On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport as a regular commercial passenger flight, with its intended destination in Beijing, China. Halfway through the flight, MH370 was instructed to contact air traffic control in Ho Chi Minh City as it entered Vietnamese airspace. It never did.
Minutes later, it vanished from all flight radar, and any attempts to contact the pilots were unsuccessful. Almost a decade later, the plane and all 239 people on board are still missing, and have never been fully recovered.
In the days following the disappearance, a search effort involving 26 countries began. Using satellite information transmitted from the plane after radar connection was lost, the flight was suspected to have diverted from its normal course. Subsequently, it is thought to have flown towards the Southern Indian Ocean where it would inevitably crash due to fuel exhaustion. Search efforts in the suspected crash area on the surface of the ocean, as well as underwater, yielded no evidence of any plane crash taking place.
While the location of the missing plane remains a mystery, there is no shortage of theories on how the fate of the lost flight came to be. One of the most prominent theories is that the pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, manually took control of the aircraft, and flew it to the ocean where it would crash.
The primary evidence for this theory is from information on Shah’s at-home flight simulator. When authorities investigated his home, files were found from sessions on the flight simulator from months before the disappearance. According to the Safety Investigation Report released by the Royal Malaysian Police in 2018, within the data included seven intentionally marked coordinates. When these coordinates were put together, they suspiciously resembled the predicted path that Flight 370 took towards the Indian Ocean. The Malaysian police were unable to verify if these waypoints were made in the same simulator session, or simply were a coincidence.
In addition to this, Shah was a highly credible pilot and had no suspected motives for diverting the flight. These facts cast significant doubt on him as a suspect for investigators.
Many other theories hold very little standing as plausible. Some believe that the flight was part of a wider conspiracy in which the U.S. had shot down the plane after it had flown off course. According to the theory, the plane was shot down from the U.S. military base on the island Diego Garcia, which is known for being a highly secretive facility. After this, the predicted flight path and evidence of the pilot’s involvement were allegedly crafted intentionally to divert attention and cover-up the incident.
Another theory posits that the plane could have been hijacked remotely by someone on land. However, there have been no cases of a plane ever being hijacked by a remote device in aviation history. For this reason, this theory is widely discredited as there is no concrete evidence to support it.
Today, official search efforts have remained suspended since 2017. Despite this, American company Ocean Infinity has not stopped their dedication to the search, claiming that they will begin efforts to scan the bottom of the ocean for wreckage in 2024. If efforts are successful, we can only hope that we may be able to finally have an answer to what happened to the most perplexing aviation mystery in history.
