At 1.22am local time, MH370 disappeared from flight radars, confounding air traffic control. After Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah radioed the infamous last words “Good night, Malaysian three-seven-zero” to air traffic control as he left Malaysian aerospace, almost nothing is known of its fate. Human beings are terrified of the unknown – it’s why we’ve gone to the moon and climbed Everest. And Malkinson’s documentary is as much about the conspiracy theories surrounding MH370 as it is about the families affected by its disappearance. “To be nine years on and having no answers… you just can’t imagine it.” “Ambiguous loss is a trauma like no other,” Malkinson says. In one piece of archival footage, Jiang Hui – a Chinese man whose mother was on the flight – is handed what is believed to be a small chunk of the plane. The pain is writ large upon his face as he recalls, “When I had the debris in my hand, I thought, ‘This was probably the thing that was closest to my mother in her last moments.’” This may be the nearest thing to a resolution that Jiang ever gets. For the next of kin of the passengers on board, this lack of evidence represents a lack of closure, which has defined their lives for the past nine years. Using what little satellite data there was, scientists had identified a vast search area in the Southern Indian Ocean. While various bits of debris – some alleged, some confirmed – have been recovered over the years, the main underwater wreckage and its crucial black box data recorders have remained elusive. In January 2017, the three-year search for MH370 was called off, leaving the most baffling case in aviation history unsolved. “It’s a mystery that hasn’t been solved and I think it’s really important that there’s a push for a resumed search for the plane.”

What occurred after the aircraft last communicated with air traffic control 38 minutes after take-off has been the subject of innumerable theories in the years since – some plausible, some risible – many of which are explored in this three-parter. “It’s important that people still talk about MH370 and don’t just forget about it,” director Louise Malkinson tells me over Zoom.

A Malaysia Airlines flight with 227 passengers and 12 crew on board departed its home capital of Kuala Lumpur and never landed at its planned destination of Beijing.

What planes don’t do is just vanish off the face of the Earth.” These are the words of aviation journalist Jeff Wise, who features in Netflix’s chilling new docuseries, MH370 : The Plane that Disappeared. But on 8 March 2014, that’s precisely what happened.

The Taking of MH370 by Jeff Wise