Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared on 8 March 2014, after departing from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing, with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board. Najib Razak, Malaysia's prime minister at the time, stated that the aircraft's flight ended somewhere in the Indian Ocean, but no further explanation was given. Despite searches finding debris which almost certainly originated from the crash, official announcements were questioned by many critics. As such, several theories about the disappearance were proposed. Some of these were described as conspiracy theories.
Background
According to Rob Brotherton, a psychology lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, whenever there is a lack of conclusive information following headline-grabbing events, conspiracy theorists rush to fill the factual vacuum that is created.
Victims' relatives questioned the veracity of the Malaysian government's statements about the fate of the aircraft. They organized a protest at the Malaysian embassy in Beijing, aiming to force the Malaysian government to reveal any withheld information about Flight 370's whereabouts.
According to Barbara Demick of the Los Angeles Times, critics of the Malaysian government's statements also found support in the Joint Agency Coordination Centre's announcement on 29 May 2014 that the plane was not in the search area authorities had been combing since April 2014. Other factors involve the lack of a distress signal from the plane. Searches discovered debris and fragments in 2015, which likely originated from the crash.
Criticism and response Conspiracy-focused internet sites claim that the official statement that the plane crashed into the Indian Ocean is "a blatant cover-up." They note that a Boeing 777 does not have the structural integrity to survive crashing into the ocean, and that it would be comparable to hitting a concrete wall at terminal velocity. If Flight 370 hit the ocean, they say, it would have been broken into tens of thousands of pieces, many of which float on water (such as the seat cushions) and would be seen washing up on regional shores or easily spotted by search teams. Those criticisms diminished after several pieces of the aircraft were positively identified in the years after its disappearance.
Harvard professor Cass Sunstein noted that the conflicting information initially released by the Malaysian government explains the interest in alternative theories. Sunstein argued in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on 20 March 2014 that conspiracy theories in general often are born out of horrific and disastrous situations because such events make people angry, fearful and looking for a "target".
David Soucie, a former FAA inspector, has said that the theories that have been put forth in this matter are important when there is a lack of knowledge, as the theories and notions help us to consider various possibilities. On 26 March 2014, he stated on CNN: In an accident investigation, it's a critical part to come up with theories. Especially right now when we don't have anything. We don't have anything tangible. We don't have something to say, hey, yes—because we don't know where that airplane is and we need to find out why. If you take one theory, the airplane would be where we're looking at right now. If you take another theory, where there was nefarious intent, they're trying to avoid radars, the airplane could be somewhere else. If you say it was—whatever it is, you've got to use these theories, weigh them against the facts so you know which one to go to.CNN Transcripts – Piers Morgan Live – 26 March 2014. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
Tim Black, deputy editor of Spiked, wrote: "...it's in this darkness, this near absence of knowledge [about MH370], that speculation has flourished," and an editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times not only stated that "conspiracy theories fill a vacuum when facts are scarce," but also urged governments to search for the plane to debunk these theories and give victims' family members peace of mind.
The common hypothesis, cited also here, that MH370 avoided Indonesian radar is based only on a statement that the plane was not observed by Indonesia.
Pilot suicide/mass murder
Shortly after Flight 370's disappearance, media reports revealed that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah's wife and three children moved out of his house the day before the disappearance; and a friend claimed that Captain Shah was seeing another woman and Shah's relationship with her was also in trouble. Claims of domestic problems have been denied by Shah's family. A fellow pilot and long-time associate of Shah stated the captain was "terribly upset" that his marriage was falling apart. Police were also investigating reports that Shah received a two-minute phone call prior to the flight's departure from an unidentified woman using a mobile phone number obtained with a false identity. Furthermore, Captain Shah was also a supporter of Malaysian opposition politician Anwar Ibrahim, who was sentenced to jail on March 7 after an earlier acquittal on sodomy charges was overturned in a move viewed as politically motivated. Shah was in the courtroom the day before the flight.
Investigators noted strange behaviour by Shah from conducting 170 interviews—namely, that the Captain had made no social or professional plans for after March 8, when Flight 370 disappeared. However, according to the French journalist Florence de Changy who wrote a book about the flight, dismissing "100 per cent of the official narrative", Shah made an appointment with his dentist to get back his tooth crown when the dentist phoned him a few days before March 8. News reports about the Captain's lack of social plans and flight simulator exercises cite results of the police enquiry into the pilots, which have been shared with some of the investigation team but have not been released publicly. However, news reports on July 23, 2014 stated that the police considered the possible culpability of all those onboard the plane, and identified the captain as the prime suspect—if it is proven human intervention was involved.
The United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation reconstructed the deleted data from Captain Shah's home flight simulator; a Malaysian government spokesman indicated that "nothing sinister" had been found on it. However, The Sunday Times later reported that among deleted flight paths performed on the flight simulator, investigators found a flight path into the Southern Ocean where a simulated landing was made on an island with a small runway. In 2016, a leaked American document stated that a route on the pilot's home flight simulator closely matching the projected flight over the Indian Ocean was found during the FBI analysis of the hard drive of the computer used for the flight simulator. This was later confirmed by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) and by the Malaysian government. In the ATSB's 2017 report "The Operational Search for MH370," new details were provided regarding the flight simulator path. It had been flown five weeks prior to the disappearance on February 2 and was reconstructed from data deleted on February 3. The simulated aircraft was a Boeing 777-200LR. The first data point showed the flight beginning in Kuala Lumpur. Subsequent data points indicated the aircraft flying northwest along the Strait of Malacca before tracking southeast to the fifth data point, located deep in the southern Indian Ocean, where fuel exhaustion occurred. In the sixth and final data point, the altitude was manually set to 4000ft, with the aircraft observed in a nose-down pitch of 5°. The report states:
Tony Abbott was Prime Minister of Australia when MH370 disappeared. In February 2020, six years after the plane disappeared, Abbott disclosed in a Sky News documentary: "My very clear understanding, from the very top levels of the Malaysian government, is that from very, very early on, they thought it was murder-suicide by the pilot." Shah's family vehemently denied the possibility of pilot suicide.
Many aviation experts believe, and some analyses of the flap and flaperon debris suggest, that the shearing damage evident on the trailing edges of the flap and flaperon, coupled with the minimal damage observed on the leading edges, strongly suggests a controlled ditching as the likely end-of-flight scenario. This perspective contrasts sharply with the ATSB's hypothesis of a high-speed, uncontrolled plummet following fuel exhaustion. The distinct lack of substantial leading edge damage and clean shearing of the trailing edges contradicts what would be expected from a high-velocity impact.
A book, Goodnight Malaysian 370, was published in August 2014 by New Zealanders Geoff Taylor and Ewan Wilson; the authors blamed a deliberate act of the pilot for the aircraft's disappearance, but admitted they were not able to "provide any conclusive evidence to support his theory" nor any motive.
In 2015, a former British Airways senior Boeing 777 pilot, Simon Hardy, told BBC News that the plane's route was "probably very accurate flying rather than just a coincidence", and noted that the aircraft's turn toward the north-west over the Malacca Strait allowed a clear view of the captain's home island of Penang:
In May 2018, Hardy repeated his claim on 60 Minutes Australia that the captain used the flight as a murder–suicide and had deliberately flown the plane over his hometown of Penang before turning right and ditching the plane over the Indian Ocean. He said they found these results by reconstructing the captain's flight plan from the military radar and that the captain had avoided detection of the plane by military radar by flying along the border of Malaysia and Thailand, crossing in and out of each country's airspaces.
The cockpit had the mandated anti-hijacker fortified doors that could prevent locked-out crew or passengers from interfering with a suicide or hijacking into the Southern Ocean. A British television documentary, broadcast in March 2024, suggested that Captain Zaharie Ahmad could have selected manual control of the cabin conditioning system to deprive all occupants of air.
In 2022, retired French captain Patrick Blelly and senior telecom engineer Jean-Luc Marchand released a long report about scientific-based figures arguing for a pilot suicide, and used flight simulators to support their findings. In 2023 and 2024, they gave several conferences in which they discussed their scenario.
Hijacking The possibility of a simple hijacking has been brought up by various news outlets, including ABC News and the Los Angeles Times. Speculation has mounted about the possibility that hijackers took the plane to a remote island, although no group has claimed responsibility; unofficial researchers have identified more than 600 possible runways at which the plane was capable of landing. No confirmation has been received from Malaysian officials. The credibility of several hijacking theories have become further marginalized following the discovery of the first definitive fragments of MH370 wreckage in July 2015.
Terrorist attack Shortly after the aircraft disappeared, it was claimed that it may have been an act of terrorism, possibly a conspiracy attack. Between 9 and 14 March 2014, media mogul Rupert Murdoch tweeted that Flight 370's disappearance "confirms conspiracy turning to make trouble for China ." He later suggested the flight might have been hidden in northern Pakistan, "like Bin Laden". These remarks have not been confirmed, and were characterized as conspiracy theories by Shiv Malik in The Guardian. The following month, the Russian newspaper Moskovskij Komsomolets endorsed a similar theory, claiming that "unknown terrorists" had hijacked the plane, flown it to Afghanistan, and then held the crew and passengers hostage.
North Korea