Has MH370 finally been found?

[Peter Mugridge]

There's a couple of interesting posts appearing in LinkedIn this evening, which suggest that the wreckage of MH370 has finally been located, but that the discovery has not yet been confirmed - hence no announcements yet.

Back in April 2025 there was a lot of comment about this vessel and the search starting, a lot of it speculative, but these new posts sound a lot more positive and confident... but as yet, only a small number of posts.

One thing I would wonder about, though, is that this post and the one it replies to ( which is by the same person ) suggest the fuselage is largely intact - which strike me as being highly unlikely. I would think it is much more likely that if there is a large concentration of wreckage it would be a jigsaw of rather smaller parts - but equally, if there is a lot in one area that would tend to suggest the aircraft hit the water nose first at some speed rather than belly flopping?

Thoughts on this, please - am I right to be rather sceptical of this?


The most interesting post is this one:

It Is Time to Bring Back MH370 | Vincent Lyne | 15 comments

Bar the shouting, the MH370 search is over! After twelve years of expanding theories and failed search zones, the evidence is finally unavoidable. The last satellite communications show MH370 traveled south-east, not into the western 7th arc. We now know the aircraft was never in the...

www.linkedin.com

It is fair to say the search saga is conceptually over but the location still needs explicit confirmation. We now have the evidence to say with very high confidence where MH370 is, and there is a strong possibility that China’s research vessel Tan Suo Yi Hao has already confirmed the wreck. However, either that confirmation needs to be made public, or an independent verification must occur before a recovery fleet is mobilised. That is standard practice for an operation of this scale. The encouraging point is that the recovery itself is no longer constrained by technology. The necessary classes of vessels already exist, many of them operating out of Western Australia. What remains is coordination and availability. A vessel well suited to the task is China’s Zhong Ren 121, a large semi-submersible with substantial lift capability, which is currently in Fremantle, although it may be scheduled for work in the North West. Once location is formally confirmed, the focus shifts from theory to logistics, and that is a very different and technologically difficult operation problem to solve.

 

[Cloud Strife]

Thoughts on this, please - am I right to be rather sceptical of this?

I think it's highly unlikely that the fuselage is intact, unless the pilot(s) somehow performed an astonishing landing in a very wild ocean. We already know that one piece (the flaperon) washed up, so it seems very unlikely that the wing would be broken while the rest of the plane would be intact.

Looking now, the author has some links to Chinese researchers. I'd strongly suggest that his motive here is to promote China for whatever reason, and it's also worth pointing out that his academic career is not in navigation or physics, and definitely not in aviation. It's true that his theory was published in a fairly credible journal, but well, anyone in academia knows that even credible journals are guilty of publishing nonsense.

His entire theory is that the plane was intentionally put into a deep hole in the ocean, and he's even claiming that a single yellow pixel on some oceanographic mapping is proof that the plane is where he says it is. From what I understand, he's already been debunked by getting the calculations wrong.

 

[Acathater]

I can't find any reference to this on PPRUNE so I'd be inclined to take little notice of it

 

[gabrielhj07]

I can't find any reference to this on PPRUNE so I'd be inclined to take little notice of it

That beacon of truth & wisdom!

 

[JohnMcL7]

On searching for MH370 there's some recent articles warning that unusual movements of a search vessel should not be interpreted to mean they've found MH370 so I certainly think you're right to be sceptical.

 

[GRALISTAIR]

On searching for MH370 there's some recent articles warning that unusual movements of a search vessel should not be interpreted to mean they've found MH370 so I certainly think you're right to be sceptical.

I agree. I remain sceptical.

 

[DaleCooper]

It is fair to say the search saga is conceptually over

What on earth does that mean?

 

[LYuen]

What on earth does that mean?

Typically LinkedIn language isn't it, more to show off yourself than to tell something material

 

[birchesgreen]

Typically LinkedIn language isn't it, more to show off yourself than to tell something material

Its a wonder there wasn't a picture of a car fob to accompany the post, or a prefix about how he is up at 3am and eats 30 raw eggs before speed reading a business book.

 

[Cloud Strife]

Its a wonder there wasn't a picture of a car fob to accompany the post, or a prefix about how he is up at 3am and eats 30 raw eggs before speed reading a business book.

Couldn't agree more.

His theory is pretty much based on nothing more than a "it makes sense that the guilty party arranged it like this" type of feeling. Are we really supposed to believe that the person at the controls was able to execute a perfect landing at sea with minimal damage in the middle of the night with no assistance?

I think the most likely and plausible scenario still remains that the plane broke up on impact, and then various storms simply scattered the pieces all over the ocean.

 

[Peter Mugridge]

Thank you everyone; pretty much as I suspected then.

I imagine that if that ship really had discovered the wreckage, then Chinese or not, at least one of the crew would have opened their mouth to the media by now?

 

[Cloud Strife]

I imagine that if that ship really had discovered the wreckage, then Chinese or not, at least one of the crew would have opened their mouth to the media by now?

For sure. This is just too big to keep secret, not to mention that opposing powers would know if China had found something of interest by the fact that various signals would intensify dramatically. It also seems that the Chinese ship in question was doing research somewhere else, and that there's no evidence of them actually searching for anything.

 

[Topological]

Note arc 7 runs through the desert in China.

Unless I missed something, the only thing anyone established was the arc.

Later some debris washed out of the sea. But you can put debris in the sea.

I am 99.99999% likely to be wrong, but it is a conspiracy theory that does not get aired very much and is one that was strong in China at the time the plane went missing.

 

[Acathater]

Note arc 7 runs through the desert in China.

Unless I missed something, the only thing anyone established was the arc.

Later some debris washed out of the sea. But you can put debris in the sea.

I am 99.99999% likely to be wrong, but it is a conspiracy theory that does not get aired very much and is one that was strong in China at the time the plane went missing.

Well......my favourite theory is it was flown to Khazakstan on the orders of the Russians, and then bits were dumped in the sea.
Who was there on that aircraft that the Russians wanted to get hold of?
Also as a theory probably totally wrong...but.......

 

[Topological]

Well......my favourite theory is it was flown to Khazakstan on the orders of the Russians, and then bits were dumped in the sea.
Who was there on that aircraft that the Russians wanted to get hold of?
Also as a theory probably totally wrong...but.......

It was felt at the time there were people China were interested in on the plane. I do not know about Russia.

I think this is one of those cases where it just suits global politics to accept the rogue pilot and sea theory because there would be very limited value in going after anything else.

Whatever happened, it is just such a shame so many innocents were caught up in it.

 

[Cloud Strife]

Unless I missed something, the only thing anyone established was the arc.

So, what Inmarsat did was compare the pings from MH370 vs other flights. That's how they were able to establish that the plane turned south, which correlates with the lack of information from any civilian or military radars after it left Malaysian military radar coverage. Essentially, the pings combined with the known trajectory of the satellite allowed Inmarsat (in cooperation with others) to rule out the northern corridor.

The problem is that the information available simply doesn't give us a precise enough location. We know that the plane is in a certain area, but this is still a vast area and one which isn't even mapped properly. The company that is currently looking for the plane, Ocean Infinity, has been progressing rather slowly due to the storms and general poor weather in that area, and they're rather behind schedule.

There is something else: we simply don't know if the plane was piloted down to the sea, or if it simply ran out of fuel and crashed. We know that the first turn after the waypoint IGARI was carried out manually as the turn was beyond the capabilities of the autopilot, and there is fairly strong evidence that the plane was being flown manually until the final turn. The final descent is the problematic part, as most studies assume a high speed ditching after fuel starvation due to the data from the final ping.

For me, the most interesting and intriguing thing about MH370 is that China hasn't put serious resources into finding the wreckage. Their naval capabilities are quite poor, but it still surprises me that they didn't pour money into finding the wreckage in the way that France did after AF447.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 28 Jan 2026 ==

I think this is one of those cases where it just suits global politics to accept the rogue pilot and sea theory because there would be very limited value in going after anything else.

The sea route is confirmed through various pieces of data, including Inmarsat communications and radar. The problem is the final part of the flight: if the person / people in charge of the flight at the end deliberately chose to glide the plane down to the sea, then the final Inmarsat data point could be misleading us into believing that the plane ditched in the sea after running out of fuel. It's not inconceivable that they instead took the plane down in a completely different direction: even changing direction by 90 degrees after the final data point would make it much harder to find.

 

[jupiter]

They didn’t realise they were producing data points though, never mind the timing of them. Are you suggesting a 90 degree turn at the point the fuel was exhausted.

 

[Cloud Strife]

They didn’t realise they were producing data points though, never mind the timing of them. Are you suggesting a 90 degree turn at the point the fuel was exhausted.

Yes, it was just a fortunate coincidence that whoever was responsible for this had overlooked that one part of the communications blackout. It was a remarkably fortunate oversight, because without those pings, anything could have happened.

At the point of fuel exhaustion, we simply don't know. There is a possibility that whoever was at the controls did a controlled glide, as the SATCOM automatically tried to log on after power was restored. If the plane was out of fuel, it wouldn't have been possible to start the APU, so this automatic log on suggests that a controlled glide took place before all fuel was exhausted. With the APU operational, it would allow for a controlled glide to the ocean.

 

[Acathater]

Yes, it was just a fortunate coincidence that whoever was responsible for this had overlooked that one part of the communications blackout. It was a remarkably fortunate oversight, because without those pings, anything could have happened.

Is there any realistic possibility that those signals were spoofed by another aircraft to put searchers off the track?