Posted by MH370: The Plane That Disappeared is a docu-series that landed on Netflix in 2023, investigating the tragic story of one of the most significant aviation incidents of history, the one involving Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014. It’s still a case highly discussed and debated today, and the Netflix series is the last installment of a long sequence of productions on that topic. Let’s discover more about the true story of this incident.
You can watch the official trailer for MH370 – The Plane That Disappeared here on Youtube.
MH370: the true story of the plane that disappeared in 2014
On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at 12:41 local time. It was an international passenger flight headed to Beijing, China. The night flight was supposed to land the morning after in China, at 6:30 AM, but communication with the air traffic control was lost less than one hour after take off. The flight was still tracked by military radar for another hour, during which we discover that it drastically deviated its path, turning westward. After that, every radar contact was lost.
Below you can find a representation of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370’s path until there was radar contact, from Wikipedia.
The search operations for the missing plane lasted many years and became the most expensive search in the history of aviation, costing more than $100 million and involving dozens of countries. The search was called off in 2018 without success.
Based on the signals sent between the plane and a communications satellite, it is believed that the aircraft kept flying over the whole night, for six more hours, probably headed southward, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. This conclusion was already communicated some days after the incident by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak on March 24, 2014.
The MH370 plane that disappeared in 2014 is not only a true story but also one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history. Still today, many people have been investigating what could have happened. In 2022, this investigation, run by a British physicist and engineer who believes he knows where the plane is, collected millions of views on Youtube: he analyzed the disturbances the plane made on radio waves, tracking its trajectory and identifying the precise area where these disturbances ended.
What are the main theories about what happened to the MH370 flight?
There are several theories about what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, but none of them have been definitively proven. According to the leading theory, the pilot took a suicide route, intending to take his own life, killing all the passengers and crew members on that flight. This theory is supported by the discovery of a session he simulated some weeks before on his computer: his sessions on Microsoft Flight Simulator X were recovered by the FBI, showing a route very similar to the one the plane probably took that day in 2014, in the Indian Ocean. The pilot’s name was Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and this article on the New York Magazine explains what has been discovered.
Other theories developed over the years included a mechanical failure, a possible hijacking, an eventual shootdown by a military aircraft or a missile (either accidentally or intentionally), and even a cyber attack. They all remain theories, as no evidence has ever been found about what happened that day.
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