The decade-long mystery over the fate of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 which disappeared in March 2014 still continues to baffle experts – but one aviation enthusiast believes he might still be able to solve the conundrum.
It has been assumed that the craft plunged into the Southern Indian Ocean, but despite a search spanning 46,332 square miles the plane has never been found beyond a few fragments – some of which were discovered on a beach in Saint Denis on Reunion Island in July 2015.
However, despite several pieces of the plane being found, nothing more substantial – including the craft’s data recording devices, which could contain crucial information – have ever been located.
Now, US-based science journalist and private pilot Jeff Wise is launching a new experiment, which he believes could hold the key to where the plane may have crashed. The Finding MH370 project will try to establish whether the plane did indeed end up in the Southern Indian Ocean by placing a replica of a piece of debris in the likely crash site and remotely monitoring marine growth on that piece.
Speaking to FEMAIL, he said: ‘It is the most baffling case – most are far more straight forward.’
The final destination of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 remains unknown, with different flight paths suggested by different theorists
The most important piece of evidence found from the ill-fated flight is the plane’s flaperon, which was found in Saint-Andre, Reunion. Barnacle grown can be seen on the debris
He likened the case to another aviation mystery: Air France Flight 447, which disappeared on June 1, 2009]. The craft’s flight recorders were only recovered from the Atlantic Ocean in May 2011, and the final report in 2012 concluded that mechanical faults and incorrect crew reaction had caused the accident.
He added that, in the case of MH370, the disappearance ‘looks like a case of pilot murder-suicide’ when one glances at the details – but this has not been definitively proven.
Wise, author of the book The Taking Of MH370, says the outcome of his new experiment could help point the needle in the direction of what happened to the craft.
Currently, the most prominent of many theories is that the flight’s disappearance was caused by a murder/suicide carried out by one of the plane’s pilots. This is supported by the fact that the plane’s tracking devices were switched off in the cockpit, leading Malaysian authorities to believe someone had deliberately disabled them to lead the plane off course.
The pilot in command was 53-year-old Zaharie Ahmad Shah. With 18,365 flying hours, he was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines, having joined the company in 1983.
His first officer was Fariq Hamid, 27. It was a training flight for him – his last before he was set to be examined to become a fully certified pilot. He had joined the airline in 2007 and he had a good record with 2,700 hours of flight experience.
Jeff Wise (pictured) is a US-based science journalist who has been investigation the disappearance for many years. He has launched the Finding MH370 project, in the hopes of finding out what happened to the missing aircraft
In the weeks following the tragedy, authorities reported that they were looking into the two pilots: searching their homes in Kuala Lumpur, probing into their private lives and analysing their psychological profiles. It is not thought that the pair were working together on a plot.
Suspicion largely fell on the older, more experienced Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah due to rumblings that he was experiencing issues in his personal life that could have contributed to mental strain.
The most popular theory as to what happened to the missing flight is that its captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah (pictured), perpetrated a murder-suicide plot, deliberately crashing the plane into the ocean
On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 and the 239 people on-board took off into the night’s sky from Kuala Lumpur, never to be seen or heard from again (the missing aircraft is pictured here in December 2011)
New Zealand-based air accident investigator Ewan Wilson, the founder of Kiwi Airlines and a commercial pilot himself, provided the first independent study into the disaster. In it, he came to conclusion it has been a murder-suicide after considering ‘every conceivable alternative scenario’.
The claims are made in the book Goodnight Malaysian 370, which Wilson co-wrote with the New Zealand broadsheet journalist, Geoff Taylor. However, he has not been able to provide any conclusive evidence to support his theory and many family members of Captain Zaharie have strongly disputed the theory.
Additionally, it was reported that Malaysian police and technical experts from the FBI found ‘no evidence’ that Captain Zaharie was planning to hijack a flight – despite the fact he had used a flight simulator to plot a path to the Southern Indian Ocean at home.
After a huge search operation, focused on the Indian Ocean, yielded little in the way of concrete information about the disappearance of the jet, the hunt was abandoned in January 2017.
A second search launched in January 2018 by private contractor Ocean Infinity ended without success after six months.
What is known for certain about MH370 – obtained from radar data – is that the aircraft was flying normally along its intended flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing around 1am on March 9, 2014.
At 1.01am Captain Zaharie radioed to say that the plane had levelled off at 35,000ft, then repeated the transmission at 1.08am as he left Malaysian airspace. At 1.19am the controller at Kuala Lumpur Center radioed to say goodnight as the plane neared the start of Vietnamese air-traffic jurisdiction.
Zaharie radioed back: ‘Good night. Malaysian three-seven-zero.’ He was never heard from again.
Shortly afterwards, at 1.21am, the flight dropped off secondary radar systems used by air traffic control.
Primary radar systems later revealed that, moments after the plane vanished from secondary systems, it made a sharp turn away from its intended flight path. Experts say this turn would have to be made by hand, because it was too tight to have been executed by autopilot.
March 8 2024 marked 10 years since the disappearance of the aircraft, leaving families and friends of those aboard without answers as to what happened to their loved one (a relative is pictured writing a message at the Day of Remembrance for MH370 in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia on March 3, 2024)
Catherine Gang, whose husband Li Zhi was on board the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, holds a banner as she walks outside Yonghegong Lama Temple after a gathering of family members of the missing passengers in Beijing, on March 8, 2015
Speaking about the murder/suicide theory, Wise notes he has an open mind about the fate of the flight; but it boils down to two theories; that the plane crashed into the Southern Indian Ocean, or that it didn’t.
While he remains open to the possibility that the incident was due to pilot mass murder-suicide, he says that based on the evidence available, he is more drawn to the theory that the plane could have been hijacked remotely.
However, some people have cast doubt on Wise’s theory, with people in the aviation community dismissing him as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ who makes ‘outlandish’ claims.
‘I’m not looking for converts,’ Wise told FEMAIL, acknowledging these accusations. ‘I’m not trying to start a religion. I’m saying that [we live] in an environment that potentially has threat actors in it.
‘[This is] an environment where we know that cybersecurity is an issue in every aspect. Every industry is increasingly automated, increasingly computerised.’
He added: ‘I’m not trying to tell people that I know 100 per cent what happened in the plane, but I’m trying to say that we really owe it to ourselves to to consider the possibility that this is a cyber security breach, because it is possible. We are in an age of cybersecurity.’
Families of passengers from both China and Malaysia, who were aboard the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, are seen during a remembrance event commemorating the 10th anniversary of its disappearance, in Subang Jaya, Malaysia March 3, 2024
Indian sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik creates a sand sculpture of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 on Puri beach in eastern Odisha state on March 7, 2015
Many have questioned whether it is even possible to hijack a plane remotely; however, there have been reports in recent years suggesting it might indeed be plausible.
Wise’s new project hopes to determine whether or not the plane crashed into the Southern Indian Ocean. It’s based on information found on the most significant piece of debris so far found from this missing craft – the flaperon.
As the first piece of the plane to be found, it had spent the least amount of time drifting, which indicates it provides the most useful data point for reverse-drift modelling.
Notably, the piece was covered in gooseneck barnacles (Lepas anatifera) whose shells contained chemical clues that should have provided further evidence about where the plane crashed.
It was hoped that studying this barnacle growth could help find pinpoint the crash site – something professor Gregory Herbert at the University of South Florida also explored.
Barnacle shells on parts of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 that washed up can reveal more about what happened to the plane, experts say. Pictured, authorities stand near a piece of barnacle-covered plane debris (part of the wing known as a flaperon) in Saint-Andre, on the French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion, in this picture taken on July 29, 2015
Malaysian Minister of Transport, Anthony Loke (centre) looks at the flaperon found on Pemba Island, Tanzania, which was identified a missing part of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370
A study led by Gregory Herbert considered that the answer to the mystery could be contained in these barnacles that attached themselves to bits of the plane’s debris.
He explained that the geochemistry of the crustaceans attached to the plane debris ‘could provide clues to the crash location’, likening them to rings on a tree.
For his study, Professor Herbert and colleagues performed a lab-based growth experiment with live barnacles to unlock their temperature records from their shells.
‘We grew Lepas barnacles in the lab at different constant temperatures over weeks and then chemically analysed the new shell layers that were grown in that time,’ he told MailOnline in August 2023.
‘We found that the shell chemistry is so predictable that we can tell what ocean temperature the barnacle was experiencing when it grew each sub-millimetre thick layer of shell.’
After the experiment, they applied the successful method to small barnacles that were taken from MH370.
With help from experts at University of Galway in Ireland, they combined the barnacles’ water temperature records with oceanographic modelling to generate a simulation of where the plane’s debris drifted from.
French scientist Joseph Poupin was one of the first biologists to examine the flaperon from MH370 that was found covered in barnacles. Poupin concluded that the largest barnacles attached were possibly old enough to have colonised on the wreckage very shortly after the crash and very close to the actual crash location where the plane is now.
Temperatures recorded in these largest shells could help investigators narrow their search, according to Professor Herbert. However, the University of South Florida study, published in the journal AGU Advances, only used data from the flaperon’s smaller barnacles.
Until now, the search for MH370 spanned several thousands of miles along a north-south corridor deemed ‘the seventh arc’ where investigators believe the plane could have glided after running out of fuel.
Because ocean temperatures can change rapidly along the arc, still speaking in 2023, Professor Herbert said this method could reveal precisely where the plane is.
Even if the plane is not on the arc, studying the oldest and largest barnacles can still narrow down the areas to search in the Indian Ocean.
‘Investigators have good reason to believe that the plane is somewhere along the seventh arc,’ Professor Herbert told MailOnline. ‘However, they’ve spent close to $200 million searching for it along the seventh arc since 2014 and have found nothing. There’s currently no method or tool for finding the plane if it crashed away from the seventh arc, but our new method fills that need.’
Unfortunately, further study yielded inconsistent results – when the largest barnacles were analysed, they suggested that the flaperon had been drifting for around some four months – far less than the 16 months that passed between the plane’s disappearance and the discovery of the piece of debris.
A photo from Professor Herbert’s study shows barnacles growing in a controlled environment as part of a growth experiment for the research
Speaking about the results, Iain Suthers, a researcher with the University of New South Wales, said: ‘Unfortunately for crash investigators, the new, faster Lepas growth rates suggest that the large (36 mm) Lepas found on the missing Malaysian Airline flight MH370 wreckage at Reunion Island – 16 months after the aircraft was believed to have crashed in 2014 – were much younger than previously realised.’
However, barnacle studies still provide some hope for investigators – and this is where Wise’s experiment steps in.
He describes the previous barnacle findings as presenting a ‘paradox’. He notes that not only does the barnacle growth on the flaperon suggest it was not drifting for 16 months, but also that there was barnacle growth on the piece of flaperon that had floated above water – which was unexpected, as barnacles live exclusively underwater.
This has led to questions as to whether the conditions in the Ocean mean the barnacles did not grow as expected, or whether the piece could have been planted there at a later date.
Wise has started a Kickstarter to fund the experiment – though he notes that even if the target isn’t reached, he will make sure he is able to go ahead with the research.
According to the Kickstarter: ‘This project will resolve the issue by obtaining a real 777 flaperon [one of which has been found] cutting it down to match the damaged flaperon recovered on Réunion Island, outfitting with sensors and telemetry, and then releasing it near the presumed crash site of MH370 on the 11th anniversary of the disappearance.
‘Cameras will monitor the growth of barnacles on the surface, and a radio transmitter will relay its location and the temperature of the water. After 15 months, the flaperon will be recovered and the barnacle population examined.’
While that is happening, the Finding MH370 team of volunteers will be working on sampling Lepas barnacles growing on some of the more than 1,000 Global Drifter buoys currently floating in the world’s oceans.
‘Each buoy regularly transmits its location and the temperature of the water it is floating in,’ it says. ‘By examining a large number of buoys that have floated in the same region of the ocean that MH370’s flaperon did, we can build a robust understanding of what natural Lepas growth on the debris would have looked like.’
This is not the first time a 777 flaperon will be put into the water: in 2017, a piece cut down to match that from the missing flight was submerged by Australian government researchers, who used it to refine their drift models – however, they did not leave it in the water to track barnacle growth.
Wise pointed out that in scientific study, hypotheses are formed, and evidence is gathered to then test them. He believes that the Finding MH370 Project will lead to one of two outcomes.
The first is that they find that ‘Lepas barnacles do grow all over the flaperon, and they often reach a small maximum size in the southern Indian Ocean due to predation, lack of food, or other factors’.
In this case, he says, these findings would support the theory that pilot was the perpetrator of a mass murder-suicide.
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The other outcome, according to the Kickstarter, is that researchers will ‘find that Lepas barnacles live only on the portion of the flaperon which remains continuously immersed in water, and that in 15 months they consistently grow considerably larger than those found on the Réunion flaperon’.
It notes: ‘Such findings will support the conclusion that MH370 was hijacked by a third party with pieces of debris later planted to further their deception.’
The Finding MH370 project has partnered with various experts to carry out the experiment including the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
In 2017, Australian researchers put a flaperon (cut down to replicate the piece found from the missing aircraft) in the water to follow drift patterns, but did not leave it there to measure barnacle growth
As with any experiment, there is the possibility that things could go wrong – telemetry equipment could fail, resulting in the loss of communication with the flaperon, for example. However, the technology is robust, and Wise is optimistic that this project offers the most comprehensive option for further insight into where MH370 could be.
He hopes that any new information the project yields could re-open the investigation with authorities, who seem to have stopped any attempts to find the craft, despite the lack of any definitive conclusion as to what happened to the plane and the 239 people who vanished.
Wise told MailOnline: ‘[Authorities] are saying, “Oh, we’ve done everything we can”.
‘You have not done everything you can. You haven’t. You stopped trying. There are things that you can do. And if I have to do it myself, I will.’
