We hear from the journalists, investigators and aviation analysts whose lives were turned upside down by the aviation world’s greatest mystery: the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, which happened 10 years ago today. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Malaysian 370 Contact Virtual 120- decimal9 hello and welcome to a special edition of the Monocle Weekly.
It is Friday 8th March, which marks the 10 year anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370.
I'm Chris Termack and I'll be walking you through the impressions of impassioned journalists, aviation analysts and private investigators who have dedicated the last 10 years of their lives to what is still one of the aviation world's greatest mysteries.
We start the show with a special feature of Andrew Muller's regular installment called on this Day looking back at the moment that MH370 disappeared.
At about 1.20am local time on March 8, 2014, Kuala Lumpur Air traffic control made a routine call to a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 which had taken off from Kuala Lumpur 37 minutes previously bound for Beijing.
Malaysian 370 contact Ho Chi Minh 120-.
Decimal-9 Kuala Lumpur was waving the plane, its 227 passengers and 12 crew on to Ho Chi Minh City, whose air traffic controllers would oversee the next leg of its trip.
The reply from the 777's flight deck was no more and no less than might have been expected.
Two minutes later, Flight MH370 vanished from the radar screens.
Aircraft, even large ISH aircraft, had disappeared before in the post World War II years, especially as commercial and military flights started taking their chances over oceans with greater frequency.
Accidents happened.
In 1948, one of Air France's mighty Latacoair 631 flying boats was lost over the Atlantic along with 52 passengers and crew.
In 1950, a Northwest Orient Airlines DC4 with 58 souls aboard plunged into Lake Michigan and was never seen again.
In 1962, a Lockheed Constellation chartered by the US army vanished somewhere over the Pacific with the loss of 107 people.
In 1965, an Argentine Air Force Douglas C54G went missing between Panama and El Salvador along with 68 occupants.
As late as 1989, a Pakistan International Airlines Fokker Friendship took off from Gilgit, never arrived in Islamabad, and is presumed still to be somewhere in the Himalayas, but nobody knows exactly where.
But in 2014, by when anybody with a smartphone could track whichever flights they pleased in real time, the idea that it was somehow possible to just lose an entire modern airliner seemed outrageous, even ridiculous.
It is certainly the case that the hours and days immediately following the disappearance of MH370 were not a masterclass in corporate or governmental communications.
But all concerned could be forgiven an amount of bewilderment.
Early reports were understandably vague.