By John Kelly
Mirror UK

7 March 2015

It has been a year since Captain Zaharie Shah steered his mighty Boeing 777 into the night sky with 227 passengers and 12 crew, who have never been seen again

In a routine he had performed ­countless times before, Captain Zaharie Shah steered his mighty Boeing 777 into the night sky.

All must have seemed normal to the 227 passengers and 12 crew on the Beijing- bound aircraft – but something was wrong.

Shortly afterwards, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared.

One year on, what happened still remains a mystery.

In a world where every movement seems to be recorded by someone, somewhere, the best ­investigators have failed to produce a single scrap of evidence, not even a flake of paint, to show where the plane went.

That is despite the spending of around £62million on a so-far fruitless search in which 10,000 square miles of the southern Indian Ocean – a “priority zone” – have been trawled by underwater mapping machines.

An interim report on the disappearance from ­Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation is due to be released.

The country’s transport minister Liow Tiong Lai has promised the airliner will be found in weeks – possibly by May.

But for the families of those missing, the waiting just goes on.

There are growing signs that the will to find the plane is waning.

Tony Abbott, the Prime Minister of Australia which has ploughed most of the money into solving the mystery, this week said he could “not promise that the search will go on at this intensity for ever”.

What is known is this: the flight left Kuala Lumpur at 12.41am a year ago supposedly heading for Beijing with the last contact at 1.19am, when a co-pilot radioed: “Goodnight Malaysian three seven zero.”

Two minutes later the plane fails to check in with air traffic control in Vietnam. Radar shows it makes a sharp turn left and an alarm is raised at 5.30am. No distress signal is ever picked up.

What happened to the pilot?

Had he prepared an audacious plan?

Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, had his own flight simulator at home.

Investigations showed he deleted a flight path to an island in the southern Indian Ocean.

Or did he kill himself mid-flight?

He was supposedly unhappy after a marital split and some investigators believe he simply turned off the plane’s oxygen supply.

Where did the aircraft go?

There are three theories:

*It went north heading towards ­Kazakhstan. Thai military radar seems to confirm the plane turned west, then north.
*It went west and was flown to Diego Garcia, the British-owned island in the Indian Ocean that is let as a military base to America. Surrounding islanders claim they saw a plane low in the sky the morning Flight MH370 went missing.
*It went south over the ocean off Australia, where the search has been concentrated.

But the seas are among the roughest in the world, with mountainous underwater terrain that has hampered the search.

What has happened to the plane?

The most likely explanation is it crashed because of:

*Mechanical or structural failure, perhaps caused by sudden decompression.

*Terrorists who over-powered crew and crashed the plane in a remote ­location. Eleven al-Qaeda suspects were interrogated last May with a Malaysia Special Branch officer saying: “The possibility it was diverted by militants is high on the list.” No terrorist organisation has claimed involvement.

*A fire in the cargo. The jet was carrying 200kg of lithium-ion batteries which are known to catch fire and are now banned by some airlines. Malaysia only admitted this two weeks after the disappearance.

*It was shot down accidentally, perhaps by a joint US military exercise with ­Thailand in the South China Sea that involved the use of live heat-seeking missiles.

*It was shot down on purpose. Did US forces on Diego Garcia panic when a low-flying plane came at them?

*It was captured by the Russians, on the orders of President Putin. There were ­allegedly three ethnic Russians on board.

*It was captured by the CIA and flown to Diego Garcia because the US wanted someone or something on board. Relatives say passengers’ mobile phones were still ringing hours afterwards.

*The Lost Theory – after the TV show – that the plane landed somewhere is believed by many families because not a scrap of wreckage has been found and they feel in their hearts that their loved one is still alive.