The still-unsolved disappearance in 2014 of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 is not just the biggest-ever mystery in aviation. How a Boeing 777 carrying 239 passengers and crew seemingly vanished into thin air remains perhaps the most confounding mystery of the modern world.
Nine years after MH370 slipped off radar during a red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, apparently turning sharply off course and flying for several hours until it crashed into the world’s loneliest ocean, there are still more questions than answers — and plenty of wild conjecture that has rushed in to fill the gaps.
MH370 is an abnormal case study in the proliferation of conspiracy theories, because even the likeliest scenarios barely seem more plausible than what you’d find in the depths of a Reddit or YouTube rabbit hole.
The simplest possible version of the story still defies comprehension: a pilot who had no apparent experience with mental illness commits the most elaborate suicide in human history without leaving an explanation.
And the speculation only gets more outlandish from there. Maybe Russians hijacked the plane and flew it to Kazakhstan. Maybe the American military shot it down to prevent top-secret cargo from reaching China. Maybe it got hit by a meteor or swallowed by a black hole or intercepted by aliens.
“MH370: The Plane That Disappeared,” a new three-part documentary series on Netflix, doesn’t pretend it has answers to the riddles that have bedeviled media outlets, aviation experts, internet sleuths, corrupt and/or incompetent government bodies and grieving families for almost a decade.
The series, directed by Louise Malkinson, gives a patient hearing to several of the predominant theories, each of which is a Russian nesting doll that never runs out of smaller interior dolls.
For instance, if the plane actually crashed in the South China Sea, as some still maintain, then how was it exchanging pings with a stationary satellite for six hours after it disappeared? (This data, from the satellite operator Inmarsat, established the presumption that the plane flew south until it ran out of fuel.)
If this data points to a probable crash site in the southern Indian Ocean, why have years of costly searches turned up almost nothing? And if pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah is the most logical suspect, then why did the incriminating evidence on his home flight simulator look as if it was planted?
One of the documentary’s primary sources is the aviation journalist Jeff Wise, whose positioning here as an authoritative voice obscures how polarizing a figure he is in the discourse. Wise has written books and articles suggesting the satellite data was spoofed, and the plane was somehow diverted north by Russian operatives to distract the world from that country’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula.
The downing of a second Malaysian jet over the Ukrainian war zone four months later could have been the smoking gun, but it would mean all the debris recovered from the east coast of Africa was also faked — which maybe it could have been, but how, since every other 777 on the planet is accounted for?
That this is one of the least far-fetched ideas is an indication of what a hall of mirrors the MH370 story has become. You can look at it and see whatever you want. The conflicting voices seem to agree only on one thing: MH370 is a needle in a haystack, except nobody knows where the haystack actually is. And probably the hayfield is on fire.
The ongoing arguments about MH370 tend to minimize the human element. No matter what bizarre, extraordinary or terrifying sequence of events unfolded that night, 239 people are almost certainly dead, and hundreds more loved ones still seek closure.
And “The Plane That Disappeared,” more than any other MH370 documentary, makes an admirable effort to recenter the voices of family members who just want someone to tell them what happened.
Ultimately, we may never know. A state-of-the-art commercial aircraft simply does not disappear, unless somebody with deep technical knowledge really, really wants it to. And the ocean — vast, churning, indifferent — does not surrender its secrets easily.