Netflix MH370 doco ‘a horrible piece of conspiracy nonsense’

An aviation expert who appears in a Netflix documentary about the disappearance of MH370 has criticised the ‘shameful’ series and said he regrets participating in it.

A relative of a passenger who was travelling on board the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is escorted in a hotel in Beijing in 2014. Picture: AFP

An aviation expert who appears in a Netflix documentary about the disappearance of MH370 has criticised the “shameful” series and said he regrets participating in it.

Engineer Michael Exner says he feels betrayed by production company RAW, which produced the three-part series, MH370: The Plane That Disappeared, which he has labelled a “a horrible piece of conspiracy nonsense”.

“Before agreeing to be interviewed for the series, I asked for and received assurances from RAW producers that this was going to be a ‘first-class documentary’,” he said. “They said it would be focused primarily on the Next of Kin stories. In reality, the series is not about the NoK at all. Instead, it exploits the NoK stories to help set up and push baseless conspiracy stories, ignoring most of the factual evidence and analysis they were provided by me and several other experts.”

Mr Exner – a member of the Independent Group of experts investigating the world’s greatest aviation mystery – said producers had promised to stick to the verified evidence.

“They assured me that they would stick to the facts and the science, and not dwell on the debunked conspiracies promoted by people like (journalists) Jeff Wise and Florence de Changy,” he said in a tweeted three-page documentary review. “They used the NoK stories to get the viewers sucked in emotionally, then turned Jeff and Florence loose with their conspiracy book promotions. It is shameful beyond belief.”

MH370 vanished during a red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. The airliner disappeared from air traffic control screens about 40 minutes into the flight when its secondary radar transponder was turned off.

Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah issued the last radio transmission, saying “Good night, Malaysian Three-Seven-Zero”.

Military radar and satellite “handshakes” later showed MH370 flew back over Malaysia, then up the Straits of Malacca, ­before turning south to the Indian Ocean, where it remains lost ­despite multiple searches.

The series, released this month to coincide with the nine-year anniversary of the disappearance, ­focuses on three theories about what might have happened, including an act of mass-murder-suicide, a Russian hijacking, or that US Airforce jets shot down MH370 in the South China Sea.

Mr Exner, a pilot, said the Russian hijack theory was “complete garbage” and that the “wacky” American military intercept theory was “100% BS”.

He said documentary producers omitted critical information.

“They had all this information, and understood the implications, but deliberately left it out to push the conspiracy episodes,” he said.

British aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey – who declined to participate in the documentary due to concerns about the story treatment – has also claimed the series is “full of misinformation and disinformation”.

“Netflix has relied entirely on speculation and fantasy from questionable sources, but they provide no definitive answers to the what, where and why of MH370,” he said. RAW did not respond to questions by deadline.