‘Ambiguous loss is a trauma like no other’: The director of MH370: The Plane that Disappeared on the biggest mystery in aviation history

In 2014, a Malaysia Airlines flight with 227 passengers and 12 crew on board seemed to disappear into thin air. Tom Murray speaks to the filmmaker behind a new Netflix documentary about the case that continues to mystify the world

Nine years on from the tragedy, people who lost loved ones still have no answers (Netflix)

Planes go up. Planes go down. What planes don’t do is just vanish off the face of the Earth.” These are the words of aviation journalist Jeff Wise, who features in Netflix’s chilling new docuseries, MH370: The Plane that Disappeared. But on 8 March 2014, that’s precisely what happened. A Malaysia Airlines flight with 227 passengers and 12 crew on board departed its home capital of Kuala Lumpur and never landed at its planned destination of Beijing. What occurred after the aircraft last communicated with air traffic control 38 minutes after take-off has been the subject of innumerable theories in the years since – some plausible, some risible – many of which are explored in this three-parter. “It’s important that people still talk about MH370 and don’t just forget about it,” director Louise Malkinson tells me over Zoom. “It’s a mystery that hasn’t been solved and I think it’s really important that there’s a push for a resumed search for the plane.”

In January 2017, the three-year search for MH370 was called off, leaving the most baffling case in aviation history unsolved. Using what little satellite data there was, scientists had identified a vast search area in the Southern Indian Ocean. While various bits of debris – some alleged, some confirmed – have been recovered over the years, the main underwater wreckage and its crucial black box data recorders have remained elusive. For the next of kin of the passengers on board, this lack of evidence represents a lack of closure, which has defined their lives for the past nine years. In one piece of archival footage, Jiang Hui – a Chinese man whose mother was on the flight – is handed what is believed to be a small chunk of the plane. The pain is writ large upon his face as he recalls, “When I had the debris in my hand, I thought, ‘This was probably the thing that was closest to my mother in her last moments.’” This may be the nearest thing to a resolution that Jiang ever gets. “Ambiguous loss is a trauma like no other,” Malkinson says. “To be nine years on and having no answers… you just can’t imagine it.”

Human beings are terrified of the unknown – it’s why we’ve gone to the moon and climbed Everest. And Malkinson’s documentary is as much about the conspiracy theories surrounding MH370 as it is about the families affected by its disappearance. After Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah radioed the infamous last words “Good night, Malaysian three-seven-zero” to air traffic control as he left Malaysian aerospace, almost nothing is known of its fate. At 1.22am local time, MH370 disappeared from flight radars, confounding air traffic control. When the plane was picked up by the military an hour later, it had veered sharply off course, heading west across the Malay Peninsula instead of north towards the Chinese capital. It eventually flew out of range of the military radar while over the Andaman Sea, never to be seen again. Why did the plane divert course? How did all of its communication technology drop off at once? Where did it end up? Who was responsible? These are the questions that journalists, experts, internet commentators and amateur sleuths have sought to answer.

“When there’s a lack of information, people fill the void,” Malkinson points out. And boy, did people cram that void. From a meteorite striking the plane in mid-air to an alien abduction, every theory imaginable has been put forward to explain the unexplainable. “We’re trying to sift through this waterfall of misinformation,” Wise says in the series. “Sometimes you just feel like you’re drowning in horse s***.”

In some cases, laypeople went to extreme lengths to attempt to solve the mystery. One of the most fascinating parts of Malkinson’s documentary is her examination of the Tomnodders – a group of dilettantes who used the satellite company Tomnod’s imagery to scan more than 24,000 square kilometres of ocean for signs of debris. More than 8 million people scoured the seas using the resource, crashing the website more than once due to high traffic. “The fact that you could, from your own home computer, join in and be part of that search for the aircraft was extraordinary,” Malkinson says. We see Cyndi Hendry, a Florida woman, peering through her glasses at endless blue pixels on her screen. “I was able to identify this piece as the nose cone,” Hendry says, zooming in on an indecipherable white blur among the boundless shadows. “Then something that looked like the fuselage. Something that looked like the tail.”

As we are presented with more grainy streaks, the issues with crowdsourcing a major investigation are laid bare. To see the risks at play, one need only look at the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, where Reddit sleuths falsely identified people involved in the attack; or, more recently, when TikTokers descended on the Lancashire village where 45-year-old Nicola Bulley went missing, which police condemned and branded a “hindrance to their investigation”. With the MH370 case, Hendry’s alleged findings, which were never verified by Tomnod or any authority, have not stopped more than 750,000 images being tagged as “objects of interest” on the site. Hendry is still tweeting her Tomnod finds on Twitter to this day.

Malkinson claims there is no ill feeling from the passengers’ families towards the Tomnoders, though. “They were just grateful for people trying to help with the search in any way they could,” she says. “The challenge of balancing information with misinformation is something the families have faced from day one, so they quickly became experts at managing their own hopes and expectations, and they’ve told us themselves that now they are just grateful to have anybody talking about MH370, because their greatest fear is that this tragedy gets forgotten.”

Various bits of debris – some alleged, some confirmed – have been recovered over the years (Netflix)

What is the director’s personal hypothesis after two years of working on the documentary? “When I first started this," says Malkinson, "I thought that eventually, I would be able to say, ‘This is what I think happened to the plane,’ but I can’t. I think the probability is that the plane is in the South Indian Ocean somewhere, but how and why it ended up there, I don’t know.” It’s clear from the series that for the loved ones of those who died, the fight won’t be over until they get answers. Just this week, Voice370 – a group comprised of relatives of missing passengers – called on the Malaysian government to allow a private US seabed exploration firm to mount a new search for the plane. “We’ll never leave hope behind,” Intan Othman, wife of an MH370 cabin crew member, says in the documentary. “We deserve to know the truth.”

‘MH370: The Plane that Disappeared’ is out now on Netflix