The incident could have been caused by a technical failure or human misconduct, or a combination of both, but a conclusive understanding about what happened to flight MH370 is as far along as it was five years ago.
A lack of clarity over what went wrong on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 could mean that any aircraft could be vulnerable, an aviation expert has claimed.
“This accident may apply to other aircraft or it may have been an engineering repair job which has been done incorrectly and may also affect other makes of aircraft,” Alastair Rosenschein, a pilot-turned-aviation consultant, said in Channel 5’s documentary ‘Flight MH370’.
“So it is vital that one tries one’s hardest to get to get to the bottom of it,” he added.
Rosenschein had already suggested in 2017 that the most likely reason for the MH370 tragedy was the explosion of an oxygen tank.
He theorised that it could have depressurised the plane and incapacitated the pilots, who started flying back but passed out before they could land the Boeing in Malaysia.
Rosenschein claimed that the plane had actually flown above Kuala Lumpur on its supposed way back, but that the military failed to notice the aircraft and then lied that it vanished from radars due to a disabled transponder.
The fateful Boeing, bound for Beijing, disappeared on 8 March 2014 as it was supposed to be handed over from Malaysian air traffic controllers to Vietnamese airspace.
Satellite data analysis showed that the plane made a leftward detour over the South China Sea and flew out of radar range toward the southern Indian Ocean.
The most popular theory is that it flew on autopilot until it eventually ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere in the ocean. However, an Australian-led search for the missing plane − the most expensive in aviation history − and a separate search by a US-based firm have yielded no results.
In July 2018, a final report by Malaysian investigators stated that all the evidence was pointing to the plane being under manual control, and that it was deliberately flown off course to its demise.
At the same time, they failed to reveal what caused the plane’s disappearance, suggesting that third-party interference may have been the case.