10 years on and Malaysian Flight 370 still has to be solved

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What really happened to flight MH370?

The mystery began as a standard red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Forty-two minutes after midnight on 8 March 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight 370, a Boeing 777 jet designated MH370, climbed into the moonlit night and turned north-east, toward the South China Sea

The first officer, Fariq Hamid, was 27 years old and one training flight away from full certification. The pilot in command, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was, at 53, one of the most senior and respected pilots for Malaysia Airlines. They led a crew of 10 flight attendants, all Malaysian, and ferried 227 passengers.

The majority of those on board were Chinese, along with 38 Malaysians and citizens of Indonesia, Australia, India, France, the US, Iran, Ukraine, Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Russia and Taiwan.

The first 40 minutes of the flight were unremarkable. At 1.19am, MH370 approached the end of Malaysian airspace. Malaysian air traffic control radioed to pass the flight off to Ho Chi Minh. Zaharie answered, “Good night. Malaysian three-seven-zero” – he didn’t repeat the frequency, but not unusual.

It was the last anyone heard from the flight. Zaharie never checked in with Vietnamese controllers. Seconds after it crossed into Vietnamese airspace, MH370 disappeared from radar. All subsequent attempts to contact it were unsuccessful. Commercial airplanes are supposed to be reachable at all times, known and tracked, but MH370 was gone.

What followed, as recounted in a new Netflix series on the disappearance, was delayed confusion, on the part of Malaysian controllers and the airline. Shock, as officials scrambled to find the aircraft and loved ones waited in Beijing for a flight that never arrived.

Obsession, as the disappearance transfixed international audiences and prompted armchair theories for a seemingly impossible mystery. Devastation, as next of kin suffered through hours, then days, then weeks, months and years of question marks and inconclusive searches.

And speculation, as aviation experts, engineers, data scientists, journalists, hobbyists and more tried for years to piece together a confounding puzzle of evidence into an explanation for the disappearance of MH370.

That explanation remains elusive. “It’s the greatest aviation mystery of all time,” said Louise Malkinson, the director of MH370: The Plane That Disappeared. “This is a world where we have mobile phones and radar and satellites and tracking, and so to be nearly nine years down the line … and still have so little is extraordinary.”

The three-part Netflix series attempts to piece together the timeline based on evidence that emerged in the weeks and years following the disappearance. Primary radar – as in, conventional radar that pings off objects in the sky – from the Malaysian air force indicated that following MH370’s entry into Vietnamese airspace, the flight made a sharp left turn and headed back, in a south-western direction, over the Malay peninsula. It banked around the island of Penang, flew north-west up the Strait of Malacca, and headed out over the Andaman Sea, where it dropped off radar.

But MH370 did continue to link up periodically, over the course of six hours, with a geostationary Indian Ocean satellite operated by the London-based company Inmarsat. Data from these seven electronic blips indicated, according to Inmarsat and several independent experts who appear in the series, that MH370 turned southward once it reached the Andaman Sea, flew straight for hours until it ran out of fuel, and plunged into the southern Indian Ocean, somewhere between south-western Australia and Antarctica.

Whoever was flying the plane – most point to Zaharie, who had the expertise to execute such a maneuver though no known motive – probably depressurized the cabin early on, killing everyone on board hours before MH370 dropped into the sea.

That is the “official” narrative, at least – one largely supported by a collection of aviation experts and scientists known as the Independent Group and Australian investigators, who led a futile, years-long search for MH370 in a remote slice of the Indian Ocean.

It’s the one cogently argued by American aviation writer William Langewiesche in a 2019 report for the Atlantic, which supposed that the Malaysian government, rife with corruption and not known for transparency, knew more about Zaharie’s personal life than it let on.

(The official Malaysian accident report, released in July 2018, offered no definitive conclusions and did not rule out “unlawful interference by a third party”.) It’s also supported by the fact that debris attributed to MH370 has been found on the coasts of Réunion, Madagascar and Mozambique.

The first episode of the series, called The Pilot, outlines this narrative: a mass murder-suicide plot by Zaharie, whose home flight simulator was found to have mapped a similar strange path to the one indicated by radar and satellite data. But subsequent episodes, delineated by theory, hear contradictory theories that regard the evidence previously cited as either inconclusive, misinterpreted or fabricated.

The second episode, The Hijack, presents a theory put forth by American aviation journalist and longtime MH370 obsessive Jeff Wise that Russian operatives stole MH370 via the plane’s electronic bay, accessible by a hatch in the first-class cabin, to distract from the Crimean war. (This would ignore the satellite data, which Wise said was tampered with as a decoy.)

The third, The Intercept, features French journalist Florence de Changy, a south-east Asia correspondent for Le Monde who speculates that the plane was shot down over the South China Sea by the US military to prevent mysterious cargo from reaching China. (This would suppose that the radar sightings and satellite data by Inmarsat, a company that works with governments, was fabricated as part of a cover-up.

Both theories assume washed-up debris was either wrongly attributed or planted.) A similar theory is proffered by Ghyslain Wattrelos, a French businessman whose wife Laurence, 17-year-old son Hadrien, and 13-year-old daughter Ambre were lost on MH370. (Wattrelos’s legal case in France is currently the only ongoing investigation into the missing flight.)

It’s a fine line between asking questions and conspiracy, and the latter two episodes knowingly toe it – both Wise and De Changy admit their theories sound far-fetched to them, too. Asked on the decision to proceed down the rabbit hole of doubt, dissecting or dismissing different pieces of evidence,

Malkinson pointed to the experience of obsession, for those who lost someone aboard MH370 and those determined to find answers. The series was “not just about what happened”, she said. “It was about the people that have been consumed by this for the past nine years … It’s about what does a mystery like this do to the people who are involved in it?”

Indeed, the series plays not as a Tetris game of evidence but as a slow-moving maze of facts, conjecture, blanks and grief. Major developments – the radar sighting, the Inmarsat data, the downing of another Malaysian airlines flight by the Russian military over Ukraine in July 2014, the wing flap found on Réunion, the revelation of Zaharie’s flight simulator – appear in roughly chronological order over the course of three hours. The feeling is more confusion, squinting too hard at the map willing it to make sense, than conspiracy.

“These are people that have been involved in the story from the very beginning, and they are questioning what has been deemed the official narrative,” said Malkinson. “They’ve written extensively on it, they’ve done a huge amount of research, and yes, they may be joining their dots together in a way that people don’t agree with, but they have definitely put the time and effort into it, and they are posing questions that haven’t necessarily always been answered.”

“It’s most likely that the plane is in the southern Indian Ocean,” she said when asked which theory she found most credible. “But how and why it ended up there, we just don’t know.

“There are still a lot of questions that haven’t been answered, and so I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I know that some of the theories are more far-fetched than the others, but I think what’s the most important thing for me is that the next of kin still don’t have all the answers, and that actually this mystery hasn’t been solved.”

Several loved ones of those lost, from seven different countries, testify to the pain of the mystery in the series, in addition to the grief. Some turned to political action, publicly protesting the Malaysian government’s wobbly response. Others searched for closure in the bits of debris found on Madagascan beaches.

Many stay in contact with each other. “The heart of the series for me has always been the next of kin,” said Malkinson. “To try and even understand the complex trauma of ambiguous loss. The just not knowing – it’s incomprehensible.”

“The people that we’ve spoken to, their biggest fear is that this does get forgotten, and it’s just a tragic event that they have to move on from,” she added. In 2017, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau suspended the search for MH370 in the rough waters of the southern Indian Ocean. It was always an improbable mission – a vast area based on an estimated endpoint, remote and battered by storms, with seafloor caverns like the Grand Canyon.

Still, Malkinson said she hoped for a search to one day resume, for closure, confirmation and most importantly, for next of kin. “I think that we can’t be in a world that a 777 has gone missing and it’s very tragic and we have to move on – that shouldn’t happen.”

MH370: The Plane That Disappeared is available on Netflix

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radi ... obal-en-GB

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MH370 Disappearance

Where Is Missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370? Know All About One of the Greatest Unsolved Aviation Mysteries of Our Time

A recent documentary on Netflix tried to answer the questions related to the missing Malaysian airline MH370, but there were no concrete conclusions about where is Flight MH 370. In this article, we tell you a bit about the history of the incident and what probably happened to this flight.

The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is one of the greatest aviation mysteries of recent times with no definite answers. The flight which left from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on March 8, 2014, was headed to Beijing, China but it never reached the destination.

The whereabouts of the flight has not been found almost close to a decade later. A recent documentary on Netflix tried to answer the questions but there were no concrete conclusions about where is Flight MH 370. In this article, we tell you a bit about the history of the incident and what probably happened to this flight.

The Boeing 777 flight was carrying 227 passengers and had 12 crew members aboard before it went off the radar and apparently changed course. Families of these 239 passengers await answers as to what exactly happened on March 8, 2014.

There are several theories that suggest the plane was hijacked or ended up crashing into the vast ocean. MH370 Flight Was Taken Off Course Manually and Flown Towards Indian Ocean, Says Report.

The plane is recorded to have entered Vietnamese airspace in the early hours of March 8 and the pilot signalled "Goodnight" to the air traffic control. But when the communications systems were turned off, it is said to have taken a left turn, returning into Malaysian airspace and disappearing from the radar after flying for six hours.

Some reports suggest that the plane crashed into the Indian Ocean after a few debris from a plane were recovered in 2015. Some other pieces of the plane have been said to be discovered in Tanzania, South Africa, Madagascar and Mauritius. But not all of these were confirmed as parts of the MH 370. There was no distress signal or any indications of bad weather or any other technical problems before the plane went off the radar.

The mystery of what happened to the plane had several theorists launching their separate investigations to know about the whereabouts. As the issue caught global attention, there were some reported sightings from witnesses, but none of them seemed credible enough to send a rescue mission.

There was a multinational search effort that even turned out the most expensive aviation search in history that began from the Gulf of Thailand to the South China Sea, tracing every signal detected on the flight.

The search for the flight was last undertaken by the private American marine exploration company Ocean Infinity in Jan 2018 but was unsuccessfully concluded in June 2018. From aerial to underwater search, authorities kept trying to find evidence and debris that suggested what happened to MH 370.

It was finally concluded by the Malaysian government that Flight MH370 ended in the southern part of the Indian ocean. Nine years later, with no concrete answers to where is MH 370, the disappearance of this plane has been described as “one of the biggest mysteries in modern aviation history.”

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on May 08, 2023 11:36 AM).

https://www.latestly.com/world/malaysia ... 10692.html

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10 Years Ago

Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappearance

Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappearance, also called MH370 disappearance, disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet on March 8, 2014, during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The disappearance of the Boeing 777 with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board led to a search effort stretching from the Indian Ocean west of Australia to Central Asia. Flight 370 took off at 12:41 AM local time. It reached a cruising altitude of 10,700 metres (35,000 feet) at 1:01 AM.

The Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which transmitted data about the aircraft’s performance, sent its last transmission at 1:07 AM and was subsequently switched off.

The last voice communication from the crew occurred at 1:19 AM, and at 1:21 AM the plane’s transponder, which communicated with air-traffic control, was switched off, just as the plane was about to enter Vietnamese airspace over the South China Sea.

At 1:30 AM Malaysian military and civilian radar began tracking the plane as it turned around and then flew southwest over the Malay Peninsula. After crossing the peninsula, the plane turned northwest over the Strait of Malacca.

At 2:22 AM Malaysian military radar lost contact with the plane over the Andaman Sea. An Inmarsat satellite in geostationary orbit over the Indian Ocean received hourly signals from flight 370 and detected the plane for the final time at 8:11 AM.

Synopsis | MH370: A Decade of Despair (2024)

Early next month will mark ten years since Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was lost somewhere in the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean. For the families of the 239 passengers and crew on board the Boeing 777, it has been a decade of despair.

Since the plane vanished, they’ve been living with the never-ending pain of not knowing what happened to their loved ones. Many of them also have feelings of anger, directed at governments around the world that seem reluctant to do more to find the truth about this disaster.

As Dimity Clancey reports, it is a frustration that has amplified because new and credible information continues to be collected.

Put simply, MH370 is a mystery that can and must be solved.

Link to important Video:

https://youtu.be/5y4OqwBLzog?si=Jw3Lz1MusVPzUzGG

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Sailor saw Malaysian Airlines flight MH370

British sailor who saw Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 just before crash, explains what she witnessed

Published 17:40 6 Jun 2025 GMT+1

Brit sailor Katherine Tee revealed she believed she'd seen an aircraft on fire, but later doubted herself

A British sailor who believes she may have spotted Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on the fateful night of its disappearance shared details of her account.

It's been over a decade since flight MH370 departed from the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur.

However, the jet would vanish just 40 minutes into its flight to Beijing, China, with authorities yet to recover anything more than a few pieces of debris.

To this day, it remains one of the biggest aviation mysteries.

The lack of definitive evidence to prove MH370's ultimate fate has since led to numerous theories developing, as well as people coming forward to claim they saw the aircraft on its doomed voyage.

This list includes British sailor Katherine Tee, who revealed details of her account to the Phuket Gazette back in June 2014

Recalling her whereabouts on 8 March with the outlet, Tee explained that she and her husband Marc Horn were travelling from Cochin, India, to Phuket.

While crossing the Indian Ocean that night, she said she noticed what appeared to be a plane on fire crossing through the sky.

She explained that she'd been on night watch and the only person awake on the boat when she noticed what looked like an aircraft with orange lights.

"I saw something that looked like a plane on fire," Tee claimed.

"That’s what I thought it was. Then, I thought I must be mad… It caught my attention because I had never seen a plane with orange lights before, so I wondered what they were."

She continued: "I could see the outline of the plane, it looked longer than planes usually do. There was what appeared to be black smoke streaming from behind it."

Tee added that she'd seen other aircraft in the sky at the time and believed that, if it was a plane on fire, another pilot would report it.

"I remember thinking that if it was a plane on fire that I was seeing, the other aircraft would report it," she said.

"I wondered again why it had such bright orange lights. They reminded me of sodium lights. I thought it could be some anomaly or just a meteor."

Tee went on to explain that she'd kept the sighting to herself until the boat reached Phuket as she was having marital issues at the time and was encouraged by local sailors to report her experience.

However, the Liverpool native was unsure about what she saw and kept quiet for several more months.

This changed when she read about a search being called off due to technical problems a couple of months later, leading her to go through her own yacht logs.

"The first time I told him [Marc] was after hearing the radio report. That is when we checked our GPS log and realised that perhaps I really did see it," Tee explained.

After sharing their data on Cruisers Forum, the couple discovered they may have been in one of the projected flight paths, prompting Tee to make an official report of her sightings.

Revealing her regrets at not reporting the incident sooner, she added: "Maybe I should have had a little more confidence in myself. I am sorry I didn't take action sooner."
What have authorities said about MH370?

It's unclear whether or not Tee's sighting was ever investigated after she reported it to the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC), however, searches for the plane continue to take place.

Investigations to uncover the remains and mystery of MH370 are still ongoing as of 2025, with recent searches being suspended in April as it is currently 'not the season' (via Reuters).

It's one of the biggest aviation mysteries ever, but could we be on the verge of finally finding the missing Malaysia Airlines plane MH370?

Flight MH370 departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport on 8 March 2014, with its destination being Beijing, China.

However, the aircraft would never arrive. What exactly happened next isn't too clear, however, we do know the flight lost contact with air traffic control at 1:19am, while flying over the South China Sea.

Investigators believe the plane likely crashed into the Southern Indian Ocean, around 2,500km west of the Australian city of Perth, presumably killing all 239 passengers onboard.

The bulk of the wreckage or remains of those onboard have never been recovered, prompting numerous conspiracy theories over what 'really' happened to MH370 over the years.

But without the wreckage, we'll never know for sure.

However, one marine robotics company is hoping to change that.

Leading what is likely to be the last search for the doomed plane is Southampton-based company Ocean Infinity which is now combing the seabed of the Indian Ocean in search of clues.

According to The Independent, the company's deep-water support vessel Armada 7806 was seen heading to various locations where researchers believe the plane may be. The vessel is expected to spend around six weeks searching in total.

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are then deployed to thoroughly scan the seabed floor, which are operated remotely from Ocean Infinity's headquarters.

The Telegraph adds that the search is backed by the Malaysian government, who previously agreed to a 'no find, no fee' deal with the robotics company at the end of last year.

Meaning that Ocean Infinity will only receive a payout if it finds the wreckage. However, the company doesn't appear to have signed a deal with Kuala Lumpur, with Malaysian transport minister Anthony Loke confirming that an agreement was still to be made.

"Nevertheless, we welcome the proactiveness of Ocean Infinity to search for MH370 as this is great news for all the victims’ next of kin," he said of the news, adding that Ocean Infinity and the Malaysian government were still 'finalising the details for the contract to be signed'.

Relatives of the passengers previously welcomed the decision to restart the search, as it could mean the mystery of what happened to their loved ones is finally solved

"I am so happy for the news... [It] feels like the best present ever," Jacquita Gonzales, the wife of MH370 inflight supervisor Patrick Gomes, told the New Straits Times (via BBC).

"This announcement stirs mixed emotions - hope, gratitude, and sorrow. After nearly 11 years, the uncertainty and pain of not having answers have been incredibly difficult for us," Intan Maizura Othaman, wife of cabin crew member Mohd Hazrin Mohamed Hasnan added.

MH370 had departed Kuala Lumpur International Airport in the early hours of 8 March 2014 en route to Beijing, China. The flight was scheduled to land in the Chinese capital five hours and 34 minutes.

However, the flight would never make it.

MH370 last made contact with air traffic control while flying over the South China Sea, with investigators believing the flight likely crashed somewhere in the Southern Indian Ocean, around 2,500km west of the Australian city of Perth.

Minor fragments of the aircraft have since been recovered by investigators, confirming that MH370 likely crashed around 08:19 and 09:15 on 8 March due to fuel exhaustion.

Extensive searches have continued to take place in the Southern Indian Ocean, while a number of conspiracy theories have regarding what had 'really' happened to MH370 have circulated online over the years.

Final contact was made with the aircraft at around 1:19am, with Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah sending the following transmission about 38 minutes after take-off.

"Good night, Malaysian three seven zero," he said in the transmission, moments before the plane entered Vietnamese air space

Sky News added that the plane's transponder was turned off shortly after the message was sent, meaning that it could not easily be tracked.

Military radars out later show that MH370 had veered off of its flight path and begun to head back towards Malaysia. The flight would exit Malaysian military radar range around 230 miles northwest of Penang Island in northwestern Peninsular Malaysia.

THE THREE MAJOR THEORIES ON WHAT HAPPENED TO MISSING FLIGHT MH370

The recording was released more than 50 days after the flight vanished during a briefing with the families of the missing passengers. 150 of those onboard were Chinese nationals alongside 50 Malaysians and citizens of France, Australia, Indonesia, India, the United States, Ukraine and Canada (via Reuters).

While we may never know what exactly happened inside the cabin of MH370 on that fateful night, investigators may be closer than ever to recovering the plane's debris.

It was revealed that Southampton-based company Ocean Infinity was using an ocean support vessel to comb the seabed of the seabed of the Indian Ocean in search of clues.

The Telegraph added that the search had been backed by the Malaysian government, who'd previously agreed to a 'no find, no fee' deal with the robotics company at the end of last year. However it is unclear if a deal was since been reached by the two parties.

The three major theories on what happened to missing flight MH370 after decade-long mysteryThe three major theories on what happened to missing flight MH370 after decade-long mystery

The decade-long mystery of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 remains one of the deadliest cases of aircraft disappearance.

227 passengers and 12 crew members on board the Boeing 777 were presumed dead after travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8 March, 2014.

MH370 lost contact with air traffic control at 1:19am, over the South China Sea, while investigators believe the plane deviated from its planned route and flew west for several hours before vanishing.

The new search for MH370

Southampton-based marine robotics firm, Ocean Infinity, is resuming its mission in a new area in the southern Indian Ocean.

If the company - who ended a previous search in 2018 - is able to locate significant wreckage, it will be awarded $70 million (£56 million), according to Malaysia's transport minister Anthony Loke.

"Our responsibility and obligation and commitment is to the next of kin," Loke said.

"We hope this time will be positive, that the wreckage will be found and give closure to the families."

MH370 theory 1: Hijacking

There are some suggestions that the incident was an 'act of war', as mentioned in Netflix's 2023 documentary MH370: The Plane That Disappeared.

Aviation journalist Jeff Wise noted that another incident involving a Malaysia Airlines Flight could have been the result of MH370 being hijacked.

Wise suspected that international spies were on board the flight and went into the electronics bay underneath the plane to operate the computers which control the plane's flight system.

MH370 theory 2: The pilot was involved

When taking a look into the pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah, Wise speculates that he purposely took down the plane.

Instead of heading to Beijing as planned, the journalist thinks Shah may have turned the aircraft around to head south so it would eventually run out of fuel and crash.

But following further evaluation, Wise was more convinced by theory number one above.

MH370 theory 3: Plane interception

Last, but not least, is the theory set out by French journalist Florence De Changy.

In the Netflix doc, she believed that it was NATO or US Air Force planes with AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System), who 'jammed' the plane's communication system.

This was because they, allegedly, picked up that there was suspicious cargo on board.

And in the third episode of the series, De Changy says that this led to the aircraft getting 'lost', which would have been the perfect opportunity for interception.

"More than anything, we want to pull the hidden truths about MH370 out from the carpet under which they've been swept, and remind people that this is still a story with no ending, a mystery that hasn't been solved, that somebody out there knows more than the world has been told," producer, Harry Hewland, said.

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