Throwback Thursday: As the 7 Year Anniversary of MH370's Disappearance Nears, New Evidence and Theories Emerge

Throwback Thursday takes a look back into Beijing's past, using our 13-year-strong blog archives as the source for a glance at the weird and wonderful stories of Beijing's days gone by.


Next Monday, Mar 8, marks seven years since the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, an event that kicked off the largest and most confounding aviation mystery in history. The news deeply affected Beijingers and the rest of the Chinese public as 152 of the 227 passengers on board were Chinese nationals, as well as citizens from Canada, France, the US, Australia, and Malaysia, many of whom were living and working in Beijing at the time.

Although there are few certainties in this story, some absolutes and official accounts have emerged. Namely, the plane – which left Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing on the evening of Mar 8, 2014 – never made it to its destination and its full wreckage has never been found. Likewise, leading up to the plane's disappearance, investigators know that air traffic control lost contact with the plane around 40 minutes following takeoff, somewhere over the South China Sea. It then deviated west from its planned route, continuing to fly for six hours until it is assumed to have run out of fuel and crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean. To date, all 227 passengers and 12 crew onboard are presumed dead as a result.

Over the course of the next four years, an investigative team conducted an exhaustive survey, culminating in a 1,500-page report that was released by the Malaysian government in July 2018. In the report, investigators admit that foul play is possible given the manual deviation of the plane’s course and abrupt ceasing of communication. The officially accepted theory, however, is that both the crew and the passengers were afflicted by an event of mass hypoxia (lack of oxygen), which rendered everyone on board unconscious. According to this theory, the plane continued to fly on autopilot until it ran out of fuel, crashing into the ocean.

While that initial investigation wrapped up in January 2017, a subsequent search to locate the aircraft was conducted by US-based company Ocean Infinity. Unfortunately, that too concluded in May 2018, after combing more than 112,000 sq km of ocean over the course of three months.

Seven years on and an unprecedented amount of time, energy, and money continues to go into making sense of what happened, largely down to the efforts of private enterprise, amateur investigators, and “wreck hunters” who turn up small clues and pieces of debris year by year. Moreover, an astounding 130 books have been written on the subject – ranging from heartfelt and earnest to conspiratorial. To that end, over the last couple of weeks, a spat of sorts has been brewing between two members of these dueling camps.

Blaine Gibson, a self-described “wreck hunter” has been chasing the story of MH370 since September 2014, six months after the plane initially disappeared. His search began in the South China Sea around Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar, however, in July 2015 he uncovered a flaperon – that little piece on the wing that moves up and down to control airflow – on Réunion Island, a small French-owned piece of land in the Indian Ocean. That piece, as well as a larger flap, was later confirmed to be a piece of MH370.

Conversely, May 18 will see the release of The Disappearing Act: The Impossible Case of MH370 by Hong Kong-based investigative journalist Florence de Changy, a follow-up to her 2016 release, Le Vol MH370 N'a Pas Disparu (Flight MH370 Did Not Disappear). After years of investigation and research, de Changy has always held the line that, “The official narrative on MH370 is an insult to human intelligence,” however, this time around she’s upped the ante, implicating the French, Malaysian, and US militaries in a nefarious plot during an interview with France24 last month. Moreover, de Changy has asserted time and time again that the Boeing-777 “vanished without a trace.”

And yet, it is reported that 16 people have recovered a total of 34 pieces of debris in six different countries, the most recent of which was found by Gibson off the coast of South Africa last month. Allegedly, as much as half of the debris that Gibson has recovered has been positively identified as coming from flight MH370, or at the very least, a Boeing-777. Responding directly to de Changy’s claims that the plane was shot down near Vietnam, Gibson stated, “Not one piece of debris has turned up in the South China Sea – not one. There is no evidence for this theory and in fact, all the physical and scientific evidence points to the contrary.” For her part, de Changy claims to have conducted years of research and interviewed countless officials and experts.

Meanwhile, last October, another group of aviation experts added credence to Blaine’s version of events when they announced that the plane flew past Indonesia and eventually crashed into the South Indian Ocean, about 2,070km off the coast of Perth, Australia. Malaysia’s New Straits Times reported that Victor Iannello – an engineer from the US who worked with three other experts on the crash site study – told AirLive that “there are ‘better than even odds’ that the plane is within 100 nautical miles of its last estimated point.” Another aviation expert quoted in the story, Byron Bailey, believes that searches were a mere 30km off the mark from where they estimate the plane to be and suggested that “the pilot was trying to ditch the aircraft as far south as possible so that little wreckage would be found.”

And therein lies the rub, the tangled web of truths and conjecture enveloping the mystery of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370. Both Iannello and Bailey support Blaine’s theory that the plane is to be found in the South Indian Ocean, however, Bailey’s claim that the pilot intentionally dropped the plane so that “little wreckage could be found” throws us back into a web of de Changy-like conspiracy and coverup. All of which is to say, even when the crash site is finally located, we probably won’t be any closer to finding out how it ended up there in the first place.

Needless to say, at this point, our hearts continue to go out to all the friends and family of those who were lost, and may some semblance of closure eventually be reached.

With additional reporting from Tautvile Daugelaite

Click here for our full coverage of the MH370 flight disappearance

Images: Rojak DailyNew Straits Times, airlineratings.com (2)(3), via The Guardian