Malaysia Flight 370

One of the most chilling aviation mysteries in modern day: a Boeing 777, carrying 239 people, vanishes over the Indian Ocean. Nearly a decade later, the whole world still wonders: what really happened to Malaysia Flight 370? Thank you to our experts who contributed to this episode: Shanon Baker, Christine Negroni, Janet Todd, Ross Aimer, and Jeff Wise. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow History’s Greatest Mysteries to never miss an episode! History’s Greatest Mysteries is a History Channel Original Podcast, brought to you by Rewind Studios. 🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Rewind Studios Originals, Hidden History and Government That Doesn’t Suck, wherever you get your podcasts! Follow us on Social Instagram: @RewindStudios https://www.instagram.com/rewindstudiosTikTok: @RewindStudios https://www.tiktok.com/@rewindstudios See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  And now, a History Channel original podcast presented by Rewind.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  Today, one of the most chilling aviation mysteries in modern day. Two hundred thirty-nine people vanish over the Indian Ocean without a trace.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  With not enough oxygen feeding the brain, people can't do the simplest things, let alone something as complicated as piloting a commercial aircraft.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Now we'll uncover the top theories surrounding the world's most infamous missing aircraft.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  The officials and most of the media convinced themselves that the satellite data could only mean one thing, that the plane went south, but they were wrong.

• 0:52Speaker 03

  Was it potentially a murder-suicide? There's 227 passengers on board. Any of them could be responsible.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  Can new clues bring us closer to answers?

• 1:04Speaker 02

  If the plane isn't flying itself, was it something more sinister? Because planes don't just disappear.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  What really happened to Malaysia Flight 370? Welcome to History's Greatest Mysteries, a History Channel original podcast presented by Rewind Studios. Each episode, we take a deep dive into some of the greatest unanswered questions from history, backed by some of the foremost experts on the subject. Today, the mystery of Malaysia Flight 370.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  March 8th, 2014, Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Malaysia Flight 370 sits on the runway, awaiting clearance for takeoff.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  The cabin has been secured. Tray tables and seat backs are in their upright and locked position. And the flight attendants are ready for what they hope will be a routine flight.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Onboard, we have 239 people, 227 passengers. We have 12 crew members. The 12 crew members are all Malaysian citizens. And up front, we have Captain Shah.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  They're headed to Beijing International Airport. It's a routine flight. They make it twice a day. March 8th is no exception.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  This flight was a flight that Zahari Shah, the captain of the flight, was quite familiar with.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Normally, the flight takes about six hours, flying over a handful of countries and international waters.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  At 12:40 a.m., MH 370 is cleared for takeoff.

• 2:45Speaker 04

  107 ACLS lock on six miles, any needles?

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Recording and some of the radio chatter back and forth between the aircraft and the tower shows that everything is routine, mundane even.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  At 1:06, the plane's computer sends an automated position report.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  The transponders are continuously communicating with air traffic control, relaying information about the flight status. These messages show up on what's called secondary radar.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  At this point, Malaysia 370 is flying on course and has 96,000 pounds of fuel remaining. That's enough fuel for another six to seven hours of flight.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  A few minutes later, at 1:19, Captain Shah radios air traffic control as he transitions from Malaysian to Vietnamese airspace.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Air traffic control in Kuala Lumpur radios MH 370 and says, "Contact Ho Chi Minh on 120 decimal niner. Good night." That means it's time for MH 370 to call the Vietnamese controllers on the frequency given.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Captain Zahari then says, "Good night, Malaysia 370." So, everything seems fine. The next thing that should happen is that air traffic controllers in Ho Chi Minh City should hear from Malaysia 370.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  But that's not what happens.

• 4:07Speaker 05

  The Vietnamese air traffic controller at Ho Chi Minh never hear from that flight at the scheduled time. And all of a sudden, the flight transponders aren't responding at all, and they disappear from the air traffic controller's screen.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Just 38 minutes into the flight, Malaysia 370 simply disappears from radar.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  It's really inexplicable that this aircraft, which had been flying and transmitting the secondary data all along, would, at this point of transition, just disappear. The transponder was turned off, and the power was in some way stopped to the transponder. We don't know why it happened.

• 4:46Speaker 05

  In modern aviation, air traffic controllers know exactly where their airplanes are through secondary radars and precisely scheduled communications.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  So this is something that doesn't happen. Planes don't just vanish.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Alarm bells immediately ring, and Vietnamese air controllers desperately attempt to contact the aircraft.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  It's just not the case that an airline would be flying through some nation's airspace without the controllers knowing who it is, where it is, and why it's there. That's the way it works. Doesn't happen otherwise.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  They tried to contact the cockpit through the satellite phone several times, but there was no answer. Then it was clear to them that the aircraft crashed into the sea.

• 5:31Speaker 00

  Which brings us to theory number one, a catastrophic mechanical failure.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  How could this happen so suddenly? Why was there no warning from the pilot? No mayday? Nothing. This kicks off what will eventually become the most expensive search in aviation history. Everyone, dozens of governments, hundreds of families, all want to know what happened to MH 370.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  By 5:30 a.m., a massive search and rescue mission is underway.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  They gathered 26 countries to help with the search by sending 50 ships and about 60 aircraft.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  They're looking for anything on the water, wreckage, oil slick.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  The search starts naturally where the last transmission from the aircraft occurred and the last radar trace was found. It was right on the border between the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  So they do find some oil slick. They test it to see if it's aviation fuel, but it's not.

• 6:39Speaker 05

  They look at satellite imagery. They see what they think is debris, but they physically go out there and there's nothing there.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  If the aircraft had crashed in that area initially, there'd be debris and oil slick and plastic and stuff all over the China Sea. Makes no sense that there's no sign of this airplane anywhere.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  After two days of searching, investigators turn to military radar records.

• 7:07Speaker 05

  Radar on military bases are constantly tracking to see if there's anything in range. Malaysia Flight 370 would have been in radar range for bases in Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam. So their radar records track the plane as well, and they do it slightly differently.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  Civilians rely on secondary radar, which requires a signal from the airplane's transponder.

• 7:31Speaker 05

  And that's what they've been using to search for MH 370 so far. But the military uses what's called primary radar. Primary radar doesn't require a special signal from an airplane. It sends out radio waves where it bounces off any object that might be in the sky, and it reflects that radio signal back.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  It's kind of like echolocation, like a bat would use, but on a large scale. A Boeing 777 has two transponders. Specifically, in case one fails, the other one is still going to be fine. So when MH 370 vanishes from all the radar, that means both transponders are dead at the same time.

• 8:13Speaker 05

  After the transponder is turned off, the secondary radar can't see the airplane anymore. But guess what? The primary radar can still see the airplane and continues to track it. It shows the airplane keeps flying.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Not only does it keep flying, it makes drastic course changes, just as it's supposed to cross into Vietnamese airspace.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  So MH370 turns a little bit to the east, then kind of loops back around. It's almost like it's turning back, back towards Malaysia. Then MH370 approaches the Isle of Penang and flies near the Strait of Malacca.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  Military radar tracks MH370 for another 230 miles into the Andaman Sea until the aircraft finally goes out of range.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  So in other words, they're looking in the wrong place. The searchers move their search to the Andaman Sea. But once again, there's nothing there. So the investigators are closer, but they're clearly not close enough. Keep in mind, military radar doesn't pinpoint where this airplane stops flying. As far as we know, it's still in the air all the way until it goes out of range.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  After that, it could have gone in a lot of different directions.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  The radar records raise an important question. Why does the plane fly off course?

• 9:34Speaker 01

  The MH370 planned flight path would have had it flying over the South China Sea towards Beijing. But the radar tracking shows it made a series of turns going towards the west. And it just keeps flying until it goes out of radar range.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Once investigators realized the airplane kept flying, every possible theory was out there. Was it a bomb? Was it terrorism? Was it a crime? Was it something more sinister? Because planes don't just disappear. The internet went crazy, and so did every global government agency.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  To some, there's an obvious explanation.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Right away, we know that the aircraft continues flying after the transponders go offline. The aircraft continues on its path and drops off of military radar. We know that because it's recorded on the military radar until 2:22 a.m. Take this radar information and combine it with the fact that the transponder was cut off just prior to the aircraft veering off course. Combine that with the fact that there is no emergency distress call made, and it creates a truly terrifying possibility.

• 10:51Speaker 03

  Was it potentially a murder-suicide?

• 10:54Speaker 00

  That's theory number two: murder-suicide.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Early in the investigation, they thought they should look very deep into the two men in the cockpit. Which is natural with this type of investigation. The question is, would anything motivate these two men to bring that aircraft down?

• 11:14Speaker 02

  In the cockpit, we have Captain Zahari Shah and First Officer Farik Abdulhamid. Farik is not fully qualified yet on the 777. However, this is his last flight to qualify on the 777. This is a big deal. The realization of a lot of hard work. He's been with the airline for seven years. He's 27 years old. He's getting married soon. He has a long career in front of him. And as a result of that, the investigative bodies rule him out pretty quickly. They don't think he did it.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  Leaving only one other suspect in the cockpit.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  People who subscribe to the murder-suicide theory believe that the captain, Zahar Shah, deviated from the flight plan and intentionally crashed that airplane into the Indian Ocean, sadly taking everyone with him.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Investigators dig deeper into Captain Shah, and a search of his home turns up a disturbing clue.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  Zahar Shah had a very sophisticated simulator, a actual 777 simulator, in his house.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  When the investigative bodies pull the data from it, it shows a variety of flight paths. We see that they run out over the Indian Ocean. They just stop. And ultimately, this is the path that MH370 takes. It seems as though Captain Shah had rehearsed this. So the flight path is somewhat telling in itself. Captain Shah is from the island of Penang.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  The final maneuver recorded by the military radar was northwest of Penang, very close to it. It was a clear night, perfect visibility. And this turn gives him a perfect view, a final view of his home in Penang. Some people believe that when you finally decide to commit suicide, that person has a level of serenity. So some people believe that this final turn towards Penang was him waving goodbye to his home.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  While all of this evidence paints a damning picture for the pilot, it's not enough to close the case.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  So officially, MH370 is not ruled suicide by pilot. Because there's no suicide note, and they determined it's impossible to know what's in his mind.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  If the plane wasn't brought down by the pilot or copilot, could it be someone else on the inside? Investigators turn their attention to the crew.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  There's always another possibility that one of the cabin crew was trained and familiar with the aircraft and how to get into the cockpit. So the investigators looked into every one of these crew members. 170 interviews, looked into their bank accounts, social media accounts, their love life, everything that they could possibly look into, and they didn't find anything.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Ultimately, there's no substantial evidence to tie the pilot or crew members to any wrongdoing.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  There's absolutely no proof that this was a murder-suicide. But authorities have this nagging problem. Why is there no distress call? What could have happened?

• 14:52Speaker 00

  Coming up, is it possible that flight MH370 was a flying tomb? Months after disappearing, the public is desperate for investigators to find Flight 370. But with so little evidence, they had their work cut out for them.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  One of the most common things that investigators can use to determine the cause of the crash is radio chatter.

• 15:18Speaker 05

  402's radar contact at 18 miles. Take speed 250, final bearing is 230.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  When there's something unusual happening on the airplane, the flight crew usually gets on the radio about it. Whether there's an emergency, they see something out the window, or there's a passenger acting up, they usually radio that in. And in this case, there's no radio distress calls. We don't have that clue to help us.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Unless the lack of a distress call is the clue.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Based on what we know, I think the most logical explanation is that the airplane depressurized, causing everyone onboard the aircraft to become unconscious and die from a lack of oxygen.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  Which is theory number three: the cabin depressurizes, killing all onboard.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  The reason this airplane is flying off course and on an unusual path is because the pilot is not thinking clearly.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  This theory says that a terrible accident happened onboard, disabling the crew and probably the passengers as well. So the problem with MH370 could have actually started before it left the ground.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  Just before takeoff, maintenance logs show that work was performed on MH370's oxygen system.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  The pressurization system in a 777 handles all the air that everyone breathes onboard.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  And it also handles the cabin pressure.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  At a high altitude, the pressure outside the aircraft is very low, too low to sustain life. Inside the aircraft, it's pressurized and it's comfortable. So it's possible that a maintenance fault could have resulted from the work they did on the pressurization system, essentially causing the aircraft not to pressurize properly. It's not terribly uncommon, but if it does happen, someone has to pressurize the aircraft, typically using an emergency procedure.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  But what if they didn't?

• 17:19Speaker 01

  The last communication with air traffic control was made by Captain Zahari. "Goodnight, Malaysia 370." And that means that he was not flying the aircraft. On a commercial airliner, there are two pilots, one who is doing the flying and the other who's doing the monitoring. The pilot who is making the radio calls is not the pilot flying. That's just the way it works. Every radio call from the time that Malaysia Flight 370 took off was made by the First Officer, Farik Abdulhamid. Captain Shah was handling the takeoff, getting out of Kuala Lumpur airspace. It's one of the more difficult parts of the flight. Captain Shah was a highly experienced airline captain. He had 18,000 flight hours and he was only 53 years old.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  That's just 1,500 hours less than Captain Sully Sullenberger had when he famously landed his airliner in the Hudson River. After takeoff, we can assume that 38 minutes into the flight, when Captain Shah's voice is on the radio, he has handed control of the aircraft to the First Officer. Remember, this was his last flight before becoming qualified on the aircraft.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Now we have the First Officer, who's operating an aircraft for which he's not yet fully qualified. We have 227 passengers onboard, 12 crew members, and the aircraft is climbing, and we may have a maintenance problem, a pressurization issue. This is a dangerous situation. It can lead to hypoxia.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  Hypoxia is a lack of oxygen in the body tissue and brain, which can occur in any aircraft flying over 16,000 feet.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  With not enough oxygen feeding the brain, people can't do the simplest things, let alone command an airliner. To be blunt, hypoxia makes you stupid, makes you unable to have rational thoughts. At a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, incapacitation due to hypoxia can occur in less than a minute. The statistics indicate that for pilots, the time of useful consciousness could be as low as 15 seconds.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  Gradual onset hypoxia has caused numerous airline crashes over the years. It's a deadly scenario with very little time to react.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  There are a number of cases in which an airplane takes off and the pilots have failed to pressurize the aircraft, or the aircraft simply doesn't pressurize. And because of the nature of hypoxia, there are cases in which pilots got a cabin altitude warning horn, a warning that the aircraft was not properly pressurized, and they may not respond to it correctly if their brains are already lacking oxygen.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  Could this have happened aboard MH370?

• 20:05Speaker 02

  So at first, it makes sense. There is a lack of a mayday call. There's no call for help. But under hypoxic conditions, they might not even think they're in danger.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  The erratic flight also speaks to a hypoxic event. The pilot turned the aircraft around, heading back to Kuala Lumpur as part of a response to the emergency.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  According to radar, the plane makes one last turn.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  So the final move made by the first officer could have been to turn the aircraft toward the runway that he knows?

• 20:38Speaker 00

  That airport is Langkawi International, set on an island just west of the Malaysian Peninsula.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  This is where he did his flight training. He's familiar with the terrain. He knows that the runway is long enough to land a fully loaded 777.

• 20:53Speaker 00

  Instead of landing, the plane continues to fly for 230 miles.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  So at this point, we think that both crew are incapacitated by hypoxia. They've passed out. Then the autopilot takes over.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  The aircraft is carrying 239 people, who are most likely dead. And they are flying until that airplane runs out of fuel.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  Not everyone is convinced the cabin depressurized. Could it be something more sinister? When Malaysia Flight 370 goes missing, investigators from nine countries join the search, including the United States. Their biggest challenge is the lack of evidence, almost all of which lies on that missing airplane. But several months into their search, authorities get a treasure trove of new data, and it changes the course of the investigation.

• 21:49Speaker 05

  They hear from a company called Inmarsat. They handle satellite data for commercial airlines. Things like satellite phones in the back of your seat to make calls, TV and entertainment systems. These systems are in constant communication back and forth with the satellite system. It's pretty much just checking in. While Inmarsat has records of this communication, first thing that happens is the airplane logs into the Inmarsat system at midnight Malaysia time, which is expected right before takeoff. Then the satellite system checks in with the airplane on an hourly basis, using automatic pings. It checks in to see, hey, are you there?

• 22:32Speaker 05

  And we call that a handshake. While the aircraft transponder is offline, the Inmarsat communication system keeps going. It takes months to analyze the data, and at the time, they didn't have the technology to make full sense of it. But then when they finally figure out the Inmarsat data, guess what? It shows something incredible. Previously, the last known contact of the airplane was 2:22 a.m., when it disappears from military radar. And investigators assume that the plane crashed not too long after. The Inmarsat data shows seven automated pings after 2:22 a.m. And those pings go all the way until 8:19 a.m.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  If the plane continues flying for six more hours, where did it go?

• 23:23Speaker 02

  So the technology at the time didn't allow them to get a specific location using the Inmarsat ping. All they know is that the plane is within range of a certain satellite. So they calculate that to cover a large area off the western coast of Australia, which is way farther south than anywhere they'd previously looked. This means that MH370 turned south and flew for six hours into the middle of nowhere. Some theorists say that it's not on autopilot. And why fly around for so long if you intend to kill yourself?

• 24:04Speaker 02

  So if the plane isn't flying itself and the pilots are not committing suicide, that leaves one other option: a passenger took control of the aircraft.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  So that's theory number four: hijacked by a passenger.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  There are 227 passengers onboard. Any of them could be responsible.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  In the world post-September 11th, we look very carefully at who's on a plane.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  As they dig deeper, investigators realize not all of the passengers are who they claim to be.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  So they checked everybody's info, and then there was this red flag. Two people had boarded using stolen passports. One Italian and one Australian. When these two guys checked in, for some reason, the passports were not discovered by Interpol. So we have two men onboard this airplane that are trying to hide something clearly, and we didn't know about it. We don't know who they are. Fake names, fake passports. These guys could be anybody. So fortunately, it's not 1950. It's 2014, and there's a large number of surveillance everywhere.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  We can trace these guys' steps. The police found out these are two friends using stolen passports. Turns out, these two passports were stolen in Thailand about two years before. They bought a one-way ticket through a payphone in Thailand. From Thailand, they entered Malaysia using their real passport. So now we know who they are.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  The men have a valid reason to hide their identities.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  These are two Iranian refugees, 19 and 29, seeking asylum in Beijing. They don't have any knowledge about airplanes. So with those maneuvers that MH370 went through, whoever was doing it knew what they were doing in that cockpit. So it turns out, these guys were not really suspects.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  Investigators also believe the culprit knows how to work the plane's internal systems, like the transponders.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  There's a passenger onboard who might fit the bill. He's a flight engineer from Switzerland. The Boeing 777-200 has access to the avionics bay, which is under the cockpit. That's in the forward first-class cabin. And it's a small lock to get there. This is where the flight computers are. This is where the pressurization and everything is. So if you could get access to this room, you could cause serious harm to an aircraft in flight. Would a flight engineer know about this? Possibly.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  But does the flight engineer have a motive?

• 26:56Speaker 02

  When we look into this person, we find that he has a clean background. He works on a completely different type of aircraft. He works on corporate jets. He's probably not a suspect.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  With no evidence to implicate any passengers, the search goes cold for three years.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Remember that proving what happened is all about the evidence, and there is none until suddenly, something washes up.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  It's 2017. There's been almost no lead from MH370.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  But one day, somebody's walking on the beach and makes an incredible discovery.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  Over 6,500 miles from the Malaysian airport, wreckage appears on several remote islands.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  So now, we finally have some hard evidence that we could look at that are the pieces of that airplane.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  Coming up, will the world finally get answers?

• 27:58Speaker 00

  For three years after Malaysia Flight 370 disappears, there's no sign of the actual aircraft until 2017, when debris begins to surface.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  So now we're getting some of these chunks that are washed ashore over the east coast of Africa, Mozambique and Reunion Island.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  In all, 33 pieces are found in six different countries.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  They even found this big piece. It's a flaperon, unique to the 777, that had a serial number on it that matches MH370. So it's got to be from that airplane.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  The parts also hold an important clue.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  There was some scorched marks on the debris. And that tells me that they may have been a fire.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Leading to theory number five, a fire brings down the plane.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  What we know for sure is that the transponder went off 38 minutes into the flight. Maybe it is caused by the fire onboard.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  Fires happen for a variety of reasons: electrical, mechanical, maybe something in the cargo hold, or something in the cabin.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  MH370 was carrying about 500 pounds of lithium ion batteries in the forward cargo hold. And we know this is more than enough to possibly bring down an aircraft, as has happened before.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  On September 3, 2010, UPS Flight 6 takes off from Dubai International Airport.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  This was a massive 747 400 freighter, UPS, piloted by Captain Lampy and First Officer Matthew Bell.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  138 miles into that flight, the cockpit fills with smoke. At this point, it's chaos. It's not smoke like from a campfire. This is thick smoke, so thick you can't see through it. They had no chance.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  First Officer Lampy disconnected the autopilot, perhaps trying to make a quick turn towards Dubai. And when he did that, he realized the primary flight control system had failed because of the fire. And now he couldn't quite fly it properly. The captain got out of his seat to get a fire extinguisher. Unfortunately, succumbed by the fumes and the smoke and fire immediately.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  Bell couldn't see his instruments, but he was given a heading towards Dubai Airport, runway 12 left. Sadly, he crashes a few miles on the other side of the runway. Both pilots were killed.

• 30:54Speaker 03

  The subsequent investigation discovered that there was a pallet with 81,000 lithium ion batteries onboard that freighter. Lithium ion batteries are extremely volatile. Even the ones that you have in your phone, they have a high amount of charge in them, but very thin walls. Because of the thin walls on these batteries, if one of them catches fire, it's very easy to propagate into the other batteries adjacent to it. In rare cases, lithium ion batteries actually combust, and almost like a mini explosion.

• 31:33Speaker 00

  The FAA has recorded 340 airplane incidents involving lithium batteries. In 2019, regulations were put in place to safeguard passenger planes.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  It is now prohibited to carry lithium ion batteries in passenger airliners and in the cargo compartment of an airliner. And very limited amount on freighters.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  But that was years after pieces of MH370 began to wash up on remote shores.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  So in the case of MH370, you have some charred wreckage. You also have a large amount of fuel in the form of lithium batteries onboard.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  What about the unusual flight path and erratic maneuvers?

• 32:18Speaker 03

  A lot of people are questioning that sharp left turn. That could also be explained by the fire. We're trained that in case of a fire, what you do is you immediately get off the airway.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  And at first, that's what it appears that MH370 does.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  Your next step is to find an airport to land. Some of these sporadic turns could be possibly trying to figure out where are they going to land this airplane as soon as possible. You have to either put out this fire or get that airplane on the ground as fast as you can.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  Usually, they say it's between 12 to 14 minutes to get that airplane from altitude down to the ground. And airplane that is designed to basically glide, it is very hard to get it on the ground that quickly, unless if you literally nosedive.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  People always ask why there was no mayday call, why they didn't call on a radio.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, the aircraft may not have been capable at that point of calling for help. The radios or the communication systems could have been knocked out. Additionally, you need to understand what it's like to fly in a cockpit or a cabin that is full of dense smoke.

• 33:45Speaker 03

  If your car is on fire, or your truck, or your boat, you can step out and jump out. Unfortunately, you can't do that out of an aircraft. There's no help. Fire department is not coming.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  The crew is on their own. So what they would be doing is working to put out the fire.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  777 has a very sophisticated onboard fire detection and fire suppression system. But unfortunately, it was not designed to fight a lithium ion battery. So when there's nothing else to do, the other choice is to climb the aircraft and starve the fire of the oxygen. But the problem with that is the fire needs oxygen to breathe, and so do the folks in the back. It's a gamble.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  Would the fire run out of oxygen first, or the people? If you don't climb, everyone is going to burn alive. It's very possible that everybody was dead long before it crashed into the water. And perhaps that was the autopilot, flying the airplane, and no one was in control till eventually runs out of fuel.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  But this evidence doesn't close the case on Malaysia Flight 370.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  We have only a few pieces of this airplane that weighs almost a million pounds. So we can make educated guesses. We can keep digging. We can make assumptions. But the truth is, we don't have an answer.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  In fact, some experts are highly skeptical about this physical evidence.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Some people look at patterns and the incredible amount of time that passed before the wreckage washed up. And they wonder, could this evidence have been planted?

• 35:36Speaker 00

  Can a second look at old evidence lead to a radical new discovery? On January 17, 2017, the official search for Malaysia Flight 370 is suspended. Despite a sweep of 46,000 square miles of the Indian Ocean seabed, the rest of the plane isn't found.

• 35:56Speaker 06

  So the official search, which took hundreds of millions of dollars and years to conduct, came up empty.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  According to some theorists, the search might have been in the wrong area.

• 36:12Speaker 06

  The officials and most of the media convinced themselves that the satellite data could only mean one thing, that the plane went south. But they were wrong. There's another possible interpretation of the data. The reason that search officials thought that the plane must have gone to the southern Indian Ocean was because of satellite metadata.

• 36:34Speaker 06

  MH370 remained visible to ground-based radar systems until about 2:30 in the morning. After that, until 8:19 in the morning, the only clues are these satellite data pings.

• 36:49Speaker 05

  They're able to calculate the distance of the plane from the satellite using these pings and how it travels through time and space.

• 36:56Speaker 06

  The time delay between the satellite sending its signal and the plane replying allows you to calculate how far away the plane is from the satellite.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  But that only tells you one part of the story.

• 37:08Speaker 05

  The problem with those pings is it's really challenging to identify where the airplane exactly flew. In fact, at the time of the crash, we didn't have the technology to fully analyze the data that was provided by MRSAT.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  And then we have an airplane that's on the move. We don't know how fast it's going. And we don't know how high it is. These calculations have to be within milliseconds, or you could be off thousands of miles.

• 37:34Speaker 06

  Once they did their calculations, they came to the conclusion that this data meant unequivocally that the plane could only have gone to the southern Indian Ocean.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  But there's another possible route.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  It's taken years to figure out the math here. But the data also aligns with a northern arc. Following the northern arc, the aircraft would have passed through northern Thailand and then Central Asia.

• 38:00Speaker 06

  If the plane did fly along the northern route, the final ping puts it over central Kazakhstan.

• 38:06Speaker 00

  If MH370 went to Kazakhstan, it opens up a frightening possibility: theory number six: hijacked by Russian terrorists.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  This theory says that terrorists hijacked the aircraft, take it to Kazakhstan, kill the passengers, and then they could have refueled and continued to anywhere within Russia.

• 38:29Speaker 06

  If the plane went north, it could have landed safely. It takes a lot of runway to land a big plane like the 777. And there aren't a lot of long runways in the remote central part of Kazakhstan. But it turns out that there is a runway not too far away that is a suitable runway for a 777 to land on.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  The place is called Ubeleni Runway, and it's part of the former Soviet military base.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  The big question is, did anyone on the plane have ties to Russia?

• 39:03Speaker 06

  In first class, there's a Russian national named Nikolai Brodsky. And he's sitting about 15 feet from an unlocked hatch, which contains the electronic brain that controls all of the flight surfaces of the plane and all the communications with the ground. And in economy class, you have two Soviet Army veterans sitting directly under the box that makes the satellite pings. It's entirely possible that somebody took control of the plane, killed everyone onboard, flew off into perfect safety, refueled, went and hid the plane somewhere, and got away scot-free.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  But if MH370 didn't crash, where did the debris come from?

• 39:49Speaker 02

  Some theorists say pieces were taken off the aircraft, thrown into the Indian Ocean to throw off investigators.

• 39:57Speaker 06

  The idea that these pieces might have been planted by perpetrators would explain why no debris was spotted from the aerial searches over the area where the plane was presumed to be missing for months. Was MH370 an accident? Or was it a crime? A perfect crime.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  Despite the end of the official investigation in 2018, there remain countless private citizens dedicated to solving this mystery. Around the world, scientists, journalists, nonprofits, even major corporations continue to hunt for answers about what really happened to Malaysia Flight 370, answers that will hopefully bring closure to the families of those onboard. Thanks so much for listening to History's Greatest Mysteries, a History Channel original podcast presented by Rewind Studios. Join us next time for a deep dive into another mystery and all the theories behind it.