MH 370, Ten Years On
March 19, 2024
TEN YEARS AGO this month, Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared during a routine flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing. The wreckage was never found.
There’s a solid chance the wreckage will never be found. That’s unfortunate, but there are clues to work with. And those clues have, over time, led me to believe that the plane was intentionally brought down by one of the pilots, most likely the captain, in an act of murder-suicide. It was ditched somewhere in the Indian Ocean — landed, if you will, on the surface of the sea — where it sank to to the bottom and rests today, undetected but mostly intact.
Early on, I was open to a number of theories popular at the time: fire, depressurization, and so on. Accidents. I’ve come around since then. My opinion is based on the evidence, both as it exists and, just as importantly, doesn’t exist.
If we assume an accident, we must also assume the plane crashed into the ocean. We know from electronic satellite “pings” that the jet continued on for some time after its last appearance on radar. Having suffered some catastrophic malfunction that rendered the crew dead or unconscious, the thinking goes, the plane continued on autopilot until running out of fuel, at which point the engines failed. Without pilots to control the glide, it plunged into the sea.
The problem with this idea is the absence of pieces. There is no way for a jetliner to crash “gently” into the ocean. A Boeing 777 in an out-of-control impact would have effectively disintegrated, producing tens of thousands of fragments: aircraft parts, human remains, luggage, and so on. Much of this debris would have sunk, but much would not have. Eventually, borne by currents, it would’ve washed up.
So why didn’t it?
A small number of pieces did come ashore, but that’s the thing: of the few parts recovered, almost all of them are consistent not with an out-of-control crash, but with a controlled and deliberate ditching. (Even the most textbook ditching at sea is going to cause serious damage and the likely shedding of parts.) The flaperon discovered in 2015 on Reunion Island, for example, and the trailing edge flap that washed up on Mauritius, both from the same wing.
The parts themselves are evidence enough; a thorough post-mortem on them reveals even more. The forensics are complicated, but they’re solid. Use your Google and check out the analysis by former Canadian crash investigator Larry Vance. These pieces tell a story.
For these particular parts to have been found, together with a complete absence of the myriad flotsam a full-on crash would have produced, is to me a smoking gun.
And thus, the biggest reason the submerged wreckage hasn’t been found is because the location of the search area has been based almost entirely on the fuel exhaustion theory. The search-zone calculations, extrapolating from the satellite pings, are based on when and where, approximately, the 777’s tanks would’ve run dry.
Except maybe the tanks didn’t run dry, and the plane went — was taken — somewhere else. What if that was the intent all along — to vanish?
Those pings are still important, and give us hints. Chances are the actual location of the wreckage isn’t far away. But it’s far enough away to have missed it.
I’ve been saying from the start that we should prepare for the possibility of the plane not being found. It happens this way sometimes. If it helps you feel better, the air crash annals contain numerous unsolved accidents. What makes this one different, maybe, is how we’ve come to expect easy and fast solutions to pretty much everything these days, with a fetishized belief that “technology,” whatever that means anymore, can answer any question and fix any problem.
Oh sure, radios, transponders, emergency locator transmitters, GPS, real-time position streaming, satellite tracking. But all of that is fallible, one way or another.
Sometimes nature wins. And that’s what this is about, ultimately: nature. The immensity of the ocean versus the comparative speck of a 777. It’s out there somewhere, in the ink-black darkness beneath thousands of feet of seawater. We’ll probably never find it.
Related Story:
THE RIDDLE MAY NOT BE DEEP
Photos courtesy of Unsplash.
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24 Responses to “MH 370, Ten Years On”
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Vance’s theory includes the assertion that whoever was in control of MH370 deliberately depressurized the cabin “with the flick of a switch”. Is this actually possible? What direct control does a pilot have over the cabin pressurization system?
Patrick, thank you for your perspective on this tragedy. What you have written makes a lot of sense. Your thoughts are, as you state, consistent with the best and most credible analysis I have seen on MH370, which is the analysis set forth by Larry Vance.
I respect your claim that the plane may never be found. But sooner or later, someone – probably NOT the Malaysian government – will search for the plane based on the controlled ditching theory. Then I believe there is at least a fighting chance that the plane will be discovered. The controlled ditching theory is entirely consistent with murder-suicide, and I have not come across any other explanation for the disappearance of MH370 that makes sense and fits with all the facts that we know.
As Mr. Vance states, I do not know why the Captain (I believe it was the Captain) would commit murder-suicide. But not knowing the reason does not mean that the evidence should be ignored.
The pictures of the largely intact flaperon found on Reunion Island shows clear and compelling evidence that a controlled ditching occurred. There is no other credible explanation.
I hope that a search for the plane will be resumed. Again, thank you.
It’s bad enough that the above pilot casually and coldly concedes to refer to human remains as “body parts”. As if the souls aboard that plane were essentially like flaps and tray tables; only different by calculated semantics.
What’s more concerning is the pilot makes no mention of the Air France Flight 447, a flight in which it is documented that the plane went nose-down into the ocean. Human remains of the souls onboard (in pilot-speak, body parts) were found, promptly. Google.
Something’s going on when basic compare and contrast like we learn in high school or what, is ignored by the bloggers and pilots. Errors of omission are a tell.
Solved?
Thank-you Patrick (a možná by Darina mohla poslat odkaz na zdroj ke stažení).
I hadn’t run across Vance’s book before, and while pedantic, that’s likely the nature of a neutral investigator. He does present multiple lines of relatively independent evidence that, by his interpretation, support his conclusions.
My thought as I was going through it was how useful it would be to present evidence of similar ditching events in similar aircraft (it reminded me of U.S. Airways flight 1549, thought that was an Airbus, albeit superficially similar with underwing mounted engines): seeing whether the witness markings showed a similar patter, which would support Vance’s interpretations.
As a non-expert I’d take his interpretation as being pretty plausible, deferring to his (and his team’s) expertise, and the lack of coordination between the criminal and technical investigations seems another weak point. As well, given the potentially political nature of these things, it would be interesting to see whether a less biased international team responsible for all such investigations would take some of the possible local bias out of these investigations: working in government, I’ve run across decision-based evidence-making many times, alas.
Hopefully, time will tell if the wreck is ever found, but my version of Occam prefers this narrative. Thanks again for referring me to the book.
Dobrý den pane kapitáne,
dekuji moc za Vaš článek a Vaši verzi,která zapříčinila katastrofu letu MH 370 malajskych aerolinií.
Sleduji všechny zprávy průběžně ve všech médiích celých 10 let.
Myslím, že se nemýlite. Máte letité zkušenosti z pilotovanim těchto typů Boeingu 777 a tudíž i dobrý odhad na to, co se za letu stalo. Informace se postupně hromadily a třídily a logika těchto poznatků Vás vede jistě ke správnému závěru.
Tento týden jsem stahovala na fb.dokumentarni film o této letecké katastrofe. Natočen byl našimi odborníky v letectví právě k této události. Je to cca devadesatiminutove video a ráda bych Vám ho preposlala v příloze.
Bohužel se mne to nedaří, nevím, jak ho do Vašeho profilu vložit.
Myslím, že by Vas zaujalo. Vyjadřují se v něm piloti, kteří na těchto strojích letali několik let a také profesionální pracovníci řídících letových center.
Jejich zavery se shodují s Vašimi. Video je prostoupeno původními snímky a celková rekonstrukce nehody je částečně v angličtině. Převážně pak komunikace s řídícím střediskem a dalšími složkami.
Napište mne, jak Vám případně toto video mám zaslat.
A jinak přeji opět hodně krásných a bezpečných letu.
Darina Minarčíková
Dobrý den pane kapitáne,
dekuji moc za Vaš článek a Vaši verzi,která zapříčinila katastrofu letu MH 370 malajskych aerolinií.
Sleduji všechny zprávy průběžně ve všech médiích celých 10 let.
Myslím, že se nemýlite. Máte letité zkušenosti z pilotovanim těchto typů Boeingu 777 a tudíž i dobrý odhad na to, co se za letu stalo. Informace se postupně hromadily a třídily a logika těchto poznatků Vás vede
Malay gov DIDNT want to find it. They confessed to ICAO they had lied about the volume of unstable batteries. It maid them millions in revenue.
So sad to see the need for conspiracy has damaged rational fact based thought.
Or is it Bots feeding discord?
Many captans practice emerg returns to base – it is a given maneuver during exam :turn back”
He had a few waypoints known to him that would turn him back around the mountainous island as he could turn due south and pick up an ILS in ,,, as little as 4 waypoints to get bk to the runway, He managed some while the FO battled a black smoke and perished quickly.. He managed a few waypoints and perished,
With little actual Boeing exp in many comments all over the place the conspiracy has been nurtured by Lalay Gov to keep them from owning the responsibility for these terrible deaths.
You dont need boogeyman when the science and factual events are all around us,
Unrelated,
By the way, the pilot who brought down EgyptAir 990 did it as, basically, twisted revenge. He had just been fired for sexually assaulting hotel workers and was being flown home to Cairo. He had been at the airline for some time and knew the on-duty pilots, and he managed to talk his way into the captain’s seat on the flight deck while one of them got up for a bit.
Why did they let him do that? They knew him, and it was literally unimaginable to them that a pilot would deliberately crash a plane full of passengers.
The lithium-ion-battery fire theory (crew died during attempted return to KL airport) doesn’t explain why, after passing over Malaysia, MH370 flew right up the center of the Strait of Malacca (right on the border between ATC jurisdiction for Malaysia and Indonesia) and then, well clear of both countries, made a 170-degree turn and moved south.
It also doesn’t explain why the Malaysian government allowed a search in the South China Sea to continue for a week when it (the Malaysian air force, at least) knew the plane wasn’t there.
Please consider the voluminous evidence and statistics regarding these unquenchable fires from unstable chemical components. That crew died very quickly with an aircraft turned back to KL airport for emergency return, radios burned out.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/mh370-news-flight-cargo-fire-16873283?fbclid=IwAR1AKAqb92vXiom2n37lxTxDWX_EQjMPgrfdSXzdC6GxPnFEglHJ9B6F8QI_aem_ASrVYtf4YqYNqq5NbD54ba9tcVsU90Aqmbkx4MBlaiFUHRHrOvEv7LClOuzNJyBU34g
If fire was the culprit, the plane HAD TO have subsequently crashed into the sea.
So where was the debris field? Where are the thousands of pieces? Why are the ONLY parts that washed up consistent with a ditching, and why do they show evidence of the flaps having been deployed?
Doesn’t make sense.
After 24 years of Lithium Ion battery training (“you cant extinguish this with halon”) fruitlessly fighting cargo deck fires, the toxic black smoke will kill you w/or without 100% Emerg O2 … for the love of God…Scooter batteries burn down apartments, as PC batts are smoking in cabins, as at least 2 Cargo 74’s disappeared mid ocean… reasonable folks must admit these items were handled recklessly/carried in a Pax forward belly in that 777.
Within 48hrs ICAO banned the transport of these batts in Pax Cargo holds.
The 777 held enough time release Halon for 7hours. Ghost ship- fire dim & relight.
Billion $ economy.
There was little known about the air hazards that resulted from reckless handling of this cargo in those days.
KL was a major manufacturer of Lions. One AA bat would ignite an entire pallet. And this was a major new economy for this country.
W/undeclared extra 2500lbs of batts fwd belly – basically 1) next to the Electronic &E
2) nearly directly beneath the flight deck….
What Capt w/ a home sim rig hasn’t practiced return to base? As for MA – In that region best option better than begging Vietnam for vectors to their airport. Read report re Bahrain Tower denying UPS Dubai pilots when they were on fire from batteries. All they could do was return to DXB.
Also a fire next to the E & E? Good luck with FO on last leg IOE working the Memory Items in billowing black smoke. Radios already dead
In LION fire that crew died from black smoke & halon in minutes
“Mentour Pilot on YouTube has a great video on this.”
@MichaelKennedy: Yes, it was very good. But he should read Vance’s book.
That said, the book is subversive regarding the enduring positions of Malaysia & the authors of the official report. Maybe MP just doesn’t Do subversive.
Mentour Pilot on YouTube has a great video on this.
I e always been confident that the evidence points to the captain for political reasons of making the airline and the Malaysian government look bad.
Just curious if, after 10 years the “black box(es)” would still be salvageable and able to provide insights into what happened. IF found that is…
Apparently calculations based on the “WSPRnet” method & reverse-drift analysis by oceanographer Charitha Pattiaratchi have produced startlingly similar results as to the position.
In addition, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was apparently a distant relative & supporter of Malaysian PM Anwar Ibrahim who, that very day, had been sentenced to a 5-year prison term for sodomy, a decision viewed by many as an act of lawfare.
Dunno how much that thickens the plot. Anyone doubting this was murder-suicide should read Larry Vance’s book. The families know what happened, if they’re willing to accept the facts. For the bereaved it’s a bit like the Titanic was.
This makes an enormously costly search operation superfluous.
Good read – based on what is known – not what we wish was known, or what might have been. You nailed it – everyone thinks in the modern era everything can be answered and figured out. Perhaps more than ever before, but not everything in all cases.
Is anything known of the pilot’s mental health? I seem to recall the Egyptian plane that went down off of Nantucket had a pilot who had mental health issues. Just wondering.
Hi Patrick. On MH 370, read https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-malaysia-airlines/590653/
There is a link at the bottom of the current post, to an older one in which I discuss that Atlantic article.
“a controlled and deliberate ditching”
doesn’t that contradict with the murder-suicide theory?
This kind of thing would never happen on a train!