plain about the plane

[calimac]

So I watched Netflix's 3-part documentary, MH370: The Plane That Disappeared. It's oriented not to tell the story of the disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight to Beijing that vanished and has never been seen since, but to tell the story of the unfolding of the evidence. It starts by recounting the day itself, emphasizing the confusion over the gradual realization that something had gone wrong, and then turns to the development of various competing theories: a suicide mission by the captain (end point, the south Indian Ocean); hijacked by Russians eager to drive the invasion of Crimea off the front pages (end point, Kazakhstan); shot down by US spy planes to keep sensitive equipment in cargo from reaching Chinese hands (end point, South China Sea).

The documentary presents all of these in counterpoint and doesn't take sides, though it leans towards the last. The conspiracy theorists admit they don't have a definitive answer or any proof; they just strongly doubt the official story. But I did get very tired of the way they backed their stories by conjuring up ulterior motives for the supporters of the other stories: oh no, Blaine Gibson (the guy who's been finding wreckage on Indian Ocean beaches) has done business with Russians; oh no, Inmarsat (the tracking company whose pings indicated how far the plane traveled) also works for the US government. The Russian theory in particular requires the plotters to have the sort of omniscient pre-knowledge of the plot that's characteristic of bad conspiracy movies.

But the stories all leave lots of holes that aren't addressed. Nothing I already knew about this story isn't covered in this film, and it does include a lot I didn't know. Assuming that it's accurate, and that it's complete - and I'm expecting that the answers to my questions will include a lot of denial of those assumptions - here are some questions that raised in my mind that weren't settled.

1. When the Malaysian military initially reported that the plane had turned southwest, they weren't certain that the signal they saw was of the same plane. Later they reported that they had now confirmed this. What was the basis for the confirmation?

2. When the first piece of wreckage, the flaperon, was found on Réunion, it was not at first certain that it came from MH370. Later, investigators reported that they had now confirmed this. Florence De Changy, the French reporter, says that this confirmation came from 12 ID numbers stamped on the piece, but that only one of the 12 actually matched the records for the plane in question. Can that possibly be true? If so, where's the confirmation from?

3. The theorists are suspicious that Gibson has so easily found so much wreckage on various beaches. Have other people been looking and not found any?

4. Why is Gibson's wreckage only from the shell of the plane? Hasn't any of the contents - like passenger belongings that might also float - been found? (Lack of this might support the theory that the wreckage was actually salted and came from a decommissioned plane.)

5. Any discussion of how such small pieces survived the rough ocean and great distances in time and space from the presumed crash site to being found (over a year?) later on the coasts of Africa and Madagascar?

6. Cyndi Hendry is a volunteer who scoured imagery of the disappearance area in the South China Sea and found pictures of what she claims is wreckage. If this is the answer, then: Why wasn't any of that wreckage found in the initial physical search of the area, before it was proposed that the plane flew somewhere else? Why hasn't any of it washed up on beaches there?

7. If the plane had sensitive computer equipment being sent to China and the US wished to stop this, is this the only time such equipment had been shipped to China? If this happened all the time, there ought to be many stories about planes being intercepted.

8. Why do the conspiracy theorists consider it so damning to the Indian Ocean theory that the plane hasn't been found? Isn't it a huge expanse of ocean? Isn't it tremendously rough waters, thus making it hard to search, with a highly mountainous and irregular bottom? These are not typical of the waters in which planes have crashed in the past, and their locations were more precisely known than this. Not finding it doesn't surprise me at all.

Comments

[wild_patience]

This is actually in reply to an earlier post about another documentary, the Elephant Whisperer. I was not as entertained by it as you were, and two big things stuck out for me.

One, there are so many scenes of them washing the elephant in the river but they never explain why they need to do this. Is it always after they've chalked up the elephant for religious festivals? Elephants' trunks are flexible enough to shoot water over their own backs, I believe, so why were humans doing it so often? Or was the amount of time one would spend on this in any week greatly exaggerated for filming purposes?

Two, the narration translation - the keepers are clearly Hindu, which is a polytheistic religion, yet the translator keeps saying "god" in the singular. If these people pray primarily to Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, that would make sense, but I wish they had used that name. At one point towards the end, he does mention other gods. It makes me question the validity of the whole documentary as I feel they have done this deliberately to make it more palatable to white American Christians.

[anna_wing]

Re your point 4, My guess would be that passenger belongings would have been much more fragile than the fuselage, which also did not survive the crash and the ocean intact. The small pieces found were exactly that, small pieces, what was left after the crash and the ocean. I only read some of the articles about Gibson, but I thought he claimed to have followed the currents to the likeliest possible landfalls. So presumably he would have been searching in specific places, not at random, and also had an idea what he was looking for. It's quite possible that random people might have come across bits but just not realised what they were looking at.

Re your point 8, I find that baffling too. The Indian Ocean is deep, gigantic and in the south, extremely empty of human observers, so it would the easiest thing in the world for something to disappear there.

The South China Sea on the other hand is small, shallow, and the most contested body of water in the world, and nothing moves there that someone isn't aware of. I didn't even know that anyone thought that the South China Sea could be involved after the satellite evidence came out. No-one in Southeast Asia would take it seriously. The version of the Chinese-related theory that was going around here was even sillier and involved the plane coming down in the "uninhabited mountainous jungles of the Himalayan foothills" i.e. the borders of India, China and Myanmar. Those are pretty inhabited too, by a lot of heavily-armed people who would not miss a civilian airliner arriving unexpectedly in territory that they were claiming.

[calimac]

That raises a second part to my question 6, which is: If what Hendry found is the plane's wreckage, how can this possibly not have been confirmed? If what she found is not the plane's wreckage, why doesn't the documentary say so?