The red-eye to Beijing lifted off the tarmac six minutes late, at 12:41 in the morning, and made a climbing turn over Kuala Lumpur until it was pointed northeast, into the dark over the South China Sea. The aircraft, a twin-engine Boeing 777, was a marvel of engineering and avionics, one of the safest machines of any kind, ever, to transport people, and was flown by a pilot with more than thirty years of experience. The first officer, a young man who was engaged to be married, hadn’t been born when the pilot started flying, but he was fully certified and still had thousands of hours of flight time.

There were ten other crew members on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which flew for the last time on March 8, 2014, and 227 passengers. More than two-thirds were Chinese nationals, and another thirty-eight were Malaysians. There was a Russian and two Canadians in business class, two Ukrainians in coach, and two Iranians traveling on stolen passports, from Italy and Austria, hoping eventually to slip into Europe. There was an Italian in 34C and a New Zealander in 19C. A French mother, two of her children, and her son’s girlfriend filled a row of middle seats, and on the left side of the plane, two Australian couples were four days into an Asiatic tour they’d planned for a year.

There was a single American adult, in an aisle seat in the first row of economy. His name was Philip Wood, and he managed sales to high-end clients for IBM. The company had transferred him from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur, and he was flying back to close out some accounts and help his partner, Sarah Bajc, pack up their apartment.

Twenty-four seconds after the plane left the ground, air-traffic controllers cleared it to climb to 18,000 feet on a line to IGARI, a spot in the sky at the edge of Malaysian airspace and one of thousands of oddly named navigational waypoints airliners follow. Over the next eight minutes, MH370—the flight’s call sign—was cleared for 25,000 feet, then 35,000, its cruising altitude.

Just before 1:08, the plane’s ACARS (aircraft communications addressing and reporting system), which automatically reports on various flight and mechanical systems, bounced a routine message off a satellite to a ground station. There was nothing abnormal.

Controllers in Malaysia watched MH370’s label, a cluster of letters and numbers, stutter-step up their screens toward IGARI. The flight by then was out of primary radar range. At that distance, air-traffic relies on secondary radar, longer-range technology that gathers information—call signs, altitudes, headings, speed—from transponders in every aircraft. There are two of them on commercial airliners, because every system is redundant in case one fails.

At 1:19, just before MH370 reached IGARI, Malaysian controllers instructed the flight crew to switch their radio to the frequency for Ho Chi Minh control, which would take over beyond the waypoint. The co-pilot answered in a flat, professional cadence. "Good night, Malaysia three seven zero."

MH370 passed IGARI at 1:21. Twelve seconds later, its radar label disappeared.

Seventeen minutes passed before anyone was concerned enough to start trying to find the plane.

Air-traffic control in Malaysia and Vietnam radioed. Silence. Other pilots on other airliners tried, too. Static. Someone in the Malaysian Airlines operation center called the cockpit, twice, on the satellite phone. No answer. Every communication system had gone dead, even ACARS, which never sent its scheduled update at 1:37. Singapore air-traffic control hadn’t picked up any odd blips. Neither had Hong Kong nor Phnom Penh.

A modern aircraft had simply vanished, an event as rare as it is disastrous.