MH370 vanished in March 2014, while travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. Captain Zaharie Shah was piloting MH370 when it last made contact with air traffic control at 1.19am over the South China Sea. And only moments later, MH370 disappeared from radar screens following a routine switch from Malaysian to Vietnamese channels.
MH370’s relatives of the victims have had to endure five agonising years of not knowing what happened to their loved ones.
If MH370’s fuselage was ever found, the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder would provide invaluable evidence.
The only available evidence as to MH370’s fate is based on painstaking analysis of satellite “pings” automatically transmitted from the aircraft each hour until it disappeared.
MH370 was calculated to be close to the so-called “Seventh Arc” off the west coast off Australia.
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However two intensive searches of vast swathes of seabed never detected any trace of the Malaysia Airlines jet.
Nineteen accident investigators concluded in the official report: “The team is unable to determine the real cause for the disappearance of MH370.”
And this vacuum of evidence has been filled by speculation.
Many conspiracy theories are easily dismissed: a North Korean missile did not down MH370, and nor is the aircraft hidden in a hangar in Kazakhstan.
However an array of other explanations are still possible.
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Martin Dolan, of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, said: “This was planned, this was deliberate, and it was done over an extended period of time.”
Philip Baum, editor of Aviation Security International, agrees.
He said: “Most agencies are confident that the loss of MH370 was the result of a criminal act and that the aircraft was deliberately, and manually, made to divert from its intended flight plan.
“The question then arises as to who carried out the act and where they were at the time?”
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Five plausible scenarios for MH370’s fate:
Pilot-assisted suicide: a pilot on board intentionally hijacked his own aircraft in order to take his own life and kill everyone on board.
MH370 was hijacked by Captain Zaharie Shah with the intention of landing or ditching, surviving and escaping.
MH370 was hijacked by a passenger or another cabin crew member.
MH370 was hijacked remotely in a sophisticated acts of cyberterrorism.
MH370 was seized by a stowaway concealed in the avionics bay with the skills to control communications and pilot the aircraft out of sight.