Consider this one statement about Flight MH370: It flew until it ran out of gas.

On its own that’s a pretty remarkable image. The whole story of this flight begins to look different if you begin at the end, not the beginning.

The end is alarmingly simple and final. It is not surrounded by disputes about who did what and when. There is only one source for it, the “pings” indicating that the airplane was still “alive” in the air, and (roughly) for how long. If we reverse-engineer the progress of the Boeing 777 from this single moment of clarity, where does it begin to get complicated?