THE MYSTERY OF MALAYSIAN AIRLINE MH370

I will today focus on aircraft that just disappeared, with an in-depth analysis on Malaysian Air 370, a Boeing 777-200ER, that vanished on 8March2014.  

• There have been 242 incidents when a flying object with at least one passenger disappeared, going back to 1857.  There is a Cuban expression, Voló como Matías Pérez, meaning he flew like Matias Perez, which became popular since Matías Pérez in a hot air balloon over the North Atlantic Ocean never was found.
• 
  A particularly notable loss was the Lockheed Electra 10E with Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan in 1937 over the Central Pacific Ocean.
• They were on an around-the-world flight.
• The U.S. government searched for 16 days with nine vessels and around 4000 crew members, including the aircraft carrier Lexington, and 66 aircraft.
• 
  Several films were produced: 1943 with Rosalind Russell as Earhart, 1976 with Susan Clark, 1994 with Diane Keaton and 2009 with Hilary Swank.
• There have been numerous private attempts, and this year, a Purdue University-backed team, named the Taraia Object Expedition, will be investigating the island of Nikumaroro.  Interesting that Earhart was an employee of Purdue, which helped fund her historic flight.

• 
  1945 was a particularly terrible year, for there were nine flights that vanished.
• On December 5, five TBM Avengers with a total crew of 14 disappeared, supposedly in the vicinity of the Bermuda Triangle.  The presumed suspicion is that they just ran out of fuel.

• 
  Then on the same day, a Martin PBM 5-A Mariner with 13 people, conducted a search mission for the TBM Avengers.  No clues, but the surmisal was a mid-air explosion.
• No remains were ever found of the 27 individuals and 6 planes.

• 
  However, in 1977, the beginning of the movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, shows the five Avengers in the Mexican Sonora Desert, with no crew members..... but, at the end of the film, are shown to be released by a gigantic flying saucer, with many others who had similarly disappeared.

Just about a decade ago I posted on, WHAT HAPPENED TO MALAYSIAN AIR 370?  I said:

To recap, the plane took off with 227 passengers and 12 crew members from 15 nations, departing  Kuala Lumpur for Beijing at 12:41AM (hate these night flights) on 8 March 2014.  At 1:19 AM the co-pilot said to air traffic control in Malaysia, "All right, good night."  Three minutes later the transponder and automatic dependent surveillance link went off, and at 6:30AM the flight failed to arrive in Beijing.  MH370 had vanished. 

Here is the operational map at this early stage.

Here is the summary:

Not much difference.  Clearly, the plane crashed, for significant plane parts floated to Reunion Island, Madagascar, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa and Australia.  The evidence from the latter site was largely ignored because it did not fit the pattern, but the fisherman who found it, and then had to ditch the part, provided some good timing data for models.

Into the spotlight again pops Tony Romeo, who runs underwater search company Deep Sea Vision, who recently said he had discovered the remains of Amelia Earhart's lost plane between Hawaii and Australia.  Read that link and you will learn that he "thinks" his firm has narrowed the search to a certain site, but now seeks millions to do the actual exploration.  One might think he again is using this sales technique.

Others are also searching for MH370, as for example, British Simon Hardy, who suggested that the airline pilot remained in control for the whole flight, and intentionally plunged the plane into the Geelvinck Fracture Zone to make discovery difficult.  Some evidence:

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  This pilot requested that only the cockpit's oxygen level to be topped up before the flight, and nowhere else.  Thus, chances are he wanted early on to depressurize the passenger cabin to render then unconscious before the crash.  Also, the extra half an hour would mean that dawn would by then occurred, and it was possible the pilot wanted to see evidence of the fracture zone.
• An extra 3000 kg of fuel was added, the absolute max for this Boeing 777.

Oh, Netflix released a three-part documentary on March 8, MH370: The Plane That Disappeared.  Rotten Tomatoes reviewers gave it an 80% score, but audiences only 30%.

Here is a summary I saw last week where you can ask Chatbot a question about this disappearance.

• Malaysian 370 took off at 12:41AM from Kuala Lumpur (for Beijing) on 8March2014 and reached a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet at 1:01AM.

• 
  At 2:22AM, Malaysian military radar lost contact with the plane over the Andaman Sea.
• An Inmarsat satellite over the Indian Ocean last detected the plane at 8:11AM.
• All data and searches concluded that the flight crashed in a remote part of the Indian Ocean 1500 miles southwest of Australia.

• 
  An Australian ship detected several acoustic pings (possibly from the flight black box), placed about 1200 miles northwest of Perth, Australia, beginning on April 6.  Final ping on April 8, likely at the end of the battery life.

• 
  The first piece of debris, the right-wing flaperon, was not found until 29Juy2015 on Reunion, 2300 miles west of the Indian Ocean where the search had mostly been centered.
• Over the next year and a half, 27 more pieces were recovered on the shores of Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar and Mauritius.  Three of the items were positively identified as coming from Flight 370, with 17 more thought possible.

• 
  These pieces indicated that the plane did not glide into the water, but that the crash was vertical.
• The search was terminated in January of 2017.
• 
  No dominant theory of what happened.
• Pilot suicide?
• Mechanical failure?
• A hijacking?
• Plane shot down?
• The most likely was planned suicide by 54-year old Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah.  However, his son thinks not.

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