The Vanishing of Flight 370 — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:34At Kuala Lumpur International Airport, a Boeing 777 is preparing for departure.
2. 0:50Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is a daily passenger flight between Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Beijing, China.
3. 1:07Forty-two minutes past midnight, Flight 370 is given clearance to depart.
4. 1:11On board are Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid,
5. 1:16ten cabin crew members, and 227 passengers.
6. 1:40Less than an hour into the flight, the plane is cruising over the South China Sea at an altitude of 35,000 feet.
7. 1:46The night sky is clear and the weather is calm.
8. 1:51Flight 370 is then instructed to signal air traffic control in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam
9. 1:55as it is about to enter Vietnamese airspace.
10. 1:58The flight controller in Kuala Lumpur says good night with no sign that anything should be amiss.
11. 2:29One minute and forty-three seconds later, the aircraft suddenly vanish from radar screens
12. 2:34at Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Minh, and Bangkok.
13. 2:38This form of positional tracking depends on a signal being emitted by one of two transponders
14. 2:42aboard the plane, and so its disappearance would suggest both transponders ceased to function,
15. 2:48or the system was manually deactivated by someone onboard.
16. 2:53All subsequent attempts to contact and ascertain the whereabouts of Flight 370 are unsuccessful.
17. 2:59The aircraft has seemingly vanished without a trace.
18. 3:02After missing its scheduled time of arrival in Beijing some four hours later,
19. 3:07Flight 370 is officially declared missing, and in the wake of that announcement,
20. 3:11the most expensive search effort in aviation history is about to commence.
21. 3:29The search was initially concentrated around the location of the flight's disappearance
22. 3:33between the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand.
23. 3:37The search area was soon expanded, however, after the Malaysian military disclosed additional information.
24. 3:42Unlike the radar system employed by Air Traffic Control, long-range military radar does not rely on transponders
25. 3:48but use reflectance to track the position of aerial targets.
26. 3:52A review of the data collected by the Malaysian military revealed that moments after contact
27. 3:56with Flight 370 was lost, the aircraft had deviated from its scheduled flight path
28. 4:01with a subtle turn to the right followed by a prolonged turn to the left.
29. 4:05The aircraft had then flown back towards and across the Malaysian peninsula
30. 4:09before turning right near the island of Penang.
31. 4:12It maintained this northwesterly heading until it escaped the radar's coverage.
32. 4:16Over the next few days, the Strait of Malacca, the Andaman Sea, and the Bay of Bengal
33. 4:21was scoured by a multinational fleet of aircraft and vessels, but there was no trace of Flight 370.
34. 4:28Meanwhile, investigators began to analyze the aircraft's satellite communication records.
35. 4:33Like all modern airliners, Flight 370 was equipped with a satellite communications terminal,
36. 4:38or SATCOM, to send and received transmissions to and from the ground.
37. 4:44Prior to departure, the SATCOM terminal had logged on to the satellite network
38. 4:48and established a connection with a ground station in Perth, Australia.
39. 4:52That station then maintained a detailed record of all the incoming and outgoing traffic
40. 4:57between it and Flight 370.
41. 4:59This is what it contained.
42. 5:01Prior to the flight's disappearance over the South China Sea,
43. 5:04everything appeared to be working as intended.
44. 5:07Then, at some point during this portion of the flight, the SATCOM link was severed.
45. 5:12For whatever reason, the terminal ceased to respond.
46. 5:16But three minutes after the flight vanished over the Andaman Sea
47. 5:20the terminal requested to log back on to the network.
48. 5:23The SATCOM link was successfully reestablished and was not disrupted again
49. 5:27until nearly six hours later when the flight is presumed to have crashed due to fuel exhaustion.
50. 5:36During these final hours, two attempts were made to contact the plane via satellite telephone.
51. 5:41Both calls were acknowledged by the SATCOM terminal and would've been routed to the cockpit,
52. 5:46yet they went unanswered.
53. 5:49The terminal had also responded to five automatic status requests.
54. 5:53In short, if the ground station had not heard from the aircraft in over an hour,
55. 5:57it would transmit a signal to confirm the terminal was still online.
56. 6:01While these transmissions did not contain any information about the flight's position,
57. 6:04investigators were able to measure the distance between the satellite and the aircraft
58. 6:09at the time of each transmission based on how long it took those transmissions
59. 6:13to be sent and received.
60. 6:15This generated seven rings of possible locations
61. 6:19from which seven of these transmissions are thought to have originated.
62. 6:24By taking fuel consumption, speed, and other factors into account,
63. 6:28flight path analysis indicated the most probable origin of the final transmission
64. 6:32to be somewhere along this arc in the southern Indian Ocean.
65. 6:37The search effort shifted accordingly, and as the region fell within the jurisdiction of Australia,
66. 6:42the Australian government took charge of the operation.
67. 6:45Over the next few weeks, the search area was progressively refined to account for oceanic drift
68. 6:50as well as improved estimations of the flight path.
69. 6:53But this part of the southern Indian Ocean is so remote it took six days just to get there.
70. 7:00A new fleet of aircraft and vessels gradually covered more than 4,500,000 km2 of ocean,
71. 7:07but Flight 370 was nowhere to be found.
72. 7:17If the impact with the ocean had been sufficiently forceful, it was possible the resulting sound
73. 7:22had been recorded by underwater listening devices known as hydrophones.
74. 7:27This possibility was investigated, and four hydroacoustic monitoring stations
75. 7:31had recorded something...
76. 7:44While the timing and direction of the sound were reasonably consistent
77. 7:48with the final satellite transmission, the estimated origin was not.
78. 7:52The sound was in all likelihood caused by nothing more than geological activity.
79. 7:57Flight 370 was also equipped with two underwater locator beacons
80. 8:01which had a battery life of some 40 days, and as the deadline approached in early April,
81. 8:06signals with a pulse and frequency somewhat similar to the signal emitted by the beacons
82. 8:11were detected at depths of up to 3,000 meters.
83. 8:14An autonomous submersible then spent weeks scanning the seafloor
84. 8:18where the signals had been detected, but no wreckage was ever found.
85. 8:25And nothing would be found until more than 16 months later when a discovery was made
86. 8:29on the opposite side of the Indian Ocean.
87. 8:33On the 29th of July, 2015, a group of people was cleaning up a beach in Réunion,
88. 8:38a small island to the east of Madagascar, when they stumbled upon this
89. 8:422-meter-long metallic object covered in barnacles.
90. 8:46Aviation experts quickly identified the object as a section of an aircraft wing known as a flaperon.
91. 8:51Upon closer inspection, internal markings, including dates and serial numbers,
92. 8:57conclusively ascertained the flaperon belonged to Flight 370.
93. 9:02Even though Réunion Island is some 4,000 km west of the search area,
94. 9:06and more than a year had gone by since the flight disappeared,
95. 9:09the location was consistent with simulations of debris dispersal patterns.
96. 9:13There was now tangible evidence that Flight 370 had crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
97. 9:19The discovery of the flaperon prompted numerous searches
98. 9:22along beaches and shorelines of southeastern Africa,
99. 9:25and at least 31 additional items of interest have since been recovered and examined.
100. 9:30Some of these items include:
101. 9:32A section of the outboard flap from the right wing.
102. 9:36A piece of cowling from one of the two engines.
103. 9:40A partial door from the nose landing gear.
104. 9:44A section of the vertical stabilizer.
105. 9:48And a mangled casing from one of the embedded headrest monitors.
106. 9:52Eighteen of these items were identified as either likely, highly likely, or almost certain
107. 9:57to have originated from Flight 370, whereas only three could be confirmed.
108. 10:02The remaining eleven could not be identified.
109. 10:05There were no traces of an explosion found on any of the debris tested
110. 10:08nor was there any evidence of a fire except for three small burn marks on one of the unidentifiable items.
111. 10:15The search for debris was further aided by Earth observation satellites.
112. 10:20Analyses of satellite imagery from March of 2014 uncovered a number of images which appeared
113. 10:25to feature man-made objects floating on or just below the surface in the southern Indian Ocean.
114. 10:31However, the images were not nearly sharp enough to resolve any identifiable markings,
115. 10:36and multiple searches notwithstanding, this debris was never recovered.
116. 10:41A satellite image taken mere hours after the final transmission,
117. 10:44also captured what appeared to be a contrail some distance away from the search area.
118. 10:49A later analysis, however, concluded it was most likely a shadow
119. 10:53from a somewhat linear cloud formation.
120. 11:01The underwater portion of the search continued for months and eventually years
121. 11:06before it was finally suspended in early 2017.
122. 11:09By which point some 120,000 km2 of seabed had been scrutinized.
123. 11:15The search effort was then resumed by an American salvage company known as Ocean Infinity,
124. 11:19but after more than a year of searching, they too came up emptyhanded.
125. 11:23Unless the final resting place of Flight 370 can be located,
126. 11:27it may be impossible to determine exactly why it crashed.
127. 11:32Nevertheless, there has been no shortage of theories.
128. 11:41On the day of the disappearance, two of the passengers raised suspicion as they had boarded the flight
129. 11:46with stolen passports which immediately prompted concerns of a hijacking.
130. 11:51But investigators were unable to link the two men to any terrorist organizations
131. 11:55and soon determined they had traveled under false identities because they were seeking asylum,
132. 11:59not due to any nefarious intent.
133. 12:02Similar suspicions were raised when one of the passengers were identified as a flight engineer
134. 12:06who might have possessed the necessary expertise to take control of a Boeing 777.
135. 12:11Apart from the 239 persons onboard, Flight 370 carried nearly 11 metric tons of cargo.
136. 12:18Among the items listed on the flight manifest was a shipment of lithium-ion batteries,
137. 12:22which lead some to suspect a fire might have broken out mid-flight.
138. 12:26For instance, the crash of UPS Airlines Flight 6 in September of 2010 was the result of a fire
139. 12:33that was ignited by a pallet of lithium-ion batteries.
140. 12:36Another potential source of ignition would be an electrical malfunction.
141. 12:40The crash of Swissair Flight 111 in September of 1998
142. 12:44is thought to have been caused by a fire within the electrical wiring above the cockpit.
143. 12:48The fire damaged and disabled multiple avionic systems, including the transponders and SATCOM.
144. 12:55In the case of Flight 370, the sudden loss of communication
145. 12:58and subsequent deviation from its scheduled flight path might have been a direct response to a fire.
146. 13:04The two pilots may have turned back towards Malaysia to attempt an emergency landing
147. 13:08at the nearest suitable airport.
148. 13:10But no such attempt was ever made.
149. 13:13Instead, Flight 370 kept going and remained aloft for another six hours.
150. 13:19Some have theorized the crew might have been incapacitated
151. 13:22by a sudden or gradual loss of cabin pressure.
152. 13:25For instance, when Helios Airways Flight 522 failed to pressurize in August of 2005,
153. 13:31the pilots quickly fell unconscious, yet the aircraft continued to fly on autopilot for more than two hours
154. 13:37until it ran out of fuel.
155. 13:39Airline pilots are of course trained for such an event.
156. 13:42In the event of cabin depressurization, an automatic system is designed to deploy oxygen masks
157. 13:47to give the pilots enough time to perform an emergency descent to a more breathable altitude.
158. 13:52The data recorded by the Malaysian military radar does indeed contain altitude information,
159. 13:57but it is highly inconsistent.
160. 14:00In fact, a Boeing 777 is incapable of performing the extreme altitude fluctuations recorded.
161. 14:06At one point the aircraft exceeded its maximum operating altitude by more than 15,000 feet
162. 14:12before making a 50,000 feet nosedive in less than a minute.
163. 14:16Attempts to recreate these maneuvers on a flight simulator were unsuccessful,
164. 14:21and thus the data was deemed inaccurate and unreliable.
165. 14:26If Flight 370 did loose cabin pressure at 35,000 feet
166. 14:31and the pilots were incapacitated before descending to a more oxygenated altitude,
167. 14:35it might explain why the aircraft remained aloft for as long as it did.
168. 14:40What is a bit more difficult to explain, however, are these alterations in heading.
169. 14:45Flight simulations have established the aircraft must have been under manual control
170. 14:50during the initial left turn as the bank angle, or inclination, of that turn,
171. 14:55was beyond the limits of the autopilot.
172. 14:58Subsequent turns, however, could have been either manual or automatic.
173. 15:01But for the autopilot to have made these course corrections, someone with the requisite knowledge
174. 15:06must have programmed it to do so.
175. 15:09The only other alternative is that the aircraft was in fact under manual control.
176. 15:25In late June of 2014, several news outlets reported that a special investigation
177. 15:30had identified the captain of Flight 370 as a prime suspect.
178. 15:34A search of the captain's home had uncovered a flight simulator
179. 15:37which supposedly contained a suspicious route which ended in the southern Indian Ocean.
180. 15:43At the time, there was no official acknowledgment that such a route had been recovered,
181. 15:47and a lengthy public report, issued by the Malaysian government in 2015,
182. 15:51made no mention of such a discovery.
183. 15:54Then, in 2016, confidential documents pertaining to a forensic examination
184. 15:59conducted by the Royal Malaysia Police in May of 2014 was leaked to the media.
185. 16:05These documents made it clear that such a route had not only been recovered but thoroughly examined.
186. 16:10Soon thereafter, the Malaysian government confirmed the existence of this simulated flight path
187. 16:14and this is what it looks like.
188. 16:18It should come as no surprise that many regard this as damning evidence of premeditation,
189. 16:24but according to investigators it is not quite so evident.
190. 16:28The data recovered consists of seven coordinates.
191. 16:31Two in Kuala Lumpur.
192. 16:33Two in the Strait of Malacca.
193. 16:36One in the Bay of Bengal.
194. 16:38And two in the southern Indian Ocean.
195. 16:41The data was reconstructed from a file that had been automatically generated and saved
196. 16:46by the simulation software a month before the incident.
197. 16:49However, it's not clear whether the coordinates originate from the same flight session.
198. 16:54In other words, it might not be correct to simply trace a continuous line
199. 16:58between these seven coordinates as they could be from separate sessions.
200. 17:02The forensic examination by the Royal Malaysia Police simply concluded:
201. 17:06"No activity captured conclusively indicate any kind of premeditated act
202. 17:11pertaining to the incident of MH370."
203. 17:14Even so, the similarities between this simulated route and the presumed route of Flight 370
204. 17:19directly influenced the search operation.
205. 17:22Australian investigators considered the possibility of someone
206. 17:25deliberately extending the range of the flight by gliding the aircraft after fuel exhaustion.
207. 17:31If so, the plane could have traveled an additional 200 kilometers.
208. 17:35Alternatively, the range could have been reduced by a controlled ditching prior to fuel exhaustion.
209. 17:40While ultimately deemed unlikely, these two scenarios did affect the search effort.
210. 17:47If the captain steered Flight 370 off-course with the intention of crashing
211. 17:51in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean, his motive is an even greater mystery.
212. 17:57Zaharie Ahmad Shah was 53 and married with three children.
213. 18:01He had more than 18,000 hours of flight experience and a spotless track record.
214. 18:06Investigators found no evidence of financial issues
215. 18:09and his monthly expenses before the disappearance indicated nothing unusual.
216. 18:13He had no history of mental illness nor had he displayed any recent changes
217. 18:17in lifestyle or behavior.
218. 18:20He was raised on the island of Penang which has led some to speculate
219. 18:23the flight's second turn to the southwest of Penang was the captain getting a final view of his hometown.
220. 18:30Some believe a hijacking could have been politically motivated
221. 18:32as Zaharie was an avid supporter of a democratic opposition leader
222. 18:36who was sentenced to five years in prison mere hours before Flight 370 took off.
223. 18:41Others point to unconfirmed reports of marital issues, but this is contradicted by the official investigation
224. 18:47and disputed by family members.
225. 18:50The only real inconsistency noted by the final report
226. 18:53is that the captain failed to repeat the assigned radio frequency during the last verbal communication.
227. 19:06It would have been standard procedure to repeat the assigned frequency
228. 19:10as the captain had correctly done a few minutes prior.
229. 19:20Whether this omission is indicative of anything but a mistake is anyone's best guess.
230. 19:27By all accounts, Captain Zaharie was an affable and well-respected pilot
231. 19:31who was passionate about aviation as evident by the photos and videos he shared on social media.
232. 19:37Captain Zaharie: Hi everyone. This is a YouTube video that I've made
233. 19:42Captain Zaharie: as a community service.
234. 19:47The copilot was found to be even less conspicuous.
235. 19:50Fariq Abdul Hamid was only 27 and due to marry a fellow pilot.
236. 19:55He had nearly 3,000 hours of flight experience, although only 39 hours in this type of aircraft.
237. 20:01Much like Zaharie, Fariq had no financial, mental, or interpersonal issues of note,
238. 20:06nor was there any evidence of conflict between the two of them.
239. 20:10Some question the plausibility of a pilot-instigated hijacking
240. 20:13due to the apparent lack of interference by the other pilot.
241. 20:17Well, when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702 was hijacked by the copilot in February of 2014,
242. 20:23he did so by merely waiting for the captain to take a bathroom break
243. 20:26before locking the cockpit door behind him.
244. 20:29The copilot was then free to divert the Italy-bound flight to Switzerland to seek asylum.
245. 20:35The only noteworthy piece of evidence in regards to the copilot of Flight 370 is his phone.
246. 20:41You see, when the confidential documents were leaked, they also confirmed another long-circulated rumor.
247. 20:47Namely, that a cellphone tower had briefly established a connection with an iPhone 5S
248. 20:51belonging to the copilot as Flight 370 approached the island of Penang.
249. 20:56According to investigators, it was not a phone call, as has been widely reported by the media,
250. 21:01but merely an automatic location signal.
251. 21:04Why this information was omitted from public reports, we may never know.
252. 21:14So what is one to make of all of this?
253. 21:16On the one hand, the simulated flight path seems suspicions.
254. 21:20On the other, it is difficult to cast any substantial doubt on either of the two pilots' character.
255. 21:26It is equally difficult to deny a hijacking is consistent with the available evidence.
256. 21:31Then again, we're missing some quite major and literal pieces of evidence.
257. 21:36The final report issued by the Malaysian government in 2018 could not attribute the loss of communication
258. 21:42nor diversion of Flight 370 to a malfunction.
259. 21:46Instead, it is believed that someone manually manipulated the aircraft and its systems.
260. 21:52For instance, investigators believe SATCOM was manually disabled
261. 21:56by a sudden and prolonged interruption of power.
262. 21:59Then, once power was restored, the terminal simply rebooted.
263. 22:04Likewise, the alterations in heading are believed to be the result of manual inputs.
264. 22:09With that being said, the uncertainty of these findings are repeatedly emphasized
265. 22:13due to the limited evidence available, and the report does never explicitly state the flight was hijacked.
266. 22:20In fact, no real conclusion is reached.
267. 22:23Both the Malaysian and Australian government agree that Flight 370 crashed in the southern Indian Ocean
268. 22:29but that the cause is indeterminable without a wreckage.
269. 22:33The location of which has managed to elude some of the foremost aviation experts in the world
270. 22:38as well as an impressive arsenal of cutting edge technology for more than half a decade.
271. 22:43Authors, aviation experts, and independent investigators have all chimed in to offer their own
272. 22:49thoughts and theories as to the nature of the crash and the location of the wreckage.
273. 22:54Some believe there was no crash but that the aircraft was shot down by an American naval base
274. 22:59in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
275. 23:01The satellite transmissions where then supposedly forged as part of a massive cover up.
276. 23:06Others believe the aircraft turned right towards India and traveled as far north as Kazakhstan
277. 23:11completely undetected.
278. 23:13Debris was then supposedly planted along shorelines of southeastern Africa
279. 23:17as part of a massive cover up.
280. 23:20Another theory suggest the aircraft was remotely hijacked and controlled by someone on the ground.
281. 23:26While Boeing and other companies have experimented with technology
282. 23:29that would allow for an aircraft to be remotely controlled,
283. 23:32no commercial airliner is known to be outfitted with such a system.
284. 23:39On the less conspiratorial side, the assumption that Flight 370 flew in a straight line
285. 23:44and at a constant speed after turning left towards the southern Indian Ocean
286. 23:48might simply be incorrect.
287. 23:50In early 2018, a French team of independent investigators proposed an alternate flight path
288. 23:57whereby an attempted landing on Christmas Island lead to a crash site much further north
289. 24:02than the region identified by the official investigation.
290. 24:06While a surface search of this area was conducted about a week after the disappearance,
291. 24:11the underwater phase never reached this far north.
292. 24:20As of the making of this video, the search operation has been suspended,
293. 24:24but there have been talks of potentially resuming the search.
294. 24:28For now, it seems, the vanishing of Flight 370 will remain a mystery.