MH370: The Final Investigation

At 12:41 a.

m.

, Malaysia Airlines flight 370 left the gate in Koala Lumpa.

Nothing about the flight stood out.

The aircraft was serviceable.

The crew was experienced.

The route was routine.

38 minutes later, the flight disappeared from the sky.

>> Malaysia 370, Quo Lumpur control.

We cannot see you anymore.

Radar contact is gone.

Please talk back to us immediately.

>> Not lost, simply disappeared.

For more than a decade, investigators collected radar records, satellite data, drift analyses, and debris.

Yet, no confirmed crash site and no explanation that fully held up.

This video focuses on what that investigation produced in its most recent phase.

The findings reassessed in 2025 and what they change in our understanding.

>> Light MH370 ended in the middle of the INDIAN OCEAN.

THIS IS VERY rare for an airplane to disappear uh is not normal.

>> Traffic control lost contact with the plane about 2 hours after takeoff.

Before we walk through those 11 years step by step, we need to do one thing.

We need to go back to where it started.

To the night when flight 370 pushed back from the gate, everything looked normal and the most mysterious disappearance in modern aviation began.

It is the night of March 8th, 2014.

The time at Koala Lumpur International Airport is just after midnight.

Most of the terminal is quiet.

Shops are closing.

Cleaning staff move through empty seating areas.

On the departure boards, one longhaul flight still stands out.

Malaysia Airlines flight 370.

Destination Beijing.

The aircraft is a Boeing 77200 extended range.

Registration 9 Mike Romeo Oscar.

It is a longhaul workhorse.

Two large engines, twin aisle cabin, range to cross continents and oceans.

The type has an excellent safety [music] record.

Inside the terminal, passengers start to gather at the gate.

There are business travelers, families, couples, and tour groups.

Many are Chinese citizens returning from holidays or business trips in Malaysia.

Some are Malaysian passengers heading to Beijing for work, study, or onward connections.

In total, 227 passengers and 12 crew members will board.

On the flight deck, the captain and first officer prepare.

The captain is 53 years old with more than 18,000 hours of flight time, including over 8,000 on the Boeing 77.

He is one of the most senior pilots at the airline, a training captain, and a simulator instructor.

The first officer is 27, relatively early in his jet career, but fully qualified on the type, building hours under supervision.

They review the route to Beijing, a night departure heading northeast over the Gulf of Thailand, then across Vietnamese airspace, past the coast, and up towards Chinese territory.

The weather forecast is good.

No major storms, no severe turbulence.

Nothing that should make this flight special.

The aircraft has fuel for the trip, plus reserves.

Weight and balance are within limits.

No major technical issues are noted in the maintenance log.

From every angle, this is just another overnight longhaul flight.

Boarding begins.

Passengers scan their boarding passes and walk down the jet bridge into the cabin.

Flight attendants greet them at the door.

Some people head left into business class.

Most turn right, filling economy seats in a 333 layout.

Bags go into overhead bins.

Mobile phones take last photos.

Seat belts click shut.

Doors close.

The jet bridge is pulled back.

The cabin crew arm the slides and take their positions.

Malaysia Airlines Flight [music] 370 pushes back from the gate at about 12:41 in the early hours of March 8th.

There is nothing on board that tells anyone this will be the last time this aircraft is ever seen.

After push back, the trip 7 taxis out to the runway.

The captain receives clearance for departure and lines up.

At around 12:42, the aircraft begins its takeoff roll.

The engines spool up, thrust builds, and the jet accelerates down the runway.

The first officer calls out the speeds.

Rotate.

The nose lifts.

The main gear leaves the ground.

Positive rate of climb.

Landing gear up.

In the cabin, the feeling is familiar to anyone who flies at night.

The push into the seat.

The vibration as wheels leave concrete.

The slight angle as the aircraft climbs into darkness.

The departure is uneventful.

Climb continues.

The crew contact Koala Lumpur departure control, then climb to a cruising level.

The trip 7 stabilizes at its planned flight level.

Heading northeast towards the Gulf of Thailand.

In the cockpit, checklists are completed.

The crew talk briefly with air traffic control, confirm their route, and settle in for a night flight of about 6 hours.

At 1:19 in the morning, as the aircraft approaches the boundary between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace, the controller in Koala Lumpur tells flight 370 to contact the next [music] sector.

The first officer responds with a short routine phrase.

It is the last confirmed voice communication from the aircraft.

Good night, Malaysian 370.

From the point of view of air traffic control, everything is normal.

The aircraft’s label on the radar screen shows correct altitude and speed.

The transponder is working.

The handover to Vietnam should be simple.

Inside the cabin, the seat belt signs are likely off.

Some passengers may already be asleep.

Others watch films, read, or play games.

Flight attendants tidy the aisles and prepare for the quiet part of the night.

No one in the cabin feels anything unusual.

The real story of flight 370 is about to begin and no one on board knows it.

In most modern airspace, controllers track aircraft using two main tools.

One is primary radar.

It sends out a radio pulse and listens for an echo from the metal body of an aircraft that gives a basic point in space, but no identity.

The second, more important tool is a transponder.

The aircraft’s equipment receives a radar request and replies with information.

flight number, altitude, and a special code.

This is what turns an anonymous dot into a labeled symbol on the screen.

Shortly after the final goodn night call, something happens.

On civilian radar screens, the transponder return from Malaysia Airlines.

Flight 370 disappears.

The label vanishes.

The clear altitude and code information drop away.

If you were watching only that system, it would look as if the aircraft had just left the display.

At almost the same time, another system stops sending routine information.

Airlines use a data link system to send automatic reports from aircraft back to company servers and maintenance.

On flight 370, this system stops transmitting normal messages shortly after the last voice call.

It is as if someone either pulled a plug or changed a setting that stopped those reports from going out to a controller in Koala Lumpur or Ho Chi Min that night.

This does not immediately look like a hijack or a catastrophe.

Radar systems are imperfect.

Transponders can fail.

Radio checks can be missed.

Procedures say, “Call the aircraft.

Check with the next sector.

Then raise alarms.

” If there is no response.

In [snorts] the next few minutes, those calls [music] start.

Vietnamese controllers try to make contact with flight 370.

They receive no answer.

They ask Quoala Lumpur if they still see the aircraft.

Confusion grows.

Each side thinks the other is in contact.

While this is happening, something else is going on that no one in civilian control rooms can see.

The aircraft has not vanished, it has turned.

Military radar, which can see raw returns without relying on a transponder reply, later shows that Malaysia Airlines flight 370 made a sharp turn back over the Malaysian Peninsula.

Instead of continuing northeast towards Vietnam, the jetbanked, flew back across the country, and then turned northwest along a route that took it out over the Andaman Sea.

It passed near known reporting points at altitudes that were entirely compatible with a large jet under control.

It did not descend into a rapid dive.

It did not break apart in midair.

It flew.

But as far as civil air traffic control was concerned, there was nothing more than an unresolved radio check and a missing transponder symbol.

No mayday, no hijack code, no call saying there was smoke, decompression, or anything else.

A 6-hour flight had just become an unsolved problem on a radar screen.

By the time it is clear that no one is talking to flight 370, the aircraft has already left the area where groundbased radar can see it.

For a period of time, the only people who know that something is seriously wrong are controllers in Quoala Lumpur and Ho Chi [music] Min and a small group of duty officers in Malaysia Airlines operation center.

At first, the airlines response is cautious.

Safety procedures require them to check fuel loads, possible diversions, and any chance that the aircraft might have landed somewhere without telling air traffic control.

Internally, people start making calls to Beijing, to other airports, to different control centers.

On paper, the flight is still in the air.

There is no confirmed accident.

Families in Beijing are still asleep or on their way to the airport.

No one outside the system has any idea that something is happening.

As the hours pass, the options begin to close.

If the aircraft had suffered a technical failure in the first part of the flight, it would have crashed within a certain range.

Search areas are discussed.

Plans are drawn up to look in the South China Sea along the route to Beijing.

But the lack of any wreckage, any distress calls, and any clear radar track in that area starts to unsettle the picture.

It is only later when military radar data is fully reviewed that investigators understand how far from the original plan the aircraft actually went.

For now, in the early hours of March 8th, the most honest description is the simplest.

A large passenger jet has gone missing.

The most important clue in the entire MH370 case did not come from a radar screen, a cockpit recording, or a piece of wreckage.

It came from a satellite in geostationary orbit, and a system that was not even designed to track aircraft minuteby minute.

The aircraft’s data link equipment was connected to a satellite network used mainly for things like sending maintenance information and text messages to and from the cockpit.

When that system is active, the aircraft and the satellite periodically exchange short automated signals to maintain the connection.

After flight 370 went silent to air traffic control and after its transponder stopped sending information, something remained alive for a while.

This automatic link between the aircraft and the satellite.

For about 7 hours after the last voice transmission, the satellite recorded a series of so-called handshakes from the aircraft.

They were not full messages with position and speed.

They were essentially pings.

Are you there? Yes, I am here.

Each of these signals contained two pieces of information that would become crucial.

The first was the time it took for the signal to travel from the aircraft to the satellite and back.

Because the speed of radio waves is constant, this gave investigators a measure of how far from the satellite the aircraft was at each handshake.

Plot these distances on a map and you do not get a single point.

You get a ring of possible positions, a curved line, an arc where the aircraft could have been at that time.

The second was a subtle shift in the frequency of the signal caused by the relative motion of the aircraft and the satellite.

This is related to the Doppler effect, the same principle that makes a passing siren sound higher as it approaches and lower as it [music] moves away.

By analyzing that frequency shift, investigators could estimate whether the aircraft was moving towards or away from the satellite along each arc.

At the time, this use of satellite handshake data to reconstruct a flight path had never been done in an accident investigation.

Teams in the satellite company and in international investigation groups spent months checking and re-checking the mathematics.

What they found when they combined the timing arcs and the frequency information was a pattern.

After turning back across Malaysia and heading northwest, the aircraft appears to have turned south, flown out over the Indian Ocean, and then continued on a broadly southerntherly track for hours until the final handshake when fuel would have been close to exhaustion.

The last of these handshakes, sometimes called the seventh arc, represents a line on the map where the aircraft likely was when it made its final contact with the satellite.

Somewhere along that arc in the southern Indian Ocean, flight 370 is believed to have descended into the sea.

That entire reconstruction is not based on normal tracking systems, not on radio calls, not on radar, but on a background function of a satellite communications network that no one expected to carry the weight of an entire investigation.

For many viewers, this is the point where the story becomes more like a detective case than a conventional crash.

We have no flight recorders.

We have no confirmed wreckage on the seabed.

We have a set of curved lines, some timing data, and the knowledge that a jet fueled for around 7 hours of flight could not stay in the air forever.

Whenever a flight disappears, the first question is always, what went wrong? With MH370, almost every simple answer breaks under the weight of the data.

If this had been a rapid catastrophic failure, such as an explosion or a major structural breakup near the last known position, there would have been floating wreckage in the South China Sea within hours.

Ships and aircraft from multiple countries searched that area intensively in the days after March 8th.

They saw nothing that matched the size, pattern, or distribution of a large passenger jet breaking up near the surface.

If this had been a straightforward hijacking to a known location, the aircraft would have needed enough fuel and a runway long enough to land unnoticed.

No such landing has ever been confirmed, and the satellite handshake data does not fit a controlled flight to a normal airport.

If this had been a simple case of an unresponsive crew with the aircraft continuing on autopilot along its planned route until fuel exhaustion, the crash would have occurred along or near the original path to Beijing, not deep in the southern Indian Ocean.

The satellite data, the military radar track, and the absence of wreckage near the planned route all point to something else.

At some point after the last voice call, someone on the flight deck or someone who gained access to flight deck systems appears to have disabled the transponder, stopped [music] normal automatic reports, turned the aircraft off its assigned course, and flown an alternative route for an extended period.

Whether that person was the captain, the first officer, someone forcing them, or someone acting in cooperation with them is a separate question and one that has fueled discussion for a decade.

The official reports are careful.

They stop short of naming a culprit or giving a final motive.

They do, however, state clearly that the changes in heading and altitude in the early part of the diversion were almost certainly made by a human, not by a random mechanical fault.

From a pure data point of view, flight 370 was not a victim of a single sudden malfunction.

It was a flight that continued under some form of control for hours after it stopped talking.

In the immediate days after the disappearance, none of this was fully understood.

Governments and search agencies had to act on what they knew then, not on what the satellite data would reveal months later.

The first assumption based on the last known air traffic control position and the planned route was that the aircraft had gone down somewhere in the South China Sea or the Gulf of Thailand.

Navies and coast guards from multiple countries deployed ships and aircraft to comb that area.

They flew visual search patterns, scanned the water with radar, and looked for any sign of floating debris, oil slicks, or life rafts.

Nothing that could be confirmed as part of flight 370 was found.

As days went by with no credible debris, attention began to shift.

The military radar data showing the turn across Malaysia was brought into the investigation.

The satellite company began to share its handshake logs.

The idea that the aircraft had gone far to the south, not northeast, started to take hold.

To families who had been told to watch the South China Sea, this was a shock.

The search zone moved thousands of kilometers away.

The possibility that their relatives last moments took place not in crowded regional shipping lanes, but in some of the loneliest waters on Earth began to sink in.

For the investigators, the scale of the problem suddenly expanded.

Instead of a relatively small area near busy coasts, they now faced a band of ocean thousands of kilometers long with depths of 4,000 m or more in places, fierce weather, and almost no existing mapping of the seabed.

The disappearance of MH370 had just become not only an aviation mystery, but a logistical and scientific one.

How do you find a single aircraft on the bottom of an ocean when all you have is an ark, some timing data, and no wreckage at the surface? The answer to that question would shape the rest of 2014 and the years that followed.

And that is where the timeline of our investigation really begins.

Not with the last words from the cockpit, but with the first serious attempts to narrow down the search area in one of the most remote parts of the planet.

The Indian Ocean was just a blue shape on a map.

By the end of March, it had become the center of the biggest and most expensive search in aviation history.

But the search did not start there.

It started in the wrong place.

In the hours after flight 370 vanished from radar, the most obvious assumption drove the response.

Last known position, somewhere over the South China Sea, planned route [music] Koala Lumpur to Beijing.

Logical conclusion, the aircraft must have gone down somewhere along that line.

So ships and aircraft were sent there.

Navies from Malaysia, Vietnam, China, and other countries fanned out over the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea.

Longrange patrol aircraft flew parallel tracks over the water.

Crews stared down from windows for hours, scanning for life rafts, seat cushions, wreckage, oil slicks.

Helicopters orbited suspected patches of floating debris that turned out to be fishing gear and trash.

Radar plots were rechecked.

Controllers from Koala Lumpur and Ho Chi Min went back through recordings.

The airline tried to account for every possibility.

A diversion, a landing at some remote strip, an error in the radar handover.

At the same time, another detail quietly caught attention.

Two passengers on the manifest had boarded with stolen passports.

For a few days, that became the focus.

Headlines around the world lit up with speculation about terrorism and hijack.

Investigators tracked the men down through security footage and intelligence channels.

The story turned out to be more ordinary than sinister.

They were asylum seekers trying to reach Europe, not known extremists.

The stolen passports were a problem for border security, not the key to the disappearance.

Meanwhile, hours were passing, and the South China Sea stayed empty.

On the 15th of March, 8 days after the flight vanished, the case pivoted.

Malaysia’s prime minister stepped in front of cameras in Koala Lumpur and revealed something the public had not heard before.

The aircraft had stayed in contact with a communication satellite for hours after it vanished from normal radar.

Those background handshakes, the pings between the aircraft’s satellite terminal and the satellite high above the equator, showed that flight 370 had not simply fallen into the ocean near its last known radio call.

It had flown on for a long time.

Analysts had taken the times of those handshakes and calculated how far the aircraft was from the satellite at each one.

That gave them a series of possible positions, arcs on the globe.

When they plotted those arcs, they saw two possible corridors.

One corridor bent northwest across Asia towards places like Kazakhstan.

The other curved south into empty Indian Ocean.

At that press conference, the prime minister announced both corridors.

Almost immediately, the northern option began to fall apart.

Countries along that corridor checked their military and civil radars.

None of them saw an unidentified Boeing 77 crossing their airspace any time after the last known Malaysian military radar return.

The idea that a widebody jet could cross that many borders at cruising altitude in peace [music] time without being seen was extremely hard to reconcile with reality.

That left the southern corridor, a long lonely swathe of ocean far off the west [music] coast of Australia.

An area that one Australian leader later described as about as close to nowhere as it is possible to be.

The search had just moved thousands of kilometers away into some of the harshest waters on the planet.

[music] There was one more clue that might still be alive in the deep.

Every modern airliner is fitted with two recorders, a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder.

Both have underwater locator beacons attached to them.

When those beacons are immersed in water, they begin to emit a regular acoustic ping at a specific frequency.

The catch, the batteries are only rated for around 30 to 40 days.

MH370 vanished on the 8th of March.

By early April, the clock on those beacons was almost at its limit.

Search [music] teams rushed to get listening equipment into the likely area along what investigators now called the Seventh Ark, the last known satellite handshake line in the southern Indian Ocean.

Australian authorities took the lead for this part of the search.

Long range patrol aircraft dropped sonar boys that floated on the surface and listened below.

A specialist ship towed a device called a pinger locator, essentially an underwater microphone tuned to hear the beacon frequency.

Other vessels with advanced sonar capability headed to the same area.

The weather was brutal.

Swells rolled through the search zone, often several meters high.

Winds [music] whipped spray across decks.

Just getting equipment into the water and keeping it at the right depth was a challenge.

Search planes flew for hours from Western Australia just to reach the area, search for a short period, and then [music] return.

On some days, they heard things.

Short bursts in the right frequency range, picked up by underwater listening [music] gear.

Hopes spiked.

News media around the world ran headlines about pings that could be from MH370’s black boxes.

Ships slowed to crawling speed over those spots.

A small autonomous submarine called Bluefin 21 was deployed to map the seabed around them with sonar.

If the signals really were from the recorders, the logic went, “The wreckage had to be nearby.

” Dive after dive, Bluefin 21 scanned the bottom.

It found nothing.

Analysis of the signals later suggested they were unlikely to be from the missing aircraft’s locator beacons.

They did not match the exact technical signature the way investigators would have expected.

It was possible they came from some other source or from damaged beacons behaving unpredictably.

It was also possible they were just noise.

By late April, the window for hearing fresh pings from healthy beacon batteries had almost certainly closed.

The surface search for floating debris in the southern Indian Ocean was called off on the 28th of April.

Aircraft had covered millions of square kilometers of ocean surface.

They had seen driftwood, containers, fishing gear, and trash.

Nothing they could prove belonged to flight 370.

The only path left was the hardest one, mapping the bottom of the ocean and searching it slowly, strip by strip.

There was a deeper problem hiding under all of this.

No one really knew what the seafloor looked like in much of the target zone.

On nautical charts, the area was just vague depth numbers and guesses.

For a detailed, safe underwater search, that was not good enough.

Submarines and towed sonar vehicles could not operate blind in complex mountainous terrain without risk of collision.

So before the full underwater search could begin, a different kind of ship moved in.

Survey vessels started to run long tracks across the southern Indian Ocean with sonar aimed not at finding aircraft parts, but at measuring the shape of the seabed itself.

They sent narrow beams of sound down and listened for echoes bouncing off ridges, plateaus, and trenches.

Slowly, line by line, they built up a three-dimensional map of the underwater landscape along and around the seventh ark.

That baometric survey would eventually cover more than 200,000 square kilm of ocean floor.

It revealed deep trenches, unexpected seamounts and steep slopes.

It also showed large planes where underwater search vehicles could operate more safely.

From a storytelling perspective, this is one of the strangest parts of the MH370 case.

A single missing aircraft forced countries to map huge areas of the planet that had never been charted properly before.

The investigation was not just about what happened to one flight.

It was literally redrawing our picture of the world beneath the waves.

But the families of the people on board were not interested in new maps.

They wanted one thing, proof of where the aircraft was and what had happened to the people they loved.

That would require a different phase, the real underwater hunt.

On the 29th of January 2015, Malaysia formally declared the disappearance of Flight 370 an accident with no survivors.

From a legal point of view, this step mattered.

It allowed compensation claims to move forward.

It gave families a framework in which to process estates, insurance, and official [music] documents that required a clear status.

From an emotional point of view, it felt brutal.

There was still no aircraft, no flight data recorder, no cockpit voice recorder, no confirmed wreckage.

The official line was effectively, “We have no idea exactly where it is or why it crashed, but it is gone and everyone on board is dead.

” For some families, this felt like being abandoned.

For others, it was a painful but necessary formal recognition of what they had already accepted.

The search at sea, however, continued.

Ships kept scanning new strips of seabed in the southern Indian Ocean, expanding the coverage of the 120,000 kilome box.

The paradox of MH370 in early 2015 was harsh.

On paper, the case was now an accident.

In reality, the investigation still looked very much like an unsolved missing person’s file.

That would change later that year when something washed up on a beach thousands of kilometers away.

By early 2015, the story of MH370 looks stuck.

The southern Indian Ocean has been mapped and scanned for months.

Ships have dragged sonar equipment across tens of thousands of square kilometers of seabed.

Nothing.

On paper, the aircraft is now officially classed as an accident with no survivors.

In reality, investigators still do not know where it is.

That changes when the ocean finally decides to give something back.

It is the 29th of July, 2015.

On a quiet beach on Reunion Island in the western Indian Ocean, a man walking along the shore sees something large and strange in the surf.

It is white, curved, about 2 and 1/2 m long, and heavily barnacled.

It looks like part of an aircraft wing.

Reunion is a French territory, thousands of kilome west of Australia and far from the official underwater search area.

Locals call the authorities.

Photos hit the internet.

Within hours, aviation experts around the world are zooming in on those images.

The shape is familiar.

It is not just any wing part.

It looks very much like a flapperon, a moving section on the trailing edge of the wing used to control roll and to add lift and drag on approach.

And on a Boeing trip 7, that flapperon has internal markings.

Inside this damaged piece are stencled codes.

[music] When investigators open it up and check, they find a number that matters.

657 Bravo Bravo.

That is the part number for the right flapperon of a Boeing 777.

There is only one Boeing 77 that went missing in this part of the world with no wreckage ever recovered.

After detailed analysis in France, officials confirm it.

The Flapperon belongs to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

For the first time since March 2014, investigators are holding a physical piece of the aircraft in their hands.

The disappearance is no longer just satellite arcs and sonar images.

It is a torn, weathered wing section lying in a hanger.

For the families, this moment is devastating and grounding at the same time.

[music] It proves that the aircraft did reach the Indian Ocean.

It proves that it broke up.

It proves that debris can drift thousands of kilome and wash up more than a year later on distant shores.

It does not on its own tell anyone exactly where the main wreckage is.

Investigators study the flapperon in detail.

They examine the way it has broken away from the wing, the damage to the hinges and fittings, the pattern of impact marks.

They look at marine growth on the surface, the barnacles and other organisms that attach themselves while it floated.

Some questions they ask, did this piece likely separate in the air or on impact with the water? Was it torn away with flaps extended or retracted? How long was it floating before it beed? What do the types and sizes of barnacles say about its time in the water and the temperatures it moved through? The answers are complex and sometimes disputed even among experts.

Many analysts conclude that the damage is more consistent with a high energy impact into the sea rather than a gentle ditching.

The Flapperon does not look like a piece that simply broke off in a low-speed controlled landing on water, but that still leaves a lot of room.

A controlled descent flown to the end versus an uncontrolled spiral into the ocean would both involve high energies at the final moment.

The Flapperon alone cannot tell investigators exactly which one happened.

What it does confirm beyond any doubt is that the aircraft ended in the ocean and that the debris drift predictions from the earlier search were not fantasy.

Modeling had suggested that if MH370 had crashed somewhere along the seventh ark in the southern Indian Ocean in March 2014, floating debris could after 16 months reach the western Indian Ocean.

The Flapperon appears on an island exactly where some of those models said it might.

For the search teams, this is an important validation.

They were looking in the right ocean.

The question now is, were they looking in the right part of that ocean? The Flapperon is not the last piece.

Over the next 2 years, debris suspected and in some cases confirmed to be from MH370 begins washing up on beaches scattered across the western Indian Ocean, Maitius, Rodriguez, Madagascar, Mosambique, Tanzania, [music] South Africa.

Some of these pieces are
clearly from a Boeing trip 7.

interior panels, a section of engine cowling with a faded logo, parts of the horizontal stabilizer.

Many are small, battered, and heavily eroded, but a number of them are in good enough condition to carry manufacturer codes and part numbers.

Teams from Malaysia, Australia, and other countries collect these fragments and send them for examination.

Step by step, more items are confirmed as almost certainly or definitely from MH370.

For the families, each confirmation hits like a delayed echo of the original loss.

A wing part here, a cabin piece there, a torn fragment from the interior.

Each one is proof that the aircraft broke apart, that it floated, that currents carried pieces into different corners of the Indian Ocean.

For the scientists working on the search, the debris is something else as well.

Data.

If you want to trace a debris item back to where it came from in the ocean, you have to understand currents, [music] winds, and time.

Researchers at organizations like the Australian National Science Agency take the debris finds and feed them into computer models.

They start with when each piece was found, where it was found, and how long it could realistically survive floating before becoming too water logged or fouled to travel further.

Then they run those backwards through ocean current models.

They simulate virtual pieces of debris starting on different points along the 7th Ark on the 8th of March, 2014, and let them drift forwards in time in the model.

They then compare where those simulated pieces end up after 16 months, 18 months, 2 years with the real locations where debris was discovered.

It is not an exact science.

Ocean currents are messy.

Winds can push floating debris in ways that are hard to model perfectly.

Pieces that lie low in the water behave differently from those that sit higher.

Some items may have been on the beach unseen for weeks before [music] someone found them.

So instead of a single point, drift analysis gives a probability map.

It tells you which parts of the seventh ark are more likely to have been the origin of debris that matches what came ashore.

In report after report, these models tend to favor a zone slightly north of the original high priority area, but still along the same arc.

That matters later when people ask whether the official underwater search in 2014 to 2017 spent too much time in the wrong sub area of a very long line.

For now, in 2015 and 2016, the drift work does two things.

It confirms that MH370 almost certainly hit the water somewhere along the southern part of the seventh ark.

It suggests that the highest probability region for the crash might not be exactly where search vessels have been spending most of their time.

By mid 2016, underwater search vessels have scanned almost all of the 120,000 kilometer area that Australia, Malaysia, and China agreed would be the official search zone.

The sonar maps are incredibly detailed.

The seabed is no longer an unknown landscape.

It is a gallery of ridges, plains, and volcanic features.

What is missing from that gallery is a Boeing trip 7.

Each time [music] ships finish a new strip of seabed, analysts check the data.

Each small object that looks unusual is flagged, revisited, and reimaged.

None of these suspicious shapes has the size, form, or pattern of a large aircraft.

As the end of the planned 120,000 km comes into view, the search team faces a hard reality.

If the aircraft is not in this box, there are only two possibilities.

It is outside the box in uncarched seabed along the seventh ark or the data used to define the ark is wrong in a way that no one has yet understood.

In December 2016, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau publishes an update based on additional drift modeling and reanalysis of the satellite data.

They identify a new area of roughly 25,000 km just north of the original search zone as the most likely region where MH370 may have ended.

But there is a catch.

The governments involved have already agreed that the official search will stop once the 120,000 km area is complete [music] unless there is compelling new evidence that pinpoints a much smaller, more precise location.

A
higher probability box is not enough on its own to restart a search that has already cost around $150 million and 3 years of work.

The choice facing ministers in Malaysia, Australia, and China is brutal.

Do they extend the search into the new recommended area, spending tens of millions more with no guarantee of success, or do they stop? And in the absence of credible new evidence, Australia, China, and Malaysia have collectively decided to suspend the search.

>> On the 17th of January 2017, the decision becomes public.

Malaysia, Australia, and China announced that the underwater search for MH370 is suspended.

They stress that this does not mean the case is closed.

They say that if credible new evidence emerges pointing to a specific location, search operations can resume.

But for the crews on the search vessels, it is simple.

They are told to pack up their equipment, stow the sonar vehicles, and sail back to port.

3 years of continuous mapping and scanning ends without finding the main wreckage, the flight data recorder, or the cockpit voice recorder.

The numbers are sobering.

120,000 km of seabed searched.

Tens of thousands of square kilometers of surface water covered earlier.

Dozens of debris items on far-off beaches.

[music] No aircraft on the bottom.

For the families, this feels like a second loss.

The first was the night the flight disappeared.

The second is the moment the official search stops.

Many relatives of the passengers issue statements calling the decision premature.

They argue that the new 25,000 km area recommended by drift analysis should be searched.

They are not alone.

Some members of the original investigation team also publicly expressed disappointment that the search is ending just as the science is pointing to a refined zone.

But without political will and funding, science does not move ships.

For a while, it looks as if the story of MH370 will stay stuck there.

An expensive, incomplete search, a long arc on a map, and a shelf full of reports.

That changes when a private company makes an offer.

In early 2018, a deep sea exploration company called Ocean Infiniti approaches the Malaysian government with a proposal.

They want to search for MH370 in the revised high probability area north of the original zone, and they are willing to take on the financial risk.

The offer is simple in principle, no find, no fee.

[music] If they do not find the wreckage, Malaysia pays nothing.

If they do, the contract allows for payment [music] up to $70 million, depending on the circumstances and how quickly they succeed.

From Malaysia’s perspective, this is attractive.

The country can show it is still committed to finding answers without immediately committing more public money to an uncertain search.

The agreement is signed.

The search is back on.

Ocean Infinity charters a specialist vessel, [music] the Seabed Constructor.

On board, they carry a fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles, torpedo-shaped robots that can dive to 6,000 meters [music] and scan large areas of seabed with highresolution sonar.

Unlike earlier methods where a ship towed one sonar vehicle on a cable, these robots can be launched in groups.

Each one can run a pre-programmed search line mapping the bottom independently while the mother ship coordinates from above.

This makes the search much faster.

Ocean Infinity plans to focus first on the 25,000 km area.

identified in late 2016, then extend if time and conditions allow.

Officially, they talk about 90 days of active searching, not counting time needed for resupply.

In January 2018, Seabed Constructor arrives in the southern Indian Ocean and begins work.

The company’s robots fan out beneath the waves.

They run parallel lines at a set height above the seabed, sending sonar pulses down and recording the echoes.

On board the ship, analysts watch the data come in.

The patterns are familiar by now.

ridges, plains, steep slopes, and the occasional solitary boulder.

Once again, every unusual contact is marked and checked.

Ocean Infinity’s technology allows them to cover huge areas quickly.

Over the next month, they scan not only the original 25,000 km high probability zone, but also a significant additional area.

By the time they are done, they have examined more than 100,000 km of seabed, much of it never seen in such detail before.

They find shipwrecks.

They find geological features no one had mapped.

They do not find MH370.

In June 2018, the search ends.

The contract expires.

The ship moves on to other projects.

Malaysia confirms that no wreckage was located.

For the second time in 4 years, a major underwater hunt backed by careful analysis and expensive equipment has come up empty.

From a cold investigative perspective, this narrows the problem.

If the satellite data is correct and if the drift analysis is broadly right, then by mid 2018, the number of places where MH370 can still be hiding on the seabed is much smaller than it was in 2014.

From an emotional perspective, it feels as though the mystery is deeper than ever.

Now we have a confirmed wrecked flaperon and other debris proving a crash in the Indian Ocean.

A well-defined seventh ark derived from satellite handshakes.

A huge portion of that ark’s seabed searched twice with no wreck found.

With no new search underway, attention shifts to something else.

If you cannot change the ocean, you change how you look at the data.

That leads to the next big milestone in the MH370 story, the official Malaysian safety investigation [music] report.

On the 2nd of July 2018, Malaysia releases a long- aaited document.

[music] The safety investigation report into Malaysia Airlines flight 370.

It runs to hundreds of pages.

It covers the history of the flight, the performance of air traffic control, the technical status of the aircraft, the background checks on the captain and first officer, the analysis of satellite data and radar tracks, and a review of possible failure and hijack scenarios.

Some of the key findings match what independent investigators have been saying for years.

The report confirms that the aircraft diverted from its filed flight plan route soon after the last radio contact.

The changes in track after the waypoint near the Vietnamese boundary are consistent with deliberate inputs on the flight deck, at least in the early phase.

There is no evidence of a sudden catastrophic technical failure that alone could explain the entire sequence.

The aircraft most likely ended in the southern Indian Ocean along the seventh ark after flying for hours beyond normal radar coverage.

The report also highlights serious weaknesses in the response on the ground.

It criticizes the slow reaction of air traffic control units in both Malaysia and Vietnam in the crucial minutes after the transponder return disappeared.

Controllers assumed for too long that the other side was in contact.

There was confusion over responsibilities and key escalation steps were [music] delayed.

Those delays did not cause the disappearance, but they did mean that search and rescue assets were not put in motion as quickly as they should have been.

On the question everyone cares about most, why the aircraft diverted, and who, if anyone, was responsible, the report stops short of a conclusion.

Investigators go through the captains and first officers backgrounds, their training, medical history, financial situation, personal lives, social media, and home flight simulator.

They find nothing that amounts to a clear motive or a proven plan to take the aircraft.

They examine the cargo manifest, including lithium batteries and other items that had raised suspicion in public discussion.

They find no evidence that any specific cargo caused a fire or catastrophic event early in the flight.

They consider hijacked scenarios, including the possibility of a hidden third party taking control of the cockpit, but find no confirming evidence of that either.

The head of the investigation team stands at a press conference and says the line that sums it up.

In conclusion, the team is unable to determine the real cause of the disappearance of MH370.

[music] The report does make recommendations.

It calls for improvements in how aircraft are tracked over oceanic regions, better coordination between air traffic control centers when a flight goes missing, longer cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder capacities, and stronger requirements for independent position reporting over open ocean.

In other
words, it tries to make sure that the next MH370 does not happen in silence, but it does not give the families what they wanted most.

It does not tell them why their relatives never came home.

By the end of 2018, the story of MH370 has entered a strange phase.

Officially, the disappearance is an accident with no survivors.

[music] Two major underwater searches have failed to find the wreck.

A long detailed safety report has been published with no firm cause, and no further large-scale search is underway.

Unofficially, the work has not stopped.

Independent researchers continue to study the satellite data, the radar returns, and the debris.

New drift models are published.

Alternative reconstructions of the final flight path are proposed, some only small variations on the official view, others more radical.

Some focus on the idea that one of the pilots deliberately flew the aircraft into a remote part of the ocean.

Others push mechanical or electrical failure theories that would have left the aircraft on autopilot until fuel exhaustion.

Some speculate about hijack or remote interference.

Without the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, none of these theories can be confirmed.

The only way to break the deadlock is to find the aircraft.

But searching millions of square kilm of ocean is not something independent enthusiasts can do from laptops.

It takes ships, robots, and money.

[music] For several years after 2018, MH370 lives in this tension.

[music] Enough data to know roughly where it should be.

too much uncertainty to justify government spending another hundred million dollars on another wide search.

That stalemate holds until something else changes.

Not in the data, but in technology and in how a new generation of investigators combines different signals.

By the end of 2018, MH370 looks like a story frozen in place.

Two massive searches have failed.

The official report has admitted what nobody wanted to hear.

We do not know the real cause and we do not know exactly where the aircraft is.

On paper, the case is complete.

In reality, it is anything but.

Because while the ships go home, something else happens.

The data does not stop talking.

Behind the scenes, a new phase of the investigation is starting.

Not in the southern Indian Ocean, but on computer screens, in research [music] labs, and in the homes of engineers and pilots who cannot let this go.

5 years after the disappearance, the families of the passengers gather again.

They bring photos of loved ones.

candles and banners with one demand that has not changed since 2014.

Please do not close the book.

At an anniversary event in Malaysia, the transport minister says something important.

He promises that the government will not consider MH370A finished case.

If anyone can present new and credible information that points to a specific area where the aircraft might be, Malaysia will seriously consider authorizing a new search.

That phrase new and credible information becomes the key.

It is not enough to say search again.

It needs to be search here for this reason.

For the families, that statement is both a reassurance and a challenge.

The governments will not spend another $100 million on a vague hope.

So, the pressure shifts back to the researchers.

Can anyone squeeze more out of the data we already have? Can anyone refine the crash location enough to justify sending ships back out? In the years after the official report, the MH370 case develops a second life online.

Pilots, engineers, mathematicians, satellite specialists, oceanographers, even radio amateurs.

They all take passes at the same puzzle.

Some efforts are careful, disciplined, and deeply technical.

Others drift into speculation and conspiracy.

Most serious independent work focuses on three big evidence streams.

One, satellite handshakes, trying new ways of modeling speed, altitude, and heading changes.

Two, drift analysis using more refined ocean models and the growing list of debris finds.

Three, radar and performance, checking that any suggested path actually [music] fits what is known from the early part of the flight.

With time, another possible source of information begins to emerge from an unexpected place, a worldwide network of weak radio signals.

Continue reading….
Next »