Fans Call 'MH370' Documentary A 'Reckless And Insincere' Attempt At Summarizing The Tragedy

Filmmaker Louise Malkinson and producer Harry Hewland team up for MH370: The Plane That Disappeared, which digs into the numerous theories behind the disappearance of the 777 on its routine red-eye journey from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The first episode of the three-part series focuses mainly on the plane's disappearance and the government of Malaysia's response to it.?

After moving from Malaysian air traffic control to Vietnamese air traffic control in Ho Chi Minh City, MH370 disappeared from all screens.?

Families of the passengers and crew members gathered in Kuala Lumpur and Beijing to wait for news.?

Rumors were spreading that the plane may have made a sharp left turn and crossed back over the Malay Peninsula, heading either north into Asia or south into the remote Indian Ocean.

Several people are interviewed in this documentary, including family members of passengers and crew, Malaysian aviation investigators, investigative reporter Jeff Wise, and citizen investigators looking into the many possible explanations for what occurred.

The first speculation included the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah.?

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The general theory is that he banned his co-pilot from the cockpit, dropped cabin pressure until the oxygen masks ran out, and then flew the jet south over the Indian Ocean until it ran out of fuel.

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Second theory: Russian Hijackers

Wise, a former Independent Group member, has another MH370 scenario resembling a James Bond movie.

A surface-to-air missile downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, another 777, over Ukraine a few months after the flight went missing.?He believed two of the three diverted attention while the third flew the jet remotely.?The theory was shortly debunked.

"Anyone who gets into the hatch can disable the transponder and disable the communications systems," Sharuji says. "But flying the aircraft from the avionics compartment is impossible."

Wise's coworkers similarly dismissed the concept.

"[The group is] certain that the plane turned south, not north. It was surprising that Jeff decided to take off on this route," says Exner.?Wise's speculations stopped with his Independent Group dismissal.

Third Theory: American Interception

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There is also the outlandish theory that the United States military, which was conducting drills in the South China Sea at the time, shot down MH370 at the location where it lost radar contact, halfway between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace.?

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Florence de Changy, a French journalist, has noted that MH370 was carrying 2.5 tons of electronics without first scanning the cargo.

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“It’s public knowledge that China was very eager to acquire highly sensitive US technology in the field of surveillance, stealth, drone technology,” de Changy says.?

“This could be at the heart of what happened to MH370.”?

In the evening, MH370 took off, and the United States had two radar-jamming aircraft with an Airborne Warning & Control System (AWAC) nearby.?

Hoda Emam/Reuters

De Changy speculates that they were deployed to electrically take the jet off the radar, at which point Shah was explicitly instructed to land.?

She maintains that when he called to keep the airplane on track, “either through a missile strike or a midair collision, MH370 met its fate.”

Although de Changy shares Wise's lack of evidence, her argument is not supported by Inmarsat data projections. Exner is critical of her for utilizing the controversial theory to market her book "The Disappearing Act: The Impossible Case of MH370," which was?published in 2021.

After viewing the three-part docuseries, the audience pointed out that much focus was on conspiracy theories, and victims' families were not interviewed.

Many pointed out that the Singapore authorities and Malaysian airlines failed to act wisely and track the plane.?

Several viewers of MH370: The Plane That Disappeared have taken to social media to express their displeasure, stating that the series offers no new information beyond the "theories" mentioned.

Here are the reactions.?

The Malaysian government has concluded that the jet crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, irrespective of the many theories that have been proposed.?

The lack of debris or other tangible evidence frustrated the passengers' relatives, who had to rely on math instead.

MH370: One of the biggest mysteries in civil aviation

Edgar Su/Reuters

On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared somewhere over the South China Sea en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Despite a multi-national search operation that lasted for years, the missing plane and its 239 passengers and crew members have still not been located.

Jason Lee/Reuters

Subsea searches for the plane have cost around $200 million and spanned 120,000 square kilometers of the Indian Ocean. So, in January 2017, the undersea investigations were halted indefinitely.?

AP Photo/Ng Han Guan

The Malaysian government, however, has accepted a "no-cure, no-fee" offer from a US exploration company, Ocean Infinity, in 2018.

Researchers looked at 112,000 square kilometers of territory north of their first search zone for three months. Unfortunately, the investigation yielded no valuable results. In May 2018, they quit looking.

Samsul Said/Reuters

MalayMail cited a 495-page government report from July 2018 that concluded that MH370 had been purposefully diverted from its intended route. In terms of money spent, it ranks as aviation's priciest search-and-rescue mission ever.

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