air traffic control would hand it to Vietnam. Then the cockpit made its last radio call, a calm goodnight. Two minutes later, the transponder, the device that broadcasts a plane's identity and location, stopped transmitting. Investigators later judged it had most likely been switched off, but could not say by whom or why. Vietnamese controllers waited for the jet to check in at the handover point. It never did. The plane had vanished from the screens that were watching it, yet it was still flying somewhere in the dark. Where was it going, and why had it gone silent? Everything that followed was an attempt to answer that.