LOST & NEVER FOUND
In the early hours of March 8, 2014, pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah sent Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 into air just before 12:45 a.m. local time.
Everything was routine on board the Boeing 777 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing as the plane readied to leave Malaysian airspace and fly toward Vietnam across the South China Sea.
“Good night, Malaysian 370,” Shah tells air traffic controllers as they ready to relay communications duties to the Vietnamese.
Those were the final words ever heard from the 239 people on board flight MH370, which mysteriously lost all radar contact a mere minute and a half later.
The flight had vanished without a trace and, to this day, what actually happened in the air remains one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history. A new Netflix docuseries, “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared,” examines several theories as to what happened that night.
Although MH370 had lost all radar communications, the plane was still electronically speaking to a satellite run by a British company called Inmarsat.
“Every hour, the Inmarsat system was checking that the satellite terminal on the aircraft was responding . . . these pings continued for up to six hours after last contact,” Inmarsat representative Mark Dickinson says in the doc.
The Inmarsat data did not possess GPS-tracking capabilities, but it was able to determine how far away the aircraft was from the satellite with which it had been communicating.
Based on this information, two speculative routes have been drafted. In both scenarios, MH370 did not continue toward mainland Vietnam but instead veered westbound back over Malaysia. From there, it is projected that the flight either went north over central Asia — or down toward the southern Indian Ocean by Australia.
The latter route is the likeliest scenario, widely agreed upon by experts. But what actually happened in the air is still in dispute. Following are three theories explored in the series.
The pilot
The most incriminating piece of evidence to the theory that Shah, a veteran pilot, intended to commit a mass-murder suicide by putting the plane down into the Indian Ocean was found on a flight simulator he had inside his home.
It was there that Shah had reportedly flown a simulation similar to the airplane’s suspected, off-charted final course over the ocean a mere month before MH370 was airborne.
But the home simulator data is not be quite the “smoking gun” it seems, says Mike Exner of the Independent Group, a watchdog panel of aviation experts established to get the truth on the flight’s final hours.
“It’s very odd you would have a simulation end with fuel exhaustion in the southern Indian Ocean,” Exner admits. “I don’t think taking the simulator data by itself proves a whole lot . . . The simulator data is not the whole puzzle, it’s just one piece in the puzzle that fits.”
A potential motive remains unclear and the final report on MH370 found that “there is no evidence to suggest any recent behavioral changes for the [pilot].”
Russian hijackers
Jeff Wise, a former member of the Independent Group, has another working theory on the whereabouts of MH370, but it sounds closer to the plot of a James Bond movie.
A few months after the flight was lost, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, another 777, was shot down by a surface-to-air missile over Ukraine at the same time Russia was invading nearby Crimea.
Checking flight logs, Wise observed that there were three Russian passengers on board MH370 — all of whom were seated near an electrical hatch. He theorized that two of the three created a diversion while the other member snuck below deck to remotely control the plane’s flight, which he believes headed north. But his conjectures have been debunked.
“Anyone who gets into the hatch can disable the transponder and disable the communications systems,” Fuad Sharuji, former crisis director for Malaysia Airlines, says. “But it is impossible to fly the aircraft from the avionics compartment.”
American interception
Another wild theory is that the American military, which was doing training exercises at the time in the South China Sea, had downed MH370 at the point where it had first lost radar contact in between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace.
French journalist Florence de Changy has observed that the cargo carried — and delivered “under escort” — by MH370 included 2.5 tons of electronic devices. “It’s public knowledge that China was very eager to acquire highly sensitive US technology,” de Changy says.
The United States had two radar-jamming planes suited with an Airborne Warning & Control System in the vicinity the night MH370 took off. De Changy theorizes that they were used to knock the plane electronically off radar and instructed Shah to land. When he chose to keep the flight on course, she claims that “either through a missile strike or a midair collision, MH370 met its fate.”
But de Changy has no proof — and it’s not backed by the Inmarsat data projections either.