0:00 On March eighth, 2014, a Boeing 777 with two hundred thirty-nine people aboard vanished from civilian radar screens.0:09 Last week, you and I looked at how Amelia Earhart was swallowed by the Pacific Ocean in 1937.0:17 The file on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is different.0:22 Here, modern technology didn't solve the mystery.0:26 It created it.0:27 Let’s open the case file.0:29 The flight, MH370, departed Kuala Lumpur, bound for Beijing.0:34 Less than an hour into the flight, it disappeared.0:39 The initial crisis team, led by Mohd Fuad Sharuji, did exactly what you’d expect.0:46 They focused their search along the planned route.0:50 But the plane wasn't there.0:52 It had never been there.0:54 Civilian radar simply failed to register a critical event: the plane had made a sharp, deliberate U-turn.1:03 It was military radar that picked up the ghost.1:07 It tracked the plane flying west, back across the Malay Peninsula, out over the Andaman Sea.1:15 And then, it too went silent.1:17 For days, that was the entire story.1:20 A plane that turned around and vanished.1:24 But then a British satellite company, Inmarsat, found something in the data logs.1:31 A series of automated “handshakes.” Seven of them.1:35 The plane hadn't just disappeared from radar.1:39 It had kept flying.1:40 For six more hours.1:42 Those signals didn't give a location.1:45 They gave a distance.1:47 A series of concentric rings, or arcs, showing how far the plane was from the satellite at the top of each hour.1:56 This allowed analysts to plot two possible corridors.2:01 A northern route, over the dense airspace of Central Asia… or a southern route, into the vast, empty expanse of the Indian Ocean.2:12 The northern route was quickly ruled out.2:15 And so began the largest, most expensive underwater search in aviation history.2:22 So what happened in those six hours?2:25 The first theory on the table was hijacking.2:29 It was the immediate thought of the crisis team when they learned two passengers had boarded using stolen Austrian and Italian passports.2:40 But that lead went cold.2:42 INTERPOL found no links to terrorism.2:46 The men were likely just migrants.2:48 The hijacking theory was built on a suspicious detail, but it lacked a motive, a claim of responsibility… any evidence of an actual event.3:00 Next, the file turns to the pilots.3:03 Specifically, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah.3:07 The theory: pilot suicide.3:09 A deliberate, calculated act to make the plane disappear forever.3:14 But again, you look for the evidence.3:17 You run the psychological profiles.3:20 You search for a note, a motive, a history of instability.3:25 And you find… nothing.3:27 Speculation filled the void, but the file remains empty.3:32 No concrete evidence has ever supported it.3:36 That leaves mechanical failure.3:38 But the data argues against it.3:41 A catastrophic failure doesn't usually involve a clean turn, a steady flight path for six hours, and then a disappearance.3:51 And unlike Air France 447, which left a field of floating debris, the surface of the Indian Ocean was quiet.4:00 The absence of evidence became its own clue.4:04 This is the central contradiction of the case.4:08 We have pieces of confirmed debris.4:11 A flaperon, and other parts, washed ashore on the coasts of Africa.4:17 We know the plane went down in the southern Indian Ocean.4:22 We have satellite data that tells us, with unnerving precision, the path it flew.4:28 And yet… after searching over one hundred twenty thousand square kilometers of ocean floor, we have found NOTHING.4:38 Not the main wreckage.4:40 Not the black boxes.4:42 The search continues.4:43 A company called Ocean Infinity has a contract, on a “no find, no fee” basis, extended to June of 2027.4:52 They are still looking.4:54 But the case file for MH370 doesn't close with an answer.4:59 It closes with a quote from an oceanographer, David Gallo.5:04 He said, "the truth lives in the silence between the signals." The silence of a transponder switched off.5:13 The silence of a cockpit that never made another call.5:17 And the deep, unending silence of the ocean itself.5:22 That silence is the one piece of evidence that still refuses to fit.
