Why Planes Vanish: The Hunt for MH370

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Carlo Massarella

Peter Gauvain

Windfall Films Ltd

Why...?: Why Planes Vanish: The Hunt for MH370

BBC One - Why...?, Why Planes Vanish: The Hunt for MH370

Ten years after a plane carrying 239 people vanished, can new evidence finally locate it?

Ten years after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 and its 239 passengers and crew vanished, can new evidence help locate the plane and finally solve aviation’s greatest mystery?

Ten years after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared with 239 passengers and crew on board on 8 March 2014, this documentary looks at whether new radio technology may finally help locate the missing aircraft and asks what lessons can be learned to make aviation safer.

8 March 2014. A Boeing 777 carrying 239 passengers and crew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared from air traffic controllers’ radar. It sent no emergency distress calls. The aircraft was never heard from again, but startling evidence soon emerged that Flight MH370 stayed in the air for a further seven hours.

What could have caused the plane to divert so drastically off course? Was it struck by a catastrophic technical failure? Or was it hijacked – and if so, who by?

Answers to these questions may be locked inside the plane’s black box flight recorders, now lost somewhere on the seabed, more than three miles underwater in the remote and storm-ridden Southern Indian Ocean.

The disappearance of flight MH370 is the greatest unsolved mystery in aviation. Many questions the families of the missing passengers and crew had on the night the plane vanished have still not been answered.

As new evidence emerges of MH370’s possible location through pioneering radio technology, which has never been used to locate a missing plane before, the documentary hears from scientists at the University of Liverpool who are undertaking a major new study to verify how viable the technology is, and what this could mean for locating the aircraft.

The documentary features interviews with relatives of the missing, aviation experts, former Malaysia Airlines employees, as well as current and former pilots, and unpicks other commercial aviation incidents to try and piece together what may have really happened to MH370.

An innovative mix of current-affairs investigation and scientific analysis, the film also explores other cases of missing aircraft to examine what lessons can be learned to make the aviation industry safer. And it investigates recent cases of mass-murder suicide by pilots - and asks what can be done to improve the mental health of flight crews, who are responsible for the lives of ten million people who fly every day.

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