MH370 Theories

Theories on what may have happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went missing on Saturday, 8 March 2014. The event was brought to the world's attention at 7.24am with the words Malaysia Airlines confirms that flight MH370 has lost contact with Subang Air Traffic Control at 2.40am, today (8 March 2014) (emphasis added). Instead of landing at Beijing International airport at around 6:30 am the aircraft apparently (and unknown to everyone) was still in the air and continued flying until running out of fuel at an unknown location in the southern Indian Ocean.

The lack of data created an information vacuum which would be filled with suggestions on what may have happened, ranging from possibly helpful to outright fantasy.

To provide content to articles about the incident, beyond what was officially released by Malaysia Airlines or the Ministry of Transport (Malaysia), mainstream media promoted various theories and added filler content by referring to past incidents, inferring that a current suggestion had credibility because a similar event had occurred in the past.

Some of those scenarios are repeated in this section together with links to related accidents and incidents.

Sub-page List

• MH370 Theories/Communication Loss
• MH370 Theories/Crashed
• MH370 Theories/Disappeared

	Crashed
	Disappeared
	Communication Loss
	Evaded Radar
	The Get Away

Could the pilots have succumbed to hypoxia? Did MH370 become a 'zombie flight' like Helios Airways Flight 522?

Could the aircraft have depressurized, caused by a known fault: cracking and corrosion in the fuselage skin underneath the SATCOM antenna?

Could the aircraft have been affected by fire? There are many instances of aircraft fires, but of interest was EgyptAir Flight 667, also a Boeing 777.

The search for MH370 was unsuccessful, but there are many lost aircraft. The search for Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan in 1937 was the largest ever (at that time) but the aircraft has never been found. When Air France flight AF447 crashed some debris was recovered within 5 days, but the wreckage was not located until nearly two years later.

Or could the fate of MH370 have been a tragic case of pilot suicide? Several incidents had occurred prior to 2014 and another, Germanwings Flight 9525, may have been influenced by MH370.

Each of the above examples, and other theories covered in this section, use past incident(s) to attempt an explanation for the present (MH370) tragedy.

However, flight MH370 is unprecedented. No large passenger aircraft on a scheduled flight has ever shut down communications and been flown so far away from either the departure or destination airports, beyond the range of both civilian and military radar, and to a final location in such a remote place as the southern Indian Ocean. The wreckage has not been located. The reason for the diversion is unknown. No-one apart from the pilots had the skills to fly the aircraft, and the flight path is unlikely to have been programmed into the auto-pilot. So we don't know what happened; why it happened; or where exactly it is. Unprecedented.

To cover the various theories that have been proposed since MH370 went missing, each possibility is discussed in the context of related events which include those covered by mainstream media and with perhaps a few more examples added.

As neither Malaysia Airlines nor Air Traffic Control, or anyone else, knew anything at the beginning of the news cycle the media published headlines and content which reflected what little was known, with conjecture filling an information vacuum, starting with the first two observations: contact with the aircraft was lost; and the aircraft seemed to have 'disappeared'. That is the starting point here too, followed by other topics linked by the navigation buttons to the right:-

Topics

Causes for a Crash

Causes for Disappearance

Causes for Air Turnback

Causes for Loss of Communication

Satellite Communications