Asia Nine years of mysteries about flight MH370: Russian hijacking, US shootdown or pilot suicide?

Theory one: The Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 that went missing on March 8, 2014 was hijacked by the Russians and taken to the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan

Asia Nine years of mysteries about flight MH370: Russian hijacking, US shootdown or pilot suicide?

Theory one: The Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 that went missing on March 8, 2014 was hijacked by the Russians and taken to the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan.

Second theory: the US military, which happened to be conducting exercises in the South China Sea that day, accidentally shot down MH370. Or maybe he did it on purpose because they thought a terrorist had taken control of the plane and was going to crash it into one of their military bases in the Indian Ocean.

Third theory: a terrorist took control of the controls to attack a fleet of the Chinese navy, but failed in his maneuver and crashed the ship directly into the water.

Fourth theory: it's the pilot's fault. Malaysian Zaharie Ahmad Shah, with two decades of flying experience, planned a mass suicide by throwing the plane into the Indian Ocean.

Fifth theory: What if it was the co-pilot? Fariq Abdul Hamid, who had many problems with his partner, knocked his colleague Shah unconscious and crashed the plane.

Sixth theory: a technical failure caused the pilots to lose control. It was a simple unprovoked accident.

Seventh theory: as in the popular Manifest series, the plane simply vanished into thin air, engulfed by a burst of light, and will reappear at some point without time having passed for the 239 people on board.

Nine years without answers to one of the greatest mysteries in the history of aviation give rise to many crazy theories. The only certain thing today is that the MH370 that was en route to Beijing from the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, disappeared on March 8 and nothing was ever heard from again.

Just 40 minutes after takeoff, after entering Vietnamese airspace, radar lost the plane's signal. The last communication was when the pilot, Shah, addressed the Vietnamese air traffic controllers: "Good evening. Malaysia three-seven-zero."

Taking advantage of the pull of the ninth anniversary of the disappearance of the plane, Netflix has just released a docuseries (MH370: The plane that disappeared) where it reviews all the theories, some more irrational than others, and gives voice to all kinds of characters and technicians who have investigated the event. Like an employee of the British company Inmarsat, which operated the satellite with which the plane maintained, according to him, electronic communication for up to six hours after losing contact with the radar.

"The Inmarsat data could only confirm that the flight was still airborne as it did not have GPS tracking capabilities. But it could determine how far the aircraft was from the satellite it had been communicating with. Two scenarios were put forward. in neither did the aircraft continue into Vietnam. It either turned west back over Malaysia, or headed north over central Asia or south into the Indian Ocean over Australia," said Mark Dickinson, an Inmarsat representative.

The documentary also affects the alleged evidence of the theory that points to the pilot, since in 2016 it was news that the FBI recovered the data from a flight simulation that Shah had carried out at home, just a month before the MH370 took off, where the plane was also heading towards the ocean. But the final report coordinated by Malaysia, China and Australia, which closed the case in 2017 as an "accident", noted that there was no evidence of "any unusual behavior change of the pilot".

This week, several relatives of the 12 Malaysian crew members and 227 passengers from 14 different countries on board have called on the Malaysian government to give the green light to another search for the aircraft. "As long as we remain in the dark about what happened to MH370, we can never prevent a similar tragedy. Consequently, we believe it is a matter of the utmost importance that the search for MH370 be carried out to completion," reads the statement from a support group for families.

The last in-depth investigation, without results, was carried out in 2018 by the American marine robotics company Ocean Infinity. Since MH370 went missing, more than 20 pieces of the plane's wreckage are believed to have washed up along the African coast and on some islands in the Indian Ocean.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project