SHATNER:
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 prepares to depart from Kuala
Lumpur International Airport, en route to Beijing. On board are 227 passengers and a flight crew of 12. NANCE:
Malaysia 370
was a commercial flight. Malaysia Airlines,
it was a routine procedure, a routine flight as we say. The flight path was more
or less a straight line. Aimed from Kuala Lumpur
out over the water in the South China Sea
to the main landfall of China. As far as everybody
was concerned, it took off normally, was flying its route
north towards China. TUTTLE:
Then all of a sudden it turned off its communications
and basically went dark. SHATNER:
At about 1:20 a.m., as the plane was flying
over the South China Sea, ground control
lost all contact with the plane. One second,
the 240-ton Boeing aircraft was emitting a clear
transponder signal to air traffic control. And then, mere moments later, there was nothing. The fact
that the signal disappeared, that was the unusual element. The fact that that transponder, which was chirping back
every time it was hit by the radar beam from air
traffic control, went silent. KAKU:
Flight controllers
frantically tried to communicate
with the airplane. Nothing. What happened? How can you lose a jetliner? How can it vanish in thin air? SHATNER:
Although the aircraft was lost
on civilian radar screens, unbeknownst to ground control, military radar was able to track
the plane for another hour. And what it detected
was baffling. At that point,
when the radios were turned off, the flightpath did a 90-degree
turn to the left, basically on
a southwestern heading and disappeared into the
vastness of the Indian Ocean. We don't know the motivation
for doing this. We just, we don't know. SHATNER:
Around 2:20 a.m.,
radar contact with the plane was lost for good. By 7:20 a.m., one hour after
it was scheduled to land, authorities in Beijing
realized that Flight MH370 was not going to reach
its destination. A search and rescue operation
was immediately launched and it quickly became the most
expensive and difficult in aviation history. The initial search
was basically, uh, aircraft searching
for the immediate wreck, looking for any survivors or telltale wreckage
on the sea surface. Unfortunately,
after a while, things sink. Survivors aren't there and you go from a search
and rescue mission to a search
and recovery mission. SHATNER:
When the wreckage
did not turn up, officials were
eventually forced to admit that all 239 people
on board the flight had perished. We were clueless as
to what could have caused this tragedy
right under our noses. In an era when
we have the Internet, satellite, radar communication, it just disappears
off the radar screen. SHATNER:
The wreckage of the plane, despite the efforts of the
world's top aviation experts had seemingly vanished
without a trace. But then after
months of searching, investigators finally uncovered
an important clue. Boeing had included a maintenance reporting thing
that goes by satellite. It was called an ACAR system. And Boeing had installed
the system to report maintenance
information about the engines
in the airplane every hour. In this particular case,
it was still pinging away. It was saying essentially
to the satellite, "Hey, I'm here.
You want any information?" SHATNER:
The information revealed
by the ACAR system was shocking. It showed that the plane
did not crash anywhere near
where it was last detected. It actually changed course and kept on flying. GREG LIEFER: It was flown
for another six hours after it made
the initial diversion from its intended flight plan and it was flown, uh,
to a very remote area. SHATNER:
Based off this data,
aviation experts believe that the plane
most likely crashed somewhere in the southern
portion of the Indian Ocean after running out of fuel. It seems that the aircraft
flew in the wrong direction for thousands of miles, to a distant part of the ocean where there was no possible
place to land. But how could
that have happened? Initially, the theory that was
proposed by a lot of the media was that the pilot in command
committed suicide. But in fact, the accident
report clearly stated that the pilot had no history of
emotional or physical problems that would preclude suicide and family, friends
and coworkers said he had no abnormal behavior
before the flight. KAKU:
Other people say, "No, it was some kind
of mechanical failure." If it were to catch on fire, the plane could rapidly
depressurize, meaning that people
would suffocate very rapidly. And I think
that what happened then was you had a ghost airplane. Where everyone was
either dead or dying. It was randomly
going back and forth until it finally ran out of fuel and crashed
into the Indian Ocean. You had theories
of oxygen malfunction that incapacitated the pilots but I don't think
that makes sense because the aircraft,
it certainly appeared to me, like it was being flown manually for up to at least 30 minutes,
if not up to an hour after it made
that hard left turn. The thing that makes
the most sense to me was some type of hijacking. The abrupt maneuvers
that it was making, the changes in altitude
and air speed and heading, all that indicates to me
that it was a deliberate, uh, manipulation by other people that took control
of the aircraft. But then that poses
the question, "Well, why did they
hijack the aircraft? What was the motive and why fly
to the southern Indian Ocean?" SHATNER:
While the theory that the plane was hijacked
may sound logical, authorities thoroughly
checked the background of all the passengers and crew
and none of them fit the profile of a hijacker. The truth is that while
several of the explanations that have been put forth
seem to have merit, we simply don't
have enough information to verify any of them. We have no way of knowing because the cockpit
voice recorder is at the bottom
of the Indian Ocean someplace. But the other, and the most important thing
to keep in mind is, we found a piece
of that airplane. A piece of the wing
was found and verified. It was washed up on, I believe
the shores of Madagascar. Or close to it. And it was definitively
from this particular airplane. So, we knew then categorically
that that airplane had gone into the Indian Ocean. And in this case, this
particular piece of the plane had taken about
a year and a half to float all the way
across the Indian Ocean. LIEFER:
It was one of 27 pieces
that were eventually recovered and it was one of three pieces
out of the 27 that was positively identified
as coming from the aircraft. The aircraft wasn't found,
occupants weren't found, but yet, 17 months later, they find these
pieces of debris, thousands of miles away. And that's what
makes this mystery, I think, probably the biggest mystery
of all the aviation mysteries.
