MH370 - A Mystery and Tragedy that may never be found...

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A Bizarre Disappearance

This week marked a tragic milestone as the official search for MH370 was called off. On March 8th, 2014, MH370 disappeared from radar, taking with it 239 passengers and crew, never to be seen again.

The investigation into the cause of the crash is being conducted under international law by Malaysia but the search was eventually taken up by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau as the proximity to the search area was closer to Australia.

Despite the myths and stories being pumped out by various media outlets, there are a number of facts surrounding the disappearance of MH370 on which all major parties agree.

MH370 was an overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and 159 of the passengers aboard were Chinese, because the flight was a code-share with China Southern Airlines.

Key tracking systems including the transponder which gives radar data to air traffic controllers were switched off and the last voice transmission was from Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah which was unusual because he was flying the plane. But it was still being tracked by military radar.

The plane turned south-west back towards Malaysia before turning west across Malaysia just south of Penang and then making another turn to the north-west and joining a regular air route N571. Once clear of the northern tip of Indonesia it turned south.

This information — which is not disputed — came from military radar and one unanswered call to the co-pilot’s phone.

Within a week of the disappearance, a complex analysis of satellite signals revealed that the plane had flown on for several hours once it turned south towards the southern Indian Ocean.

Inmarsat, the British satellite company, had continued to receive responses from the plane to hourly status requests. The final status request and aircraft acknowledgement occurred at 8.10am (WA time) on March 8 and the plane sent a log-on request at 8.19:29am, then a “log-on acknowledgement” message at 8.19:37am. The plane did not respond to a status request from the Inmarsat satellite at 9.15am.

Those signals were picked up from its satellite 38,000km above the Indian Ocean and were relayed via a ground station in Wangara, in Perth’s north.
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There is broad agreement that there had to be human input at the start of the flight and most of the focus is on the captain. Where the confusion comes from is the question of whether someone was in control at the end of the flight?

The burning question is, did the captain also take his life at this stage or a little later or did he stay in control to the end?

The plane simply could not perform all those turns without human control at some point. Either someone was controlling each turn or they re-programming the flight management computer with the new course headings.

So where is the plane and why, in this time of technological advancement, can't we seem to find its resting place? Now that the search has been called off, we may never know what happened....

The tragedy is that MH370 may be lying a tantalising few hundred metres outside the area that has been scoured over the past four years. A tragedy and mystery indeed.

Thanks for reading!

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