Post by hi224 on May 13, 2021 5:36:39 GMT
March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370) took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport towards Beijing, China, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crewmembers.
The pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, had years of flight experience with no history of trouble. So, once the flight took off in clear skies at 12:41 a.m. that morning, there was no reason to suspect anything would go wrong.
Less than an hour after takeoff, at 1:19 a.m., MH370 would end their final chat with air traffic controllers with one simple message: "All right, good night."
After that, the plane vanished from radar, and neither the machine nor any of the 239 people on board would be seen or heard from again -- though the final moments of the aircraft, and the course it took, continues to baffle investigators to this day.
----------------------------
It was sometime after that 1 a.m. contact with air traffic controllers that both of the plane's transponders inexplicably stopped sending signals, which is why the aircraft had disappeared from conventional radar screens.
At first, searches were conducted near the South China sea, with the belief that 370 had simply crashed near the location of its last known contact with the outside world.
But as the Malaysian military would later disclose, their specialized radar systems (which does not rely on transponders) caught MH370 diverting dramatically off course shortly after that last chat with air traffic controllers, veering West and coming to within 200 miles of the island of Penang before making a slight right turn and flying out of the radar’s range, deep into the Northern Indian Ocean. This path is almost directly opposite the direction they were supposed to be heading.
Furthermore, it was discovered that the flight’s communications terminal (SATCOM) was severed for a large portion of the flight, and bizarrely re-connected mere minutes before the plane disappeared from military radar. It would stay online for another 6 hours before eventually going out again, presumably when 370 finally crashed.
In the hours after the link was re-established, several attempts were made to contact the pilots through the SATCOM terminal, all of which went unanswered.
Over the years, a total of 33 pieces of debris – confirmed and suspected from MH370 – would be found and recovered by 16 different people in six different countries.
This debris has all but confirmed that 370 did, indeed, crash somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
Neither that fact nor the question as to why we haven’t found the plane itself is a mystery.
Rather, the real mystery is what made MH370 crash in the first place. What made it veer off its original course so dramatically? Why didn’t the pilots, or anyone else on board, signal for help in what was clearly a time of distress?
We will likely never be able to come to a conclusive answer, but numerous theories have surfaced, and all with varying degrees of plausibility.
----------------------------
THEORIES:
Hijacking:
During the investigation, it was discovered that two of the men on board had used stolen passports for the journey, lending suspicion that perhaps they hijacked the plane in service of a terrorist organization.
It would, after all, explain how the transponders were shut off, the random deviation from the flight path, and why the pilots went silent after their final chat with air traffic controllers.
After digging into the men, however, police concluded they were not linked to a terrorist group, instead attributing the suspicious activity to illegal migration.
A fire in the cockpit:
Journalist Ean Higgins, author of “The Hunt For MH370,” came up with his own theory on what happened to the flight. According to him, it was a fire in the cockpit that led to the disaster.
Higgins suggests that the windshield heater on the pilot's side caught fire, leading to a malfunction of the secondary radar transponder and the communication systems.
According to Higgins, an explosion then ensued after one of the oxygen masks the two pilots were wearing was yanked out of its socket, leading to both of the pilots, and many of the passengers, becoming incapacitated either due to flame or the depressurization of the plane.
Faced with a choice, Captain Zaharie decided that, instead of landing and potentially hurting people on the ground, he would divert the aircraft over the Southern Indian Ocean and crash land in the sea.
Alternatively, since the plane was carrying lithium-ion batteries, some have theorized that a fire did, in fact, break out mid-flight, just not in the cockpit as Higgins claims.
It is an undeniably logical explanation for what may have happened, but there is no actual evidence such a series of events ever took place, and no evidence of an explosion was ever discovered on any of the recovered pieces.
Mass murder-suicide:
In June of 2014, the pilot (Zaharie Shah) was named as a suspect, primarily based on what they saw in a flight simulator he had in his home.
The simulator contained an eerily similar route to the one MH370 took on its final flight, with both paths ultimately ending in the Southern Indian Ocean.
To add even more suspicion, he was raised on Penang, suggesting that maybe the flight’s second turn (which curved right around the island) was a last attempt at seeing his hometown before ultimately ending his life.
Unfortunately, the simulator data (which was based on seven coordinates) couldn’t be used conclusively, as there was no way of knowing what order those coordinates were flown or even if they were all used in the same flight session.
A coverup:
On the conspiratorial side, there are claims that the Malaysian government themselves were the ones who shot down MH370.
According to Noel O'Gara, a private investigator with interest in the case, authorities believed MH370 was hijacked for a 9/11-style attack on Kuala Lumpur after radar showed that initial, unplanned turn back towards the country.
According to O’Gara, this prompted Malaysian officials into scrambling a fighter jet, purposed to fire a warning shot and get the plane back on course.
If the “warning” shot accidentally brought down 370, and killed everyone on board, that would certainly be something the authorities would want to cover up.
It is true that the initial search was restricted, and it wasn’t until March 15 — a full week after the plane disappeared — that the search was brought to the Indian Ocean.
Alternatively, the matter of who may have shot the plane down is not unanimous, as Russia and China have also both been suspected of being involved.
But, unsurprisingly, no evidence has surfaced to prove these claims, and they remain completely speculative.
----------------------------
Notes:
- While the second turn (near Penang) could have been directed by the plane's autopilot systems, the first turn, however, was too sharp to have been automated.
- If a fire did break out on 370, and Zaharie wanted to avoid ground fatalities, it’s rather strange he would stay airborne for so long after passing the island, and even stranger that the plane would be able to stay operational for six hours with a raging fire on board.
- While suspicion has been placed on both pilots before, no clear motive has been presented for their involvement. On the surface, both men seemed in good spirits, had families, and were not in significant financial trouble.
- A cell phone tower in Penang made contact with Fariq Hamid's (co-pilot) cell phone 30 minutes after the plane made the sharp turn westward. This could be significant, as pilots aren't supposed to have their cell phones on at all in the cockpit.
Unfortunately, the clues of what happened to MH370 only leave us with more questions than answers. And while I'm hesitant to accept some of the wilder conspiracy theories in this case, I have yet to find a scenario that explains all of the bizarre details of the disappearance.
While there remains hope of some resolution in the future, I fear this may be one mystery that remains unsolved.
----------------------------
If you want to do some additional digging on the case, I highly recommend this video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd2KEHvK-q8&t=216s
If there's something I missed, or something I need to correct, please let me know so I can take appropriate action.
Sources:
www.airlineratings.com/news/new-mh370-debris-washed-south-africa/#:~:text=A%20total%20of%2033%20pieces,in%20the%20southern%20Indian%20Ocean.
www.livescience.com/44248-facts-about-flight-370-passengers-crew-aircraft.html
simpleflying.com/mh370-seven-years-on/
www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/mh370-news-malaysia-airlines-flight-16829972
www.businessinsider.com/mh370-theories-dead-ends-unanswered-questions-ahead-of-major-new-report-2018-7
The pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, had years of flight experience with no history of trouble. So, once the flight took off in clear skies at 12:41 a.m. that morning, there was no reason to suspect anything would go wrong.
Less than an hour after takeoff, at 1:19 a.m., MH370 would end their final chat with air traffic controllers with one simple message: "All right, good night."
After that, the plane vanished from radar, and neither the machine nor any of the 239 people on board would be seen or heard from again -- though the final moments of the aircraft, and the course it took, continues to baffle investigators to this day.
----------------------------
It was sometime after that 1 a.m. contact with air traffic controllers that both of the plane's transponders inexplicably stopped sending signals, which is why the aircraft had disappeared from conventional radar screens.
At first, searches were conducted near the South China sea, with the belief that 370 had simply crashed near the location of its last known contact with the outside world.
But as the Malaysian military would later disclose, their specialized radar systems (which does not rely on transponders) caught MH370 diverting dramatically off course shortly after that last chat with air traffic controllers, veering West and coming to within 200 miles of the island of Penang before making a slight right turn and flying out of the radar’s range, deep into the Northern Indian Ocean. This path is almost directly opposite the direction they were supposed to be heading.
Furthermore, it was discovered that the flight’s communications terminal (SATCOM) was severed for a large portion of the flight, and bizarrely re-connected mere minutes before the plane disappeared from military radar. It would stay online for another 6 hours before eventually going out again, presumably when 370 finally crashed.
In the hours after the link was re-established, several attempts were made to contact the pilots through the SATCOM terminal, all of which went unanswered.
Over the years, a total of 33 pieces of debris – confirmed and suspected from MH370 – would be found and recovered by 16 different people in six different countries.
This debris has all but confirmed that 370 did, indeed, crash somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
Neither that fact nor the question as to why we haven’t found the plane itself is a mystery.
Rather, the real mystery is what made MH370 crash in the first place. What made it veer off its original course so dramatically? Why didn’t the pilots, or anyone else on board, signal for help in what was clearly a time of distress?
We will likely never be able to come to a conclusive answer, but numerous theories have surfaced, and all with varying degrees of plausibility.
----------------------------
THEORIES:
Hijacking:
During the investigation, it was discovered that two of the men on board had used stolen passports for the journey, lending suspicion that perhaps they hijacked the plane in service of a terrorist organization.
It would, after all, explain how the transponders were shut off, the random deviation from the flight path, and why the pilots went silent after their final chat with air traffic controllers.
After digging into the men, however, police concluded they were not linked to a terrorist group, instead attributing the suspicious activity to illegal migration.
A fire in the cockpit:
Journalist Ean Higgins, author of “The Hunt For MH370,” came up with his own theory on what happened to the flight. According to him, it was a fire in the cockpit that led to the disaster.
Higgins suggests that the windshield heater on the pilot's side caught fire, leading to a malfunction of the secondary radar transponder and the communication systems.
According to Higgins, an explosion then ensued after one of the oxygen masks the two pilots were wearing was yanked out of its socket, leading to both of the pilots, and many of the passengers, becoming incapacitated either due to flame or the depressurization of the plane.
Faced with a choice, Captain Zaharie decided that, instead of landing and potentially hurting people on the ground, he would divert the aircraft over the Southern Indian Ocean and crash land in the sea.
Alternatively, since the plane was carrying lithium-ion batteries, some have theorized that a fire did, in fact, break out mid-flight, just not in the cockpit as Higgins claims.
It is an undeniably logical explanation for what may have happened, but there is no actual evidence such a series of events ever took place, and no evidence of an explosion was ever discovered on any of the recovered pieces.
Mass murder-suicide:
In June of 2014, the pilot (Zaharie Shah) was named as a suspect, primarily based on what they saw in a flight simulator he had in his home.
The simulator contained an eerily similar route to the one MH370 took on its final flight, with both paths ultimately ending in the Southern Indian Ocean.
To add even more suspicion, he was raised on Penang, suggesting that maybe the flight’s second turn (which curved right around the island) was a last attempt at seeing his hometown before ultimately ending his life.
Unfortunately, the simulator data (which was based on seven coordinates) couldn’t be used conclusively, as there was no way of knowing what order those coordinates were flown or even if they were all used in the same flight session.
A coverup:
On the conspiratorial side, there are claims that the Malaysian government themselves were the ones who shot down MH370.
According to Noel O'Gara, a private investigator with interest in the case, authorities believed MH370 was hijacked for a 9/11-style attack on Kuala Lumpur after radar showed that initial, unplanned turn back towards the country.
According to O’Gara, this prompted Malaysian officials into scrambling a fighter jet, purposed to fire a warning shot and get the plane back on course.
If the “warning” shot accidentally brought down 370, and killed everyone on board, that would certainly be something the authorities would want to cover up.
It is true that the initial search was restricted, and it wasn’t until March 15 — a full week after the plane disappeared — that the search was brought to the Indian Ocean.
Alternatively, the matter of who may have shot the plane down is not unanimous, as Russia and China have also both been suspected of being involved.
But, unsurprisingly, no evidence has surfaced to prove these claims, and they remain completely speculative.
----------------------------
Notes:
- While the second turn (near Penang) could have been directed by the plane's autopilot systems, the first turn, however, was too sharp to have been automated.
- If a fire did break out on 370, and Zaharie wanted to avoid ground fatalities, it’s rather strange he would stay airborne for so long after passing the island, and even stranger that the plane would be able to stay operational for six hours with a raging fire on board.
- While suspicion has been placed on both pilots before, no clear motive has been presented for their involvement. On the surface, both men seemed in good spirits, had families, and were not in significant financial trouble.
- A cell phone tower in Penang made contact with Fariq Hamid's (co-pilot) cell phone 30 minutes after the plane made the sharp turn westward. This could be significant, as pilots aren't supposed to have their cell phones on at all in the cockpit.
Unfortunately, the clues of what happened to MH370 only leave us with more questions than answers. And while I'm hesitant to accept some of the wilder conspiracy theories in this case, I have yet to find a scenario that explains all of the bizarre details of the disappearance.
While there remains hope of some resolution in the future, I fear this may be one mystery that remains unsolved.
----------------------------
If you want to do some additional digging on the case, I highly recommend this video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd2KEHvK-q8&t=216s
If there's something I missed, or something I need to correct, please let me know so I can take appropriate action.
Sources:
www.airlineratings.com/news/new-mh370-debris-washed-south-africa/#:~:text=A%20total%20of%2033%20pieces,in%20the%20southern%20Indian%20Ocean.
www.livescience.com/44248-facts-about-flight-370-passengers-crew-aircraft.html
simpleflying.com/mh370-seven-years-on/
www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/mh370-news-malaysia-airlines-flight-16829972
www.businessinsider.com/mh370-theories-dead-ends-unanswered-questions-ahead-of-major-new-report-2018-7