MH370 documentary | greatest aviation mysteries | what happened to MH370? | famous missing airplane

at 12:42 a.m. local time on Saturday the 8th of March 2014 this airplane designated as Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 took off from koala lumur International Airport Bound for Beijing it never arrived and none of those on board ever came home the fate of the plane and its occupants has since become arguably the biggest Aviation mystery of all time so what do we know about what happened to MH370 and might it ever be [Music] found disclaimer first I'm an historian not an aviation expert my main sources for this video were a 2017 report by the Australian transport safety Bureau the atsb which focused on the search for the plan under the 2018 report by the Malaysian International civil aviation organization Annex 13 safety investigation team which looked at the whole incident including search efforts up to that point I've linked them below for you and I'm just going to call them the 2017 and the 2018 reports going forwards obviously I've tried to provide all accurate information in this video but I'm only human and I'm working to a tight schedule so there's always the possibility of error or oversight if you want to double check anything I advise you to refer to those reports MH370 started off as unexceptionally as any other scheduled flight might be expected to do in koala lumur it's 227 passengers 10 cabin crew pilot and co-pilot boarded the plan which was a boing 7 manufactured in 2002 and prepared for what was expected to be a 5 hour 34-minute Journey journey to China the plane was loaded with sufficient fuel to last 7 hours 31 minutes and the pilot Captain zahari Ahmed sha assigned the first officer fori Abdul Hamid to be the pilot flying for this flight so far so good this was all very normal as you can see from this breakdown of the nationalities of those on board the majority 153 people were Chinese with Malaysians making up the next largest group at 50 people then small numbers of people from 12 other countries five of the passengers were children and the total number of souls on board was 239 Communications with air traffic control initially contained nothing noteworthy and the tar cleared the plane for takeoff at 12:40 a.m. wheels up was 2 minutes later and it was cleared to climb to 18,000 ft Communications before takeoff were made by the first officer and after takeoff by the the captain again there was nothing unusual here MH370 was expected to reach a way point on its Journey known as agari at 1:22 a.m. and could be seen on secondary surveillance radar with the transponder code a2157 if I understand radar correctly secondary radar means that the radar signal communicates with the transponder on the plane whereas primary radar just relies on reflecting a signal off an object with the object itself being a massive participant in the exercise most of the earth is not covered by primary radar and the majority of what is covered is on land the plan was given permission to ascend to 25,000 ft at 12:46 a.m. then 35,000 ft at 1250 a.m. the captain reported in at 101 and 107 a.m. to state that they were at that altitude and it has been noted that it was OD that he reported this twice in 6 minutes the 2018 safety the investigation report also remarked that only when cruising altitude had been reached could one of the pilots leave their seats for a break at 1:19 a.m. they were instructed by koala lumpur's air traffic control to contact Vietnamese Air Traffic Control in hoochi Min City on the frequency 1 12.9 MHz the captain responded with the words good night Malaysian 370 this was slightly unusual as he didn't read back the instructions he had been given but it may have been nothing more than human error it was not followed up on by Ground Control and after this transmission no one on the plan was ever heard from again it passed the agari waypoint at 1:20 a.m. and 31 seconds and ought to have reported in then but did not instead within a minute its transponder became inactive and as a result its position symbol known as a mood s symbol disappeared from primary and second Ary radar screens in koala lumur Vietnam and Thailand that doesn't mean that it was invisible to radar but it was no longer identified as MH370 because the plane was no longer talking back to the radar signal the air traffic controller working at koala lumur area control center later said he didn't notice the mod as symbol disappear as he was distracted dealing with four other plans blips on the koal lumur radar which now represented MH370 appeared and disappeared between 1:30 and 1:52 a.m. and were coded with the letter P meaning primary radar and a four-digit number I don't know why the signal dropped in and out but the 2017 report does say that primary radar usually has a much shorter range than secondary had the transponder fed on its own the crew would have been alerted in the cockpit and could have manually switched on the plan's second transponder this obviously didn't happen nor was any automatic message received from the plane indicating that this system had failed such a message would have been expected from the plan's acars which stands for aircraft communication addressing and Reporting System it's basically a digital link between the plan and the gr that handles things like the flight plan weather information and provides ground stations with details about what the plane is doing and how systems are operating its last transmission had been at 10:7 a.m. and 29 seconds 27 seconds before the second unnecessary call was made that the plane was maintaining a flight level of 35,000 ft and 13 or 14 minutes before whatever event occurred which caused it to leave its flight path had it failed the crew would have been alerted in the cockpit yet no failure was reported its download link could be switched off from inside the cockpit however so that it wouldn't send information to the ground the 2017 and 2018 reports note that it was only only expected to give a position report every 30 minutes and so didn't miss such a check-in until 1:37 a.m. despite the loss of the transponder and AC cars as I've explained the plane remained on primary civilian radar for a time under a different identification code before going out of range and on primary military radar for longer we therefore know that at 1:12 a.m. it made a 40° turn to the right then a 180° turn left and flew back across the Malay Peninsula later simulator tests showed that it had to be under manual control to make these turns at 1:52 a.m. it was 10 nautical miles south of the island of panang which is where a captain sha was from at the exact same minute a signal was picked up from the first officer's phone on a mobile phone tar on the island later tests suggested that the t's ability to connect to the device indicates that the plane's altitude was no more than 20,000 ft though it was stressed that those tests were not ideal as the results they provided were really only valid for the test flights this seems like a good time to quickly explain possible reasons why no other calls were placed from the plane and why when relatives later tried to contact their loved ones they heard a ringtone the probable reason for no calls from the plan assuming for a moment that passengers and crew were still alive awake able to dial out and were trying to do so is that airplanes at high altitude and speed are often out of the range of mobile phone tars and even if they briefly come into range as the first officers did they can't connect to any given tar for long enough for a call to be placed or received before the airplane has moved away the reason for a ringtone being heard when a call is placed to a mobile phone even when the actual handset is no longer able to ring is that the network is trying to connect the caller to the Target phone and the ringtone you hear is basically just holding noise to keep you on the line while it searches for the phone this is so that you know it's working on the problem and don't hang up because you can't hear anything at all it doesn't mean that the target phone is actually ringing somewhere shortly after the plane went missing CNN aired a short interview with a tech expert who explained this and which I've Linked In the description box below for you having made a turn south of panang which could have been done either manually or via the autopilot MH370 was flying Northwest when it disappeared from military radar between 23 a.m. and 2:15 a.m. then again for the final time at 2:22 a.m. just over an hour after its last contact with the gr at that point it was on a heading of 285° and was about 195 nautical miles from Butterworth and 10 nautical miles past another Waypoint called ma although military radar did provide air speed and altitude readings according to both written reports I read these readings are inherently unreliable and show the plane doing things Beyond its capability nevertheless there has been speculation based on this evidence that the plane climbed to about 40,000 ft and that this suggests that it was deliberately depressurized to render the passengers and crew unconscious and very quickly dead of hypoxia had there been a decompression the oxygen masks in the cabin would have deployed to passengers but would only have provided air for about 22 minutes because the idea is just to keep them going until the plane descends to a safe altitude where they can breathe normally there was also a supply of emergency oxygen available to the flight crew and delivered to the cockpit through four masks because there could theoretically be as many as four people in the cockpit on some flights it was enough to support one person at 36,000 ft for 27 RS more than enough time to keep a pilot alive until fuel exhaustion the deployment of the passenger oxygen masks cannot be deactivated from the cockpit so if the plane was depressurized including on purpose the passengers and crew in the cabin will have known about it 15 portable oxygen cylinders would have allowed the cabin crew to endure longer if used as each cylinder is good for at least 15 and a half minutes the military later claimed they knew that the plane was MH370 but did not view it as a threat and so did not intercept it I'll come back to that claim and discuss it a little further later on when I'm talking about the search efforts weather conditions later confirmed with satellite imagery were good there was no rein or lightning recorded at the point where the plane dropped off civilian radar and little Cloud though the wind at that point could not be measured weather forecasts did not anticipate any serious weather events nor is there any evidence that such events occurred no Mayday call was ever made from the police in and none of the four emergency locator transmitters kept on board appear to have been activated of these four one was in the ceiling of the passenger cabin but could be switched on from the cockpit two were attached to exterior doors and designed to activate if the doors were opened and their life rafts deployed and the fourth was portable and kept in a coat closet in the cabin its battery was good until November 2014 these elts were designed for use outside but not underwater if they are switched on inside a plane the plane itself can block their signals on the grind no one realized anything was seriously a Miss at first hoi Min expected to have the plan transfer to their control at 1:22 a.m. which was 3 minutes later than the time koala lur actually told the plane to transfer and when two-way communication was not established with MH370 within 5 minutes of 1:22 a.m. they ought to have contacted quala lumur instead they made attempts to call the plane starting at 1 127 and it was 139 a.m. when the call to quala lur was made so 12 minutes late it is evident that there was confusion about who was responsible for the plane at the time it dropped off secondary radar as it was on the border between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace and meant to be in the process of transferring from the control of one to the other there was also serious confusion as to to where it was after hoochi Min inquired after the plane at 1:39 a.m. koal lumur made inquiries with Malaysian Airlines operations Dispatch Center hoi Min also contacted other Air Traffic Control tars in Hong Kong and Cambodia looking for the aircraft and Hong Kong in turn contacted Singapore attempts were made by the operations Dispatch Center to contact the plane starting at 2:03 a.m. but no messages could get through via the AC cars and a gr telephone call went unanswered at 239 it was suggested incorrectly by hoochi Min that it had reached another Waypoint known as bod but radar data showed that this was not true it was likewise incorrectly suggested that it was in Cambodian airspace and Malaysian Airlines operation Dispatch Center even said at 2:33 a.m. that it knew the plane's coordinates only to admit at 3:30 a.m. that and I quote the 2018 report the flight track was based on flight projection and not reliable for aircraft positioning a lack of Staff training on the flight following system was later blamed for these mistakes which gave a false sense of security about the plane situation koala lumper Ground Control should have declared the distress fears which is basically tax B for an emergency at 2:27 a.m. yet it was only at 5:30 a.m. that its aeronautical rescue coordination Center was activated and 6 6:32 a.m. that the distress phase message went out it was only then that the search and rescue mission coordinator had enough information to act upon though the distress phase message had numerous errors including the plan's takeoff time the 2018 team later noted that the Judy controller in hooi Min had trouble communicating in English and needed an interpreter when interviewed the team suggested that this language barrier may have hindered Communications on the 8th of March between koala lumur and hoochi Men with the alarm at last raised a huge search operation was now mounted which at first focused on an area in the South China Sea over the next few days information trickled out from the Malaysian military about the plan's deviation from its flight path which turned attention to the Andaman sea then suddenly came the biggest twist in the intire teal on the 13th of March British company in marsat which managed the airplane satellite Communications or satcom told the Malaysian authorities that it had startling new evidence about MH 370s fat the satcom system was used to handle things like the plan's Communications acars and its inflight entertainment system when the plane was parred up it logged onto the system and thereafter it had stayed in touch with it via a series of pings known as handshakes these were automatically sent to the plane from the ground Earth station or GES in Perth Australia and they elicited responses from it to show it was still logged on incredibly the handshakes which numbered seven and all and which you can see listed on this chart continued until 819 a.m. showing that the plane had remained parred up and presumably in flight for all of that time they would have occurred early but the attempts to telephone the plan from the ground resulted in the system's inactivity timer resetting onto occasions and there were also two periods when the satcom link failed one was after the a cars went out and we aren't certain what caused it Beyond a probable par outage to the satcom the other was near the end of the plan's flight the 2018 report specifically says that there is no indication of the satcom link being manually logged off from the cockpit such activity would have been captured in the GES logs but it was not the seventh handshake was not initiated by the GR Earth station but rather by the aircraft itself and came only 8 minutes after the previous ping this suggests that the plane had run out of fuel disconnecting the satcom this is the second R I just mentioned which had then come back on when it began to be parred by the auxilary par unit designed to come on automatically when the engine shut down and so requested to log onto the system again this indicates that the aircraft crashed or ditched shortly after this time and another handshake attempt at 9:15 a.m. M field such conclusions chime almost to the minute with what we know about how much fuel the plane had set off with and how long it could remain Airborne before fuel exhaustion the inmarsat data had severe limits as it was never intended to be used to ascertain location over the course of a few days however the company's technicians were able to establish how far away their satellite was from the plane based on the length of time the pings took to go between the to and this information was used to establish a series of Seven Rings one per handshake which could be superimposed on a map of the Earth's surface every time a handshake occurred it indicated that the plan had to be somewhere on a specific ring based on where the aircraft was known to have been earlier in the flight thanks to radar data the Rings were immediately narrowed down to arcs one taking a northern route over Kazakhstan the other taking a Southern route into the Indian Ocean thanks to some more complex maths and the fact that the plane clearly didn't crash on land it quickly became obvious that it had taken the southern route a conclusion supported by the debris that eventually washed up on Western Indian Ocean shorelines and which we'll come to shortly the Malaysians didn't stop searching in areas around their country until after the 15th of March on the 17th Australia took over the coordination of the aerial search of the Southern Arc in an area which the 2017 report points out is up to 2800 km from the Australian coast up to 6,000 M deep and with unknown underwater topography and currents the scale of the challenge facing them cannot be underestimated the seventh Arc is over 3,000 km long and due to the delay in defining the correct search area combined with the length of time it took to get search vessels there any surface wreckage had been able to disperse to over 100 km away from from its starting position Andor SN satellite images of that section of the ocean which were taken between the 16th and 27th of March did flag up objects of interest and some may have been pieces of wreckage but nothing actually recovered turned out to be from the plan search teams scarred an area over 120,000 Square km using sunar but nothing was found except some long lost shipwrecks that's an area about the size of the US state of Pennsylvania by the way the pings from the locator beacons on the airplanes black boxes will have run out of battery par sometime in April 2014 and later refinements of the search area suggested the boats weren't looking in the correct spot anyway the acoustic search for the beacons was halted on the 17th of that month the plane was declared officially lost and its occupants Deed on the 29th of January 2015 thereby allowing for compensation and insurance claims by the families to be better pursued but the search lasted far longer 1,64 days in fact and during that time some additional evidence did come to light in the form of partial wreckage the first piece of debris located was a flapper on which is part of one of the Wings this washed up on the tiny island of reunion to use its English pronunciation but I do know it's a French island on the other side of the Indian Ocean from where the plane was last known to have been it was located there on the 29th of July 2015 and ocean drift models combined with the type and age of the Barnacles which had grown on it showed that this discovery was in line with what would be expected if the pl had broken up on The 7eventh Arc in March 2014 since that initial Discovery scores of additional pieces of wreckage have been found in places including mamb South Africa and macius only a few including the flapper on and a section of the left outboard AF flap also from a wing can be absolutely confirmed to have come from MH370 through the likes of serial numbers While others are deemed highly likely or likely to have come from it by virtue of the fact that there are no other missing boing trip 7s which could have been the source of such Parts the condition of the flapper on and the flap have been interpreted in different ways damaged to the flap suggested it was most likely in the retracted position while the 2018 report says that the quote right flapper on was probably at or close to the neutral position at the time it separated from the wing end quote the 2017 report concluded that it was established from the debris that the aircraft was not configured for a ditching at the end of flight this is important because if the plan was glided then it could have stayed in the air for significantly longer after the fuel ran out and the search area would be much bigger simulator tests suggested that in a dive scenario one would have seen to quote the 2018 report the end of flight occurring within a 100 nautical square mile box that extended 10 nautical miles Beyond fuel exhaustion and 10 nautical miles to the left of the flight path a controlled Glide and ditching however would have extended the range which the plane could have traveled by about 120 nautical miles after the engine floid and also limited the amount of wreckage the flap and flapper on suggest to many however that this didn't happen and an analysis of the final two Satellite Transmissions to inmarsat indicated under quote the 2017 report that the aircraft was descending at a rate of between 2,900 ft per minute and 15,200 ft per minute when the seventh Arc was crossed 8 seconds later the rate of descent had increased to between 13,800 ft per minute and 25,300 ft per minute these rates of descent ruled out a controlled unpar Glide with the intent to extend ringe something else to consider when thinking about whether it was a dive or a ditch is that while most pieces of debris found are from the exterior of the plane on the 6th of June 2016 a seatback trim panel which would have encased one of the little TV screens you watch movies Etc on in the back of the seat in front of you was located for such a piece to have become separated from the plane suggests that it broke up upon impact with the ocean or possibly before if it was falling through the air at an extreme speed rather than being put through a neat water landing of the type seen in 2009 when a plane was successfully ditched in New York's Hudson River and remained intact in an episode of 60 Minutes Australia which I've left linked blue for you you can hear various experts debating whether it was a dive or a ditch by reverse engineering the likely start position of the debris using drift patterns caused by ocean currents the search area was narrowed down and the fact that no debris thought likely to be from the plan has been washed up in the eastern Indian Ocean on Australian beaches for example further supports the conclusion that it met its end in the search Zone selected where ocean currents would have carried it West while no surface debris was ever found during the searches the atsb did note in 2017 that reanalysis of satellite imagery taken on the 23rd of March 2014 in an area close to the 7th Arc has identified a range of objects which may be MH370 debris sadly despite the hopes of all involved the initial search proved fruitless and was finally called off by the trational search team of China Malaysia and Australia on the 17th of January 2017 just one year later though search efforts resumed when us company ocean Infinity agreed to comb the ocean floor again for 90 days they began their hunt on the 22nd of January and finished on the 29th of May covering over 112 Square kilm in the process again no sign of the plane was found since then no further search has taken place if we assume for a moment that the plane can and will be found what might we get from it it was carrying two so-called black boxes which are actually orange like the ones you see here one was the flight data recorder which does as the name suggests it gathers data about the flight and which could hold 25 hours worth of information the other was a cockpit voice recorder again it does as the name suggests which could only record the final two hours of Any Given flight both were in the ceiling above the AF cabin and both had underwater locator beacons with a battery life of at least 30 days and which could operate in up to 20,000 ft of water the battery in the Locator Beacon on the flight data recorder had expired in December 2012 though and not been replaced though the cvr's locator battery was good until June 2014 if the plant was found now the flight data recorder in particular would be incredibly important if it has survived due to the cockpit voice record's limited recording time it might not necessarily be as useful if there were no signs in the cockpit other than the automated warnings we would expect to hear about for issues such as impending fuel exhaustion in fact the limits of the CVR might even explain why the plane was not crashed immediately keeping it Airborne meant that by the time it ended its flight the recording of whatever had happened at around 1:20 a.m. when the plane deviated from its flight path and the transponder was switched off had been recorded over and lost forever other evidence available from the wreckage would depend on what condition it's in if there were identifiable human remains you might be able to get some indication of who was in the cockpit but I think we need to bear in mind how much time has already passed and the fact that the plane may have shattered upon impact and the cockpit or any given area of the aircraft might no longer be recognizable a few theories about what had happened were quickly ruled out first there is absolute abolutely no evidence to support the idea that the plane was taken over remotely as no such technology was ever installed on that aircraft second no onboard fire could have caused this scenario as the plane remained flying for such a long time had to be under manual control for at least some of that so it wasn't a ghost plan on autopilot at least not at the beginning of its deviation from its flight plan and there was no distress signal third its continued flight with manual inputs also rules out out an onboard bomb accidental decompression leading to unconsciousness for all on board fuel exhaustion at the time it dropped off radar and any exterior event such as a missile or midair Collision no group ever claimed responsibility for this event either and none of the debris so far recovered shows explosion damage once all other theories are excluded the only one that remains is that one or more persons on the plane caused this incident and so concurrent with the early search effort was an investigation into the crew and passengers to determine if any of them might have interfered with the normal functions of the plane one of the people looked at most closely who was on the aircraft was Captain sha he was 53 years old married with three children had worked for Malaysia Airlines from 1981 and was very experienced at flying the boing trip 7 he was well regarded within his job and had been promoted to be an instructor and an examiner he had not worked in the previous 24 hours before the flight suggesting he will have been well rested he did not have any known ongoing medical issues substance abuse problems or disciplinary issues at work his family and friends reported no changes in behavior and he had not taken out any recent insurance cover in addition to what he already had he did not have any financial problems and was felt to be good at handling the stress of his job his home flight simul ler was seized by the Royal Malaysia police on the 15th of March 2014 I'm going to quote the 2018 report to explain the police's findings and the conclusions they did and didn't draw from them it said that the rmp forensic report dated the 19th of May 2014 documented more than 2700 coordinates retrieved from separate file fragments and most of them are default game coordinates it was also discovered that there were seven manually programmed way Point coordinates that when connected together will create a flight path from kli that's koala lumper International Airport to an area south of the Indian Ocean through the Andaman sea these coordinates were stored in the volume Shadow information vsi file dated the 3rd of February 2014 the function of this file was to save information when a computer is left idle for more than 15 minutes hence the rmp forensic report could not determine if the waypoints came from one or more files the rmp forensic report on the simulator also did not find any data that showed the aircraft was performing climb attitude or heading Maneuvers nor did they find any data that showed a similar route flown by MH370 the rmp forensic report concluded that there were no unusual activities other than game related flight simulations the atsb report also discussed this data and in the interests of th this I'm also going to tell you what it said which was that the simulator data was a partial reconstruction of a flight simulator session from the 2nd of February 2014 I don't know why the atsb says 2nd of February when the 2018 report says the third but it doesn't make any real difference it comprised four complete and two partial data captures of various aircraft and simulator parameters at discret points during the simulation the aircraft simulated was a b7200 LR information on the data points is summarized below the initial data point indicated an aircraft at koala lumur airport no useful location or aircraft information apart from simulator time was able to be recovered for the second data point the next two data points indicated an aircraft tracking to the Northwest along the street of Mala the aircraft had climbed to an altitude of 40,000 ft by the fourth data point and was in a 20 ° Left Bank 4° nose down on a heading of 255° side note this seems to contradict the other report I just read to you which says that there was no data quote that showed the aircraft was performing climb attitude or heading Maneuvers but perhaps I'm not understanding what they're saying correctly I don't know anything about simulators after all now back to the atsb report the final two data points were close together in the southern Indian Ocean 820 miles Southwest of cap Luan the data indicated that the simulated aircraft had exhausted its fuel the fifth data point was at an altitude of 37,6 51 ft the aircraft was in an 11° right bank and heading almost due south at 178° the data for the sixth data point was incomplete it was 2.5 nautical miles from the previous St point and the aircraft right bank had reduced to 3° the aircraft was pitched nose D 5° and was on a heading of 193° at this time there was also a user input of an altitude of 4,000 ft personally I thought there were some Eerie parallels between this simulator data and MH 370s known movements but I'll leave it up to you to decide what you think the captain simulator information means as some interpret it in a more Sinister way than others regarding his personal life there have been some conflicting reports the official line from his family and the Malaysian government in 2014 and later in the 2018 report whose investigators were mostly Malaysian was that he had no issues other sources have claimed that this was not so and that his wife had left him or was about to leave and that he had had affairs this is speculation though not confirmed by any official source and I'd like to see some clear evidence before I would commit to that information those who claim he was experiencing problems argue that it was due to the importance within Malaysian culture of Saving Face that his family employer government and the 2018 report covered for him as I know nothing about Malaysian culture I can't tell you if that is a fair assessment or not one of the sources making this claim was a pilot and author who spoke to journalist Megan Kelly on her YouTube channel and I've left that interview linked below for you it also talks through and demolishes some of the deluded conspiracy theor about this flight which I won't be looking at here another noteworthy source which I've also linked below for you was an interview with Tony Abbott who was the Prime Minister of Australia in 2014 and who said that he was told by senior but unnamed officials within the Malaysian government within a week of the plane going missing that they suspected the captain on the other hand in that same program a woman whose mother was on the flight was interviewed and she said which I thought showed great great kindness and magnanimity that she wouldn't lay the blame for this at the Captain's feet on the strength of the evidence we presently have as she didn't think it was sufficient and she was mindful of the effect of blaming him on his family so I guess my point here is that there are very different ways of looking at this moving on to First officer fari Abdul Hamid he was 27 years old and engaged to be married he hadn't worked in the previous 72 hours so also well Ed we would think and had quite limited experience on the boing trip 7 just 39 RS although he did not have a lot of money in savings nor was he in financial trouble and family and friends did not report any changes in Behavior nor did he have any known medical problems like the pilot there were no disciplinary issues on his record he was seen as good at handling his job related stress and he had not taken out any new insurance policies both he and Captain sha appear to be acting perfectly normally on on the CCTV footage of them in the airport just prior to the flight and there were no reports of any conflicts between them all the cabin crew were checked out and none appeared to have any flight training or any motive to interfere with the plane their experience ranged from 13 years to 35 years so a well seasoned crew and they were all well rested too some had minor disciplinary issues on their records but nothing to cause any alarm and none had taken out any insurance policy icies or appear to be in financial difficulties in short there were no red flags amongst any of the 12 crew none of the passengers seemed to fit the bill of a hijacker either there were two men on board traveling on Stolen passports but they were determined to be Iranian Asylum Seekers since 2014 suspicion has most often focused on one or other of the pilots for several reasons first the way in which the plan was maneuvered suggests that it was was under the manual control of a skilled pilot second the fact that the transponder was deactivated in some way and the plane left its flight path just at the minute when it was supposed to switch from the control of koala lumur to hoochi Min City again indicates that whoever did this knew what they were doing and how to skirt the air borders between the two countries third the pilots were already in the cockpit and since 9/11 cockpit doors are kept locked they are also very sturdy literally bulletproof in fact and hard to break down and they lock when electrical par is available unlocking when it is not they can be open from the inside by turning a handle and include a viewing port to enable the occupants of the cockpit to look out into the cabin although there is a keypad outside the cockpit into which an emergency coup can be entered to gain access this is intended to be used if the pilots are incapacitated and can be overridden from within the cockpit by an active pilot the door is also designed to open if either the cockpit or the cabin suddenly depressurizes so had someone else tried to force entry not only is it highly unlikely they would have been successful there would likely have been time for a Mayday signal we have to wonder though if someone could have pushed in when one of the pilots left to go to the bathroom I think the likelihood of this is also low the cockpit had CCTV allowing the pilots to view the other side of the door and the galley before they would open that door and the chances that such an attempt would chime so perfectly with the crossover between airspaces that none of the crew or passengers would be able to stop a wouldbe intruder and that that Intruder would know about turning off the a cars and transponder make this scenario even more unlikely the limited time between the final verbal transmission from the playin at 1:19 a.m. and 30 seconds when everything seemed to be in order and its transponder being deactivated at 1:20 a.m. and 36 seconds also make it improbable that so many things could have gone wrong that fast the captain has received more scrutiny than the first officer because the plan seems to have flown over his home Island which has been interpreted in some quarters as him wanting a last look at it because of the points in the southern Indian Ocean found loaded into his home simulator and because of the slightly unusual messages he sent to ground control the extra message about altitude and the failure to readback the frequency on the final message no clear motive has ever been found for either him or anyone else on board to do this though so what conclusions can we draw in this bizarre case well they are quite limited but here is what I would be comfortable saying the first sign something was a Miss was the acar system deactivating sometime shortly after 107 a.m. the incident which caused the plane to deviate from its flight path was at 1:20 a.m. when when the transponder went dark and the plan failed to call hoim in as it had been instructed to do a matter of seconds earlier prior to that the captain had done two things which were slightly unusual but on their own not a cause for concern he reported the plane's altitude of 35,000 ft twice in 6 minutes though the second report was unnecessary and in his final transmission he failed to read back the frequency to koal lumur gr control that he was meant to use to call hoochi men the plan then flew on for about 7 hours over the Malay Peninsula around the island of panang and down into the southern Indian Ocean its last partial handshake with the inmarsat satellite was at 8:19 a.m. on the 8th of March 2014 the flight probably ended within a few minutes of that due to fuel exhaustion though it could have been glided for a period of time it was in the water no later than 9:15 a.m. when another handshake attempt failed everyone on board died in the incident though we don't know at what point in the flight any of them passed away the type of wreckage find which included small interior pieces of the plane make me think that it broke up very significantly upon hitting the water or even as it fell from the sky but that doesn't mean that it definitely wasn't glided to the end that area of the ocean is very rough and it wouldn't be like the Miracle on the Hudson flight which was able to set down on a pretty calm River and so stay intact even an attempt to land on water could have result resulted in significant breakup the length of time MH370 flew for after communication ceased and secondary radar was lost and the lack of a Mayday signal or claim of responsibility indicates that no fire bomb sudden electrical failure or external event caused this disaster it was initiated by one or more persons not a fault with the plan there is a small chance that someone gained access to the cockpit other than the pilots and forced one or both of them to do this but that seems unlikely given the challenges of getting in there the lack of a Mayday call and The Coincidence of such an event happening just as the plane was moving from Malaysian into Vietnamese airspace when its disappearance would be most likely to go unnoticed for a period of time I did consider the idea that passengers nowadays can often see where the plane is on a map on their inflight entertainment systems but I don't know if such systems would give sufficient detail to tell passengers where an airspace border is whoever was at the controls after 1:19 a.m. could manually fly a boing trip 7 and knew that to make that plane disappear in inverted commas it was necessary to deactivate its aars and its transponder they also knew how to do these things the only people on board known to have that knowledge and skill set were the pilots though again we can't completely rule out that they were coerced it is interesting though not conclusive that the plane flew over the captain's home Island and that his home flight simulator recorded a couple of manually entered waypoints in the southern Indian Ocean barely 5 weeks before the flight if it was one of the pilots who did this then the other would have had to be incapacitated I thought the chances that the second pilot would get up for a bathroom break at the exact minute the plane was crossing from Malaysian oversight to Vietnamese then be locked out were rather low though certainly not impossible and I consider that there are other ways of getting someone to leave One Pilot could have said something as simple to the other as would you grab me a sandwich from The Galley please still I wondered if perhaps the innocent pilot was incapacitated in the cockpit possibly without anyone else realizing finally despite concerns over the captain there is no definitive motive for anyone on board to have done this which only makes the whole thing even more terrifying in my view regarding the actions of the ground control teams in koala lumur and hoochi Min I was persuaded by the opinions I read and heard from expert invest investigators that the Malaysian controller ought to have been paying attention to the radar blip that MH370 became after its transponder ceased functioning and I took their points that when concerns began to be raised there was a lot of confusion procedures weren't followed more time was wasted and an emergency ought to have been declared much faster I don't know that that would have resulted in any of the people on board the plane surviving for the flight may have ended in an equally tragic manner but we might know where it was and possibly who did this that would be incredibly valuable information to have for the family and friends of those lost and for the investigation in the grind team's defense a lack of certain training and issues of overwork seem to have contributed to some of the problems I also thought it was strange that the Malaysian military did nothing when they said they spotted the plane flying around over the Malay Peninsula and Beyond clearly out of its expected position that lack of action and the fact that they delayed announcing for so long that they had tracked its course DV ations even though there was an incredibly expensive search taking place in the South China Sea makes me agree with an opinion expressed by the interviewee on the Megan Kelly show that they actually weren't monitoring the flight in lifetime and when they later realized the data they had they didn't want to admit to this oversight due to embarrassment this is all just supposition though and as it transpired even if they had known about and admitted to the radar information earlier it still wouldn't have focused the search in the correct area as the southern Indian ocean is well beyond any radar coverage I also ultimately put the blame for this incident on whoever took control of the plane not anyone on the ground so do I think MH370 will ever be found I certainly hope so but there are challenges which might make it all but impossible at least with current technology if it broke into millions of little pieces which then dissipated over many square miles of ocean floor there might not be a big enough chunk or a concentrated enough debris field to show up on sunar even if it stayed largely intact at the point of impact if it hit an underwater Mountain as it sank it could be buried in an avalanche it's not like the Titanic which was much bigger to start off with which stayed in two very big pieces after its sinking and for which there was a much narrower search area still I don't think we should give up hope it may not have broken up that much and Technology improves all the time things which we take for granted today would have seemed like magic barely 100 years ago perhaps new satellite technology will be invented which will enable the ocean to be scanned from space it sounds like sci-fi at the moment but who knows that brings us to the question of the day which is do you think MH370 will ever be located let me know in the comments below and until next time keep learning

Channel: History Calling

Views: 50,759

Keywords: MH370, MH370 documentary, Flight MH370, what happened to MH370, aviation mystery, History Calling, historical mystery, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, Inmarsat, missing airplane, Ocean Infinity, MAS 370, Malaysian Flight MH370

Id: c42Zj-mGrIM

Length: 47min 53sec (2873 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 04 2024