Six years after the mysterious disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines passenger aircraft that was heading from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, various theories that try to explain the aircraft's disappearance and the events surrounding it continue to emerge to this day.
In his book titled "The Taking of MH370", aviation expert Jeff Wise draws attention to the fact that even as the plane disappeared prior to entering Vietnamese airspace, air traffic controllers in Ho Chi Minh City only contacted Kuala Lumpur nearly twenty minutes after the moment they were expected to detect the plane, while they were apparently supposed to do it immediately after failing to locate the aircraft, the Daily Express reports.
"This was odd: modern commercial aircraft operate with an extreme precision enabled by satellite navigation, computer control and atomic locks. The routes are planned and flown like laser-like accuracy", he wrote.
Air traffic controllers then apparently spent quite some time trying to figure out where the plane might've gone, and the actual search-and-rescue effort was initiated over four hours after MH370 vanished, which may be related to the fact that the incident occurred at night and that it wasn't immediately clear where to look for the aircraft, the media outlet notes.
"At 5.20am, a Malaysia Airlines staffer asked a Kuala Lumpur controller whether the plane had been successfully handed off to Ho Chi Minh City. The controller had to wake up his supervisor to ask", Wise noted. "Ten minutes later, the supervisor activated a search-and-rescue response."
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared from radar screens with 239 passengers and crew on board on March 8, 2014, during a handover from Malaysian to Vietnamese air traffic controllers while on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
And while there are plenty of theories about what happened to the airliner out there, the ultimate fate of MH370 remains unknown.