Featured Image Credit: BBC/Windfall Films/Alessandra Bonomolo
Topics: Travel, World News, Documentaries, BBC
Bec Oakes
Topics: Travel, World News, Documentaries, BBC
A decade on from the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, an expert has shared his chilling theory on what he thinks happened.
On 8 March, 2014, MH370 was flying over the South China Sea on route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it disappeared from air traffic control radars.
There were 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board.
An investigation into the missing flight found that the aircraft had deviated from its planned route, although it is not known why. It sent no distress calls and the jet has never been found, despite a £157million international search effort spanning four years.
Many unsettling theories about why/how MH370 disappeared have floated around since 2014, from an accidental crash to the pilot purposefully downing the jet, and even the government shooting it down.
Some have gone as far as to speculate that the plane may have hijacked by Russian spies.
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But, the latest theory is perhaps the most chilling, with two experts claiming that the doomed jet was deliberately flown into a 'black hole'.
Jean Luc Marchand, a former manager of Air Traffic Control, and Patrick Blelly, a retired pilot, have used a Boeing 777 simulator to analyse and reenact the aircraft's last known flight pattern.
They believe the area it dropped off air traffic control radars over the Malacca Strait provides us with a key clue as to what happened.
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Speaking in a new BBC documentary, Why Planes Vanish: The Hunt for MH370, Marchand explains what happens after the aircraft goes off radar: "Now the aircraft is invisible and not traceable any more. It's clever because the choice of the area where the aircraft disappeared is really a black hole between Kuala Lumpur and Vietnam.
"If you want to disappear, this is where you do it."
After the flight disappeared from radars, it was simply never seen again, but shocking evidence suggests it had turned off its scheduled flight path and continued flying for several hours.
Transponders were switched off manually in the cockpit giving Air Traffic Control no way of tracking the flight and once invisible, MH370 deviated from its flight path in a 'carefully planned' manoeuvre.
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Marchand says: "It definitely made several turns but also made changes to altitude and speed, that implies to me that there was an active pilot right until the end of the flight."
"This u-turn is a very challenging manoeuvre because they had to make sure that it disappeared quickly from the Vietnamese sector," he added.
"It demands attention and skill so that's why we believe it was not an accident...we're convinced that only an experienced pilot could do it - they took care to be invisible, not traceable, to not be followed."
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Meanwhile, Blelly said he believes the cabin was depressurised, meaing the air is sucked out of the cabin and the oxygen masks come down.
"The problem was, the passengers and the crew were going to find that the plane was no longer on its way to Beijing," he said.
"My theory is that MH370 was depressurised - it is quite easy for a pilot to depressurise an aircraft...this made it possible to neautralise all the people behind in the cabin."
"The person who took control of this plane did something extraordinary which led to the deaths of 239 people on board this plane and put it on the bottom of the Indian Ocean and we don't know why he did that, we have no idea why," he continued.
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The plane was being operated by senior pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53 who had worked for the airline for three decades, and first officer Fariq Hamid, 27.
While speculation has been rife, Malaysian authorities have repeatedly denied claims Zahaire deliberately crashed the plane, and there has been no evidence to suggest either pilot had poor mental health or had any involvement in the plane's disappearance.
Why Planes Vanish: The Hunt for MH370 airs on BBC One tonight (6 March) at 8.00pm.