The mystery of flight MH370

Malaysia Airlines MH370 — The first physical proof that MH370 had crashed into the Indian Ocean had turned up in July 2015, on the French island of Réunion

(Image credit: Pedro Pardo / AFP / Getty Images)

At 12.41am local time on 8 March, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 set out from Kuala Lumpur, bound for Beijing. About 40 minutes after its departure, however, nearly all electronic communications from the Boeing 777 stopped: it disappeared from air traffic control radars; and by 2.22am, it had dropped off military radars, too. Half an hour later, the airline confirmed that it had lost contact with MH370.

In the days that followed, a huge Malaysian, and later Australian-led, search operation was launched; but it soon became clear that all 239 people on board – 227 passengers and 12 crew, including 154 people from China and 50 from Malaysia – were likely to have died. More than a decade later, the fate of MH370 and its passengers is unresolved.

What do we know about where it went?

For more than seven hours after it dropped off flight radars, MH370 sent “handshakes”, routine communications with a satellite network, confirming that it was still flying – meaning the plane had not suffered some sudden catastrophic event. Data from Malaysian military radar suggests that it made a sharp left turn soon after entering Vietnamese airspace; it then headed southwest, back over the Malayan peninsula, before flying northwest up the Strait of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia. There, it was lost beyond radar range.

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Initially, the search operation centred on the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca; but investigators later established (using satellite data, and a process of elimination) that MH370 turned sharply again and flew on for hours, to the southern Indian Ocean. There it descended steeply into the sea, presumably because it ran out of fuel. Underwater searches of that area have since covered more than 50,000 square miles of one of the world’s least-explored seafloors.

What have these searches found?

The official search involved nearly 60 ships and 50 aircraft from 26 nations, and lasted until January 2017. A private US company, Ocean Infinity, later resumed the search for five months in early 2018, working for the Malaysian government on a no-find, no-fee basis, and using underwater drones to scan the seabed. Nothing was found.

The first physical proof that MH370 had indeed crashed into the Indian Ocean had turned up in July 2015, on the French island of Réunion – beach cleaners found a “flaperon”, a large wing component, which was later confirmed to be from the airliner. Another flap from its right wing was found on Pemba Island off Tanzania; Other debris almost certainly from the plane was found from Mauritius to Madagascar. But nobody has yet managed to track down the debris to its point of origin, nor have they found the plane’s black boxes.

So what happened?

There are scores of theories, some plausible, many preposterous. In the absence of any distress call, hijack seems unlikely. Even so, it has been suggested that the plane was hijacked and flown to Russia, or the US airbase on the island of Diego Garcia; others have said it could have been shot down. Less fanciful theories include a mass hypoxia event – in which everyone was knocked out owing to oxygen deprivation caused by a sudden cabin depressurisation, while the plane continued flying on autopilot until it ran out of fuel.

The consensus among experts, however, is that the plane’s disappearance was probably the result of pilot suicide: either by the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, or First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid.

What evidence supports the theory?

The flight path, with its sharp turns, in no way resembles an autopilot flight plan; it is consistent with manual control. The turning off of all communications is more likely to have been a deliberate act than a total system failure. The circumstances suggest control was seized from within the cockpit, sometime between 1.01am and 1.21am, when the plane disappeared from radar. By this time – barring the unlikely event of two pilots acting in concert – one of the pilots must have either been dead, incapacitated or locked out of the cockpit.

Experts hypothesise that MH370 was deliberately and rapidly depressurised, rendering passengers dead within minutes. Passenger oxygen masks provide 15 minutes of oxygen at best; pilots have access to several hours’ worth. This would have allowed a pilot to keep flying for hours, without disturbances.

Do we know which pilot might have been to blame?

No. However, an FBI investigation discovered that Captain Shah had practised flying a very similar southerly path over the Indian Ocean using a Microsoft flight simulator; he had then deleted the record. The Malaysian police investigation presented him as a respectable family man, but it was widely deemed inadequate and designed to minimise embarrassment. Shah was described by friends as sad and lonely: his wife had recently moved out. By contrast, Hamid, the first officer, was widely seen as an optimistic person, with no history of mental health problems.

Who is leading the new search?

It is again being conducted by Ocean Infinity, which will collect a £56 million reward from Malaysia if it finds the plane, but nothing if it fails. The seabed surveying company will target a 5,800 square mile area it believes is most likely to contain the plane’s wreckage. Drones are using sonar, laser, optic and echo sound technology to look for debris on the ocean floor at depths of up to 6,000 metres.

But the precise crash zone is impossible to pinpoint from satellite data. And even if the debris, and the black boxes, are found, aviation experts will only learn more about technical data from the flight. The cockpit voice recorder is on a self-erasing two-hour loop, so – unless a pilot chose to (and was able to) provide some explanation at the end of the flight – it may contain little more than the sound of alarms blaring on the plane’s final descent.