Shortly after midnight on 8 March 2014, a Boeing 777 heaved into the air from Kuala Lumpur and climbed steadily to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000ft. After being instructed to switch frequencies to Vietnamese air traffic control, the pilot replied in the polite but methodical manner that is common in radio calls: “Good night, Malaysian three seven zero.” It was the last message that would ever be received from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
A decade has passed since the plane veered wildly off course during a routine flight to Beijing and disappeared but, despite one of the largest and most expensive multinational searches in history, one of aviation’s greatest mysteries remains unsolved.
For Naren, whose wife, Chandrika, was among the 239 people onboard the flight that never reached its destination, that is impossible to accept. “I worry that by not knowing what happened to the flight, we are collectively vulnerable to a recurrence.”
It is a question that haunts all who fear flying, and many of those who don’t. How can a sophisticated Boeing 777 – one equipped with modern instruments for an era of global satellite tracking and constant communication – simply vanish?
“Every succeeding anniversary has been less about my personal loss and more about not yet having answers to what really happened to the flight,” says Naren, from India, whose full name is KS Narendran. “Knowing where the flight ended and what led it to its resting place, in whatever form or shape, remains important. It is the question I come back to once in a while with a sense of agitation, even frustration. I may never know in my lifetime.”
The need for answers also burns inside the families of those who were operating the doomed flight, as accusations and conspiracy theories swirl.
Dr Ghouse Mohd Noor, a friend of the flight’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, says: “Captain Zaharie’s family is still strongly hoping for answers. There is still no closure on it. There must be an explanation of what happened.
“His wife and children [remain] objective, but the big question mark remains closure. Everybody needs closure. I pray day and night that this plane will be found. We will support every effort and new efforts that are being put forward.”
Fuad Sharuji, who worked as the crisis director for Malaysian Airlines when MH370 was lost, says Zaharie’s family has become isolated as they struggle with the conspiracy theories surrounding the pilot.
“For them it is quite difficult, they have been shutting themselves away from media as they cannot accept the accusations ... They are trying their best to resume life.”
In the days after the flight disappeared, there was so little information available that the search area stretched from Kazakhstan in central Asia to Antarctica. In the weeks, months and years since, fragments of evidence gathered from satellite data, radar tracking and even ocean current analysis have helped narrow the search. But they also led to wildly different theories.
Those have ranged from a pilot “gone rogue” to sabotage and conspiracies that the flight was shot down or “disappeared” by a nefarious government agency and landed at a dark site, either because of sensitive cargo or a politically significant passenger. For months, the missing passengers were under scrutiny, with allegations one or a group had commandeered the plane in an elaborate murder-suicide. Less dramatic, non-human factors have been looked at too, including electrical failure, fire or sudden depressurisation of the cockpit.
Meanwhile, poor public communication and dithering from the Malaysian government – which at the time of the disappearance was led by prime minister Najib Razak, who is now in prison over unrelated corruption charges – has hampered search efforts.
On Sunday, prime minister Anwar Ibrahim reiterated Malaysia’s position that it was willing to reopen an investigation if there was compelling new evidence. Malaysia’s transport minister, Anthony Loke said he was ready to meet the US marine robotics company Ocean Infinity to discuss a new search operation after it submitted a proposal to the government.
Since 2014, three official investigations have been launched: a fruitless Australian-led undersea search, a Malaysian police probe, and the latest, a Malaysian official accident inquiry that produced a nearly 500-page report in 2018. None has determined the cause of the plane’s disappearance.
Even amateur sleuth Blaine Gibson, a lawyer from Seattle who became quasi-famous after finding MH370 debris on beaches in Madagascar and Mozambique, has gone quiet. In the nasty world of conspiracy theories, Gibson faced hordes of online trolls.
The same questions from 2014 remain unanswered in 2024. Chief among them is why the plane made a seemingly controlled turn off course towards the Indian ocean and, critically, why two pieces of key communication and tracking equipment on the plane went silent.
This has led to much focus on Zaharie, 53, and co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, who led a crew of 10 others. The “rogue pilot” theory gained further airtime when data recovered from a home-built flight simulator owned by Zaharie showed someone had plotted a course to the southern Indian Ocean.
“In truth, a lot can now be known with certainty about the fate of MH370,” William Langewiesche, a pilot turned investigative journalist, wrote in the Atlantic in 2019. “First, the disappearance was an intentional act. It is inconceivable that the known flight path, accompanied by radio and electronic silence, was caused by any combination of system failure and human error.”
Langewiesche believes that Zaharie may have sent the more junior first officer out of the cockpit on some made-up errand, then shut down much of the electrical system and deliberately depressurised the aeroplane, causing the rapid incapacitation of everyone in the cabin within minutes. “The scene would have been dimly lit by the emergency lights, with the dead belted into their seats, their faces nestled in the worthless oxygen masks dangling on tubes from the ceiling,” he wrote.
With much more powerful oxygen masks in the cockpit, Zaharie could have survived, even at tens of thousands of feet altitude, Langewiesche claims.
Another theory, one that other aviation experts suggest is possible or even probable, is that of the “confused” rather than “rogue” pilot. That is, Zaharie encountered an issue such as a fire or depressurisation and turned back towards Malaysia but was overcome by fumes or lack of oxygen, known as hypoxia. In the muddle, Zaharie or Fariq might have accidentally turned off comms equipment. The plane would then have continued in what is known as a “ghost flight”, in which its occupants are dead but the aircraft continues on autopilot.
Sylvia Spruck Wrigley, the author of The Mystery of Malaysia Flight 370 and a two-book series on plane disappearances, Without a Trace, says that while there may never be closure, the aviation industry has already learned so much from the tragedy and implemented new safety rules.
Europe and the UK have since mandated that an additional low-frequency underwater locator beacon, which helps search-and-rescue locate survivors at sea, be attached to an aircraft’s airframe and they need to be able to transmit full-strength for at least 90 days, up from 30 days. There are also efforts to get cockpit voice recorders to retain 25 hours of data, rather than just two.
Still, after 10 years of unanswered questions, theories and counter-theories continue to proliferate online, swelling to fill the information vacuum.
“I think to a great extent,” says Spruck Wrigley, “people cannot imagine that it is possible that we will never know what happened.”
