The story of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 is a tale almost inconceivable were it not one of fact.
The Boeing 777 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing vanished without explanation in 2014 with 239 passengers and crew aboard.
The final communication from the plane came just two hours after it departed, when Malaysian pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah signed off from Malaysian airspace and prepared to enter Vietnamese airspace with the uneventful words to air traffic control: “Goodnight Malaysia three seven zero.”
What happened next has been subject of almost unprecedented conjecture, as the plane was never heard from again. Immediate speculation followed: Did the plane crash without trace? Was it hijacked?
Perhaps, some posited, it had been shot down by rogue actors (usually blamed without evidence on either the Chinese, the Americans, or the Russians).
As the search continued and remained fruitless, the theories mushroomed. Had the plane been abducted by aliens, landed on a desert island, or perhaps been swallowed by a black hole?
Now, the Malaysian cabinet has announced and authorized a resumed search for the plane, in conjunction with Ocean Infinity, a British search company that will look for the wreckage on a reported “no find, no fee” basis.
The search will reportedly cover the Southern Indian Ocean where the plane is thought to have ended its flight.
One of the ongoing questions that continues to haunt the case of MH370 is how a plane as large as a Boeing 777 could go missing in the modern age, when the world’s sky is monitored more than it has been at any other time in history.
Much of this lies with the fact that the plane “went dark” when it traversed into Vietnamese airspace that fateful night, and many theories have suggested that the plane’s internal systems must have been manually switched off from inside the cockpit.
Yet despite the operating system either being switched off or turning off for another reason, such as a mechanical malfunction, huge amounts of data that show the plane’s trajectory still exist.
This data has been the cornerstone of previous searches in the Southern Indian Ocean and of theories regarding the plane’s fate, including Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) data, radar data, Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) data, and Inmarsat satellite data.
This data has always indicated that the plane continued to fly for over seven hours across the Southern Indian Ocean where it then vanished – presumed to have crashed into the depths of the sea where it could no longer be detected.
As such, experts have closely analyzed this data, hoping it will lead to answers that are based in fact rather than conspiracy theories.
Simon Maskell, a professor of autonomous systems at the School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, told The Diplomat that he and his team had performed research based on specific data called Weak Signal Propagation Reporter (WSPR).
This data is based on amateur radio operators who record low frequency signals from transmitters to receivers with a range of up to 10,000 kilometers, which have been stored since 2008 in a database named WSPRnet.
By analyzing this data, Maskell explained that his team had been able to largely discount most of the more outlandish theories about what happened to MH370 – and narrow down some of the theories that remained.
“The analysis we did indicated that there are three explanations that appear to be approximately equally consistent with the information we had at the time: there is a chance that a freak accident occurred and the crew were unable to communicate or land the aircraft elsewhere,” he said.
“[Or] it was a murder-suicide with the murderer alive when the descent occurred, [or] a murder-suicide with the murderer no longer alive when the descent occurred.”
The murder-suicide theory is one that was previously discussed after Malaysian police raided pilot Shah’s home and discovered a home flight simulator which showed a recording of the pilot flying a simulated route into the middle of the Indian Ocean – close to where MH370 may have potentially crashed.
There were however no other indications or evidence that Shah, or his co-pilot, had planned to hijack the plane and deliberately crash it.
However, the murder-suicide theory has gained arguably the most traction over the years, perhaps due to the absence of any other plausible explanations.
Other theories, Maskell explained, were less consistent with the observed information.
It is also important that a number of searches have been launched over the years, including by the Australian authorities, who spent three years combing over 120 square kilometers of the Southern Indian ocean, to no avail.
“Given the plane has not been found and the area that has been searched is underpinned by assumptions that involve there being no human intervention during the descent, it now seems more plausible that there was human intervention during the descent,” Maskell said.
“That therefore slightly nudges up the probability that there was someone alive in the cockpit during the descent. However, all three explanations remain commensurately likely.”
Whether the new search will yield results remains to be seen, but the absence of any concrete answers some 11 years after the plane’s disappearance is evidence in itself of the complexities of the case.
“While it transpires that our calculations indicate that an accident would be a commensurately rare event to there being a successful attempt at murder-suicide,” Maskell said, “all the explanations imply that something like this happens very rarely indeed.”
