Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, disappeared from radars on March 8, 2014, less than an hour after takeoff with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board in the Boeing 777 aircraft. Various search attempt has been conducted but the craft has not been found yet.
The United States seabed exploration firm, Ocean Infinity confirmed that its search vessel is moving to look for debris of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane on January 3rd of 2017. Despite the previous announcement that the company would search for the aircraft on ‘no find, no pay’ basis, official contract is yet to be signed as Malaysian official claims the final decision has not been made and information on the vessel movement by the US firm comes as a surprise.
Various debris of the aircraft are suspected to be of aircraft that were found at various locations like Mozambique, South Africa and the French island of Reunion. On January 2017, Australian government’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC), tasked with coordinating the search but was unsuccessful costing $145 million.
In October 2017 the Australian Transport Safety Bureau released the final report in which it claims that “the understanding of where MH370 may be located is better now than it has ever been”. Malaysia then agreed with other Indian Ocean states to allow private searches for the plane wreckage with an agreement on debris management in place.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau claims that the possible location of the missing MH370 is now identified to be within an area of less than 25,000 square kilometers. Some independent oceanographic studies concluded that the crash site is not in the initial 120,000 square kilometer search area, but further north.
Some conspiracy theories of missing MH370:
- 1. It was shot down during a joint military exercise between the US and Thailand
- 2. It was hijacked for use in a terrorist spectacular on the anniversary of 9/11
- 3. It was switched with flight MH17, and it was actually MH370 that was shot down over Ukraine
- 4. It landed on Diego Garcia, a British-owned island in the Indian Ocean that is home to a major US military base
- 5. It was destroyed by a ‘mysterious new weapon’ capable of plucking planes out of the sky without a trace
- 6. Russia hijacked the plane under Putin’s orders and flew it to Kazakhstan.
- 7. The reality check: Experts say the truth is almost certainly more mundane – probably a carefully planned suicide and revenge attack
