Right after midnight on March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members, heading to Beijing. Just 1 hour later, the plane disappeared from air traffic control screens.
In the following days, dozens of aircraft and ships from many countries searched a sea area of hundreds of kilometers to search for MH370. The latest search resumed at the end of last year has also not yielded any results.
The most controversial hypothesis is the pilot's suicide ability, even a murder - suicide. Co-pilot Fariq Hamid was only 27 years old at the time, about to get married and was on his final training flight before being fully certified.
According to procedure, he is the person directly controlling the aircraft, while Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah plays the role of commander and in charge of radio communication.
More attention is focused on Captain Zaharie, 53 years old, who has a family with 3 grown children. At the time MH370 went missing, his wife was said to have moved to another house. More importantly, radio communication with air traffic control was suddenly cut off when he was in charge.
Malaysian police then discovered in a flight simulator at his home a route significantly matching the flight path that MH370 was believed to have taken.
Proponents of the captain's suicide hypothesis argue that many suicides, especially in adults, are often planned. For a pilot, simulating a flight can be part of a psychological preparation process.
Radar data and satellite signals show that MH370 left the airspace of the South China Sea, turned around sharply, flew over the Malaysian peninsula, and then continued towards the Indian Ocean.
At one point, the plane seemed to circle over the sea for about 20 minutes before continuing its journey for many more hours until it completely lost signal.
Those complex changes cannot happen without the proactive control of humans.
Some psychologists believe that this prolonged "hesitation" may reflect an inner state of tug-of-war: Not wanting to live but also fearing death. From there, a more gruesome hypothesis arises: Murder - suicide.
However, many journalists and experts strongly refuted this speculation. Florence de Changy, a French journalist living in Hong Kong (China), said that it is not uncommon for husband and wife to live in two places in Malaysia. Captain Zaharie's flight simulator also contains many other routes, not just the suspicious route alone.
According to Ms. de Changy, assigning full responsibility to the pilot is too simple an explanation, while inadvertently "expelling" other parties, from airlines, aircraft manufacturers to management agencies.
A veteran pilot who used to fly a Boeing 777 said that in flight simulations, users are forced to enter a specific destination; they cannot just choose "between the ocean" if they do not enter the correct coordinates - something that has never been publicly confirmed in the MH370 case.
The debris believed to be the column of flight MH370, drifting ashore in the Indian Ocean after 1 year, also leaves many doubts. The identification plaque with the lost serial number, and the question of whether such a heavy part could float for a long time has not yet been convincingly answered.
