Passengers of Missing Flight MH370
On March 8, 2014 Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur and was scheduled to land in Bejing about six hours later. One hour and nineteen minutes in flight, communication between the plane and everything else was completely lost. The plane had flown into the night and the families of the passengers were left in the dark.
Starting this infographic was a challenge not only because it was my first one but because there is so much information to find about the missing flight MH370. For those that have not seen the news about it, this plane disappeared. No wreckage, bodies, or any clues were found to suggest what happened. Naturally, conspiracy theories started to be formed about what happened, where it went or who was involved. My task was to show what we definitely know happened, just the facts. I could have shown many things: a timeline of the communications or a map of the projected trajectories, but I chose to show who is missing. The shear number of people that "disappeared" was the most interesting part to me.
When I started making icons for the countries, I tried about 5 options with colors. I wanted to relate their symbol to the country's flag. After a few attempts, it was impossible to have all different colors that looked original. I then tried arbitrary colors and found that 14 colors for countries and 2 more for sex were too many colors to differentiate. Finally. I made icons for each country to keep them in grey scale and then used only blue and pink for identification of sex.
I show where each person was on the plane, what their age, name, sex, and country of origin was. This allows the viewer to draw some of their own conclusions.
Did passengers in seats 12A-12E plan something in Malaysia and board the plane to follow through with their plan? They are all female, they surely knew one another.... What about 12G-12K? Did they work together to board the plane and take it over? Will time ever tell for this flight?
My opinion? I don't think the plane disappeared, I think it went somewhere. Where is the question, but also why?
