Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: PBS ‘NOVA’ Show Says ‘Human Intervention’ Caused Plane To Vanish

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished seven months ago today, October 8, and PBS marks the event with a special edition of NOVA that concludes only the deliberate acts of a human being could have taken the missing plane off course and caused it to disappear.

Now in its 42nd season on the United States Public Broacasting System, NOVA is one of the longest-running programs of any kind on American television. The highly respected science documentary series has been on the air since March 3, 1974, tackling dozens of scientific puzzles and mysteries from ancient cave paintings to futuristic space exploration.

The new NOVA special, “Why Planes Vanish,” is scheduled to debut in the U.S. at 9 p.m. Eastern time on October 8. The show, introduced by science journalist Miles O’Brien, probes all of the major theories that attempt to explain what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Among those theories, the possibility that a cache of lithium batteries carried as cargo on the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 blew up and caused a raging fire that took out the plane’s controls.

But the “accident” theory of Flight 370 does not appear to be the conclusion favored by NOVA. Instead, the show leans toward “something more sinister” as a solution to the baffling Malaysia Airlines mystery.

“It was intentional. Some humans did this,” says former National Transportation Safety Board member John Goglia, quoted in the online preview for the October 8 NOVA episode, which can be seen above. “The dots don’t line up. It doesn’t make sense.”

The NOVA preview goes on to suggest that the plane was hijacked, because “you could remove control from the cockpit.”

Goglia says that while a fire or some other type of accidental catastrophe on board Flight 370 could have caused the radio and other electronic communications systems to go silent — the first sign on March 8 that the plane was in trouble.

But if Flight 370 had suffered such an accident, it is highly unlikely that the Malaysia Airlines 777 could have stayed in the air for another six or seven hours, reaching the southern Indian Ocean, a destination thousands of miles off of its original Kuala Lumpur to Beijing flight plan, Goglia says in the NOVA show.

Investigators are certain that the Malaysia Airlines flight did exactly that, based on satellite “ping” data that continued long after the plane’s other communications were cut off.

The PBS documentary also explores how another aviation disaster like the mystery of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 can be prevented from happening again.