Malaysian Airlines Flight 370’s disappearance remains one of aviation’s greatest mysteries almost 11 years later, and now, a British company has launched what is likely to be the final search for the doomed aircraft.
MH370 departed from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board. The flight took off at 12.41am local time, reaching a cruising altitude of 35,000 ft at 1.01am. The plane’s transponder, which communicated with air traffic control, was switched off at 1.21am as the plane entered Vietnamese airspace over the South China Sea.
Malaysian military and civilian radars began tracking the flight at 1.30am as it turned around and flew southwest over the Malay Peninsular and then northwest over the Strait of Malacca. Less than an hour later, at 2.22am, Malaysian military lost contact with the plane over the Andaman Sea. A satellite over the Indian Ocean continued to receive hourly signals from the aircraft until 8.11am, when it simply vanished.
Now, British marine robotics company Ocean Infinity has begun a search of the seabed in a last ditch attempt to find the wreckage. Armada 7806, a deep-water support vessel, arrived at a new search zone in the Indian Ocean 1,200 miles off the coast of Perth, Australia, over the weekend, according to tracking websites. Autonomous underwater vehicles were deployed from the ship just hours after its arrival at the site and are believed to have now started scanning the ocean floor.
The vessels, along with remote vehicles designed to help recover any wreckage found, are operated from Ocean Infinity’s Southampton base via satellite link. It’s thought that this latest search mission may provide the last chance of finding the wreck of the Boeing 777. Over the past decade, there has been endless speculation about what happened to the doomed flight. Below, we’ve taken a look at some of those theories.
Cyber-hacking attack
Chris Roberts, a cyber defence expert, has argued that the aircraft may have fallen fould of cyber hacking, speaking of his theory in the 2019 documentary The Missing Plane: MH370. He said: “A determined hacker with the right tools and the right knowledge of a [Boeing] 777 would have the ability to go through the cabin system, to the cockpit system and influence the flight.
“The in-flight entertainment system is connected to a box that is just underneath the seats. That box has a number of ports you can plug into if you have the right type of connectors. Then you can work like hopscotch to other parts of the network where you can look at fuel management, take control of the engines, and several other systems.”
However, this theory has been disputed by others in the field. In his 2015 book The Plane That Wasn’t There, MH370 expert Jeff Wise said the perpetrator would have had to have been onboard he flight to take over the plane, saying: “Given the possibility that MH370 was hijacked, the question inevitably arises: who might have carried it out?
“While some have raised the possibility that hackers could ahve taken control of the plane remotely via the satellite link, this theory runs aground on the fact that the saellite link was down prior to 18.25 UTC. There would have been no way in. Whoever took the plane had to be physically aboard.”
Suicide mission
Speaking in an interview in 2020 with Sky News, ex-Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott claimed that senior members of the Malaysian government believed Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah had deliberately crashed the jet into the Indian Ocean in what he described as a carefully orchestrated mass murder-suicide mission. Abbott, who was PM at the time of the disappearance, said: “My understanding, my very clear understanding, from the very top levels of the Malaysian Government is that from very, very early on here they thought it was a murder-suicide by the pilot.
“I’m not going to say who said what to whom, but let me reiterate – I want to be absolutely crystal clear – it was understood at the highest levels that this was almost certainly murder-suicide by the pilot. A mass murder-suicide by the pilot.”
Malaysia later dismissed claims, stating that there was no evidence to support such a theory. Former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak told Free Malaysia Today that, although a potential pilot suicide had never been ruled out, it would be ‘unfair and legally irresponsible’ to blame Zaharie, given that the black boxes hadn’t been found, and the truth of that final flight never brought to light.
Fire onboard MH370
In 2018, retired pilot Captain Ross Aimer put forward his theory that a fire had begun onboard after lithium-ion batteries in the cargo ignited. During an interview with the Daily Star, Capain Aimer stated his belief that the pilots were likely ‘incapacitated immediately’ due to the quick-spreading blaze, which would have killed them in seconds.
Aimer, who worked for 40 years in the airline industry, told the publication: “That type of fire would very shortly consume perhaps the cockpit area and at least their oxygen supply. Because their oxygen supply is in what we call a lower 41, the electronic equipment that is adjacent to the cargo hold. So if that had happened, the pilots would have probably been incapacitated immediately.”
He then went on to suggest that the plane could have continued flying for hours on auto-pilot while ablaze, before eventually running out of fuel and crashing into the ocean. The Ministry of Transport Malaysia previously stated that the plane had been carrying 221kg of lithium-ion batteries, sparking suspicion that fire could have begun after they combined with the 4,566kg of mangosteens which had also been held in cargo.
Hijacking by crew or passengers
Some believe MH370 could have been hijacked by someone who knew how to fly a plane, with a sudden sharp U-turn cited as evidence. The plane was seen passing waypoint IGARI – the final checkpoint within Malaysian airspace – at approximately 1.21 am local time, before making a seemingly aggressive 180-degree turn, flying in the opposite direction towards the Malay peninsula.
A climb and acceleration were then noted, with the place reaching the limit of its flight envelope. As MH370 flew back towards Malaysia, turning northwest up the Malacca Strait, it notably always kept right in the middle of Flight Information Regions (FIRs), travelling along the boundaries between Malaysian and Vietnamese-controlled airspace and Malaysian and Thai-controlled airspace. At each point, both countries believed the other to be in charge of the plane.
Offering his expertise in 2019 Channel 5 documentary Flight MH370, aviation journalist David Learmount stated: “I believe that what happened to this airplane was not an accident, it was planned. It was carried out by somebody on board. Somebody on board did that, because it couldn’t have happened any other way. The aircraft almost turned back on itself and flew along the division of airspace between Vietnam and Malaysia, so each thought the other was in charge of it. To you, that might be a coincidence, for me that was incredibly deliberate, because the accuracy of the flying was remarkable.”
Plane shot down
Another theory is that MH370 was accidentally shot down during a military exercise. This could involve a missile or a jet fighter from a nearby country’s military. Another version says the plane was deliberately shot down due to perceived threats or as part of a covert operation. This could be linked to concerns about the plane being used as a weapon (like in 9/11) or was carrying sensitive cargo or passengers on board.
Many believe that the show down theory involves a cover-up by the military or government to hide the mistake or the intentional act. This could include tampering with radar data, withholding information, or planting false leads to misdirect search efforts. However, no concrete evidence supports the claim that MH370 was shot down as wreckage and debris that have been found do not show signs of explosive impact or missile strike.
Debris from MH370 has been found on various shores along the Indian Ocean, including 32 pieces by a US amateur investigator Blaine Gibson, which aligns with the southern flight path suggested by satellite data. The condition and distribution of the debris do not definitively support or rule out any one of these theories but are consistent with a controlled descent into the ocean.
