It has been 11 years since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 signed off from Malaysia's air traffic control. When the Boeing 777 crossed Vietnam's airspace, it was “Good night Malaysia 3 Seven Zero.”
I never heard of the plane travelling from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing, China on March 8, 2014, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members.
Two minutes after the final message from the plane's Malaysian pilot Zahary Ahmad Shah, the plane disappeared from the radar screen.
Despite the plane being “dark,” the tracker of a Malaysian military aircraft could still follow the MH370, and it appears that the plane suddenly turned sharply to the left and returned to Malaysian airspace before flying another seven hours into the middle of the Indian Ocean, running out of fuel and crashing.
Many searches have started following the disappearance of flight MH370, including Australia. Australia searched for three years covering the South Indian Ocean of 75 square miles with a desperate bid to find planes and passengers, including eight Australians.
However, in 2017, Australian authorities canceled the search.
“Despite all efforts using the best science available, cutting edge technology, and modes and advice from the best highly skilled experts in their field, unfortunately, the search was unable to find the aircraft,” authorities at the time said.
“The decision to suspend the underwater search has not been light or sad.”
Eleven years later, a new search was launched in the hopes of the MH370 and British maritime exploration company Ocean Infinity eventually carrying 239 people.
Malaysian Minister of Transport Anthony Rourke recently said that the Malaysian government was in the process of signing a contract with the Infinite Ocean and that Malaysia welcomed “the infinite ocean positivity to deploy ships.”
What happened to the MH370?
Richard Godfrey, author of the website www.mh370search.com The retired aerospace engineer told news.com.au that there are nearly 150 books written about the MH370, each with its own theory.
“The different theories were filmed by aliens, from odd things like the MH370 to some conspiracy involving several government and secret service agents,” Godfrey said.
“There were some ominous people like the MH370 had been taken by Chinese, Russian or Americans. He was a guardian who said he might not have been the captain because he was such a nice person, and a clairvoyant who had eyesight and saw the MH370.”
He added that he had both useless theories by the public who claimed to have discovered the MH370 on Google Earth, as well as documentaries that mixed theories that are different and confusing.
One well-discussed theory is that the US forces either fire down the MH370 or landed on Diego Garcia, an island in the British Indian Ocean territory that the US and the UK used as military bases.
This theory suggests that experts crashed this roundly because the plane didn't have enough fuel to fly near Diego Garcia, but there is no reliable evidence that it was hijacked or shot down, so the US believes the plane was hijacked by terrorists, presenting a security risk.
Another theory of hijacking is that the plane flew to Kazakhstan on the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin, but flight data shows that the MH370 is facing in the opposite direction from Kazakhstan towards the Indian Ocean.
In addition to the theory that aliens may have been involved, there was also speculation that the plane was engulfed by a black hole.
“I only deal with scientific research based on hard data and evidence,” Godfrey said.
“From Boeing, we know how long the Boeing 777 can fly, how long it can stay in the air. From the engineering of Malaysia Airlines, we know that the fuel efficiency of both the amount of fuel and the actual aircraft engines exists exactly.”
Godfrey also said that there will be a wealth of comprehensive data on flight paths and performance, including automatic dependency monitoring-broadcast (ADS-B) data, radar data, and aircraft communication addressing and reporting systems (ACARS) data.
“we [also] I know from Inmarsat's satellite data that the aircraft continued to fly 7 hours 37 minutes from the South Indian Ocean until fuel fatigue,” he said.
He added that it was clear that MH370 had crashed from 43 floating debris items recovered from the Indian Ocean area.
“We know from drift analysis where floating debris is the most common, and common crash areas are the most. [ …] When all these facts come together, there is a good case,” he said.
One of theories that experts most embrace is that Pilot Shah, or perhaps co-pilot Fariku Abdulhamid, deliberately turns off the plane's tracking device, then manually control the aircraft and fly until it runs out of fuel as part of a murder-suicide plot.
When police attacked Shah's house in Malaysia, they found a flight simulator system that showed they flew a simulated route into the middle of the Indian Ocean, similar to the flight path of the MH370, but no suicide notes were found.
Alvin Lee, head of the Indonesian Air Transport Services Users Association, told news.com.au that the incident is baffling in the modern era.
“From a technical standpoint, that makes no sense and isn't logical with all the technologies available these days. It's easy to track an airplane even if your own tracking device is disabled,” he said.
“What's even more strange is that after flying from Malaysia to Vietnam's airspace, he returned to the border between Malaysia and Indonesia and went missing.
“In the Southeast Asia region, there is a technology superpower that is Singapore.”
The lie was that when other flights crashed in the area, such as the Adam Air Mail 574, which jumped into Indonesia's Makassar Strait on January 1, 2007, Singapore authorities were able to quickly find it using air tracing data.
“I don't have a theory about planes. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but it's very strange that planes can disappear without traces,” he said.
