WHERE IS FLIGHT MH370?
Amid new plans to find the missing Boeing 777, which disappeared 10 years ago this week carrying 239 people, could barnacles stuck to the wreckage help pinpoint its final location?
THIRTY-EIGHT minutes after taking off over the South China Sea, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 lost contact with air traffic control 10 years ago this week. Its 227 passengers and 12 crew were never seen again – sparking the most expensive search for a missing plane in aviation history and igniting conspiracy theories that continue to torment the victims’ families. Did the Boeing 777 succumb to a tragic accident, or was it a target of terrorists or hijackers? Was it shot down, or deliberately crashed by a suicidal pilot?
Now, after a decade shrouded in mystery, the plane’s fate may finally be revealed, as new technology promises to uncover MH370’s final resting place and solve the riddle of its disappearance on March 8, 2014.
Malaysian officials this week disclosed plans to renew the hunt with high-tech robotics, while transport minister Anthony Loke insisted: “The government is steadfast in our resolve to locate MH370.”
The jet vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to Beijing, China, captivating the world while leaving a bewildering array of unanswered questions.
The answer to them all may be locked within the jet’s black box recorders, lost to the depths of the ocean, but for the families of the missing, the nightmare never ends.
“It is the biggest mystery in the aviation industry,” said Lokman Mustafa, whose sister Suhaili was aboard the flight. “I think everyone wants to know what really happened to the aircraft.”
Sakinab Shah, sister of the plane’s senior pilot, Capt Zaharie Ahmad Shah, urged: “They have to continue the search until they find the plane.”
Compounding the conundrum, a portion of a wing identified as coming from MH370 was found washed up 17 months later on Reunion, a tiny French island in the southern Indian Ocean, 3,800 miles from the plane’s last known location.
Intan Maizura Othaman, whose husband Hazrin Hasnan was a crew member on MH370, said: “I just cannot believe that with all the high-tech gadgets and vessels that were deployed, they still failed to reach the aircraft.”
The search for MH370 was marred by confusion, incompetence, and governmental secrecy from both Malaysia and China.
Departing Kuala Lumpur 42 minutes past midnight and heading north to Beijing, the plane appeared to veer off course toward the Andaman Sea to the west shortly after entering Vietnamese airspace.Though air traffic control soon lost contact, Malaysia’s military continued to track the plane for another hour before it disappeared from radar screens, making another turn headed south-west toward the open ocean.
Investigators later concluded that control of the cockpit was seized shortly after 1am and that the autopilot was probably switched off.
The plane flew for at least seven hours, 38 minutes before making its last satellite link. It most likely ran out of fuel and crashed – or did it?
The initial search by Malaysian military planes focused on the Andaman Sea in the east, which proved to be a wild goose chase after the jet’s southern change of course was discovered.
Investigators believe that the cabin was depressurised, either accidentally or deliberately, while the plane climbed to 40,000ft, “causing the rapid incapacitation and death of everyone in the cabin”, according to investigator Mike Exner. Oxygen masks would only have kept passengers alive for 15 terrifying minutes, though the pilots’ oxygen masks could sustain them for several hours.
The jet flew on for more than seven hours before apparently disappearing without trace in the ocean, somewhere between south-western Australia and Antarctica.
Government attempts to explain the disappearance were attacked as a “blatant cover-up” by critics. Investigators note that there are more than 600 runways where the jet could have landed if hijacked.
A jihadist attack targeting China was considered possible – and Russian newspaper Moskovskij Komsomolets suggested that terrorists had flown the jet to Afghanistan, with its passengers and crew held hostage there.
Conspiracy theorists speculated that the jet was captured by the US government and forced to land on the Indian Ocean atoll of Diego Garcia – a claim denied by the White House.
BUT it was the plane’s pilot, Capt Shah, 53, who authorities considered the likeliest suspect. His wife had left him the day before the flight, after catching him sleeping with several flight attendants. Friends reported that he was “lonely and sad,” and “spent a lot of time pacing empty rooms”.
An FBI study of the pilot’s simulator programme revealed that he had experimented with a flight profile very similar to that of the missing plane, ending in “fuel exhaustion over the Indian Ocean”. He also practised a simulated landing on an island with a short runway.
A mid-air fire might also have damaged the plane, forcing the pilot to turn south-west searching for an island runway, or even losing all cockpit control. The Malaysian Air Force denied shooting down the jet,
though only four months later Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over the Ukraine by Russian-controlled forces, with the loss of 298 aboard that Boeing 777.
Chinese and Malaysian authorities have been accused of knowing more than they have disclosed – and a series of investigations failed to find the missing jet.
A Malaysian-led independent probe admitted “intervention by a third party” was a possible reason for the disappearance, but denied the flight was hijacked by a remotecontrol cyber-attack. Police cleared all passengers, confirming that none had pilot training, and supposedly found no evidence that either of the two pilots hijacked the plane.
“We are not of the opinion that it could be an event committed by the pilot,” said chief investigator Kok Soo Chon. There was insufficient evidence to determine if the plane had broken up in mid-air, or upon impact with the ocean.
A search by Malaysian, Chinese and Australian authorities failed to locate the crash site, while a 2018 search by American robotics company Ocean Infinity came up empty-handed as well.
But new technology could at last find the plane.
Barnacles found on pieces of the plane washed ashore on Reunion, Madagascar and Eastern Africa are helping investigators pinpoint where the jet went down.
The molluscs react to localised sea surface temperatures and chemicals by growing distinctive tree-like rings of calcium carbonate and minerals.A study is now under way to determine if the barnacles encrusting the wreckage came from further south in the Indian Ocean, directing future searches.
A recent probe using groundbreaking radio technology claims the missing wreckage could be located about 970 miles west of Perth, Australia.
The study supposedly proves that the plane was hijacked and deliberately crashed: the transponder was turned off, and it made a U-turn away from its flight path that could not have been made by autopilot.
Aerospace expert Jean-Luc Marchand and pilot Patrick Blelly delivered a lecture to the Royal
Aeronautical Society last year, calling for a search of the newly defined crash area.
Yet, as the search goes on, the anguish continues for families of the missing.
“Some still believe the conspiracy theories,” said Kuala Lumpur businessman Calvin Shim, whose wife Christine Tan was among the missing. “Some were numb, sad, angry. Some just don’t know what to feel.”
ACOURT case began in November in Beijing, with 40 Chinese families currently suing for up to $11million each in compensation, having rejected the $50,000 per victim offered by the airline. More than 150 of the 239 passengers were Chinese citizens.
Hu Xiufang, 72, who lost a son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter on Flight 370, demands a speedy resolution to the search.
“We have suffered for a decade without any resolution,” he says. “I worry about whether I can wait for another 10 years, whether I can live for another 10 years.”