The most mysterious plane crash in history: What happened to the Malaysian Boeing that evaporated in the sky?

If you consider yourself a fan of conspiracy theories, then you should definitely know the story of the plane that flew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, but disappeared from the radar after 37 minutes and never landed. On board the Boeing of the Malaysian company Malaysia Airlines, there were 227 passengers and 12 crew members, but all of them disappeared without a trace. Ten years have passed since the tragedy that occurred on March 8, 2014, but the investigative services have not been able to find either the ship itself or the answer to the question of what happened on that fateful night.

There are many versions of what happened. Some talk about the malfunction of the aircraft, while others suggest that the disappearance of the ship is directly related to something mystical.

In this article, we will talk about all the versions of the disappearance of the Boeing 777-200ER that have emerged over the past 10 years. By the way, none of them have been officially confirmed. Malaysian authorities are still planning to find an answer to one of the main questions of the 21st century: What happened to the plane?

How was that day?

A Malaysian airline plane took off from Kuala Lumpur towards the Chinese capital on the night of March 8, 2014. As planned, the landing gear lifted off the ground at 00:42 local time. The pilot of the plane was 53-year-old Zachary Ahmad Shah and his assistant 27-year-old Farik Abdul Hamid. By the way, the name of the first pilot will be mentioned more than once in this material, because later it will be his investigation that will hold him responsible for this plane crash.

There were 227 passengers on board, including 5 children. About 150 were Chinese flying home. The rest were Malaysians, Europeans, Russians and Americans traveling around the world. 38 minutes after takeoff, the plane left Malaysian airspace, at 01:19 the controller asked the captain to work at Ho Chi Minh City Airport and wished him good night. The pilot replied: “Good night MH370.” And those were his last words.

What happened next is unknown. Three minutes later, the Boeing 777 was somewhere in the middle of the South China Sea when the aircraft’s transponder was turned off. The loss of the aircraft was not immediately apparent; only 20 minutes later did Malaysian services contact Vietnam to make sure the pilots had contacted them, but no information was received from them.

Later, the Vietnamese military determined that the aircraft, after turning off the transponder, headed southwest and flew along the borders of Malaysia and Vietnam. And already in the area of ​​Penang Island, located above the Andaman Sea, it turned northwest. At 02:22 local time, it left the range of ground radars. There is no direct evidence of what happened next, only indirect.

One of the most popular versions of the plane crash, which even intelligence agencies adhered to for a long time, directly concerns the pilot Zachary Ahmad Shah. True, he is accused not of failure to control the ship, but of deliberately turning off the transponder and autopilot and completely changing course.

There is an opinion that at that time the pilot was in a rather unstable psychological state due to the fact that his wife left him. In the last months of his life he was lonely and often complained of depressive thoughts. And these are exactly the arguments presented by the investigation. And later it turned out that shortly before the tragedy, a similar flight with a fatal outcome was reproduced in a flight simulator.

Another popular version of the pilot’s fault is that he was familiar with the radar schedules in nearby areas and knew that radar systems would not work at night on weekends. This allowed him to stray off course and remain undetected for a while.

Despite all the controversy, Zachary’s family does not agree with either version of the investigation.

After the events of September 11, 2001, any plane crash could be attributed to a terrorist attack. The Malaysian Boeing crash was no exception. This version emerged after the investigation services established that two people on board were not who they claimed to be. It turned out that the passengers from Australia and Italy were Iranians traveling on stolen passports. At the time of the plane crash, Iran had tense relations with many countries of the world, so a version of the hijacking emerged. However, an investigation by Interpol soon revealed that these people should not be considered terrorists or intelligence agents. Most likely, they were just refugees. Moreover, security standards in Southeast Asia are very different from those in the West, and therefore it is not uncommon for people to fly using someone else’s documents.

As we have said before, most of the passengers were from China. And Chinese authorities, who have detailed files on their citizens, have ruled out the possibility that any of the Chinese on board could have carried out a terrorist attack.

The mysterious disappearance of the plane forced society to come up with the most bizarre theories: for example, that this was an operation of North Korean intelligence services to kidnap foreign citizens, or that the plane was swallowed by a microscopic black hole. But such a theory has actually been discussed on social media for a very long time. It is connected to a secret American military base on the island of Diego Garcia. They say that there is a huge hangar at the airport, where a 63-meter Boeing can be easily stored. And later in Zachary’s house they found a computer simulator in which he tried not only to fly over the Indian Ocean, but also to land on this island.

The cause of the Malaysian Boeing crash remains one of the main mysteries of this century, and no intelligence agency can give a definitive answer to what happened that night 10 years ago. Although such a long statute of limitations leaves little to no chance, some relatives of the missing passengers still hope to one day learn the truth.