Disappearance of Flight MH370

The Disappearance of Flight MH370

What happened to flight MH370 and its missing passengers?

In 2014, scientists failed to find a missing Boeing 777 with 239 people. The idea that a sophisticated machine could simply vanish with its modern instruments and communications seemed beyond the realm of possibility.?

The following is an abbreviated clip from the full article in the Atlantic Journal, July 2019 print edition, with the headline “‘Good Night. Malaysian Three-Seven-Zero.’”

By William Langewiesche.

At 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777 flight number MH370, operated by Malaysia Airlines, took off from Kuala Lumpur toward Beijing, climbing to a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old on his last training flight, soon to be fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who, at 53, was one of the senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. He was married, had three adult children, and lived in a gated development, owning two houses.

In the cabin were 10 Malaysian flight attendants and 227 passengers to care for, including five children. Of the passengers, 153 were Chinese, 38 were Malaysian, and in descending order, the others came from Indonesia, Australia, India, France, the United States, Iran, Ukraine, Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Russia, and Taiwan. First Officer Fariq flew the airplane up in the cockpit, and Captain Zaharie handled the radios. The arrangement was standard. But Captain Zaharie’s transmissions were a bit unusual. At 1:01 a.m., he radioed that they had leveled off at 35,000 feet—a superfluous report in radar-surveilled airspace where the norm is to report leaving an altitude, not arriving at one. At 1:08, the flight crossed the Malaysian coastline and set out across the South China Sea in the direction of Vietnam. Zaharie again reported the plane’s level at 35,000 feet.

Eleven minutes later, as the airplane closed in on a waypoint near Vietnamese air-traffic jurisdiction, the controller at Kuala Lumpur Center radioed, “Malaysian three-seven-zero, contact Ho Chi Minh.” Zaharie answered, “Good night. Malaysian three-seven-zero.” He did not read back the frequency, as he should have, but otherwise, the transmission sounded normal. It was the last word heard from MH370. The pilots never checked in with Ho Chi Minh or answered any subsequent attempts to raise them.

Five seconds after, MH370 crossed into Vietnamese airspace and disappeared from the radar screens of Malaysian air traffic control, and 37 seconds later, the entire airplane disappeared on a secondary radar. The time was 1:21 a.m., 39 minutes after takeoff. The controller in Kuala Lumpur was dealing with other traffic elsewhere on his screen and simply didn’t notice. When he finally did, he assumed that the airplane was in the hands of Ho Chi Minh, somewhere beyond his range.

The Vietnamese controllers, meanwhile, saw MH370 cross into their airspace and then disappear from radar. They misunderstood a formal agreement by which Ho Chi Minh was supposed to inform Kuala Lumpur immediately if an airplane that had been handed off was more than five minutes late checking in. They tried repeatedly to contact the aircraft, to no avail. By the time they phoned to inform Kuala Lumpur, 18 minutes had passed since MH370’s disappearance from their radar screens. Kuala Lumpur’s Aeronautical Rescue Coordination Centre should have been notified within an hour of the disappearance. Four more hours elapsed before an emergency response finally began at 6:32 a.m.

The following news tells the synopsis of the disappearance.

A—1:21 a.m., March 8, 2014: Over the South China Sea, near a navigational waypoint between Malaysia and Vietnam, MH370 drops from air-traffic-control radar and turns southwest, back across the Malay Peninsula.

B—Roughly an hour later:

After flying northwest above the Strait of Malacca, the airplane makes what investigators call the “final major turn” and heads south. The turn and the new course are later reconstructed from satellite data.

C—April 2014:

The surface search is abandoned, and a deep-ocean search gets underway. Analysis of satellite data had located MH370’s final electronic “handshake” along an arc.

D—July 2015:

The first piece of debris from MH370—a flaperon—is discovered on the island of Réunion. Other confirmed or likely parts have been found on widely dispersed beaches in the western Indian Ocean.

The fact remains that no one has yet been able to work backward from where the debris has washed ashore and trace it to some point of origin in the southern Indian Ocean.?

The airplane would not have dived quite as radically as the satellite data suggest that it did—a suspicion, in other words, that someone was at the controls at the end, helping to crash the airplane. Either way, somewhere along the arc, the engines failed from lack of fuel, and the aircraft entered a vicious spiral dive with descent rates that ultimately may have exceeded 15,000 feet a minute. We know from that descent rate and shattered debris that the airplane disintegrated when it hit the water.

The official investigations have petered out. The Australians have done what they could. The Chinese want to move on and are censoring any news that might inflame the passions of the families. The French are off in France, rehashing the satellite data. The Malaysians just wish the news would go away. The inaction of the air force and all of the parties involved in the first hour didn’t follow protocol. Every person who had some form of responsibility at the time did not do what he was supposed to do. Maybe in isolation, some might not seem so bad, but when you look at it as a whole, every one of them contributed to the fact that the airplane has not been found.

They hoped that the submersible Ocean Infinity, which had recently found a missing Argentine submarine, would return to search again on a no-find, no-fee basis. The plane did not catch on fire, yet it stayed in the air for all that time. No, it did not become a “ghost flight” able to navigate and switch its systems off and then back on. No, it was not shot down after lengthy consideration by nefarious national powers who lingered on its tail before pulling the trigger. And no, it is not somewhere in the South China Sea or sitting intact in some camouflaged hangar in Central Asia. The one thing all of these explanations have in common is that they contradict the authentic information investigators do possess.

That aside, finding the wreckage and the two black boxes may accomplish little. The cockpit voice recorder is a self-erasing two-hour loop and is likely to contain only the sounds of the final alarms going off unless whoever was at the controls was still alive and in a mood to provide explanations for posterity. The other black box, the flight data recorder, will provide information about the functioning of the airplane throughout the entire flight. Still, it will not reveal any relevant system failure because no such failure can explain what occurred. At best, it will answer some relatively unimportant questions, such as when exactly the airplane was depressurized and how long it remained, or how exactly the satellite box was powered down and then powered back up.?

The essential answers probably don’t lie in the ocean but on land in Malaysia. That should be the focus moving forward, and the Malaysian police might know more than they have dared to say. The riddle may not be deep. “‘Good Night. Malaysian Three-Seven-Zero.’”

My Summary:

With all the modern technology used in aviation, it’s alarming that a giant Boeing 777 aircraft can’t be found. They claim that people can be tracked by their cell phones, although everyone is instructed to turn their phone to Airplane mode. However, one internet report says someone sent a Twitter message that they were being hijacked. The answers may be a failed hijacker’s attack, a meteorological event, or put your theory here… But nothing explains why a large Boeing 777 plane can't be found.

All the debris washed ashore failed to point to where the plane disappeared in the south Indian Ocean. Nine years and 37 days ago, a plane and 239 people disappeared. That's very alarming.

Science In Your Life, at https://LovinThings.com/, continues to ask big questions, including What is God, are we alone, and what happens when we die?

Thank you for reading my weekly newsletter. My site is ad-free and trustworthy. Become one of my followers, and see the difference. If you have the means of helping me, here is a DONATE link to help me feed my wife. I'm grateful for any amount. xoxo