MH370: The Lost Flight

What really happened to Malaysia’s missing airplane? The MH370 flight was a Malaysia Airlines aircraft that vanished on March 8, 2014, coming from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia flying to Beijing, China. (History, 2014) There were an estimated 227 passengers, and twelve crew members boarded this plane. Throughout the years of widespread endeavors from search teams and personnel, there is still no confirmed wreckage of a crash site, debris, or even a sign of the missing plane. There are several theories regarding this missing flight and here, I will go over three of them.

Veteran Pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah organized mass murder of all the passengers on the flight because of personal problems dealing with failed marriage.

Mechanical failure caused the plane to crash into the ocean.

Did the plane vanish into some otherworldly portal?

Let’s examine the disappearance of the MH370 flight and look at different theories related to this mysterious case.

Zaharie Ahmad Shad was a successful pilot. Born in July 1961, he joined Malaysia Airlines in 1981. In his over three decades tenure with Malaysia Airlines, he had 18,423 hours of flight time (Kishore). Due to his good record of accomplishment and ranking, he was selected as a type rating instructor and examiner on B777, which he flew as its Captain for 16 years and had 8,659 hours on it (1). Shah was recognized as a skilled and admired pilot who had no faults with his records or accounts. He was known for always being professional and was a mentor to many young aviators.

Zaharie Shad was married with three kids. He loved to cook and was an excellent fisher. He and his wife lived in a high-class gated community in Kuala Lumpur, where he was said to have created and built his own flight simulator. In the wake of the plane's disappearance, rumors surfaced claiming his wife had moved out of their home (Birchall). This created speculations that he caused the plane to crash because several people that knew him said that he was highly upset about the troubles he was having with his family. Sivarasa Rasiah, a member of the parliament who knew Shad personally stated, “He was a likable, very sociable kind of guy. He would not have actively, in any way, endangered the lives of his passengers.” (Semple).

Shad was seen to be very flirtatious based on his social media pages. When investigations started, they found 97 Facebook messages that led psychologists to believe he was "self-destructive"(Birchall). There was proof that he constantly sent explicit messages to Malaysian twin sisters, repeatedly asking them when they are coming to his hometown even though they never responded to him. Shad was seen as a family-oriented man who loved his life. After the plane disappearance and investigation began, speculations were brought to light, and it was revealed that Zaharie Shad was, in fact, living a double life.

Zaharie Shad was known to be very vocal about his political views online. He was constantly complaining about the government on his Facebook page, which owned the airline he flew. Zaharie urged his followers: "There is a rebel in each and every one of us. Let it out!" Aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas said he should have been fired for his political rants (Birchall). He has close ties with Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, who has been fighting a charge of sodomy. Hours before boarding the flight, Zaharie turned up at the Court of Appeal in the country's new administrative capital, Putrajaya, for a hearing at which Anwar was sentenced to five years in prison (Ramakrishnan). This resulted in many people calling Shad a terrorist and deliberately crashing the plane. Although Shah was a successful pilot and family man, he was also flirtatious with strong political views. Several theories have been created about what could’ve been the causes of the missing plane, and the pilot’s involvement has been at the top of the list.  

Three intriguing conspiracies stand out regarding the disappearance of MH370. First, is the conspiracy that the pilot Zaharie Shad planned the mass murder-suicide. The second conspiracy theory is that a mechanical failure caused the plane to crash in the ocean. Finally, the conspiracy regarding the possibility of an otherworldly portal sucking up the flight by either aliens or an Asian Bermuda triangle.

The first theory proposes that the pilot, Zaharie Shah, planned mass murder because of a personal problem. Zaharie's marriage was ending and he deliberately crashed the plane in devastation because his wife moved out the day before this flight. His voice was heard on the final radio communication less than two minutes before the plane began to divert from its flight path. He said: “Good night. Malaysian three-seven-zero” (Kitching).The electrical system was deliberately turned off, making the plane impossible to track by satellite (1). Shad was a very experienced pilot and built a flight simulator in his home, so he knew exactly how to make the plane disappear without any traces of its whereabouts.

Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shad hijacked and diverted the plane. Aerospace engineer, Richard Godfrey, has been investigating the missing aircraft for years after it mysteriously vanished En route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. He believes Zaharie deliberately steered the Boeing 777 into areas where it would go undetected, before taking the craft soaring into dizzying altitudes that would have swiftly incapacitated then killed the passengers and crew, before nosediving the flight into the ocean. The pilot would have had enough oxygen in the cockpit to continue controlling the plane in the final descent to its watery grave, Mr. Godfrey claims (Shadwell).

This was not an accident. It was done on purpose and expertly by Zaharie Shad, who was trying to diminish the possibilities of the plane ever being located. The route the flight took was perfectly normal until the pilot signed out of Malaysian-controlled airspace. The pilot should then have signed into the Vietnamese-controlled airspace. Instead, the transponder was turned off and the plane switched course heading west taking it out to the Indian Ocean, and then switched course again taking to the most southern part of the Indian Ocean when the plane's fuel was empty and possibly collided into the ocean. (Shadwell).The estimated crash location was extremely remote and was as remote as possible given the amount of fuel available (1). The ocean is huge, and people still have not located shipwrecks from hundreds of years ago, so the plane is somewhere they just have not found yet.

Another theory that has been speculated over the years is that a mechanical failure caused the plane to crash in the ocean. The only thing is, why has the plane or people on board not been located, if that is the case. Initial reports suggested all signals had been lost simultaneously, bolstering the idea that the plane might have exploded or disintegrated at a high altitude. The closest investigators have come to a sign that a technical fault might have brought the plane down was a statement from a worker on an oil rig off the coast of Vietnam, who claimed to have seen a "burning" object (Malaysia flight MH370: Theories swirl around disappearance). The lack of debris makes this case hard to believe. If there was a mechanical failure, the pilot and plane staff had sufficient time to teach and send a distress signal to air traffic controllers of the danger they were facing. So, mechanical failure is not a good theory but more so an easy excuse or reason because there has not been a cause yet of this mystery.

Another intriguing theory that has been floating around is the possibility of the plane being sucked up by some otherworldly portal. Reason.com conducted a poll in the United States and found out that five percent of their respondents believed Flight 370 was abducted by aliens (Whigham). Several bloggers also pointed out a number of UFO sightings around Malaysia before the plane’s disappearance (1). It was inevitable that the disappearance would also evoke comparisons to the infamous patch of water into which ships and planes are said to vanish without a trace, which is the Bermuda Triangle. People are calling it the Asian Bermuda Triangle. If you look at a map you will notice that the search area is nowhere near Bermuda Triangle.

Captain Zaharie Shad wanted to kill himself without anyone knowing it was a suicide. He died without his family blaming him or themselves. It is the “perfect” suicide, ignoring killing all the other people on board. It is hard to understand someone who, on the one hand, could be so compassionate regarding family members and yet on the other hand so barbaric to take 238 innocent souls to their deaths along with him. He had a failed marriage and he was becoming more politically aligned with leader of the opposition of Malayasia, Anwar Ibrahim. After attending the trial on the morning of the flight and seeing him get locked up, he boards his flight with ill-intent. If and when the main wreckage is located, it could also provide clues about who was on the flight deck, as well as evidence such as whether the oxygen masks were deployed – from which investigators could then begin to piece together an answer to the mystery of MH370 (Calder). Depressurize the plane, put it on a path to nowhere, and take off your oxygen mask. The plane disappears, and without any evidence, your family might even receive your life insurance. It is all speculation either way, but it is easy to imagine he wanted to also create modern aviation's greatest mystery in the process.

After examining the missing flight of MH370, three conspiracies theories are left to ponder:

Did pilot, Zaharie Shad plan this mass-murder suicide?

Was there a mechanical failure that caused the plane to crash in an unknown area?

Did the plane vanish into some otherworldly portal?

Even today, years after the disappearance of the plane, this mystery remains unsolved, and many theories continue to spread as people continue to investigate.

Work Cited

Birchall, Guy. "Who Was Zaharie Ahmad Shah? MH370 Pilot Who Was in Command of the Malaysian Airlines Jet When It Vanished." The Sun, 18 June 2019, https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7483593/zaharie-ahmad-shah-mh370-pilot-malaysian- airlines/.

Calder, Simon. MH370: Everything we need to know about Aviation’s Greatest Mystery, July 2018, MH370: Everything we now know about aviation’s greatest mystery | The Independent | The Independent

History.com Editors, “Malaysia Airlines flight vanishes with more than 200 people aboard.” (March 8th, 2014), https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/malaysia-airlines- flight- vanishes-with-more-than-200-people-aboard

Kishore, Divya. “Who was Zaharie Ahmad Shah? 'Depressed' MH370 pilot changed plane's route, speed and avoided radar, says engineer, 2021, https://meaww.com/zaharie-ahmad- shah-mh-370-pilot-changed-plane-route-speed-avoided-radar-before-diving-indian-sS ocean

Kitching, Chris. “MH370 disaster almost certainly planned mass murder-suicide by pilot”, Feb 2020, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/mh370-almost-certainly-mass-murder- 21526964

Malaysia flight MH370: Theories swirl around disappearance, March 2014, Malaysia flight MH370: Theories swirl around disappearance - BBC News

Ramakrishnan, Mahi. “Missing jet's pilot was opposition 'political activist,” March 16th, 2014, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/03/16/malaysia-flight-missing- pilots/6484249/

Shadwell, Talia. ‘Depressed’ missing MH370 pilot made a series of strange turns, expert claims, May 2021, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/depressed-missing-mh370-pilot- made-24049357

Simple, Kirk. “Pilots’ possible role in plane’s vanishing is ‘unthinkable’ to friends, 2014, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/pilots-possible-role-in-plane- s-vanishing-is-unthinkable-to-friends-1.1729869

Whigham, Nick. “The year’s best cases of alien ‘proof’, December 2014, MH 370 and X-37B as proof of alien existence | news.com.au — Australia’s leading news site