The enduring mystery of missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370

Retro

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Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 disappeared on 8th March 2014 and hasn't been found since, remaining aviation's most enduring mystery. However, there have been developments, such as many pieces of wreckage found and things continue to move forward, if agonizingly slowly, so I thought I'd start this thread to track progress. Please feel free to contribute as you see fit.

After having watched several documentaries and seen and read lots of news reports over the years, it seems reasonably obvious to me that the pilot did it, especially given the weird flight path that the flight took to avoid radar detection.

Now there's pressure to resume the search:

Efforts to find Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared with 239 people on board should resume now that new equipment and data is available, expert says

The Australian government should get behind a new search for the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, the man who headed up the initial search says, now that new equipment and data is available.

Peter Foley was the program director for the international effort, led by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, to find the plane. MH370 went down on 8 March 2014 with 239 people on board. The disappearance of the plane is one of the world’s greatest enduring mysteries.

Foley hopes pressure from families and the upcoming anniversary will push things in the right direction.

Thing is, unfortunately, even if they find the two black boxes (voice and data recorders) they're highly unlikely to have any data on them by now, firstly from the crash damage which would have significantly weakened them, or perhaps fatally damaged them and then from being in the ocean for almost 9 years. No black box can survive that. The best that they can hope for now is closure for the families and finding more wreckage to help figure out a bit better what happened.

I hate enduring mysteries like this and really want them to find that airplane, so just imagine how those poor families feel about it. Best of all, if such terrorist incidents never happen again.



Downed airplane.jpg
This picture from Wikipedia is of the missing airplane, tail number 9M-MRO, taking off from Charles de Gaulle Airport in December 2011.



A slightly older article from December suggests even more strongly that the pilot did it, as the damage found on a landing gear door could only happen if the gear was extended and the plane hit the water in a nose dive. This piece of debris was found in 2017, but not handed in for years.

And finally, Wikipedia as it has lots of reference information on the incident which will be updated over time:
 

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By now, people are aware that on 3rd March, the Malaysian government said that the search could continue after new evidence came to light that using Weak Signal Propagation Reporter (WSPR) radio signals could help to locate the missing aircraft in the Indian Ocean. I really hope this happens and that they finally find the plane, providing closure for the bereaved families and also for everyone else in the world.

However, why has it taken a decade for it to come out that the pilot ordered extra oxygen for the pilots only not the cabin crew, along with an extra 3000KG of fuel? These significant facts, along with various others such as the flight simulator find strongly point to captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah having done it, hence should have been released right at the beginning.

It looks very much like a murder-suicide by the captain with him intentionally making it as hard as possible for the plane to be found afterwards. Unfortunately, we're unlikely to ever know his motives, but it should be possible to stop something like this from ever happening again.



 

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Finally, the search resumes 6 years after they'd given up on it.

Thing is, even if the two black boxes are found, after more than a decade in the water at serious depth, the information is likely to have been destroyed, in which case, investigators will have a really difficult time to try and work out what happened by examining the wreckage. At that depth, anything more than a generalised analysis may be impossible, but bringing up some of the pieces might help. I'll bet they'll never be able to prove exactly why the plance went down and if it was the captain that so many of us suspect of doing a murder-suicide. At least the families and the world would have some kind of closure though.

 

Tiffany

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This is a nice collection of articles on this missing flight; intriguing. I'll take a look at them soon when I'm not doing a complete accounting audit for 2024. 😝
 

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Thanks Tiffs.

I'm surprised that your response is the only one that this thread has received. I mean, MH370 is such a big thing that I thought people would want to talk about it. 🤷‍♂️
 

Tiffany

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Yeah, I don't know, when planes vanish they rank right up there in a "Bermuda Triangle" kind of thing for me. Look at Amelia Earhart? Recently, look at what happened with Assad from Syria when he fled. The plane stopped transmitting its location, only for us to find out later him and his family flew in exile to Russia. We all thought for a little while his plane was hit by a missile or something.
 

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The search for MH370 is finally going to be restarted and this YouTuber actually managed to speak to the volunteers who helped to make it happen with the extra data that they've uncovered.

One thing I disagree with is that one of the volunteers says we'll get all the data from the flight data and voice recorders once found. I doubt it as they'll have been in salt water under high pressure for over a decade and are not built to withstand that for anywhere near this length of time. If they do find them, the data will most likely be gone. At most, they'll have to figure out what they can from the wreckage, of which there might not be much of it after all this time if the parts drifted away with the currents over time, especially the smaller ones. I can't see there being anything left of the bodies either, even the skeletons.

What a grim situation and I can understand why incidents like this put some people off flying even though it's a very safe form of transport.

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