Netflix MH370 series backs conspiracists
A claim that Britain helped to cover up the American destruction of Flight MH370, the Malaysian Airlines plane that disappeared nine years ago with 239 people aboard, has circulated among conspiracy theorists for years.
It has now been given added weight by a Netflix series that starts with the premise that the world has been fed lies over the fate of the Boeing 777 that vanished on a night flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014.
Experts have dismissed claims made in the series as ‘‘ridiculous’’ and a distraction offered by sensationalists who do not understand the facts.
MH370: The Plane That Disappeared gives the most space to two journalists who are promoting rival outlandish theories.
In the final episode, Florence de Changy, an Asia correspondent for Le Monde, explains her belief, set out in two books, that the plane was shot down over the South China Sea by the United States government to stop a cargo of secret electronics reaching China.
The second episode focuses on Jeff Wise, a New York-based journalist who has spent years seeking to prove that the Boeing was hijacked by Russian operatives and flown to Kazakhstan to distract from the annexation of Crimea.
The consensus among scientists, aviation experts and officials holds it the jet lies in pieces at the bottom of the remote southern Indian Ocean, after it reversed course over the China Sea and switched off its radio links.
This conclusion came from data of British company Inmarsat indicating that the plane turned and flew south for more than five hours, and from two dozen pieces of debris, some of which have been positively identified.
The evidence suggests that someone was controlling the aircraft until it ran out of fuel.
Louise Malkinson, the Netflix show’s director, starts with the prime theories after the initial bungled response by the Malaysian authorities: that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah may have flown the plane to its doom in a murder-suicide, or that decompression knocked out everyone on board.
Blaine Gibson, an American former lawyer whose obsessive beachcombing in Madagascar and other islands off Africa has turned up the bulk of the debris, is depicted as a stooge for Russia, presenting fake remains.
Wise suspects Gibson because he once lived in Russia. He rejects the Inmarsat data, saying it was probably faked by Moscow.
De Changy accuses the Americans of using AWACS radar surveillance jets to jam the Boeing’s communications, but admits: ‘‘I’m the first to say it sounds incredibly farfetched.’’
Her version, enthusiastically repeated by Russian media, is backed by Ghyslain Wattrelos, a French businessman who lost his wife and two of his children on MH370. He is convinced that ‘‘the Anglo-Saxons’’ got rid of the plane and covered it up. A French investigating judge is on the case after Wattrelos laid a criminal complaint.
Australian search officials are outraged by the claims. Mike Exner, member of a watchdog panel of aviation experts, calls them a distraction. ‘‘These are people that don’t really understand the facts.’’
David Mearns, an American marine scientist living in Britain who made his name finding deep-sea wrecks, has denounced the show’s claims as ‘‘ridiculous and unsupported’’.
Defending her series, Malkinson says it is not only about the event. ‘‘It was about the people that have been consumed by this for the past nine years. I know that some of the theories are far-fetched, but the next of kin still don’t have all the answers.’’ She has acknowledged to US media: ‘‘It’s most likely the plane is in the southern Indian Ocean.’’