The facts in the disappearance of flight MH370

I'm going to do another of these posts where I've watched a stupid Netflix documentary and it's left me profoundly unsatisfied. This time it was MH370: The Plane That Disappeared, on Malaysia Airlines flight 370, the Boeing 777 that vanished in 2014 on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and inexplicably ended up crashing in the Indian Ocean.

What's annoying about the three-part documentary series is that it does such a bad job of presenting the actual facts of the case. What's downright irresponsible, in fact unethical, is that they give huge amounts of screen time to fantasists hawking ridiculous conspiracy theories. So, just to register my protests, I want to go over what we actually know about the MH370 incident, and then say a few words about the so-called "theories" presented on the show.

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Let's start with the facts. Sadly, the official report released by the Malaysian government doesn't seem to be online any more, or at least I couldn't access it. So I'll be doing this based on secondary sources, with the help of Wikipedia.

Here's a useful map from Wikimedia Commons, which shows the known flight path of MH370.

Here are the facts of the matter.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, a Boeing 777 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, took off at 12:41 MYT (UTC+8). At 01:19, the flight was approaching the border between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace, and Kuala Lumpur air traffic control instructed them to get in touch with Ho Chi Minh ATC. The captain of MH370 acknowledged the message.

However, MH370 never got in touch with Vietnamese air traffic control. Instead, as it passed navigational waypoint IGARI, the plane's transponder stopped transmitting.

A short digression is in order, as aviation people apparently say "radar" to mean two different things, which is confusing for a layperson, and terribly confusing for someone who knows a little about military aviation. What I believe most of us think of as radar, i.e. an electronic transmitter that detects objects based on their radar reflection, is apparently known in aviatiom as primary radar. When popular accounts of MH370 say that the aircraft "disappeared from radar", they mean secondary radar, which isn't actually a radar system at all in the sense I understand it, but rather a system similar to military IFF, which communicates with transponders on aircraft. When MH370's transponder stopped transmitting, air traffic control could no longer see it on secondary radar.

Military radar data would later show that the plane then made a sharp (at least for a passenger plane) turn left, onto a southwesterly heading. The official investigation would later determine that the turn could not have been done by autopilot, and therefore must have been made by hand. So either some frankly unbelievable sequence of events occurred on board, or someone deliberately turned the aircraft using the flight controls.

After flying to a point very near the island of Penang, the aircraft made a right turn and flew up the Strait of Malacca, along an established air route, passing several waypoints, until it flew out of the range of Malaysian military radar at 02:22. Thai military radar also detected an aircraft believed to be MH370, and as it passed Penang at 01:52 MYT, the first officer's cellphone briefly registered with a nearby cell tower.

After the plane's transponder stopped transmitting, the satellite communication system on the aircraft rebooted and established contact with an Inmarsat satellite. Using the satellite communication data, it was later determined that MH370 kept flying west, and then turned south, into the southern Indian Ocean. As the aircraft had limited fuel, there were no possible landing sites in the vicinity, and pieces of debris confirmed as coming from that specific Boeing 777 were later found, it seems that flight MH370 eventually crashed into the ocean. Because the specific crash site is not known and the conditions and size of the area make searching extremely difficult, the wreck has not been found as of this writing.

As I understand it, while the initial hard turn off the plane's expected flight path must have been made by hand, the subsequent turns could have been flown by autopilot, but in that case, someone must have programmed the autopilot to do so. Again, it seems almost impossible to conceive of any other explanation. Based on the evidence that exists, it is a fact that MH370 flew into the Indian Ocean and crashed there. It seems very difficult to believe that it was not flown there intentionally by someone.

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Unfortunately, the Netflix program does not make these basic facts at all clear, and indeed omits some of them. It's probably not a coincidence that some of the absolutely bizarre conspiracy theories peddled on the show require this omission of facts.

Something that genuinely annoys me is when people ask rhetorical questions that they absolutely should be asking as real questions. A particularly egregious example on the Netflix show is the French reporter, who points out that MH370 "supposedly" flew right over Malaysia, in fact almost directly over a Malaysian airbase. She then asks, rhetorically, whether it's supposed to be possible that no-one would have noticed this and attempted to intercept the plane.

In my capacity as a military historian, let me assure you that the answer to any question that starts "could a military organization be so incompetent" is yes. This is almost certainly true of all human organizations, but the ones I've studied happen to be military. In this case, as can be read online (ironically, in French!), the air base MH370 overflew was not in operation at night. Even if someone had wanted to intercept the unknown radar contact, it would have taken two hours to get a plane in the air. Is this believable? In my opinion, absolutely. It also explains much of the delay in publishing the radar data, as no nation will want to advertise the fact that they don't, or even worse, can't effectively police their own airspace.

If you still think it's unbelievable that an unidentified aircraft could fly through air defenses without being intercepted, well, by coincidence I gave a lecture on the Soviet Union and the Cold War earlier this year, where I discussed the extraordinary flight of Mathias Rust.

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Sadly, instead of concentrating on the facts and some sensible attempts to explain what happened, two of three Netflix episodes are dedicated to totally ridiculous conspiracy theories.

The first is peddled by an American journalist, who has been inexplicably elevated to the position of Will Buxton in the program. His version of events is that Russia hijacked the aircraft, flew it to Kazakhstan, and... something. Ostensibly to distract everyone from their invasion of the Crimea. The story is childish nonsense. Obviously it would make sense for the Russians to risk a catastrophic breach in their relations with China as they're embarking on a military operation in Europe. Murdering over a hundred Chinese civilians for a stupid media distraction is completely insane.

The hijack theory is foreshadowed by linking it to the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 by Russian-controlled "separatists" in Ukraine. But no link between the two is actually ever made, except that apparently the shootdown of MH17 gave the American journalist vibes.

A far more serious objection to the Russia/Kazakhstan theory is that there's simply no way the plane could have been flown there without anyone noticing. It would have had to cross vast swathes of Indian and Chinese airspace, either completely undetected by anyone, or with the inexplicable complicity of at least those nations. There's simply no excuse for taking drivel like this seriously.

However, it gets so much worse. In the first episode, we already encountered a lady from Florida who participated in a volunteer satellite imagery interpretation operation called Tomnod. Apparently it was an effort to crowdsource looking for things in publicly available satellite pictures.

As this article in the Guardian makes clear, Tomnod volunteers have no training in satellite image interpretation. So when the Florida lady cheerfully explains to us that she found aircraft wreckage in some of the pictures, this is frankly nonsense. She can't tell a crashed aircraft from a wave or a flock of seagulls. This is never explained on the show, and we're simply left with this woman insisting she has "evidence" MH370 crashed in the South China Sea. Apparently she couldn't get Tomnod or indeed anyone else to take her "evidence" seriously, to their credit.

Sadly, she is taken very seriously by a French journalist, whose idiotic conspiracy theory takes up almost all of the third episode. With the help of a man who tragically lost his partner and child on the flight, she spins a moronic story that is totally implausible from start to finish, which must have been obvious to anyone with even a cursory understanding of, say, military aviation.

The French story is that MH370 was carrying some kind of super secret Chinese cargo, which the Americans were determined to stop from reaching Beijing. Supposedly, two E-3 AWACS planes intercepted MH370, jammed its communications and ordered it to divert somewhere. When the flight crew refused, the Americans shot the plane down. Everything we've been told about the plane turning west and so on is a deliberate lie to conceal this.

It's hard to know where to even start with this. AWACS planes have no radio jamming capability. If somehow they'd made enough noise to stop MH370 from communicating and mask its transponder signal, this would have been very obvious to everyone around. The AWACS planes are also completely unarmed, so then some other aircraft would have shot down the plane. This would all have been clearly visible on Malaysian and Vietnamese radar screens.

Also, by the way, all the debris from the shootdown inexplicably vanished, with none of it washing up anywhere on the nearby coasts. When small amounts of debris are recovered from the actual crash, that "proves" it didn't really happen. When a made-up crash produces no debris whatsoever, somehow this isn't a problem.

This "theory" also requires all of the evidence to the contrary to have been faked. The Inmarsat data is just completely made up, as is the Malaysian, Vietnamese and Thai radar data, and the cellphone tower ping at Penang. Instead of saying the plane crashed or disappeared, supposedly a massive Malaysian-Vietnamese-Thai-UK deception operation was set into action, telling an almost unbelievable fake story that captures interest and imagination a decade later. Some coverup!

The hawkers of this idiocy make it amply clear on the program that they have no idea what they're talking about. They don't seem to know what an AWACS plane even is, let alone what electronic jamming is. They have literally zero evidence for anything. They can't tell us what cargo could even in theory have been so important that the US armed forces would deliberately shoot down a passenger airliner to stop it getting to China. The whole thing is raving madness, and none of the glaring holes in the supposed logic, none of the ludicrously false statements, are in any way challenged. It amounts to pure disinformation.

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Speaking as a historian, the most fundamental problem with these crackpot theories is not how stupid they are. It's that they're asking us to believe in incredibly elaborate deception operations, and discount factual evidence, in favor of a "theory", or rather an entirely baseless conjecture, that even if you accept its premises, still doesn't do a better job of explaining what happened.

In history terms, none of the alternate explanations for what happened to flight MH370 have better explanatory power than the ones based on what we believe are the facts. To put it crudely, we're being asked to discard facts and official investigative findings, and we're not being offered anything better in exchange.Why should I believe that the Inmarsat data is faked, or that the Malaysian air force is lying about their radar data? What better understanding of the case do I arrive at if I do that? None whatsoever.

That's the most elementary test that all of these conjectures fail, and it's why I consider them nonsense conspiracy theories. They're disinformation: deliberate lies cooked up to sell books and media appearances, at the expense of real people who lost loved ones in the tragedy. It's beyond repulsive that Netflix collaborates with these ghouls.

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There are some theories of how the otherwise inexplicable flight of MH370 could have been caused by an accident. Two are dealt with quite well in this blogpost, even if I don't quite agree with its conclusions. The problem with all accident theories, in my opinion, is that the accident would have to have happened at such an incredibly convenient time, at the exact handover point between two air traffic control stations. Of course it's entirely possible that this is what happened, but it's a hell of a coincidence.

Where I disagree with the blog I linked just now is that I also find the most popular theory, that the captain of the aircraft deliberately crashed the plane into the ocean, equally difficult to believe. There's been so much nonsense talked about the captain that it's quite hard to figure out what the truth is. As far as I know, no-one has been able to explain why he would have done it, and my understanding is that the significance of the recovered flight simulator data is unclear. It certainly doesn't prove anything, and I think the blog I linked is wildly incorrect in maintaining that other explanations have been eliminated. They certainly have not been.

Even though I clearly know more about military aviation than some of the people involved in that risible television program, that's an indictment of them and Netflix, not a sign that I'm any kind of expert on anything related to this case. Still, since this is my blog, I can offer up my two cents on the whole thing.

My starting point is that someone selected the route that MH370 flew from the point where the transponder was switched off. If someone wanted to make the flight disappear, that handover point between two ATC areas has to be the best possible place to do it. This is the contention at the heart of the popular theory that the pilot did it, for which there is still no actual evidence whatsoever.

It would also be the best possible place to hijack the aircraft, especially if you wanted to fly it to some completely different destination and wanted to get a head start on the authorities. I think this theory has been unfairly discounted.

The specific objection I want to make is to the idea that hijacking can be discounted because the various authorities have checked up on all the passengers and crew, and found no-one to suspect. I maintain that with the information we have now, no-one can possibly know whether there were people on board MH370 who should not have been there.

People do stow away on planes, often in wheel wells, and it mostly ends badly for them. But only last year, someone survived an 11-hour flight from South Africa (or at least Nairobi) to Amsterdam (BBC). If someone wanted to hijack a plane, one way it could be done would be by stowing away on board.

This may sound implausibly far-fetched, but something like this has happened at least once: in 1986, a man snuck on board an airplane at Eugene, Oregon and hijacked it when it was in flight (UPI).

The same arguments that are made in favor of the pilot hypothesis also support the hijack hypothesis, for example, the choice of a flight path down the middle of the Strait of Malacca, along the border of different national airspaces. If I remember correctly, when only the military radar data was available, it was calculated that there were hundreds of airfields that the plane could have flown to after it left Malaysian radar coverage.

What if someone, one or more people, did secretly board the plane, hijack it over the South China Sea, and order the pilots to fly the route the plane flew? I'm not aware of any evidence that contradicts this. It's a somewhat far-fetched scenario, sure - but so are all of the other explanations.

By a startling coincidence, the first ever fatal crash suffered by Malaysia Airlines happened in 1977, when it was still called Malaysian Airline Systems. Flight MH653, a Boeing 737 from Penang to Kuala Lumpur, was hijacked and diverted to Singapore. The hijackers were told that the plane didn't have enough fuel to reach Singapore, and they then apparently shot the pilots, and the plane crashed. Everyone on board died. As I understand it, nobody ever really found out who was responsible, and why they did it.

In the case of MH370, if it was hijacked, I would assume the hijackers had some kind of plan, but it went badly wrong, and the plane ends up crashing into the ocean. Or there was no plan, or it was a stupid one, as seems to have been the case with MH653. I didn't know about MH653 before I started looking into this, but I think it's a powerful reminder that sometimes hijackings don't seem to make sense, and can remain unsolved.

I have no idea who could have wanted to hijack a Malaysia Airlines flight to Beijing or why, or where they might have been trying to fly the plane. I also have no idea whether something went wrong that led to the aircraft ending up in the Indian Ocean, or if that was actually the plan all along. It would be an exceptional sequence of events. However, none of the people advocating for the theory that the pilot flew the plane into the ocean deliberately can explain why he did it, or why he chose that particular flight path.

I would be willing to go so far as to say that the theory that the plane was hijacked is actually a better explanation than the pilot being responsible, for one reason only: the hijacking theory does not require any known person to suddenly behave inexplicably. Again, none of the people blaming the pilot can explain why he would have done it.

To sum up, I think the theory that what happened to MH370 was a hijacking gone wrong, or a really weird hijacking, by people who were neither part of the crew nor on the passenger manifest, cannot be discounted. I would even go so far as to say that I think it is one of the most likely explanations for what happened, but that's just a layman's opinion. At the very least I maintain that this hijacking theory is much less stupid than the one Netflix dedicated an entire damn episode to.

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I suppose the odds are that we'll never find out what really happened to flight MH370. Maybe the wreckage will eventually be found, but I don't know if there's really the slightest chance that any meaningful information could be gleaned from it after all this time, or what other evidence could possibly emerge.

I can't imagine what it's like to have a partner, family member or other loved one disappear like this, with no explanation and not even any real certainty that they're dead. That's why I think it's all the more despicable that there are people willing to use this tragedy as fodder for childish conspiracy theories, and to make money exploiting the suffering of the people affected by it.

I think the ethics of Netflix participating in this are absolutely deplorable. To air this kind of Ancient Aliens-level garbage about the deaths of real people is disgusting commodification of human suffering for our leering consumption. I freely admit that I'm fascinated by unsolved mysteries, and in that sense I, too, am partly culpable in this. But I don't see why we can't discuss things like this without platforming profiteering liars and irresponsible conspiracy theorists. Companies like Netflix simply must do better.