The search for MH370 is set to resume (Image: Getty)
When Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished without a trace over a decade ago it sparked one of aviation’s most baffling mysteries. Despite multiple searches, investigators still don’t know exactly what happened to the plane or its 239 passengers and crew.
The Malaysian government said on Wednesday (December 3) that US marine robotics firm, Ocean Infinity, would resume a seabed hunt for the missing plane on December 30, reigniting hopes the plane might finally be found. The Boeing 777 disappeared from air-traffic radar 39 minutes after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8, 2014.
Since then a number of theories have been advanced as to how or why the jet disappeared, some of which are wilder than others.
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Sudden event leads to ‘ghost flight’
Fire, depressurisation or another sudden event could have rendered the crew and passengers unconscious, with the jet flying on autopilot until its fuel ran out.
The pilot’s last radio call to Kuala Lumpur — “Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero”— was the final communication before the plane crossed into Vietnamese airspace and failed to check in with controllers there.
Minutes after take off, the plane’s transponder, which broadcasts its location, shut down. Military radar showed the jet turn back over the Andaman Sea and satellite data suggested it continued flying for hours before crashing into a remote section of the southern Indian Ocean.
According to Aerospace Global News, this theory is supported by hourly “ping” arc signals between the aircraft and satellites. A lack of radio communication and the flightpath being consistent with the autopilot would also back the theory.
The Boeing 777 disappeared from air-traffic radar 39 minutes after departing Kuala Lumpur (Image: Getty)
Crew-member diverted the plane
Some experts have suggested the plane was flown off course by the pilot or someone else who was in the cockpit and towards a remote part of the Indian Ocean.
They point to the lack of a distress call from the aircraft, the difficulty of attributing the navigation to a system failure and a route ending in the Indian Ocean being found on the captain’s home computer.
The Independent Group claim Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah flew the jet off course before waiting for the fuel to run out or directing the aircraft straight into the sea.
However, Malaysian investigators in 2018 cleared the passengers and crew but did not rule out “unlawful interference”. Authorities have claimed someone deliberately severed communications and diverted the plane.
Kim Jong-Un and Vladimir Putin have both been singled out in outlandish theories (Image: Getty)
Sabotage by a foreign power
In the book, The Disappearing Act: The Impossible Case of MH370, journalist Florence de Changy argues the plane was shot down by the US to prevent secret technology arriving in China.
She claims the US tried to re-route the plane, but when that failed it was shot down, according to The Sun.
Another wild idea circulated on social media is that Kim Jong-Un, North Korea’s dictator, ordered the jet to be hijacked because he wanted in on its tech.
Yet another outlandish theory is that the Kremlin was behind the disappearance. Aviation expert Jeff Wise told Channel 5 in 2019 that Russia was “getting a lot of heat” in 2014 for illegally annexing Crimea.
He claimed: “It’s getting a lot of heat for it and would really love for people to talk about something else, anything else. And so the world’s attention shifts completely away from this nasty business in Ukraine.”
No one knows exactly what happened to the plane or its 239 passengers and crew (Image: Getty)
Catastrophic mechanical failure
Some experts have suggested MH370 disappeared because of a mechanical or electrical failure which disabled equipment used to communicate and navigate.
Aerospace Global News reports that the plane turning back to Malaysia fits in with the idea it was forced to by such a failure.
But the same publication notes that the idea doesn’t explain why the aircraft followed a “long, stable” flight path afterwards, unless the crew were somehow later “incapacitated”.
