MH370: 12 Years Later, The Search Is Back

[00:00:00]At 25 minutes 2 in the morning, over the Indian Ocean, a machine that everyone believed had gone silent forever quietly switched itself back on. For over an hour, the aircraft had been dark. No radio, no transponder, no contact of any kind. A Boeing 777 with 239 people aboard that had simply erased itself from the sky. And then without warning, a single piece of equipment deep inside that plane reached up to a satellite 35,000 km above the Earth and it sent one automated message, a kind of electronic hello, as if nothing at all were wrong. No one has ever been able to fully explain why it went dark. And no one has ever been able to fully explain [music] why an hour and a half later it came back. But that single [music] reconnection is the reason we know the most haunting fact in this entire story, which is that long after the world had lost Malaysia Airlines flight 370, the plane was [music] still flying on and on into the dark. This is not the story of how MH370 [music] vanished because you have probably heard that part. This is the story of the small, strange, technical ghosts it left behind. the handful of signals and clues that tell us something far stranger than a simple crash. And the reason that more than a decade later, people are still out [music] on that ocean right now searching. Because everything about the way this plane disappeared suggests that it was not an accident. And everything about where it went suggests that whoever or whatever was in control did not want to be found. To understand why this disappearance is different from every other, you have to understand how genuinely difficult it is to make a modern airliner vanish. A Boeing 777 is one of the most connected machines humans have ever built, constantly announcing itself to the world through several independent systems at once. And to erase it completely, every one of those systems has to go silent [music] in the right order at the right moment.

[00:02:13]So let's walk through exactly what happened [music] on the night of the 8th of March 2014 because the sequence itself is the first real clue. The flight took off from Koala Lumpur just after 41 minutes past midnight bound for Beijing carrying 12 crew and 227 passengers. In the cockpit were two men, Captain Zahari Ahmed Sha, a senior pilot with more than 18,000 hours of experience, and by every account, a spotless record, and first officer, Farik Abdul Hamid, far younger, still training on this type of aircraft. For the first 40 minutes, everything was utterly normal. The plane climbed to 35,000 ft. The night was clear, the weather calm, and at 7 minutes 1, one of its automatic reporting systems sent a routine message down to the ground exactly as it was supposed to. That message was the last completely normal thing MH370 [music] ever did because what happened over the next 20 minutes was so precise and so deliberated a routine flight into the greatest mystery in the history of aviation. At 19 minutes past 1, as the plane approached the boundary between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace, the cockpit was handed off to the next set of controllers. The way every flight [music] is passed from one region to the next. The captain answered calmly, "Good night, Malaysian 370.

[00:03:45]>> Malaysian 370, contact 12 decimal 9."

[00:03:49]>> Those were the last words anyone on the ground would ever hear from the aircraft. And there is nothing in them.

[00:03:55]No strain, no fear, no hint that anything was wrong. And then less than 2 minutes later, at 21 minutes past [music] 1, the plane's transponder switched off. Now, the transponder is the device that makes an aircraft visible and identifiable to air traffic control. The thing that turns it from an anonymous blip into a named tracked flight. And when it stopped, MH370 simply vanished from the controller's screens. And here is the first detail that tells you this was almost certainly not a malfunction because of the timing.

[00:04:31]And the timing is everything. The transponder went dark at the precise moment the plane was passing between two countries airspace in the small handover gap where Malaysia had said goodbye and Vietnam had not yet said hello. The one brief window where for a moment no one is fully watching. If you wanted to slip away unseen, that is the exact instant you would choose, and whoever was in control chose it perfectly. For a while, the controllers assumed it was a temporary glitch, and they waited, and the minutes stretched on. But the plane did not reappear where it should have, and when another aircraft was asked to try and reach MH370 on the radio, its crew heard only mumbling and static, and then nothing. And while the controllers were still trying to understand where their flight had gone, MH370 was doing something that no one on the ground could see and would not discover until much later. Because the plane had not continued on toward Beijing. There was another kind of radar still watching that night, military radar, which does not rely on a plane broadcasting its identity. And it saw something the civilian controllers could not. It saw MH370 turn. Not a gentle course correction, but a hard turn back on itself west straight across the Malay Peninsula. The entire aircraft doubling back over the country it had just left and then swinging north up the straight of Malaca, flying away from its destination and out toward the open ocean. This was a deliberate flight path, a series of controlled turns following [music] real navigational way points. The kind of flying that does not happen by accident [music] and does not happen if everyone on board is unconscious or the plane is flying itself. Someone was flying it. And [music] then at 22 minutes 2, even the military radar lost it. And this is the point where MH370 crossed over into something close to the impossible. For the next several hours, the plane was beyond the reach of every radar in the region, invisible, unaccounted for. somewhere over one of the emptiest stretches of ocean on the planet. And it is here that we come back to the machine that switched itself on because although the plane had gone dark to radar, it still carried a satellite communication unit. And that unit did something the people who disappeared this plane may not have fully understood. Roughly an hour after the plane first went silent at 25 minutes past 2, that satellite unit powered back up and reconnected to a network run by a British company called InMarat. And once it had reconnected, it did something quietly automatically for the next 6 hours. Every hour on the hour, the satellite would send out a kind of electronic check asking in effect, [music] "Are you still there?" And every hour, the aircraft would answer, "Yes.

[00:07:32]These automated exchanges are called handshakes and they are not messages.

[00:07:36]They contain no words, no location, no data about what was happening on board.

[00:07:42]They are simply a pulse, a sign of life from a machine. But those silent pulses which the plane sent without anyone intending them to turned out to be the only thread connecting the vanished aircraft to the world. And investigators would spend years learning how to read them. Because although a handshake does not tell you where a plane is, the scientists at InMasat realized it told you something almost as useful. By measuring exactly how long each signal took to travel between the aircraft and the satellite, they could calculate how [music] far away the plane had been at that moment. Not a point, but a vast arc, a curved line across the earth along which the plane must have been sitting when it answered. And there were seven of these handshakes. Seven arks, the last of them sent at 19 minutes past 8:00 in the morning, more than 7 hours after takeoff, which meant one staggering thing above all others. Long after MH370 had vanished from every screen, long after the world had begun to fear the worst, the plane was still in the air, still flying, still answering that lonely hourly call [music] from the satellite hour after hour into the morning. And then the scientists found [music] a second, even more delicate signal hidden inside those handshakes, [music] one that had never been used this way before. And it pointed the search in a direction almost no one wanted to believe. Buried in the frequency of those signals was a faint distortion. The same effect you hear when an ambulance siren rises in pitch as it races toward [music] you and drops as it speeds away. A shift caused by motion. By analyzing that shift across all seven handshakes, the investigators could tell not [music] just how far the plane was, but roughly which way it had been moving. And the answer was south.

[00:09:35]Not north toward land and safety and airports, but south out into the southern Indian Ocean, one of the most remote and least traveled expanses of water on Earth, thousands of kilometers from anywhere in a direction that led to nothing at all. The plane had flown deliberately into the emptiest place it could possibly go. And somewhere out there, when its fuel finally ran out, [music] it had come down, which raised the question that has driven this entire mystery ever since, and the one that no amount of technology has yet been able to answer. If we know roughly where it went, [music] then why, after more than a decade and the most expensive search in aviation history, has no one been able to find it? The answer is the sheer punishing scale of the ocean it chose.

[00:10:25]Search teams from Malaysia, Australia, and China combed an area of the southern Indian Ocean covering 120,000 km, mapping a seafloor that in places lies 4,000 m down through underwater mountains and trenches and canyons. And after years of effort, they found nothing. The one thing that finally proved the plane had come down in that ocean arrived over a year later. And it arrived not through technology, but by washing up on a beach. In July of 2015, on the shore of Rayuno Island, far to the west near Africa, a cleanup crew found a large piece of debris crusted in barnacles, and it was identified as a flapperon, a section of the wing of a Boeing 777. Over the following months, more pieces came ashore along the coast of Africa and its islands, and a handful of them were confirmed as belonging to MH370, drifting thousands of kilometers on the ocean currents from wherever the plane had gone down. But here is the detail that deepened the mystery rather than solving it. None of the recovered debris showed any sign of fire or of an explosion. The pieces spoke of a plane that had struck the water, not one that had blown apart in the sky. And yet, they gave no hint of exactly where. And the flight recorders, the so-called black boxes that hold the answers, remain somewhere on the ocean floor to this day. And it is into that [music] silence, that absence of a clear answer that every theory about MH370 has rushed. And this is where we have to be careful because this is where fact ends and speculation begins. [music] The most widely discussed explanation, the one investigators themselves have leaned toward, is that the plane was under deliberate human control the entire time. That the precise turns, the perfectly timed disabling of its systems, and the long straight run into the empty ocean all point to someone in that cockpit who knew exactly what they were doing. And inevitably, attention turned to the captain, Zahari Ahmed Sha.

[00:12:36]Investigators examined a flight simulator he kept at his home and reported finding among the countless routes such simulators store, a path that ended in the far southern Indian Ocean, not far from where the plane is believed to have gone. To some, that felt like a chilling premonition. But it is essential to be fair here because the same investigation found no evidence of any motive at all. No financial trouble, no history of instability, no note, no warning, nothing. The simulator data was fragmentaryary and disputed. Possibly just the echo of a routine flight he had practiced. And Captain Sha was never charged with anything [music] because there was never proof of anything. He remains to this day a man under a shadow that was never confirmed. And it would be [music] wrong to convict him where the evidence could not. And because that central question was never settled, the empty space around it filled with other theories, some plausible, some strange, and a few that refused to die no matter how many times they are questioned. One of the more grounded possibilities is that there was never a villain at all, but a disaster. The plane was carrying a shipment of lithium ion batteries, the same kind that [music] have caused catastrophic fires on other aircraft.

[00:13:56]And some believe a fire could have broken out, filling the cockpit with smoke, disabling the communication systems and forcing the pilots to turn back toward land in a desperate attempt [music] to reach an airport. In this version, the strange turn is not sinister at all. It is a rescue attempt that failed. The crew overcome before they could land and the plane flying on for hours as a silent pilotless [music] ghost until its fuel ran dry. There is even a fragment of evidence that hints at it. Because at one point during [music] that turn, the first officer's cell phone briefly connected to a tower on the ground. [music] The kind of connection that only happens if the plane had dropped to a lower altitude, [music] exactly as a crew fighting a fire and looking to land might do. But for every grounded theory, there is a wilder one. And no story about [music] MH370 is complete without the one that took hold of the internet and never let go.

[00:14:54]That theory holds that the plane never crashed at all. That it was secretly diverted to a [music] remote American military base on an island called Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean [music] and hidden there for reasons no one can agree on. It is a theory built almost entirely on coincidence and suspicion rather than evidence. And the single most cited piece of so-called proof, a supposed message from a passenger claiming to be held captive, has every hallmark [music] of a hoax.

[00:15:25]The kind of thing that is easy to fake and impossible to verify. We mention [music] it not because it is likely but because it shows something true about this case which is that when a mystery is this large and this unresolved [music] people cannot bear the emptiness and they will fill it with almost anything rather than accept [music] that we simply do not know and that more than a decade later is still where we stand. We know MH370 turned back across Malaysia in the dark.

[00:15:55]We know its systems went silent in a way that looks deliberate and then strangely partly came back. We know it flew south for hours into the emptiest ocean on Earth, answering that hourly call from the satellite until the very end.

[00:16:10][music] And we know from the wreckage that drifted onto distant beaches that it came down somewhere in that vast southern sea. What we do not know is the one thing that matters most, which is why. But the story is not over. And that is the part most people don't realize because in early 2025, after years of silence, [music] the search began again.

[00:16:34]A marine robotics company called Ocean Infiniti returned to that stretch of ocean with a new generation of technology. Autonomous underwater vehicles that can dive [music] thousands of meters and scan the seafloor on their own, controlled by operators sitting in rooms on the other side of the world.

[00:16:52]They went back under an agreement so confident it is almost unsettling. A deal in which they are paid the full $70 million only if they actually find the plane and nothing at all if [music] they fail. They are searching a refined patch of the seventh ark, guided by fresh analysis, suggesting the aircraft may have glided further than anyone first believed, coming [music] to rest just beyond the edges of where everyone looked before. Somewhere down there in the cold and [music] the dark, 4,000 m beneath the surface, lie the answers.

[00:17:26]The black boxes that recorded the final hours, the wreckage that could finally reveal whether this was a crime or a catastrophe or something no one has yet imagined. 239 people went up into the night sky over Koala Lumpur and never came down where anyone could find them.

[00:17:44]and their families have now waited more than 11 years for a single certain word about what happened to them. The ocean has kept this secret longer than almost any it has ever been asked to keep. The question is whether this [music] time we are finally about to take it back. So, I'll leave it with you. A fire, a hijacking, [music] a deliberate act by someone we may never name, or something we haven't thought of at all. Where do you think MH370 really went? Tell me in the comments and I'll read them. If this is your first time here, this is what we do. One story at a time, the ones that were never fully explained. So stay with us and I'll see you in the next