The Malaysian Airlines plane disappeared without a trace on March 2014 on a flight from Kuala Lumpor to Beijing, killing all 239 people on board.
National Geographic’s Drain the Oceans series has now looked the crash and with the help of experts pinned its likely location in what the wreckage will look like on the ocean floor.
The programme says the plane is located at around 35 degrees south on a line known as the seventh arc, in reference to the last time MH370 sent a satellite message.
Using computer graphics it has “drained” the area around the seventh arc to reveal what the wreckage of the aircraft could look like.
The debris will stretch over thousands of yards, it says, and while the engines will be in one piece, the fuselage will be in thousands.
Drain the Oceans says blackboxes will reveal if anyone was in the cockpit at the end and oxygen cylinders show if the plane was deliberately depressurised in flight
Personal electronic devices could reveal the experiences and fate of individual passengers and crew.
Andy Sherrell, an undersea search specialist who has taken part in the hunt for MH370 and found the wrecks of other aircraft underwater, says the moment it is found will be “sombre”.
“It’s a really surreal sombre moment because you realise all of a sudden you’ve found this grave site, this place where all these people persished,” Sherrell told the programme.
“It’s sad but it’s also a bit of a relief because you know from that point forward some answers are going to come back.”
The exact location was arrived at by oceanographer David Griffin using wreckage found thousands of miles away.
He believes the flapperon which was found on the French island of Reunion holds the key to finding the location of MH370.
Dr Griffin conducted an experiment using an identical flapperon off a Boeing 777 and using data about currents in the Indian Ocean was able to map its 500 day journey across the sea.
He was also curious about why no debris had been washed up in Australia when currents in the area where the plane crashed flow towards the country.
The scientist was able to rule out areas on the seventh arc where the current flows towards Australia as a possible crash site.
Dr Griffin looked at the data for the currents that exists for the day MH370 crashed and pinpointed where on the seventh arc currents would have pushed debris away from Australia towards Africa.
Only one of the locations on the seventh arc matched his calculation of the flapperon’s journey – 35 degrees south.
The area was not checked during the initial surface search for the wreckage of the plane.
His view that MH370 crashed there was backed by images from a French military satellite taken 15 days after the plane’s disappearance showing possible debris on the surface in the 35 south area.
“I remember the day when I first saw those images in high resolution and I thought ‘oh my God’,” he said.
Beginning in January this year a search was mounted in that area by a privately funded expedition run by salvage company, Ocean Infinity.
But despite searching an enormous area, the expedition found no trace of MH370.
The search has now covered an area 14 times that in the hunt for Air France flight 447, which crashed in the South Atlantic and took two years to find.
In May the Malaysian government called off the search for MH370 but Drain the Oceans says it could lie tantalisingly outside the search area
“I think it’s enormously important to find the plane because while planes crash routinely they don’t just disappear and I think this just terrifies people,” says David Griffin.
:Drain The Oceans: Malaysia Airlines 370 airs on National Geographic this Thursday, 27 September at 8pm.
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