Ten years ago today, on 8 March 2014, Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur, en-route to Beijing – only to veer wildly off course and vanish, never to be seen or heard from again. There were 239 people on board. How can an aircraft simply disappear without a trace? Even now, no one has any real clue what happened. It is a mystery like no other.

The only indisputable facts are those that have existed from the very beginning. The flight left Kuala Lumpur, travelled north-east and out over the South China Sea, heading for Beijing. The crew last communicated with air traffic control 38 minutes into the flight. Everything seemed normal enough. Minutes later, the aircraft veered dramatically off its planned flight path to head over the southern Indian Ocean. Then it disappeared.

It is not surprising that conspiracy theories are rife when there are so few facts about what actually happened

The disappearance prompted one of the largest multinational searches ever undertaken: more than 105,000 sq km of seafloor in the Indian Ocean was searched but no trace of the aircraft was found. Debris, believed to be from the missing plane, later washed up on the shorelines of South Africa, Mozambique and Mauritius.

The official Malaysian accident investigation report, published in 2018, ran to more than 500 pages but provided no definitive answer to the question of what caused the plane to disappear. In the intervening years, the information void has inevitably been filled with dotty conspiracy theories. The fate of the aircraft has spawned multiple books and blogs, and a travelling circus of experts, all touting their own answers: was it murder-suicide by the pilot or an elaborate hijack plot? Some conspiracy theorists claimed that the plane was shot down by the US airforce and the facts covered up.

The finger of blame was initially pointed at the plane’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, an experienced pilot. It was claimed that he had ‘gone rogue’ because of problems in his personal life. Only the deliberate actions of the pilot, it was suggested, could explain why the plane turned so sharply off course towards the Indian Ocean in the way it did, and why the communications equipment went silent at a critical point. Data from a home-built flight simulator owned by Shah showed someone plotting a similar course to that taken by the aircraft. Yet Malaysian police and technical experts found nothing to suggest he was planning to hijack the aircraft, and the official investigation into the plane’s disappearance found no evidence to suggest any recent behavioural changes in the pilot. His family, who have had to live with the speculation for years, insist that he was a devoted family man and loved his job.

Then there is the ‘ghost flight’ theory, in which the plane was left to fly on autopilot for hours after a catastrophic event, possibly a fire, led to the crew becoming incapacitated, such as due to a lack of oxygen. For a while, even the missing passengers were under suspicion, with suggestions that one or a group might have taken over the plane as part of a hijack plot. No evidence for this was ever put forward and the authorities later cleared all passengers of any link to terrorism.

The wilder conspiracy theories have included one that claimed the plane was shot down by the US government after it had been hijacked and placed on course to attack the American military base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Why would the Americans want to keep secret a potential terrorist attack of this kind?

There have been other equally implausible claims that the plane was carrying top secret electronics cargo to China, before being intercepted by the US government, which then faked the satellite data. It is hardly surprising that conspiracy theories are rife when there is so little in the way of facts about what actually happened and the plane remains missing.

This week, as the tenth anniversary of the disaster approached, the Malaysian government said that it was willing to re-open the investigation and fund a new search if necessary. The US marine robotics company Ocean Infinity, which carried out an unsuccessful hunt for the aircraft in 2018, says it is willing to undertake a new search operation on a ‘no find, no fee’ basis. The problem remains that the potential search area in the Indian Ocean is huge and very deep. In the meantime, the human suffering of those who lost loved ones on the doomed flight goes on. Will they ever get the answers they seek? It doesn’t look likely any time soon.