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"The red-eye to Beijing lifted off the tarmac six minutes late, at 12:41 in the morning, and made a climbing turn over Kuala Lumpur until it was pointed northeast, into the dark over the South China Sea. The aircraft, a twin-engine Boeing 777, was a marvel of engineering and avionics, one of the safest machines of any kind, ever, to transport people, and was flown by a pilot with more than thirty years of experience. The first officer, a young man who was engaged to be married, hadn\u2019t been born when the pilot started flying, but he was fully certified and still had thousands of hours of flight time.\n\nThere were ten other crew members on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which flew for the last time on March 8, 2014, and 227 passengers. More than two-thirds were Chinese nationals, and another thirty-eight were Malaysians. There was a Russian and two Canadians in business class, two Ukrainians in coach, and two Iranians traveling on stolen passports, from Italy and Austria, hoping eventually to slip into Europe. There was an Italian in 34C and a New Zealander in 19C. A French mother, two of her children, and her son\u2019s girlfriend filled a row of middle seats, and on the left side of the plane, two Australian couples were four days into an Asiatic tour they\u2019d planned for a year.\n\nThere was a single American adult, in an aisle seat in the first row of economy. His name was Philip Wood, and he managed sales to high-end clients for IBM. The company had transferred him from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur, and he was flying back to close out some accounts and help his partner, Sarah Bajc, pack up their apartment.\n\nTwenty-four seconds after the plane left the ground, air-traffic controllers cleared it to climb to 18,000 feet on a line to IGARI, a spot in the sky at the edge of Malaysian airspace and one of thousands of oddly named navigational waypoints airliners follow. Over the next eight minutes, MH370\u2014the flight\u2019s call sign\u2014was cleared for 25,000 feet, then 35,000, its cruising altitude.\n\nJust before 1:08, the plane\u2019s ACARS (aircraft communications addressing and reporting system), which automatically reports on various flight and mechanical systems, bounced a routine message off a satellite to a ground station. There was nothing abnormal.\n\nControllers in Malaysia watched MH370\u2019s label, a cluster of letters and numbers, stutter-step up their screens toward IGARI. The flight by then was out of primary radar range. At that distance, air-traffic relies on secondary radar, longer-range technology that gathers information\u2014call signs, altitudes, headings, speed\u2014from transponders in every aircraft. There are two of them on commercial airliners, because every system is redundant in case one fails.\n\nAt 1:19, just before MH370 reached IGARI, Malaysian controllers instructed the flight crew to switch their radio to the frequency for Ho Chi Minh control, which would take over beyond the waypoint. The co-pilot answered in a flat, professional cadence. &amp;quot;Good night, Malaysia three seven zero.&amp;quot;\n\nMH370 passed IGARI at 1:21. Twelve seconds later, its radar label disappeared.\n\nSeventeen minutes passed before anyone was concerned enough to start trying to find the plane.\n\nAir-traffic control in Malaysia and Vietnam radioed. Silence. Other pilots on other airliners tried, too. Static. Someone in the Malaysian Airlines operation center called the cockpit, twice, on the satellite phone. No answer. Every communication system had gone dead, even ACARS, which never sent its scheduled update at 1:37. Singapore air-traffic control hadn\u2019t picked up any odd blips. Neither had Hong Kong nor Phnom Penh.\n\nA modern aircraft had simply vanished, an event as rare as it is disastrous.\n\nA few hours later in Beijing, Sarah Bajc checked the status of Flight 370 online. Delayed. She\u2019d sent a car to pick up Wood at the airport while she waited for the movers, who were coming at nine. Before long, she checked her computer again: News sites were reporting that a Malaysia Airlines plane had lost contact.\n\nBy the time she got the official phone call\u2014she was listed as Wood\u2019s next of kin\u2014she already knew MH370 was missing. The airline couldn\u2019t tell her anything more.\n\nNine months later, when I first met Bajc, no one else could explain, convincingly, definitively, what happened to that red-eye to Beijing. The plane still hadn\u2019t been found. Nothing from it\u2014a suitcase, an in-flight magazine, a life vest\u2014had washed ashore, at least not that anyone had come across. So maybe Philip Wood, maybe all of them, were still alive. There was still a chance, and Sarah Bajc was still willing to believe.\n\n&amp;quot;Not unrealistically so,&amp;quot; she told me in a caf\u00E9 on a bright Malaysian morning. &amp;quot;The chances are very, very slim. A lot of zeroes in that percentage. But there\u2019s no proof that it crashed, which means it might have landed. We don\u2019t know.&amp;quot;\n\nWhen nothing is certain, everything is possible.\n\nFacebookPinterestPhoto: Richard Polden/Pool/Getty Images\n\n\n\nCommercial airliners very rarely crash, but when they do there is always debris. It doesn\u2019t matter if the plane explodes at 35,000 feet or nose-dives into deep water or slams into a desolate Antarctic mountain: There will be wreckage. It might be days or weeks before they get to it, but investigators eventually will find the fragments and, usually, a recording of the cockpit sounds and another of thousands of bits of flight data. From those, they will figure out, to within a reasonable degree of certainty, why that particular plane fell out of the sky. They can determine if a spark from a loose wire ignited the fumes in a near-empty fuel tank (TWA Flight 800, in 1996), or if an air-speed sensor iced up (Air France Flight 447, in 2009), or if the pilot made a mistake (also Air France, as well as about half of all crashes, often in conjunction with foul weather, a mechanical failure, or both). It might take a while to sort out all the details\u2014the recorders from Air France 447 weren\u2019t recovered for two years\u2014but there is always an answer.\n\nThe search for that debris logically begins near where the aircraft was last known to be. So at first light on March 8, ships and helicopters and slow, lumbering aircraft began scouring the waters beneath IGARI. They found nothing from MH370, not even a rainbow smear of jet fuel, which is not uncommon in such situations because the sea is vast and planes do not fall in plumb lines.\n\nBy the end of the second day, the searchers had still turned up nothing. The Malaysian government at that point could well have known that MH370 was almost certainly nowhere near those waters. They had access to two pieces of information, the most crucial of which they kept to themselves, sharing with neither the public nor the search teams.\n\nThe first, according to a well-placed source, was that the Malaysian authorities learned as early as the morning of March 9 that MH370 had likely continued flying long after its radar signal blinked off the controllers\u2019 screens. For almost seven hours, in fact, which means it was probably still in the air when search-and-rescue teams were swarming below IGARI. They knew that at 2:25 A.M., a little more than an hour after the flight\u2019s last contact, the plane\u2019s satellite-data unit powered up. From an antenna on top of the airframe, it sent a log-on request to an aging piece of hardware wobbling in space above the equator, which then relayed the signal to a ground station in Perth, both of which are owned by a British company called Inmarsat. This was a cry from the void, MH370 effectively saying &amp;quot;I\u2019m still out here.&amp;quot; Every hour after that, the Perth station bounced a signal off the satellite to the plane, asking if MH370 was still online. In the jargon, those are called handshakes, and the plane answered five of them\u2014still here, hour after hour. Then, at 8:19 in the morning Malaysia time, the satellite data unit sent a second log-on request. It was never completed, and the plane was never heard from again.\n\nNone of those handshakes, by themselves, indicated which direction MH370 had flown, how fast or how high or, least of all, where the flight ended. All of that would need to be deciphered, if it was even possible to do so; the system was designed to provide a communication link for phone calls and such, not location tracking. But it could safely be assumed a plane that remained airborne for seven hours was almost certainly many thousands of miles from where the search had begun.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nWhich leads to the second piece of information the authorities initially withheld: Malaysian military radar had tracked MH370 after it went dark. While civilians were frantically trying to contact a missing airliner, an unidentified dot blipped across military screens. After the plane went silent just past IGARI, it turned hard to the left and flew west, across the Malay Peninsula, then northwest through the Strait of Malacca, pinged by radar almost the entire way yet completely ignored. &amp;quot;The military should be on high alert, everyone knows that,&amp;quot; Julian Tan Kok Ping, a Malaysian lawmaker, told me. &amp;quot;They should have scrambled fighter jets. If they allow an aircraft to fly in controlled airspace without a transponder and no one does anything, that\u2019s criminal. Imagine if MH370 had turned back toward KLCC.&amp;quot; That\u2019s Kuala Lumpur City Centre, where stand the Petronas Towers, currently the tallest twin spires in the world. &amp;quot;As MPs, we\u2019ve raised this in the press many times, we\u2019ve raised this in Parliament many times,&amp;quot; Tan says. &amp;quot;And there\u2019s no answer.&amp;quot;\n\nIt\u2019s unclear exactly when the Malaysians realized the military had tracked MH370. In May, in a summary of the search, the Ministry of Transport said the information was retrieved from &amp;quot;a playback of a recording from primary military radar,&amp;quot; which would suggest that no one was paying attention when that recording was made. Some early reports, on the other hand, most notably by Reuters, had military officials watching an unidentified and unresponsive aircraft in real time, and apparently not reacting. In any case, the military radar was made public on the second day, and the search was expanded to the Strait of Malacca and the Andaman Sea.\n\nBut the Inmarsat data strongly suggested MH370 wouldn\u2019t be anywhere close to there, either. On March 15, a week after the plane disappeared, Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak announced that the search was being moved to the southern Indian Ocean based on what he called, many times, new satellite data\u2014the Inmarsat data. One could argue, as Razak did and not completely unreasonably, that revealing that information immediately would have been cruelly premature. The existence of the handshakes did not appreciably reduce the odds that MH370 had crashed. Announcing it had flown for hours without being able to say where would at best offer unwarranted hope and, at worst, horrific imaginings of a terrifying seven-hour death cruise.\n\nOn the other hand, one could also argue\u2014much more convincingly\u2014that revealing the Inmarsat data would have established a standard of transparency, and thus credibility, as the search continued. Yet the Malaysian government\u2014which is basically the same government that\u2019s run the country since independence in 1957\u2014has never been a model of transparency, and to become one in the glare of global media would have been absurdly embarrassing. A plane crash is a tragedy. Losing track of a plane that made a rogue pass unmolested over sovereign airspace and then kept flying for seven hours is tragedy compounded by farce.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nThat information delay, then, became the original sin of omission, seeming to corrupt everything that followed. When governments obfuscate, they breed suspicion. And when they do so in a matter involving the lives of 239 civilians on one of the safest and most reliable jetliners to ever fly, they invite\u2014they encourage\u2014conspiracy theories.\n\n\n\nIf the loss of MH370 was implausible\u2014when a hundred-dollar phone can pinpoint its position, how could a $269 million aircraft get lost?\u2014then the reason for that loss, in the ether of unverifiable speculation, could be equally implausible. The blankness of the investigation became an enormous canvas upon which any fear, rationally considered or raving lunacy, could be sketched into a workable, and not disprovable, theory. Ten percent of Americans, according to a CNN poll, believe the disappearance of an enormous aircraft involved nothing more complicated than an alien abduction.\n\nThe most common scenarios, of course, involve terrorists. One, which was gussied up into a hugely publicized Paris Match story by a French novelist, offers the possibility of MH370 being commandeered as a flying bomb and shot down by American fighters near a military base on the island of Diego Garcia. That was markedly different from, yet only slightly more sensible than, the other shoot-down theory, promulgated early and quickly forgotten, that the flight was accidently destroyed during a joint U.S.-Thai live-fire ercise. Since no debris has ever been found, there is a more robust subset of hijack theories: that MH370 landed somewhere. Various versions had it touching down on Christmas Island, the Maldives, Afghanistan, or Kazakhstan, to be either weaponized for future use or held for some other cryptic reason no one can yet fathom.\n\nThe possibility of a Kazakhstan landing was explained in fine-grained detail by Jeff Wise, a journalist and aviation writer who has studied MH370 exhaustively since March. In a six-part speculative ercise posted on his eponymous blog, he suggested that the Russian in first class and the two Ukrainians in coach could have been Russian intelligence agents capable of disabling the crew and flying a precision path to a Soviet-era space base. The specifics are very technical, and there are problems matching parts of it to the available data. &amp;quot;The fuel model,&amp;quot; Wise says, for instance, &amp;quot;doesn\u2019t really allow it.&amp;quot; The route would have traversed militarized and tightly monitored airspace, and the motive is completely unclear, except Vladimir Putin is an irrational thug. But it\u2019s a reasoned, good-faith ercise, and Wise argues Kazakhstan is more probable than any other terrestrial landing and no more improbable than a crash into the ocean. &amp;quot;You either think the debris must have washed up by now or you think it evaded all those northern radars,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Which seems more impossible to you?&amp;quot;\n\nThat is a difficult question to answer. A year ago, everything seemed possible. Perhaps, for example, it was a failed hijacking. Maybe there was a struggle and a grenade went off and blew a hole in the fuselage and the plane depressurized and everyone\u2014captain, crew, passengers\u2014died of hypoxia and the plane wandered off on autopilot for seven hours until it ran out of fuel.\n\nA hijacking seemed plausible because of the way MH370 went dark all at once, as if someone had pulled several circuit breakers in rapid sequence. Those circuits are in a bay beneath the cockpit that is accessed either from the cargo hold or through a hatch beneath the carpet next to the business-class lavatory. That hatch is not locked, and it is not difficult to locate; indeed, there are YouTube videos showing how to access a 777\u2019s electronics bay, and what\u2019s inside. (Wise\u2019s theory requires the use of that bay.)\n\nThen what of the pilot, Zaharie Shah? In the unaccountable realm of theorizing, Shah became either a madman or a hero. In the damning theory, he flew his plane into the ocean in mass-murder suicide because his marriage was falling apart or as an act of political dissidence, albeit an ineffective one, as he never bothered to tell anyone. And while other commercial pilots have deliberately crashed, none have flown for hours beforehand.\n\nIn the heroic version, MH370 was crippled by a catastrophic failure, one severe enough to sever communications but not to bring down the plane\u2014and the pilot did his best before being overcome by fumes or hypoxia. But that\u2019s not quite right, either, since the first thing a pilot would do is drop to 10,000 feet, where the air is breathable, and there is no credible evidence MH370 ever flew that low.\n\nThen there are the dark ops. In Malaysia, for example, two well-informed and perfectly rational people told me the key was the four tons of mangosteens, an exotic fruit, in the cargo hold. Perhaps those weren\u2019t mangosteens at all, they suggested, but rather, say, sensitive military technology that someone, probably the Americans because Americans do lots of nefarious things, didn\u2019t want to reach Beijing. So they remotely took control and flew MH370 like a drone to parts unknown, and killed everyone.\n\nPossible? Well, yes. Those Malaysians weren\u2019t the only ones to mention Boeing\u2019s uninterruptible autopilot, a counterterrorism gadget that, according to its 2006 patent, could be switched on &amp;quot;remotely via a communication link.&amp;quot; But even if the plane had it, this seems like an awful lot of effort and death for a problem that could have been solved with a phone call\u2014stop that plane!\u2014or a few operatives sneaking past an airport-security apparatus that a pair of untrained Iranian refugees with bogus passports handily beat.\n\nYet are those theories really so easy to dismiss? Maybe, if there is nothing personal at stake. But if your wife or son or grandfather was on that red-eye to Beijing, the plane that no one can find and that left no debris and that was lied about, whether through incompetence or mendacity, in the hours after it vanished...then, no, it is not so easy. Nor should it be. Hope is durable, especially when it is alchemized with mistrust.\n\n\n\nThe French mother on MH370 was Laurence Wattrelos. She was traveling with two of her three children\u2014daughter Ambre and son Hadrien, 14 and 17, respectively\u2014and Hadrien\u2019s girlfriend, another French citizen named Yan Zhao. They were returning from a week on a Malaysian beach to Beijing, where they lived because Laurence\u2019s husband, Ghyslain, worked there for years as an ecutive at Lafarge, a cement and building-materials firm. Lafarge had transferred Ghyslain back to Paris a few months earlier, but his family stayed so Hadrien and Ambre could finish out the school year.\n\nI met Ghyslain Wattrelos on a gray December morning at a private club not far from the Arc de Triomphe. The first thing he wanted me to know was that many people had contacted him since March, and that he divided those people into three categories. The largest group can be fairly described as kooks. They tell him they know what happened to his wife and children because it was revealed to them in a dream or a psychic vision or perhaps the entrails of a goat. Next are the mourners, people who\u2019ve also lost wives or husbands or children and want to share their grief or ease his sorrow or maybe both.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nThe third category is composed of journalists or, rather, those who introduce themselves as journalists. He splits them into two subgroups, because some of them do not appear to be journalists at all. They ask questions, he told me, and he gives them answers, but they never follow up and never write anything, and he never hears from them again. He suspects, frankly, that they are spooks, trying to figure out how close he is to finding out what happened to MH370.\n\nI told him I am not a spook. Wattrelos gave me a half nod and a half smile. A real spook wouldn\u2019t tell him, anyway.\n\nHe was in the air when his wife and two of their three children boarded MH370. He\u2019d left Paris the night before to join them in Beijing for a week, and his flight landed at about four o\u2019clock in the afternoon. While the plane was still taxiing, he switched on his phone. There was a text from a friend at Lafarge. &amp;quot;I\u2019m sorry, Ghyslain,&amp;quot; it read, &amp;quot;for what has happened.&amp;quot;\n\nFrench diplomats were waiting at the gate.\n\nHe has spoken to only a few actual journalists since then, and that is the part they usually want to talk about. Often they want to photograph him at home, preferably weeping over pictures of his wife and children, which he understands but isn\u2019t comfortable with. And really, is it even necessary, staging a display of something so obvious? &amp;quot;Of course it is horrible, what we\u2019re going through,&amp;quot; he said flatly and firmly, simply to get the matter out of the way. &amp;quot;I\u2019m alone at night now. It\u2019s all a black hole. It\u2019s awful.&amp;quot;\n\nNothing more needs to be said of grief. Wattrelos did not invite me to breakfast to discuss his emotions, with the notable exception of announcing his dominant one at the outset. &amp;quot;I\u2019m not sad anymore,&amp;quot; he told me. &amp;quot;I\u2019m just...I don\u2019t know how to say it in English. In French, it\u2019s col&amp;amp;#xE8;re. Angry, but more than that....&amp;quot;\n\nFurious?\n\n&amp;quot;Yes. Furious.&amp;quot;\n\nHe is furious because he does not believe the Malaysian authorities\u2014and quite possibly, to varying degrees, the American, British, Australian, French, Indonesian, Thai, and Singapore authorities\u2014have been truthful. Which is a reasonable assumption, considering the Malaysians were not, in fact, truthful in the immediate aftermath of the plane\u2019s disappearance. &amp;quot;They had something to hide from the very beginning, that\u2019s all I\u2019m saying,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;It pisses me off when journalists say it\u2019s a mystery, the biggest mystery in aviation history. No, it\u2019s not. It\u2019s a cover-up. Maybe the reasons are good, but we need to know.&amp;quot;\n\nA good reason, he said, would be if MH370 had been hijacked, which is what he initially thought. &amp;quot;If it\u2019s a hijacking, you have no choice: You fly it somewhere and you shoot it down,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;That I could understand. If Malaysia or the U.S., if they shot it down to avoid another 9/11, I think everyone would understand that.&amp;quot;\n\nBut when weeks passed without any wreckage being found, Wattrelos began to suspect the plane might have landed, though where or for what purpose he could not say. He is well versed in all the theories, but he did not favor one over the others.\n\n&amp;quot;Everything is possible,&amp;quot; he told me. &amp;quot;But they\u2019re lying to us.&amp;quot;\n\nWattrelos\u2019s disdain for the French government is personal, and it began with an official silence. &amp;quot;When something happens to French people, they always say something,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Always. For this flight, they never said a word. Nothing. To me, that is very strange.&amp;quot;\n\nHe wrote a letter to the French president, Fran&amp;amp;#xE7;ois Hollande, outlining his concerns, and got banal generalities from an aide in reply. &amp;quot;My interpretation is they can\u2019t say they don\u2019t know anything,&amp;quot; Wattrelos said. &amp;quot;He didn\u2019t want to lie to me.&amp;quot; In March, he asked a French judge to begin an inquest into MH370 as an act of terrorism; in late August, his application was denied for jurisdictional reasons he does not find convincing. &amp;quot;That\u2019s why I strongly believe they&amp;quot;\u2014he meant the French and, by extension, several other governments\u2014&amp;quot;know what happened.&amp;quot;\n\nWattrelos has one surviving child, a son who is 21. &amp;quot;I wake up every morning for two things: my son and this fight,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;But everything else is awful. And when the fight is over, what will happen? It might be worse, this is true. But for now, I have this fight.&amp;quot;\n\nPart of that fight required hiring a private investigator. Wattrelos, Sarah Bajc, and the families of two Indian passengers raised a few thousand dollars on crowdfunding site Indiegogo to pay him, but by December the money was running out and the P.I. wasn\u2019t having much success. Maybe it would have been easier if more people had been involved, the relatives of the Chinese and the Malaysians on board. &amp;quot;One of the problems we have,&amp;quot; Wattrelos told me, &amp;quot;is as an association, the families, we are not strong.&amp;quot;\n\nA week after we had breakfast in Paris, Wattrelos flew to Kuala Lumpur to see Bajc and the P.I. I met him for coffee in a hotel lobby overlooking a freeway. When he lived in Beijing, Wattrelos used to visit Malaysia fairly often. Nice place to vacation. But this was his first time back since his wife and children disappeared. &amp;quot;The airport,&amp;quot; he\u2019d told me earlier, when the talk was of failures and lies, &amp;quot;we say it\u2019s a cheese with holes.&amp;quot; How else did two Iranians on stolen passports slip through?\n\nThis time, he told me about his daughter. Before she boarded MH370 with her mother and her brother, she was texting with a friend. I\u2019m very happy to be going back to Beijing, she tapped out in her last message. I\u2019m going to see my father.\n\nWattrelos looked at the traffic for a moment. &amp;quot;So that\u2019s what I\u2019m thinking,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;when I see this airport.&amp;quot;\n\n\n\nSarah Bajc and Philip Wood had been together since the autumn of 2011. She\u2019d been in Beijing for eight years, first with Microsoft and then with a Chinese technology company, but she\u2019d cashed out of both and gone back to school for a master\u2019s degree in education so she could teach business and economics to high school kids. She was out with friends one night in an expat bar, and they wanted to go dancing. She didn\u2019t. She stayed at the bar and ordered a drink.\n\n&amp;quot;I\u2019ve never seen a woman drink bourbon,&amp;quot; the man two stools down said. &amp;quot;Especially Wild Turkey.&amp;quot;\n\nThey were living together soon after. They were both divorced, and it was good, Bajc told me, for her children to see her with Wood, a man who was respectful and kind and openly affectionate. They had similar personalities, generally calm, appropriately playful. &amp;quot;Friends would meet him,&amp;quot; Bajc said, &amp;quot;longtime friends, and they would say, \u2019Oh, my God, he\u2019s a male version of you.\u2019 &amp;quot;\n\nThe movers arrived on time the morning of March 8, more than two hours after Wood should have been on the ground. She got the official phone call when there were strangers in her apartment, packing her life in China for a new one in Kuala Lumpur.\n\nCBS interviewed her the next day. She said the things people usually say in those first startled hours of cavernous grief, the most important and unsurprising of which was that she did not accept that the man she loved was truly gone. &amp;quot;I\u2019m personally not willing to give up hope that there\u2019s a chance we\u2019ll find survivors, that we\u2019ll find the plane,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;There just has to be a chance.&amp;quot;\n\nThat was not, she told me, reflexive denial. She did not believe then, and certainly did not believe in December, that MH370 simply fell out of the sky. &amp;quot;By the ninth, I was sure it was something intentional,&amp;quot; she said. Partly that was instinct, but it was also logic. Even then, in the very beginning, there were obvious hints. Airliners, with their multiple and redundant communication systems, do not go completely silent all at once unless they\u2019ve been destroyed or hijacked. Yet there was no wreckage in the shallow and heavily traveled waters beneath IGARI, which suggested those transponders and radios and such had been deliberately turned off. &amp;quot;It all pointed to an abduction,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;And I think I knew at that point already that it had to be talked about. Otherwise it would be spun.&amp;quot;\n\nBajc believes the Malaysian government already knows what happened to MH370. If the authorities weren\u2019t truthful in the beginning, there\u2019s no reason she should assume they\u2019re being so now. &amp;quot;The country is covering it up,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;That should be considered criminal conduct, the cover-up. What they\u2019re covering up, we don\u2019t know.&amp;quot;\n\nWe were at a caf\u00E9 in a pleasant neighborhood of Kuala Lumpur, near the apartment she and Wood had picked out and not far from the secondary school where she teaches. She lives alone, except for a cat. &amp;quot;This is the place we\u2019d decided to build a new life. This is where I last spent time with him,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;I had to be close. And I still expected to hear something. Never did I expect to go this long without knowing.&amp;quot;\n\n\n\nI met captain Desmond Ross, a leading aviation-security expert, at his local pub in the Pyrmont neighborhood of Sydney. He was born in Belfast, was taught to fly by the Royal Air Force, and has spent most of his career in aviation security, including years in Southeast Asia. He understands, as all aviation professionals understand, that certain protocols should be followed when civilian airliners blink off radar screens. Ho Chi Minh control should have been in contact with Kuala Lumpur within three minutes of MH370 not showing up, preferably two, and most definitely not seventeen. Civilian controllers should have contacted their military counterparts, and there should be a record, written and audio, of those communications. If they exist, they\u2019ve never been released.\n\nMore important, when unidentified and unresponsive aircraft appear on military screens, fighter jets are supposed to be scrambled. Those pilots are supposed to visually identify the rogue plane, waggle their wings as a signal to land if need be, drift in close if there\u2019s no response. &amp;quot;They can look into the cockpit. If the pilot\u2019s not there, they can see that. If the pilot\u2019s dead, they can see that,&amp;quot; Ross said. &amp;quot;This is not rocket science. That is standard operating protocol. Everybody knows it, everybody understands it.&amp;quot;\n\nIf any of that had happened, the fate of MH370 would likely be known. That those things did not happen leaves, to Ross\u2019s mind, a binary choice. &amp;quot;Either incompetence, total dereliction of duty, which amounts to criminal negligence,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;or a conspiracy. What else is there?&amp;quot;\n\nHe let that hang for a moment. Then: &amp;quot;You have to discard most of the conspiracy theories.&amp;quot;\n\nHe ticks off the main ones, and a few variations of each. There\u2019s no evidence either the pilot or co-pilot was suicidal. &amp;quot;There\u2019s no point in hijacking it and not taking credit,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;unless they fucked up and they\u2019re keeping it under wraps because they want to try again.&amp;quot; At that point, nine months after the fact, no one had. And stealing it? &amp;quot;If someone is really believing in this day and age that they can hide an aircraft and 239 people,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;they\u2019re kidding themselves.&amp;quot;\n\nThat leaves incompetence, gross dereliction of duty, and so forth. Ross favors that option. Which would explain why questions aren\u2019t answered and records aren\u2019t released and there are wide, yawning holes in the narrative begging to be filled with conspiracies. &amp;quot;Malaysia\u2019s dug themselves a trench because they\u2019re trying to save face,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Do not underestimate that, saving face. If that\u2019s the case, they\u2019ve dug themselves such a fucking trench they could bury all of Kuala Lumpur.&amp;quot;\n\nA short hop away, in Canberra, Martin Dolan hinted at pretty much the same thing. He is the chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, the ATSB, which is in charge of the search. But he\u2019s limited in what he can say. What about, for instance, Indonesian radar? It should have picked up MH370. &amp;quot;It detected nothing...,&amp;quot; Dolan started. &amp;quot;Wait, I\u2019m sorry. There was no detection. I have to choose my words carefully. I can\u2019t say more about Indonesia, but they are not concealing anything from us.&amp;quot; As for Australian radar, he chooses his words even more carefully. &amp;quot;It, ah...wasn\u2019t aimed there at that time. And that\u2019s all I can say.&amp;quot;\n\nDolan understands that those are the kind of words that breed conspiracies. He also understands bureaucracies. &amp;quot;Speaking as a career public servant,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;if you have a choice between a conspiracy and a stuff-up, go with the stuff-up. It\u2019s a good rule of thumb.&amp;quot;\n\n\n\nMalaysia Air Flight 370 is probably at the bottom of the southern Indian Ocean. That is the consensus view, at least, of a great number of technically savvy people, of whom there are far too many to form a coherent conspiracy.\n\nThat conclusion is based on the seven handshakes between Inmarsat and the aircraft. The signal for each of those brief data exchanges had to travel from a ground station in Australia to a satellite in space, down to the moving airliner, and then back again (or vice versa for the log-on requests initiated by the aircraft). The signal travels at a fid speed, so by measuring how long it took to make the round-trip cycle, engineers were able to calculate how far the plane was from the satellite during each handshake.\n\nThose calculations produced seven circles, each centered on the satellite, upon which MH370\u2019s possible route could be plotted. For practical reasons\u2014the plane had neither the fuel nor the time to get west of the satellite, for instance\u2014those circles were snipped to arcs, one stretching north from Thailand to Kazakhstan, the other slashing through thousands of miles of empty sea in the south. Assuming the plane went down during or immediately after that final, abbreviated handshake, it would be at a point on or very near one of those long, thin curves.\n\nThe next step, then, was to figure out which direction MH370 turned out of the Strait of Malacca, the last point Malaysian military tracked it. Because the aircraft was moving, the frequency of the signal it sent either stretched or compressed on its way to the satellite. It\u2019s the same principle, to use the most common example, as a train\u2019s whistle seeming to change pitch as it passes. The difference between the frequency the ground station expected to receive and the one it actually did\u2014whether that hypothetical train\u2019s howl sounded higher or lower than it does at a standstill\u2014would indicate whether the plane was traveling toward the satellite or away from it and, thus, north or south.\n\nThe algorithms to sort all that out had to be developed on the fly. But Inmarsat engineers by mid-March calculated MH370 had rounded the northern tip of Sumatra and then flown south, apparently until it ran out of fuel. Exactly where depended on a number of variables\u2014altitude, speed, winds, the precision of the last turn, whether that even was the last turn. (The plane &amp;quot;could also have flown around in circles and ended up almost anywhere on the final arc,&amp;quot; they noted in a paper published last fall in The Journal of Navigation.) But they\u2019d at least placed it along a narrow, if dauntingly long, slice of the Indian Ocean.\n\nInmarsat engineers are not the only ones to have reached that conclusion. Analysts working for five different governments, including the United States, Great Britain, and Australia, have, too, although they differ on precisely which point on the seventh arc is the most likely. Perhaps more important, a number of skeptical civilians with deep expertise in appropriate fields\u2014satellites, avionics, communications technology, and the like\u2014have scoured the data as well. Among the false-flag paranoids and the conspiracy crackpots cluttering the Internet, a few dozen scientists, technicians, and others, including Jeff Wise of the Kazakhstan postulate, last spring self-sorted themselves into something called the Independent Group. They were forced to rely on limited data, cobbled together from public documents and databases. (The IG has never seen Inmarsat\u2019s complete data logs.) For the Malaysian military radar track, they used a news photographer\u2019s picture of a slide shown at a briefing for the passengers\u2019 next of kin. A Lenovo engineer named Bill Holland culled a few columns of unreleased data from the b-roll of a CNN piece on Inmarsat. &amp;quot;This is really reverse engineering in a very, very ugly way,&amp;quot; he said.\n\nBetween them, the Independent Group members ran the available data through countless flight scenarios of differing speed and altitude, and in September, issued a report arguing MH370 most likely spiraled into the Indian Ocean 1,500 miles southwest of Perth. At the time, the ATSB had its priority search zone 600 miles north on the arc. On October 8, after refining its own analysis, the ATSB moved south, to almost the exact same spot.\n\nThis January, four ships were steaming methodically across 23,000 square miles of ocean, bouncing sonar waves off the bottom, which in some places is more than 14,000 feet beneath the surface. Eventually, maybe, one of those signals will hit a large metallic object\u2014say, a Rolls-Royce Trent 892 turbo-fan engine\u2014and the recovery of MH370 will begin. &amp;quot;We are very confident,&amp;quot; Martin Dolan told me, &amp;quot;that if the aircraft is where we\u2019ve calculated it to be, we\u2019ll find it.&amp;quot;\n\nThe search is expected to be completed by May. And if they don\u2019t find it? &amp;quot;Then we\u2019ll go to the governments,&amp;quot; Dolan said, &amp;quot;and say, \u2019We\u2019ve got a problem. A very expensive problem.\u2019 &amp;quot;\n\n\n\nEarly one morning last year, a commercial airliner disappeared over Southeast Asia. It was a big, modern aircraft, well maintained and flown by a seasoned crew on a routine flight. Air-traffic controllers watched it climb out from the airport for almost an hour, a small block of identifying letters and numbers stutter-stepping toward the top of their radar screens.\n\nThere was heavy weather in the area, a string of monsoon-season thunderheads. The pilot asked air-traffic control if he could deviate from his assigned route path, which was allowed, and to climb to 38,000 feet, which was not because of other traffic.\n\nFive minutes later, the signal for AirAsia Flight QZ8501 was gone. It blinked off the control screens, and its communication systems went silent, and it was presumed\u2014because this is always the presumption soon after such things occur\u2014that it had fallen out of the sky.\n\nThe search, by ships and helicopters and slow, lumbering planes, began in the most logical place, which was where QZ8501 was last known to be. They looked until nightfall and the next day, too, but did not find anything. There is always debris, except for that one time when there wasn\u2019t, and suddenly it seemed possible that it was all beginning again.\n\nOn that second day, before the wreckage was found, a man named Calvin Shim sent me a text. He lives in the great urban sprawl of Kuala Lumpur, and we\u2019d been trying to connect for weeks, first in Malaysia and then by phone.\n\n&amp;quot;QZ8501 is really a recurrent shock for me,&amp;quot; Shim texted. A moment later: &amp;quot;I am available for phone call now.&amp;quot;\n\nWe spoke mostly about his wife, Christine Tan, who had been a flight attendant with Malaysia Airlines for more than twenty years. She worked long-haul flights to Paris or London, but every so often she flew the red-eye to Beijing. The airline sometimes sent a car to ferry his wife to the airport, but she\u2019d called a cab the night before she left for her final flight. Shim walked her out to say good-bye. Their 6-year-old daughter came with him.\n\n&amp;quot;Mommy,&amp;quot; she said as Tan got into the cab, &amp;quot;can I give you one last kiss before you go to work?&amp;quot;\n\nShim winced inside. &amp;quot;I remember that sentence,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;because I didn\u2019t feel comfortable.&amp;quot; He didn\u2019t know why. Now he tells his kids they should always ask for one more kiss, never one last kiss.\n\nHis wife had been gone almost ten months the night he told me that. He wanted to be objective, a realist, to believe what he\u2019d been told, that he hadn\u2019t been lied to.\n\nBut when nothing is certain, everything is possible. What if one of those other theories, the ones dismissed as conspiracies, is true? What if it landed? How can he know?\n\nHe can\u2019t. So he pays the bill every month for his wife\u2019s cell phone. And when his mother tries to comfort her grandchildren, when she tells them Mommy is in heaven, he gently corrects her: &amp;quot;Don\u2019t say their mother\u2019s in heaven,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Because we don\u2019t know yet.&amp;quot;\n\n SEAN FLYNN is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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