Shortly after midnight on March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777 carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members left Kuala Lumpur Airport in Malaysia on what was supposed to be a routine, five-and-a-half-hour flight to Beijing. An hour later, it dropped off air traffic control screens and was never sighted again.

In the following days, dozens of planes and ships from multiple countries searched hundreds of miles for MH370, but found nothing. In an age of sophisticated technology and high-speed communication, the plane and all of its passengers vanished without a trace. Was it murder-suicide by one of the pilots, as has been speculated?

First Officer Fariq Hamid was 27 years old and engaged to be married in a few months. Flight 370 was his last training flight before he was fully certified. By all accounts, he was actually flying the plane while Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was the Pilot in Charge (PIC).

Captain Zaharie—it’s customary in that part of the world for a man’s surname to be noted first—was 53, married 30 years, with three adult children. He has received more attention because at the time of the flight, his wife had moved out of the family’s main house and was living in a second house. Also, he was in charge of radio communication, which ceased for no apparent reason after an hour. In addition, he spent many of his off-hours on a flight simulator program,........

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