MH370: aviation expert Jeff Wise spells out his theory

The unsettling oddness was there from the first moment, on March 8 last year, when Malaysia Airlines announced that a plane from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, Flight 370, had disappeared over the South China Sea in the middle of the night. There had been no bad weather, no distress call, no wreckage, no eyewitness accounts of a fireball in the sky - just a plane that said goodbye to one air traffic controller and, two minutes later, failed to say hello to the next. And the crash, if it was a crash, got stranger from there.

My year-long detour to Planet MH370 began two days later, when I got an email from an editor at online magazine Slate asking if I'd write about the incident. I'm a private pilot and science writer, and I wrote about the last big mysterious crash, of Air France Flight 447, in 2009. My story ran on March 12. The following morning, I was invited to go on CNN. Soon, I was on-air up to six times a day as part of its non-stop MH370 coverage.

There was no introduction course on how to be a cable-news expert. The Town Car would show up to take me to the studio, I'd sign in with reception, a guest-greeter would take me to make-up, I'd hang out in the green room, the sound guy would rig me with a mike and an earpiece, a producer would lead me onto the set, I'd plug in and sit in the seat, another producer would tell me what camera to look at during the introduction, we'd come back from the commercial break, the anchor would read the introduction to the story and then ask me a question or two, I'd answer, then we'd go to another break, I would unplug, wipe off my make-up and take the car 43 blocks back uptown. Then, a couple of hours later, I'd do it again. I was spending 18 hours a day doing six minutes of talking.

As time went by, CNN trimmed its expert pool down to a dozen or so regulars who earned the on-air title "CNN aviation analysts": airline pilots, ex-government honchos, aviation lawyers and me. We were paid by the week, with the length of our contracts dependent on how long the story seemed likely to play out. The first couple were for seven days, the next few were for 14 days and the last one ran for a month. We'd appear solo, in pairs or in larger groups for panel discussions - whatever it took to vary the rhythm of perpetual chatter.

I soon realised the germ of every television-news segment is: "Officials say X". The validity of the story derives from the authority of the source. The expert, such as myself, is on hand to add dimension or clarity. Truth flowed one way: from the official source, through the anchor, past the expert and onward into the great sea of viewerdom.

What made MH370 challenging to cover was, first, that the event was unprecedented and technically complex and, second, that the officials were remarkably untrustworthy. For instance, the search started over the South China Sea, naturally enough, but soon after, Malaysia opened up a new search area, in the Andaman Sea, 650km away. Why? Rumours swirled that military radar had seen the plane pull a 180-degree turn. The Malaysian government explicitly denied it but, after a week of letting other countries search the South China Sea, the officials admitted they'd known about the U-turn from day one.