The Tale of the Two Doomed Flights: QZ8501 and MH370

23rd Jan 2015

The mysterious disappearance of MH 370 in March last year didn't escape parallel comparison with the recent crash of Indonesia AirAsia's aircraft, as both incidents failed to send distress signal to ground controllers before their disappearance.

The comparison is inevitable as both airlines share their Malaysian ownership, with the former being owned by the Malaysian government, while the latter is partly owned by a Malaysian business mogul. However, the parallelism doesn't end there as both aircraft were unable to send a distress signal before their disappearance.

Although the missing MH 370 remains a mystery up to this day, it is believed that it crashed into the Indian Ocean. The QZ 8501, on the other hand, crashed into the notoriously rough Karimata Strait, an arm of the Java Sea that connects itself to South China Sea.

The two incidents happened just nine months apart.

After the finding of several pieces of debris of flight QZ 8501 and the subsequent recovery of bodies three days later, many people, especially the victims' relatives and friends, heaved a sigh of relief. However, it didn't remove doubts on the possible cause of the incident and speculations started to grow nonetheless.

Until the recovery of the aircraft's flight recorders on January 12 and 13, many people believed that the incident was the handiwork of terrorists.

In the case of MH 370, many experts agree that it was intentionally doomed by some sort of terrorists. Conspiracy theories abound during the nine months of fruitless search, foremost of which is that it was downed deliberately by a US military.

Many people, including experts, were more inclined to believe in the conspiracy theory that the British author, Marc Dugan, has proposed in his book about MH 370 that the missing aircraft was shot down by the US military.

Investigators on the Indonesia AirAsia flight, meanwhile, rejected the terrorist theory after listening to the audio from the recovered flight recorders. They were convinced that the incident was caused by human error for their failure to observe the plane's limitations. They only heard the voice of the two pilots the whole time and no evidence of threats.

The flight data recorder didn't indicate unusual information that suggests acts of terrorism.