Original subtitles

It's the greatest aviation mystery of all time*

RADIO CHATTER

How can a Boeing **** with 2** people on board*

simply vanish without a trace?

The answer lies somewhere at the bottom of the I ndian Ocean*

I magine if we could empty the oceans*

letting the water drain away*

to reveal the secrets of the sea floor*

Now we can

Using the latest underwater scanning technology

piercing the deep oceans and turning accurate data into D images

This time

with unique access to the official investigation

key mysteries of Malaysia Airlines 0

What lessons lie amid the wrecks of previous air disasters?

Can Cold War technology extract vital clues from the deep ocean?

And if the plane is found

what secrets could lie hidden in the tangled wreckage?

March 8th 201

Malaysia Airlines Flight 0 departs uala Lumpur

on a six- hour to Beijing

As the Boeing enters Vietnamese airspace

it suddenly drops off air traffic control radar

A modern commercial airliner

carrying 2 people has just vanished

There's no Mayday call

and no wreckage at the point of last radar contact

Aviation authorities struggle to understand

We beleve famly members should prepare themselves for the worst.

Families left behind demand answers

The Malaysian government launches an investigation

It will be the largest and most expensive in aviation history

With multiple dead ends

false leads

a deluge of speculation

but only a handful of real clues

One of the first comes from the Malaysia military

Powerful defence radar has detected the plane

turning back across Malaysia

heading north-west up the Straight of Malacca

then disappearing out of range here just north of Sumatra

It's a shocking discovery

After it disappeared from civilian radar

it didn't crash

it continued flying

I ntally when the aeroplane made a turn

wthout talkng to ar traffc control

n my mnd all bets were off.

It could be a terrorst event t could be a delberate act

by a crewmember t could be a mass falure n the electrcal system.

The next clue comes from space

Although lost to radar

MH0 continued to exchange what are called heartbeat signals

with an I nmarsat satellite above the I ndian Ocean

The heartbeats come once an hour

Frequency changes in the signals

help experts calculate its direction of travel

and reveal something extraordinary

After its initial track to the north-west

MH0 turned south and flew for six more hours

From the travel time of each signal,

investigators also calculate the plane's distance from the satellite

These lines are called arcs

Using the fuel load and cruising speed

they can recreate a range of possible flight paths

as the plane crosses each arc

The final, or seventh arc is deep in the I ndian Ocean

There are no more heartbeat signals beyond this point

It's the biggest breakthrough so far

instantly shifting the search 000 miles south

of the last military radar contact

taking it into the jurisdiction of the Australian government

and accident investigator Peter Foley

They start looking here

a swathe of ocean running 00 miles along the seventh arc

They estimate that the plane could lie 10 miles either side

the maximum glide range of a

The seventh arc is over 1500 miles from the nearest land

It will take two days for Australian search vessels to get there

Two powerful storms have swept through since MH0 disappeared

making the job of spotting debris even harder

22 aircraft and 1 surface vessels look for wreckage

and possibly even survivors

Surface debris is normally the first step to finding a missing aircraft

but it is not a guarantee

Before MH0 the largest and most expensive search in aviation history

takes place here 8000 miles away in the Atlantic Ocean

Hunting for the wreck of Air France Flight

What lessons lie amid this tangled wreckage

for those searching for MH0?

On J une 1st 200

Air France Flight leaves Rio de Janeiro Brazil,

carrying 21 passengers and 12 crew to Paris

Weather reports indicate severe thunderstorms along the flight path

Three hours and 5 minutes into the flight

as the plane nears the equator

its onboard computers send a burst of emergency warnings

then fall silent

Olivier Ferrante is in charge of the French search team

The warning signals are his first clue

o mantenance messages and an mportant poston message

whch was very useful for a search.

It is a deep and remote stretch of ocean

but the search team has every advantage

A known flight path

an accurate final position

and then surface debris - found within five days

And yet despite initial optimism

it takes two years four expeditions

and 0 million to find the plane

Yes I remember that moment when we found the wreckage.

I was very careful because weve had false alerts before

and then t turned out to be geology

or not what we were lookng for.

Why does it take so long?

Using the data meticulously collected by the search team

combined with the latest visualisation technology

it is possible to drain the Atlantic Ocean

revealing the hostile world that faces every deep-water search effort

I mmense water pressure

freezing cold total darkness

and hidden dangers everywhere

Finally at 12800ft

the shattered remains of Air France Flight

Engines

wheel assemblies and other heavy items lie together

The twisted remains a testament to the force of the impact

Smaller lighter objects stretch along more than

a third of a mile of sea floor

equivalent to ten New York City blocks

And a critical realisation

the sea bed wreckage is nowhere near the surface wreckage

It's almost 2 miles away

I nvestigators spend about two years

searching in this very challenging area

not realising that ocean currents

have carried debris far from the crash site

The long and frustrating search for

the French aircraft carries a warning

Even with debris and an accurate final position

when a plane goes into deep water it's very hard to find

A sobering thought for the team searching for MH0

Ar France was very dffcult

wth our area of 7 square klometres

but ts nothng compared to the surface that the search teams

have to search for MH7 ts much more dffcult.

I n the southern I ndian Ocean

investigators look for surface debris for over two weeks

Even with the aid of satellites they find nothing

One of the greatest ntal mysteres

and that has transcended the entre perod of tme that weve been

lookng for ths aeroplane wheres the debrs?

With no debris they need to find another way to narrow the search

So they focus on MH0's black box data recorders

Each has an underwater locator beacon or U LB

I n water they emit an electronic ping

with a range of just over a mile

Find the beacons and you find the plane

But time is running out

By the time specialist pinger locator technology reaches the

search zone there are just three days of battery life left

teer . teer .

I nvestigators have only a few days to locate MH0's black boxes

before their locator batteries run out

Faced with a vast search zone

they decide to focus on commonly used air routes

Australian Navy vessel Ocean Shield steams to the point where the air

route to Perth intersects the seventh arc

The team looking for Air France

also use pinger locators in an attempt to discover the crash site

They begin listening for signals

within days of the plane's disappearance

I n most cases the pnger locator works

And that the assumpton before Ar France **7.

Ships scour the search area for 0 days

but here - nothing

The hunters wonder

are the locator beacons lost or destroyed?

Returning to the remarkable drained seascape of the Air France

wreckage reveals the scale of the problem

The sea floor here is 12800 feet below the surface

deep in the Mid -Atlantic Ridge

And here amid the wreckage

nestling in the remains of the tailplane

the black boxes one with its locator beacon still attached

A search ship passed directly over here but detected nothing

The metal wreckage may have blocked the signals

or they could have been damaged by the sheer force of the impact

I thnk they were unfortunately damaged at that stage.

I nvestigators listening for the MH0 black boxes

can only hope they'll have better luck

They monitor the ocean for 15 days using three ships equipped

with sensitive listening technology

and military aircraft launching sonar buoys

They do detect some signals

but conclude it's just random interference

It's another disappointment

But at this low point

there's a dramatic new lead

A team from Curtin University in Western Australia

runs a network of sensitive underwater microphones

called hydrophones

positioned all around the Australian coast

They're designed to monitor earthquakes

Antarctic ice and wildlife

And remarkably one of them has picked up an unusual noise

one hour and 1 minutes after MH0's last communication

with the I nmarsat satellite

When we looked at the data from that hydrophone

we found one sgnal that looked as

though t had nterestng characterstcs.

Is this the actual sound of MH0's final moments?

U N DERWATER NOISE

Alec Duncan's team look for other audio recordings

so they can calculate a geographical fix

One hydrophone does tell you a

certan amount about the source of the sgnal

so you can tell whether ts a whale

you can tell whether ts a snappng shrmp

you can tell whether ts just nose from the moorng

but you cant tell drecton.

Fortunately other agencies are listening too

for the sound of illegal nuclear tests

with technology that can accurately pinpoint the source

Just off the coast of Cape Lewin in Western Australia

the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test- Ban Treaty Organisation

runs a listening post

specifically designed to detect and locate illegal nuclear tests

The station has three hydrophones set 125 miles apart

They can determine the direction of a sound to within half a degree

and calculate the distance to the source over thousands of miles

And astonishingly

this network has detected the exact noise

heard by the team from Curtin University

The analyss of the data from Cape Lewn told us that

that sgnal had come from the northwest

and gave us a farly accurate bearng

along whch the source of that sgnal must have been.

It's a tantalising clue

and the sound does come from the direction of the seventh arc

But when the scientists crunch the numbers

the source of the sound is far to the north-west

so far beyond the current search area

that it's considered not worth further investigation

Our concluson was that the sgnal was

most lkely to be of geologcal orgns

such as a small undersea earthquake

but we cant completely rule out the possblty

that t came from somethng to do wth the arcraft.

Faced with a new disappointment

the search team moves to a different approach -

searching the sea floor itself

using towed sleds carrying sonar scanners

It will be the largest undersea hunt in history

But before it can even start there's a new problem

This part of the I ndian Ocean has never been surveyed in detail

The sleds will be close to the sea floor

and no-one knows exactly what is down there

The MH0 team need a simple way to create a snapshot

of the sea floor across the vast search area

They find help in an unexpected place

The team hunting MH0

across 000 square miles of I ndian Ocean face one big problem

More than * of the sea floor area n ths regon

has not been covered by shps wth modern equpment

satellte navgaton mult beam echo sound.

Geophysicist Walter Smith thinks he

might be able to fill in the blanks using satellites

The satelltes actually cannot see the bottom

they're not seeng the ocean floor.

What they're dong s usng radar to

measure varatons n the seas surface heght.

It's possible thanks to gravity

Mountains on the sea floor create their own gravitational attraction

surrounding water is drawn towards the mass

creating measurable changes on the surface

The smallest ones I can resolve are a klometre or less n heght

and they move the sea surface about fve centmetres

and the satellte has no problem resolvng that.

It doesn't have the resolution to spot the wreckage of an aircraft

but is enough to help create a basic map of the sea floor

and identify hazards in the MH0 search zone

What does the data reveal?

Using the exact information gathered by Walter Smith's team

it's possible to drain away the I ndian Ocean

to show what the ocean floor actually looks like

As the water flows away

it exposes a world no human has ever seen before

Dramatic cliffs more than twice the height of the Empire State Building

Fault lines plunging almost 20000ft deeper than any canyon on land

A volcano-dotted valley running for 100 miles

Operating underwater scanning vehicles in this terrain

will take a huge amount of skill and luck

Armed with their new map of the sea floor

the search team deploys the latest in subsea technology

Travelling deep underwater

these towed sleds begin to scan the sea floor

and they will be guided by a game-changing new clue

It comes from further detailed analysis

of the final I nmarsat signal from MH0

Engineers crunch the numbers

and discover something shocking

I n its final moments the plane descends rapidly -

almost certainly because after 5 hours in the air

it's run out of fuel

Boeing engineers then simulate what

happens when a exhausts its fuel,

making it possible for the first time

to recreate the likely final minutes of MH0's mysterious flight

The right engine flames out first

The autopilot compensates for the imbalance with a hard left turn

Minutes later the second engine flames out

With no power the autopilot switches off

leaving MH0 in a long spiral descent

I n every Boeing simulation

the crash site lies within 2 miles of the seventh arc

These dramatic new insights

immediately reduce the size of the search area

from 000 square miles to just 2000

But that's still three and a half times the size of the search area

for Air France

Ths s a massve search area

ts magntude s larger than any prevous search I've ever worked on.

Deep-sea salvage expert Andy Sherrell

analyses all the data that's been gathered underwater

Oddly enough when I frst heard about MH7s dsappearance

my wfe was n labour wth our frst chld.

The news came on about the dsappearance of the flght

and my wfe looked at me and she sad

* Now that's a job you're not gong to get nvolved wth.*

Andy has been involved ever since

Using his knowledge from six previous investigations

including a search for Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra

As soon as the underwater scanning begins

it identifies shapes that could be man- made

o when you're revewng the sde scan sonar

t comes down n a waterfall dsplay

and you can see the dfferent ntenstes of you know

soft sand versus hard rock.

Guided by the scans

the team investigate 80 locations in detail

but find no trace of MH0

Then in May 2015 the sonar picks up something new and exciting

It was a typcal lookng debrs feld

that defntely warranted more nvestgaton.

The debris field covers an area similar in size

to the wreckage of Air France

Could this finally be the remains of MH0?

They launch an autonomous underwater vehicle

armed with state-of-the-art sensors to take a closer look

Using the actual data it recorded that day

it's now possible to drain away the water from over the site

revealing the most hopeful discovery so far in the hunt for MH0

At one end a pile of chains

then a 2ft- long metal box

rusted machinery

and finally three metal anchors

They've found a shipwreck

Its wooden hull long rotted away

The site strewn with coal, probably cargo on its final voyage

They haven't found MH0

but in these dark uncharted depths

they're casting light on tragedies from a different age

The investigators discover three other wrecks

including this iron- hulled sailing ship upright on the sea bed

And a modern fishing trawler

nets stretched out across the sea floor

Proving that their technology

can locate and retrieve objects as small as a piece of coal

After 15 months of detailed scanning

covering 2000 square miles of sea floor

there's still no sign of the missing plane

We have a very hgh confidence that

we would have detected the plane n that search area

so all these factors gves us really hgh confidence

that the aeroplane debrs feld s not n that area.

The investigation continues

still guided by just two key pieces of evidence -

the I nmarsat calculations and Boeing's flight performance data

Then suddenly a third line of inquiry

brings hope of a breakthrough

On a remote island on the other side of the I ndian Ocean

000 miles from the search area

a piece of metal washes up on a beach

and it looks like it comes from an aircraft

I n J uly 2015

a council worker on Reunion island

a French territory in the I ndian Ocean

stumbles upon an unusual object on a beach

It's called a flaperon

There is one on each wing of a Boeing

part of the mechanism that makes it rise or fall

Boeing quickly confirms that its

serial number matches that of the missing plane

It's the first piece of physical evidence

that MH0 ended its flight in the ocean

It s my hope that ths confrmaton

wll at least brng certanty to the famles and loved ones.

The suffering of the families

attracts the attention of amateur wreck hunter Blaine Gibson

and sets him off on a remarkable personal quest

I was very very touched very moved

and realsed that I needed to go do what I could to solve ths.

And what I learned what that nche was

was that there was no off cal search

for debrs that washed ashore.

Blaine consults ocean drift experts who direct him to Mozambique

where he makes an immediate discovery

And t was a trangular greyshaped pece of debrs that sad

* No tep* on t.

Clearly arcraft.

I felt an enormous sense of responsblty...

...because I realsed that I had just found the second pece of debrs n

the greatest avaton mystery n hstory.

Boeing confirms that the " No Step" debris is from MH0

Blaine has found it 50 miles away from the main search zone

Still acting alone he continues to search

We just found on Rake beach

ths pece of debrs we have not pcked t up yet.

Almost 0 pieces of debris thought to come from MH0 are recovered

all on the western side of the I ndian Ocean

Blaine Gibson finds 15 of them

One piece stands out from the rest

The most sgnfcant to me

and also to the nvestgaton

was the case around the TV screen on

the back of the seat n front of you.

Ths s the one that brought tears to my eyes.

Ths s perhaps the last thng that somebody saw.

Ths s what anyone who fles on a plane would recognse.

Debris like this from inside the passenger cabin

confirms that MH0 hit the water hard

Another piece of debris helps resolve a key question

I nvestigators already believe the plane ran out of fuel

But as it fell towards the ocean

was someone trying to save it with a controlled ditch?

The flap extends on an internal support track

I nvestigators discover that the track has left

impact marks inside the flap

That can only happen if it's in a retracted position -

strong evidence that the plane was in its normal cruising state

as it fell towards the sea

The flap supports the theory that the plane ran out of fuel,

and suggests that no-one at that point

was trying to ditch or save it

But the debris doesn't only confirm how MH0 crashed

it opens up a new and exciting line of inquiry

that could narrow the search area

I thnk ts enormously mportant to fnd the plane

because whle planes crash routnely...

...they don't just dsappear and I thnk ths terrfes people.

Oceanographer David Griffin believes

that the very first piece of debris recovered

the flaperon on Reunion island may be the key

Ths could be a good spot I reckon.

The wnds probably a bt stronger I guess. Yep.

Ths s a Boeng 777 flaperon off another arcraft not MH7.

Well use ths end to snk t agan all rght? Yep.

David Griffin is trying to recreate the journey of the flaperon across

the ocean in the hope this will pinpoint the crash site

He compares the flaperon's movement to these buoys

nown as ocean drifters

they're used to daily all around the world to monitor ocean currents

We very quckly determned that these replca flaperons

moved about ten centmetres per second faster downwnd

than an oceanographc drfter.

That may not sound like much

but when he compares it to known data about the currents

in the seventh arc on the day of the crash

it helps him estimate the flaperon's travels

during the 500 days it was afloat

It's an extraordinary discovery

To narrow the search zone even further

David Griffin investigates another strange feature of the debris

I n addton to knowng where thngs are found n Afrca

the other key thng s where thngs have not been found

and that's Australa.

Why has no debris been washed ashore in Australia?

Some of the ocean currents in the search area

flow east towards the country

A plane crashing here should leave evidence on Australian beaches

o ths mmedately tells us that

all those potental paths of the seventh arc

where the flow s strongly towards Australa

they're essentally ruled out.

When David Griffin looks at the historic drifter data

from the day MH0 disappeared

he finds three places on the seventh arc

where the current would have pushed debris

away from Australia towards Africa

Here around * you have ths area

where everythng s movng to the west.

Agan up at everythngs movng to the west.

If the plane crashed in one of these areas

it would explain why debris was not found in Australia

And critically only one of these locations

matches his calculation of the flaperon's journey

o that led us to propose that * outh

s the most lkely area for the crash.

5 South is an area that was not checked

during the initial surface debris search

For investigators it's an exciting new lead

but it comes too late

It s wth some level of sadness

certanly wth a great deal of frustraton and dsappontment

that I stand here and acknowledge that the search

the underwater search effort has been suspended.

On January 1th 201

after almost three frustrating years

the search for MH0 is called off

It was record breakng n terms of the tme t took

the area that was covered.

Theres never been a search as bg by an order of magntude.

But will David Griffin's flaperon experiment

persuade authorities to search 5 degrees south?

It takes almost a year to answer that question

and new evidence from the skies

Oceanographer David Griffin has a new theory

He thinks MH0 is in an area called 5 South

And in 201 he finds more evidence pointing to the same place

I remember the day when I frst saw those mages n hgh resoluton

and I thought *My *od ths really helps.*

15 days after MH0 disappeared

a French military satellite captured images of possible man- made debris

in the vicinity of 5 South

At that time the location wasn't considered a high priority area

But four years later it's a different story

And I thought that ths s really exctng

ths could be used to restart the search.

A new year brings new hope

I n January 2018 salvage company Ocean I nfinity

sets out on a brand - new privately funded mission

The seventh arc is still the focus

but they expand the width of the previous search zone

and move towards the new area identified by David Griffin

Once again Andy Sherrell is on board and this time

he has eight autonomous underwater vehicles or AUVs

One deep tow vessel would do a swng of about days onste

and over those days on ste they'd cover

about * square klometres.

*sng eght A*Vs smultaneously

we can cover that n about three to four days.

It's a high-stakes gamble

If they find nothing they don't get paid

Ocean I nfinity searches the new priority area at 5 South

I n five months

they cover an area almost equal in size

to the original sea floor search

But frustratingly

they find no trace of MH0

The two search efforts have covered almost

2000 square miles of sea floor

1 times the size of the Air France search zone

I n May 2018

the Malaysian government announces

that it will not support any new searches

Is the wreckage of MH0 waiting to be discovered in the 8000 square

miles of seventh arc search zone that remains unexplored?

Do clues to the mystery lie a few feet outside the circle of light

and knowledge already cast by the search teams?

Only time money and the continued desire for answers

separate us from the moment of discovery

But the knowledge hard -won over two search efforts and four years

will be invaluable for any future hunt

Using the extraordinary data

gathered by hundreds of investigators

we can drain the area around the seventh arc

to reveal what MH0 might look like when it is found

The debris will stretch out over thousands of yards

The engines will be in one piece

the fuselage in thousands

The nearby black boxes will reveal

if anyone was in the cockpit at the end

Emergency oxygen cylinders may show if the plane

depressurised in-flight whether

intentionally or the result of an accident

And personal electronic devices could reveal the experiences and

fate of individual passengers and crew

It will be a profound moment

one that Andy Sherrell has experienced before

Its a really surreal knd of sombre moment

because you realse all of a sudden that you've found ths graveste

ths place where all these people pershed.

Its sad but ts also a bt of a relef because you know

that from that pont forward some answers are gong to come back.

I thnk you have to reman optmstc and f you don't search

you don't fnd so hopefully at the end they wll fnd t.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media