Thread by @battleforeurope

🧵 The disappearance of #MH370 remains the most mind-boggling mystery in aviation history. If you think it’s impossible for an airliner carrying 239 people to disappear into thin air, that’s because it is. So what really happened to MH370?

A THREAD.
unherd.com/2023/03/will-w…

1/ Last week marked the 8-year anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. It also saw the release of a new 3-part Netflix documentary on the subject, which explores several hypothesis.

2/ The documentary has the merit of poking holes in the official narrative — though it leaves out several important details. So what is the official story? According to Malaysian and Western authorities, 40 minutes after take-off, 90 miles off the east coast of Malaysia...

3/ ... someone on the plane — most likely the captain — turned off its communication signals, causing it to disappear from Air Traffic Control (ATC) radars. The plane then made a U-turn, flew back across Malaysia and then down south to the Indian Ocean, where it crashed.

4/ There are, however, several problems with this narrative, as the French journalist @FChangy, who writes for Le Monde, explains in the documentary, and in much greater detail in her 2021 book “The Disappearing Act: The Impossible Case of MH370”.
harpercollins.com/products/the-d…

5/ The official account hinges on two pieces of evidence: Malaysian military radar data, which tracked the plane deviating westward, and analysis of the automatic communication “pings” between the aircraft and a satellite operated by a British company called Inmarsat.

6/ However, even the Malaysians’ final report acknowledged that the data behind its military radar sighting is inconsistent with the capability of a B777 in terms of speed, altitude and height variations. And the radar images were never made public.
mot.gov.my/en/MH370%20Inv…

7/ And why didn’t the Malaysians scramble jets at the sight of a rogue plane flying over national airspace, considering that MH370 is said to have passed over the headquarters of the Integrated Air Defence system of the the Five Power Defence Agreement?
mod.gov.my/ms/maklumat/fi…

8/ There was also a massive presence of the US Seventh Fleet in the region at the time of the plane’s disappearance — likely including AWACS spy planes. Yet the Americans weren’t able to provide any evidence of the plane’s alleged U-turn either.

9/ There’s another problem with the “deliberate act” narrative. As de Changy notes, if someone had turned off the transponder, all flight data related to MH370 would have disappeared from ATC screens at the same time. But it took 37 seconds for it all to go dark.

10/ As for Inmarsat’s satellite data, the company — which also provides services to the US government and military — initially refused to release the raw data, and when it did several details were missing. Since then, Inmarsat has refused to share its complete set of data.

11/ But the biggest hole in Inmarsat’s story is also the most obvious: the fact that, despite the world’s largest search in history, covering 2 million square miles in the southern Indian Ocean, no remains of the plane have been found in the supposed crash area near Australia.

12/ The only few pieces of debris considered by investigators “almost certainly” or “highly likely” to be linked to MH370 have been discovered around the coast of Africa, 1000s of miles away — however, there are several problems with the debris, as de Changy explains in the book.

13/ Finally, it remains unclear why the plane’s captain would have committed such a horrendous act. From interviews with his friends and family, and analysis of the police reports about him, de Changy concludes that he was unlikely to be suffering from mental health issues.

14/ In her book, de Changy presents an alternative account of what might have happened to MH370. She suggests that MH370 didn’t disappear from the screens of ATC because someone turned off its transponder, but because the plane’s communications system was jammed.

15/ The aim might have been to force the plane to land in order to seize a highly sensitive cargo which the US didn’t want to reach China (she points to a 2.5-ton consignment that was delivered to Kuala Lumpur) airport under escort and was not X-rayed).

16/ However, something went wrong and MH370 met its fate somewhere above the South China Sea, possibly as a result of a mid-air collision or a missile strike. It’s obviously a highly controversial claim, but de Changy has compiled quite a bit of evidence to back it up.

17/ There are several aspects that collide with the “someone turned off the transponder and then the plane made a U-turn back over Malaysia” story — I go over the most salient ones in the article:
unherd.com/2023/03/will-w…

18/ There are also reports that that point to a crash occurring in the S/ China Sea that day, including the oil slicks spotted off the coast of Vietnam; the Cathay Pacific pilots flying the next day above the Vietnam coast who reported debris; and...
theguardian.com/world/2014/mar…

19/ ... the employee working on a rig off the coast of Vietnam who claimed to have seen a fire the night of the disappearance — and whom, to this day, it is virtually impossible to talk to.
stuff.co.nz/world/asia/775…

20/ De Changy is aware that her theory is mostly speculative, but remains confident that MH370 met its fate in the South China Sea, not in the Indian Ocean. “It’s still more credible than the idea that the plane flew halfway around the world completely undetected,” she told me.

21/ I asked de Changy to ask what it feels like for a respected journalist to be presented as a fringe conspiracist — the conclusion many will reach after watching the film. “Actually, I started with an anti-conspiracy theory approach”, she explains. “I looked very closely...

22/ ... at the evidence and eventually I discovered a cluster of corroborating conclusions that point to something incredibly consistent and that did indeed point towards a massive international conspiracy scenario. It’s for the readers to decide whether it’s credible or not”.

23/ If you enjoyed the thread, check out the article it’s based on for a much more detailed account:
unherd.com/2023/03/will-w…

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