MH370News:Media Statements
News Background
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 departed Kuala Lumpur International Airport on Friday, 7 March 2014 with 12 Crew and 227 Passengers onboard. The destination was the International Airport at Beijing and the expected arrival time was 6:30 am on Saturday, 8 March 2014. The aircraft never arrived, no distress message was ever sent, the aircraft did not land at any alternate airport, and the only news was simply that all contact with the aircraft had been lost.
The days passed, with news introduced by phrases like "It has been more than 24 hours since we last heard from MH370...", "It has been more than 48 hours since we lost contact with our flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.", and on Tuesday, 11 March 2014 "As we enter into Day 4, the aircraft is yet to be found."
Each passing day was then numbered "It has been 47 days since MH370 went missing...", until Day 100 was reached on Sunday, 15 June 2014. Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, Group Chief Executive Officer, Malaysia Airlines opening statement was "It has been the longest 100 days since the disappearance of our MH370." And Hishammuddin Hussein, Acting Minister of Transport (Malaysia) said "100 days after MH370 went missing, its loss remains a painful void in the hearts of all Malaysians and those around the world."
Media Statements were initially made by Malaysia Airlines and each Statement was numbered in the title, for example Malaysia Airlines MH370 Flight Incident - 20th Media Statement on Sunday, 16 March 2014. On that day, Hishammuddin Hussein, Minister of Defence and Acting Minister of Transport, also read a Press Briefing to the media and subsequently provided frequent updates from the Malaysian Government perspective.
On Thursday, 17 July 2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over the Ukraine.
News Sources
The news collected here is generally limited to Media Statements and news summaries from official sources - Malaysia Airlines, the Department of Transport (Malaysia), the Prime Minister (Malaysia), and many others. Most of those resources are no longer available from their original internet location, although many of them can be downloaded as portable document (.pdf) files from the official Malaysian website for MH370. For presentation here, however, the original files have been converted to text and formatted using html. This enables links to be added and tooltips will function automatically. Comments, where added, are separate from the quoted text (identified by a white background).
News Articles - Naming and Indexing
Articles in this Section are prefixed with MH370News:[1] (this is a MediaWiki Namespace). Media Statements are presented on a separate article page for each day. A naming convention used for these articles uses the format MH370News:Year/Day Number. For example, the page containing news for Day 1 which is Saturday, 8 March 2014 is titled MH370News:2014/Day 001, followed by MH370News:2014/Day 002 etc.
The days merged into years, as the underwater search failed to locate any wreckage, and the Malaysian Government urged the ICAO Annex 13 Investigation Team to complete their report. The Safety Investigation Report was released to the public on Monday, 30 July 2018 (Day 1606). The article containing a press release accompanying the Safety Investigation Report would be named MH370_News:2018/Day 1606.
News from 2019 onwards is scant. The Safety Investigation Report provided an unsatisfactory level of closure and the coronavirus pandemic from 2020 interrupted any possibility of further searches. Consequently, Media Statements from this period are simply collected as 'Other' and articles are named MH370News:Other/Day nnnn.
Documentaries
Throughout the period since Saturday, 8 March 2014 there have been many documentaries made, primarily for television audiences. These typically include interviews with experts whose research and opinions are of public interest. However, the content of such programs is generally not 'news' in the sense defined for inclusion in this Section. At this stage, the only items which would constitute News would be the discovery of the aircraft wreckage on the sea floor, or the release of a report or document which had previously been classified.
Notes
- ↑ The words MH370 and News have been deliberately joined together for the reason that if the word News is separated and forms part of a link or URL, Browsers may automatically look for, and open, a news reader application. This occurred even if the words were joined like this MH370_News. To avoid an unwanted browser action the two words were joined.