MH 370: The One That Disappeared - Conspiracy theories and sensationalism are on display in the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370's disappearance in 2014. Other than Amelia Earhart’s fate, civil aviation has no greater mystery than the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on March 8, 2014. The Boeing 777-200 departed Kuala Lumpur International Airport (WMKK) in the very early hours of the morning, destined for Beijing. It never arrived. With all 227 passengers and 12 crew aboard presumed dead, the disappearance of Flight 370 was the deadliest incident involving a Boeing 777 and the deadliest in Malaysia Airlines' history until it was surpassed in both regards by Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down while flying over Ukraine four months later on 17 July 2014. The combined loss caused significant financial problems for Malaysia Airlines, which was renationalised by the Malaysian government in August 2014.
The search for the missing airplane became the most expensive search in the history of aviation. It focused initially on the South China Sea and Andaman Sea, before a novel analysis of the aircraft's automated communications with an Inmarsat satellite indicated that the plane had traveled far southward over the southern Indian Ocean. The lack of official information in the days immediately after the disappearance prompted fierce criticism from the Chinese public, particularly from relatives of the passengers, as most people on board Flight 370 were of Chinese origin. Several pieces of debris washed ashore in the western Indian Ocean during 2015 and 2016; many of these were confirmed to have originated from Flight 370. After a three-year search across 120,000 km2 (46,000 sq mi) of ocean failed to locate the aircraft, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre heading the operation suspended its activities in January 2017. A second search launched in January 2018 by private contractor Ocean Infinity also ended without success after six months.
Relying mostly on analysis of data from the Inmarsat satellite with which the aircraft last communicated, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) proposed initially that a hypoxia event was the most likely cause given the available evidence, although no consensus has been reached concerning this theory among investigators. At various stages of the investigation, possible hijacking scenarios were considered, including crew involvement, and suspicion of the airplane's cargo manifest; many disappearance theories regarding the flight have also been reported by the media.
The Malaysian Ministry of Transport's final report from July 2018 was inconclusive, and made no mention that the pilot may have been committing suicide. It highlighted Malaysian ATC's failures to attempt to communicate with the aircraft shortly after its disappearance.
The search for the missing airplane became the most expensive search in the history of aviation. It focused initially on the South China Sea and Andaman Sea, before a novel analysis of the aircraft's automated communications with an Inmarsat satellite indicated that the plane had traveled far southward over the southern Indian Ocean. The lack of official information in the days immediately after the disappearance prompted fierce criticism from the Chinese public, particularly from relatives of the passengers, as most people on board Flight 370 were of Chinese origin. Several pieces of debris washed ashore in the western Indian Ocean during 2015 and 2016; many of these were confirmed to have originated from Flight 370. After a three-year search across 120,000 km2 (46,000 sq mi) of ocean failed to locate the aircraft, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre heading the operation suspended its activities in January 2017. A second search launched in January 2018 by private contractor Ocean Infinity also ended without success after six months.
Relying mostly on analysis of data from the Inmarsat satellite with which the aircraft last communicated, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) proposed initially that a hypoxia event was the most likely cause given the available evidence, although no consensus has been reached concerning this theory among investigators. At various stages of the investigation, possible hijacking scenarios were considered, including crew involvement, and suspicion of the airplane's cargo manifest; many disappearance theories regarding the flight have also been reported by the media.
The Malaysian Ministry of Transport's final report from July 2018 was inconclusive, and made no mention that the pilot may have been committing suicide. It highlighted Malaysian ATC's failures to attempt to communicate with the aircraft shortly after its disappearance.
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TVTranscript
00:00 An extraordinary search in the South Indian Ocean is underway.
00:04 The Royal Australian Navy,
00:06 coordinated by the Australian Transport Safety Board,
00:09 is leading an international search for a plane that simply disappeared,
00:14 while on a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
00:19 The Malaysian Airlines Flight 370,
00:23 with 230 passengers and 9 crew aboard.
00:27 There is an official hypothesis about where it crashed,
00:31 but nothing has been found.
00:33 Some private individuals have attempted to calculate where it might be
00:37 using their own professional experience.
00:43 Finding the black box is vital to establishing the truth
00:47 of one of the world's most mysterious air disasters.
00:53 There is only one theory that stacks up in every way
00:58 about what happened to this aircraft.
01:01 This aircraft was deliberately taken wherever it's gone
01:05 by somebody who knew everything about the 777.
01:13 We might think that the pilots became unconscious after a few seconds.
01:17 The plane in fact had a very erratic trajectory.
01:20 This erratic trajectory may come from the fact that the pilots tried to find a new route,
01:25 to do something, but one may have fallen unconscious before the other.
01:32 We have built a theory which is based on technique,
01:37 and this hypothesis is that the plane and the people at the controls
01:42 wanted to land safe and sound somewhere, on a landing strip, able to have them.
01:48 We don't go any further, we give no political interpretation,
01:51 and based on the facts that the radar and Inmarsat data gave us.
01:56 The first thing I noticed was, I looked at the waypoint where the aircraft had gone missing,
02:02 and I saw that it was a place quite unusual,
02:05 and it was a place where all five different airspaces actually meet in one spot.
02:12 Everything that we know about MH370
02:16 has been pulled together by both public authorities and private individuals
02:20 to get a fleeting glimpse of what might have gone wrong aboard the flight.
02:43 It is the evening of the 8th of March 2014.
02:46 The flight for Beijing is ready for departure.
02:50 There isn't a cloud in the sky, and 153 Chinese, 38 Malaysian,
02:55 and a mix of other nationalities, including two Italians,
02:59 are preparing for their flight to China.
03:03 Captain Zachary Ahmed Shah and his co-pilot,
03:06 First Officer Farik Abdul Hamid, are in the cockpit.
03:10 They have been through security and are preparing the plane for take-off.
03:15 Neither has shown any sign of mental stress.
03:18 Both have families and enjoy the prestige of flying for one of the best airlines in the world.
03:25 What happened on board MH370 remains one of the great mysteries of aviation.
03:32 Bernard Chabert is an internationally renowned aviation journalist
03:37 and has investigated aviation accidents for the last 50 years.
03:42 It was an aircraft in a perfect state, piloted by serious people,
03:56 competent people who fly for an airline that has a good reputation, especially in Southeast Asia.
04:01 An airline that's an example, an old airline, a traditional one that knows what it's doing.
04:09 The flight takes off around midnight, the weather's good, there's nothing special.
04:13 It's not a long flight either, several hours.
04:17 A flight to China that crosses airspaces that are not dangerous either weather-wise or geopolitically.
04:22 A flight to China that crosses airspaces that are not dangerous either weather-wise or geopolitically.
04:31 In the initial report presented by the Malaysian government,
04:37 the exact route followed by MH370 is accurately traced.
04:42 But understanding the sequence of events, even partially, was not easy.
04:48 The flight took off at 0042 Malaysian time, or 1642 Coordinated Universal Time,
04:55 the time measure used by the investigation.
04:59 It rapidly rose to 35,000 feet, or 10,500 meters, and headed directly for Beijing.
05:07 MH370, we are ready, requesting V350 to Beijing.
05:13 The flight was due to last approximately five hours.
05:16 Just after 1.20am, the aircraft left an area of Singapore's air traffic responsibility
05:23 delegated to Malaysia, at a waypoint known as Igari.
05:28 As he entered the Ho Chi Minh air traffic control area,
05:32 Zahary Ahmed Shah said goodnight to Malaysian air traffic control.
05:36 Malaysian 370, contact Ho Chi Minh 120.99.
05:41 Good night Malaysian 370.
05:45 David Learmount is a civil airlines expert for Flight International magazine.
05:51 A whole lot of simple things happened in a few moments.
05:55 Just as the aircraft's captain called Kuala Lumpur control and said goodnight,
06:04 and was told to call Ho Chi Minh City air traffic control,
06:09 he then... the transponder on the aircraft went off, OK?
06:16 So, let's say one of the pilots turned the transponder off,
06:20 so it could no longer be seen by Kuala Lumpur.
06:24 And they would have thought, that's a bit odd, but he's talking to Ho Chi Minh City.
06:30 But of course he didn't call Ho Chi Minh City.
06:31 What he did do was he turned quite sharply to the left.
06:37 MH370 disappeared from the air traffic control radar
06:41 that traces the signals sent out by the aircraft's transponder
06:45 with its individual call sign.
06:47 Former Eurocontrol project manager
06:50 and member of the CAPTIO group of investigators into the mystery,
06:54 Jean-Luc Marchand, understands exactly what this means.
06:58 You have to understand what was going on in the mind of the air traffic controller.
07:03 Kuala Lumpur had said goodbye to the aircraft,
07:05 which means that in his mental procedure, he was no longer under my control.
07:10 I asked you to manually make radio contact with Ho Chi Minh.
07:14 It is an old-fashioned manual process.
07:17 It is the aircraft that takes the initiative, not the air traffic controller,
07:21 which explains the reaction time.
07:23 So the Malaysian controller thinks, that's it, I'm done.
07:27 This aircraft is no longer with me.
07:29 So he concentrates, and that night he concentrated on four aircrafts
07:33 that were flying in the southwest quadrant
07:35 that maybe weren't going to meet, but required his attention.
07:39 And for him, the Malaysian 370 was out of his control area.
07:44 The civilian air traffic control services lost sight of the aircraft
07:49 because they rely on what's known as secondary surveillance radar.
07:53 Basically, their radar sends out an interrogation signal
07:58 and a transponder on the airplane answers it and says,
08:02 I'm here and this is me, identification.
08:06 If you switch off the transponder on the airplane, nothing comes back.
08:09 So air traffic control loses sight of it.
08:13 Other automatic and voluntary communications systems exist also.
08:18 The aircraft captain will change VHF radio frequencies
08:21 as he or she enters a new air traffic control airspace
08:25 to be able to communicate with the new controllers on the ground.
08:29 The aircraft also signals its status directly to the airline.
08:34 The system is called Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS.
08:41 ACARS is an auto-diagnostic system of the aircraft,
08:50 a system by which the aircraft self-diagnoses
08:54 and is able at predetermined intervals to automatically send a status report,
08:58 saying, I'm here, I'm going there, I'm flying at this speed,
09:03 engine temperatures are this, and a mass of data as requested,
09:07 as required by the airline and the owner of the aircraft
09:10 who decide how they want to follow the aircraft and how often, and so forth.
09:15 So the aircraft sends data that shows the state of the plane constantly.
09:19 It's almost on demand, we do pretty much what we want.
09:23 We send data that makes the aircraft self-diagnose constantly.
09:29 The system that goes through the satellite network in Marsat
09:47 is a system of communication relay.
09:50 The Inmarsat satellite system is a system of communications relays
09:55 that are emitted by stations in the air, on the ground, on the sea.
09:59 There are signals that can be received within a certain range of the transmitter,
10:05 but if this transmitter contacts the satellite
10:07 and the satellite can send the same signal to another satellite,
10:10 the signal can be received anywhere you want on Earth.
10:15 And so the signal can be practically distributed anywhere you want to distribute it on Earth.
10:22 At 1.20 hours local time on the 8th of March 2014,
10:26 all these communications ceased to function.
10:30 By the next morning, the aircraft was declared lost.
10:39 It never landed in Beijing.
10:42 Hundreds of distraught relatives would be left without answers.
10:47 With the heaviest heart and deepest sorrow
10:50 that on behalf of the government of Malaysia,
10:54 we officially declare Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 an accident
11:03 and that all 239 of the passengers and crew on board MH370
11:14 are presumed to have lost their lives.
11:19 This aircraft didn't disappear in one click.
11:22 It disappeared over a couple of hours.
11:25 It was being watched.
11:27 The military, who use other forms of radar, mainly primary radar,
11:32 they did not lose sight of it.
11:34 They were watching it for some time
11:37 and they watched the aircraft virtually do a 180 degree turn
11:41 and fly along a line precisely between two areas of air traffic control responsibility,
11:48 that's Vietnam's and Kuala Lumpur's responsibility,
11:53 so that each side thought the other side had responsibility
11:57 and nobody questioned what was going on.
12:00 It was the beginning of one of the most tragic aviation mysteries of all time.
12:06 Had the aircraft crashed into the South China Sea?
12:10 It took a week for the Malaysian Air Force to volunteer the information
12:14 that MH370 had been tracked by military radar.
12:21 In fact, the flight flew right over Panang
12:24 and north-westwards out over the Andaman Sea before disappearing.
12:29 What could possibly have happened aboard?
12:35 The military, if they had been watching
12:43 and they said they had seen the plane,
12:46 at that point could not understand that the four segments they had seen on their radar
12:50 and their echo radar were the same aircraft.
12:54 Only a person could make that connection.
12:56 And if the controller did, then, as he said in his report,
13:00 he did not consider the aircraft as a threat.
13:03 And rightly and cleverly, the aircraft flew along the frontier between Thailand and Malaysia,
13:08 making each side think that it was under the other's control.
13:18 One of the people determined to find the plane is Simon Hardy,
13:22 himself a Boeing 777 pilot and instructor.
13:26 It was only when the first report came out saying that they had really no way of finding where it was
13:34 that I became interested.
13:37 The first thing I noticed was, I looked at the waypoint where the aircraft had gone missing
13:43 and I saw that it was a place quite unusual
13:46 and it was a place where all five different airspaces actually meet in one spot.
13:53 Six weeks after the aircraft disappeared,
13:55 the satellite company Inmarsat was able to come forward with information of its own.
14:01 The aircraft's Inmarsat receiver contacted the Indian Ocean satellite seven times,
14:08 beginning at 2.25 local time, an hour after the aircraft had disappeared,
14:14 signalling that the system was booting up, proving that it had been turned off beforehand.
14:21 Our interpretation is that when the aircraft's electricity was cut off
14:25 or that someone aboard turned off the electricity, there are two ways.
14:30 There's the electronic bay that is under the cockpit
14:33 that someone could have got into on the ground and stayed there during the flight,
14:37 as it's pressurised, heated, habitable,
14:40 and decide to open the main electricity disjunctors that turns the electricity off.
14:46 What happens?
14:47 The RAT, or a turbine, a little windmill, is deployed from the aircraft
14:53 and produces a small amount of electricity, but enough to fly the plane,
14:57 and enough hydraulics to activate the controls.
15:01 The system sent out an interrogation, that is the satellite sent out an interrogation from time to time,
15:07 and got a vestigial response.
15:10 It wasn't a response that contained much detail,
15:13 but geometrically the satellite could work out where, at what range from the satellite that aircraft was.
15:22 Now, the range means it's anywhere on a big circle.
15:26 Those signals enabled people who understand navigation and mathematics
15:36 to work out where the aircraft must have gone.
15:39 Your GPS in your car finds three satellites,
15:47 and it doesn't know where you are, your GPS, it knows how far you are from that satellite,
15:54 and it also knows the distance to that one and the distance to that one.
15:57 So in its brain, in your GPS, it then draws three circles,
16:02 and where they intersect is your position, and then it puts it on a map.
16:08 So in this way, we've got, if you look at these seven circles,
16:14 they're the sort of GPS distance circles, but we've only got one satellite.
16:20 We haven't got the three, so there's no intersection of three lines to show you where you are.
16:25 You've just got a circle, and you're somewhere on that enormous circle.
16:29 The satellite provided two types of information.
16:33 The burst time offset is the time it takes for a signal to leave the ground station
16:38 and reach the aircraft via the satellite, which gives an arc of possible locations.
16:46 Another set of data, burst frequency offset, is derived from the difference between
16:51 expected and real speed of delivery of the return signal,
16:56 which varies due to a Doppler effect caused by the planes and the satellite's movement.
17:04 For each Inmarsat signal, we have two values, the BTO and the BFO.
17:13 The first gives us a position on a sphere that isn't necessarily the terrestrial globe,
17:19 as it is also in altitude.
17:22 The second gives us an indication of the movement of the plane at that moment in time.
17:27 Is it climbing or descending? How come?
17:31 Because the aircraft has a system of frequency compensation that compensates the Doppler effect,
17:38 that is imperfect, and this error tells us whether the aircraft was climbing or descending,
17:44 and whether it was approaching or distancing itself from the satellite.
17:51 The seven concentric rings produced by the Inmarsat satellite tell us MH370 was somewhere on the circumference,
18:00 but do not tell us the direction it was flying in.
18:04 However, the BPO values did help identify the route and the altitude.
18:10 The Malaysian radar signal shows an extremely calm, precise execution of the flight,
18:20 and the turn-off course shows that the pilots were professional and executed it manually,
18:26 and clearly were not panicking.
18:30 They turned the electricity back on when they needed to, but they had plenty of time,
18:35 because the manoeuvres were every half an hour.
18:39 Their aircraft can't descend by itself. Someone has to enter a new altitude.
18:45 An aircraft will always remain at the same altitude unless there is a human intervention.
18:57 In the meantime, a number of safety issues were coming to light,
19:01 together with various theories as to what might have happened on board.
19:08 Two travellers on Italian passports were found to be Iranian refugees who presented false passports,
19:16 but the hijacking thesis was quickly discarded when the two Iranians were identified.
19:22 However, another terrifying hypothesis came to light.
19:45 We think that there was a case containing 200 kilos, maybe 240 kilos of lithium-ion batteries,
19:51 loaded aboard this aircraft.
19:54 Let's imagine that this crate was loaded into the front cargo bay.
20:00 When you go into a 777 cargo bay, which is a high-ceiling space, almost as high as here,
20:06 you're in a room, a long room that's several, maybe six metres wide.
20:11 And in front of this room and under the cockpit, there's a bulwark
20:15 that separates the cargo bay from the electronics bay.
20:20 The communications bay of the Boeing 777 is separated from the cargo bay by a thin bulwark and a door.
20:36 If the lithium-ion batteries had been loaded against the bulwark,
20:40 any explosion would have cut through the separating wall and the communications bay,
20:45 releasing toxic gases directly into the air conditioning.
20:50 This might have knocked out the crew and passengers,
20:53 leaving only the pilot enough time to don his oxygen mask.
21:06 When a lithium-ion battery burns, it produces a fireball, a flash, that burns out very fast,
21:12 but doesn't burn very long.
21:14 A real flash that releases an enormous heat, that releases mortal gases very quickly.
21:20 Without communications and struggling to find somewhere to land,
21:32 the fainting pilot could have headed for the closest airfield, missed it,
21:37 and turned back before losing consciousness.
21:40 What will be the first reaction of a crew that is swamped by fumes
21:48 and realises that they're dangerous fumes?
21:51 They put on their masks, they try to communicate to alert someone,
21:56 and the first thing they do is to turn towards the closest emergency landing strip.
22:00 The aircraft did, in fact, according to the presumed radar trace,
22:04 the aircraft did turn towards an airport,
22:07 that could have worked as an emergency airport in case of a catastrophic problem aboard.
22:12 So the aircraft did in fact follow an erratic route,
22:16 and this erratic route could have been due to the fact
22:19 that the pilots tried to find a new route to do something,
22:22 but one might have fallen unconscious before the other.
22:30 Two other lithium battery related incidents in the past decade
22:34 suggest that this is a possibility.
22:37 Flight UPS 9 from Dubai crash-landed in the desert
22:42 after the pilots signalled a fire aboard provoked by lithium batteries.
22:47 However, the fire was so catastrophic that the aircraft crashed.
22:52 There were two 747 cargo accidents.
22:56 One took place in the Middle East and the other in the Far East.
23:00 There have been two accidents involving 747 cargos,
23:03 one in the Middle East and the other in the Far East, over the Pacific,
23:07 a short time after take-off.
23:11 In the case of the Middle Eastern accident, the flight lasted just a few minutes.
23:14 The captain, it seems, had left his seat in the cockpit full of fumes
23:18 to go and get a mask, because his wasn't functioning.
23:21 But the co-pilot, on the other hand, who was equipped with a mask,
23:24 said, just before the aircraft crashed, that he couldn't even see the instruments,
23:28 such was the smoke in the cockpit.
23:31 The supposed fire didn't bring the aircraft down, unusual,
23:38 and two, didn't cut off the communications, very unusual.
23:42 So, it's something that you wouldn't expect.
23:47 And the aircraft was still flying, and we can still see it on the military radar.
23:50 It was still flying very successfully as it goes around Penang.
23:54 So, the time between the fire and somebody not controlling the aircraft is quite long.
24:01 If there's a fire, you do want to get the aircraft on the ground as soon as possible,
24:04 land as soon as possible, is what the checklist says.
24:06 It's someone in the cockpit who, on the upper control panel above the pilot's head,
24:12 can press four, five buttons to open the circuits, like the disjunctors,
24:17 that are simple pressure buttons.
24:19 He presses and turns off the generators, the two main ones,
24:24 one in each engine, plus the backup, plus the turbine
24:27 that you hear when you go aboard an aircraft.
24:30 You hear the turbine at the back of the aircraft,
24:34 that supplies power to the aircraft at times, and the fifth generator.
24:38 If you turn off all five, then the RAT is deployed automatically.
24:45 The investigation brought to light another disturbing fact.
24:49 Pilot Zahary Ahmed Shah had mapped a route to the South Indian Ocean
24:54 on his personal computer simulator. Why?
24:58 The co-pilot was a young man who was starting a brilliant career as a line pilot.
25:07 Which isn't the worst job in the world.
25:10 As for the captain, he had a great career,
25:14 and although he was like anyone else with his ideas, with the life,
25:19 but he'd showed no signs of mental stress, unlike other crashes caused by suicide as a pilot
25:24 that could have been foreseen or were foreseeable.
25:27 While here, there's nothing that could indicate
25:30 that there was a deliberate decision on the part of a crew member.
25:34 We know that this aircraft must have been directed
25:38 for the time that it was watched by military radar.
25:41 It must have been directed by somebody who knew how to fly the aircraft,
25:46 and how to navigate it, and how to operate its systems.
25:49 So, it's not a suicide.
25:51 It's a suicide that was foreseen.
25:54 It's a suicide that was foreseen.
25:57 It's a suicide that was foreseen.
26:00 It's a suicide that was foreseen.
26:04 So, we're probably talking about a pilot.
26:07 There were only two pilots on board.
26:10 We don't know if this was a deliberate act.
26:13 We don't know the precise motivation for it,
26:16 but it might have been revenge against Malaysia,
26:19 against the airline, against the employer, against the government.
26:23 You've got a huge device with "Malaysia" written down the side of it.
26:27 If you want to get your own back on something Malaysian,
26:30 making that airplane disappear might be rather a good way of doing it.
26:34 However, speculation on the reasons for the loss of MH370
26:39 will only be fully dispelled once the black box,
26:43 or flight data recorder, has been found.
26:47 As the world puzzled over what had happened to MH370
26:55 with 230 people aboard, a number of new details came to light.
27:01 The first officer's telephone was on,
27:04 and a signal had been picked up at 2.31 hours
27:07 as the aircraft flew around Penang Island.
27:11 No other telephones were picked up,
27:13 and yet there were hundreds of phones on the aircraft.
27:16 What had happened to the passengers and crew?
27:20 The aircraft followed a route that only a very able pilot could have managed,
27:24 according to Jean-Luc Marchand.
27:27 Two other aircraft were flying along the flight path MH370 was on,
27:31 so the pilot took evasive action.
27:35 He managed to find this route after leaving Penang.
27:44 It was an air lane that runs from Singapore, Kuala Lumpur,
27:48 towards the Middle East and Europe, and which was quite active,
27:52 which planes were flying along.
27:55 And that night, as he left the radar coverage,
27:58 he was followed by an Emirates flight about 20 nautical miles behind his left shoulder.
28:04 And in front of him, he had a flight that had left half an hour earlier
28:07 from Madras, from Chennai, which was on Indigo,
28:11 and which was flying about the same altitude.
28:14 So he had two planes flying more or less at his altitude,
28:18 and he wanted to take a left turn.
28:21 And to avoid them, he carried out a contingency procedure,
28:25 which involves shifting right by 15 nautical miles
28:29 and then descending to pass under the air lane.
28:33 The aircraft went to great lengths not to alert air forces
28:38 by flying along non-threatening routes and as far away as possible from known radar ranges.
28:45 But if the plane flew south, where did it end up?
28:51 We hypothesized that the pilot or whoever was at the controls
28:57 respected the structure of airspace and the lanes.
29:01 And keeping that in mind, we deduced the potential
29:04 and possible actions of the aircraft at each key moment.
29:08 And thanks to the measurements, we identified the direction
29:11 and the altitude of flight from the Inmarsat data.
29:15 So we interpreted the data to find the trajectory,
29:19 and this gave us a trajectory that was descending between 1825 and 1840,
29:25 before turning south to fly under the air lanes, remaining at altitude 270,
29:32 to go around the secondary radar of Seabang, and then he flew south,
29:36 so changed heading, and then he flew under two air lanes that are lower.
29:45 On the other hand, Simon Hardy does not believe the plane flew low,
29:49 but rather tried to get as far away as possible.
29:52 So he concentrated on the last three arcs on which the aircraft was located,
29:57 while still communicating with Inmarsat.
30:00 There's seven pings, seven circles, seven range circles, which have to be solved.
30:08 The first one, and the last one, is the aircraft being repowered,
30:15 or the satellite unit, the satellite data unit on the aircraft being repowered,
30:19 and it's saying to the satellite, "I'm starting up after having been off."
30:23 The other one is a periodic inquiry from the satellite to the aircraft,
30:31 saying, "Are you still turned on?"
30:34 So that's why these arcs are an hour apart, apart from one,
30:38 which is the ones I use later, is an hour and a half apart,
30:42 because there's a telephone call that comes in at the moment
30:45 when it would have been sending the inquiry, the hourly inquiry.
30:50 The information Simon Hardy was looking for was direction and speed values
30:55 that were compatible with the plane taking an hour to fly between the 5th and 6th arc,
31:01 and 90 minutes between the 6th and 7th.
31:04 Most of my lines, when I drew them on this big map here, were pretty much parallel.
31:12 I didn't know which one was correct, but I was finding something out.
31:16 I was finding out that the track of the aircraft during those two and a half hours
31:21 was somewhere between 188 degrees and 192 degrees.
31:26 Now Simon had to find the speed.
31:30 The aircraft has to fly down from up near the tip of Sumatra.
31:34 It has to get to these various points on the last section.
31:39 It has to get there, and so what I did then was say,
31:42 "OK, the distance from there to there, or the time from there to there,
31:46 is three hours and five minutes. It has to get there,
31:49 so what's the speed of it from there to there?"
31:52 One of these lines will be no speed change between the three hours and five minutes
31:57 and the next bit, which is drawn down here.
32:00 So then the next process was, "OK, what is the constant speed line of all these lines?"
32:06 And they're crossing over nicely in the opposite direction.
32:10 So which is the constant speed line?
32:13 I did my calculations. I found the constant speed line, which was 488 knots.
32:19 The constant speed line that connected the distance between the 5th and 6th arc
32:26 and the 6th and 7th indicated a speed that Simon had seen often.
32:31 Unlike a car, in cruise, an aircraft goes pretty much at the same speed day in, day out.
32:39 So for the last 15 years, I've been seeing 488 knots in front of me as I'm in cruise on my 777.
32:46 So the fact that it was telling me the constant speed line is 488 knots, that's astounding.
32:54 That tells me not only that I'm making progress,
32:57 but maybe the aircraft that made this line was a 777 rather than a 737.
33:02 If the aircraft was flying at 488 knots along those lines,
33:07 what course would it have taken to reach the place it disappeared from radar coverage
33:12 in three hours and five minutes from its last sighting?
33:16 So at that point, I then transferred from this map,
33:21 where you can't see, this is a long way away from the tip of Sumatra.
33:24 So I then transferred my affections onto Google Maps,
33:29 drew the little line down here, which is the 488 between 4, 5 and 6,
33:35 and joined it up the three hours, five minutes to see what the difference in the angle was.
33:40 Well, there wasn't a difference in the angle. It's a straight line.
33:45 That was the second part where I'd say, oh goodness, I'm onto something here.
33:50 The slower the plane flies, the more its route will curve to the east,
33:55 so it will end up further north than the areas searched,
34:00 that were searched assuming a straight line.
34:04 If you assume a high speed, then the straighter the line,
34:07 and the more it will take a southerly route. It's inevitable.
34:11 In our case, our trajectory is descending bit by bit,
34:15 so the speed of the plane is slower and slower.
34:18 That's inevitable. So our trajectory aims towards Christmas Island.
34:23 Other groups, such as the ATSB for example,
34:27 say that they think it flew at a constant speed,
34:31 because at that altitude you need to fly relatively fast to fly at all.
34:36 So inevitably their heading is much more southerly.
34:42 That little line down here in southern Asia could have been pointing at Bali or India
34:47 or anywhere, but it wasn't.
34:49 It was pointing directly at the place where the aircraft turned south.
34:54 However, it is the last part of the route that is so difficult to estimate.
35:00 The Inmarsat transmitter was rebooted, but never told the satellite it was ready.
35:06 At some time within those three minutes, the aircraft was no longer flying.
35:16 The Royal Australian Navy and the Malaysian government
35:19 joined forces to search for the aircraft
35:22 and launched the most expensive search and rescue operation of all time.
35:27 The resources placed at the disposal of the operation were impressive,
35:32 but the size of the area was also awe-inspiring.
35:36 More than a million square kilometers of empty ocean.
35:40 The search continued for four years,
35:43 and then the private oil prospecting company Ocean Infinity
35:47 offered a success fee deal to find the plane.
35:51 These two campaigns also drew a blank.
35:56 Once Simon Hardy was able to establish the route and the distance,
36:00 it was a logical step to estimate the location of the aircraft.
36:05 That where that 188 degrees crosses the last beep
36:10 is the place to say, "OK, the aircraft passed over the seventh arc here."
36:15 That is not where they've searched there,
36:18 but I've always said that's not the place to search.
36:21 Where the seventh arc is, is where the aircraft is saying,
36:26 it's another indication that the satellite unit is working.
36:30 It's actually a startup again.
36:32 But it's saying, "Windows starting." So it's working.
36:36 The seventh arc, all these complicated things inside the aircraft are working.
36:40 It hasn't been smashed into a thousand pieces.
36:44 The Inmarsat transmitter was rebooted because it had been turned off beforehand,
36:50 possibly because the engines no longer provided electrical power.
36:54 It never sent a message to say it was ready.
36:58 In those three minutes, the aircraft was no longer flying.
37:02 By creating a flight plan based on the actual route followed by the aircraft
37:07 and the presumed route to the South Indian Ocean,
37:10 Simon Hardy was able to find three parameters
37:13 that indicate where the plane should be.
37:16 As a 777 pilot, I was able to use a professional flight plan
37:21 for the known part of the flight, which you can see, for about the first hour,
37:26 up to when it disappears off the edge of the radar at 1822, forever.
37:32 So that's all absolutely correct.
37:35 And then after that, I have to add in a little bit up to the turn South
37:39 and then the turn South on 188 straight.
37:42 And then I can also draw another circle of where it runs out of fuel.
37:46 So I've got two circles, I've got two lines, 188, seventh arc,
37:51 and now I've got another arc, which is the range circle.
37:54 So those all cross in almost the same place.
37:58 They cross in about 27 nautical miles from each other,
38:02 which is, again, that's extraordinary.
38:05 I couldn't make it up.
38:07 According to this theory, pilot Zahary Ahmad Shah was alive and piloting
38:12 for the whole period of the flight,
38:14 from where it disappeared off the radar screens to its final descent.
38:19 It is a terrifying idea.
38:22 The French former Eurocontrol expert has a different theory.
38:27 We don't know how whoever was in control actually introduced the data
38:32 into the flight computer to indicate the next point.
38:35 Did they introduce a flight plan, or did they do it point by point?
38:40 So if it was a flight plan, and they had indicated Christmas Island,
38:44 we have to take into account that the predictions of the flight computer
38:48 are not perfectly precise, and it gets more accurate
38:51 as it draws closer to the destination.
38:54 Our flight simulator continued to tell us that we had enough fuel to get there,
38:59 up to 200 nautical miles beforehand, and then, as we drew closer,
39:04 told us we wouldn't make it.
39:07 How could the pilot have got away with it?
39:10 There was a crew, and there was a co-pilot.
39:13 The most obvious way to disable the passengers
39:18 would be to do a depressurization, which can easily be organized.
39:22 We have switches to prevent it.
39:26 So it's usually done by the aircraft, it's automatically doing pressurization.
39:31 But if that goes wrong, we have switches,
39:34 you can go to manual opening of outflow valves.
39:38 They're big, about this size, outflow valves on the side of the aircraft,
39:43 one at the front, one at the back, and we can manually control them.
39:47 So if you wanted to do a depressurization for some reason,
39:52 you can do it.
39:54 As the pilot, you have full control over the aircraft.
39:58 So that would be the easiest way to disable the passengers and the crew.
40:06 One of the reasons Simon Hardy is so convinced
40:09 that the aircraft was deliberately taken off course
40:12 is a strange maneuver it carried out over the island of Panang.
40:16 The aircraft does a strange turn around Panang.
40:20 That was another one. It took me months to think of that one.
40:24 It doesn't go directly over the airport, so I was thinking,
40:27 "Why is it staying away?" It's staying a few miles away,
40:30 but it does a very shallow turn all the way around the southern waters of the island.
40:35 And then after a while, I remembered that I'd done this sort of maneuver myself.
40:39 When I wanted to look at something, it was Ayers Rock.
40:42 So I went, "I want to look at something."
40:44 So I thought, "Oh, somebody's looking out the window.
40:46 Somebody's looking at something."
40:48 And so that's when I came down here, and I typed in, "Where are the crew from?
40:53 Where's the first officer from?" It's from Selangor.
40:55 "Where's the captain from?" He's from the island of Panang.
40:59 We think that the aircraft was controlled right to the end,
41:06 and despite having no engines, the pilot tried to ditch the plane.
41:13 Why? Because there was so little debris on the surface that has been recovered,
41:18 and the nature of the debris and the way it has broken suggests to us that it was a ditching.
41:26 Study of the ocean currents suggests that MH370 really did crash land in the southern Indian Ocean.
41:34 One part in particular is of interest.
41:37 It is the left flaparon, and it suggests that the pilot tried to ditch the plane smoothly on water
41:44 rather than crashing it vertically.
41:47 The flaparon, found in Réunion, was eroded along the trailing edge,
41:53 damage that can only have been produced if it had been extended for landing.
41:59 An event that was spectacularly achieved on the Hudson River in 2017 by Chesley Burnett-Sullenberger.
42:09 We took a look at all the depressions that crossed the potential path of the debris,
42:16 and there were about 15, of which one was very important, and that is Gillian.
42:22 Just a few days after the crash, and that's determining because it took the debris very far south for several days,
42:29 and then pushed them westwards, which makes the point that we have found as the aircraft's crash site plausible.
42:38 So we projected this debris and saw where they would land,
42:42 and in fact the data suggested La Réunion Island over the time observed,
42:47 and the coast of Madagascar and Africa over the same time.
42:53 Simon Hardy's calculations did not end with an approximate place of ditching.
43:00 He continued to look at the data available and at the area where he thinks the plane might be.
43:06 When I started drawing the final resting place of the aircraft, which ends up with the shape of a piece of cheese,
43:15 I saw that there was a dark line running through this piece of cheese from the tip of it to the curved edge,
43:24 running right through it like a spine through it, and I had no idea what that was, but it's another coincidence.
43:30 So I then looked it up and it's called the Hale-Vinch Fracture Zone.
43:33 It's a big trench, it's 4,500 metres deep, it has seismic activity.
43:43 As somebody who was planning to make an aircraft disappear, if that's what's happened,
43:49 this would be an ideal place to put it.
43:52 According to some reports, there is a final twist in the story of MH370.
43:58 Shah received a telephone call on his own cell phone, half an hour before take-off.
44:04 It was made from a phone using a SIM card that had been bought by a woman using a false identity.
44:11 However, the telephone that used that SIM card has been identified,
44:17 but that identity has not been released by the Malaysian government, nor where the telephone call was made from.
44:25 The SIM card made that one single telephone call.
44:30 Who made it and what was said will never be known,
44:34 even in this day and age of high-tech and ubiquitous personal information,
44:39 nor will the reason why one of the largest and most sophisticated aircraft available today
44:45 disappeared over the most remote area of the Earth.
44:53 The mystery will continue, unless the aircraft is found and its flight data recorder retrieved,
45:00 as the relatives of the 230 passengers and crew aboard MH370 earnestly hope.
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