Ten years ago, a Malaysian airliner carrying 239 passengers and crew vanished from air traffic control screens over the South China Sea. Search officials were never able to locate the plane or those aboard. For the family members of the disappeared, it was a tragedy all the more painful for remaining unexplained; for investigators, it was a riddle unlike any they had ever encountered. 

But the disappearance of MH370 is just the start of the story. Because in the years that have followed, another dimension of the mystery has opened up. It’s become evident that the scant clues available in the case have somehow led investigators astray. It isn’t just that we don’t know where the plane is. We don’t know why we don’t know.

Journalist Jeff Wise in MH370: The Plane That Disappeared

Why does this matter now, a decade after the event and five years after the Malaysian government closed its investigation? Planes as large and modern as MH370 don’t just disappear. Consider the case of TWA800, which blew up off the coast of Long Island in 1996. At the time, it was a mystery as baffling as that of MH370, and American investigators spent years collecting every scrap of debris from the ocean floor and painstakingly piecing it together in an empty hangar. By the time they were done, they had reassembled the fuselage from hundreds of jagged fragments. And in doing so, they were able to solve the mystery: The plane had suffered an accidental fuel-tank explosion. Planes built since then has incorporated safety measures to make sure the same accident doesn’t happen again.

If we can’t figure out what happened to MH370, we can’t say that something like it won’t happen again. The entire commercial aviation industry has an asterisk next to it.

To the casual observer, it’s not surprising that investigators didn’t find the plane. The ocean is a big place, after all. But the failure of the search actually is surprising. The reason why requires some mathematical heavy lifting to fully understand, as I explain in my 2019 book, The Taking of MH370. But the upshot is simple: the fact that the plane hasn’t been found means that investigators must have made a major error. In my estimation, MH370: The Plane That Disappeared is the first documentary to clearly and compellingly explain what we know about the Boeing 777 and what might have happened to it. My hope is that, with the renewed attention around the tragedy, the officials responsible for the search will finally reassess their conduct of the investigation and make a serious effort to understand where they went wrong.

The basics of the case are simple enough. MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia shortly after midnight on March 8, 2014 for a scheduled red-eye to Beijing. It flew out over the South China Sea and then, just seconds after it passed the last waypoint in Malaysian airspace, the plane’s communication systems were switched off. Still being observed by Malaysian military radar, the plane pulled a U-turn, flew back over the Malay Peninsula, then back up the Strait of Malacca towards India. It then flew out of radar range and disappeared again. 

At this point the plane was more or less invisible to the rest of the world. Whoever took the plane could have flown it wherever they wanted to in secrecy. But that’s not what happened. Instead, something bizarre and inexplicable took place. A component of the plane’s satellite communication system called the SDU (Satellite Data Unit) came back to life three minutes after the plane vanished from radar. Why is this strange? Because 777 pilots are not trained how to turn the SDU on, and there’s no plausible way it could have come on accidentally. But come on it did, leaving the plane in an electrical configuration that no 777 has ever been in before or since.

Victims’ loved ones comfort each other during the early days of the search.

It’s important to understand that the satellite communication data didn’t transmit coordinates, like a GPS. Rather, it allowed investigators to simulate flight paths the plane might have taken and compare the signals those paths would have generated with the signals actually recorded. The investigators generated millions of possible routes, then threw out all the ones that didn’t match the data. What they were left with was a patch in the southern Indian Ocean where the plane might have come to rest.

At this point, the authorities conducting the search were confident they would find the plane. Officials from Australia, China and Malaysia vowed that they would keep searching until the plane was found. Over the next few years, these governments funded a search of unprecedented difficulty, scanning a region of seabed the size of Great Britain at depths of up to three miles deep, until all the plane’s plausible end points were exhausted.

To their bafflement, the plane was nowhere to be found. And they couldn’t explain why. So the search officials broke their pledge to the public, and gave up. The last search ship left the area in 2018.

It very much looks like the plane didn’t actually go into the southern Indian Ocean. How could this be?

One possible explanation is that the SDU was tampered with, which would have changed where officials would have looked. Even now, no one has been able to come up with a reasonable explanation how it could have been turned on, either accidentally or through benign intention. 

Searchers cart off washed-up debris that some experts say were from MH370; others are not so sure.

So, we’re left with a mystery of immense consequence and no resolution. “The reasons for the loss of MH370 cannot be established with certainty,” search officials admitted in their final report. “We… deeply regret that we have not been able to locate the aircraft.”

No one should think that attitude is acceptable. The case is too important to just let go. It requires a total commitment. 

For viewers whose interest is piqued by the documentary, I recommend my blog where I discuss various aspects of the case, as well as two blogs run by well-informed independent investigators who still hold out hope that the plane is in the southern Indian Ocean: MH370 and Other Investigations and MH370-Caption. 

Ten years is a long time, but it’s still important that we solve this mystery. We don’t just owe it to future airline travelers. We owe it to the victims and their family members who expressed their despair and frustration about the unresolved mystery. They feel that they are not being told the full truth and that the authorities haven’t made a wholehearted effort to explain what happened. I happen to agree with them. I hope that MH370: The Plane That Disappeared will encourage the public to demand a full and complete reassessment of investigators’ past efforts.

The families deserve better. We all do.

Jeff Wise is a science and aviation journalist whose commentary and work is featured in Netflix docuseries MH370: The Plane That Disappeared.