MH370: The Plane That Disappeared (2023) s01e01 Episode Script
The Pilot
1
- [waves crashing]
- [soft, tense music playing]
[music turns sinister]
[beep]
[music intensifies]
[beep]
[plane engine whirring]
[reporter 1] How is it possible for
an airliner to disappear out of thin air?
[crying, shouting indistinctly]
There's a million different theories that
people could tell you about MH370, but
one of them is right.
[reporter 2]
There's a theory going around
[Piers Morgan] Hijacking.
Mechanical failure. Meteorite hitting it.
Pilot suicide.
Who knows?
[mechanical clunking]
[tense music playing]
[woman] Two hundred and thirty-nine
innocent people.
Someone knows.
Someone definitely knows.
So much about this flight
simply doesn't add up.
[woman 2] This very mysterious
and very suspicious
cargo could be at the heart
of what happened to MH370.
[reporter 3] It appears to be part of the
wing system called the flaperon.
[woman 3] The first time I saw that,
my honest feeling was,
"Who planted it there?"
"Who brought the piece there?"
[man 1] I've been accused
of being a Russian spy,
a Chinese spy.
It is just patently ridiculous.
We are equally puzzled as well.
[indistinct shouting, screaming]
There is new information coming in
that is reshaping the theories
[reporter 4]
The search was in the wrong area.
We'll never have peace
until we know where they are.
- [siren wailing]
- [man 2] They're lying from the beginning.
They are lying to the whole world.
[man 1] It was a deliberate act.
It's possible it was hijacked.
We don't know.
[shouting in Mandarin] Fuck Malaysia!
Malaysia is lying!
[woman 4 in English]
I have the real evidence.
It's there. And you can't deny that.
[waves lapping]
[man] Planes go up.
Planes go down.
What planes don't do
is just vanish off the face of the Earth.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Piers Morgan] We don't have the answers.
This is one of the great mysteries
in aviation history.
[suspenseful music playing]
[eerie music playing]
[plane engine buzzing]
[man] MH370 is a mystery
whose malevolence is still with us today.
It's a snake that is still alive.
As an aviation journalist,
you know, this is like the bat signal
shined on the clouds.
It has its hooks in me.
And I had to investigate.
[clock beeping]
[beeping hastens]
[beeping slows and regulates]
[Jeff] So, the flight was a red-eye
from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The plane was going to
take off around midnight
and fly through the night,
and arrive in Beijing around dawn.
Everything was routine.
There were 227 passengers.
And 12 crew.
[ominous music plays]
My husband and I, Hazrin,
were working for Malaysia Airlines
as cabin crew.
We have one daughter
and I was heavily pregnant,
so I was not working.
He was rostered for Beijing,
and it was winter.
I still remember he packed his
fluffy jacket [chuckles]in his bag.
[sighs]
[woman] My husband, Paul Weeks,
and I lived in Australia
with our two young sons.
Paul was preparing
to start a new job in China.
He said to me,
"Look, do you want me to go?"
Because Jack was young and
and so was Lincoln,
and it was 28 days on, 14 days off.
And I said to him, "Of course."
[man speaking French]
I had been living in Beijing
with my children for almost six years.
My children had been on school holidays in
Malaysia and I was on my way to meet them
in Beijing to spend
the second week of holidays with them.
The day before, I had spoken to my wife.
Everything was fine.
They were happy we were meeting.
There was another message
from my daughter saying,
"I'm at the airport in Kuala Lumpur."
"I'm happy
because I'm going to see my daddy again."
[soft music playing]
[Danica in English]
His plane was called, and
It was obviously very emotional.
There was a lot of tears.
The boys, you know, blew kisses,
said, "I love you."
And he walked out that door.
And that was like it was yesterday.
- [whirring]
- [radio crackles]
[man 1, over radio]
370, 32 right for take-off. Good night.
[man 2, over radio] 32 right,
cleared for take-off, Malaysian 370.
Thank you. Bye.
[plane engines whirring]
[Intan] Hazrin called me
before the plane took off.
Last
Last thing he said was, "I love you."
Ah.
[sighs]
[soft music playing]
- [ominous music plays]
- [beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping regulates]
[Jeff] So, 41 minutes past midnight,
the plane takes off.
[engine whirring]
[soft instrumental music playing]
It's a clear night.
Everything's very calm.
It climbs to cruising altitude.
It heads out over the South China Sea.
[man, over radio] Malaysian, uh, 370,
maintaining level three five zero.
Shortly after one o'clock in the morning
is when things start to get strange.
The plane is about to leave
Malaysian airspace.
They're going to be handed to the next set
of air traffic controllers in Vietnam.
So, the Malaysians said
[air traffic controller] Malaysian 370,
contact Ho Chi Minh 120, decimal 9.
Good night.
[Jeff] As the plane approaches
the limits of Malaysian airspace,
the captain of the flight,
Zaharie Ahmad Shah,
gets on the radio and says
[Zaharie] Uh, good night, Malaysian 370.
[beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping regulates]
[ominous music plays]
[Jeff] And then 90 seconds later,
the plane suddenly
goes electronically dark.
[suspenseful music plays]
It vanishes from radar.
That is basically
where the mystery begins.
[suspenseful music plays]
- [traffic whizzing]
- [horns honking]
[man] I was awakened
by a phone call at 2:20 in the morning.
- [engines humming]
- [horn honks]
I was told that flight MH370
is missing from our system.
We knew this is very, very unusual.
Extremely unusual.
- [suspenseful music playing]
- [traffic humming]
When I arrive at the
Emergency Operation Center
- [music crescendos]
- [shutters clicking]
I felt numb and I was very nervous.
We requested Thailand,
Hong Kong, as well as Vietnam,
to call and communicate with MH370.
But they told us that
there was no response at all.
[suspenseful music playing]
Between 4 o'clock in the morning
until 6:30, we were virtually scrambling.
[shutter clicking]
We were calling everyone
that we can get hold of,
hoping that the aircraft could have landed
somewhere in Vietnam, or in Hong Kong,
or somewhere in China
before it arrived in Beijing.
[dramatic music playing]
- [engine buzzing]
- [music fades]
[beeping]
[Fuad] As the time grows nearer
to 6:30 a.m
[beeping slows down]
we knew there was something
seriously wrong.
[news jingle]
We have breaking news.
Malaysia Airlines confirms
it has lost contact
with a plane carrying 227 passengers
[man] 6:30 in the morning in Beijing.
At this stage, very sketchy details
[journalist] Just to re, re uh
remind you of what we're finding out.
The flight number is MH370.
It was expected
[speaking French]
[speaking Spanish]
[reporter] Boeing 777
seems to have vanished into thin air.
[electronic tweeting]
[tweeting continues]
This was absolutely my worst nightmare.
What do we tell the family members?
What do we tell the media?
[tweeting continues]
I was already getting calls
from several media, including CNN.
On the phone with us is Malaysian Airlines
Vice President of Operations.
Mr, Sharuji,
I appreciate you being with us.
What's the latest
you can tell us about this aircraft?
[Fuad] Okay, the aircraft has got
about seven hours of fuel.
And we suspect that by 8:30,
this aircraft would have run out of fuel.
At the moment, we have got no idea
where this aircraft is right now.
[suspenseful music playing]
[clock beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping regulates]
[man] As senior officers,
you are trained
to expect the worst-case scenario.
You are trained
to handle crisis management.
But when it happens,
it's it's it's it's different
because you don't have a clue.
You don't have a clue then
where is the aircraft.
[water churning]
[boat engine whirring]
[plane engine whizzing]
[propellers whirring]
[Azharuddin] Early in the morning
of the eighth,
the search-and-rescue had been activated.
The standard operating procedures is to go
to the location where we lost the aircraft
on the radar screen.
We got calls saying that personnel
from one of the oil rigs
in the South China Sea
sighted an explosion,
as if an aircraft
had crashed into the sea.
- [clacking]
- [electronic tweeting]
[Jeff] Right away,
when the plane failed to appear,
you got a huge amount of interest,
social media activity,
people posting about, "What happened
to this plane?" "Where is it?"
[Fuad] We received so many reports
from social media.
One claimed
that the aircraft was hijacked.
Another said that the aircraft crashed
in the jungles of Java.
At that time,
we had to take all information
as possible truth.
Because we do not know
whether they are true or not.
[propeller whirring]
[reporter 1] Vietnamese Air Force planes
have apparently spotted
two large oil slicks in the area,
off the southern tip of Vietnam.
Each of those slicks apparently
about six miles wide.
Our time and effort was consumed
in trying to validate this information.
[plane engine whirring]
[reporter 2] Cathay Pacific pilot
reported seeing
large solid debris in the ocean during
a flight from Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur.
Of course the families want to know
what happened to their loved ones.
Are they alive? Are they dead?
And we have no answers.
[reporter 3] We do know
another pilot contacted flight 370
just before it disappeared.
The captain of the overnight flight
to Tokyo was positioned 30 minutes ahead
and he called them
on the emergency frequency.
He told Malaysian media,
"There was a lot of interference, static,
but I heard mumbling from the other end."
- [static]
- [indistinct mumbling]
[soft music playing]
[Danica] It was Saturday morning
and Paul had sent an email from
the airport titled, "Miss you already."
He finished his email with,
"You and the boys are my world."
"And as soon as I land in Beijing,
on March 8th, I'll give you a call."
[traffic humming]
- [horns honking]
- [motorcycle engine whirring]
[Intan] I was just at home.
Everything was totally normal.
Kuala Lumpur to Beijing
is a daily departure.
So Hazrin worked the flight many times.
It was a routine for us to send each other
a text message when the plane landed.
We had been doing that
throughout our flying career.
[Danica] I was in the kitchen
and then I got a call.
And it was a lady asking for Paul.
And I said,
"Oh no, look sorry, he's on a plane."
I said, "Where are you from?"
She said, "I'm a reporter
from the New Zealand Herald."
[Ghyslain in French] I was on a plane,
on my way to meet my children.
I arrived at 4:00 p.m. in Beijing.
At that point,
I'm heading out of the plane.
There was a hostess waiting for me
who said, "Sir, follow us."
I had no idea what was happening.
[Intan in English]
I woke up early morning.
I look at my phone.
When I don't receive the text from him
I say to myself,
"Never mind, just go back to sleep."
"He will call or text later on, right?"
[Danica] And I thought,
"What does she want with Paul?"
And she said, "You haven't heard?"
And I said, "Heard what?"
[inhales]
She said,
"There's been an incident with the plane."
- [guests cheering]
- [shutter clicks]
- [engine roars]
- [camera clicks]
[menacing music plays]
See you tomorrow morning.
Papa misses you too. I love you.
[traffic whizzing]
[Zaharie] Good night, Malaysia 370.
[engine whirring]
[woman laughing]
[Danica] I dropped the phone
and ran outside screaming.
[Intan] All I can remember
was I was just crying.
It's just so unimaginable
that becomes a reality to to me.
[Ghyslain in French]
At that moment, time stops.
"How's that possible?"
"Is this a nightmare?"
"Please wake me up!"
I said, "Are you sure?"
And at that moment, they answer,
"No, we aren't sure of anything."
[reporter 1 in English] Well, I'm at
terminal three at the moment.
You would expect there
to be a lot of people here waiting for
[reporter 2]
Friends and relatives in Beijing
were sent to a city-center hotel
to wait for news.
[in Mandarin]
We hope the Chinese government
will send a search-and-rescue team,
because the Vietnamese government
is not proactive.
[man in English] We are working
with authorities who have activated
the search-and-rescue team
to locate the aircraft.
Our team is currently calling
the next of kin of passengers and crew.
[woman speaking indistinctly]
- Thank you very much.
- [indistinct chatter]
[Ghyslain in French] I was the last
of the family members to get there.
[reporters speaking indistinctly]
You get out of the car
and you're mobbed by journalists.
Mobbed.
There was a crazy amount of people.
[indistinct shouting]
Everybody is taking pictures of you
and reaching out with microphones
I remember my friends had to push
them away so we could reach the room.
[menacing music plays]
[wailing and crying]
[crying and wailing continue]
[moaning, crying]
[Ghyslain in French] And then someone
from Malaysian Airlines
came to me and they tell me to sit down.
I ask, "What are we doing?"
They say, "We're waiting."
All the families were there.
They were mostly Chinese.
I couldn't even communicate with them.
And that's when I told my friends,
"Please take me home, I can't stay here."
- [indistinct shouting]
- [shutters clicking]
[reporter in English] Here in Beijing,
hundreds of family members
and friends of the passengers on board
have gathered in the hotel.
They're growing increasingly frustrated
by the lack of information
about their loved ones.
[man speaking Mandarin]
The room was full of people
crying and wailing.
There were families in the corridor,
leaning against the wall,
standing there,
squatting down, sitting on the floor.
[crying and wailing]
When I think about it now,
that room was like a living hell.
That's not an exaggeration.
[reporter in English]
Relatives of the missing passengers
say they've called
their loved one's cell phones
and instead of going to voicemail,
the phones continue to ring.
- [indistinct chatter]
- [cell phone beeps]
[indistinct]
[Jiang in Mandarin] Suddenly, there was
a daughter of a passenger running towards us.
We could see her phone
was showing an incoming call.
Uh, It was displaying "Papa."
She said, "What should I do?"
I shouted back to her, "Pick up the call!"
But sadly,
when she tried to pick up the phone,
it stopped ringing.
Many of us tried to call
our families on the plane.
In many of these calls,
there was a connection and a ringtone.
We requested that Malaysia Airlines
and the government
follow the lead on the connected calls.
But their replies were always the same.
They didn't have the technology
to trace it further.
Um, it was incomprehensible to us,
the families.
This was the easiest way
to locate the passengers and the plane.
[ominous music playing]
[frantic beeping]
[beeping stops]
[reporter 1 in English] Sunrise,
and the waters south of Vietnam
brought an all-out search
for Malaysia Airlines flight 370.
[man] If it's landed at an airport,
we'd know it.
It does not have enough fuel
to be still in the air.
So it sure doesn't look good.
[reporter 2] And we don't know anything.
We're not even sure of
where that plane is.
[reporter 3]
There was a glimmer of hope today.
The Vietnamese thought
they'd spotted a life raft,
but it turned out to be a cable reel.
An investigator's best lead
came to nothing.
Residue from an oil slick
was tested in the lab.
They were looking for jet fuel,
but the oil came from a ship.
We went there. There's nothing.
- [journalist] Oh
- There's nothing.
[Azharuddin] It was very, very hard
because things are not going
as what we expected it to be.
[journalist] So, do you have any comment
on the status of MH370?
[Jeff] There is just this tremendous
interest from around the world.
What happened to this plane? Where is it?
And it had to be explored.
It had to be investigated.
And so I wound up spending countless hours
to try to really understand what happened
to this plane.
An immediate focus of attention
was the question of communications
and why and how they'd been lost.
[man] On the top of the 777 is an antenna
[Jeff] A modern commercial jetliner
is in communication multiple ways
with the outside world.
All of them went dark at the same time.
Why?
[man] A team of clever technicians
The most obvious answer would be
catastrophic failure.
Like, the plane blew up.
It impacted the ocean.
Um, it suffered a fire so intense
that it just destroyed
all the equipment simultaneously
before anyone could issue a mayday call.
But
the plane's debris was still not found
underneath the spot where that
disruption in communication occurred.
If it wasn't catastrophic failure,
what's option two?
The only really obvious possibility
is that somebody on board the plane
deliberately turned off
its electronic communication signals.
And if that's the case,
the question is, "Who?"
- [ominous music playing]
- [clock beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping slows down and stops]
Extraordinary new twist
in the disappearance
of Malaysia Airlines flight 370.
Malaysian officials now say the plane
was hundreds of miles off course,
and flying in the wrong direction
when last tracked.
Here are the latest developments.
[reporter 1] It apparently turned
the opposite direction
and flew to the Malacca Strait.
[reporter 2] reports the plane
may have flown
for more than an hour
after disappearing from radar.
[Jeff] Something very unexpected
had been spotted by military radar
that doesn't require
any kind of signals from the plane.
But the Malaysian military
couldn't confirm 100%
that this actually was MH370.
We're now hearing from Reuters quoting
a Malaysian military source saying
There is a possibility that
that this aircraft made a turn back,
but we are not sure
whether it is the same aircraft.
Good evening.
Military radars can't say particularly
that this was even flight 370.
It can't tell you what kind
of aircraft it is,
whether it's a helicopter or an airplane.
It just says, "There's a target out there,
here it is."
But it doesn't give you
altitude or airspeed.
[Jeff] So now, is it possible that,
far from crashing,
the plane disappeared
from Malaysian civilian radar,
reversed course back over
peninsular Malaysia,
is seen doing so
by Malaysian military radar,
flies to the end of the zone
of military radar coverage,
and vanished again?
[clamoring, indistinct shouting]
If that's true for MH370,
why did he turn back?
Why don't he call us, you know?
What is he trying to do?
[Ghyslain in French] We had a house
not too far from the airport.
[inhales]
I didn't know what else I could do,
so I switched the TV on.
[in English]
Search-and-rescue teams from Vietnam,
Malaysia and Singapore are conducting a
[Ghyslain in French] The BBC and CNN
had this story on a loop.
I sat in front of it
and I realized I had to call my son now.
He was a student at the time in France.
That was the hardest moment
of my whole life.
[groans]
[telephone ringing]
[ringing continues]
[call ends]
The first thing he told me,
I hadn't said a word yet, was,
"Tell me they weren't on that plane."
I answered "Yes."
[indistinct]
And then I heard a scream.
Ah.
[beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping slows down and stops]
[reporter in English] Seventy-two hours
after the disappearance of flight 370,
forty ships and thirty-four aircraft
have failed to find
any sign of the jetliner.
[Jeff] So at this point, there's people
searching in the Andaman Sea,
and at the same time,
they're still searching
in the South China Sea.
The state of confusion was so profound.
I mean,
it's farcical.
It's impossible that the plane could be
both of these places.
[reporters shouting questions]
Where's the focus your search now?
Can you confirm
if the plane has turned back?
You're searching east.
You're searching west.
- This is utter confusion.
- I don't think so.
[Azharuddin] It is overwhelming.
The clicking noise of all the cameras.
Click, click, click.
They keep asking, "Where?"
"Why you are looking at the wrong place?"
As far as we are concerned,
we are equally puzzled as well.
Do you feel like
we are getting the whole story?
Is it possible that some information
is being held back at this point?
[Intan] One day you say this.
The next day, the reporter says that.
Who to believe? What to believe?
[reporter 1]
It's still difficult to understand
why they've withheld this information,
given they would've seen it
when it happened in real time.
[in French] Right away,
my first reaction was to say,
"They're talking us for fools.
They're mocking us."
[reporter 2] Relatives threw water bottles
at officials in frustration.
They want some answers.
[journalist] Why are you stopping us
speaking to the relatives?
Why are you stopping us speaking
to the relatives? Why are you stopping us?
[loud grunt]
[Danica] For the families,
it created so much confusion.
Every day, it just seemed like there
was something different coming out.
That's the torment. It's the not knowing
is the most horrible part of it.
[beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping slows then stops]
[reporter] Turning now to new developments
in a search that's both unbelievable
and unprecedented in modern times.
We're now entering a fourth day
without a single sign
of that massive Boeing 777.
[Jeff] So, four days in, the case is just
obviously strange and getting stranger.
I'm trying to wrestle with the more
technical aspects of the case.
And I'm writing about it
on my personal blog.
And as I'm writing about this stuff,
people are joining the conversation
in the comments section
and we're sort of running
a parallel investigation almost.
And I got one comment from a guy named
"Air Land Sea Man"
who was in enormous detail.
I couldn't even understand fully
what he was saying.
This guy clearly knew
what he was talking about.
[man] I've been a pilot for over 50 years.
My career was
mainly involved
with engineering and science.
A number of us
started communicating to see if we could
come up with any kind of, uh,
solid theory on where the airplane went.
The group consisted of pilots,
engineers, scientists,
legal experts, mechanical engineers,
electrical engineers,
people very familiar
with how the 777 flies
and how the different systems work.
[Jeff] I had never experienced
anything like this,
where people were coming together
spontaneously from all around the world.
[Mike] We're spending 12 hours a day
or more digging up details,
going back over everything
again and again.
[Jeff] We were suddenly working together
as a tight-knit team.
One of them suggested that we should
call ourselves the "Independent Group."
We felt this was done by somebody who
really knew what they were doing.
So the spotlight turns more and more
to the pilots.
I write up my findings in a piece
for Slate Magazine called,
"How to Disappear a Jetliner."
It gets a lot of attention.
The next thing I know, I'm live on CNN.
[Piers Morgan]
Jeff, let me come to you first.
I read your piece before I came on air.
Absolutely fascinating theory.
Basically, what some pilots
are talking about, I'm hearing,
is the idea that
perhaps the pilot
or co-pilot of this plane,
um, took control of the cockpit.
[Jeff] Who knows what the motive is
to do something like this. The point
We, of the Independent Group,
weren't making really any kind of claims,
but we were just trying to
figure out what was known.
Because
if you wanted to know about MH370,
which so many people did,
you weren't getting it
from Malaysian authorities.
We weren't the only group out there.
There was another tribe
called the Tomnoders.
[news jingle]
As multiple countries and crews
search for that missing
Malaysian Airlines plane,
so can you too,
using your very own computer.
Here's how it works.
[reporter] They're inviting anyone to go
onto their platform called Tomnod
to view the high-res pictures of the area
where the Malaysia Airlines jet
might have gone down.
[reporter] The Air Force Chief told us
more time and help was needed
to pinpoint the aircraft's location.
Grieving family members long to know
where flight 370 went down.
[woman] When I saw
the anguish on the faces
of these family members,
I thought, "I have to do something."
It just tugged at my heartstrings.
My hobby is photography,
so I have an eye for detail.
So I thought I could be a great person
to help look for this airplane
from the satellite images.
As a Tomnoder,
the areas we were searching
we had no control over to pick.
And so I was handed the area
pretty close to where the airplane
first disappeared from radar
in the South China Sea.
The satellite images were empty.
It was just the blackness of the sea.
Then you press next
more black scans.
So much black.
And then, finally
there's something white.
[soft, tense music playing]
I pulled the schematics off the internet
for a B777.
And I was able to identify this piece
as the nose cone.
That's when I started saying, "Holy crap!"
"There's a piece of debris," you know?
"There's the airplane."
And then I started seeing more pieces.
Something that looked like the fuselage.
Something that looked like the tail.
I got goosebumps.
I literally cried because I knew
someone had died there.
Because I knew
that was a part of the plane.
That meant
they were no longer alive
and that wasn't the answer
their family members were looking for.
[melancholic music playing]
[beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping slows then stops]
[dramatic music playing]
[reporter] This is the most security
that we've seen so far.
They're obviously here
to protect the Prime Minister.
[journalist] Mr. Prime Minister,
this is for American journalism.
Press conference later.
[camera shutters clicking]
[Danica] On the 15th of March,
I received a call from Malaysian Airlines
to say that
there's going to be an announcement
from the Malaysian prime minister.
There's a moment of trepidation that,
"Oh no, they've found them
and this is it."
"This is it, he is truly gone."
Today,
based on new satellite communication,
we can confirm
MH370
did indeed
turn back over Peninsular Malaysia
before turning northwest.
[Cyndi] I was like, "What is going on?"
I was just in disbelief that
that they were telling us this.
We are ending
our operations in the South China Sea
and reassessing
the redeployment of our assets.
[Cyndi] I knew that what I had
in the South China Sea
was the debris of MH370
and I was not going to just sit around
and not be vocal about that.
I already had notified Tomnod
that this debris existed.
But I never got an acknowledgment
that I tagged debris.
I mean, it was like nothing ever happened.
So I tweeted everybody I could tweet.
I put it on Facebook.
I emailed.
I did everything I could to try and get
someone's attention that the debris
was off Vietnam in the South China Sea.
It frustrated a lot of us Tomnoders.
[electronic tweeting]
But then the next thing I heard
was even more confusing.
[Najib Razik] Based on this new data,
we have determined
that the plane's last communication
with a satellite
was in one of two possible corridors.
So this is really this is getting
weirder and weirder by the day.
So now,
after the plane
leaves the area of military radar,
it turns out that
a satellite communication service
called Inmarsat
had equipment aboard the plane that was
communicating with a satellite
that was located above
the central Indian Ocean.
There are stunning new developments
in the disappearance of flight 370.
There is new information coming in
that's reshaping theories
[reporter]
The search was in the wrong area.
The aircraft could be anywhere
in these two arcs
they're covering are so vast,
hundreds of thousands of square miles.
[eerie music plays]
[man, over radio] 370 [indistinct]
[Jeff] When a plane is out
over the open ocean,
the only way it can communicate by radio
is by transmitting a signal
up to a satellite.
[reporter 1] So, still no plane,
but streams of data to sift through.
[reporter 2] Inmarsat are in
the business of providing
satellite communication for planes.
when they're beyond
range of ground radar systems.
[man] What we found in the data
were these seven handshakes,
or "pings," as they came to be known.
Every hour,
the Inmarsat system was checking
that the satellite terminal
on the aircraft was responding.
So it would send a message
basically saying, "Are you still there?"
And the satellite terminal
responded saying, "Yes."
And these pings continued,
or these messages continued,
for up to six hours after last contact.
[eerie music playing]
[Mark] There was a deep sense of shock.
We weren't expecting to see the aircraft
appear still to be flying.
But there's nothing in the data itself
to give any positional information.
There was no GPS coordinates, for example.
All we know is how far
the aircraft is away from the satellite.
So we knew that we had additional work
to determine whether
the aircraft was traveling north or south
for the last part of the flight.
But we knew analysis
was going to take time.
[Jeff] So
the mystery has only deepened.
Um, we know that the plane flew on
for several hours.
One of the routes went south
and ended up
in the remote southern Indian Ocean.
The other one
went north into Central Asia.
Now. the most optimistic possibility is
that it landed somewhere in Central Asia,
like Kazakhstan.
But if the plane went south
it must have crashed
in the remote ocean.
There's no way that anyone
could have survived.
[tense music plays]
So while Inmarsat
worked on where the plane went,
the Malaysians are now
forced to acknowledge
a basic fact that'd been pretty obvious
to onlookers for a while.
Good evening.
The word from Malaysia tonight
is that whatever happened
to Malaysia Airlines flight 370
was no accident.
The country's prime minister
publicly confirming today
what has been a widely held suspicion
that the plane
was deliberately flown off course.
[man speaking indistinctly over radio]
[reporter 1] Can you tell us
what you were doing inside the house?
[reporter 2] In Kuala Lumpur,
flight 370 is now
a criminal investigation.
[reporter 3] This white police car
has just raided the home
of the captain of MH370.
[dramatic music playing]
The general consensus
was that the pilots took the plane.
As I said before,
this is definitely not an accident.
You don't fly for eight hours
and travel thousands of miles by accident.
[Jeff] From the get-go,
of the two pilots,
one was considered infinitely more likely
to be the culprit.
The co-pilot was
very wet behind the ears.
He had just been approved to fly
as a first officer on a 777.
So the focus was always on the captain
of the flight,
Zaharie Ahmad Shah
because he was an extremely
experienced captain,
and what was done
was aggressive and sophisticated.
[suspenseful music playing]
Hi everyone, uh
this is a YouTube video that I made, um
[reporter] The pilot's
home flight simulator
was removed by police to see if perhaps
the erratic route flight 370 took
was first rehearsed in cyberspace.
We took possession of a simulator
of a flight simulator.
[Jeff] Zaharie had the chops.
Zaharie was a veteran, experienced guy,
who would know all the angles.
Who'd be able to conceive of something
as complicated as this.
[tense music playing]
But
there was still no sign of this plane.
Whether it's heading north or south.
[telephones ringing]
[Mark] Our engineer,
who'd been working on the numbers,
contacted me to say
that he had cracked the problem.
He had to really dig into the system,
understand how all the components
in the system work,
to establish, essentially, the equation
for what would be expected
if the aircraft was moving north
or if it was moving south.
He had been able to determine
which of the flight paths
MH370 had taken.
So, I sat at my kitchen table that weekend
creating some information that we
could pass to the Malaysian authorities.
[Ghyslain in French]
The Malaysian Airlines center tells us,
"There's an important press
conference coming up tomorrow,
so be in front of your TV in the morning."
[waves lapping]
So deep down you're telling yourself,
"They're still alive."
"If there's no crash,
they're still alive."
For quite some time,
I kept communicating with them.
They had their phones
so I kept sending texts.
So every night before going to bed,
I would text them all.
"How are you?" "Thinking about you."
"Here's what I did today."
It was a way for me to keep the dialogue
going with them in a way.
[waves lapping on shore]
[clock beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping slows and stops]
[clamoring]
- [indistinct chatter]
- [man coughs]
[in English] This evening,
I was briefed by representatives from
the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch.
Based on their new analysis,
Inmarsat
and the AAIB
have concluded
that MH370
flew along the southern corridor.
This
is a remote location,
far from any possible landing sites.
It is, therefore,
with deep sadness
and regret that I must inform you
that according
to this new data,
flight MH370
ended in the southern
Indian Ocean.
[crying, clamoring]
[melancholic music playing]
[crying, yelling]
[melancholic music continues]
[wailing, crying]
- [clamoring]
- [indistinct agitated chatter]
[Jeff] They still don't have any proof
that their loved ones are dead.
All we had was the satellite data.
We had no physical evidence.
So,
he's essentially telling
the loved ones of the passengers and crew,
"Your loved ones are dead
because of math."
[in Mandarin] Fuck Malaysia!
Malaysia is lying!
[indistinct shouting]
[screaming, yelling]
[screaming and shouting continue]
[in English]
Never in the history of human existence
have 239 people
been declared dead
on the basis of mathematics alone.
[Jiang in Mandarin]
Nothing had been found.
The exact location of the plane
had not been worked out.
There was some sort of calculation
on the position of the plane.
But the result had not been verified.
To us, they were frantically trying
to hide something
and wrap it up quickly.
- [camera shutters clicking]
- [indistinct chatter]
[chatter continues]
[in Mandarin] Here, we the families
of the 154 Chinese passengers on MH370,
vehemently protest against
and condemn Malaysia Airlines,
the Malaysian government and the military!
- [man in Mandarin] Bring our family back!
- [men] Bring our family back!
- [man] Tell us the truth!
- [men] Tell us the truth!
[in Mandarin] We will use all possible
means to hold Malaysian Airlines,
the Malaysian government and military
accountable for their unforgivable crimes.
[siren wailing]
[clamoring]
[indistinct chatter]
[reporter in English] Parts of Beijing
were in full riot mode today
as families descended
on the Malaysian embassy to protest.
[in Mandarin] Bring our families back!
[in English]
This is such a rarity in Beijing,
a public protest
bringing the streets to a standstill,
but such is the discontent
amongst these family members,
they're allowed to do it.
[shouts indistinctly]
[breathing heavily, panting]
[chanting in Mandarin]
[Jiang in Mandarin] The families
had been yelling slogans like
Tell us the truth!
[Jiang] "Malaysia is a liar."
Bring our families back!
[Jiang] "You are murderers."
We simply refused to accept
that the fate
of our 154 loved ones had been
sealed by virtue of an announcement.
[reporter in English] The rally itself was
kept outside of Malaysian embassy fences,
out of the view of the world's media.
[Jiang in Mandarin]
We felt really helpless.
And angry.
[reporter in English] The chief executive
of Malaysia Airlines
agreed to be interviewed
for the first time today.
[Ahmad] Our primary role is really
to ensure we take care of the families.
I think we've gone beyond
our normal responses.
I think they would say
you haven't gone far enough.
Well, I think it's unfair.
I think we've done all we can.
[tense music softens]
[Jeff] There was this swirling fog
of unanswered questions.
But for me, it was clear.
The overwhelming body of evidence
pointed strongly to my theory.
The pilot decided to commit
mass murder-suicide.
He had wound up
on this straight beeline
into the southern Indian Ocean,
in order to end his life and to murder
more than 200 other human beings.
This was something that
must have required significant planning.
And so,
as an aviation journalist,
I felt like I had to paint a comprehensive
and final decisive picture
of what had happened that night.
[suspenseful music plays]
[clock beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping slows, regulates, then stops]
[eerie music plays]
[Jeff] Shortly after one o'clock
in the morning,
Zaharie is flying
over the South China Sea.
He is responsible for 11 crew
and 227 passengers
making their way to Beijing
on a routine red-eye.
At this stage,
air traffic control in Kuala Lumpur
calls up and says
[radio crackling]
[air traffic controller] Malaysian 370,
contact Ho Chi Minh 120, decimal 9.
Good night.
[Jeff] MH370 is about to be handed over
to the next set
of air traffic controllers,
who are in Vietnam.
So Zaharie says
[Zaharie] Good night, Malaysian 370.
[Jeff] He's now in a kind of gray zone
in between two areas
of air traffic control.
Nobody's paying attention to him.
Maybe he says to the co-pilot,
"Hey, buddy, why don't you go in the back
and get me something?"
The co-pilot closes the door.
Zaharie locks it.
[ominous music playing]
[dramatic music playing]
Now, he's about to implement his big plan.
He turns off all the electronics
that make the plane visible
to the outside world.
[electronics go silent]
It vanishes from radar.
At that moment
for everyone else aboard the plane,
everything was routine.
Zaharie is in complete control
and nobody knows anything about it.
He grabs the yoke
and he pulls it into a hard left turn.
[electronic whirring]
[dramatic music playing]
He heads back towards
the Malaysian peninsula.
But then
perhaps the co-pilot realizes that
he's been locked out of the cockpit.
Zaharie knows that he
is going to have a very hard time
keeping control of the plane.
So
maybe he
starts depressurizing the cabin.
Everyone is confused.
But what a lot of the passengers
don't realize
is that the oxygen generators
in these emergency masks
only work for about 15 minutes.
The captain has
a more sophisticated, longer-lasting mask.
And soon the entire cabin is quiet.
[silence]
[eerie music plays]
He turns the plane to the south.
And he flies straight, into the darkness,
waiting for his fuel to run out.
After six hours of flight
the engines stop running.
He pushes the nose down.
And he starts to slide into a dive.
[warning system] Decrease, pull up.
Decrease, pull up.
[loud whirring]
[whirring stops]
That is the scenario that is necessary
if Zaharie took the plane.
It had to be that sequence of events.
It is worth pointing out that
there have been a handful of cases
of pilots who have decided to
kill their passengers.
But
there has never been a case
that someone has taken six hours
to commit mass murder-suicide.
I started to wonder
maybe it wasn't Zaharie after all.
And then, four and a half months
after the disappearance,
something happens that
is like a rip in the fabric of reality.
[Barack Obama] Good morning.
Yesterday, Malaysian Airlines flight MH17
took off from Amsterdam
and was shot down over Ukraine,
near the Russian border.
And I think, "Oh my God."
Malaysian Airlines hadn't had
a significant accident since the '90s.
And now,
in the span of four and a half months,
they'd lost two huge 777s.
It seemed like an incredible coincidence.
At this point,
MH370 is not just an unsolved mass murder.
It's potentially
an act of war.
[dramatic music plays, then stops]
[theme music playing]
[theme music fades]
- [waves crashing]
- [soft, tense music playing]
[music turns sinister]
[beep]
[music intensifies]
[beep]
[plane engine whirring]
[reporter 1] How is it possible for
an airliner to disappear out of thin air?
[crying, shouting indistinctly]
There's a million different theories that
people could tell you about MH370, but
one of them is right.
[reporter 2]
There's a theory going around
[Piers Morgan] Hijacking.
Mechanical failure. Meteorite hitting it.
Pilot suicide.
Who knows?
[mechanical clunking]
[tense music playing]
[woman] Two hundred and thirty-nine
innocent people.
Someone knows.
Someone definitely knows.
So much about this flight
simply doesn't add up.
[woman 2] This very mysterious
and very suspicious
cargo could be at the heart
of what happened to MH370.
[reporter 3] It appears to be part of the
wing system called the flaperon.
[woman 3] The first time I saw that,
my honest feeling was,
"Who planted it there?"
"Who brought the piece there?"
[man 1] I've been accused
of being a Russian spy,
a Chinese spy.
It is just patently ridiculous.
We are equally puzzled as well.
[indistinct shouting, screaming]
There is new information coming in
that is reshaping the theories
[reporter 4]
The search was in the wrong area.
We'll never have peace
until we know where they are.
- [siren wailing]
- [man 2] They're lying from the beginning.
They are lying to the whole world.
[man 1] It was a deliberate act.
It's possible it was hijacked.
We don't know.
[shouting in Mandarin] Fuck Malaysia!
Malaysia is lying!
[woman 4 in English]
I have the real evidence.
It's there. And you can't deny that.
[waves lapping]
[man] Planes go up.
Planes go down.
What planes don't do
is just vanish off the face of the Earth.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Piers Morgan] We don't have the answers.
This is one of the great mysteries
in aviation history.
[suspenseful music playing]
[eerie music playing]
[plane engine buzzing]
[man] MH370 is a mystery
whose malevolence is still with us today.
It's a snake that is still alive.
As an aviation journalist,
you know, this is like the bat signal
shined on the clouds.
It has its hooks in me.
And I had to investigate.
[clock beeping]
[beeping hastens]
[beeping slows and regulates]
[Jeff] So, the flight was a red-eye
from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The plane was going to
take off around midnight
and fly through the night,
and arrive in Beijing around dawn.
Everything was routine.
There were 227 passengers.
And 12 crew.
[ominous music plays]
My husband and I, Hazrin,
were working for Malaysia Airlines
as cabin crew.
We have one daughter
and I was heavily pregnant,
so I was not working.
He was rostered for Beijing,
and it was winter.
I still remember he packed his
fluffy jacket [chuckles]in his bag.
[sighs]
[woman] My husband, Paul Weeks,
and I lived in Australia
with our two young sons.
Paul was preparing
to start a new job in China.
He said to me,
"Look, do you want me to go?"
Because Jack was young and
and so was Lincoln,
and it was 28 days on, 14 days off.
And I said to him, "Of course."
[man speaking French]
I had been living in Beijing
with my children for almost six years.
My children had been on school holidays in
Malaysia and I was on my way to meet them
in Beijing to spend
the second week of holidays with them.
The day before, I had spoken to my wife.
Everything was fine.
They were happy we were meeting.
There was another message
from my daughter saying,
"I'm at the airport in Kuala Lumpur."
"I'm happy
because I'm going to see my daddy again."
[soft music playing]
[Danica in English]
His plane was called, and
It was obviously very emotional.
There was a lot of tears.
The boys, you know, blew kisses,
said, "I love you."
And he walked out that door.
And that was like it was yesterday.
- [whirring]
- [radio crackles]
[man 1, over radio]
370, 32 right for take-off. Good night.
[man 2, over radio] 32 right,
cleared for take-off, Malaysian 370.
Thank you. Bye.
[plane engines whirring]
[Intan] Hazrin called me
before the plane took off.
Last
Last thing he said was, "I love you."
Ah.
[sighs]
[soft music playing]
- [ominous music plays]
- [beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping regulates]
[Jeff] So, 41 minutes past midnight,
the plane takes off.
[engine whirring]
[soft instrumental music playing]
It's a clear night.
Everything's very calm.
It climbs to cruising altitude.
It heads out over the South China Sea.
[man, over radio] Malaysian, uh, 370,
maintaining level three five zero.
Shortly after one o'clock in the morning
is when things start to get strange.
The plane is about to leave
Malaysian airspace.
They're going to be handed to the next set
of air traffic controllers in Vietnam.
So, the Malaysians said
[air traffic controller] Malaysian 370,
contact Ho Chi Minh 120, decimal 9.
Good night.
[Jeff] As the plane approaches
the limits of Malaysian airspace,
the captain of the flight,
Zaharie Ahmad Shah,
gets on the radio and says
[Zaharie] Uh, good night, Malaysian 370.
[beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping regulates]
[ominous music plays]
[Jeff] And then 90 seconds later,
the plane suddenly
goes electronically dark.
[suspenseful music plays]
It vanishes from radar.
That is basically
where the mystery begins.
[suspenseful music plays]
- [traffic whizzing]
- [horns honking]
[man] I was awakened
by a phone call at 2:20 in the morning.
- [engines humming]
- [horn honks]
I was told that flight MH370
is missing from our system.
We knew this is very, very unusual.
Extremely unusual.
- [suspenseful music playing]
- [traffic humming]
When I arrive at the
Emergency Operation Center
- [music crescendos]
- [shutters clicking]
I felt numb and I was very nervous.
We requested Thailand,
Hong Kong, as well as Vietnam,
to call and communicate with MH370.
But they told us that
there was no response at all.
[suspenseful music playing]
Between 4 o'clock in the morning
until 6:30, we were virtually scrambling.
[shutter clicking]
We were calling everyone
that we can get hold of,
hoping that the aircraft could have landed
somewhere in Vietnam, or in Hong Kong,
or somewhere in China
before it arrived in Beijing.
[dramatic music playing]
- [engine buzzing]
- [music fades]
[beeping]
[Fuad] As the time grows nearer
to 6:30 a.m
[beeping slows down]
we knew there was something
seriously wrong.
[news jingle]
We have breaking news.
Malaysia Airlines confirms
it has lost contact
with a plane carrying 227 passengers
[man] 6:30 in the morning in Beijing.
At this stage, very sketchy details
[journalist] Just to re, re uh
remind you of what we're finding out.
The flight number is MH370.
It was expected
[speaking French]
[speaking Spanish]
[reporter] Boeing 777
seems to have vanished into thin air.
[electronic tweeting]
[tweeting continues]
This was absolutely my worst nightmare.
What do we tell the family members?
What do we tell the media?
[tweeting continues]
I was already getting calls
from several media, including CNN.
On the phone with us is Malaysian Airlines
Vice President of Operations.
Mr, Sharuji,
I appreciate you being with us.
What's the latest
you can tell us about this aircraft?
[Fuad] Okay, the aircraft has got
about seven hours of fuel.
And we suspect that by 8:30,
this aircraft would have run out of fuel.
At the moment, we have got no idea
where this aircraft is right now.
[suspenseful music playing]
[clock beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping regulates]
[man] As senior officers,
you are trained
to expect the worst-case scenario.
You are trained
to handle crisis management.
But when it happens,
it's it's it's it's different
because you don't have a clue.
You don't have a clue then
where is the aircraft.
[water churning]
[boat engine whirring]
[plane engine whizzing]
[propellers whirring]
[Azharuddin] Early in the morning
of the eighth,
the search-and-rescue had been activated.
The standard operating procedures is to go
to the location where we lost the aircraft
on the radar screen.
We got calls saying that personnel
from one of the oil rigs
in the South China Sea
sighted an explosion,
as if an aircraft
had crashed into the sea.
- [clacking]
- [electronic tweeting]
[Jeff] Right away,
when the plane failed to appear,
you got a huge amount of interest,
social media activity,
people posting about, "What happened
to this plane?" "Where is it?"
[Fuad] We received so many reports
from social media.
One claimed
that the aircraft was hijacked.
Another said that the aircraft crashed
in the jungles of Java.
At that time,
we had to take all information
as possible truth.
Because we do not know
whether they are true or not.
[propeller whirring]
[reporter 1] Vietnamese Air Force planes
have apparently spotted
two large oil slicks in the area,
off the southern tip of Vietnam.
Each of those slicks apparently
about six miles wide.
Our time and effort was consumed
in trying to validate this information.
[plane engine whirring]
[reporter 2] Cathay Pacific pilot
reported seeing
large solid debris in the ocean during
a flight from Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur.
Of course the families want to know
what happened to their loved ones.
Are they alive? Are they dead?
And we have no answers.
[reporter 3] We do know
another pilot contacted flight 370
just before it disappeared.
The captain of the overnight flight
to Tokyo was positioned 30 minutes ahead
and he called them
on the emergency frequency.
He told Malaysian media,
"There was a lot of interference, static,
but I heard mumbling from the other end."
- [static]
- [indistinct mumbling]
[soft music playing]
[Danica] It was Saturday morning
and Paul had sent an email from
the airport titled, "Miss you already."
He finished his email with,
"You and the boys are my world."
"And as soon as I land in Beijing,
on March 8th, I'll give you a call."
[traffic humming]
- [horns honking]
- [motorcycle engine whirring]
[Intan] I was just at home.
Everything was totally normal.
Kuala Lumpur to Beijing
is a daily departure.
So Hazrin worked the flight many times.
It was a routine for us to send each other
a text message when the plane landed.
We had been doing that
throughout our flying career.
[Danica] I was in the kitchen
and then I got a call.
And it was a lady asking for Paul.
And I said,
"Oh no, look sorry, he's on a plane."
I said, "Where are you from?"
She said, "I'm a reporter
from the New Zealand Herald."
[Ghyslain in French] I was on a plane,
on my way to meet my children.
I arrived at 4:00 p.m. in Beijing.
At that point,
I'm heading out of the plane.
There was a hostess waiting for me
who said, "Sir, follow us."
I had no idea what was happening.
[Intan in English]
I woke up early morning.
I look at my phone.
When I don't receive the text from him
I say to myself,
"Never mind, just go back to sleep."
"He will call or text later on, right?"
[Danica] And I thought,
"What does she want with Paul?"
And she said, "You haven't heard?"
And I said, "Heard what?"
[inhales]
She said,
"There's been an incident with the plane."
- [guests cheering]
- [shutter clicks]
- [engine roars]
- [camera clicks]
[menacing music plays]
See you tomorrow morning.
Papa misses you too. I love you.
[traffic whizzing]
[Zaharie] Good night, Malaysia 370.
[engine whirring]
[woman laughing]
[Danica] I dropped the phone
and ran outside screaming.
[Intan] All I can remember
was I was just crying.
It's just so unimaginable
that becomes a reality to to me.
[Ghyslain in French]
At that moment, time stops.
"How's that possible?"
"Is this a nightmare?"
"Please wake me up!"
I said, "Are you sure?"
And at that moment, they answer,
"No, we aren't sure of anything."
[reporter 1 in English] Well, I'm at
terminal three at the moment.
You would expect there
to be a lot of people here waiting for
[reporter 2]
Friends and relatives in Beijing
were sent to a city-center hotel
to wait for news.
[in Mandarin]
We hope the Chinese government
will send a search-and-rescue team,
because the Vietnamese government
is not proactive.
[man in English] We are working
with authorities who have activated
the search-and-rescue team
to locate the aircraft.
Our team is currently calling
the next of kin of passengers and crew.
[woman speaking indistinctly]
- Thank you very much.
- [indistinct chatter]
[Ghyslain in French] I was the last
of the family members to get there.
[reporters speaking indistinctly]
You get out of the car
and you're mobbed by journalists.
Mobbed.
There was a crazy amount of people.
[indistinct shouting]
Everybody is taking pictures of you
and reaching out with microphones
I remember my friends had to push
them away so we could reach the room.
[menacing music plays]
[wailing and crying]
[crying and wailing continue]
[moaning, crying]
[Ghyslain in French] And then someone
from Malaysian Airlines
came to me and they tell me to sit down.
I ask, "What are we doing?"
They say, "We're waiting."
All the families were there.
They were mostly Chinese.
I couldn't even communicate with them.
And that's when I told my friends,
"Please take me home, I can't stay here."
- [indistinct shouting]
- [shutters clicking]
[reporter in English] Here in Beijing,
hundreds of family members
and friends of the passengers on board
have gathered in the hotel.
They're growing increasingly frustrated
by the lack of information
about their loved ones.
[man speaking Mandarin]
The room was full of people
crying and wailing.
There were families in the corridor,
leaning against the wall,
standing there,
squatting down, sitting on the floor.
[crying and wailing]
When I think about it now,
that room was like a living hell.
That's not an exaggeration.
[reporter in English]
Relatives of the missing passengers
say they've called
their loved one's cell phones
and instead of going to voicemail,
the phones continue to ring.
- [indistinct chatter]
- [cell phone beeps]
[indistinct]
[Jiang in Mandarin] Suddenly, there was
a daughter of a passenger running towards us.
We could see her phone
was showing an incoming call.
Uh, It was displaying "Papa."
She said, "What should I do?"
I shouted back to her, "Pick up the call!"
But sadly,
when she tried to pick up the phone,
it stopped ringing.
Many of us tried to call
our families on the plane.
In many of these calls,
there was a connection and a ringtone.
We requested that Malaysia Airlines
and the government
follow the lead on the connected calls.
But their replies were always the same.
They didn't have the technology
to trace it further.
Um, it was incomprehensible to us,
the families.
This was the easiest way
to locate the passengers and the plane.
[ominous music playing]
[frantic beeping]
[beeping stops]
[reporter 1 in English] Sunrise,
and the waters south of Vietnam
brought an all-out search
for Malaysia Airlines flight 370.
[man] If it's landed at an airport,
we'd know it.
It does not have enough fuel
to be still in the air.
So it sure doesn't look good.
[reporter 2] And we don't know anything.
We're not even sure of
where that plane is.
[reporter 3]
There was a glimmer of hope today.
The Vietnamese thought
they'd spotted a life raft,
but it turned out to be a cable reel.
An investigator's best lead
came to nothing.
Residue from an oil slick
was tested in the lab.
They were looking for jet fuel,
but the oil came from a ship.
We went there. There's nothing.
- [journalist] Oh
- There's nothing.
[Azharuddin] It was very, very hard
because things are not going
as what we expected it to be.
[journalist] So, do you have any comment
on the status of MH370?
[Jeff] There is just this tremendous
interest from around the world.
What happened to this plane? Where is it?
And it had to be explored.
It had to be investigated.
And so I wound up spending countless hours
to try to really understand what happened
to this plane.
An immediate focus of attention
was the question of communications
and why and how they'd been lost.
[man] On the top of the 777 is an antenna
[Jeff] A modern commercial jetliner
is in communication multiple ways
with the outside world.
All of them went dark at the same time.
Why?
[man] A team of clever technicians
The most obvious answer would be
catastrophic failure.
Like, the plane blew up.
It impacted the ocean.
Um, it suffered a fire so intense
that it just destroyed
all the equipment simultaneously
before anyone could issue a mayday call.
But
the plane's debris was still not found
underneath the spot where that
disruption in communication occurred.
If it wasn't catastrophic failure,
what's option two?
The only really obvious possibility
is that somebody on board the plane
deliberately turned off
its electronic communication signals.
And if that's the case,
the question is, "Who?"
- [ominous music playing]
- [clock beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping slows down and stops]
Extraordinary new twist
in the disappearance
of Malaysia Airlines flight 370.
Malaysian officials now say the plane
was hundreds of miles off course,
and flying in the wrong direction
when last tracked.
Here are the latest developments.
[reporter 1] It apparently turned
the opposite direction
and flew to the Malacca Strait.
[reporter 2] reports the plane
may have flown
for more than an hour
after disappearing from radar.
[Jeff] Something very unexpected
had been spotted by military radar
that doesn't require
any kind of signals from the plane.
But the Malaysian military
couldn't confirm 100%
that this actually was MH370.
We're now hearing from Reuters quoting
a Malaysian military source saying
There is a possibility that
that this aircraft made a turn back,
but we are not sure
whether it is the same aircraft.
Good evening.
Military radars can't say particularly
that this was even flight 370.
It can't tell you what kind
of aircraft it is,
whether it's a helicopter or an airplane.
It just says, "There's a target out there,
here it is."
But it doesn't give you
altitude or airspeed.
[Jeff] So now, is it possible that,
far from crashing,
the plane disappeared
from Malaysian civilian radar,
reversed course back over
peninsular Malaysia,
is seen doing so
by Malaysian military radar,
flies to the end of the zone
of military radar coverage,
and vanished again?
[clamoring, indistinct shouting]
If that's true for MH370,
why did he turn back?
Why don't he call us, you know?
What is he trying to do?
[Ghyslain in French] We had a house
not too far from the airport.
[inhales]
I didn't know what else I could do,
so I switched the TV on.
[in English]
Search-and-rescue teams from Vietnam,
Malaysia and Singapore are conducting a
[Ghyslain in French] The BBC and CNN
had this story on a loop.
I sat in front of it
and I realized I had to call my son now.
He was a student at the time in France.
That was the hardest moment
of my whole life.
[groans]
[telephone ringing]
[ringing continues]
[call ends]
The first thing he told me,
I hadn't said a word yet, was,
"Tell me they weren't on that plane."
I answered "Yes."
[indistinct]
And then I heard a scream.
Ah.
[beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping slows down and stops]
[reporter in English] Seventy-two hours
after the disappearance of flight 370,
forty ships and thirty-four aircraft
have failed to find
any sign of the jetliner.
[Jeff] So at this point, there's people
searching in the Andaman Sea,
and at the same time,
they're still searching
in the South China Sea.
The state of confusion was so profound.
I mean,
it's farcical.
It's impossible that the plane could be
both of these places.
[reporters shouting questions]
Where's the focus your search now?
Can you confirm
if the plane has turned back?
You're searching east.
You're searching west.
- This is utter confusion.
- I don't think so.
[Azharuddin] It is overwhelming.
The clicking noise of all the cameras.
Click, click, click.
They keep asking, "Where?"
"Why you are looking at the wrong place?"
As far as we are concerned,
we are equally puzzled as well.
Do you feel like
we are getting the whole story?
Is it possible that some information
is being held back at this point?
[Intan] One day you say this.
The next day, the reporter says that.
Who to believe? What to believe?
[reporter 1]
It's still difficult to understand
why they've withheld this information,
given they would've seen it
when it happened in real time.
[in French] Right away,
my first reaction was to say,
"They're talking us for fools.
They're mocking us."
[reporter 2] Relatives threw water bottles
at officials in frustration.
They want some answers.
[journalist] Why are you stopping us
speaking to the relatives?
Why are you stopping us speaking
to the relatives? Why are you stopping us?
[loud grunt]
[Danica] For the families,
it created so much confusion.
Every day, it just seemed like there
was something different coming out.
That's the torment. It's the not knowing
is the most horrible part of it.
[beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping slows then stops]
[reporter] Turning now to new developments
in a search that's both unbelievable
and unprecedented in modern times.
We're now entering a fourth day
without a single sign
of that massive Boeing 777.
[Jeff] So, four days in, the case is just
obviously strange and getting stranger.
I'm trying to wrestle with the more
technical aspects of the case.
And I'm writing about it
on my personal blog.
And as I'm writing about this stuff,
people are joining the conversation
in the comments section
and we're sort of running
a parallel investigation almost.
And I got one comment from a guy named
"Air Land Sea Man"
who was in enormous detail.
I couldn't even understand fully
what he was saying.
This guy clearly knew
what he was talking about.
[man] I've been a pilot for over 50 years.
My career was
mainly involved
with engineering and science.
A number of us
started communicating to see if we could
come up with any kind of, uh,
solid theory on where the airplane went.
The group consisted of pilots,
engineers, scientists,
legal experts, mechanical engineers,
electrical engineers,
people very familiar
with how the 777 flies
and how the different systems work.
[Jeff] I had never experienced
anything like this,
where people were coming together
spontaneously from all around the world.
[Mike] We're spending 12 hours a day
or more digging up details,
going back over everything
again and again.
[Jeff] We were suddenly working together
as a tight-knit team.
One of them suggested that we should
call ourselves the "Independent Group."
We felt this was done by somebody who
really knew what they were doing.
So the spotlight turns more and more
to the pilots.
I write up my findings in a piece
for Slate Magazine called,
"How to Disappear a Jetliner."
It gets a lot of attention.
The next thing I know, I'm live on CNN.
[Piers Morgan]
Jeff, let me come to you first.
I read your piece before I came on air.
Absolutely fascinating theory.
Basically, what some pilots
are talking about, I'm hearing,
is the idea that
perhaps the pilot
or co-pilot of this plane,
um, took control of the cockpit.
[Jeff] Who knows what the motive is
to do something like this. The point
We, of the Independent Group,
weren't making really any kind of claims,
but we were just trying to
figure out what was known.
Because
if you wanted to know about MH370,
which so many people did,
you weren't getting it
from Malaysian authorities.
We weren't the only group out there.
There was another tribe
called the Tomnoders.
[news jingle]
As multiple countries and crews
search for that missing
Malaysian Airlines plane,
so can you too,
using your very own computer.
Here's how it works.
[reporter] They're inviting anyone to go
onto their platform called Tomnod
to view the high-res pictures of the area
where the Malaysia Airlines jet
might have gone down.
[reporter] The Air Force Chief told us
more time and help was needed
to pinpoint the aircraft's location.
Grieving family members long to know
where flight 370 went down.
[woman] When I saw
the anguish on the faces
of these family members,
I thought, "I have to do something."
It just tugged at my heartstrings.
My hobby is photography,
so I have an eye for detail.
So I thought I could be a great person
to help look for this airplane
from the satellite images.
As a Tomnoder,
the areas we were searching
we had no control over to pick.
And so I was handed the area
pretty close to where the airplane
first disappeared from radar
in the South China Sea.
The satellite images were empty.
It was just the blackness of the sea.
Then you press next
more black scans.
So much black.
And then, finally
there's something white.
[soft, tense music playing]
I pulled the schematics off the internet
for a B777.
And I was able to identify this piece
as the nose cone.
That's when I started saying, "Holy crap!"
"There's a piece of debris," you know?
"There's the airplane."
And then I started seeing more pieces.
Something that looked like the fuselage.
Something that looked like the tail.
I got goosebumps.
I literally cried because I knew
someone had died there.
Because I knew
that was a part of the plane.
That meant
they were no longer alive
and that wasn't the answer
their family members were looking for.
[melancholic music playing]
[beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping slows then stops]
[dramatic music playing]
[reporter] This is the most security
that we've seen so far.
They're obviously here
to protect the Prime Minister.
[journalist] Mr. Prime Minister,
this is for American journalism.
Press conference later.
[camera shutters clicking]
[Danica] On the 15th of March,
I received a call from Malaysian Airlines
to say that
there's going to be an announcement
from the Malaysian prime minister.
There's a moment of trepidation that,
"Oh no, they've found them
and this is it."
"This is it, he is truly gone."
Today,
based on new satellite communication,
we can confirm
MH370
did indeed
turn back over Peninsular Malaysia
before turning northwest.
[Cyndi] I was like, "What is going on?"
I was just in disbelief that
that they were telling us this.
We are ending
our operations in the South China Sea
and reassessing
the redeployment of our assets.
[Cyndi] I knew that what I had
in the South China Sea
was the debris of MH370
and I was not going to just sit around
and not be vocal about that.
I already had notified Tomnod
that this debris existed.
But I never got an acknowledgment
that I tagged debris.
I mean, it was like nothing ever happened.
So I tweeted everybody I could tweet.
I put it on Facebook.
I emailed.
I did everything I could to try and get
someone's attention that the debris
was off Vietnam in the South China Sea.
It frustrated a lot of us Tomnoders.
[electronic tweeting]
But then the next thing I heard
was even more confusing.
[Najib Razik] Based on this new data,
we have determined
that the plane's last communication
with a satellite
was in one of two possible corridors.
So this is really this is getting
weirder and weirder by the day.
So now,
after the plane
leaves the area of military radar,
it turns out that
a satellite communication service
called Inmarsat
had equipment aboard the plane that was
communicating with a satellite
that was located above
the central Indian Ocean.
There are stunning new developments
in the disappearance of flight 370.
There is new information coming in
that's reshaping theories
[reporter]
The search was in the wrong area.
The aircraft could be anywhere
in these two arcs
they're covering are so vast,
hundreds of thousands of square miles.
[eerie music plays]
[man, over radio] 370 [indistinct]
[Jeff] When a plane is out
over the open ocean,
the only way it can communicate by radio
is by transmitting a signal
up to a satellite.
[reporter 1] So, still no plane,
but streams of data to sift through.
[reporter 2] Inmarsat are in
the business of providing
satellite communication for planes.
when they're beyond
range of ground radar systems.
[man] What we found in the data
were these seven handshakes,
or "pings," as they came to be known.
Every hour,
the Inmarsat system was checking
that the satellite terminal
on the aircraft was responding.
So it would send a message
basically saying, "Are you still there?"
And the satellite terminal
responded saying, "Yes."
And these pings continued,
or these messages continued,
for up to six hours after last contact.
[eerie music playing]
[Mark] There was a deep sense of shock.
We weren't expecting to see the aircraft
appear still to be flying.
But there's nothing in the data itself
to give any positional information.
There was no GPS coordinates, for example.
All we know is how far
the aircraft is away from the satellite.
So we knew that we had additional work
to determine whether
the aircraft was traveling north or south
for the last part of the flight.
But we knew analysis
was going to take time.
[Jeff] So
the mystery has only deepened.
Um, we know that the plane flew on
for several hours.
One of the routes went south
and ended up
in the remote southern Indian Ocean.
The other one
went north into Central Asia.
Now. the most optimistic possibility is
that it landed somewhere in Central Asia,
like Kazakhstan.
But if the plane went south
it must have crashed
in the remote ocean.
There's no way that anyone
could have survived.
[tense music plays]
So while Inmarsat
worked on where the plane went,
the Malaysians are now
forced to acknowledge
a basic fact that'd been pretty obvious
to onlookers for a while.
Good evening.
The word from Malaysia tonight
is that whatever happened
to Malaysia Airlines flight 370
was no accident.
The country's prime minister
publicly confirming today
what has been a widely held suspicion
that the plane
was deliberately flown off course.
[man speaking indistinctly over radio]
[reporter 1] Can you tell us
what you were doing inside the house?
[reporter 2] In Kuala Lumpur,
flight 370 is now
a criminal investigation.
[reporter 3] This white police car
has just raided the home
of the captain of MH370.
[dramatic music playing]
The general consensus
was that the pilots took the plane.
As I said before,
this is definitely not an accident.
You don't fly for eight hours
and travel thousands of miles by accident.
[Jeff] From the get-go,
of the two pilots,
one was considered infinitely more likely
to be the culprit.
The co-pilot was
very wet behind the ears.
He had just been approved to fly
as a first officer on a 777.
So the focus was always on the captain
of the flight,
Zaharie Ahmad Shah
because he was an extremely
experienced captain,
and what was done
was aggressive and sophisticated.
[suspenseful music playing]
Hi everyone, uh
this is a YouTube video that I made, um
[reporter] The pilot's
home flight simulator
was removed by police to see if perhaps
the erratic route flight 370 took
was first rehearsed in cyberspace.
We took possession of a simulator
of a flight simulator.
[Jeff] Zaharie had the chops.
Zaharie was a veteran, experienced guy,
who would know all the angles.
Who'd be able to conceive of something
as complicated as this.
[tense music playing]
But
there was still no sign of this plane.
Whether it's heading north or south.
[telephones ringing]
[Mark] Our engineer,
who'd been working on the numbers,
contacted me to say
that he had cracked the problem.
He had to really dig into the system,
understand how all the components
in the system work,
to establish, essentially, the equation
for what would be expected
if the aircraft was moving north
or if it was moving south.
He had been able to determine
which of the flight paths
MH370 had taken.
So, I sat at my kitchen table that weekend
creating some information that we
could pass to the Malaysian authorities.
[Ghyslain in French]
The Malaysian Airlines center tells us,
"There's an important press
conference coming up tomorrow,
so be in front of your TV in the morning."
[waves lapping]
So deep down you're telling yourself,
"They're still alive."
"If there's no crash,
they're still alive."
For quite some time,
I kept communicating with them.
They had their phones
so I kept sending texts.
So every night before going to bed,
I would text them all.
"How are you?" "Thinking about you."
"Here's what I did today."
It was a way for me to keep the dialogue
going with them in a way.
[waves lapping on shore]
[clock beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping slows and stops]
[clamoring]
- [indistinct chatter]
- [man coughs]
[in English] This evening,
I was briefed by representatives from
the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch.
Based on their new analysis,
Inmarsat
and the AAIB
have concluded
that MH370
flew along the southern corridor.
This
is a remote location,
far from any possible landing sites.
It is, therefore,
with deep sadness
and regret that I must inform you
that according
to this new data,
flight MH370
ended in the southern
Indian Ocean.
[crying, clamoring]
[melancholic music playing]
[crying, yelling]
[melancholic music continues]
[wailing, crying]
- [clamoring]
- [indistinct agitated chatter]
[Jeff] They still don't have any proof
that their loved ones are dead.
All we had was the satellite data.
We had no physical evidence.
So,
he's essentially telling
the loved ones of the passengers and crew,
"Your loved ones are dead
because of math."
[in Mandarin] Fuck Malaysia!
Malaysia is lying!
[indistinct shouting]
[screaming, yelling]
[screaming and shouting continue]
[in English]
Never in the history of human existence
have 239 people
been declared dead
on the basis of mathematics alone.
[Jiang in Mandarin]
Nothing had been found.
The exact location of the plane
had not been worked out.
There was some sort of calculation
on the position of the plane.
But the result had not been verified.
To us, they were frantically trying
to hide something
and wrap it up quickly.
- [camera shutters clicking]
- [indistinct chatter]
[chatter continues]
[in Mandarin] Here, we the families
of the 154 Chinese passengers on MH370,
vehemently protest against
and condemn Malaysia Airlines,
the Malaysian government and the military!
- [man in Mandarin] Bring our family back!
- [men] Bring our family back!
- [man] Tell us the truth!
- [men] Tell us the truth!
[in Mandarin] We will use all possible
means to hold Malaysian Airlines,
the Malaysian government and military
accountable for their unforgivable crimes.
[siren wailing]
[clamoring]
[indistinct chatter]
[reporter in English] Parts of Beijing
were in full riot mode today
as families descended
on the Malaysian embassy to protest.
[in Mandarin] Bring our families back!
[in English]
This is such a rarity in Beijing,
a public protest
bringing the streets to a standstill,
but such is the discontent
amongst these family members,
they're allowed to do it.
[shouts indistinctly]
[breathing heavily, panting]
[chanting in Mandarin]
[Jiang in Mandarin] The families
had been yelling slogans like
Tell us the truth!
[Jiang] "Malaysia is a liar."
Bring our families back!
[Jiang] "You are murderers."
We simply refused to accept
that the fate
of our 154 loved ones had been
sealed by virtue of an announcement.
[reporter in English] The rally itself was
kept outside of Malaysian embassy fences,
out of the view of the world's media.
[Jiang in Mandarin]
We felt really helpless.
And angry.
[reporter in English] The chief executive
of Malaysia Airlines
agreed to be interviewed
for the first time today.
[Ahmad] Our primary role is really
to ensure we take care of the families.
I think we've gone beyond
our normal responses.
I think they would say
you haven't gone far enough.
Well, I think it's unfair.
I think we've done all we can.
[tense music softens]
[Jeff] There was this swirling fog
of unanswered questions.
But for me, it was clear.
The overwhelming body of evidence
pointed strongly to my theory.
The pilot decided to commit
mass murder-suicide.
He had wound up
on this straight beeline
into the southern Indian Ocean,
in order to end his life and to murder
more than 200 other human beings.
This was something that
must have required significant planning.
And so,
as an aviation journalist,
I felt like I had to paint a comprehensive
and final decisive picture
of what had happened that night.
[suspenseful music plays]
[clock beeping]
[beeping accelerates]
[beeping slows, regulates, then stops]
[eerie music plays]
[Jeff] Shortly after one o'clock
in the morning,
Zaharie is flying
over the South China Sea.
He is responsible for 11 crew
and 227 passengers
making their way to Beijing
on a routine red-eye.
At this stage,
air traffic control in Kuala Lumpur
calls up and says
[radio crackling]
[air traffic controller] Malaysian 370,
contact Ho Chi Minh 120, decimal 9.
Good night.
[Jeff] MH370 is about to be handed over
to the next set
of air traffic controllers,
who are in Vietnam.
So Zaharie says
[Zaharie] Good night, Malaysian 370.
[Jeff] He's now in a kind of gray zone
in between two areas
of air traffic control.
Nobody's paying attention to him.
Maybe he says to the co-pilot,
"Hey, buddy, why don't you go in the back
and get me something?"
The co-pilot closes the door.
Zaharie locks it.
[ominous music playing]
[dramatic music playing]
Now, he's about to implement his big plan.
He turns off all the electronics
that make the plane visible
to the outside world.
[electronics go silent]
It vanishes from radar.
At that moment
for everyone else aboard the plane,
everything was routine.
Zaharie is in complete control
and nobody knows anything about it.
He grabs the yoke
and he pulls it into a hard left turn.
[electronic whirring]
[dramatic music playing]
He heads back towards
the Malaysian peninsula.
But then
perhaps the co-pilot realizes that
he's been locked out of the cockpit.
Zaharie knows that he
is going to have a very hard time
keeping control of the plane.
So
maybe he
starts depressurizing the cabin.
Everyone is confused.
But what a lot of the passengers
don't realize
is that the oxygen generators
in these emergency masks
only work for about 15 minutes.
The captain has
a more sophisticated, longer-lasting mask.
And soon the entire cabin is quiet.
[silence]
[eerie music plays]
He turns the plane to the south.
And he flies straight, into the darkness,
waiting for his fuel to run out.
After six hours of flight
the engines stop running.
He pushes the nose down.
And he starts to slide into a dive.
[warning system] Decrease, pull up.
Decrease, pull up.
[loud whirring]
[whirring stops]
That is the scenario that is necessary
if Zaharie took the plane.
It had to be that sequence of events.
It is worth pointing out that
there have been a handful of cases
of pilots who have decided to
kill their passengers.
But
there has never been a case
that someone has taken six hours
to commit mass murder-suicide.
I started to wonder
maybe it wasn't Zaharie after all.
And then, four and a half months
after the disappearance,
something happens that
is like a rip in the fabric of reality.
[Barack Obama] Good morning.
Yesterday, Malaysian Airlines flight MH17
took off from Amsterdam
and was shot down over Ukraine,
near the Russian border.
And I think, "Oh my God."
Malaysian Airlines hadn't had
a significant accident since the '90s.
And now,
in the span of four and a half months,
they'd lost two huge 777s.
It seemed like an incredible coincidence.
At this point,
MH370 is not just an unsolved mass murder.
It's potentially
an act of war.
[dramatic music plays, then stops]
[theme music playing]
[theme music fades]