Date: March 8, 2014
Location: Indian Ocean
The Conspirators: Various
The Victims: 239 passengers and crew on board the plane
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, a Boeing 777 with 239 people on board, disappeared on March 8, 2014. Conspiracy theories range from a suicide by the pilot to a Russian state operation to an abduction by time-traveling aliens.
We have no idea what happened to MH370, but we have no reason to believe it was anything more extraordinary than a typical mechanical failure.
Taking off just after midnight on the morning of March 8, 2014, Flight MH370 began normally, leaving Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing. About forty minutes after takeoff, they were over the South China Sea, about halfway between Malaysia and Vietnam. Leaving the Malaysian air traffic control area, the pilots signed off with a “good night” message, and stopped their transponder from squawking, as is normally done. At this point they were no longer inside radar coverage, and the only ongoing contact with the outside world was the ACARS system, which periodically used the plane’s satellite data connection to send maintenance information back to the airline.
What happened thereafter remains unknown, but very shortly after signing off, the plane made a U-turn to head back toward Malaysia. This is known only by sporadic military and secondary radar contacts. The plane overflew Malaysia and turned right, heading west over the Andaman Sea, west of Thailand. Their last known maneuver was to turn south onto a heading that the plane appears to have followed until it ran out of fuel. Near the end of that path, a satellite made a brief handshake connection to the aircraft but no data was transmitted or received. Inmarsat, the company that operated the satellite, was able to derive a particular arc over the Indian Ocean, somewhere along which the plane was when their satellite made that brief handshake. And then, there was no more contact.
The lack of any radio communication throughout these obviously controlled movements aroused suspicion immediately among conspiracy theorists; questions persisted. Perhaps the plane had been hijacked, but then where did it go? Perhaps it was a suicide plan by the pilot, but then why the elaborate maneuvers?
Serious investigation first focused on the pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah. There were claims that he was distraught over separating from his wife, and that he had no future appointments written in his calendar. This line of inquiry was eventually dropped when it became clear that there was no evidence of suicidal thoughts or tendencies. He also had a number of unusual routes on the flight simulator on his home computer, which the press made much of, but they were not substantially different from funky flight paths that many pilots fly when they’re relaxing on their computer.
One theory held that the plane was hijacked to the island of Diego Garcia, a British territory in the western Indian Ocean where the British and Americans both have military and intelligence facilities. According to some theorists, it landed there and the passengers were killed for some unclear nefarious purpose; according to others, it was shot down as it approached. French author and former airline executive Marc Dugain has been a staunch proponent of this theory, and pointed out that residents of the Maldives claimed to see a plane fly low over their country early that morning. However, the Maldives are not on the way to Diego Garcia, and there do not appear to have been any such reports from islanders until some three months after the disappearance.
The Russians have been implicated in at least two conspiracy theories. One holds that Russia hijacked the plane and had it secreted away in Kazakhstan to retaliate against the United States for sanctions, but that theory is odd because MH370 was not an American plane. Another theory is that a Russian satellite detected the plane crash, but Putin would not reveal the location to anyone to protect the secret of the satellite’s existence.
Even North Korea has been suggested as the mastermind. In one theory, North Korea hijacked the plane and brought it there in order to reverse engineer it to benefit their own struggling aircraft industry. Another suggests MH370 was being used to deliver a nuclear weapon to North Korea, so the Americans shot it down in flight.
All of these hijacking theories are, of course, in direct violation of what’s known about the plane’s flight path.
Within just a few days of the disappearance—and well outside of the conspiracy theory community—airline pilots were already writing about what they believed had happened, and it’s a much more plausible scenario without Russians, aliens, or time warps. All of those weird things about the flight that confused conventional reporters fit right into the pilots’ theory. All it required was a minor electrical fire.
If pilots smelled smoke in the cockpit, the very first thing they would do is shut down all the electronics they could possibly spare. This would include the ACARS and the radio. They would even physically pull out the fuses if they could. Thus, the automated communications stopped. The voice communications would stop too, but mainly because pilots are trained that communicating is the last priority when dealing with an emergency. Aviating—keeping the plane flying—is always the first priority, and this meant doing whatever was necessary to keep the plane safely in the air. If a fire was suspected, putting it out would have taken precedence over anything else. The second priority is to navigate—to make sure that wherever the plane is headed is actually a useful direction to go. In this case, Shah was probably heading not back to Kuala Lumpur, because of its mountainous terrain, but to a preferred backup airport at Pulau Langkawi, with longer runways and easier access. That their first turn put them on this course tells us a lot about what was happening on board.
After a pair of later turns that eventually left them headed south on autopilot from a position just west of Thailand, the pilots eventually became incapacitated, either from carbon monoxide or possibly from decompression. The plane, which by then could well have been a flying tomb, made it at least as far as the Inmarsat arc before it ran out of fuel or a fire did sufficient damage to bring it down.
The third priority, communicating, is something they obviously never got around to. Thus their lack of radio communication is not suspicious, but rather it is telling. It tells us they had more important things to worry about before calling for help.
From the expert perspective—that of pilots who saw what the plane did and recognized that it was exactly what they themselves would have done—there is no mystery surrounding the loss of MH370. Unfortunately, we can’t know exactly what happened without seeing the wreckage. And that particular riddle remains as deep as the ocean.