In the early morning of March 8, 2014, pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah sent Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 into the air just before 12:45 p.m. local time.
Every thing was routine on board the Boeing 777 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, China, as the plane prepared to depart Malaysian airspace and fly towards Vietnam via the South China Sea.
“Good night, Malaysia 370,” Shah tells air traffic controllers as they prepare at hand over communications duties to the Vietnamese.
These were the last words ever heard from the 239 people aboard Flight MH370, which mysteriously lost contact with radar only a minute and a half later.
The flight disappeared with out a trace, and to at the present time, what actually happened in the air stays considered one of the best mysteries in the history of aviation.
latest Netflix The documentary series MH370: The Plane That Vanished explores several theories about what happened that night.
The flight had about seven hours of fuel, Fuad Sharuji, Malaysia Airlines’ former crisis director, says in archived footage.
Although MH370 lost radar contact, the aircraft continued to speak electronically with the satellite of the British company Inmarsat.
“Every hour the Inmarsat system checked to see if the plane’s satellite terminal was responding…these pings continued for as much as six hours after the last contact,” says Inmarsat rep Mark Dickinson in the documentary series.
Nonetheless, data from the Inmarsat satellite could only confirm that the plane was still in the air because it had no GPS tracking capability. Still, he was capable of determine how far the plane was from the satellite it was communicating with.
Based on this information, two speculative routes were drawn showing how and where the plane veered off beam. In each scenarios, MH370 didn’t proceed towards mainland Vietnam, but as a substitute turned westward back over Malaysia. From there, the flight is predicted to fly either north over Central Asia – or down towards the southern Indian Ocean via Australia.
The latter route is the almost definitely scenario, widely accepted by experts. But what actually happened in the air continues to be in dispute. Has the Shah rebelled? Or was one other state chargeable for the unknown fate of the flight? The committee’s final report on MH370 stated that “the team is unable to find out the true explanation for the disappearance.”
Distant
Essentially the most incriminating evidence for the theory that Shah, an experienced pilot, intended to commit mass suicide by throwing the plane into the Indian Ocean, was found on a flight simulator he had at his housewhich hit the headlines in 2016.
It was there that Shah reportedly performed a simulation much like what he supposedly did, aside from a map of the plane’s final course over the ocean only a month before MH370 took off.
Nonetheless, home simulator data doesn’t appear to be quite a smoking gun, says Mike Exner of the Independent Group, an audit panel of aviation experts set as much as uncover the truth about the last hours of flight.
“It is very strange that the simulation finally ends up running out of fuel in the southern Indian Ocean,” admits Exner. “I do not think just downloading the simulator data proves much… The simulator data is not the whole puzzle, it’s only one matching piece of the puzzle.”
That is in response to Jeff Clever, an aviation journalist whose flight theories have sparked controversy amongst experts The FBI knew the route in a flight simulator in 2014.
Clever says the practicality of Shah taking up the plane himself would require an “aggressive and complicated” plot involving locking the co-pilot in the cockpit, interrupting radar communications and depressurizing the cabin to forestall interference.
Meanwhile, the potential motive stays unclear.
The ultimate report on MH370 concluded that “there is no such thing as a evidence to suggest any recent behavioral changes for [pilot]”.
Russian kidnappers
Clever, a former member of the Independent Group, has one other working theory about the whereabouts of MH370 – nevertheless it sounds closer to the plot of a James Bond movie than anything.
Months after the flight went missing, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, one other 777, went missing shot down by a surface-to-air missile over Ukraine at the same time that Russia invaded nearby Crimea.
Checking flight logs, Clever noticed that there have been three Russian passengers on board MH370, all seated near the electric hatch. He theorized that two of the three created a diversion while the other member snuck below decks to remotely control the plane’s flight.
As a substitute of sending him south, Clever theorizes that he was delivered to the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan.
But this theory was quickly established.
“Anyone who gets into the hatch can disable the transponder and communication systems,” says Sharuji. “But you’ll be able to’t fly the plane from the avionics compartment.”
Colleagues at Clever also quickly refuted this concept.
“[The group is] absolutely sure that the plane turned south and never north. It was surprising that Jeff decided to run this route,” says Exner.
Clever’s conjecture ended along with his removal from the Independent Group.
American takeover
One other wild theory is that the US military, which was on exercises in the South China Sea at the time, shot down MH370 at the point where it first lost radar contact between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace.
French journalist Florence de Changy noted that the cargo carried – and delivered “under escort” – by MH370 contained 2.5 tons of electronic devices that had not been scanned prior to loading.
“It’s publicly known that China was very desirous to acquire highly sensitive American technology in the field of surveillance, stealth technology, drone technology,” says de Changy. “This may increasingly be the crux of what happened to MH370.”
The US had two airborne warning and control (AWAC)-equipped radar jamming aircraft in the vicinity on the night of MH370’s launch. De Changy theorizes that these were used to electronically knock the plane off radar and ordered Shah to land.
When he decided to maintain the flight on the right track, he claims that “either by a rocket strike or a mid-air collision, MH370 met its fate.”
But, like Clever, de Changy has no proof for his theory – and it isn’t backed up by Inmarsat data predictions either. Exner can also be critical of using the inflammatory thesis to advertise her 2021 book “The Disappearing Act: The Not possible Case of MH370.”
“I’m just reluctant to speak about Florence, Jeff, or conspiracy supporters,” Exner, who believes the most rational conclusion shouldn’t be a Tom Clancy novel and lies in the Indian Ocean.
“They’re just distractions… They’re individuals who don’t really understand the facts and data.”