The shocking truth about MH370

In early March 2014, the world was captivated in a way never seen before by the news of a missing Malaysian Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, MH370. The last voice contact with the flight crew was early morning 8^th March somewhere over the South China Sea, just over an hour after take-off. Soon after the plane disappeared from Malaysian Air traffic Control radars, but was tracked shortly after flying over the Malay Peninsula, and tracking across the Andaman Sea.

MH370 was a Boeing 777-200ER, which had 227 passengers and 15 crew members aboard that night. This disappearance of the aircraft has led to one of the largest and longest searches in history for the aircraft, which is still going on today in the Southern Indian Ocean, the most probable place authorities believe that plane went down.

MH370 is not the only aviation mystery. There have been a long line of aviation mysteries, many which still have not been solvedtoday. One of the most famous cases that have attracted a lot of speculation was flight 19, a group of 5 TBM Avenger torpedo bombers that disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle in 1945. A PBM Mariner flying boat that went searching for the lost planes also disappeared.

Charismatic Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan, mysteriously disappeared in the Pacific while on a round the world flight in a twin engine Lockheed Electra 10E. In 1956, a fully nuclear armed B-47 Stratojet disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea and was lost without a trace. In 1962, a Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation flight from Travis Air Force Base in California to Saigon disappeared without a trace after a mid-air refuelling over Guam. In 1979, a Boeing 707-323C transporting valuable paintings disappeared mid-flight between Tokyo and Rio de Janerio and was never found.

However, some aircraft have disappeared by design. In 2003, a Boeing 727-223 was stolen in Angola from the airport, took off and has never been seen again.

All the above cases have not been solved and led to speculation and conspiracy theories ranging from the plausible to the extra-terrestrial explanations.

Yet time has allowed similar cases to be solved when someone stumbles across wreckage or other artefacts from these besieged flights. Such a case included a South American Airways Star Dust aircraft that disappeared in 1947. It took 50 years to solve this mystery when glacial ice in the Andes melted, exposing the aircraft wreckage. More recently, the remains of Air France Flight 447, were only found two years after it disappeared.

However the search area for the ill-fated MH370 is hundreds of times more expansive than flight 447.

As the events of March 2014 panned out, several things became clear.

The first thing exposed by the MH370 tragedy was the ad hoc haphazardness of the Malaysian Government. The early responses of the government were heavily criticized for uncoordinated and sometimes contradictory approach to the disaster. The chief spokesman for the Malaysian Government Defence Minister and acting Transport Minister Hishamuddin Hussein was criticized for his smugness, evasiveness, sometimes condescending attitude, and delay in providing information to the families of MH370 passengers and public.

It took Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak a week before he appeared on television after the plane vanished. This delay made Malaysia appear very unprofessional to people who were not familiar with the political culture of Malaysia.

The families and relatives of the missing were particularly critical of the search operation. Critical time was lost searching for flight MH370 in the South China Sea. Voice370 representing the families of the passengers accused the Malaysian Government of a cover-up. The families and relatives of the passengers, mainly Chinese nationals, were angered by the coarseness of an English language text message "we have to assume beyond all reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and all those on board haven't survived". This led to Chinese protests outside the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing.