Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Green Dot’s Deliberate-Act Scenario

This 73-minute Green Dot Aviation video is different from most of the films on this site. It does not just set out the evidence about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. It dramatises one scenario, which the creator considers the most likely explanation: that the captain deliberately diverted the aircraft and flew it into the southern Indian Ocean. Its title refers to the Netflix documentary series, and part of the video responds to theories presented there.

What the video presents as fact

Some of the content matches the official record. The aircraft took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 227 passengers and 12 crew. The first officer, Fariq Abdul Hamid, was on his last training flight on the 777. The crew's final radio call came as the aircraft approached waypoint IGARI, after which the transponder stopped. Military radar tracked the aircraft back across the Malay Peninsula, past Penang and up the Strait of Malacca. The satellite communications system logged on again, and seven hourly handshakes with an Inmarsat satellite, received at a ground station in Perth, showed that the aircraft flew on for hours, ending on an arc in the southern Indian Ocean. More than 30 pieces of debris, including a flaperon from the right wing, have since washed up in the western Indian Ocean.

What the video presents as a scenario

Much of the rest is a reconstruction. The video shows the captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, sending the first officer out of the cockpit, locking him out, switching off the transponder and the satellite system, and depressurising the cabin so that the passengers and crew would lose consciousness. It imagines the first officer trying to get back in with the door code, and the captain choosing a route to avoid radar and turning south. It also describes a route in the captain's home flight simulator to the southern Indian Ocean, and suggests a final controlled glide. These scenes show what the creator thinks happened. They are not established by the investigation, and some details, such as what was said and done inside the cabin, cannot be known.

What the investigation said

The official safety investigation report, published in July 2018, said the team was unable to determine the real cause of the disappearance. It found it more likely that the communications were switched off manually or lost through a power interruption than through a technical failure, but it did not conclude that the captain or anyone else was responsible. The video ends by suggesting that, unless new evidence is released, the most useful line of inquiry may be the motives of those on board.

For a fact-based account of the radar and satellite evidence, see the Mentour Pilot and Air Crash Investigation videos on this page.