Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared without a trace in 2014 with 239 passengers and crew members.
The last contact from the plane came just two hours after the plane took off, when captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah announced MH370 had left Malaysia's airspace.
One of the questions that has haunted the MH370 case to this day is: How could a large plane like Boeing 777 disappear in modern times, when the world sky is being closely monitored more closely than ever.
Although MH370's operating system was turned off (per intentional or technical failure), there was still a large amount of data recording the plane's journey. ADS-B, radar, ACARS, and Inmarsat satellite data all show that MH370 flew continuously for more than 7 hours in the southern Indian Ocean before falling into the deep ocean and disappearing.
This data is the foundation for the search for MH370 deployed in the southern Indian Ocean.
Therefore, experts have analyzed this data very carefully, hoping to find a real explanation for the reason for MH370's disappearance, instead of plot theories.
Simon Maskell - a professor specializing in automation systems at the University of Liverpool (UK) - shared with The Diplomat that he and his colleagues conducted research based on WSPR data.
WSPR is data collected by amateur radio stations, recording low- frequency signals from the starting point to the receiving point, which can be up to 10,000 km away. This data has been stored since 2008 in the WSPRnet database.
By analyzing the above data, Professor Maskell's team was able to eliminate most of the unreasonable assumptions related to MH370 and zoning off the three most well-founded assumptions.
"There may be a rare accident that will prevent the flight crew from communicating or controlling the plane to land elsewhere. Or a murder-suicide case in which the perpetrator was alive when the plane began to drop. Or it was a murder and then a suicide, but the perpetrator was not alive when the plane landed," said Professor Maskell.
The Liverpool University Professor also said that since MH370 has not yet been found and the search areas are based on the assumption of no human intervention while the plane was downgraded, the current assumption of someone affecting the downgrading process seems more reasonable.
This makes it possible that there are people still in the cockpit while the plane is lowered to a slight increase. However, all three hypotheses still have almost equal probability," he said.
"While our calculations show that the likelihood of an accident is rare compared to the likelihood of a murder and a successful suicide, all theories suggest that things like this are really uncommon," maskell added.
