The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines MH370 for more than a week is a case of "If it didn't happen, no one could have invented this story".

Here are three reasons this case of a missing plane is unlike anything that has ever happened before:

1. The precision of MH370's disappearance

How and where the plane disappeared is probably something you will only watch in a movie.

But yet, this is exactly what could very possibly have happened in real life.

Source

The zone between Malaysia and Vietnam where MH370 supposedly went missing has always been known as an area where plane signals disappear, but it's never an issue, as thousands of flights have occurred without incident.

This fact shouldn't bother you or be as surprising as it sounds because it is an oddity of the modern aircraft: Planes are not constantly in contact with air traffic controllers and are assumed to be still flying until they fail to resume contact with air traffic controllers, which was what happened to MH370.

Therefore, that sweet spot that MH370 found itself in -- where it was transitioning between Malaysian and Vietnamese air traffic controllers -- is where an experienced aviator would have the most time to turn off his electronic transmissions, change direction and deviate away from the original path before anyone noticed the plane was missing.

MH370 was last in communication with Malaysian air traffic controllers and was supposed to contact Vietnamese controllers.

But by the time the red flag went up that there was no resumption of contact, the plane could have joined an established route and followed a flight path that would not make it suspicious.

2. Real time hypothesis elimination

It has been a week since MH370 disappeared and we have been following the news as it happens.

First, it was assumed the plane had crashed.

Then it was assumed to have to crashed in the ocean.

And when a crash site failed to show up after so many days, it became less obvious that the plane had crashed.

Now, what appears to have happened was that after deviating from the original course to China somewhere between Malaysia and Vietnam, the plane turned west and up north and followed a seemingly unusual and haphazard zigzag trajectory in the most inefficient way possible.

Source

But it has convinced investigators of one thing: The plane is piloted by someone with experience, who is trying to avoid flying in a conspicuous manner by navigating between well-traveled waypoints and not behaving suspiciously as an aircraft to draw attention to itself.

A missing plane has gone from "accident" to "possible terrorism".

And we're watching the "live" updates as it happens.

3. The one-in-a-million far-fetched theory is plausible

Investigators on the case are most likely taking a scientific approach to fact-finding through a process of elimination.

Investigators will first come up with competing hypotheses about what might have happened. And as new information comes in, hypotheses will be eliminated one by one.

The history of airline accidents and how they are solved has a strategic purpose.

By eliminating hypotheses, airline accidents that have occurred before actually help to generate understanding as to how they happen in the first place. This will help to prevent the same type of accident from happening again in the future.

By learning from the past and adapting the new information, lesser and lesser planes are lost to accidents in the long run. Basically, accidents that have occurred before, shouldn't happen again.

Therefore, common problems disappear over time, leaving behind only uncommon problems that have never been solved because they have never surfaced until now.

The longer it takes to find out the circumstances, the stranger and more implausible and far-fetched and unreasonable the explanation and scenario will be.

And the unruly, one-in-a-million, never-has-it-happened-before explanation appears to be what we are left with.

A combination of bad luck, rare events and human agency can compound to become something never before experienced.

Very Hollywood-scripted, isn't it?

Find Mothership.SG on Facebook and Twitter.