they re going through checklists. miles o brien is a pilot and aviation analyst for cnn. it doesn t matter how mundane it is, how many times you ve done it. you do it religiously because that is absolute foundation of safety in aviation. in the cockpit, 27-year-old first officer fariq hamid. this video shows him training on the 777. flight 370 was his first time flying the aircraft without an instructor. so while his experience level might have been low on the aircraft, he was totally up to date on how to fly it. a lot of airline pilots tell me these are the best people to fly with because they ve just come out of rigorous training. next to fariq, zaharie shah, a captain with over 18,000 hours in the air and a stellar reputation. captain zaharie and me, we go
mh370 as well. no success. with no response, an air traffic controller in kuala lumpur calls malaysia airlines for help. i think fundamentally you have to assume nobody expects one of these planes to fall out of the sky. nobody expects a 777 to vanish. and malaysia airlines tells air traffic control a completely different story. they say mh370 hasn t vanished at all. according to their own internal flight tracking system. malaysia airlines says, oh, the aircraft s fine. we know exactly where it is. yet they ve had no communication. they ve had none. they ve had none. so their system was showing that the aircraft had continued to go on that heading. over the next hour and a half, malaysia airlines gives air traffic control more promising messages. they had exchanged signals with the flight. the plane was in normal condition, and the plane was
debris found off the coast of reunion island in the indian ocean. the second piece of mh370 s wreckage picked up. and setbacks. it was terrible. it felt like we were right back at the beginning again. questions still unanswered. we need to know what happened. and the only way you re going to do it is to find the aircraft. there s just too much at stake here to say we re going to stop. now, vanished: the mystery of malaysia airlines flight 370. march 8th, 2014. kuala lumpur international airport. just after midnight, the pilots of malaysia airlines flight 370 are preparing for takeoff. it s all about checklists in aviation.
are you sure? and their answer to me was, we are as sure as we can possibly be. he needed to be sure because based on those calculations, the prime minister was about to deliver some very somber news. flight mh370 ended in the southern indian ocean. the southern indian ocean, thousands of miles away, where no one could likely have survived. family members were shocked, distraught, and angry. there would be no rescue. one last hope remained. could they find the black boxes before they stopped emitting pings? you re not in an ivory tower. you haven t got the luxury of time. you ve got pingers that may
mm-hmm. yes. everything was routine until now. two minutes after talking with air traffic control, 40 minutes into the flight, the plane s transponder goes dark. the plane s transponders is effectively the instrument which sends out a signal to air traffic control. it tells you what height it s at, which direction, and what speed it s traveling. suddenly this giant 777 is blind to the world. and there s no easy explanation for why it happened. either it was intentional and someone tried to turn all of those systems off at once, or the pilot was unable to communicate, kept from communicating, or there was a mechanical failure of some kind that took all those systems out at one time. then minutes after the transponder stops, the 777 makes an unexpected turn, heading west and way off course. that the plane turned