How does a Boeing 777 plane with 227 passengers and 12 crew members disappear from the face of the earth? It’s a question many people are rightly asking now, nine years later, about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. It’s one of aviation’s most puzzling, frustrating, and macabre mysteries. Air travel is based on this comforting basic: “planes go up and planes go down” (a sentiment echoed a few times in the Netflix documentary MH370: the plane that disappeared).
We know specific facts from this case that are certain. MH Flight 370 began a routine flight from Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur International Airport to Beijing in the early hours of March 8, 2014. handed over. It’s not shortly after that that the plane’s electronic system goes completely dark, and it’s just… gone.
What begins is a frantic search for clues to find where the plane is and the people on it. A fascinating part of director Louise Malkinson’s three-part documentary is the archive and accounts of the families who have lost relatives during that period. We’re talking about mothers, fathers and children who didn’t reach their destination without a plausible explanation as to why that happened. Those left behind are rightly angry about the lack of answers – a theme that is given the right time to show.
Unfortunately, when you have so little tangible evidence, that leaves room for the most absurd conspiracy theories to fill that space. MH370 emphasizes people who apparently have good intentions to find answers. In particular, a collection of super sleuths called The Independent Group pounced on whatever minuscule data they had to find the most likely opportunity. Florida photographer Cyndi Hendry, within a group called the Tomnoders, pounced on millions of high-resolution photos to claim they had seen debris in the South China Sea (the images turned out to be inconclusive).
A small amount of satellite data from the British company Inmarsat suggests that the plane unsuspectingly deflected into the Indian Ocean and may have crashed there. However, a collection from several countries toured up and down the opposite crash site and found nothing.
So what happened? The documentary bets on presenting three different theories that, quite frankly, show how hard the passage of time can be on the truth (or lack thereof). The first has to do with Captain Shah himself, and this may be the result of a long-planned suicide mission. A flight simulator in his house only added to the confusion, but many people testified to this character – so this school of thought seemed far-fetched at best.
The next two seem to imply that different countries had something to do with the disappearance. First, aviation journalist and author Jeff Wise stated that he believed Russian agents had hijacked the plan within a train of events that included the invasion of Crimea and MH17. Another Malaysian Boeing 777 shot down by the country. It feels more action movie than reality. Another comes from Le monde journalist Florence de Changy who believes the United States may have shot down the plane – to prevent unmarked electronics from reaching China. This clashes with a similar belief held by Ghyslain Wattrelos, whose wife and two children are on board the flight.
MH370 has people pushing back somewhat on how far-fetched an international cover-up could be. It even takes some time to show why people can believe in such things. The families receive little information from the Malaysian government or any leads from Blaine Gibson, who has an uncanny ability to find wreckage from the flight.
Unfortunately, this situation may eventually become another unsolved mystery. While MH370: the plane that disappeared expands on these theories, but also debunks them (almost accidentally) at the same time. In any case, this documentary shows the pain that comes with the unknown. A surviving family member describes possible wreckage found in Madagascar as reopening the door to grief. People deserve answers – answers that this documentary doesn’t get any closer to exposing.