What happened to MH370? Netflix's The Plane That Disappeared true story

The series details the timeline of events which started with the plane's shocking disappearance before looking at various theories for why it never landed, from a possible hijacking situation to an electrical fire.

"It’s a story full of conspiracies and rabbit holes, shadowy figures and official silence – but most of all, it’s an opportunity to keep alive the memory of those who were lost in one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time and to keep pushing for answers," Netflix says.

Featuring interviews with family members of those aboard the flight, aviation experts and those involved in the story, MH370: The Plane That Disappeared is a gripping three-parter that looks at the case in intricate detail.

"Planes go up, planes go down. What planes don't do is vanish off the face of the Earth," aviation journalist Jeff Wise says in the documentary.

Read on for everything you need to know about the documentary, including possible theories for the plane's disappearance and whether it was ever found.

What happened to Flight MH370?

Flight MH370 was a Malaysia Airlines flight carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew that went missing on 8th March 2014 over the Indian Ocean.

A Boeing 777, the flight set off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12:41am local time in the hopes of landing in Beijing – however, the plane vanished from the air traffic radar at 1:22am MYT.

The last communication that the plane made was as it approached the end of Malaysian airspace, with Malaysia's air traffic control passing the flight off to Ho Chi Minh, with the pilot in command Zaharie Ahmad Shah replying: "Good night. Malaysian 370."

However, a military radar tracked the plane, which appeared to head west away from its original course. At 2:22am, the plane left the military radar range over the Andaman Sea.

The search effort for Flight MH370 was the biggest and most expensive in aviation history, with authorities looking in the Gulf of Thailand – where the plane's radar was last spotted – and in Andaman Sea, which is where the military signal last tracked it.

On 15th March, Malaysia's prime minister Najib Razak said that MH370 turned back over Peninsular Malaysia before turning northwest and that they were ending their operations in the South China Sea.

Razak went on to announce that the flight had crashed in the southern Indian Ocean after an Inmarsat satellite produced data indicating that conclusion, with authorities searching over 1,500 miles off the south-west coast of Australia.

In June, the Australian Transport Safety Board issued a report stating that passengers and crew likely died from suffocation and that the plane flew into the ocean whilst in autopilot, according to Reuters.

"Given these observations, the final stages of the unresponsive crew/hypoxia event type appeared to best fit the available evidence for the final period of MH370’s flight when it was heading in a generally southerly direction," the report read.

After years of searches failing to yield results, private US marine company Ocean Infinity started its own investigation in January 2018, however this ended six months later.

The Malaysian Ministry of Transport issued a final report in July 2018, concluding that investigators did not know what had happened to the plane and that some evidence pointed to "irresistibly to unlawful interference", including communications ceasing and the manual turn back.

Was Flight MH370 found?

Despite disappearing nine years ago, MH370 is still yet to be found and the bodies of its passengers are yet to be recovered.

In August 2015, part of an aircraft wing from MH370 was found on Reunion Island, while a year later, the transport ministers of both Australia and Malaysia announced that debris found in Mozambique was "almost certainly" from MH370, with two parts being "consistent with panels from a Malaysia Airline Boeing 777 aircraft".

The pieces were found on a Mozambique sandbank by members of the public, with Australian politician Darren Chester saying that they were "consistent with drift modelling" of ocean currents.

While the main structure of the plane is yet to be located, Ocean Infinity stated last year that it will continue its search in 2023 or 2024.

Flight MH370 theories

Crew hijacking

One theory that was considered by many was that MH370 had been hijacked by a member of the plane's crew, with suspicion on the plane's lead pilot Captain Zaharie Shah. In 2014, Shah was rumoured to have been the main suspect in the Malaysian police's investigation.

According to The Sunday Times, police learnt through interviews with over 170 people that Shah had made no social commitments for the future and had programmed a flight simulator in his home with drills rehearsing a flight far out into the southern Indian Ocean, which had been deleted.

However, the pilot's family defended him against the speculation, with his daughter Aishah denouncing rumours as "lies", while officials in Kuala Lumpur said that Malaysian police and the FBI had found nothing from the simulator to suggest he was planning to hijack the flight.

Fire

Another theory is that a technical error on the plane led to an emergency, such as a fire, and that the captain was attempting to make an emergency landing by heading off course.

According to Wired, the loss of communication would make "perfect sense" if an electrical fire had broken out in the plane, adding: "The first response is to pull the main busses and restore circuits one by one until you have isolated the bad one. If they pulled the busses, the plane would go silent.

"It probably was a serious event and the flight crew was occupied with controlling the plane and trying to fight the fire. Aviate, navigate, and lastly, communicate is the mantra in such situations."

According to this theory, the flight crew would have been overcome by smoke and the plane would have continued to fly on autopilot, dropping when it ran out of fuel or was destroyed by fire.

Another Boeing 777 had suffered a cockpit fire while crew were preparing for departure back in July 2011.

Shot down

In July 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 – also a Boeing 777 – was shot down over Ukraine, with some suggesting that the same may have happened to MH370.

However, a Malaysian defence official said in March 2014 that this was "highly not possible" and that while a military radar had picked up signs of the jet, they believed the aircraft was friendly.

In December of that year, the former boss of Proteus Airlines, Marc Dugain, theorised that the plane may have crashed after being subject to remote hacking or being shot out of the sky by US military after residents of the Maldives reportedly spotted an airliner travelling towards Diego Garcia on 8th March.

MH370: The Plane That Disappeared is available to stream on Netflix. Sign up for Netflix from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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