MALAYSIA
Twin Tragedies: One of the greatest aviation mysteries of modern times remains unsolved heading into 2015 — the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. It was the first of two disasters to strike MAS, which was already in deep financial trouble. MAS has since been delisted from the stock market ahead of a massive overhaul under a new German chief executive who is expected to shed at least 6,000 jobs, among other changes.
Flight MH370, with 227 passengers and 12 crew, vanished on March 8 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. No distress signals were sent, and no one knows why the plane deviated from its flight path. The Boeing 777 is now believed to have plunged into the Indian Ocean somewhere west of Australia, where experts say it will take until May 2015 to complete a search of the “priority zone” they have identified. Months of searches costing hundreds of millions of dollars and personnel and equipment from 26 countries have yet to uncover a trace.
Just three months later, on July 17, Flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew. A missile fired by Russian-backed rebels was believed to have been the cause, while Russia blames a missile fired by a Ukrainian pilot. A Dutch Safety Board report stopped short of saying the Boeing 777 was downed by a missile, saying that the aircraft “was penetrated by a large number of high-energy objects ... [resulting in] a loss of structural integrity”.