The Mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (2019)

♪ ♪

- Malaysian 370.

- It's been five years since a state of the art

aircraft disappeared.

- Nobody expected triple seven to vanish.

It just doesn't happen.

- Where is Malaysia Airlines Flight 370?

- Hundreds of loved ones gone missing.

[wailing]

- Years of searching.

- It's in exactly the most remote part of the world.

- The surprises.

- Debris found off the coast of Reunion Island

in the Indian Ocean.

- The second piece of MH 370s wreckage picked up.

- And the setbacks

- It was terrible, it felt like we were

right back at the beginning again.

- Questions still unanswered.

- We need to know what happened.

And the only way you're going to do it is

to find the aircraft.

- There's just too much at stake here to say we're going to stop.

- Now, Vanished, the Mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

♪ ♪

- March 8, 2014,

Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

Just after midnight, the pilots of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

are preparing for takeoff.

- It's all about checklists in aviation,

they're going through checklists.

- Miles O'Brien is a pilot and aviation analyst for CNN.

- It doesn't matter how mundane it is,

how many times you've done it, you do it religiously because

that is absolute foundation of safety and aviation.

- In the cockpit, 27 year old First Officer Fariq Hamid.

This video shows him training on the triple seven,

flight 370 was his first time flying

the aircraft without an instructor.

- So, while his experience of it might have been low

on the aircraft, he was totally up to date on how to fly it.

A lot of airline pilots told me these are the best people to fly

with because they've just come out of rigorous training.

- Next to Fariq, Zaharie Shah, a captain with over

18,000 hours in the air and a stellar reputation.

- Nick Huslan is a former chief pilot for Malaysia Airlines.

- And there was real confidence in the aircraft

they were about to fly, the Boeing triple seven.

- It's a great airplane, it's got a sterling record of safety.

- For any critical electric or hydraulic system that

would fail, there are two or three backup systems.

After making their final preparations,

the pilots are ready for pushback.

- At 12:32am the pilots taxi to the runway.

- Cleared for departure, flight 370 takes off

for a five and a half hour scheduled flight to Beijing.

♪ ♪

- By 1am, the crew and 227 passengers

on board are cruising comfortably at 35,000 feet.

Even the pilots can relax a little,

the plane is basically now flying itself.

- There was no particular challenge there

for a seasoned captain, and that first officer

to handle that flight without any problem.

- And in 1:07am, all seems well, according

to an automatic message sent from the

aircraft's communication system called ACARS.

Richard quest is an anchor

and aviation correspondent for CNN.

- Think of ACARS as a giant smartphone

that will send out huge amounts of information

via satellite or by radio transmission.

- Then at 1:19am, a standard handoff with air

traffic control as the plane leaves Malaysian

airspace and enters Vietnamese airspace.

- There was no indication

that anything had gone wrong.

- David Soucie is a former safety inspector for the FAA.

So, for the first 40 minutes of this flight,

up to that point, everything has been routine.

- Mhm, yes.

- Everything was routine until now.

Two minutes after talking with air

traffic control, 40 minutes into the flight,

the plane's transponder goes dark.

- The plane's transponder is effectively the instrument

by--which sends out a signal to air traffic control.

It tells you what height it's at,

which direction, and what speed it's traveling.

Suddenly, this giant triple seven is--is blind to the world.

- And there's no easy explanation for why it happened.

- Either it was intentional and someone tried to turn all

of those systems off at once, or the pilot was unable

to communicate, kept from communicating,

or there was a mechanical failure of some kind

that took all those systems out at one time.

- Then, minutes after the transponder stops,

the triple seven makes an unexpected turn

heading west, and way off course.

- That the plane turned immediately

after the transponder went off is

completely inexplicable, and very worrisome.

- Peter Goelz is a former Managing Director of the NTSB.

- We don't know whether this was done voluntarily,

whether it was done under duress, we simply have no idea.

- No idea what really happened, but Goelz sees a red flag.

- It was completely out of the ordinary that there was

no distress call, that the turn takes place and there's absolute

silence, it means that somebody on that plane redirected it

to a new course heading and they were not telling anyone.

- Not telling anyone and never checking

in with Vietnam air traffic control.

- The fact that that westerly turn happens at

the point of handover between Malaysia and Vietnam,

for many, is the strongest evidence

that something nefarious was going on.

- You've investigated many incidents,

is that coincidence, that everything seems

to go wrong at this particular critical moment?

- It can't be coincidence,

I don't believe in coincidence with my accidents.

It just seems to me that there was something,

now it doesn't mean that it was nefarious,

it doesn't mean anything else, but remember, there's a lot

of systems doing a lot of things at that time as well.

- So, the critical moment is immediately after this

handover when you're essentially in this

kind of no man's land in the sky.

- Yeah, nobody's watching right then.

- No one was watching and flight 370 would vanish.

♪ ♪

- Coming up, a critical mistake by

air traffic control with time running out.

- The aircraft was still flying as we know now,

that just is so painful to think about,

that four hours later, no one's looking yet.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

- In the middle of the night on March 8, 2014, at 1:21am,

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanishes into thin air.

There's been silence from the cockpit

and by 1:37am, a second flight communication

system, ACARS, isn't working either.

- ACARS was either switched off or it failed,

we don't know which because whatever did happen,

this is the crucial moment.

We pretty much know that all the comms are

disabled, switched off, broken, blown up.

- As an investigator looking at this,

what would the determination be, at least to this point,

as to what is happening?

- At this point, I've got two different paths.

One is that that aircraft was taken over

and that the systems were intentionally set--shut down.

The other side would be that there was a singular failure

at a common location, and that singular mechanical

failure would have done exactly the same thing.

At this point in the investigation,

there's no evidence one way or the other.

- But there would be piles of evidence if

ACARS hadn't stopped transmitting.

- You'd know the condition of the engines,

the route it was taking, the altitudes it was taking,

we would know exactly the state of that aircraft.

♪ ♪

- Just the kind of information someone taking

over a plane wouldn't want anyone to know.

- If you were doing something nefarious, then switching off

ACARS would be a crucial part of making the plane go dark.

- The plane was dark and silent.

There was still no check-in with Vietnam

air traffic control, a call former chief pilot

Nick Huslan has made thousands of times.

- Around 1:27am, Ho Chi Minh's control

center tries to reach the aircraft.

- They tried the radio, they tried to call and see if

MH 370 was out there, no response.

- You attempt to communicate

directly with the aircraft first?

- Right, that's the first thing you do.

If that's not successful, then you try to contact other

aircraft around and they did do that, and those airplanes

tried to raise MH 370 as well, no success.

- With no response, an air traffic controller

in Kuala Lumpur calls Malaysia Airlines for help.

- I think fundamentally, you have to assume nobody

expects one of these planes to fall out of the sky,

nobody expects a triple seven to vanish.

- And Malaysia Airlines tells air traffic

control a completely different story.

They say MH 370 hasn't vanished at all,

according to their own internal flight tracking system.

- Malaysia Airlines says, "Oh, the aircraft's fine,

we know exactly where it is."

- Yet, they've had no communication with the aircraft.

- They've had none, they've had none.

So their system was showing that the aircraft

had continued to go on that heading.

- Over the next hour and a half, Malaysia Airlines gives

air traffic control more promising messages.

They had exchanged signals with the flight, the plane was

in normal condition, and the plane was flying

off the coast of Vietnam along its scheduled flight path.

- And at that point, the guard is let down, you start

going in a different direction, you're not search and rescue

anymore, you're just trying to communicate.

- But an hour and a half after that

first reassuring message, a tragic realization.

Malaysia Airlines now tells air traffic control

the information was wrong.

- We don't know where the aircraft is.

Our system told us it was there, but it wasn't.

- The airline tells air traffic control their

flight tracking program was based on flight

projection and not reliable for aircraft positioning.

- Everything went wrong there, everything,

it borders on scandal.

The airline in the middle, there, just offering up,

just, complete red herrings and dead ends, it's inexcusable.

- At best,

the Malaysia Airlines information

to air traffic control was unhelpful.

At worst, it was downright damaging

to getting an investigation and a search underway quickly.

- Not only did Malaysia Airlines have bad information,

air traffic control waited to sound the alarm.

- I think air traffic control waits so long because

it's just a normal confusion of the moment, but at some point

in all of this, an air traffic controller can push the big

red button that says,

help, panic, missing plane.

And that's what they didn't do until much later.

♪ ♪

- Not until four hours after it's clear the plane

is lost, did air traffic control notify emergency responders.

- That, just, is so painful to think about,

that four hours later, no one's looking yet.

- As precious hours pass, time is running out.

While flight 370 flies further and further over

one of the world's largest oceans.

♪ ♪

- Coming up, what happened onboard flight 370?

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

- In the pitch black darkness, minutes after its last

radio contact, the Malaysian military spots

a blip on its radar, its speed and flight path erratic.

They don't yet know, it is MH 370.

- If you see a primary unidentified return

flying towards your country at 500 plus knots,

that should raise concerns very quickly.

- But it didn't seem to.

By now, the triple seven is believed to be

hundreds of miles off its original course.

- We don't know what's normal for their military and I think

that a big part of the problem with this investigation is that

the Malaysians were very tight lipped about what they had,

what they knew, and when they knew it.

- The Malaysian Air Force continued to track the plane

for an hour until it disappeared from radar.

They never tell anyone with civilian authority.

- Governments don't want to talk about this, they don't want

to talk about holes in their radar system, a posture which is

not as ready as they want the world to believe it to be.

- Not only is no one told, nothing is done,

no jets are scrambled.

The military would say later, they chose not to intercept

the plane because it was friendly and did

not pose a threat to national security.

- Why would you have an Air Force if it's

not capable of doing something like this?

That's a big error, that's a big mistake,

and frankly, the Malaysian government

has not really accounted for it in a proper way

to these families, and to the rest of the world.

- For David Soucie, however, there's a gray area.

- Here in the United States, we would know that

in a heartbeat, over there, it wasn't set up that way.

It was a clear delineation of firewall

between military and civil operations,

and the two just didn't meet each other.

- A missed opportunity.

- Exactly.

- On the ground in Beijing, of course, the families waiting

patiently for the arrival of flight 370 knew none of this.

Finally, an hour after the plane was expected to land.

Malaysia Airlines makes its first

public announcement on Facebook.

- This flight, MH 370, lost contact

with Subang Air Traffic Control

at 2:40am this morning.

- It quickly becomes the biggest story in the world.

- Where is Malaysia Airlines Flight 370?

- More questions than there are answers.

- The hunt for flight 370 now covers millions of square miles.

- The world's attention turns to the Malaysian

government and airline officials.

To many critics, they don't seem to know

what they're talking about.

- There was a deer in the headlights

component to those early news conferences.

And you can almost see them struggling through it,

not knowing what they were doing.

- We cannot indulge in speculation at this stage.

- Not understanding how to begin the investigation.

- There are currently 43 ships and 40

aircraft searching for it.

- An unprecedented investigation that would

baffle the greatest minds in the aviation

world and the accident investigation world.

- They put out information without really corroborating it,

and much of it turned out to be false.

- I would like to refer to news reports

suggesting--suggesting that the aircraft may have

continued flying for some time after last contact.

As Malaysian Airlines will confirm

shortly, those reports are inaccurate.

- So they ended up, you know, on both sides

of a bad situation with too little information.

[wailing]

- Even days after the plane disappeared,

families believe they aren't being told the truth.

[wailing]

- This Chinese woman demanded answers just

before another press conference in Kuala Lumpur.

She didn't get any.

- After ten days to two weeks,

there was a public perception

that was set in stone, that the Malaysians were

not able to handle this situation,

and that they were having trouble.

- As far as the images is--are concerned,

I don't think we can actually verify when they were taken,

I will check with the Australian

- Excuse me, hold on ladies and gentlemen.

- Sorry, but this is very important.

- I know, I know, I know it is very important.

- Family members were left asking what

on earth was happening.

- And one wonders whose interests are being

served or protected by this long wait,

and something that's increasingly feeling

surreal and rapidly turning into a farce.

- The main priority area is the orange area.

- Adding to that, the early conflicting reports

on where authorities think the plane actually is

and whether it had turned or not.

- Initially, the Malaysians said there was no turnaround,

the transport minister said no turnaround.

And he was very definitive, and that

was misleading, and that was wrong.

It's noticeable in the day, and days after,

he became--he hedged--he hedged.

He suddenly--I'm not talking about that,

I'm not saying that, we're not commenting on that.

- Weeks after the flight vanished,

Richard Quest put some of those questions

to Malaysia's, then, Prime Minister.

- What would you say to the critics, and be blunt,

Prime Minister, who say Malaysia wasted

time at various parts of the investigation?

- I don't think they were fair criticism.

You remember when the plane was reported last,

I was briefed that morning, and I took the decision that we

must search both areas, the South China Sea

and the northern part of the Straits of Malacca.

- But no one was willing to comment

either on the biggest unanswered question.

Did MH 370 vanish because somebody

with intent took over its controls?

- Nick Huslan has piloted the plane thousands of times.

- No matter what scenario you go with.

We're deep into the world of crazy, crazy scenario,

obscure scenario, evil scenario, whatever it is,

it's--it's--we're in crazy land, right?

This is stuff that doesn't happen.

- But it did happen, a truly astounding mystery.

There is only a handful of verifiable facts,

and after the confusion, delay, and chaos engendered

in the first few weeks, comes this, a completely

different search area based purely on mathematics.

- It's never been done before.

They were making it up as they go along.

They were using information that was

never intended to be used for this purpose.

- Coming up, searching in all the wrong places.

Why was there so much confusion when it came to where to search?

- We had no idea where that aircraft was,

but yet the pressure's on to do something.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

- On the morning of March 8, four hours after flight

370 disappears, a search is launched

in the South China Sea, east of Malaysia.

[shouting]

- As with any search, you start where the plane was last seen.

- We begin this morning with a desperate search at sea

after a jet carrying 239 people vanished

off the southern coast of Vietnam.

- But very quickly, overnight, very quickly,

there's no debris, they can't find anything

from the aircraft, and that's unusual.

- Even more unusual, searchers also start looking

in the opposite direction, hundreds of miles to the west.

- I sat in the studio covering this and we would

look at each other and he'd say, "Hang on, did he just simply

say--did he simply say we're looking to the west?"

- Yes, that's because newly discovered military radar

reveals the plane may have turned back to the west,

at the same time, new leads are coming in.

- Late today, Chinese authorities released

satellite photos of what they call a suspected crash site.

- An international fleet of aircraft and boats

are now searching in two different areas.

- They had to look in the east because

that's where debris was allegedly being reported.

They had to look in the west because that's where

their radar data had told them the plane had gone.

- But searchers still find nothing.

Days turn into weeks, and the search area

expands even farther.

Why was there so much confusion when it came to where to search?

- We had no idea where that aircraft was,

but yet the pressures on to do something.

- Rescue seven one...

- It became the biggest oceanic search of all time.

- This is completely unprecedented on so many levels.

Nothing has ever happened quite like this.

- And into this confusion suddenly

drops the Inmarsat data.

- Inmarsat, a British company, reports

that flight 370 had exchanged digital signals

known as handshakes with their satellites.

- That was a watershed moment, and that changed everything.

- It changed everything because everyone had thought flight 370

had gone completely dark, but the discovery of the digital

handshakes was proof, the plane was in the air

for several hours longer than anyone thought.

- Suddenly, they have evidence that it flew west

and south and continued to fly for some six and a half hours.

- Using complicated calculations,

Inmarsat could roughly determine where the plane was going.

- This is evidence that is,

kind of, getting close to black magic.

I mean, it's--it's a feat of mathematics

and ingenuity and reverse engineering,

but we just don't know how accurate it is.

- But it is also the only hard evidence

available to investigators and Malaysia's Prime Minister

at the time, Najib Razak.

- I asked them again and again, are you sure?

And their answer to me was, "We are as sure as

we can possibly be."

- He needed to be sure because based

on those calculations, the Prime Minister

was about to deliver some very somber news.

- Flight MH 370 ended

in the southern Indian Ocean.

- The southern Indian Ocean, thousands of miles away,

where no one could likely have survived.

[shouting]

- Family members were shocked, distraught, and angry.

There would be no rescue.

One last hope remained, could they find the black

boxes before they stop emitting pings?

- You're not in an ivory tower, you haven't got the luxury

of time, you've got pingers that may

expire so you've got to say this is our best guess now.

- Their best guess is a remote area more

than twice the size of California.

- Good morning, these are all the aircraft flying today.

- The Australians take over the search...

...and soon after, the Australian ship,

Ocean Shield, lowers its towed pinger

locator into the water, pings are detected.

- Clearly, this is a most promising lead.

- It was, wow, again.

- It was miraculous.

They had just put the towed pinger locator in the water.

- I was convinced this is it, they've got the answer,

it's a matter of days.

- A robotic submarine scours the 329 square

mile area where the pings were heard.

It's painstakingly slow work.

Then, two months later.

- A massive setback in the search

for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the US Navy says

the underwater pings are not from the plane's black boxes.

- How big a setback was that?

- Oh, it was terrible, it felt like we were

right back at the beginning again.

- Back to the beginning, and no closer

to solving the mystery of Malaysia flight 370.

♪ ♪

- Coming up, authorities investigate

the last two men known to be in the cockpit of flight 370.

- We need to know what happened, it is not an option not to know.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

- These are the last words heard from the cockpit of Malaysia

flight 370, and the moment the mystery begins.

- You have a series of events that appear to be human driven.

You have a transponder being turned off, you have an ACARS

system being turned off, you have the plane being turned,

not once, but at least twice, probably three times.

- And most perplexing, no distress call.

- There are so many ways to notify people that there's

a distress, UHF radios, VHF radios, many, many, many ways.

- None of that happened? - None of it.

- Could the disappearance of MH 370 had been deliberate?

To answer that question, investigators zero

in on the last two men known to be in control

of the plane, seen here passing

through security on the night of the flight.

First Officer Fariq Hamid was only 27 years old.

- Very young to be flying a triple seven in the US,

but had gone through all the--the gates,

and had passed, and was with a very senior guy.

That's a perfectly safe scenario.

- Fariq had no known motive and no apparent

reason to take down the plane.

- There was just no indication that there was anything

going on in his life other than he had made it.

- Fariq had made it and was on an impressive

career trajectory.

- At 5000 hours on the 737, you go from a small

plane to a big plane, and this was his promotion.

- CNN aviation correspondent, Richard Quest, gained permission

to fly at Malaysia Airlines in February 2014.

In an eerie coincidence, it was one of Fariq's

last training flights on the Boeing triple seven.

- There is absolutely no question

that he was a qualified, competent pilot.

The captain said he was one of the best they had.

He landed the aircraft perfectly.

- One of Fariq's next flights would be his last,

Malaysia 370.

And what about the pilot sitting beside Fariq Hamid,

Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and the flight simulator

he had built in his home to practice landings.

- Yesterday, officers from the Royal Malaysian Police

visited the home of the pilot.

- It seemed like a potential lead,

until investigators declared it a dead end.

- Examination of the flight simulators revealed

nothing suspicious for the authorities.

- Like First Officer Fariq,

Zaharie lacked any apparent motive.

- Many aspects of the case have been centered on the captain,

and the more they've looked, the less they have found.

- Zaharie's sister, Sakinab Ahmad Shah, spoke out

to Channel News Asia months after the plane's disappearance.

- Nick Huslan met Zaharie at Malaysia Airlines during

the rigorous days of flight school, 35 years ago.

- Above all, Huslan remembers his friend as

a skilled and seasoned pilot who loved to fly,

seen here in a video tribute posted by his family.

- But if it wasn't Zaharie and it wasn't Fariq,

what about the other passengers on flight 370?

Could it have been a hijacking?

- It would explain the fact that the radios were shut down,

possibly systematically, it would explain why

there may not have been communication.

- Are there any suspects?

- They've gone through everybody on an aircraft

and they've determined that there is no one there that would

match the profile of someone who would take over that aircraft.

- If not human intervention,

could something on the plane have malfunctioned?

- It's got to fly for another six hours.

That's the problem with the mechanical questions.

- What kind of catastrophe could shut down the plane's

communications, but still have allowed it to fly?

- Anybody that chooses to hang their hat on one scenario

or the other, in my view, is heading for a fall.

The entire experience of crash air crash investigations

is that, yes, it's usually the obvious, but it's

quite frequently--it's something you've never even thought of.

- There's no way to know until the black boxes are found.

Until you find the plane, how can you rule

anybody, anything, out?

- Well, you can't, what you'll know from

the black boxes is what happened.

What you won't know, necessarily, is why.

- There are no black boxes inside human beings,

that's what we need in this case.

- Our best hope of solving one of the greatest mysteries

of all time, is presumably somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

- We need to know what happened, we need to know whether

this plane came down at the point of a gun,

by the hand of the pilot, or whether

by mechanical failure, it is not an option not to know.

♪ ♪

- Coming up, a brand new search for answers

begins in the Indian Ocean.

- It's a big, big hunk of ocean.

It's as remote as you can get and still be on this planet.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

- The southern Indian Ocean, rough, remote, forbidding.

- When we look at that route, as pilots,

we all look at the charts and we look

for the waypoints in the airways.

There aren't any.

It as remote as you can get and still be on this planet.

- This is where experts believe the wreckage

of flight 370 may lie.

Finding it, an immeasurable challenge.

- To put the analogy of what we got out there at the moment,

we're not searching for a needle in a haystack,

we're still trying to define where the haystack is.

- That was March of 2014 when this vessel, the Ocean Shield,

set out in hopes of finding the plane and failed.

- This is no easy task.

We have very good techniques

for detecting needles in haystacks.

We have high confidence that if we've got

the right haystack, we will find a needle in it.

- The Australian Transportation Safety Bureau

was leading the search, with Chief Commissioner

Martin Dolan in charge.

- It's six days sailing out from the coast of Australia,

and we're operating at the range towards

the limits of the equipment that's available to us,

which is the best equipment available.

- In May, 2015, after the initial

efforts turned up nothing, they doubled

the size of the priority search area.

- It is a huge area and it's a complicated area with valleys,

and ocean mountains, and crevices.

- Complex terrain is not the only challenge they faced.

- You're grinding through high seas,