Missing Flight MH370, Part 2: Theories & Passengers

Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 went missing March 8th, 2014. This is part two: theories and passengers. We covered the facts and crew in part one. These theories are speculative, as I believe some of these do not take into account all of the facts. The theories border everything from government conspiracy to accidents and terrorism. This is a direct continuation from part one.

Some believe that MH370 may have been an attempt at recreating 9/11. There are several possible targets in this region, some of which include The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur and an American military base on Diego Garcia Island in the Indian ocean. This theory has been speculated, considering there may have been more than one person on board attempting a hijacking.

However, entering the cockpit nowadays is almost impossible. They are structured in a way to keep people out, monitored by video, and require an electronic code to access. The exception to this is if a pilot allows someone to enter the cockpit. Passengers can ask and usually the answer is no, but sometimes the answer is yes. For example, two months prior to the disappearance, first officer Faruq Abdul Hamid allowed two female passengers into the cockpit. Pictures are available to prove this. It is also possible for a terrorist to take a passenger hostage and force their way into the cockpit.

The hijacking theory does bring up another theory: if there were hijackers on the flight, the passengers could have rebelled against them. This possibility does exist, as this has happened previously, like on flight 93, September 11th, 2001. The theory suggests that the passengers may have overpowered the hijackers, which may have caused a weapon to discharge, and a bullet to pierce the fuselage, causing a gradual decompression. The big problems with any hijacking theory are: who were the terrorists, and why hasn’t any terrorist group claimed responsibility for this attack? If this was a terrorist event, the likelihood that a terrorist organization would take responsibility for this disappearance is highly likely, and at this time, no claim has been made.

Two Iranian passengers boarded the flight with stolen passports, causing the media and government to believe that the disappearance may be related to a hijacking. These two passengers bought their plane tickets at the same time using stolen travel documents from Thailand, one document belonging to an Italian man and the other an Austrian man. The first passenger was Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad, 18. His route was planned from Iran to Kuala Lumpur, and then to transition through Beijing and onwards to Amsterdam and then Frankfurt, hoping to meet up with his mother in Germany. The other passenger was Delavar Seyed Mohammadreza, 29, but less is known about his origins, only that he was heading to Europe and was excited but nervous about the flight. The two men traveled from Doha, Qatar, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, using their Iranian passports and then switched to their stolen Italian and Austrian passports in order to board the Malaysian flight. However, it was discovered that these two passengers were only seeking asylum and were not connected to any known terrorist organizations.

Among the many passengers included:

· 24 Chinese artists. The oldest was 79-year-old Lou Baotang, whose calligraphy has been included in dictionaries across China, Britain, and the United States.

· Razahan Zamani and his wife, Norli Akmar Hamid, were on their delayed honeymoon, after Norli suffered a miscarriage. This was their first time on a plane.

· One of the 3 Americans on the plane was IBM executive Philip Wood, who has just recently transferred to Malaysia. This was his last planned trip to Beijing before settling down back in Kuala Lumpur.

· 35-year-old Ju Kun was also on board. He was an expert martial artist, martial arts choreographer, and stunt double for Jet Li. He worked on films like The Forbidden Kingdom from 2008 and The Expendables from 2010.

· 20 employees of the company Freescale Semiconductor were also onboard, 12 Malaysians and 8 Chinese. Freescale Semiconductor provides embedded processing solutions, including a combination of embedded processors, complementary semiconductor devices and software. The company publicly announced that 20 of their employees were lost on this flight.

· Every theory has been scrutinized, including one passenger, Dr. Yuchen Li, who was determined to be a flight engineer who might have had the ability to take control of the aircraft. He recently finished his doctoral degree at Cambridge University in engineering, and previously studied engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, was married with 3 children. After a financial background and insurance check, his gross monthly income and out-of-pocket expenses indicated nothing unusual. No history of mental illness, no significant changes in his lifestyle or expenses, and no family stresses. He was raised on Penang, which some speculate may have been why the flight passed over the island before it disappeared from radar, the possibility that he was looking out the window to get one last view of his hometown. He was clearly passionate about aviation, as he created a YouTube channel with his flight simulator.

In June of 2014, the media speculated that the pilot may have been at fault for the missing plane. The captain owned a flight simulator and after investigation, a suspicious route was found on the terminal, which landed the plane in the southern Indian ocean. The information about the route was initially hidden from the press; the only information given to the press was that they were conducting an investigation in the pilot’s home and found a flight simulator. Even the public report released by the Malaysian government in 2015 did not mention this evidence.

However, in 2016, confidential documents were leaked to the media that explained that the Royal Malaysian police had conducted an investigation on the terminal, explaining the route that was found. Soon after, the Malaysian government confirmed the existence of this suspicious route. The coordinates include two in Kuala Lumpur, two in the Strait of Malacca, one in the Bay of Bengal, and two in the southern Indian Ocean.

Many believe this route proves premeditation, but many experts say this doesn’t prove anything. These coordinates were automatically saved by the simulation software one month before the incident, but the coordinates may not have originated from the same flight session. These could be points from multiple flight sessions that the software saved into one file. The official report states, “It is found that there was no activity captured on exhibit JP01 and MK 26 that conclusively indicate any kind of premeditated act pertaining to the incident MH370.”

However, the coordinates did effect the search area. The ATSB has theorized what they assume may have happened, called a death dive, essentially ditching the plane into the ocean. The assumption is that nobody is in control of the plane during this time. The plane begins to run out of fuel and slowly enters the death dive. No instruments in the cockpit work and the descent begins quickly. The aircraft begins to dive, turning slowly as it goes down, and multiple warning alarms tell the pilots “bank angle” and “pull up” telling them the autopilot has no more control over what is happening and the aircraft dives into the water at nearly supersonic speeds. It’s over in less than two minutes. From the time that the fuel runs out, the aircraft has only traveled 11 miles out.

The next theory comes from Boeing 777 pilot and instructor, Simon Hardy, who believes that the aircraft was controlled to the very last second before hitting the ocean’s surface, in order to hide the aircraft as well as possible. Within moments of the engines running out of fuel, the pilot or pilots control the descent of the aircraft into the water. This time, even though there is no power, the pilots are controlling the aircraft like a glider. The total time from the engines going out to hitting the water is nine minutes. By the end, this has allowed the aircraft to travel 88 miles further. A controlled crash.

This controlled ditching of the aircraft was not taken into account during the initial search for the plane up to 2017 when it was suspended. The big question: how far did the aircraft travel before hitting the ocean? There is evidence that supports both of those theories, however what we don’t have is enough evidence to make a positive stance on either side of this debate.

The pilot’s motive is questionable. There was speculation that the crash might have been politically motivated, as Anwar Ibrahim, a leader of the democratic opposition, was sentenced to five years in prison just a few hours before the flight departed.

A member of Parliament in Malaysia, who is a part of the opposition party came out to state that Zaharie is not a man who would use his political ideologies to spread a message like this, spreading a message by destroying so much and so many.

Another theory is a pilot or copilot hijacking of the plane. This has happened in the past, where one person in the cockpit waits until the other leaves for a bathroom break, for example, and gets locked out of the cockpit. Germanwings flight 9525, on March 24th, 2015, carried 144 passengers and 6 crew. This flight was hijacked by copilot Andreas Lubitz, who deliberately crashed the plane after locking the captain out of the cockpit. Ethiopia Airlines flight 961, on November 23rd, 1996, was hijacked and out of fuel, and landed in the Indian Ocean near the Comoros Islands. Amateur video captured the descent into the ocean, and 50 of the 175 people aboard survived.

There is a theory that Captain Zahari did exactly what Andreas Lubitz did, planning his own death and the death of the entire plane. Fortunately, in terms of the number of aircrafts that take off every day, pilot suicide is very rare. Simon Hardy goes on to state, “We don’t even let pilots crash the simulator… not even in a pretend situation.”

Neither the pilot nor the copilot fits the profile for suicide. The media has claimed that the pilot was estranged from his wife and his mistress had recently cut off their affair. However, this information is refuted by his wife and other family members.

One theory about the pilot that was speculated very shortly was suicide due to religion. But the pilot was not a particularly religious man in a sense and did not use religion as a way to punish others or make himself seem better than others.

No theories arose from copilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, and engaged to another pilot. He had no history of mental illness, no significant financial changes, or family stresses.

The only strange thing that did happen with regards to Hamid: Celcom reported that they detected a mobile phone number, registered to the copilot, signaling its location. But it was nothing more than an automatic location signal, not a phone call, as the media claimed.

The possibility that the flight crashed with enough force into the ocean did mean that hydrophones, which are large listening devices placed underwater, might have recorded the sound. Four of these hydrophones did record something loud enough that was consistent with the timing of the flight’s disappearance. However, the actual location of the sound determined otherwise; this heavy sound was most likely caused by oceanic and environmental activity.

The information gathered from military radar does contain altitude information, but unfortunately it is not always accurate. For example, the information given from this radar claimed that the aircraft rose to just over 58,000 feet, before diving down to 4,800 feet in less than one minute. A Boeing 777 is not capable of this, and its maximum altitude it can safely reach is 43,000 feet before the air becomes too thin for it to maintain flight. Typically, the highest any commercial aircraft is approved to fly is 41,000 feet and is most often kept at 35,000 feet. It is only ever given clearance to go above this altitude to avoid things such as extreme weather or to extinguish a fire by depriving it of oxygen. The parameters given by the miliary radar were tested on a flight simulator, but the tests were unsuccessful, so it is believed that this information is inaccurate and unreliable.

The initial left U-turn that was made by the aircraft had to have been manual, as the autopilot is limited in its turning capability for safety reasons. The maximum bank angle of a turn differs by the type of autopilot installed. They are designed to maintain altitude and a steady course during flight, and most autopilots cannot make a turn sharper than 90 degrees. This means that the following two turns made afterwards could have been manual or automatic. It is believed by experts that the aircraft must have been under manual control, but by who is the question.

Senior Boeing 777 Pilot and Instructor, Simon Hardy, believes the aircraft deliberately flew between Malaysia and Thailand, knowing that neither country would intervene. Neither country is worried about this mystery aircraft, believing that it may belong to the other country. He believes that the captain deliberately dipped his wing towards Peneng, assuming that the captain was looking out the window to say goodbye to the island he grew up. Simon claims the aircraft was controlled by someone before landing in the ocean, putting the location of the wreckage much further out that hasn’t been searched, much further south about another 40 or 50 miles from the search area.

Simon Hardy: “I think you could do a successful ditching in a big aircraft in the sea with most of the aircraft intact. The fact that this is planned meticulously to make the aircraft disappear, and therefore, if I have to — if I’m going to make the aircraft disappear, I will make sure I’m there ’til the end.”

John Cox: “If you assume that it went into the ocean, under control, at landing speed, then the idea of it fracturing into tens of thousands of pieces goes down dramatically. I think it’s probably also possible that the airplane is in multiple large pieces.”

Martin Dolan: “I still think the weight of the evidence, which is why the search has been concentrated where it is, is that for whatever reason, it’s unlikely there were controller inputs at the end of the flight, and therefore, the aircraft spiraled into the water and crashed.”

This is called a death dive. There is a possibility that this is not the case but given the information that they had at the time, the search efforts were not put into that area.

Air crash investigator, Larry Vance, claims the pilot was responsible for turning the transponders off manually and at that point, depressurized the airplane, effectively disabling the passengers from interfering. There would be too much opportunity for passengers to attempt to call for help using their cellphones. Of course, high enough in the sky, there would be no cell reception, however there would still be attempts to get help. A completely silent airplane. He says the pilot only flew the aircraft to this location in order to make the aircraft disappear, knowing it would be a difficult location to get to, as the area is vast and hazardous. Vance believes if this was a high impact crash, there would be far more damage than what we have found in terms of pieces of the aircraft. The aircraft is not scattered all over the ocean floor, it is mostly likely in four separate areas with the larger pieces all very close together. We have a four-meter long flaperon from the aircraft, and he believes this piece would not exist otherwise.

Water landings are possible, for example The Miracle on the Hudson and Ethiopia airlines flight 961, hijacked and out of fuel. Even in the worst conditions, water landings that keep the aircraft mostly intact are possible. He believes the flaps were down and fully extended, meaning the pilot must have been in control of the aircraft at the time it hit the water. The only reason to extend the flaps down is to land the plane, leaving as little debris as possible, which he also believes is why we haven’t found more debris than the 32 pieces that were located, only 3 of which were confirmed to have come from MH370.

Aviation expert from America and global air safety specialist, John Cox, also believes the aircraft to be in multiple large pieces on the ocean floor, and the theory that it was a controlled ditch is possible.

Former ATSB Chief, Martin Dolan, is adamant that the most likely location that he believes the plane is at, means that there was no one at the controls. Hardy’s theory about the controlled dive wasn’t dismissed completely, but Dolan says they had to put their focus in one area with the information they had at the time. As Vance says, it was to make the plane disappear forever with no recovery of any wreckage. He believes it isn’t necessary to find the plane and instead we can come to a conclusion as to what happened in the last few hours of the flight. However, Vance isn’t saying we shouldn’t try to locate the plane, only that we can come up with a most reasonable scenario as to what happened.

The other debate is whether or not the airplane ran out of fuel. There is no evidence to support either conclusion. Did the plane run out of fuel and spiral into a death dive or was it a controlled ditching early into the sea?

It is believed that someone manually tuned off the aircrafts systems, for example the SATCOM, disrupted by a lengthy power interruption. Once power was restored, the system rebooted, causing it to come back online. It is believed that the disruption was manual, however the report does not state that this is the case. In fact, the final conclusion states, “The Team is unable to determine the real cause for the disappearance of MH370.”

Another theory that is substantiated by previous flight crashes, is a sudden or gradual loss of cabin pressure. Pilots are trained for incidents just like this, where oxygen masks will deploy, giving the pilots enough time to make an emergency descent to a breathable altitude. However, these systems typically only have enough oxygen for about 15 minutes. And yes, that is usually enough time to descend.

There are two kinds of decompression: the first is explosive decompression. United Airlines flight 811, departing from Honolulu, Hawaii, February 24th, 1989, experienced a cargo door failure shortly after departure. The explosive decompression blew out several rows of seats, killing nine passengers, and the aircraft returned to Honolulu without further incident.

The second is a gradual decompression. This happened to Helios Airlines flight 522 on August 24th, 2005. The possibility of a gradual decompression has been considered due to the relatively straight line the aircraft flew in while on its path down to the southern Indian ocean. However, this doesn’t account for the subsequent turns in direction prior to this or why the transponders were switched off.

Some also believe that the aircraft did in fact ascend to an altitude of 48,000 feet in order to suffocate the passengers. Individual oxygen masks are released automatically during a decompression, however since they are only designed to last 15 minutes, this possibility was discussed among experts.

MH370 also carried a shipment of lithium-ion batteries, which some say could mean a fire broke out during the flight. More Lithium was carried on the flight than was quoted on the manifest, as on March 21st, 2014, Malaysian authorities finally admitted that the aircraft was carrying lithium-ion batteries in its cargo hold. The batteries were small, but the quantity was large. The total weight of electronic devices in the cargo hold was 2.8 tons. This happened on a Japan airlines flight and a grounded Egypt flight. This has also happened to people’s cellphones, causing severe burns. We know lithium-ion batteries can cause fires on flights, as it has happened in the past. UPS flight 6 on September 3rd, 2010, caught fire and it is believed to have been caused by a shipment of lithium-ion batteries on board.

Michel Armand is an expert in lithium battery combustion. He explains that a battery is extremely violent when it catches fire and explodes in a matter of seconds. Batteries can also produce toxic fumes, like hydrogen fluoride gas. Because of these issues, lithium batteries are put into special containers when onboard to prevent the risk of fire.

An electrical fire could also be the cause, as this has also happened. Swissair flight 111 in September of 2016 was caused by an electrical fire in the cockpit, which disabled multiple systems, including the transponders and SATCOM.

Because of these various incidents, it is possible that the aircraft caught fire and the initial wide left turn that was made could have been the pilots heading back to the nearest airport for an emergency landing. However, we know that the flight kept going, far past the Kuala Lumpur airport.

This theory has been speculated and is based mostly on three eye-witness accounts. An oil-rig worker in the China Sea claims to have seen a plane burst into flames mid-flight. In addition, two fishermen claim they saw a bright burning light crash into the sea. The final witness account is from Kathryn Tee, who was sailing from India to Thailand, claiming to see a plane on fire. These claims unfortunately do not equivalate to the known flight path of MH370.

There are many experts, including Jean-Paul Troadec, who do not believe the fire theory to be correct. The plane continued to fly for six more hours, and at this time, no known flight has lasted more than 30 minutes in the air after a serious fire.

The Malaysian government and Australian government both believe that flight MH370 crashed in the southern Indian ocean, but the location is unknown.

One theory claims that the flight never crashed and instead was shot down by the American Navy in the middle of the Indian ocean. Supposedly the satellite images were forged as part of a cover up.

Another theory claims that the aircraft turned right, headed towards Russia, and made it nearly to Kazakstan. The debris was then staged as part of a cover up.

Another theory claims that the flight was remotely controlled by someone on the ground. As much as it is possible for technology to be remotely controlled, even from great distances, Boeing and other aviation companies have not installed any systems in their commercial aircrafts that would allow for this kind of disruption, even though they have experimented with this technology.

Landing the plane on Diego Garcia, or at least an attempt to land on Diego Garcia, has also been brought up. Witnesses on the Maldive Islands claim to have seen a low-flying plane fly over the islands on the morning of March 8th, 2014. The aircraft was so low that they said to have been able to see the windows. However, if the plane was headed towards Diego Garcia, it would have had 1,000 kilometers to go. This theory tends to get thrown out due to the plane’s path down into the southern Indian ocean, and it also doesn’t help that the eye-witness accounts don’t correlate. If anything, it is possible this was nothing more than a private jet. Private jets fly over the Maldives all the time, as people do own private jets and own some of the smaller islands.

A group of French investigators proposed that instead of heading directly into the southern Indian Ocean, the aircraft turned left, heading towards Christmas Island for an attempted landing. MH370 then crashed before landing, making the crash site much further north than the region that the official investigation claims it must be. A surface search of this area was conducted, but no underwater search made it that far north.

January 16th, 2015, Canadian mathematician Brock McEwen published a study that put into question Inmarsat’s data and the search location. In June 2014, the victim’s families launched a campaign to raise a $5,000,000 reward for anyone who has any information on the flight’s disappearance. This reward has not brought out any new information.

Most experts agree that this was no accident.

Throughout all this chaos, there have been some positive things that have come out of this disappearance, even if we don’t know exactly what happened. New airline tracking systems have been developed and are being pushed to airlines to equip their planes with these new devices.

Something important about these theories that we need to consider is called survivorship bias. Only the missing planes and crashes that we have found can tell us what went wrong, even if we have only found the wreckage and no black boxes, as the black box was not mandatory on commercial aircraft until 1958. It’s a bias that ends up leading people to false conclusions of what really happened in a situation. It leads people to make assumptions about what they do not know based on nothing but supposition, with little to zero physical evidence.

If we don’t keep searching, we won’t find anything. The worst scenario would be that the aircraft is scattered beyond anywhere we can feasibly get to.

John Cox: “When you look at it and you go back into the history of commercial jet aviation, with fair paying passengers onboard, we’ve always found the airplane. To have one that can’t find is one of aviation’s — probably aviation’s greatest mystery, and aviation does not do well with mysteries, and that’s why so much effort has been put into it… If we’re not looking, we can’t find it. To just give up at this point, I’m not prepared to do that.”