plain about the plane

So I watched Netflix's 3-part documentary, MH370: The Plane That Disappeared. It's oriented not to tell the story of the disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight to Beijing that vanished and has never been seen since, but to tell the story of the unfolding of the evidence. It starts by recounting the day itself, emphasizing the confusion over the gradual realization that something had gone wrong, and then turns to the development of various competing theories: a suicide mission by the captain (end point, the south Indian Ocean); hijacked by Russians eager to drive the invasion of Crimea off the front pages (end point, Kazakhstan); shot down by US spy planes to keep sensitive equipment in cargo from reaching Chinese hands (end point, South China Sea).

The documentary presents all of these in counterpoint and doesn't take sides, though it leans towards the last. The conspiracy theorists admit they don't have a definitive answer or any proof; they just strongly doubt the official story. But I did get very tired of the way they backed their stories by conjuring up ulterior motives for the supporters of the other stories: oh no, Blaine Gibson (the guy who's been finding wreckage on Indian Ocean beaches) has done business with Russians; oh no, Inmarsat (the tracking company whose pings indicated how far the plane traveled) also works for the US government. The Russian theory in particular requires the plotters to have the sort of omniscient pre-knowledge of the plot that's characteristic of bad conspiracy movies.

But the stories all leave lots of holes that aren't addressed. Nothing I already knew about this story isn't covered in this film, and it does include a lot I didn't know. Assuming that it's accurate, and that it's complete - and I'm expecting that the answers to my questions will include a lot of denial of those assumptions - here are some questions that raised in my mind that weren't settled.

1. When the Malaysian military initially reported that the plane had turned southwest, they weren't certain that the signal they saw was of the same plane. Later they reported that they had now confirmed this. What was the basis for the confirmation?

2. When the first piece of wreckage, the flaperon, was found on Réunion, it was not at first certain that it came from MH370. Later, investigators reported that they had now confirmed this. Florence De Changy, the French reporter, says that this confirmation came from 12 ID numbers stamped on the piece, but that only one of the 12 actually matched the records for the plane in question. Can that possibly be true? If so, where's the confirmation from?

3. The theorists are suspicious that Gibson has so easily found so much wreckage on various beaches. Have other people been looking and not found any?

4. Why is Gibson's wreckage only from the shell of the plane? Hasn't any of the contents - like passenger belongings that might also float - been found? (Lack of this might support the theory that the wreckage was actually salted and came from a decommissioned plane.)

5. Any discussion of how such small pieces survived the rough ocean and great distances in time and space from the presumed crash site to being found (over a year?) later on the coasts of Africa and Madagascar?

6. Cyndi Hendry is a volunteer who scoured imagery of the disappearance area in the South China Sea and found pictures of what she claims is wreckage. If this is the answer, then: Why wasn't any of that wreckage found in the initial physical search of the area, before it was proposed that the plane flew somewhere else? Why hasn't any of it washed up on beaches there?

7. If the plane had sensitive computer equipment being sent to China and the US wished to stop this, is this the only time such equipment had been shipped to China? If this happened all the time, there ought to be many stories about planes being intercepted.

8. Why do the conspiracy theorists consider it so damning to the Indian Ocean theory that the plane hasn't been found? Isn't it a huge expanse of ocean? Isn't it tremendously rough waters, thus making it hard to search, with a highly mountainous and irregular bottom? These are not typical of the waters in which planes have crashed in the past, and their locations were more precisely known than this. Not finding it doesn't surprise me at all.