More than a year ago, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared from air traffic controller scopes on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The captain, with more than 18,000 hours of flight time, gave no warning and no mayday call. Fifteen months later, after hundreds of millions of dollars spent searching wide swaths of the ocean, we still only have theories—and now possibly our first good clue.
There's no radar tracking over the open ocean, so air traffic controllers rely on planes to send out their location and current speed. Because there were no radio communications from the plane, and, for an unknown reason, its automated pinger system stopped working, we don't really have any idea where the plane might have gone down, or even when. And the ocean's a big, deep place that hides secrets well.
Still, if a plane goes down it must be somewhere, whether at the bottom of the ocean or, perhaps, on Réunion Island off the coast of Madagascar.
Read the full story: How It's Possible to Lose an Airplane in 2014
