MH370 What Happened That Night
Why Didn't the Barnacles Grow for a Whole Year?
Several possibilities come to mind. One is that the flaperon and other debris spent 12 to 16 months stranded high on a beach somewhere, where barnacles could not get to it. But there are two problems with this theory. First, scientists say Lepas shells persist even after the animal dies and would remain visible for a long time after it was washed off its perch by a returning tide. Second, a high proportion of the MH370 debris that has washed up has been collected from the beaches of several East African islands. These places are well-traveled. If the debris had washed ashore so recently and in such obvious spots, people would have found it a lot earlier and reported it to authorities.
Another possibility is that the plane broke up at a relatively high altitude, scattering the debris widely, and that the various pieces took divergent paths — some floating north toward Africa, some sinking, some pushed south by the wind, some not — or even that the plane landed intact somewhere on the ocean’s surface and floated for months before breaking up.
The Mystery of Flight Path Deviations
A wide dispersal could explain both the lack of early barnacle growth and the difficulty in precisely backtracking the debris to its origins via drift modeling. But it would require a lot of luck: For its flight path to deviate so significantly from the pings’ data, the plane would have to undergo some kind of catastrophic event. That the plane would break up so completely, scattering fragments over such a huge area and somehow leaving not a single piece of debris large enough to be detected by search planes or satellites, stretches credulity.
Then again, this sort of credulity-stretching scenario is what the satellite data seems to demand. After the plane veered off course, the data indicates that it made several major changes in its final hours, flying circles, climbing and descending, before finally turning south. The question is, why would anyone do that? And, to complicate the question further, the plane’s captain, Zaharie Shah, has been described in leaked FBI and Malaysian police reports as a highly professional and experienced pilot who was not exhibiting mental health issues in the weeks leading up to the disappearance.
So, if the data is wrong, what went wrong?
Was the Plane Being Hacked?
Todd Humphreys, an aerospace engineer and professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has spent the past decade looking into vulnerabilities in aircraft navigation systems that could lead to the sort of rogue flight path indicated by the MH370 data. An aviation mystery from a century ago provides a precedent for how this could happen. In 1927, the Spirit of St. Louis disappeared during Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight. The most likely explanation is that Lindbergh somehow drifted off course and then failed to detect his error until it was too late. But at the time, some people believed that German agents had somehow manipulated the plane's instruments.
Could something analogous have happened to MH370? It is well-known that Boeing's satellite communications protocol was not cyber-secure and that the airplane could potentially have been hacked remotely while in flight. “We’ve had multiple instances where we’ve successfully attacked the avionics systems of the plane,” Humphreys told the podcast hosts of Darknet Diaries. “And it’s not difficult. It doesn't require esoteric hardware or software.” His team created several “proof of concept” attacks on Boeing systems and demonstrated that the plane’s satellite communications system could be hacked.
Image Credit - The Sydney Morning Herald
The Shadow Copy of Reality
Humphreys says that if the plane was hacked, the attack could be staged from a laptop computer anywhere in the world. He also says the attacker could send the plane fake data, giving the pilots false information about their course, speed, and altitude. “All that’s necessary is to inject the fake data into the stream of real data in such a way that it’s not apparent to the pilots. This can be very, very subtle and can be staged in steps,” he says. “It’s a very insidious and stealthy way of taking over an aircraft.”
What would such an attack look like to the pilots? In the early hours of the flight, as the plane veered off course, the captain and copilot probably noticed the discrepancies between their instruments and the plane’s flight path and would most likely assume it was caused by a malfunctioning sensor and would attempt to troubleshoot the problem by resetting the plane’s electrical systems. This would disconnect and then reconnect their avionics, which would allow time for malicious actors to inject bogus data. However, once that data had been introduced into the systems, everything would look normal to the crew. “What you’ve done is created a shadow copy of reality for the pilots,” Humphreys explains. “But the actual airplane is not responding to them.”
Intentional Crash, Terrorism, or a Bizarre Cover-up?
Is there any evidence that MH370 was subject to such an attack? The leaked police records indicate that the FBI investigated the case as a hijacking, but, ultimately they could find no suspects. Then again, if the plane was being piloted remotely, it wouldn’t really fit the definition of a traditional “hijacking” in the sense that there was likely no one physically present in the cockpit, a point that might explain the FBI’s lack of results. It’s more like the aviation equivalent of a ransomware attack than a hijacking, except that, instead of the perpetrators demanding money, it appears likely the attack was designed to hide all evidence of the crime, including the airplane itself. But to what end?
Several plausible scenarios come to mind for the flight's strange trajectory. One possibility is that the plane ran out of fuel and that the pilot, seeing the end was near, attempted a controlled landing on the ocean's surface. This would explain the flight path, with the plane circling as it lost altitude and eventually ditching in a relatively flat and controlled manner, scattering debris over a wide area. But it wouldn't explain why the satellite communications system was turned off. Additionally, a controlled ditching would likely have left at least a few large pieces of debris visible on satellite imagery, and none were ever found.
Terrorism, Government Plots, and Pilot Suicide
Another possibility is that the plane was hijacked by terrorists, who turned off the communications equipment to help hide their tracks and forced it to fly erratically as they decided what to do with the passengers and the plane. This would explain the erratic behavior of the plane but it doesn't help explain why there was no ransom demand. And why turn off all communications equipment? Surely the terrorists would at least want to keep their radios working so they could communicate with air traffic control during a tense negotiation process.
Or perhaps the disappearance was the result of an elaborate government plot. In August 2018, the former prime minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, told an audience that “my very clear understanding from the very top levels of the Malaysian government is that from very, very early on here, they thought it was murder-suicide by the pilot.” One theory is that Shah hijacked his own plane as an act of deliberate suicide, possibly as a form of insurance fraud.
That might explain why the plane’s satellite communications system was turned off and why its course was altered, making the plane difficult or impossible to track. Or perhaps, Shah was taking the plane to a secret location. In addition, Malaysian authorities were able to recover deleted flight simulator data from the pilot’s home computer; on the simulator, he had practiced flying over the remote southern Indian Ocean — an area not far from where the plane is thought to have crashed.
Coercion, Hijacking, and Misidentified Locations
It's also possible that Shah was coerced into flying the plane off course by some other person or group on board. Or perhaps the plane was hijacked in a traditional manner and then deliberately crashed at sea as a way to destroy the evidence. Alternatively, maybe the authorities have misidentified MH370’s location. If it went down to the north, off the coast of Kazakhstan, it could have landed in the territory of a former Soviet Republic and caused diplomatic problems, leading to a potential cover-up. That would mean the southern Indian Ocean search was based on a false premise.
Then again, it's possible that the plane was never in the southern Indian Ocean at all. The satellite systems Boeing used to communicate were not designed to support search and rescue operations. They were intended simply for aircraft maintenance and troubleshooting. The location data is very imprecise, and any number of technical malfunctions, hacking attacks, or even simple operator errors could have caused the system to report false positions.
So What Happened to MH370?
For now, the mystery of MH370 remains unsolved. However, after years of investigation, we know this for sure: Something very strange happened on that flight. Whether it was sabotage, an accident, or something else, it will likely go down as one of the most baffling disappearances in aviation history. And yet, in light of these anomalies, the question must be asked: Were the authorities wrong about what happened to the plane, or were they trying to mislead the investigation? And if so, why?
Why The Search Effort Focused on the Southern Indian Ocean
Boeing and Inmarsat, the companies that provided the satellite data that was used to guide the search effort, insist that the information is reliable. According to the official investigators, the “pings” the plane emitted can be analyzed to provide seven separate arcs, or possible paths the plane could have taken. The arc that cuts through the southern Indian Ocean was designated the 7th arc and was deemed to be the plane’s most likely path because it best matches the available data — specifically the amount of time between pings, the Doppler shift in the satellite’s signal that was caused by the plane’s motion, and the final handshake that occurred between the plane’s communications system and the satellite at the plane’s presumed point of engine failure.
But some researchers say there are other explanations for the data. After analyzing the available information, they conclude the plane could have flown in any direction from the point at which it fell silent, which contradicts what Boeing and Inmarsat assert. “What we know now is that the Inmarsat analysis is flawed – the burst timing offsets and burst frequency offsets are simply not precise enough to conclude MH370 turned south over the southern Indian Ocean,” says Mike Exner, an engineer who has been trying to solve the MH370 mystery for years and who has studied hundreds of pages of Inmarsat’s technical reports.
Challenging the Official Data
Along with several other colleagues, he founded a group called “The Independent Group” that has been challenging the official explanation of the data. Exner says Inmarsat has made some unjustified assumptions in conducting its analysis of the data. Furthermore, the Independent Group theorizes that a change observed in the final ping might have happened because the plane’s engines had shut down, and thus the satellite communications system switched from the high-power antenna on the top of the aircraft to a low-power antenna in its belly. That switch would slightly alter the way the satellite interpreted the timing and frequency signals from the plane and could throw off calculations about its direction.
The theory has its skeptics, though. Don Thompson, a retired engineer who has helped analyze several high-profile plane crashes, calls the low-power antenna theory “far-fetched.” He says it would be more likely that the plane turned south and ran out of fuel after flying more or less in a straight line from its last known position, near the Strait of Malacca. That would explain why its communications systems shut down. However, it still wouldn’t explain how the plane changed course without being spotted by military radar.
Was There a Military Stand-Off?
One clue comes from an analysis of civilian radar data. After comparing the readings from several ground-based radar stations in Southeast Asia, Malaysian authorities concluded that MH370 turned west, flew over the Malay Peninsula, then turned north and disappeared into the Andaman Sea between Thailand and India. This theory was eventually rejected by the Australian officials heading up the search, who concluded the radar blips were either false returns or belonged to other planes in the skies that night.
And, to some extent, the Malaysians agree. According to one official who spoke with a reporter from The Atlantic in 2018, the civilian data is “not solid, primary radar data.” But there’s an apparent contradiction implicit in the Malaysian government’s position: If they don’t trust their own civilian radar, why would they trust the Indonesians’? It’s well-known that Indonesia operates powerful military radars capable of tracking aircraft over the Andaman Sea and the Strait of Malacca, but the Indonesian government has denied seeing anything.
It’s possible the Indonesians don’t want to admit that MH370 violated their airspace or that they were unable to intercept it if they did. Indeed, one aviation security consultant who spoke to The Atlantic on the condition of anonymity claimed that “the MH370 scenario involved a military standoff and some very bad decisions on the part of those involved.”
Why The Cover-up Theory is Compelling
There’s also the possibility that the Indonesians and Malaysians are trying to avoid implicating the Thai military, which also operates radars in the region and probably saw the plane as well. That raises an even more troubling possibility: that one or more Southeast Asian air forces shot down the plane, and they’re covering it up
The cover-up theory raises an important question: Why would anyone want to hide the truth about what happened to MH370? One reason, of course, is that the authorities made some critical errors early in the investigation, which then forced them to commit to a false narrative that led them to search in the wrong place for years. If the Australians, Malaysians, and Indonesians admit they made a mistake, they'll likely be faced with a wave of public anger and recriminations, not to mention a slew of lawsuits. Another factor is that the search effort cost many millions of dollars that, in hindsight, appear to have been wasted. Admitting they were wrong about MH370’s flight path would cause immense blowback and embarrassment.
There's also the possibility that the plane was carrying sensitive cargo that one of the countries in the region didn't want discovered – something military or illicit. It may be that the governments involved fear that publicly revealing details about the flight could expose vulnerabilities in their national security.
MH370: Theories of Accidental Shootdown and Electrical Fire Amidst Diplomatic Complexities
Or, perhaps, one of the countries in the region shot down the plane, accidentally or on purpose. Admitting that would cause a major international incident. In 2014, when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over Ukraine, Russia and pro-Russian separatists were both accused of being complicit. It took five years to gather enough evidence to determine the type of missile launcher used and where it originated, yet it is still unclear who actually fired the weapon. In a similar manner, figuring out who was responsible for MH370 could involve years of investigation, diplomacy, and legal wrangling, and could destabilize the region in the meantime.
Of course, there’s a simpler explanation for what happened that night: It was an accident. Maybe there was an electrical fire on board that started under the cockpit floor and quickly spread, burning out the communications systems. It's possible this caused the passengers and crew to lose consciousness from hypoxia. With no one at the controls, the plane continued flying on autopilot until it ran out of fuel. That would mean the plane could still be in the southern Indian Ocean, perhaps just not in the area where the Australian search team focused. If so, more searches in more remote areas of the seabed are needed.
Image Credit - The Guardian
More Investigation is Needed
In 2018, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau concluded its search of the southern Indian Ocean without finding the plane, stating that “prospective areas for locating the aircraft wreckage, based on all the analysis to date, would be exhausted.” However, the company that the Australian government contracted to conduct the search, Ocean Infinity, was confident that if they continued farther south, they would find the plane. But the Malaysians canceled the search contract, citing lack of funds and promising to reopen the search upon the discovery of new evidence. That would appear to be unlikely, however.
Since the search suspension, only three new pieces of debris have been found that were later confirmed to be from MH370. In 2021, an independent investigator reported that a piece of MH370’s landing gear door had washed ashore in Madagascar, bearing marks consistent with having been extended at the time of the impact. Experts say this proves the plane didn’t crash gently. Rather, it broke apart on impact. The find has raised new questions. If the landing gear was down, did the pilot make a last-minute decision to ditch the plane in a controlled fashion? If so, then where and why?
Why the MH370 Mystery Matters
With so few new leads, and with the Australian and Malaysian officials reluctant to reopen the investigation, it seems likely the disappearance of MH370 will remain the greatest aviation mystery of the 21st century. But perhaps, after a generation or so has passed, a researcher will dig up the investigation, dust it off, and start asking the right questions. That's likely the only way we’ll ever know the truth.
The disappearance of MH370 is more than just an unsolved mystery. It has exposed vulnerabilities in civilian aviation systems that could make future disasters more likely. The disappearance raises serious questions about the security of commercial airlines. If someone was able to hack into the MH370 navigation control system or spoof its satellite communications, they could conceivably do the same thing to another plane. It's important for aircraft manufacturers to find a way to make planes less vulnerable to cyberattacks.
The incident also highlights the need for better ways to track planes over the open ocean. The satellite systems we rely on weren't designed to support search and rescue operations. As a result, it is possible for planes to deviate hundreds of miles from their course without air-traffic controllers noticing. It's clear that more robust tracking systems are needed and that they should be made tamper-proof.
The Unanswered Questions and Lingering Pain of MH370 Families
And then, of course, there’s the matter of the families of the missing passengers. They deserve to know the truth about what happened to their loved ones, no matter how disturbing it may be. The victims’ family members have expressed skepticism about the official findings again and again over the years, calling them insufficient and demanding more answers. Unfortunately, they are still waiting. In 2018, an Australian official promised the Malaysian government would “release a full report that will include the release of factual information from the Malaysian police.” Five years later, the families are still waiting for the Malaysians to fulfill their promise. With each passing year, the likelihood of getting a clear answer seems slimmer.
There’s also the question of whether the plane could have been intentionally diverted from its route, flown thousands of miles in the wrong direction, and then crashed without anyone noticing. If some criminal element is capable of this level of subterfuge, the implications are terrifying, as it could happen again. Aviation experts say that while such a scenario is technically possible, the pilots of any other aircraft on a similar route would have noticed a 777 veering off course. They would likely have radioed air traffic control to report the anomaly. However, in MH370's case, as far as we know, no such report was made.
A Call for Truth and Transparency
This suggests the plane was deliberately diverted from its flight path quickly, possibly to take advantage of gaps in military radar coverage. It also leaves open the possibility that the pilots of MH370 and even air traffic controllers in the region were somehow involved.
These questions should give travelers pause, as well. After all, if someone was able to commandeer MH370 without getting caught, there's no reason to think they couldn't do it again. While the truth about what happened to MH370 remains elusive, the plane’s ongoing disappearance serves as a constant reminder of the limitations of current technology, of unresolved political tensions in Southeast Asia, and of the human capacity for both great ingenuity and terrible deception.
