I am currently re-watching Lost, a show about a plane crashing on an island and the subsequent survival of people on the island.
Of course, Lost is fiction, and in real life, the world was shocked by the recent mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in 2014, which led to the presume deaths of all 239 people on board.
My Chinese-American family talked a lot about the disappearance — after all, the majority of passengers on the plane were Chinese, and the event got significant coverage in Chinese newspapers in our area. After all, the destination of the flight was Beijing.
On a personal level, plane crashes are very scary. Despite the fact that a plane crash is about 100 times less likely than a car crash, what’s scarier about a plane crash is the magnitude.
Plane crashes lead to hundreds of people dying and show an institutional failure of big airlines and governments failing to protect and serve vulnerable passengers, while car accidents are perceived as personal mistakes and tragedies.
William Langewiesche at The Atlantic gives a detailed account of what might have happened to the plane. Langewiesche himself was a pilot for a long time before becoming a journalist, and he explores what might have happened to the plane.
To this day, almost eight years after the disappearance of the plane, no one knows what happened to Malaysia Flight 370, despite many theories surrounding the plane’s disappearance.
This is what we know right now.
The trajectory of the flight
The plane was a Boeing 777, which is a very modern plane that’s easily tracked.
It was piloted by two men: Zaharie Ahmad Shah, a 53-year-old Malaysian veteran pilot (known by everyone as Zaharie), and Fariq Hamid, a 27-year-old trainee who was going on his last training flight.
The two were an effective team and partnership — although Zaharie was the senior pilot, he generally did not require other younger pilots to be “deferential,” according to Langewiesche. Zaharie was incredibly experienced — he had flown 18,000 hours.
Of the many tragic things that happened with Malaysia Flight 370, Fariq Hamid going missing during his last training flight is one of them.
The plane took off on March 8, 2014, at 12:42 a.m. Malaysia Flight 370 climbed to 35,000 feet en route to Beijing, which is cruising altitude for a plane, 19 minutes after takeoff. Seven minutes later, the plane crossed into the South China Sea, towards Vietnam.
Several times, Zaharie said the plane was at 35,000 feet. He then made a transmission to Vietnamese air traffic controllers, which was the last anyone heard from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
From the perspective of air traffic controllers in Vietnam, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 flew into Vietnamese airspace, and then swiftly disappeared. In Vietnam, they tried to keep contacting Flight 370, but there was no response.
Someone turned off the transponder on the plane, and air traffic controllers could no longer track the plane.
Langewiesche says the failure to notify Kuala Lampur’s Aeronautical Rescue Coordination Centre was an “exercise in confusion and incompetence.” The airport hadn’t been informed by 2:30 a.m., and it hadn’t sent an emergency response until 6:32 a.m.
Secret Malaysia air force data showed the plane disappeared from secondary radar, but military radar found it had turned sharply southwest after its disappearance from radar.
This information would have certainly been useful in the subsequent investigation, but Malaysia did not want to reveal its military capabilities to the rest of the world.
The final contact with military radar was at 2:22 a.m., into the Andaman Sea.
One Indian Ocean satellite controlled by Inmarsat, a vendor in Great Britain, started picking up on “handshakes” from the plane. These were electronic blips from the plane to the satellite, and there were seven total handshakes.
The plane turned around sometime after 2 a.m., heading southwest instead of north to Beijing. The plane had its last handshake at 8:19 a.m., which means it flew around for several hours in the southwest direction before anything happened.
After that, the plane likely ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean after the last handshake. A “Doppler value” of the plane at that point found a “steep descent” five times greater than the normal descent rate of an airplane.
The investigation
Sinéad Baker at Insider says that by the time a rescue effort was attempted, a search from 34 ships and 28 airplanes took place, all under the umbrella of seven countries. The area searched was the South China Sea, between Malaysia and Vietnam, but the plane could not be found even with an unprecedented search mission, and despite the fact that a Boeing 777 is supposed to be easily tracked.
On January 29, 2015, the Malaysian government officially declared the disappearance an accident.
After the initial international investigation, Australia launched the most strenuous effort to find the plane. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) launched an underwater search. It would ultimately be unsuccessful three years after the crash, and after the Australian government spent $160 million.
Another group of independent engineers and scientists founded the Independent Group. After the Australian government failed to find out what happened, an American company named Ocean Infinity also started looking for the plane. This search was also ultimately unsuccessful.
The theories about what happened
Suicide by pilot
One of the most prominent theories about what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 revolves around a possible murder-suicide at the hands of Zaharie.
Details of Zaharie’s troubled personal life were held back by the notoriously corrupt and authoritarian Malaysian government, and Langewiesche says they had heavy incentives to save face for Malaysia Airlines and the Malaysian government.
An international investigation (an accident inquiry) similarly did not yield much, mostly due to resistance from the Malaysian police and government.
One international observer to the process said the Malaysian government did not want to be transparent and wanted to “make the subject go away.” They were scared of what an investigation might reveal, and the international investigation wasn’t able to find the cause of the plane’s disappearance. As an example, the Malaysian military allowed the search to continue for days in the wrong direction, even though it knew the airplane was flying southwest.
Langewiesche comments the plane must have been flown by hand when it made its sudden turn towards the southwest. It also seems to have been deliberately depressurized, and for some reason, most of the electrical system was shut down.
One early theory was a hijacking by terrorists. Some initially suspected two Iranians with forged passports, but the investigation later revealed these passengers were seeking asylum in Germany. No terrorist group took responsibility for the plane’s disappearance.
Langewiesche’s puts forward a theory that Zaharie deliberately murdered everyone on the plane. The plane’s depressurization, turning off of the transponder, and sudden turn were all too precise to be accidental.
Zaharie’s personal life was troubled, to say the least. His wife had left him after discovering a pattern of infidelity. He was known as lonely and sad by those who knew him, and he would pace around empty rooms by himself. He sought to have a relationship with a married woman and tried to message Internet models on social media.
While the police claimed Zaharie had a good ability to handle stress and no “significant changes in his lifestyle,” the truth strayed far from the Malaysian government’s official account.
At home, the FBI discovered Zaharie had a flight simulator matching the flight path of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, in a matching pattern that is far from accidental.
Langewiesche met a friend of Zaharie, a fellow established pilot, who thought Zaharie had committed a murder-suicide. His marriage was falling apart, and as the senior pilot, Zaharie could have told his fellow pilot, Fariq Hamid, to leave the cabin, and he would have left the cabin.
Experts and analysts speaking on Australia’s “60 Minutes” corroborate the theory that Zaharie committed a “premeditated act of mass murder,” according to Cleve Wootson at The Washington Post.
These experts, including the former chief of the ATSB, believe the depressurization of the cabin was intentional, which knocked out anyone who wasn’t wearing an oxygen mask. These experts also believe only a pilot could have turned off the transponder, and turned the plane suddenly to the left.
The biggest loophole in the theory is, well, why? Why would Zaharie want to kill hundreds of people with him if he wanted to die by suicide?
Well, Langewiesche points to the fact that it wouldn’t be the first time it has happened. Suicide by pilot has happened, unfortunately, many times (not even counting 9/11) including in SilkAir Flight 185, which killed 104 people, EgyptAir Flight 990, which killed 217 people, LAM Mozambique Airlines Flight 470, which killed 33 people.
The most prominent recent example was Germanwings Autobus pilot Andreas Lubitz, who waited for his co-pilot to use the bathroom, then intentionally crashed the plane into the French Alps in 2015. Lubitz had a history of depression and searched the Internet in the days before the incident for how to crash an airplane.
However, “it’s happened in other cases” is not conclusive evidence the pilot killed himself and everyone on the plane deliberately. And the undertone of “depressed pilots shouldn’t fly planes” is a very dangerous conclusion to jump to.
Also, the plane did not crash immediately. It flew for several hours before its final handshake at 8:11 a.m. — which does not make sense for the suicide by pilot theory since it would prolong suffering for the pilot and all involved.
Hypoxia
Another prominent theory advanced by the ATSB is hypoxia, or the deprivation of oxygen from the brain. The theory is that everyone on the plane fell unconscious, and the plane was subsequently put on autopilot.
Christine Negroni at Smithsonian Magazine defends the hypoxia theory. Pilots can sometimes fail to turn on pressurization at the beginning of the flight, or the pressurization of the flight doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to due to holes in the fuselage or leaks in other parts of the plane. Sometimes, pilots don’t register the cabin altitude upon takeoff.
Negroni states 40 to 50 times a year, airliners experience “rapid decompression,” and slow depressurization happen even more often. When an airline depressurizes, pilots put on their emergency oxygen masks. They also descend to an altitude where they do not need the extra oxygen.
Helios Airways Flight 522 was one flight in 2005 that crashed due to loss of pressurization in the cabin and is the closest parallel to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The pilots failed to pressurize the plane after takeoff, and after the plane ascended above 10,000 feet, both pilots did not put on their masks, a case Negroni attributes to impaired judgment due to hypoxia.
Both pilots passed out and collapsed, and passengers’ masks would have only supplied oxygen for 12 to 15 minutes before passing out, which is the reason pilots have to descend altitudes so quickly.
Helios Airways Flight 522 flew for hours, entering Greek airspace and being tracked by two Greek fighter pilots. The fighter pilots saw a flight attendant going into the cockpit, and the pilot being passed out. The flight attendant was also a pilot and put on the captain’s oxygen mask.
He said, “mayday, mayday, Helios Flight 522 Athens” as the plane descended. But the radio was not on the right frequency, so no one could hear the message, and the plane still crashed.
As for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Negroni says an electrical malfunction may have led to a rapid depressurization of the plane. She suggests Zaharie actually left the airplane to the trainee flying his last flight before being fully certified.
But the plane never transferred to the radio frequency needed to communicate with Ho Chi Minh air traffic control. And the transponder stopped transmitting at all.
Negroni theorizes there was a rapid decompression in the cockpit or near it and in the subsequent attempt to change the transponder number to enter numbers to signal distress, a pilot had mistakenly put the transponder on standby.
Underlying all the incidents of hypoxia cited by Negroni is the fact that people often make poor, irrational decisions when their brains are deprived of oxygen. This would explain the sudden southwest turn of the plane.
Since 1999, there have been at least seven fatal flights involving hypoxia.
The search today
Langewische documents the journey of an American man named Blaine Gibson. Gibson had a quest to find remains of Malaysia Flight 370, and through the years, he has found debris from the plane on beaches across the Indian Ocean.
It was confirmation of an uncomfortable truth: everyone on the flight was dead, as much as people wanted to hope they were alive. It also was not put down gently but shattered violently whenever it stopped flying.
On July 29, 2015, Gibson found a piece of washed-up, six-foot airfoil on Réunion, a French island on the Indian Ocean about 550 kilometers east of Madagascar.
Gibson finding the second piece of the plane was even more bizarre. He had a life-long, bucket list goal of visiting every country in the world. He had a hunch another piece of the plane would pop up in at the coast of Mozambique, and sure enough, it did when he searched for it.
At northeastern Madagascar, Gibson helped find even more debris for the plane. The mother lode of the plane turned up on a beach. Gibson told locals he would pay for debris from the plane, and sure enough, he paid $40 for one piece of plane, enough to fund a “day-long bender” for a village.
Today, Gibson is responsible for the discovery of about a third of the wreckage from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. He has also found backpacks and purses, but they have not revealed any significant information.
What his discovery found was the plane flew for six hours without stopping.
According to Tony Shepherd at The Guardian, authorities stopped searching for the plane in 2017. But other ordinary people, experts, and amateurs, including Gibson and aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey. Godfrey believes the plane crashed 4,000 meters deep and 2,000 km west of Perth, Australia in the Indian Ocean.
While official investigations are no longer underway, many parts of the Indian Ocean are still unexplored. Peter Foley, who oversaw the ATSB search, is still involved in searching for the plane, even though he is retired.
He is optimistic the mystery behind the plane will be discovered, as will the remaining debris from the plane.
Takeaways
It’s important to note many families are still grieving the loss of their families.
But it’s still important to know what happened to Malaysia Flight 370 so a tragedy like it could be averted in the future.
Yes, the Malaysian government could have been more transparent in the investigation. Maybe more information could be found in Kuala Lumpur for people like Blaine Gibson in case “the Malaysian police know more than they have dared to say.”
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was a flashpoint in poor Malaysian-Chinese relations, given so many Chinese nationals died on the plane.
No matter what is discovered, the fact remains there’s a lot at stake. There’s a lot at stake for the families of those who passed, but there’s also a lot at stake for every government involved.
To prevent such a tragedy from happening again, some want there to be better aircraft monitoring, but the current technology is still limited. While improvements in satellite tracking systems can monitor an aircraft every 15 minutes using GPS data and other tracking metrics, the fact remains this just improves the probability for finding a lost aircraft — it doesn’t promise 100% success.
With all the technological advancements of today’s day and age, with how far we’ve come in 2022, it’s almost unfathomable that a commercial airline carrying over 200 passengers and crew just disappeared. That’s unfathomable nature is the reason so many different conspiracy theories and somewhat plausible theories have emerged.
For now, it might be best to regard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 as a freak accident and tragedy, instead of jumping to conclusions. The reality is we might never know more, as frustrating as that is.
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This post was previously published on CrimeBeat.
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