In a book from 2015, Richard Belzer and his co-authors review a mystery which has evolved a little, but surprisingly little in some ways, across several years. Some of the early comments still ring true to many analysts:
These authors refer to someone they respect who stressed, early on, “six important facts you’re not being told” about MH370.
“Fact #1: All Boeing 777 commercial jets are equipped with black box recorders that can survive any explosion.
Fact #2: All black box recorders transmit locator signals for at least 30 days after falling into the ocean.
Fact #3: Many parts of destroyed aircraft are naturally bouyant and will float in water.
Fact #4: If a missile destroyed Flight 370, the missile would have left a radar signature.
Fact#5: The location of the aircraft when it vanished is not a mystery.
Fact#6: If Flight 370 was hijacked, it would not have vanished from radar.
Conclusion: Flight 370 did not explode; it vanished…the inescapable conclusion is that Flight 370 simply vanished in some way that we do not yet understand.”
Belzer, Noory, and Wayne , 2015,”Someone is Hiding Something,” p.212
We don’t know if “someone is hiding something” (it’s entirely possible), or if any of those facts are secret, but we know this: several years in, we don’t know that much more than we did eleven days after, when the CBC broadcast the report we featured in the previous section.
And that alone is astounding. We can’t think of a modern aviation disaster that’s generated fewer clear facts, yet generated myriad theories, in inverse proportion. If you had a dollar for each television report or mini-doc on this subject since March of 2014, you’d be wealthy by now.
It’s a sort of pathetic cottage industry–go on cable television, look and sound important, and spout things you don’t know, because frankly no one does.
But in the midst of all that, there are some attemps, fact by fact, to reason deductively and make sense of unprecedented events. All the theory-making can at times serve a purpose.
In one of those mini-docs with over-the-top names starting with words like “the real truth behind”…nevertheless we’re reminded of the importance of looking at, and discarding theories one by one, over time, based on evidence.
“It may be confusing to see so many theories evolving about the loss of an aircraft and it’s a very technical issue, but all those theories are actually very useful, and it’s not ‘conspiracy theory’ but all of the side theories might put light on an unusual situation–so the forensic scientists who’ve got very open minds have to incorporate everything that’s coming up.” Dr. Sally Leivesley, Catastrophic Risk Advisor, from “The Real Truth Behind Malaysian Flight 370
But what do we know? In clear weather a superb aircraft suffered some sort of collapse of its normal functioning, yet leaving us with almost no clue. As another contributor to that same report reminds us, in a normal catastrophic failure the flight would have soon come down in pieces that we would have long since located. In most air disasters, the first photos the public sees are of the wreckage.
So what, then?
Two passengers travelled on MH370 on stolen passports, we’re told early on. A meaningful clue? Possibly, but…shifty people slink around the world all the time. The Titanic probably held a hundred people running from something, but not involved with the sinking of the ship. There’s no evidence those Iranians with false passports, or anyone else, hijacked the plane. If it was hijacked (not too likely) it was a botched or confused operation–no one ever claimed it, the plane probably did not survive or leave survivors. No purpose, no apparent motive.
Although intelligent life in our universe is probable, aliens involved in the MH370 disappearance is not. Only slightly more probable is the execution of a secret plan to spirit the plane deep into Asia for…for…why would that be again? What would be gained by bringing the plane down on remote Asian steppes, disappearing surviving passengers, and repainting a Boeing 777 that you’d can’t really hide, or use, or gain any benefit from. What’s the point?
And remember, it stretches the limits enough for the plane to have disappeared so thoroughly over water. Over land, with airports and radar scanning the sky at regular intervals? Not likely, unless “someone is hiding something,” although that would have to be a lot of someones, doing a lot of hiding. Yet we do have reason to wonder if some information has been suppressed, for whatever reason.
The captain, they tell us a couple of years later, had plugged unusual flight paths into his home-built flight simulator. Meaning what, exactly? We’ll also consider that specious news until something more solid can be made of it. Nonetheless, one of those flight paths supposedly aimed at the landing strip at the ultra-secret U.S. military base at Diego Garcia, south of the Indian subcontinent. Why would he be toying with that idea? And with the powerful U.S. intelligence presence surrounding that base, wouldn’t a flight astray over the Indian Ocean be noticed?
A cyber-hijacking? Perhaps more logical than many of the theories, it would explain why the flight went radio silent, changed course erratically, flew to nowhere for no seeming reason. A chilling throught: some of the world’s most talented cyber criminals may have just been experimenting, testing their skills for a really purposeful mission at a future time. Unlikely? Yes, but Dr. Leivesley, the same expert who challenged us to have “very open minds,” offers the possibility as real and worth exploring.
Little hints, morsels of potential evidence, scraps of theories, have been discussed for years now. Any shred of a clue’s soon pounced on by those hungry for answers. The mystery remains intact.
All that’s not to say that time hasn’t shed a little light, a very little, on the disappearance. When we said in the first section that MH370 vanished “without a trace,” well, over time, we think we have some traces.
A flaperon, part of the wing assembly, and some other debris probably from the flight began showing up in, yes, the Indian Ocean, washing up on the surrounding shores.
That flaperon, all by itself, has taken on a life of its own, and it does represent something tangible, and intriguing. We’ve even seen a mini-documentary where a man speaking in logical sequences offers a pointed assessment.
Look carefully at that flaperon, he says, and you’ll see something in very unusual shape. Not cracked into a hundred pieces. Rather seemingly sheared off along its outer edge, as if deployed in a downward position upon contact with the water, not a nose-first dive into water, but more an attempt at a controlled landing. Therefore, we know that a pilot attempted a water landing, the plane didn’t just crash into the brink out of control.
His theory depends on a chain of sequence and logic, but we have to admit, it does explain the condition of that large piece of aircraft. We do wonder however, if other crash scenarios could have produced that same piece, sheared off along its edge. If we go for attempted-landing-theory as logical, we’re faced with lots of questions. Why, how, would that plane fly that far, still under human control, still over water? Why try to land it on the ocean–that’s never, ever gone well in the history of aviation.
Could we be looking at a scenario in which a pilot, or some human agent, got control of the plane just in time to have to ditch on water, and took their best shot at it? Unlike that famous landing in the U.S. on the smooth Hudson River, with perfect weather and rescue boats within clear view, this would have been pointless, with everyone soon on their way to ocean’s bottom. So which presents more challenge, designing a scenario for a landing far out in the ocean, or a scenario in which that flaperon comes off in that unexpected shape?
In any event, our working hypothesis has to be that the plane did go down, as originally suspected, in some remote part of the Indian Ocean, hours after changing course.
But just how, why, did that flight deep into nowhere, over the water until fuel ran out, come about?