Nine years ago, MH370 took off into a clear, moonlit night and flew into the unknown. Somewhere over the South China Sea, 40 minutes into the red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, it disappeared from radar screens. None of the 239 passengers and crew were ever seen again. The conventional thinking is that the pilot had decided to commit mass murder-suicide by crashing into a remote corner of the southern Indian Ocean. But significant aspects of the case remained unexplained, including the plane’s ultimate resting place, and search officials have long since given up trying to determine what happened. Officially, MH370 is a cold case.
The urgency of solving the mystery remains, though. It’s disturbing enough that a state-of-the-art airliner can disappear so completely off the face of the earth; it’s even more troubling that the authorities, armed with hundreds of millions of dollars to conduct a search and self-proclaimed near certainty about where it must have gone, could fail to locate the 200-foot-long aircraft.
I’ve been following the case obsessively from the beginning, appearing on CNN to talk about it and writing about it in this magazine. I dove deep into the evidence for a 2019 book, and then spent several years working with the producers of a three-part Netflix documentary series, which debuts this week. My hope is that, while the passage of time has lessened the public’s interest in the case, it has also dispelled the fog of wild claims, giving us space to consider the evidence with greater clarity. Far from being a dead end, MH370 still offers multiple leads worth investigating. It’s important that we follow them.
A strange U-turn
A distinctive aspect of the flight is that it got progressively weirder as it went along. Everything was normal when it took off from Kuala Lumpur. Then 40 minutes later, the plane went electronically dark and vanished from Air Traffic Control screens. Still visible on military radar, it pulled a hard U-turn and flew west toward India. Then three minutes after leaving radar coverage, its satellite communications system, or satcom, turned back on. For the next six hours, the satcom periodically emitted signals that would later offer investigators vague hints of the plane’s trajectory.
It took weeks before the Australian government announced to the public that its scientists had solved the mathematical riddle posed by those transmissions and had calculated the plane’s final resting place in the southern ocean. The implication was that the plane’s captain, Zaharie Ahmen Shah, must have taken the aircraft. Yet after spending years searching the area, and far beyond, they found no trace of the fuselage on the seabed, a turn of events they labeled in their final report as “almost inconceivable.”
So where is the plane?
To many people, the failure of the search seemed unsurprising. The ocean is a big place, after all. But the searchers’ failure was actually baffling. The data they were working from was precise and the mathematics were well understood. For the plane to have gone into the Southern Ocean, and yet wound up somewhere outside the search zone, would require a sequence of events ranging from vanishingly unlikely to flat-out impossible.
Wrestling with how this might have happened quickly gets you into weird territory. Most people, and the search authorities themselves, prefer simple, normal-seeming explanations. And if you consider only the broad outlines of the case, there are simple, normal theories that seem compelling. But once you start examining the evidence in higher detail, the simple theories start to develop holes.
The weirdest part of a weird mystery
To me, the great underappreciated red flag of the case is the fact that the satcom was turned back on. I have yet to meet a 777 pilot who, before MH370, had even heard of the critical piece of equipment, a box called the Satellite Data Unit, or SDU. It turns out that the procedure for turning the SDU off and back on is not included on any of the pilots’ emergency checklists, and instead requires a sophisticated knowledge of the plane’s electrical system. Of all the many theories floated about MH370, none includes a plausible explanation for why anyone would want to mess with it. Yet this inexplicable eventuality gave rise to the signals that the whole seabed search rested on.
What we can say now is that whatever happened to MH370, it must have been deeply strange. As the years have gone by, even more mind-bending clues have turned up, like the data from the captain’s home flight simulator (first described in this article) which ambiguously suggests he may have practiced a flight into the southern ocean. All the same, though, the range of possibilities is not infinite. Investigators possess numerical data generated by known physical processes. This data did not come out of thin air. Theories that match it might be correct; theories that don’t must not be.
As I struggled to make sense of the case’s anomalies in the early months after the disappearance, I realized that some unusual details of the plane’s electrical configuration might point the way to a solution. As I explained in a New York Magazine feature eight years ago, if hijackers tampered with the SDU to create a false electronic trail for investigators, then the implication would be that the plane didn’t go south after all, but rather north to Kazakhstan. The only possible perpetrator of such an operation would be Russia, which was in the process of seizing Crimea from Ukraine at the time and benefited from having the world’s attention redirected. I admitted then that my theory is something of a wild ride, but it has yet to be disproven. The default hypothesis is not the only option.
What we can still do
The good news is that there are positive steps that we the public can take to help move this case closer to a resolution. For starters, we can urge the Australian government to reopen the investigation and make a serious, transparent reckoning of where its assumptions went wrong. Second, we can pressure the Malaysian government to finally release all the evidence in its possession, including the full set of military radar returns showing the plane’s last known track.
It’s clear that the authorities have been embarrassed by their failures so far. The easiest thing for them to do would be to leave it all in the past. But too much is at stake — both for the family members of the disappeared and for the flying public, who have a right to know that their aircraft will not spontaneously vanish. As I hope the Netflix documentary makes clear, there’s an uncomfortable hole in our seamless network of global transportation. We need to do every conceivable thing in our power to figure out what happened.
MH370 is not a legend. It is real, and science can find it.
This article ran in New York magazine on March 8, 2023.
Thank you for the new documentary.
One hypothesis that I have never seen explored is that the cargo of lithium batteries caught fire (as sometimes happens) , and destroyed the aircraft electronics, and then everything else.
Any comment or information regarding this postulation.
I was and still am eerily fascinated by MH370. As a family we fly regularly and without fail, I think of this case. I just can’t explain why there was never really any substantial debris ever found.m, anywhere. Except the small parts washed up in La Reunion and Madagascar. People somewhere obviously know something. I really hope we found out.
As a British citizen, what I can I do to put pressure on the Malaysian government to reopen their investigations?
Hi Jonathan S, there was a lot of attention paid to the batteries at one time, but once it was realized that the plane flew for six more hours it didn’t seem to match well with a catastrophic fire.
Hi Ana, I think the public is more likely to have success with the Australian government, which really shouldered most of the investigative heavy lifting. Perhaps Charles could go down and have a word?
Hi Jeff!
I’ve been following your articles and thoughts since MH370 disappeared. I’ve always appreciated your detailed examinations and research. I watched the Netflix doc last night and it’s the best one I’ve seen so far. So glad they pulled you in. That’s all I wanted to say – just to complement you and thank you for the thought provoking articles over the years. I wish your website had a search by keyword feature – I want to go back and read ALL your MH370 articles but I have to sort through all in the Aviation category 😉 Just a request!
Thanks,
Katie in Colorado
Edit: *compliment (haha)
Thanks Katie! I should really try to improve the functionality as you suggest. In the meantime you could try running a Google search for MH370 with the qualifier “site:jeffwise.net.”
I think the hardest this for me to believe is that once the tracking was turned off, it would have had to have been turned back on for the Inmarsat data to exist, just doesn’t seem logical. Would like to know more about the “escorted cargo” and was there any official follow up on the lady from Florida with the ocean crash site imagery. I also believe that this could be solved..
Cool, thanks for the tip!
Hi Kimberly, When I say that this case is weirder than people realize, I’m not whistling Dixie. You write “it doesn’t seem logical” — it isn’t logical! Yet it’s true, and that’s the challenge.
Here’s something weirder: people tend to talk about this case and the Inmarsat data like it’s no big deal, of course a plane has Inmarsat data. But the fact is that only because of a bizarre set of coincidences was it possible for scientists to even deduce the plane’s location from the Inmarsat communication system, which was explicitly designed not to include any navigational data.
Hi Jeff
Why you don’t reply the question about the lady from Florida with the ocean crash site imagery. In my opinion is the most important clue.
And what about the misterios goods transported in the plane to China and the military USA operations in the coast of China?
Apparently you didn’t like my comment about your shit theories because you didn’t post it. You are a chicken shit, you made your fucking money and got your name out there at the expense of these families and yet you accuse the Malaysian government of using “math” to tell the families that their relatives died in a plane crash.
Have another cup of coffee you asshole. Who did your research, Majorie Greene? Was it jewish space lasers that brought the plane down?
Great documentary and good information, Jeff, that will hopefully give MH370 some renewed pressure and focus to do more and find the resting place of the plane. I think a big question beyond the ones you have raised is, what has been done to prevent an MH370 incident from happening again? Have regulators and plane manufacturers changed any requirements for better tracking technologies and manners to maintain global positioning and other data of planes that can’t be turned on/off? I wonder if there have been any positive lessons learned from this or if it’s, nothing to see here and nothings been done to prevent this again? Thanks again!
I think that very few people found the plane-shaped wave very convincing. As for the other ideas, they don’t really add up to a theory.
Hi Casey, Great question. I think the answer is, in short: “Nothing to see here.”
All evidence points towards the captain and a ditched landing. That’s why it’s not been found. Watch Larry Vance explain the sequence of events through the witness marks of the debris found and see if your thoughts change.
https://youtu.be/q3NQ1jCxBig
The Dark Knight: Rather, if the captain had ditched the debris would have been found a long time ago.
Hi Jeff,
The one thing that strikes me about “the pilot did it” theory is that it just doesn’t make sense. If he wanted to crash the plane, why would he need to go to the trouble of going down into the avionics bay, turn off the comms, and then go back in there later to turn the satellite comms back on? Why not just crash the plane without all that unnecessary trouble?
Jeff. Larry Vance was the Swissair accident investigator and a high speed impact would have resulted in millions of pieces. I’d be interested in your verdict of his lecture in that YouTube link. I’ve watched it a few times and remain convinced.
Mario, You’ve hit on one of the major problems of the pilot-suicide-murder theory.
Hi Jeff. Watched the recent documentary on Netflix regarding MH370. Did they do a test flight with a 777 following the same path out of Kuala Lumpur toward Beijing…between the two controllers (Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Minh City) and attempt to turn off the aircraft communications that are theorized? I was thinking that doing that would shed light, possibly? (rhetorical).
The Dark Knight, Vance has misrepresented his role in the Swissair investigation and, in my opinion, was unprofessional in declaring that he’d solved the mystery based on his examination of a single piece of debris that he hadn’t even inspected in person.
Precisely Jeff. And it seems the only justification for the SDU being pressed back into service at all is to justify the narrative that MH370 went South. Which a suicidal, murderous pilot would have no interest in doing. Only a hijacker with an intent to leave a false trail while piloting the plane to a different location would have the motive to do such a thing. Or, as in the theory espoused by Florence de Changy, by someone who really didn’t want anyone to think the plane had been downed on approach to China in Vietnamese airspace.
Hi Abe, that’s a great idea. Investigators wound up doing something similar — instead of recreating the flight itself, they looked at transmissions from similar flights to see how they compared with MH370. This helped give them confidence in predicting the path the plane took based on the satellite signals.
Mario, Exactly. I would just add that Florence doesn’t deal with the SDU reboot at all; to her all the data, including the satellite and radar data, are fake.
The official explanation is that the SDU automatically rebooted after the fuel loss caused the APU to kick in. What’s your take on that Jeff? Would the APU not also have rebooted the entire comms system at the same time if this were the case?
I was speaking of the SDU reboot over the Andaman Sea. The second reboot caused by fuel exhaustion was way down in the South China Sea, where the plane would have been out of range of other forms of communication (basically, radio).
Ah I see, so there’s no reasonable explanation for the first SDU reboot over the Andaman Sea as the plane shouldn’t have encountered fuel loss at that point?
Definitely hadn’t experienced fuel loss. Most likely somebody turned it off and on again. Hard to come up with an innocent explanation.
Wow. So many obvious red flags just seem to be glossed over in the official narrative!
YES!!!!!!
Hello,
i have only one question.
In the beginning it was mention that the passengers where reachable via phone and there was a phone call from a passenger.
Is it not possible to track down from which cell this phone call comes?
If not than i ask the question is it possible to do a phone call in the south indian sea region?
Because i think if this phone call was real than they where in a region where a cellular connection is.
Daniel, So many people are asking this question! Unfortunately, I don’t have any good answers. The question of these calls going through was raised in the very early days, and then kind of went by the wayside. I vaguely recall a sense of people having looked into it and it turned out to not really mean anything.
Thanks for answering Jeff.
I think this is an important question and someone with knowledge should take a deep look at this.
Because this means:
1. they where located in a region were a mobile connection is possible (we do have some black spots on land, i think in the south indian sea i a big black spot and there would be no way that they passengers where reachable)
2. if this phone call where made: this means someone where alive and made it, that triggers the question how many hours after theire dissaperance where they reachable?
2.1. if this phone call was not made and the smartphones where only reachable: supports your theory that the passengers were out of action
3. this destroys the “airplane was shot down” theory
4. it narrows down the region where the plane went down
Jeff – has Australia ever addressed if they would have had the capability to detect 370 flying over the Butterworth airbase in Malaysia? If yes – why didn’t they independently confirm the backtrack of 370?
I just finished watching the 3 episodes and thought about it all. I think you might be close. Assume the 3 Russians were high jackers with the plan to take the plane north to land (russians aren’t know to be suicide bombers/high Jackers). They could control/distract the stewards long enough to get into the electronics compartment to disable communications like you said. They then have time to control the plane and passengers w/o pilots being able to send communications and passengers could not comment out either. Then negotiate or force into cockpit. The pilot knowing from 911 that although the highjackers demanding go north to land might have thought they intended to crash into populated area. At night over the ocean no land marks he could have easily gone south without them knowing. Pilot figured he could fly until out of fuel in a isolated area of the sea with hopes of miraculously landing (like a high jacked pilot did several years ago during the day just off a coast) possibly saving some people, but he just didn’t get lucky.
Jeff,
Really enjoyed the Netflix documentary. I was initially captured by the circumstances of this tragedy and the documentary renewed my interest to get to the truth.
Do you still see the “north” theory as viable, or does the discovery of wreckage (or other developments) make the “south” theory more likely in your mind? If “north” is still possible, what is your theory about where the plane landed specifically, and what happened to the passengers?
I generally don’t see myself as a conspiracy theorist, but I also can’t shake a strong feeling that facts are being intentionally withheld by official channels here. When the disappearance occurred, I remember being very surprised at the muted response of US (and other Western) officials. I do remember us offering condolences and some minimal search help with military assets in the region, but it felt (and continues to feel) half-baked.
It would seem to me that we would have a national interest in how an aircraft of that size (manufactured by a blue chip US company) could vanish without credible explanation. Reasonable people ask in these scenarios “where is it, what happened, and how can we be sure it won’t happen again”? It seems more likely that if those questions are not being asked, it’s because the facts are somewhere fully understood, but for whatever reason, are not convenient to disclose.
Matt, I think Malaysia has sole operational control of all military radars within its borders.
Douglas, Could be!
Preston,
Thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed the program. I do still feel that north is viable. Three theories were presented, all were ridiculed — yet something happened to the plane. Something implausible-sounding and yet true.
Great article. Just to clear a couple points up that people are discussing:
1. Regarding the batteries — it doesn’t make sense. We know the plane turned multiple times after that and are nearly certain it flew on for hours after that. If there was a catastrophic fire (caused by the batteries or anything else), there’s no way it would have turned multiple times at navigational waypoints.
2. Regarding the calls: there were lots of reports at the time of people calling their loved ones and hearing the phone ringing. That could just be “normal” as some phone systems play the phone ringing sound when the signal is still bouncing around towers seeking out the phone it is calling. But the call mentioned in the documentary, of someone receiving a call from their father who was on the plane? That really is strange. IF that is indeed true then, yes, it’s fair to assume that phone was not at the bottom of the ocean at that moment.
Jeff thank you for your ongoing interest and curiosity in all this.
The incoming phone call briefly mentioned in Episode 1 seems like hugely significant information, if true. If the gentleman interviewed remembered who received the call, perhaps call records still exist even after all this time. Given all the resources put into this search, this seems like a small effort that could have a big impact, if confirmed. Likewise while there have been vague statements that there was no passenger cell activity (except the co-pilot), I wonder if there was ever a systematic check if any passenger cells connected to any towers anywhere over the 6 hours the plane was in the air.
Jeff, great Netfilx Series. I agree with your theory that the Captain did this. Probably just the way you described. But given the fact that very little debris has been found, a flaperon that washed up is a clue. Impact with the ocean.
But not a high speed impact.
I don’t think it ran out of fuel at all. I believe this was a deliberate controlled ditching into the ocean trying to leave the least possible debris trail. Which looks like what happened. And if you were going to intentionally ditch the aircraft, why would you let it run out of fuel ? Would be much easier to control the decent and the ditching with power. The fact that they found a flaperon indicates a low speed impact. Whom ever did this found some really deep water and ditched it as slow as they could. So it would just flood and sink. Thinking it would never be found.
Was wondering if there has been any further debris found on the shores of Madagascar or Mozambique? Seems odd that just one person has found all the debris. Were there also any official searches along the coast of those countries? With the way the currents flow I would think some of the debris could be found in Western Australia as well after all these years.
The key that nobody pays attention to is the following: The same day that the plane was lost, the daughter of a passenger received a call from her father (passenger on the plane), now, analyzing all perspectives, how is this Could it be possible if he went south? in the ocean there is no coverage or way to access a phone if everyone was passed out or asleep, therefore the theory that the plane went south is weakening step by step
Finished the 3 episodes.
I feel so bad after watching it, I remembered watching so many news about this incident. My heart goes and aches to the families, after almost a decade there’s no clarity, answers, closure, nor peace… this is too heartbreaking 🙁
Hi Jeff,
I just watched the Netflix documentary and I’m still processing all the information and the overall weirdness surrounding this case.
I’m a screenwriter and something that I have to be very careful as a storyteller is the inner logic of a story, you know, coherence in the narrative so everything makes sense and I don’t find myself contradicting my own statements. That inner logic is needed the most if you are creating sci-fi or fantasy because the world of your story may feel alien to the audience, so you have to be particularly honest and clear with the rules of your world.
Sherlock Holmes put it better: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”
I’m sorry for the long preface, but my point is: We absolutely, beyond any doubt know just two things, one, that the plane took off and disappeared from flight control at around 1.20am, and two, that the plane is still missing. That’s it. Everything else? Nothing is definitive. Imagine this as a trial (from any side you like). Beyond those two facts, everything else that we know could be argued to the point of reasonable doubt, rendering the information useless.
There have been so many cooks in the kitchen that actually being able to tell useful, real data, from just noise is impossible.
From those two facts, I think that is obvious that there are major interests preventing MH370 from being found. Why? By whom? I have no idea.
But, as with any story, I think that we could find a lot more if we turn our focus on the movements before take-off (the crew, the passengers, the cargo, the plane itself -up to when it was first assembled-, the airport workers and so on) and right up to the moment it went dark. There were any vessels in the water at the moment? Any ships departed or arrived to ports in the area during the “hole” in the timeline? If I need to salvage a crash that no one knows that has happened but me, a six-hour window (at minimum) would be useful.
I hope that the families can one day know what happened to their loved ones.
I have one question. Did you pursue your russian theory only, or did you inquire about the alleged AWACS in the area?
Thanks for your time, and for still fighting for the truth!
I just finished watching the documentary and remember vividly being baffled at the time as to how no one knew where the plane went.
It seems incredibly odd that since the disappearance, the plane has still not been located and stranger still that only a few bits here and there have been located, with missing numbers concretely tying debris to the missing plane…
In a few articles I have read the theory that the pilot extended the landing gear to ensure the plane sinking quickly and breaking up into as many pieces as possible upon impact, but my question is for what purpose? Why would the suicidal/murderous pilot wish to hide the plane’s crash location?
Why turn the SDU back on?
So many questions, and if one theory is fault with the Boeing electrical systems, have these been tested and checked in other craft of the same design?
If so what were the findings? If not why not?!
Thanks William. Watch the whole series! I think you’ll like it.
Hi Ian, Yes, Blaine is still roaming around, periodically announcing new finds. It’s, shall we say, remarkable.