MH370 at the communist crossroads

This was published in January 2025 under a different title in The Spectator Australia – here.

Did MH370 really fly all the way down to the southern hemisphere, crashing in the Southern Indian Ocean (SIO) west of Perth? Or was this a manipulated narrative designed to take the search to the other side of the world from the plane’s last radar-detected position?

The upcoming search by American underwater robotics company, Ocean Infinity, will answer this question. As it finalises its plans for its new search, to be undertaken in 2025, Ocean Infinity has already indicated that the new area to be explored is one that assumes that the plane flew a little farther than previously thought and not necessarily in a straight line. Following the failed search in the SIO by the official investigation between April 2014 and January 2017, experts say, with reliance on analyses of satellite and radio wavelength data, that this area is the next most likely region for the wreckage to be. Accordingly, if Ocean Infinity search there and find it, the case is solved. MH370 was mass murder-suicide by the pilot. If on the other had Ocean Infinity is unsuccessful, the theory that the plane flew south can no longer be realistically entertained. Questions will then be asked as to why, during the official investigation, all of the evidence and opinion challenging the SIO theory was shut down and struck from the record. Attention will also turn to Malaysia and China as to whether, as has long been suspected, either or both are behind a cover-up.

Australia, too, will be questioned. Did the Australian arm of the investigation, led by retired military gentleman Angus Houston, have knowledge that the plane had never flown south? If it had taken that southern route, it would have been detected by Australia’s Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN). Australian Defence boasts that JORN ‘provides 24-hour military surveillance of the northern and western approaches to Australia … [and] serves a civilian purpose in assisting in detecting illegal entry, smuggling and unlicensed fishing’. When pressed about MH370, however, Defence said the relevant segment of JORN was switched off that night. It was a response that was met with derision. Quite apart from MH370, it tells the Australian public that their all-powerful radar is turned on only after enemy planes have reached the mainland. If JORN was in fact switched off that night, Australian Defence should produce the relevant records to verify it. Until it does so, suspicion justifiably lingers that Australia was coerced into presenting false information.

But in 2025, thought on MH370 has devolved into two schools. School A is faithful to the Inmarsat satellite data and the SIO theory, which is supported also by a practice flight path to the SIO found on the pilot’s home flight simulator. Other than the new interpretations of the satellite and wavelength data, the fact that the plane flew farther is evidenced by the flaperon that was found on Reunion Island in June 2015. It had previously been thought that the pilot was dead and that MH370 spiralled down when it ran out of fuel, but the position of the flaps indicated that the plane was glided down by the pilot, in which case it would have stayed airborne a little longer.

For School B, on the other hand, all of this is comical. The unexplained disappearance of this Boeing 777 is the most clear and apparent episode of transnational foul play to which the world has ever pretended otherwise. The SIO theory was all along a fantastic tale. We are told that the pilot, Zaharie Shah, a respected career aviator and a good-humoured man, was upset that former Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, whom Zaharie distantly knew, had been charged with sodomy. By way of protest, Zaharie took the plane back across the Malaysian Peninsula, turned right over Penang to wave goodbye to the place where he had grown up, then zig-zagged across half the planet before crashing west of Perth. According to School B, solving MH370 does not lie with forensic study of data. It lies with inhabiting the criminal mindset. It requires an acceptance that the evidence that was placed front-and-centre was the ruse and that the answers lie with the evidence that was suppressed in the official reporting and removed from the internet. It also requires an acknowledgement that the retrospective planting of evidence in order to further a narrative is standard criminal procedure. The flaperon, for instance, had had its ID plate removed and studies of the barnacles attached to it showed that it could not have been in the water that long. As for Zaharie’s home simulator, the initial inspection of it found nothing suspicious. The claim that it included a flight path to the SIO came later.

Also to be revisited, if Ocean Infinity does not succeed, is the ‘coincidence’ of the double hit to Malaysian Airlines in 2014. MH370 mysteriously disappeared on 8 March and MH17 was mysteriously shot down on 17 July, yet investigators assumed ‘nothing to see here’. This seemed comparable to saying that after the second plane hit the Word Trade Centre, there was no reason to infer that America was under attack. And that is before allowing for the communist link between the two Malaysian Airlines incidents. MH370 disappeared over the China-claimed South China Sea and MH17 was shot down over Russia-controlled eastern Ukraine.

If the CCP was responsible for the disappearance of MH370, the downing of a second Malaysian Airlines flight could create a perception of a metaphysical curse on Malaysian Airlines, one that is consistent with traditional Buddhist and Tao philosophies of karma. What was happening to Malaysian Airlines, the Chinese people would believe, was nothing to do with a mistake of their own government as the plane flew over the South China Sea, where military drills were being undertaken by the US and its Asian allies. Rather, it was attributable to karmic forces affecting Malaysia. A paranoid Xi would never arrange such a thing with Putin? He would never resort to a measure so depraved merely in the hope of turning Ancient Eastern Thought to his advantage?

All eyes will be on Ocean Infinity.