Beijing's Chaoyang District People's Court has ordered Malaysia Airlines to pay 2.9 million yuan (approximately $410,240) in compensation to each of eight families whose relatives disappeared aboard Flight MH370 over a decade ago, marking the first formal compensation ruling by a Chinese court on the ill-fated aircraft that vanished on March 8, 2014.
The court based its December 5 ruling on the Montreal Convention, an international treaty governing airline liability, along with relevant Chinese laws, with the compensation covering death damages, funeral expenses, emotional distress costs, and other related losses for passengers who have been legally declared dead despite their fate remaining unknown.
Another 23 cases involving Chinese families remain pending as legal processes continue to establish death declarations, while 47 additional families have already reached amicable settlements with Malaysia Airlines through court mediation and subsequently withdrawn their lawsuits from among the 78 total cases filed since 2016.
The ruling arrives just days after Malaysian authorities announced that underwater exploration company Ocean Infinity will resume searching for the missing Boeing 777 on December 30, 2025, focusing on a 15,000-square-kilometer area in the southern Indian Ocean under a "no-find, no-fee" arrangement where Malaysia pays $70 million only if wreckage is successfully located.
Flight MH370 disappeared from air traffic radar 39 minutes after departing Kuala Lumpur for Beijing carrying 239 people including 227 passengers—most of them Chinese nationals—and 12 crew members, becoming one of aviation's most enduring mysteries with only scattered debris discovered along Indian Ocean coastlines despite extensive international search efforts spanning over a decade.
