(NewsNation) — More than a decade after a Malaysian aircraft carrying 239 passengers seemingly disappeared, a new project headed up by an aviation journalist is seeking to unearth new details about the mystery.
The disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 in 2014 has baffled investigators over the past 10 years, leaving the families of those lost with few answers. The aircraft was believed to have vanished around the Indian Ocean, but the plane has never been found.
While bits of debris from the aircraft have washed up on beaches since the incident, the question of what happened to the plane remains unanswered. The official search for the plane ended in 2017. But now, journalist Jeff Wise is beginning a 15-month project that hopes to discover what may have happened to MH370.
Wise told NewsNation what makes this mystery different from other aviation cases is the lack of data experts and researchers have to rely on in their search for answers. Data shows that the aircraft went into the southern Indian Ocean in a very specific spot. However, those running the official search for the plane have never discovered anything more than bits and pieces of debris.
“We basically have to throw open all of our assumptions and ask, ‘Well, what are all of the possible things that could have happened to this plane?’” Wise said.
Wise believes there are two distinct possibilities of what may have happened.
One surrounds the notion that many experts believe to be true: that the pilot committed mass murder-suicide. The other involves the idea of very sophisticated hijackers taking control of the plane and getting into the plane’s electronics bay and tampering with the black box that connected the aircraft with satellites, Wise said.
If that happened, Wise said, it would have created the signals that the plane entered the Indian Ocean when it actually did not.
“It has never happened before, but then, these days, a lot of things are happening that had never happened before,” Wise said.