More than two miles beneath the southern Indian Ocean, a sonar towed behind a search ship picked up a cluster of hard shapes on the seabed in a place no human had ever seen.
The crew had spent months looking for one thing, the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
For a moment, they thought they might have found it.
However, when a camera was sent down for a closer look, it revealed a ship that had vanished more than 130 years earlier with its crew, and the plane is still out there somewhere.
My name is Elias, and MH370 is the greatest mystery in modern aviation, and the machines sent to find it keep turning up things nobody expected.
I’m going to take you through the night the plane disappeared, every search since, and the drones that are about to go back down.
If you like real mysteries that are still unsolved, subscribe now.
This one has a new chapter coming.
The shapes on the sonar turned out to be two shipwrecks.
They were found in 2015 by the search vessels Fugro Equator and Hava Harmony, lying about 3,700 to 3,900 m down, around 22 mi apart, roughly 1,400 m off the coast of Western Australia.
Search teams sent the sonar images and video to experts at the Western Australian Museum.
One was a wooden ship so badly decayed that its hull and timbers had disappeared, leaving only its anchors, metal fittings, and a cargo of coal scattered across the seafloor.
The museum’s curator, Ross Anderson, said the spread of debris suggested it was destroyed by something catastrophic, such as an explosion, a known danger for ships carrying coal.
He suggested it may have been the Brig W.
Gordon, which vanished after leaving Cape Town in 1876.
The other was an iron sailing ship sitting upright on the seabed with at least two decks.
Rails were still standing on its bow and port holes were visible at its stern.
Coal from the site appeared to be British.
The museum’s best guess was the Bark West Ridge, which disappeared on a voyage from Liverpool to Bombay in 1883.
Each ship likely carried 15 to 30 men and possibly families, too.
They had vanished without a trace, and it took the search for a missing airliner more than a century later to find them.
The plane they were looking for has still never been found.
So, what happened to it?
On the night of March 8th, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight 370 took off from Koala Lumpa at 19 minutes to 1 in the morning bound for Beijing.
The Boeing 777 carried 239 people, 227 passengers and 12 crew.
They came from more than a dozen countries and more than 150 of the passengers were from China.
Within days, it emerged that two passengers had boarded with stolen passports, which set off fears of terrorism until investigators found they were young Iranian men trying to migrate to Europe.
At the [clears throat] controls was Captain Zahari Ahmed Sha, a veteran pilot with more than 18,000 flying hours, and first officer Farik Abdul Hammed.
At 19 minutes past 1, as the plane neared the edge of Malaysian airspace over the South China Sea, the cockpit radioed a routine signoff to air traffic control in Koala Lumpa.
Good night, Malaysian 370.
They were the last words anyone ever heard from the aircraft.
Less than 2 minutes later, the plane’s transponder, the device that identifies it on air traffic radar, stopped transmitting.
MH370 should have checked in with controllers in Vietnam.
It never did.
And then it did something nobody expected.
It turned around.
Malaysian military radar later showed that the plane made a sharp turn to the west.
It flew back across the Malay Peninsula, passing near the island of Panang, then out over the Straight of Malaca and toward the Anderman Sea.
At 22 minutes past 2, it disappeared from military radar.
For days, the world searched in the wrong place.
Around the South China Sea, where the plane had last been tracked by air traffic control, and the theories began to pour in, from hijacking and fire on board, to a pilot acting deliberately, none of them proven.
Then came a clue from space.
Although the plane’s main communications had gone silent, a satellite terminal on board kept exchanging automatic signals with a satellite operated by the British company Inmarat.
These signals, known as handshakes, didn’t carry any messages or position, but by studying their timing and tiny shifts in frequency, engineers could work out roughly how far the plane was from the satellite at each moment.
The plane kept flying for almost seven more hours.
The final handshake came at 19 minutes 8.
Calculations placed it somewhere along a long curving line across the Indian Ocean which became known as the seventh ark.
The analysis pointed south into one of the most remote stretches of ocean on Earth far off the coast of Western Australia.
The plane was believed to have run out of fuel and crashed there.
So, the hunt moved to the southern Indian Ocean and the first drone went down.
In April 2014, an Australian ship, Ocean Shield, towing a device designed to detect the pings from aircraft blackboxes, picked up a series of acoustic signals.
Hopes soared.
The plane’s flight recorders had batteries that would only last around 30 days, and the clock was running.
To check the area, the search sent down a robotic submarine called Blue Fin 21, an autonomous underwater drone that could map the seabed with sonar deep in the dark.
Bluefin 21 made dive after dive.
It found nothing.
Investigators later concluded that the signals hadn’t come from MH370.
Then the real search began.
One of the largest and most expensive in history.
Led by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau with Malaysia and China, ships began towing sonar systems just above the seafloor, slowly scanning strips of seabed thousands of meters down.
If you are not subscribed yet, now’s a good time to fix that because those sonar systems were about to map a world under the ocean that nobody had ever seen.
And one of them didn’t survive the trip.
Before the search could even start, ships had to map the shape of the seafloor because almost nothing was known about it.
What they found was a wild landscape of underwater mountains, ridges, valleys, and volcanoes.
Much of it never mapped before.
How do you search a seabed that rough?
The toad sonars, called toefish, had to be flown at a careful height above the bottom, often only around 100 meters up through total darkness at the end of miles of cable.
It was dangerous work.
In January 2016, the search ship Fugro Discovery lost its toefish when it collided with an underwater mud volcano.
The impact broke the cable and the device along with 4,500 m of cable sank to the bottom.
The ships worked in the roaring 40s where storms and waves many meters high could stop operations for days.
And what did all that effort turn up?
Over almost 3 years, the official search covered about 120,000 square kilm of seabed, an area roughly the size of England.
Along the way, government scientists mapped huge features of the seabed in detail for the first time, including parts of the steep Dantina escarment and the rugged broken ridge, and later released the data so researchers around the world could study it.
The two lost sailing ships, the W.
Gordon and the Westridge we started with, were part of that same hall.
It found shipwrecks and uncharted underwater terrain, but it didn’t find the plane.
In January 2017, Malaysia, Australia, and China suspended the search after spending an estimated 200 million Australian dollars.
For the families of the 239 people on board, it was devastating.
In its final report that October, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau wrote that it was almost inconceivable in the modern aviation era for a large commercial aircraft to be missing and for the world not to know with certainty what became of it and those on board.
Before it ended, experts gathered for a review in late 2016 and concluded that the plane was probably not in the area that had been searched and suggested looking further north along the seventh ark.
But by then, the ocean itself had already started giving pieces of the plane back.
On July 29th, 2015, a beach cleaner on Reunion Island, a French territory in the western Indian Ocean, found a large piece of aircraft wreckage on the shore.
It was a flapperon, part of a wing.
French investigators later confirmed it came from MH370, the first physical proof that the plane had crashed into the ocean.
Australian analysts later concluded the Flapperon was most likely retracted when it broke away, which suggested the plane hadn’t been set up for a careful landing on the water.
More pieces followed, washing up along the coasts of Mosambique, Madagascar, Maitius, Tanzania, and South Africa.
Some were found by local people and some by an American adventurer named Blaine Gibson, who spent years combing the beaches of East Africa for debris.
In 2016 in Mosambique, he found a piece of tail plane marked with the words nostep.
One fragment of engine cowling found in South Africa still carried part of the Rolls-Royce logo.
In total, more than 30 pieces of possible debris were collected, and several were confirmed or considered almost certain to come from the missing plane.
Scientists used ocean drift models tracking how currents would carry floating debris across the Indian Ocean to work backwards and estimate where the plane went down.
Their results broadly supported the southern Indian Ocean near the seventh ark.
So, the plane was out there.
Someone just had to find the exact spot.
And in 2018, a private company decided to try with a fleet of drones.
The company was Ocean Infiniti, a marine robotics firm, and it offered Malaysia an unusual deal.
If it found the plane, it would be paid up to $70 million US.
If it didn’t, Malaysia would pay nothing.
In January 2018, its ship Seabed Constructor set off from South Africa to search the northern area the experts had recommended.
Carrying eight autonomous underwater vehicles.
These drones weren’t tied to the ship.
Each one, a type of drone called a Hugan, could dive as deep as 6,000 m, run its own mission plan for up to about 2 days, and scan the seabed with side scan sonar, a multi-beam echo sounder, and other sensors, while the others worked at the same time.
When a drone surfaced, its data was downloaded and examined on board, and suspicious targets could be checked on a later dive.
The sonar images were sharp enough to pick out objects only a few meters across on the seabed.
The results were extraordinary.
In just over 3 months of operations, Ocean Infinity surveyed more than 112,000 km of seabed, almost as much as the official search had covered in 2 and 1/2 years.
There simply has not been a subc search on this scale carried out as efficiently or as effectively ever before, said the company’s chief executive, Oliver Plunkett.
But they didn’t find MH370.
And in late May 2018, the search ended.
Later that same year, Ocean Infiniti used the same ship and drones to find the Argentine submarine Arra San Juan, which had disappeared with 44 crew in 2017, lying at about 920 m in the Atlantic.
The technology worked.
MH370 just wasn’t where they looked.
So, who was flying the plane when it turned around and why?
In July 2018, Malaysia released its official safety investigation report.
It was more than 400 pages long, and it couldn’t say what happened.
The investigators said the plane’s turnway from its route was most likely made with the aircraft under manual control rather than by autopilot.
They said they couldn’t rule out what they called unlawful interference by a third party, but they also couldn’t determine who was responsible or why.
The report also criticized the response of air traffic controllers in Malaysia and Vietnam, who took far too long to raise the alarm after the plane vanished from their screens.
The report also looked at the cargo which included lithium ion batteries and a shipment of mangoeen fruit and found nothing to suggest it caused the disaster.
There was another detail that fed theories for years.
Captain Zahari was a well-liked, experienced pilot and a keen hobbyist, and investigators examined a home flight simulator belonging to him.
They found data recovered with help from the FBI from a simulated flight that ended in the southern Indian Ocean.
Police and investigators said they found no evidence that he or anyone else on board had a motive and his family and friends have defended him.
Without the wreckage and especially the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, there’s no way to know for certain what happened in that cockpit.
That’s why the search matters so much.
Over the years, independent researchers have tried to narrow the crash site with their own analysis of the satellite data, debris drift, and aircraft performance.
One British engineer, Richard Godfrey, has even proposed tracking the plane using disturbances in a network of amateur radio signals known as WSPR.
Many experts doubt that method, but it shows how many people refuse to let this mystery go.
If you are still watching, please hit subscribe now because in 2025, the drones went back down for the first time in 7 years.
And what happened next is the latest chapter in this story.
In March 2025, Malaysia approved a new no find, no fee contract with Ocean Infiniti.
Once again, the company would only be paid $70 million if it found the wreckage.
This time it would focus on a newly identified search area of about 15,000 km in the southern Indian Ocean based on fresh analysis of the data chosen by the company and its experts as the most likely place the plane came down.
Ocean Infiniti said it brought upgraded drones and sensors, a generation beyond the ones used in 2018.
The ships returned with Ocean Infiniti’s latest generation of autonomous technology.
But the Southern Indian Ocean is one of the roughest places on Earth to work.
The search ran in two windows.
A few days at the end of March, 2025, and then from December 31st, 2025 to January 23rd, 2026, with weather repeatedly getting in the way.
Over 28 operational days, the drones covered about 7,571 km of seabed, roughly half the new target area.
To picture how hard that is, the seabed out there is around 4 km down on average, cut by ridges and valleys, and every square kilometer has to be scanned in strips by drones flying just above the bottom in total darkness.
On March 8th, 2026, the 12th anniversary of the disappearance, Malaysia’s Air Accident Investigation Bureau told families that the search had not yielded any findings that confirmed the location of the wreckage.
Ocean Infiniti said it had now spent 151 days at sea searching for MH370 since 2018 and mapped more than 140,000 km of seafloor.
If nothing else, we can say with confidence that it isn’t where we looked, Plunkett said.
For the families, that wasn’t the end.
The group Voice 370, which represents relatives of those on board, urged Malaysia to keep going.
The government pays nothing unless the aircraft is found, they pointed out, and they vowed to continue the fight for answers.
We will never give up.
In June 2026, Malaysia’s government agreed.
It extended its deal with Ocean Infiniti for another 12 months from July 1st, 2026 to June 30th, 2027 on the same no find, no fee terms.
About 7,428 kilmters of the target area remain to be searched, an area a little larger than the US state of Delaware.
According to Malaysia’s transport minister Anthony Lok, the search can resume between November 2026 and April 2027 when the seas in the southern Indian Ocean are calmer.
The government described it as part of its commitment to providing closure for the families.
That means within weeks the drones could be going back down to finish the remaining strip of the target area.
And Ocean Infinity has said it hopes to keep searching until the job is done.
And there’s a reason for hope even after 12 years.
In 2009, Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean.
It took almost 2 years to find the main wreckage nearly 4 km down.
When the flight recorders were recovered in 2011, their data could still be read, and investigators finally learned what had happened.
If MH370 is found, its recorders could still hold answers, too.
The drones would photograph and map the wreck site first, and then a remotely operated vehicle would go down to recover the recorders and any other evidence.
What the drones will be looking for this season is a debris field, a scatter of metal, engines, and landing gear spread across the seabed.
The kind of pattern their sonar is built to spot.
So, what have the underwater drones really captured in the search for MH370?
Not the plane, not yet.
But they’ve captured more than anyone expected.
Two lost ships from the 1870s and 1880s, sitting in the dark for over a century, finally found.
A hidden landscape of mountains and mud volcanoes that had never been mapped.
And more than 140,000 square kilometers of seabed now known in detail.
A gift to science that came out of a tragedy.
And for the families, the waiting has never stopped.
12 years on, some of them have taken their fight to court, including Chinese families seeking compensation.
And they still mark every anniversary, still press governments for answers, and still hold on to the hope of bringing their loved ones home, or at least knowing where they rest.
They’ve also captured something harder to measure.
Each time a search comes back empty, it rules out another piece of ocean.
The plane is somewhere in what’s left.
And when it’s found, the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder may finally explain what happened after, “Good night, Malaysian 370.”
And why a modern airliner with 239 people on board turned around and flew into the emptiest ocean on Earth.
Maybe the most unsettling part is how ordinary the night began.
A routine late flight, a polite goodbye to air traffic control, and then nothing for 12 years.
Every search since has been an attempt to fill in those hours after the last radio call.
Satellites, radar, drift models, and drones have all given us pieces of that night.
But only the wreck itself can give us the whole story.
And the people who loved those 239 passengers and crew are still waiting for it.
What do you think happened to MH370?
And do you think this next search will finally find it?
Let me know in the comments because after 12 years, everyone seems to have a theory.
If you want to follow what the drones find when they go back down, subscribe before the next one.
My name is Elias, and I want you to stay close because the calm season in the southern Indian Ocean is almost here.
The last 7,000 km are waiting.
And if MH370 is down there, this could be the season it’s finally
