Hope of finding flight MH370's final resting place is fading although parts have washed ashore.
Just before 12.45am on March 8, 2014, Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 took flight, with pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah at the helm.
The Boeing 777 was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, China but, as we know, it never reached its destination. The flight lost all radar contact just one and a half minutes after takeoff and vanished without a trace.
What happened on the flight remains one of aviation’s biggest mysteries, with dozens of theories. A new Netflix docuseries, MH370: The Plane That Disappeared, looks to examine these explanations and separate fact from fiction.
Experts were “unable to determine the real cause for the disappearance”, according to a final commission report and the crash location was never confirmed, although parts have washed ashore, mainly on Madagascar. This has not stopped dozens of experts and pundits from proposing theories.
The new Netflix series is available in New Zealand. Photo / Netflix
Cyndi Hendry, a volunteer for Tomnod, a satellite imagery company that is no longer operational, tells viewers of the Netflix series that people have been looking in the wrong body of water.
The volunteer, from Florida, was randomly assigned satellite imagery by Tomnod, to look through.
In an episode of the docuseries, Hendry said she saw what appeared to be plane debris in the South China Sea, miles from the search area, just days after the plane disappeared.
‘The satellite images were empty. It was just the blackness of the sea. Then you press next, more black scans. So much black. And then finally, there’s something white,” she said.
After seeing a mass of white debris, Hendry was able to match the shapes to the outline of a Boeing 777, which gave her “goosebumps”.
Hendry contacted Malaysia Airlines and others but her ideas were dismissed.
“I tried to reach out to so many people to tell them that this debris exists. Nobody was listening to me,” she said.
Instead, Malaysian investigators were listening to data, the Netflix show reveals.
While the plane lost radar communications, it had around seven hours of fuel in the tank and continued to speak electronically to a satellite owned by a 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 said in one of the episodes.
Inmarsat data could confirm the plane was in the air but not the exact location. It could, however, report the distance from the satellite. Using this information, two routes of diversion have been suggested.
Both suggest MH370 returned to Malaysia and either flew towards the South Indian Ocean or north over central Asia.
For this reason, investigators were confident it had landed in the Indian Ocean.
Was it the pilot?
One theory suggests Shah, the pilot, purposefully crashed the plane into the Indian Ocean to commit mass-murder suicide. This has been supported by data found on a flight simulator at Shah’s home, which had been used to fly a similar diverted course just one month prior.
While it seems incriminating, a member of the Independent Group - a watchdog group of aviation experts dedicated to the MH370 case - said it wasn’t a “smoking gun”.
“It’s very odd you would have a simulation end with fuel exhaustion in the Southern Indian Ocean,” said Mike Exner.
“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.”
Other experts suggest it would have been near impossible for Shah to single-handedly take over the plane, kick out his co-pilot, killing radar communications then depressurising the cabin to stop passengers from interfering.
Finally, there was no evident motive, with a final report stating: “There is no evidence to suggest any recent behavioural changes for the [pilot].”
Was it a group of Russian hijackers?
Another theory floated in the series is a little more thrilling and dramatic.
Months after the flight disappeared, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by a missile while flying over Ukraine during Russia’s invasion of Crimea.
Aviation journalist Jeff Wise became known among experts for controversial theories such as this one.
According to Wise, three Russian passengers were seated close to an electrical hatch. This meant they could have created a distraction and then accessed below deck to control the plane.
Instead of it being sent south, Wise theorises, it was brought to the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan.
But that theory was quickly grounded by Malaysia Airlines’ former crisis director, Fuad Sharuji.
“Anyone who gets into the hatch can disable the transponder and disable the communications systems,” Sharuji said. “But it is impossible to fly the aircraft from the avionics compartment.”
Another theory suggests it was not Russians who intercepted the flight, but Americans.
US military were training in the South China Sea at the time, leading some to suggest it downed MH370 at the point where it lost radar contact.
French journalist Florence de Changy noted MH370 had 2.5 tonnes of electronic devices on board, which had not been scanned before loading and were being carried “under escort”.
“It’s public knowledge that China was very eager to acquire highly sensitive US technology in the field of surveillance, stealth, drone technology,” she said. “This could be at the heart of what happened to MH370.”
On the night MH370 took off, America had two radar-blocking planes nearby, leading De Changy to believe they could have knocked the plane off its radar and ordered Shah to land.
After ignoring instruction, she claimed that “either through a missile strike or a midair collision, MH370 met its fate”.
Despite publishing a book on the idea in 2021, titled The Disappearing Act: The Impossible Case Of MH370, her theory is also not supported by Inmarsat data projections and lacks hard evidence.
For this reason, The Independent Group’s Mike Exner said the theories weren’t worth discussing.
“I’m just reluctant to talk about Florence or Jeff or these conspiracy advocates,” he said.
“They’re just such a distraction. These are people that don’t really understand the facts and the data.”
