The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines commercial flight MH370, with 239 passengers and crew on board in 2014, remains among the greatest aviation mysteries of all time.
It is an open case … unsolved as to the final resting place of the Boeing 777 over the Indian Ocean somewhere.
Experts have spent nine long years looking for answers, and now Netflix has packaged together MH370: The Plane That Disappeared.
It offers three staggering theories including an international cover-up, a shadowy figure and a hijacking.
Meteor strike? Alien abduction? An insurance scam?
The docu-series is divided into three 90-minute episodes, each concentrating on the most contentious theories surrounding its disappearance.
Setting the scene, the plane took off just after midnight on March 8, 2014, from Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia to its planned destination, Beijing Capital International Airport.
It was supposed to be a routine trip, a redeye, with passengers on their way to work in mines (like Perth husband and father of two little boys, Paul Weeks), do business in China, attend family anniversaries and celebrate milestone.
“Good Night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero,” said pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah to air traffic control as the plane left Malaysian airspace and later turned off course.
Then the plane suddenly disappeared off radar screens.
In the hours following, the world’s media had dramatic reports about a large and modern aircraft vanishing into thin air. It sparked riots, plunged the passengers’ next of kin into a nightmare, and generated a global search that lasted 1046 days (suspended January 2017).
Aviation experts around the world asked the hard questions, and now it’s Netflix’s turn – was it a meteor strike, pilot suicide, an insurance scam … even an alien abduction?
Using archival vision and stills, British RAW filmmakers reconstruct everything from the night the plane went missing, the aftermath, to interviews with family members, scientists, journalists and book authors to get answers: “It’s a story full of conspiracies and rabbit holes, shadowy figures and official silence.”
The pilot
Early suspicion falls on the pilot. Malaysia Airlines bosses and the country’s key ministries front angry press conferences.
They search Captain Zaharie’s home, and find a training simulator that was found to have been used by him six weeks earlier to fly a route that was initially similar to part of the route flown by MH370 up the Strait of Malacca.
Two days after it disappeared, authorities revealed the plane was hundreds of kilometres off course, flying in the wrong direction. It flew for an hour off radar, turning back, creating “utter confusion”.
However, 40 ships and 34 aircraft couldn’t find any trace of the plane or debris, anywhere.
Pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah and co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid disappeared on MH370. Photo: AAP
Danica Weeks took part in the documentary, and described those early days of the search as torment, with every day “something different coming out”.
Science and aviation journalist Jeff Wise started writing about his theories and almost immediately pilots, engineers, scientists, mechanical engineers, and experts familiar with how the 777 works, joined his chat to offer up theories. They called themselves The Independent Group.
“I’m hearing that perhaps the pilot, or co-pilot took control of the cockpit,” Wise told CNN.
The hijack
A second crash involving a Malaysia Airlines plane changes Wise’s thinking about the fate of the flight, leading to the hijack theory.
He said the plane flew out of radar range: “At this point the plane was more or less invisible to the rest of the world.
“Whoever took the plane could have flown it wherever they wanted to in secrecy. But that’s not what happened. Instead, something bizarre and inexplicable took place.”
Wise said a component of the plane’s satellite communication system called the SDU (Satellite Data Unit) “came back to life three minutes after the plane vanished from radar”.
Why is this strange?
“Because 777 pilots are not trained how to turn the SDU on, and there’s no plausible way it could have come on accidentally. But come on it did, leaving the plane in an electrical configuration that no 777 has ever been in before or since.”
He reckons one explanation was that it was tampered with.
“[This] is the first documentary to clearly and compellingly explain what we know about the Boeing 777 and what might have happened to it,” Wise said.
“My hope is that, with the renewed attention around the tragedy, the officials responsible for the search will finally reassess their conduct of the investigation and make a serious effort to understand where they went wrong.”
Wise said it could be the pilot. It could be hijackers.
A flaperon from MH370 is found on La Reunion Island, the biggest break in the investigation. Photo: Netflix
The intercept
Flight debris is found washed up on islands off the south-east coast of Africa, the first of 36 pieces was found on the French island of La Reunion.
Another theory emerges, involving suspicious cargo and that it was intercepted and shot down, and that there was ultimately a cover up.
World explorer Blaine Gibson, who spoke fluent Russian, goes from island to island finding the majority of debris, and is at one stage accused of being a Russian spy.
Gibson denied he was a spy. “Ridiculous,” he said.
Perhaps the plane didn’t turn around and end up in the Southern Ocean.
Perhaps its tragic end was in the South China Sea where there are strategic military bases. After all, there was debris found there.
Possibly the most compelling theory comes from French investigative journalist Florence de Changy, who has been investigating and reporting on the MH370 for many years.
She’s the one who suggests a cover up, arguing the American military used signal jamming technology to wipe the plane from radar screens – before shooting it down after a failed attempt to redirect it.
De Changy’s hypothesis (author of The Disappearing Act: The Impossible Case of MH370) comes from looking at the cargo manifest.
“This cargo [2.5 tonnes of Motorola electronics equipment] had been delivered under escort, loaded onto MH370, without having been scanned. I thought this was very odd,” she says in the documentary.
“It was public knowledge China was very eager to acquire highly sensitive US technology in the field of surveillance, stealth, drone technology … something like this could be at the heart of what happened to MH370.
“Maybe the US found out MH370 was carrying out problematic cargo to China and stopped it from arriving at its destination.”
Adds Wise: “We’re left with a mystery of immense consequence and no resolution.”
MH370: The Plane That Disappeared is now streaming on Netflix
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