MH370: STILL MISSING
As Malaysian investigators mark a decade since the flight’s disappearance, a new search is proposed
Ten years ago, on 8 March 2014, a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777, flight number MH370, left Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia for Beijing. It had 12 crew and 227 passengers aboard, but 40 minutes into its flight the plane vanished from radar screens as its course took it out of radar range and into airspace not frequented by commercial aircraft.
What is currently known about the missing flight is that having taken off at 12.41am, the plane sent its final automated position report at 1.07am. At 1.19am, a final voice transmission was received by air traffic controllers saying, “Good night Malaysian three seven zero”. No distress signal was ever sent, and the plane’s course changes after that final transmission appeared to be made deliberately and were unlikely to be the result of system failure. Why they were made remains mysterious, but the “possibility of intervention by a third party cannot be excluded” according to Kok Soo Chon, chief inspector of the Malaysian investigation team. No signals from the plane locator beacons were ever received, nor was the black box data recorder’s locator activated, possibly because records showed that the battery in the locator had expired more than a year before and had not been replaced.
Malaysia initially combed the South China Sea and the Straits of Malacca for the plane, but then analysis of satellite data revealed that it had turned around, flown until it ran out of fuel, then crashed into the Indian Ocean somewhere between Western Australia and Antarctica. Further analysis narrowed the potential area down to a much smaller, albeit still vast, area of ocean. This is miles deep in places and dotted with undersea volcanoes and difficult terrain. Despite intensive searches of this zone, the aircraft has never been found, although its fate is clear from fragments of debris periodically washed up on East African beaches, 20 of them to date. “We know that it’s close to the seventh arc in the southern Indian Ocean,” said Peter Foley, director of the Australian search effort. “We just need another search”.
Now, the Malaysian government has announced it is in talks with marine robotics company Ocean Infinity about conducting a major new search, the first since 2018. Then, Ocean Infinity used eight autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that could closely follow the contours of the seabed, directed from a mother ship above. This enabled searchers to cover as large an area in five months as previous searches had in three years. Any new search will take advantage of even more advanced technology, involving a new fleet of robotic ships, each with its own swarm of AUVs, operated remotely from a mission control base in Southampton. This should be able to cover a greater area still. If the aircraft is found, it is unlikely that it will be possible to raise it. It is likely to be at considerable depth and, as it would have hit the water at several hundred miles per hour, it would have been torn to pieces on impact. However, analysis of the debris field and any surviving flight recorders could provide greater clarity as to why MH370 turned round, vanished from the radar, and ultimately crashed.
The leading official theory for the strange behaviour of MH370 is that there was a disastrous depressurisation of the cabin causing everyone aboard to fall swiftly unconscious through lack of oxygen, although that conflicts with the evidence that the flight changed course under conscious control. Deliberate murder-suicide by the pilot has been proposed to account for this, something his family strongly rebut, and a cockpit fire producing smoke that overcame the crew has also been suggested. Other hypotheses claim that Russian special ops stole the plane, faked the flight traces, and flew it to Kazakhstan, although why they should do so, what happened to the passengers and why debris keeps washing up in Africa has not been explained satisfactorily. The US also gets blamed, allegedly shooting MH370 down because its pilot was taking it on a 9/11 style suicide mission, then covering this up by faking the satellite data and planting the debris, and of course, there will always be those who blame aliens. deseret.com, thedailybeast. com, 1 Mar; theguardian.com, 4 Mar 2024.
For more on the MH370 mystery, see FT345:12, 348:69, 352:8, 371:74-75, 407:53 and 432:52-53.