As the search for missing Malaysian Airlines jet MH370 enters its twelfth day, aviation experts remain baffled as to the flight's whereabouts.
Theories have moved from technical failure to the Boeing 777-200ER landing on the moon; and with them Malaysian government press conferences more about debunking myth than providing evidence as to where the plane has actually gone.
With the shift switching from the relatively smaller South China Sea, to the Indian Ocean, Central Asia and the Caspian Sea, the mystery of the 239-passenger airplane has deepened considerably.
Here are the five theories on what could have happened to Flight MH370
Technical failure:
Did decompression inside the cabin knock out all passengers and crew?
Posted anonymously on tumblr, the writer cited a US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Airworthiness directive from 2013 about the airplane. The directive was issued to airlines to look out for cracks in the fuselage beneath Boeing 777s’ satellite antennas.
The writer said that a small golf ball-sized hole in the fuselage on that part of the plane could have caused the communication failure and caused everyone onboard to drift into unconsciousness.
“If such decompression left the aircraft intact, then the autopilot would have flown the planned route or otherwise maintained its heading until fuel exhaustion. The slow decompression would have confused the pilots before cabin altitude (pressure) warnings sounded,” said the writer.
Following that the leak near the SATCOM antenna adapter, all the GPS, ACARS, ADS-B and ADS-C antennas would be knocked out. As such, only primary radars (usually military) would detect the plane.
And since it was a red-eye flight, most of the passengers would be asleep anyway, making the lack of oxygen less obvious, it added. This also may have explained how another pilot heard “mumbling” from the Malaysian pilots.
Fanatical pilot:
After it emerged that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was a supporter of Malaysia's opposition party, a British tabloid speculated that Zaharie was distraught enough to divert the plane.
Zaharie, according to The Daily Mail, had attended Justice Party Anwar Ibrahim’s trial hours before he took to the skies in the MH370. The 53-year-old was said to be “profoundly upset” by the verdict that sent Ibrahim to jail on a sodomy charge for the next five years.
The tabloid then suggested that the father-of-three was a vocal supporter of Anwar, had worn a t-shirt emblazoned “Democracy is Dead”, and was capable of diverting the plain from its Beijing destination.
According to police and other media reports, Zaharie had a flight simulator at home and had five landing routes for airports in the Indian Ocean.
Could he have travelled to the end of Malaysian airspace, turned the plane around, and then put into place a scenario that he may have acted out time and time again alone - flown under 5000 feet and used mountainous terrain as cover to evade radar detection and then casually ran out of gasoline and drifted into the sea or even landed the plane on an unknown airfield?
The last words from the plane - the co-pilot's informal "all right, good night" - have helped to support this theory, although it is unclear if they were said before or after the plane's automatic tracking systems were disabled.
Bad Weather:
Did unexpected severe weather strike the flight along its course? In 1985, a flight in the U.S. was caught in a microburst - severe wind that blasts down from a thunderstorm. The plane crashed, killing more than 130 people.
Hijack:
According to Malaysian investigators, the last Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) transmission was at 1.07am (local time) while the last pilot communication with air traffic control was at 1.19am.
At this point, it is unknown whether the ACARS was deliberately switched off. But the Malaysians said that the ACARS did not transmit 30 minutes later as normally programmed.
Although the authorities have not ruled out terrorism as a cause, no groups have come forward to claim responsibility for the act.
Pan Am flight 103 was destroyed by a bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. It wasn’t until 2003 that then Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi admitted Libya’s role.
There's something following you:
An aviation enthusiast has used his Tumblr site to put forward one of the most interesting theories yet.
Keith Ledgerwood says that Flight MH370 could have avoided radar detection by turning communications systems off and following a Singapore Airlines 777 he established was in the area so closely the two aircraft "would have shown up as one single blip on the radar."
"Once MH370 had cleared the volatile airspaces and was safe from being detected by military radar sites in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan it would have been free to break off from the shadow of SIA68 and could have then flown a path to it’s final landing site," he added.
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