5 years after MH370's disappearance: Will the search continue in the greatest aviation mystery of modern history?

By Ashley Williams, AccuWeather staff writer

Early on the morning of March 8, 2014, families gathered at China’s Beijing Capital International Airport to await the safe arrival of their loved ones traveling on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur.

The Boeing 777 airliner, along with the 239 souls on board, never reached the intended destination, setting into motion the biggest aviation mystery in modern history -- a mystery that persists five years later.

Five years after the mysterious disappearance of MH370, which vanished on its regularly scheduled route over the South China Sea and into Vietnamese airspace, investigators and families of the passengers are still without definite answers of what happened, as neither the airplane nor a crash site have yet been located. Official search efforts, which at times were hampered by severe weather, were halted as of May 2018. What was thought to be debris from the plane has previously been discovered by members of the public, however.

“There were still flights operating [after the disappearance],” said Malini Mattler, a media relations specialist for Geisinger Health who worked on Malaysia Airlines' public relations team at the time of MH370’s disappearance as well as the crash of MH17, a passenger plane carrying 298 passengers and crew that was shot down by a Russian missile while flying over eastern Ukraine four months later. 

A girl has her face painted during the Day of Remembrance for MH370 event in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Saturday, March 3, 2018. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian)

“The Malaysia Airlines cabin crew and pilots were all still flying [after MH370 went missing], and for them to actually deal with passengers on board asking questions about what happened to their colleagues on the other plane, I can’t even imagine how they must’ve felt, but they held it all together really well,” Mattler told AccuWeather.

MH370’s disappearance

Twenty-seven minutes after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur International Airport amid calm weather conditions, MH370 crossed the Malay Peninsula headed out to sea at 35,000 feet, traveling at a ground speed of 470 knots, reaching the end of airspace monitored by Malaysia. According to reports at the time, the weather conditions were clear that fateful night.

About 38 minutes after takeoff, an air traffic controller contacted the plane to inform the pilot of the name and radio frequency of the authority the pilot would next communicate with after beginning to fly into Vietnamese airspace, according to Jeff Wise, a journalist and aviation specialist who has extensively covered MH370’s disappearance since it went missing.

The last words uttered from the cockpit were, "All right, good night," a phrase used by pilots during a change from one airspace to another.

Two minutes after the final transmission was sent, the plane flew over its last waypoint in Malaysia, Wise wrote in his recent e-book, “The Taking of MH370.”

“Five seconds later, it went dark, so all of its communication systems were turned off,” Wise told AccuWeather. “Because it was in between air traffic control zones, no one was effectively paying attention to it. It is suspicious that it would wait until it was in this area where no one was paying attention.”

Grace Nathan, whose mother was on the ill-fated Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, shows a serial number on a piece of debris believed to be from the missing plane at Ministry of Transport in Putrajaya, Malaysia, Friday, Nov. 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian)

The plane turned back over the Malay Peninsula, flew over the Straight of Malacca and disappeared, according to Wise.

“It went dark, did a hard left-hand turn and it was manually flown at high speed at or above its flight envelope.”

At this point, the plane vanished, not showing up on military radar screens. “Nobody could see it, no one had any idea what it was going to do,” Wise said. “It could fly anywhere in the world and no one would be the wiser.”

A couple of minutes later, Wise said, someone turned back on a box called a satellite data unit, which is not something that captains would typically be trained to do. “It’s really hard to find out how to do it, but somebody did it,” Wise said.

The system then produced a strange, inexplicable value that no one could easily explain, but over the course of six hours, the signal seemed to say that MH370 was flying south.

“On the basis of these signals, the Australians, the Malaysians and the Chinese threw hundreds of millions of dollars at searching this really remote area of the seabed,” Wise told AccuWeather.

Search crews would eventually comb over an area the size of Great Britain in the Pacific Ocean, only to find nothing.

“Whoever took this plane in the first hour seemed to be trying hard and with great cleverness to evade detection, and all of a sudden, they turned on a signal,” Wise said. "They’re not using the satellite communication, they’re not using it to make a phone call, send a text or anything.”

“To me, all of this added up to a very suspicious set of circumstances,” he added.

Possible theories

Theories of what happened to MH370 have ranged from a fire or unexpected depressurization rendering the pilots unconscious to one of the pilots committing suicide and mass murder.

“The pilot had no radical links, he was not suicidal, he was not depressed, he was not having money or marital problems; he was a very level-headed guy,” said Wise, dismissing the suicide theory. “Why would he commit suicide in the strangest way possible? You don’t wait six hours for your fuel to run out.”

As of late 2014, Wise’s technical examination and gathering of evidence related to MH370's disappearance has led him to believe that if the plane is not in the Southern Ocean, then MH370 was taken by Russia.

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"It turns out that it’s possible to alter the data from the satellite communication system in a way to make it look like it was going south when it could really go north," Wise said. "There’s still enough data that can’t be tampered with that you could still draw a flight path where the plane would’ve gone if the plane went north."

This would take the plane across an area of China that doesn’t really have any radar, he explained. "You wind up in Kazakhstan," he said. "Russia, at this point, has just launched a hybrid war against the West. It’s got tanks and airplanes fighting in Ukraine, and it’s about to hack the British election, it’s about to hack the American election."

For those who might think the idea of Russia destroying a plane with hundreds of civilians on board is “crazy,” Wise pointed to MH17, the 777 shot down in July 2014.

"The Russian military intelligence, who I suspect of doing MH370, destroyed one of its sister airplanes four-and-a-half months later over eastern Ukraine,” Wise said. “We know that Russia destroys Malaysia Airlines 777s, so I don’t think that it should be a stretch to imagine that they did this one, too.”

Wise has been quoted in the press in the past, asserting that "ongoing U.S. economic sanctions against Russia were the direct cause of Russia's supposed involvement with the two Malaysia Airlines tragedies," with MH370 and MH17 being targets of retaliation by Russian leadership.

Resuming the search

Malaysia, Australia and China ended a two-year search of the southern Indian Ocean for the plane in January 2017, and a three-month search led by Ocean Infinity, a United States-based exploration firm, was called off last May.

On March 3, Malaysia's transportation minister announced that the country is open to resuming the search for MH370 if interested companies would come forward with "viable proposals or credible leads," Reuters reported.

"Malaysia has said they’re willing to continue the search if somebody has an idea, but nobody has any idea," Wise said. "And they won’t have an idea, because we basically have squeezed a lemon, and it’s dry."