Here Are The Theories About What Happened To Flight MH370
One of Netflix's newest three-part docuseries, MH370: The Plane That Disappeared, explores the eerie, never-been-solved story of a commercial Malaysia Airlines flight that went missing back in 2014 and was never found.
Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 took off on March 8, 2014, from Kuala Lumpur, and was headed for Beijing, the docuseries explains. But the Boeing 777 disappeared along the way with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board, per Brittanica. To this day, no one knows what happened.
“Planes go up, planes go down,” aviation journalist Jeff Wise says in the trailer. “What planes don’t do is just vanish off the face of the Earth.”
But what happened to MH370, and was it ever found? Here’s what you need to know.
What happened to MH370?
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was a red eye flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing that was scheduled to arrive on the morning of March 8, 2014, Brittanica explains.
The plane reached cruising altitude at 1:07 a.m., and had its last communication with air traffic control around 1:21 a.m. Just as it was about to enter Vietnamese airspace over the South China Sea, Malaysian radar detected that the plane turned around and flew southwest over the Malay Peninsula before turning northwest. Malaysian military radar lost contact with the plane over the Andaman Sea at 2:22 a.m.
However, an Inmarsat satellite over the Indian Ocean received hourly signals from the flight and last detected the plane at 8:11 a.m.
How many people went missing?
The plane contained 227 passengers and 12 crew members. In total, 239 people disappeared on the flight.
What is Tomnod?
The first thing to know is that Tomnod was a crowdsourcing tool people used to help figure out what happened to the flight and its passengers. The technology technically uses satellite imagery to identify evidence of urbanization across the globe, and was a tool originally developed by Professor Amit Khandelwal at Columbia Business School.
But when MH370 disappeared, people began to volunteer to search high-res imagery of different locations in an effort to try to find debris from the plane or survivors, the documentary explains. Tomnod ended up using 2.3 million internet users, according to The Guardian, but its findings were found to be inconclusive.
Was flight MH370 ever found?
Malaysia Airlines told families in late March of 2014 that the company believed the plane crashed into the Indian ocean and that it was was assumed "beyond reasonable doubt" that there were no survivors, per BBC News.
The documentary also details how debris that seemed to be from a commercial airliner washed up on the coast of Africa and islands along the Indian Ocean, with a statement from Australian authorities saying that the pieces were “almost certainly” from the missing plane, per BBC News.
What are the theories about what happened to the fight?
There are still a lot of unknowns when it comes to the story of this doomed flight. However, The Sun, a newspaper in the UK, breaks down a few theories.
One is that the plane’s captain plotted a mass murder-suicide, with the theory that Captain Zaharie Amad Shah flew the jet in circles to ensure he wasn’t being followed and then landed at a high speed to make sure no one survived.
Another theory is that the pilot tried to do a controlled emergency landing into the ocean that didn’t work.
Other theories say that the plane was hijacked, shot down by the US Air Force, or was in “cruising mode” when it crashed.
But still, to this day, no one seems to know what truly happened. You can catch more details about MH370, the plane that disappeared, and the lives on board, in Netflix's docuseries.
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