What is known for certain is that flight MH370 left Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12:41am on March 8, 2014, bound for the Chinese capital. However, moments after Malaysian air traffic control signed off for the night, handing over to their colleagues in Vietnam, the plane completely disappeared from all radar, tracking and communication networks.

What followed was a media circus, as the attention of the world turned its attention to this seemingly impossible mystery. A huge international search operation was mobilised, but to no avail.

Series director Louise Malkinson, whose previous credits include The Detectives: Murder on the Streets and Catching a Predator, devotes each 90-minute episode to investigating one of the more substantial, or at least fascinating, theories about what could have happened.

Those include: the plane was deliberately crashed into the Indian Ocean by its pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah, in an audacious murder-suicide; the aircraft was hijacked by Russian terrorists and flown to Kazakhstan; or the flight was deliberately taken out by the US military to prevent its suspicious cargo from reaching China.

The show relies heavily on the findings of a couple of passionate journalists, who took it upon themselves to probe deeper into the inconsistencies and inadequate explanations offered by the Malaysian government.

In particular, Florence de Changy and aviation journalist Jeff Wise are interviewed extensively and talk audiences through their discoveries and suspicions in exhaustive detail.

These theories are counterbalanced by intimate conversations with family members of some of the victims, whose heartbreaking search for answers and closure has inspired them to form support groups for other grieving relatives, or in some cases, launch investigations of their own.

Netflix has, over the past few years, become the go-to platform for sensationalist true crime and conspiracy theory documentary shows, and investing time in them invariably proves to be as frustrating as it is entertaining.

More often than not, the filmmakers have not solved the mystery or even uncovered any previously unknown evidence. Rather, they slickly and expertly package all of the available information with new interviews from vocal parties associated with the case, to deliver a hugely entertaining capsule presentation of the tragedy and accumulated evidence.

What one comes to understand watching MH370: The Plane That Disappeared is that the more we learn, the more we realise just how little is known about exactly what happened.

Why did the Malaysian military wait a week before announcing that the flight had veered wildly off course? Considering the extent of military activity in the region at that time, how was the plane not picked up by somebody’s radar system somewhere?

Was Blaine Gibson, the American adventurer who claimed to find debris from MH370 off the coast of East Africa, really working for the Russians? And what, if anything, did the disappearance have to do with flight MH17, another Malaysian Airlines flight that was shot down over Ukraine just four months later?

We may never know, but Netflix understands that merely posing the questions makes for riveting television.

MH370: The Plane That Disappeared will start streaming on Netflix on March 8.