SOURCE: DEMI WORLD NET
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was a scheduled flight on March 18, 2014, from Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12:35 am and arrive at Beijing Capital International Airport at 6:30 am. It never arrived. Six years later we still don’t know what happened to Malaysia Flight 370 or the circumstances behind its disappearance and it remains one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history.
MH370 was a Boeing 777 and was operated by Malaysia Airlines. The route taken by MH370 was one of two daily flights by the airline. The Bligh time was scheduled for 5 hours and 34 minutes. Flight 370 was carrying enough fuel to remain airborne for 7 hours and 41 minutes allowing for any detours that might be necessary in the event of an emergency, (passenger and crew illness or equipment malfunction, etc).
The plane in question was 11 years old and had never experienced any operational issues.
There was a crew of 12 people all of which were Malaysian citizens and two pilots. The captain was 53-year-old Zaharie Ahmad Shah who joined Malaysia Air in 1981 and 18,000 hours of flight experience.
Shah’s co-pilot was 27-year-old Fariq Abdul Hamid who joined the airline in 2007 and have 2,700 hours of flight time.
In addition to the crew of 12, 227 passengers from 8 different countries were aboard.
Malaysia Flight 370’s Path
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| FLIGHT PATH OF MH370 |
The flight departed at 12:42 am, slightly later than scheduled, and was cleared by air traffic control to climb to 18,000 feet. Voice analysis has confirmed that the first officer Hamid communicated with air traffic control before the flight took off and that Captain Shah communicated with them shortly after takeoff.
The flight continued on it’s designated route until 1:06 am when it sent its last automated positioning report and its final communication. At 1:19 am, the last verbal transmission with the flight crew took place. At that time, Kuala Lumpur contacted the cockpit telling the crew to transfer over to Beijing airspace: “Malaysian three seven zero, contact Ho Chi Mihn one two zero decimal nine. Good night.” This communication was answered by Captain Shah when he said, “Good night. Malaysian three seven zero.”
At this time, the plain was over the Gulf of Thailand on its scheduled path, but then three minutes after the final verbal contact at 2:21 am, MH370 disappeared from both the radar at Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh. This means that the transponder on the flight was no longer working. Since there were no hardly any clouds and no storms, it is very likely that the transponder was manually turned off by someone on the plane. However, military radar was still able to track the flight. Here’s where it gets cray-cray.
Uh, What?
For some reason, the plane began to turn right then made a sudden left turn into a south-westerly direction (its designated flight path had been to the northeast). It now headed back over the Malay Peninsula fluctuating a few thousand feet in altitude. At 1:52 am, the flight was detected just south of Penang Island where it took another turn and flew over the Strait of Malacca in a north-westerly direction. The last known location of MH370 was over the Andaman Sea at 2:22 am which was the limits of the Malaysian Military radar. However, the flight continued to give hourly satellite communications.
Based on the analysis of the compiled data, the flight took another inexplicable turn and began heading south where it continued in a straight line for over 5 hours. The whole time the flight was making hourly pings called “handshakes” off satellite run by the company Inmarsat. This communication was a whisper since everything inside the plane had been shut off including in-flight entertainment, cockpit texts, and automated maintenance reports. At 2:39 am, a call was made to the cockpit, but went unanswered by the crew. Over 4 hours later at 7:13 am, another call was made. Again it was unanswered.
By 7:24 am, the flight was still airborne and was one hour late for its scheduled arrival time Beijing. At this time, the Malaysian Government announced that the had lost contact with the flight and that search and rescue operations had been mobilized. Yet, unknown to the Malayan government, MH370 was still flying.
The last satellite communication took place at 8:19 am it was a logon request sent by the flight to Inmersat. This would have happened for a couple of reasons; either a software or a power failure. At this point, the plane had been flying for 7 hours and 38 minutes, close to the end of its fuel supply.
Inmersat sent another position request to the flight at 9:15 am, but it went unanswered. Based on this information, it is believed that flight MH370 crashed in the Indian Ocean sometime between 8:19 and 9:15 am several thousand kilometers off the coast of Australia, but where exactly this happened remains a mystery.
The Search
The search of the plane and the 239 people on board happened immediately. Initially, the search focused on the South China Sea. However, the Malaysian government, which happened to be one of the most corrupt, didn’t tell anyone about the actual flight path until it was leaked by The Wall Street Journal a week later. Only then did the search shift to the Indian Ocean. Had the search shifted as soon as it was known where MH370 had crashed, debris may have been found that would have told of the exact location the plane and what had transpired onboard.
The search area for MH370
Between March 18 and April 28, 19 ships, 345 sorties by military aircraft searched over 4.6 million square kilometers and found absolutely nothing.
A sonar search of the seafloor was conducted 1800 miles west of Perth, Australia. On April 6, an Australian ship detected several acoustic pings that may have been MH370’s flight recorder, or black box. The location of the pings matched up with Inmersat’s data of the plane’s flight path. Submarines searched of the area turned up nothing.
Debris begins to wash up
No clues as to what had happened to the flight were discovered for over a year after the flight disappeared. In July 2015, a piece of wreckage washed up on the shore of Reunion (Ray-union off the coast of Madagascar), 4,000 km (roughly 2,500 miles) west of the search area in the Indian Ocean.
The piece was a wing flaperon. It was confirmed to have come from MH370. This showed that the landing flaps of the plane weren’t extended when the plane crashed which means that the plane was in a vertical nose dive when it entered the ocean. The force of impact would have shredded the plane into a million pieces.
Flaperon of MH370 that washed up on Reunion Island.
More pieces of wreckage were later discovered scattered across the coast of Africa by a traveler name Blane Gibson who made it his mission to help discover what happened to MH370. But by January 17, 2017, almost three years after the pane vanished, the official search was suspended. The government of Australia, Malaysia and China contributed to the search operations and it had become one of the most expensive searches in aviation history costing $155,000,000.
In January of 2018, Ocean Infinity, a private US company continued the search pro bono, although they would have been rewarded $70-million if they had found the plane. Three months later in March, after searching a 33,000 km area, they found no sign of MH370.
What we do know
We are pretty sure of the flight path, be we have no idea why. The first theory was that of a possible hijacking by two Iranian passengers on board who were flying with stolen passports and purchased one-way tickets and had entered Malaysia a week before the flight. An investigation proved that both men were alyssum seekers.
No terrorist or governmental groups have never claimed responsibility for the missing flight, so it is unlikely that it was hijacked.
How about a crew hijacking?
There remains a lot of suspicion over Captain Shah, but no conclusive evidence has been found linking him to the flight’s disappearance. From what little information can be gleaned from the date reported to the satellite, we are unsure whether MH370 remained under the captain’s command, or if it crashed out of control into the sea.
The Malaysian govt conducted over 170 interviews with the crews’ family and friends and found nothing linking them to anything nefarious.
If the crew or pilots caused the incident, their motivation remains a mystery. The Australian Transportation Authority rejects that Shah crashed the plane deliberately because they believe he would have been unconscious it the flight’s final moments. However, this doesn’t discount how the plane became to be so far off course.
When the flight took the sudden turn south, American Intelligence believes that someone in the cockpit manually reprogrammed the aircraft’s autopilot to take that turn.
Also, remember the transponder? It is now speculated that it stopped working because someone on the flight manually turned it off. However, there is still zero evidence to support this.
Other theories range from the plan getting sucked into a black hole to abducted by aliens. Another theory speculates that the plane was hijacked remotely by cyber terrorists, but Boeing has denounced this idea as impossible.
Fire-hypoxia Theory
This last through states that a fire started somewhere on board while en route to Beijing. The through goes that the pilots wanted to turn back to Malaysia to attempt an emergency landing at a nearby airport. Based on the satellite communication date, a power interruption mid-flight may have been responsible for a fire. An engine issue has been ruled out. Perhaps someone inside the plane switched off the electrical system to stop a fire, but experts unsure that this would have worked.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau concluded that an unresponsive flight crew due to sudden cabin decompressor was the most likely explanation for why the plane flew in one direction for over five hours across the Indian Ocean. The whole crew may have been unresponsive from around mid-flight to the time it crashed into the ocean.
MH370 was flying at around 30,000 -33,000 feet while over the Indian Ocean. Fro our episode on Mt. Everest, we know that the dead zone starts much lower than that. If the cabin had lost pressure midway through the flight, it stands to reason that some pretty strange behavior may have been made by the crew. By the time the plane crashed, it would have been filled with dead people.
Mass Murder Theory
A few aviation experts believe that Captain Shah caused the decompression even to take place, knocking out the rest of the crew and passengers before rerouting the flight over the Indian Ocean to deliberately crash the plane in a mass murder-suicide plot. However, this is still speculation and we will probably never know exactly what happened to Malaysian Flight 370 or why.
One other strange component to this story is of a mysterious package. After MH370 took off, a 200-pound piece of cargo was added to the manifest. The plane was carrying too much weight and was possibly unbalanced. Could this cargo have anything to do with what happened after the plane took off?
Australia, Malaysia, and China agreed that an official search would resume only if credible evidence emerged on the plane’s location.
Sources
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4 January 2021 : 20 Jamadilawal 1442H: 2.17 pm
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