On the night of March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 slipped into history as one of the most baffling mysteries modern aviation has ever known.

A Boeing 777 carrying 239 passengers and crew departed Kuala Lumpur for Beijing and then, without warning, vanished.

There was no distress call, no emergency signal, no explosion on radar—only silence.

In the decade that followed, governments spent more than 200 million dollars searching some of the most remote ocean on Earth, yet the aircraft itself remained lost.

Now, an unconventional investigation led by a retired British engineer has reopened the case with a startling claim: the final resting place of MH370 may have been identified using faint radio signals no one thought could matter.

To understand why this claim is so significant, it is necessary to revisit what actually happened that night.

For roughly the first 40 minutes, MH370’s flight appeared entirely routine.

The aircraft climbed smoothly to cruising altitude and communicated normally with Malaysian air traffic control.

At 1:19 a.m., as the plane approached Vietnamese airspace, the pilot acknowledged the handoff with the now-infamous words: “Good night, Malaysian three seven zero.

” Two minutes later, the aircraft’s transponder was switched off, removing it from civilian radar screens.

At the time, this seemed to mark the moment the plane disappeared.

But MH370 did not simply vanish.

Malaysian military radar, which detects aircraft differently, continued to track an unidentified object performing a sharp, deliberate turn back across the Malay Peninsula.

Instead of flying northeast toward China, the plane reversed course, crossed Malaysia, and headed west over the Andaman Sea.

This maneuver was controlled and intentional, not the result of mechanical failure.

The military radar followed the aircraft until 2:22 a.m., when it faded from view northwest of Penang Island.

From that point on, conventional tracking ended.

What remained were seven faint electronic “handshakes” between the aircraft’s satellite communication system and an Inmarsat satellite positioned over the Indian Ocean.

These signals were not designed to track aircraft; they were automatic maintenance pings confirming the system was powered on.

Yet they became the cornerstone of the global investigation.

By analyzing the timing and frequency shifts of these pings, engineers reconstructed large arcs across the globe, showing where the plane could have been at each moment.

One arc pointed north across Asia, the other south into the Indian Ocean.

The northern route was quickly dismissed, as such a large aircraft would have been detected by multiple radar systems.

Attention shifted south, toward a remote and hostile stretch of ocean.

The final handshake, received at 8:19 a.m., defined what became known as the “seventh arc,” the line along which investigators believed MH370 ran out of fuel and crashed.

This assumption triggered one of the largest underwater searches in history.

Ships, aircraft, and autonomous underwater vehicles scanned more than 120,000 square kilometers of seabed.

Despite years of effort, the search yielded no wreckage.

Only scattered debris—such as a wing flaperon found on Réunion Island and fragments recovered along the African coastline—confirmed the plane had indeed gone down somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

As time passed, frustration grew.

The official narrative increasingly focused on the idea that the captain deliberately diverted the aircraft and flew it until fuel exhaustion.

Yet this explanation left troubling inconsistencies.

Analysis of the final satellite data suggested a steep, uncontrolled descent rather than a controlled glide.

The recovered debris showed signs of high-energy impact, inconsistent with a planned ditching.

And most importantly, the vast search area produced no definitive results.

The question lingered: what if the assumptions guiding the search were flawed?

This is where Richard Godfrey enters the story.

A retired British aerospace engineer with decades of experience, Godfrey approached the mystery from a completely different angle.

Instead of focusing on satellites or radar, he turned to an obscure technology used by amateur radio enthusiasts: WSPR, or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter.

WSPR is a global network in which thousands of hobbyists transmit extremely low-power radio signals that bounce off the ionosphere and travel vast distances.

These signals are logged continuously in a public database to study radio wave propagation.

Godfrey realized something that others had overlooked.

A large metal aircraft flying through the sky can disturb these weak radio signals, creating tiny but detectable anomalies.

Individually, such disturbances are insignificant.

But collectively, they form a pattern.

If MH370 crossed enough of these radio paths, it might have left a detectable trail—an invisible footprint etched into the radio noise of the planet.

Over several years, Godfrey analyzed enormous volumes of WSPR data from the night MH370 disappeared.

He filtered out interference caused by solar activity, weather, and background noise, isolating anomalies that coincided with the aircraft’s known timeline.

What emerged was remarkable.

Approximately 130 disturbances aligned in sequence, forming a coherent track that matched the plane’s departure from radar coverage and continued deep into the southern Indian Ocean.

The path ended at a specific set of coordinates: approximately 29 degrees south, 99 degrees east.

This location was striking for two reasons.

First, it lay well outside the primary areas searched during previous operations.

Second, it aligned closely with independent ocean drift models tracing debris found on African shores back to their likely origin.

For the first time, multiple lines of evidence—radio anomalies, satellite timing, and oceanography—converged on a single, relatively compact area.

Skepticism was immediate and understandable.

Critics pointed out that WSPR was never intended for aircraft tracking.

Godfrey acknowledged this but noted that many scientific breakthroughs arise from unintended applications.

The physics of radio wave disturbance by large objects is well established, and even the inventor of WSPR has acknowledged that aircraft can affect these signals.

To test the theory, Godfrey and academic collaborators conducted real-world experiments, tracking known aircraft and confirming that WSPR anomalies corresponded closely with their flight paths.

Further validation came from independent analysis.

Researchers at the University of Liverpool, experienced in complex search modeling, applied Bayesian statistical methods to Godfrey’s data.

Their conclusion was striking: there was a high probability—estimated at over 70 percent—that MH370’s wreckage lay within a relatively small zone centered on Godfrey’s proposed coordinates.

As the data accumulated, the once-dismissed idea gained credibility.

Importantly, Godfrey’s proposed crash site stabilized over time as more data was added, rather than shifting unpredictably.

This consistency addressed one of the main criticisms often leveled at alternative theories.

The implications were impossible to ignore.

In early 2025, Malaysia’s government announced a new agreement with Ocean Infinity, the deep-sea exploration company that had previously searched for MH370.

The contract operates on a “no find, no fee” basis, meaning the company will only be paid if the wreckage is discovered.

The new search area, approximately 15,000 square kilometers, is tightly focused on the region identified through the WSPR analysis.

Ocean Infinity’s technology has advanced significantly since its last mission.

Its autonomous underwater vehicles can dive to depths of six kilometers and map the seabed with extraordinary precision.

With favorable weather conditions, the entire search area could be scanned in a matter of weeks.

More than a decade after MH370 vanished, the mystery may finally be approaching resolution.

For the families of the 239 people onboard, this renewed effort represents more than scientific curiosity—it is a chance for truth, accountability, and closure.

Whether Richard Godfrey’s unconventional approach ultimately leads to the wreckage remains to be seen.

But for the first time in years, the search is guided not by broad assumptions, but by a convergence of independent data pointing to a single place in the vast ocean.

MH370 has long stood as a symbol of how modern technology can still fail in the face of the unknown.

Yet it may also become a testament to persistence, creativity, and the power of looking where no one else thought to search.