How is it possible for an airliner to disappear out of thin air?
There's a million different theories that people could tell you about MH370, but
one of them is right.
There's a theory going around...
Hijacking. Mechanical failure. Meteorite hitting it.
Pilot suicide.
Who knows?
Two hundred and thirty-nine innocent people.
Someone knows.
Someone definitely knows.
So much about this flight simply doesn't add up.
This very mysterious and very suspicious
cargo could be at the heart
of what happened to MH370.
It appears to be part of the wing system called the flaperon.
The first time I saw that,
my honest feeling was,
"Who planted it there?"
"Who brought the piece there?"
I've been accused of being a Russian spy,
a Chinese spy.
It is just patently ridiculous.
We are equally puzzled as well.
There is new information coming in that is reshaping the theories...
The search was in the wrong area.
We'll never have peace until we know where they are.
- They're lying from the beginning.
They are lying to the whole world.
It was a deliberate act.
It's possible it was hijacked.
We don't know.
Fuck Malaysia!
Malaysia is lying!
I have the real evidence.
It's there. And you can't deny that.
Planes go up.
Planes go down.
What planes don't do
is just vanish off the face of the Earth.
We don't have the answers.
This is one of the great mysteries in aviation history.
MH370 is a mystery whose malevolence is still with us today.
It's a snake that is still alive.
As an aviation journalist,
you know, this is like the bat signal shined on the clouds.
It has its hooks in me.
And I had to investigate.
So, the flight was a red-eye
from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The plane was going to take off around midnight
and fly through the night, and arrive in Beijing around dawn.
Everything was routine.
There were 227 passengers.
And 12 crew.
My husband and I, Hazrin,
were working for Malaysia Airlines as cabin crew.
We have one daughter and I was heavily pregnant,
so I was not working.
He was rostered for Beijing, and it was winter.
I still remember he packed his
fluffy jacket... [chuckles] ...in his bag.
My husband, Paul Weeks, and I lived in Australia
with our two young sons.
Paul was preparing to start a new job in China.
He said to me, "Look, do you want me to go?"
Because Jack was young and...
and so was Lincoln,
and it was 28 days on, 14 days off.
And I said to him, "Of course."
I had been living in Beijing
with my children for almost six years.
My children had been on school holidays in Malaysia and I was on my way to meet them
in Beijing to spend
the second week of holidays with them.
The day before, I had spoken to my wife.
Everything was fine. They were happy we were meeting.
There was another message from my daughter saying,
"I'm at the airport in Kuala Lumpur."
"I'm happy because I'm going to see my daddy again."
His plane was called, and...
It was obviously very emotional. There was a lot of tears.
The boys, you know, blew kisses, said, "I love you."
And he walked out that door.
And that was like it was yesterday.
370, 32 right for take-off. Good night.
32 right, cleared for take-off, Malaysian 370.
Thank you. Bye.
Hazrin called me before the plane took off.
Last...
Last thing he said was, "I love you."
Ah.
So, 41 minutes past midnight, the plane takes off.
It's a clear night. Everything's very calm.
It climbs to cruising altitude.
It heads out over the South China Sea.
Malaysian, uh, 370, maintaining level three five zero.
Shortly after one o'clock in the morning
is when things start to get strange.
The plane is about to leave Malaysian airspace.
They're going to be handed to the next set of air traffic controllers in Vietnam.
So, the Malaysians said...
Malaysian 370, contact Ho Chi Minh 120, decimal 9.
Good night.
As the plane approaches the limits of Malaysian airspace,
the captain of the flight, Zaharie Ahmad Shah,
gets on the radio and says...
Uh, good night, Malaysian 370.
And then 90 seconds later,
the plane suddenly goes electronically dark.
It vanishes from radar.
That is basically where the mystery begins.
I was awakened by a phone call at 2:20 in the morning.
I was told that flight MH370 is missing from our system.
We knew this is very, very unusual. Extremely unusual.
When I arrive at the Emergency Operation Center...
I felt numb and I was very nervous.
We requested Thailand, Hong Kong, as well as Vietnam,
to call and communicate with MH370.
But they told us that there was no response at all.
Between 4 o'clock in the morning until 6:30, we were virtually scrambling.
We were calling everyone that we can get hold of,
hoping that the aircraft could have landed somewhere in Vietnam, or in Hong Kong,
or somewhere in China before it arrived in Beijing.
As the time grows nearer
to 6:30 a.m...
...we knew there was something seriously wrong.
We have breaking news.
Malaysia Airlines confirms it has lost contact
with a plane carrying 227 passengers...
...6:30 in the morning in Beijing. At this stage, very sketchy details...
Just to re, re... uh...
remind you of what we're finding out.
The flight number is MH370. It was expected...
...Boeing 777 seems to have vanished into thin air.
This was absolutely my worst nightmare.
What do we tell the family members?
What do we tell the media?
I was already getting calls
from several media, including CNN.
On the phone with us is Malaysian Airlines Vice President of Operations.
Mr, Sharuji, I appreciate you being with us.
What's the latest you can tell us about this aircraft?
Okay, the aircraft has got about seven hours of fuel.
And we suspect that by 8:30, this aircraft would have run out of fuel.
At the moment, we have got no idea where this aircraft is right now.
As senior officers,
you are trained to expect the worst-case scenario.
You are trained to handle crisis management.
But when it happens,
it's... it's... it's... it's different because you don't have a clue.
You don't have a clue then where is the aircraft.
Early in the morning of the eighth,
the search-and-rescue had been activated.
The standard operating procedures is to go
to the location where we lost the aircraft on the radar screen.
We got calls saying that personnel from one of the oil rigs
in the South China Sea sighted an explosion,
as if an aircraft had crashed into the sea.
Right away, when the plane failed to appear,
you got a huge amount of interest, social media activity,
people posting about, "What happened to this plane?" "Where is it?"
We received so many reports from social media.
One claimed that the aircraft was hijacked.
Another said that the aircraft crashed in the jungles of Java.
At that time, we had to take all information
as possible truth.
Because we do not know whether they are true or not.
Vietnamese Air Force planes have apparently spotted
two large oil slicks in the area, off the southern tip of Vietnam.
Each of those slicks apparently about six miles wide.
Our time and effort was consumed in trying to validate this information.
Cathay Pacific pilot reported seeing
large solid debris in the ocean during a flight from Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur.
Of course the families want to know what happened to their loved ones.
Are they alive? Are they dead?
And we have no answers.
We do know another pilot contacted flight 370
just before it disappeared.
The captain of the overnight flight to Tokyo was positioned 30 minutes ahead
and he called them on the emergency frequency.
He told Malaysian media,
"There was a lot of interference, static, but I heard mumbling from the other end."
It was Saturday morning
and Paul had sent an email from the airport titled, "Miss you already."
He finished his email with,
"You and the boys are my world."
"And as soon as I land in Beijing, on March 8th, I'll give you a call."
I was just at home.
Everything was totally normal.
Kuala Lumpur to Beijing is a daily departure.
So Hazrin worked the flight many times.
It was a routine for us to send each other
a text message when the plane landed.
We had been doing that throughout our flying career.
I was in the kitchen and then I got a call.
And it was a lady asking for Paul.
And I said, "Oh no, look sorry, he's on a plane."
I said, "Where are you from?"
She said, "I'm a reporter from the New Zealand Herald."
I was on a plane, on my way to meet my children.
I arrived at 4:00 p.m. in Beijing.
At that point, I'm heading out of the plane.
There was a hostess waiting for me
who said, "Sir, follow us." I had no idea what was happening.
I woke up early morning.
I look at my phone.
When I don't receive the text from him...
I say to myself, "Never mind, just go back to sleep."
"He will call or text later on, right?"
And I thought, "What does she want with Paul?"
And she said, "You haven't heard?"
And I said, "Heard what?"
She said, "There's been an incident with the plane."
See you tomorrow morning.
Papa misses you too. I love you.
Good night, Malaysia 370.
I dropped the phone
and ran outside screaming.
All I can remember was I was just crying.
It's just so unimaginable
that becomes a reality to... to me.
At that moment, time stops.
"How's that possible?"
"Is this a nightmare?" "Please wake me up!"
I said, "Are you sure?"
And at that moment, they answer, "No, we aren't sure of anything."
Well, I'm at terminal three at the moment.
You would expect there to be a lot of people here waiting for...
Friends and relatives in Beijing
were sent to a city-center hotel to wait for news.
We hope the Chinese government
will send a search-and-rescue team,
because the Vietnamese government is not proactive.
We are working with authorities who have activated
the search-and-rescue team to locate the aircraft.
Our team is currently calling the next of kin of passengers and crew.
- Thank you very much.
I was the last of the family members to get there.
You get out of the car and you're mobbed by journalists.
Mobbed.
There was a crazy amount of people.
Everybody is taking pictures of you and reaching out with microphones...
I remember my friends had to push them away so we could reach the room.
And then someone from Malaysian Airlines
came to me and they tell me to sit down.
I ask, "What are we doing?" They say, "We're waiting."
All the families were there. They were mostly Chinese.
I couldn't even communicate with them.
And that's when I told my friends, "Please take me home, I can't stay here."
Here in Beijing, hundreds of family members
and friends of the passengers on board have gathered in the hotel.
They're growing increasingly frustrated by the lack of information
about their loved ones.
The room was full of people...
crying and wailing.
There were families in the corridor, leaning against the wall,
standing there, squatting down, sitting on the floor.
When I think about it now, that room was like a living hell.
That's not an exaggeration.
Relatives of the missing passengers
say they've called their loved one's cell phones
and instead of going to voicemail, the phones continue to ring.
Suddenly, there was a daughter of a passenger running towards us.
We could see her phone was showing an incoming call.
Uh, It was displaying "Papa."
She said, "What should I do?"
I shouted back to her, "Pick up the call!"
But sadly, when she tried to pick up the phone,
it stopped ringing.
Many of us tried to call our families on the plane.
In many of these calls, there was a connection and a ringtone.
We requested that Malaysia Airlines
and the government follow the lead on the connected calls.
But their replies were always the same.
They didn't have the technology
to trace it further.
Um, it was incomprehensible to us, the families.
This was the easiest way
to locate the passengers and the plane.
Sunrise, and the waters south of Vietnam
brought an all-out search for Malaysia Airlines flight 370.
If it's landed at an airport, we'd know it.
It does not have enough fuel to be still in the air.
So it sure doesn't look good.
And we don't know anything.
We're not even sure of where that plane is.
There was a glimmer of hope today.
The Vietnamese thought they'd spotted a life raft,
but it turned out to be a cable reel.
An investigator's best lead came to nothing.
Residue from an oil slick was tested in the lab.
They were looking for jet fuel, but the oil came from a ship.
We went there. There's nothing.
- Oh... - There's nothing.
It was very, very hard
because things are not going as what we expected it to be.
So, do you have any comment on the status of MH370?
There is just this tremendous interest from around the world.
What happened to this plane? Where is it?
And it had to be explored. It had to be investigated.
And so I wound up spending countless hours
to try to really understand what happened
to this plane.
An immediate focus of attention
was the question of communications and why and how they'd been lost.
On the top of the 777 is an antenna...
A modern commercial jetliner
is in communication multiple ways with the outside world.
All of them went dark at the same time.
Why?
A team of clever technicians...
The most obvious answer would be...
catastrophic failure.
Like, the plane blew up. It impacted the ocean.
Um, it suffered a fire so intense
that it just destroyed all the equipment simultaneously
before anyone could issue a mayday call.
But...
the plane's debris was still not found
underneath the spot where that disruption in communication occurred.
If it wasn't catastrophic failure, what's option two?
The only really obvious possibility is that somebody on board the plane
deliberately turned off its electronic communication signals.
And if that's the case, the question is, "Who?"
Extraordinary new twist in the disappearance
of Malaysia Airlines flight 370.
Malaysian officials now say the plane was hundreds of miles off course,
and flying in the wrong direction when last tracked.
Here are the latest developments.
It apparently turned the opposite direction
and flew to the Malacca Strait.
...reports the plane may have flown
for more than an hour after disappearing from radar.
Something very unexpected had been spotted by military radar
that doesn't require any kind of signals from the plane.
But the Malaysian military couldn't confirm 100%
that this actually was MH370.
We're now hearing from Reuters quoting a Malaysian military source saying...
There is a possibility that...
that this aircraft made a turn back,
but we are not sure whether it is the same aircraft.
Good evening.
Military radars can't say particularly that this was even flight 370.
It can't tell you what kind of aircraft it is,
whether it's a helicopter or an airplane.
It just says, "There's a target out there, here it is."
But it doesn't give you altitude or airspeed.
So now, is it possible that,
far from crashing,
the plane disappeared from Malaysian civilian radar,
reversed course back over peninsular Malaysia,
is seen doing so by Malaysian military radar,
flies to the end of the zone of military radar coverage,
and vanished again?
If that's true for MH370,
why did he turn back?
Why don't he call us, you know? What is he trying to do?
We had a house not too far from the airport.
I didn't know what else I could do, so I switched the TV on.
Search-and-rescue teams from Vietnam,
Malaysia and Singapore are conducting a...
The BBC and CNN had this story on a loop.
I sat in front of it and I realized I had to call my son now.
He was a student at the time in France.
That was the hardest moment
of my whole life.
The first thing he told me, I hadn’t said a word yet, was,
"Tell me they weren't on that plane."
I answered "Yes."
And then I heard a scream.
Ah.
Seventy-two hours after the disappearance of flight 370,
forty ships and thirty-four aircraft
have failed to find any sign of the jetliner.
So at this point, there's people searching in the Andaman Sea,
and at the same time,
they're still searching in the South China Sea.
The state of confusion was so profound.
I mean,
it's farcical.
It's impossible that the plane could be both of these places.
Where's the focus your search now?
Can you confirm if the plane has turned back?
You're searching east. You're searching west.
- This is utter confusion. - I don't think so.
It is overwhelming.
The clicking noise of all the cameras. Click, click, click.
They keep asking, "Where?" "Why you are looking at the wrong place?"
As far as we are concerned,
we are equally puzzled as well.
Do you feel like we are getting the whole story?
Is it possible that some information is being held back at this point?
One day you say this.
The next day, the reporter says that.
Who to believe? What to believe?
It's still difficult to understand
why they've withheld this information,
given they would've seen it when it happened in real time.
Right away, my first reaction was to say,
" They're talking us for fools. They're mocking us."
Relatives threw water bottles at officials in frustration.
They want some answers.
Why are you stopping us speaking to the relatives?
Why are you stopping us speaking to the relatives? Why are you stopping us?
For the families, it created so much confusion.
Every day, it just seemed like there was something different coming out.
That's the torment. It's the not knowing
is the most horrible part of it.
Turning now to new developments
in a search that's both unbelievable and unprecedented in modern times.
We're now entering a fourth day without a single sign
of that massive Boeing 777.
So, four days in, the case is just
obviously strange and getting stranger.
I'm trying to wrestle with the more technical aspects of the case.
And I'm writing about it on my personal blog.
And as I'm writing about this stuff,
people are joining the conversation in the comments section
and we're sort of running a parallel investigation almost.
And I got one comment from a guy named "Air Land Sea Man"
who was in enormous detail.
I couldn't even understand fully what he was saying.
This guy clearly knew what he was talking about.
I've been a pilot for over 50 years.
My career was
mainly involved with engineering and science.
A number of us started communicating to see if we could
come up with any kind of, uh,
solid theory on where the airplane went.
The group consisted of pilots, engineers, scientists,
legal experts, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers,
people very familiar with how the 777 flies
and how the different systems work.
I had never experienced anything like this,
where people were coming together spontaneously from all around the world.
We're spending 12 hours a day or more digging up details,
going back over everything again and again.
We were suddenly working together as a tight-knit team.
One of them suggested that we should call ourselves the "Independent Group."
We felt this was done by somebody who really knew what they were doing.
So the spotlight turns more and more to the pilots.
I write up my findings in a piece for Slate Magazine called,
"How to Disappear a Jetliner."
It gets a lot of attention.
The next thing I know, I'm live on CNN.
Jeff, let me come to you first.
I read your piece before I came on air. Absolutely fascinating theory.
Basically, what some pilots are talking about, I'm hearing,
is the idea that
perhaps the pilot or co-pilot of this plane,
um, took control of the cockpit.
Who knows what the motive is to do something like this. The point...
We, of the Independent Group, weren't making really any kind of claims,
but we were just trying to
figure out what was known.
Because
if you wanted to know about MH370, which so many people did,
you weren't getting it from Malaysian authorities.
We weren't the only group out there.
There was another tribe called the Tomnoders.
As multiple countries and crews
search for that missing Malaysian Airlines plane,
so can you too, using your very own computer.
Here's how it works.
They're inviting anyone to go onto their platform called Tomnod
to view the high-res pictures of the area
where the Malaysia Airlines jet might have gone down.
The Air Force Chief told us more time and help was needed
to pinpoint the aircraft's location.
Grieving family members long to know
where flight 370 went down.
When I saw the anguish on the faces
of these family members,
I thought, "I have to do something." It just tugged at my heartstrings.
My hobby is photography, so I have an eye for detail.
So I thought I could be a great person to help look for this airplane
from the satellite images.
As a Tomnoder,
the areas we were searching... we had no control over to pick.
And so I was handed the area pretty close to where the airplane
first disappeared from radar in the South China Sea.
The satellite images were empty.
It was just the blackness of the sea.
Then you press next...
more black scans.
So much black.
And then, finally...
there's something white.
I pulled the schematics off the internet for a B777.
And I was able to identify this piece as the nose cone.
That's when I started saying, "Holy crap!"
"There's a piece of debris," you know? "There's the airplane."
And then I started seeing more pieces.
Something that looked like the fuselage. Something that looked like the tail.
I got goosebumps.
I literally cried because I knew someone had died there.
Because I knew that was a part of the plane.
That meant...
they were no longer alive
and that wasn't the answer their family members were looking for.
This is the most security that we've seen so far.
They're obviously here to protect the Prime Minister.
Mr. Prime Minister, this is for American journalism.
Press conference later.
On the 15th of March,
I received a call from Malaysian Airlines
to say that there's going to be an announcement
from the Malaysian prime minister.
There's a moment of trepidation that,
"Oh no, they've found them and this is it."
"This is it, he is truly gone."
Today,
based on new satellite communication,
we can confirm
MH370
did indeed
turn back over Peninsular Malaysia
before turning northwest.
I was like, "What is going on?"
I was just in disbelief that... that they were telling us this.
We are ending our operations in the South China Sea
and reassessing the redeployment of our assets.
I knew that what I had in the South China Sea
was the debris of MH370
and I was not going to just sit around and not be vocal about that.
I already had notified Tomnod that this debris existed.
But I never got an acknowledgment that I tagged debris.
I mean, it was like nothing ever happened.
So I tweeted everybody I could tweet.
I put it on Facebook.
I emailed.
I did everything I could to try and get someone's attention that the debris
was off Vietnam in the South China Sea.
It frustrated a lot of us Tomnoders.
But then the next thing I heard was even more confusing.
Based on this new data,
we have determined
that the plane's last communication
with a satellite
was in one of two possible corridors.
So this is really-- this is getting weirder and weirder by the day.
So now,
after the plane leaves the area of military radar,
it turns out that
a satellite communication service called Inmarsat
had equipment aboard the plane that was
communicating with a satellite
that was located above
the central Indian Ocean.
There are stunning new developments in the disappearance of flight 370.
There is new information coming in that's reshaping theories...
The search was in the wrong area.
The aircraft could be anywhere in these two arcs...
...they're covering are so vast, hundreds of thousands of square miles.
370...
When a plane is out over the open ocean,
the only way it can communicate by radio
is by transmitting a signal up to a satellite.
So, still no plane, but streams of data to sift through.
Inmarsat are in the business of providing
satellite communication for planes.
when they're beyond range of ground radar systems.
What we found in the data
were these seven handshakes, or "pings," as they came to be known.
Every hour, the Inmarsat system was checking
that the satellite terminal on the aircraft was responding.
So it would send a message basically saying, "Are you still there?"
And the satellite terminal responded saying, "Yes."
And these pings continued, or these messages continued,
for up to six hours after last contact.
There was a deep sense of shock.
We weren't expecting to see the aircraft appear still to be flying.
But there's nothing in the data itself to give any positional information.
There was no GPS coordinates, for example.
All we know is how far the aircraft is away from the satellite.
So we knew that we had additional work to determine whether
the aircraft was traveling north or south for the last part of the flight.
But we knew analysis was going to take time.
So...
the mystery has only deepened.
Um, we know that the plane flew on for several hours.
One of the routes went south
and ended up in the remote southern Indian Ocean.
The other one went north into Central Asia.
Now. the most optimistic possibility is that it landed somewhere in Central Asia,
like Kazakhstan.
But if the plane went south
it must have crashed
in the remote ocean.
There's no way that anyone could have survived.
So while Inmarsat worked on where the plane went,
the Malaysians are now forced to acknowledge
a basic fact that'd been pretty obvious to onlookers for a while.
Good evening. The word from Malaysia tonight
is that whatever happened to Malaysia Airlines flight 370
was no accident.
The country's prime minister publicly confirming today
what has been a widely held suspicion
that the plane was deliberately flown off course.
Can you tell us what you were doing inside the house?
In Kuala Lumpur, flight 370 is now
a criminal investigation.
This white police car
has just raided the home
of the captain of MH370.
The general consensus was that the pilots took the plane.
As I said before, this is definitely not an accident.
You don't fly for eight hours
and travel thousands of miles by accident.
From the get-go,
of the two pilots,
one was considered infinitely more likely
to be the culprit.
The co-pilot was
very wet behind the ears.
He had just been approved to fly as a first officer on a 777.
So the focus was always on the captain of the flight,
Zaharie Ahmad Shah
because he was an extremely experienced captain,
and what was done
was aggressive and sophisticated.
Hi everyone, uh...
this is a YouTube video that I made, um...
The pilot's home flight simulator
was removed by police to see if perhaps
the erratic route flight 370 took
was first rehearsed in cyberspace.
We took possession of a simulator...
of a flight simulator.
Zaharie had the chops.
Zaharie was a veteran, experienced guy, who would know all the angles.
Who'd be able to conceive of something as complicated as this.
But...
there was still no sign of this plane.
Whether it's heading north or south.
Our engineer, who'd been working on the numbers,
contacted me to say that he had cracked the problem.
He had to really dig into the system,
understand how all the components in the system work,
to establish, essentially, the equation
for what would be expected if the aircraft was moving north
or if it was moving south.
He had been able to determine which of the flight paths
MH370 had taken.
So, I sat at my kitchen table that weekend
creating some information that we could pass to the Malaysian authorities.
The Malaysian Airlines center tells us,
"There's an important press conference coming up tomorrow,
so be in front of your TV in the morning."
So deep down you're telling yourself,
"They're still alive."
"If there's no crash, they're still alive."
For quite some time, I kept communicating with them.
They had their phones so I kept sending texts.
So every night before going to bed, I would text them all.
"How are you?" "Thinking about you." "Here's what I did today."
It was a way for me to keep the dialogue going with them in a way.
This evening,
I was briefed by representatives from the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch.
Based on their new analysis,
Inmarsat
and the AAIB
have concluded
that MH370
flew along the southern corridor.
This...
is a remote location,
far from any possible landing sites.
It is, therefore,
with deep sadness
and regret that I must inform you
that according
to this new data,
flight MH370
ended in the southern
Indian Ocean.
They still don't have any proof
that their loved ones are dead.
All we had was the satellite data.
We had no physical evidence.
So,
he's essentially telling
the loved ones of the passengers and crew,
"Your loved ones are dead because of math."
Fuck Malaysia!
Malaysia is lying!
Never in the history of human existence
have 239 people
been declared dead
on the basis of mathematics alone.
Nothing had been found.
The exact location of the plane had not been worked out.
There was some sort of calculation on the position of the plane.
But the result had not been verified.
To us, they were frantically trying to hide something
and wrap it up quickly.
Here, we the families of the 154 Chinese passengers on MH370,
vehemently protest against and condemn Malaysia Airlines,
the Malaysian government and the military!
- Bring our family back! - Bring our family back!
- Tell us the truth! - Tell us the truth!
We will use all possible means to hold Malaysian Airlines,
the Malaysian government and military accountable for their unforgivable crimes.
Parts of Beijing were in full riot mode today
as families descended on the Malaysian embassy to protest.
Bring our families back!
This is such a rarity in Beijing,
a public protest bringing the streets to a standstill,
but such is the discontent amongst these family members,
they're allowed to do it.
The families had been yelling slogans like...
Tell us the truth!
"Malaysia is a liar."
Bring our families back!
"You are murderers."
We simply refused to accept
that the fate
of our 154 loved ones had been sealed by virtue of an announcement.
The rally itself was kept outside of Malaysian embassy fences,
out of the view of the world's media.
We felt really helpless.
And angry.
The chief executive of Malaysia Airlines
agreed to be interviewed for the first time today.
Our primary role is really to ensure we take care of the families.
I think we've gone beyond our normal responses.
I think they would say you haven't gone far enough.
Well, I think it's unfair. I think we've done all we can.
There was this swirling fog
of unanswered questions.
But for me, it was clear.
The overwhelming body of evidence
pointed strongly to my theory.
The pilot decided to commit mass murder-suicide.
He had wound up
on this straight beeline
into the southern Indian Ocean,
in order to end his life and to murder
more than 200 other human beings.
This was something that must have required significant planning.
And so,
as an aviation journalist,
I felt like I had to paint a comprehensive
and final decisive picture of what had happened that night.
Shortly after one o'clock in the morning,
Zaharie is flying over the South China Sea.
He is responsible for 11 crew
and 227 passengers
making their way to Beijing on a routine red-eye.
At this stage,
air traffic control in Kuala Lumpur
calls up and says...
Malaysian 370, contact Ho Chi Minh 120, decimal 9.
Good night.
MH370 is about to be handed over to the next set
of air traffic controllers, who are in Vietnam.
So Zaharie says...
Good night, Malaysian 370.
He's now in a kind of gray zone
in between two areas of air traffic control.
Nobody's paying attention to him.
Maybe he says to the co-pilot,
"Hey, buddy, why don't you go in the back and get me something?"
The co-pilot closes the door.
Zaharie locks it.
Now, he's about to implement his big plan.
He turns off all the electronics that make the plane visible
to the outside world.
It vanishes from radar.
At that moment
for everyone else aboard the plane,
everything was routine.
Zaharie is in complete control
and nobody knows anything about it.
He grabs the yoke
and he pulls it into a hard left turn.
He heads back towards the Malaysian peninsula.
But then...
perhaps the co-pilot realizes that he's been locked out of the cockpit.
Zaharie knows that he
is going to have a very hard time keeping control of the plane.
So...
maybe he
starts depressurizing the cabin.
Everyone is confused.
But what a lot of the passengers don't realize
is that the oxygen generators in these emergency masks
only work for about 15 minutes.
The captain has a more sophisticated, longer-lasting mask.
And soon the entire cabin is quiet.
He turns the plane to the south.
And he flies straight, into the darkness,
waiting for his fuel to run out.
After six hours of flight...
the engines stop running.
He pushes the nose down.
And he starts to slide into a dive.
Decrease, pull up.
That is the scenario that is necessary
if Zaharie took the plane.
It had to be that sequence of events.
It is worth pointing out that there have been a handful of cases
of pilots who have decided to
kill their passengers.
But...
there has never been a case
that someone has taken six hours
to commit mass murder-suicide.
I started to wonder...
maybe it wasn't Zaharie after all.
And then, four and a half months after the disappearance,
something happens that
is like a rip in the fabric of reality.
Good morning.
Yesterday, Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 took off from Amsterdam
and was shot down over Ukraine, near the Russian border.
And I think, "Oh my God."
Malaysian Airlines hadn't had a significant accident since the '90s.
And now, in the span of four and a half months,
they'd lost two huge 777s.
It seemed like an incredible coincidence.
At this point,
MH370 is not just an unsolved mass murder.
It's potentially...
an act of war.