For more than ten years, the lost remains of the disappeared flight MH370 have yet to be recovered. However, one individual is convinced that the search efforts have been focusing on the incorrect location.
Last week, Malaysian officials disclosed plans for a new £55 million quest to locate the lost aircraft. This announcement has ignited optimism that the wreckage may finally be discovered a decade after its mysterious disappearance.
They are set to scour a new search area in the southern Indian Ocean with robot submarines and underwater microphones.
Jeff Wise, an American journalist dedicated to unraveling the most significant aviation puzzle of our time, argues that authorities are directing their search in the wrong direction.
Wise has dedicated years of his life to solve what happened to the Malaysian Airlines flight after it vanished with 239 on board.
On March 8th 2014 at 12.41 am, flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur Airport, bound for Beijing, a flight that was considered routine.
By 1.21 am, the plane had vanished from radar as it crossed into Vietnamese airspace and was never seen again.
The plane’s disappearance sparked the biggest search in aviation history and to this day the wreckage of the jet, presumed to have crashed in the Southern Indian Ocean, remains undiscovered.
Many theories have emerged in the ten years since it vanished, including the possibility of a depressurised cabin sparking a ghost flight into oblivion or a suicidal pilot carrying out a perfect ditching.
The official MH370 narrative suggests the plane made a bizarre U-turn, flying across Malaysia, turning northwest at Penang Island and across the Andaman Sea.
Data from military radar and satellite data from British company Immasat revealed that the plane flew on for hours towards the Southern Indian Ocean where it crashed in an unknown location.
But MH370 fanatic, Jeff Wise believes that there is a good reason the wreckage has never been discovered in the South Indian Ocean despite several searches.
He claims that a sophisticated hijacking by Russian agents was responsible for the plane being flown north into Kazakhstan.
He believes the Boeing 777 could have landed at one of three airports Kuqa Quici in China or Kyzlorda and Almaty in Kazakhstan.
Jeff was shunned from the MH370 independent group for his bizarre theory, a self-formed group of experts who came together to help try and solve the mystery.
But despite the backlash, the private pilot from New York stands by his hypothesis and makes an interesting point – the longer the plane is missing the more it proves his theory.
Talking about the disappearance exclusively to The Sun, Jeff said: “Only later in the days that followed did more and more strange things happen.
“There were so many twists and turns in this case. It was really like a compelling TV drama.
“I very early thought it went north based on almost nothing. But just my intuition has always been that.
“If the plane went south it was a suicide mission. Whoever did this their ultimate goal was to die and it also became clear, really early that this was an elaborate, sophisticated, motivated action.
“That had at least a layer of deception about it and so those things to me seemed fundamentally contradictory, why would you go to such lengths in order to die?”
Going off a gut feeling, former Jeff began looking at an alternative theory – what if the Inmarsat data had been interpreted wrong and the plane had actually turned North?
NORTH OR SOUTH?
On March 24 2014, the Malaysian Prime Minister confirmed that bombshell satellite data proved the plane had likely gone south after military radar last located MH370 over the Andaman Sea at 2.22 am.
An Immasat satellite over the South Indian Ocean had been able to track the plane further, receiving almost hourly signals until its last contact at 8.19 am.
However, the data was only able to show how far away MH370 had travelled from the satellite – not exactly in which direction.
Using a method known as Bayesian theory, experts eliminated thousands of possible routes creating a probability heat map in the South Indian Ocean.
The largest search in aviation in history was conducted in an area known as the seventh arc, the last known location of MH370 but nothing was found in the area mapped out by investigators.
Jeff said: “A couple of weeks after the plane disappeared, the Australian authorities revealed that the scientists at Inmarsat had done some mathematics, and determined that the plane had gone to the Southern Indian Ocean.
“They wound up publishing a whole book about their methodology. So we know quite a lot about how the Australians made their decision and it’s quite logically rigorous.
“I understand quite well why they assume that it went to the Southern seabed, and it’s not irrational. It makes a lot of sense.
“I was still troubled by this idea that somebody had done something very elaborate and sophisticated in order to die and so the question I asked myself was there any other way that this data could have been generated?
“Is there any sort of escape hatch from this otherwise inescapable conclusion that the plane went south?
“I found that indeed there was a possibility…”
Jeff, who appeared on Netflix’s MH370 documentary, believed there was a chance the plane could have been flown north and developed his alternative hijacker hypothesis.
He suggests that sophisticated Russian hijackers took control of the plane and were able to expertly pilot the Boeing 777 on a path most likely to avoid detection.
He believes that hijackers infiltrated the jet’s electronics system through a hatch in the first-class cabin and were able to trick investigators into thinking that the plane had been diverted south when it was taken north, eventually landing in the Russian puppet state of Kazakhstan.
When asked on his recent podcast MH370:Deep Dive, why not one country would have spotted the rogue Boeing 777 travelling through its airspace he explains they just simply wouldn’t have been expecting it.
He says: “A lot of countries, even if they have radar in certain areas, don’t always have it turned on.”
After the downing of MH17 by Russian rebels, the bizarre idea that Moscow may have been involved gained more traction.
“Essentially what I was positing was a cyber attack, a hijack, a cyber hijack and this was met with great scepticism, I would say, almost alarm.
Jeff Wise
But what would be the motive for Putin to hijack a plane and fly it north? A distraction for his illegal annexation of Crimea, Jeff says.
Jeff’s hijacker theory was met with backlash among the MH370 community with many calling his hypothesis a mere “conspiracy theory”.
Though it may seem far-fetched, a damning report that came out after the disappearance of MH370 in August 2014 suggested that Boeing 777s were highly vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
Jeff said: “This plane had a number of characteristics which were unusual but which would allow this data to be maliciously altered.
“Essentially what I was positing was a cyber attack, a hijack, a cyber hijack and this was met with great scepticism, I would say, almost alarm.
“…Tampering with this equipment requires a certain level of sophistication above what a typical 777 captain has and would require behaviour that a 777 captain, just by training and disposition, would never do.
At the time, the study by the Federal Aviation Association (FAA) revealed that software used on Boeing 777s and some other plane models could be susceptible to “software configuration”.
Allowing hackers to “wreak havoc” and “cause a mismatch between the aeroplane’s intended and actual configuration” by “preventing delivery of software, deleting software, or injecting inappropriate software during distribution.”
It concluded that there was “a significant risk” across “legacy, current, and next/new generation aircraft”.
SEA CREATURE CLUE
While Jeff has spent years working on his alternative hijacker theory – there is one issue that goes against his findings.
In July 2015, pieces of debris believed to be part of MH370 washed up in various locations around the Southern Indian Ocean.
While some fragments were “likely” pieces of the jet, the right flaperon found on the French island of la Reunion has been confirmed to be 100 per cent from MH370.
The plane part was covered in barnacles known as Lepas Anatifera and like the rings of a tree, their shells offer a record of their life and clues to where they may have travelled from and for how long.
Scientists hoped that they could track exactly where the piece of debris had come from using drift models to track when it entered the water.
But the French authorities have kept the flaperon under close guard meaning experts have been able to track the derbis’ true origins.
The barnacles also raised more questions as there appeared to be a one-year gap between the plane’s disappearance and the debris entering the water, according to Jeff.
Now Jeff is hoping to fund a project which would see an identical replica of the flaperon float from the likely crash site while tracking its movement and barnacle deposits.
He told The Sun: “The truth of the matter is we still don’t know how barnacles grow on floating debris in this stretch of the ocean sufficiently, whether the presence of the flaperon in la Reunion in July of 2015 is evidence for or against the hijack scenario.
“I want to get the data, and it’s remarkable to me that I have to do this myself.
“People are fascinated by this case. Why is nobody trying to open the box?
“Why are you not trying to find the evidence that will tell you what actually happened?”
NEW SEARCH
The Malaysian authorities announced last week few days that the search efforts for missing flight MH370 are set to resume – more than 10 years after the plane vanished.
Officials are set to scan a new search area in the southern Indian Ocean – and exploration company Ocean Infinity will receive a whopping £55million if it finds new wreckage of the jet.
Transport Minister Anthony Loke confirmed the government would be launching a fresh search.
He said in a statement that the government has a “responsibility and obligation” to those who lost loved ones when the plane vanished in March 2014.
“Our responsibility and obligation and commitment is to the next of kin. We hope this time will be positive, that the wreckage will be found and give closure to the families,” Loke said.
Underwater robotics company Ocean Infinity previously revealed to The Sun that it had submitted its search proposal for the new hunt.
The same organisation conducted the last search for MH370 which ended in 2018.
Why is MH370 still missing a decade on?
By Rebecca Husselbee, Assistant Foreign Editor
When an entire plane with 239 passengers mysteriously disappeared from the sky it left the world in utter disbelief – myself included.
How could an entire jet vanish into oblivion in a modern world when every move on land, sea and air is tracked? And how could it remain lost for a decade?
Having spent the last few years exploring the many theories on what MH370’s final moments might look like, from the bizarre to the complex, there is one hypothesis that answers every question for me.
Pilot Simon Hardy has left no stone unturned in his search for answers and having been at the helm of passenger flights for over 20 years he knows every inch of a Boeing 777 cockpit.
What makes his “technique, not a theory” even more compelling is his ability to access the world’s best flight simulators and sit in Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s seat as he commandeered the Malaysia Airlines and flew into the middle of the Southern Indian Ocean.
While others believe WSPR technology holds the key to finally discovering the wreckage, it’s never been proven and many in the MH370 community have questioned its reliability.
Many experts agree that the “suicidal” MH370 pilot was behind the plane’s demise – what we’ll never know is what his mindset was on that night and what motive he had to carry out such a chilling plan.
Passenger safety onboard in the aviation industry is rigorous and the likelihood of travellers being involved in a plane crash is 1 in 11 million.
But are airlines considering a pilot’s mental state when they sit at the controls of a jet that could be turned into a 300-ton death machine?
They told how three of the firm’s robot vessels were ready and waiting for the green light from officials.
The company said a new search would resume in a 15,000sqkm area off the coast of Western Australia, near the last known location of the doomed jet.
Malaysian officials have not confirmed the exact site for the new search.
Malaysian officials have not confirmed the exact site for the new search.
But Ocean Infinity’s plan has a “no find, no fee” meaning if the search is successful – the enormous £55million bill will have to be paid by the Malaysian government.
It’s thought that WSPR technology could play a big part in the search with Professor Simon Maskell acting as an adviser to the Ocean Infinity team.
Simon and his team at Liverpool University have been investigating the possibility of using WSPR technology to detect and track aircraft.
It’s also been revealed that the company may be looking at hydrophone data, sound picked up by underwater microphones, as part of their plans.
