The Taking of MH370

by Jeff Wise

  The region is something of an aeronautical desert. If you look at a flight-tracking web site you’ll see steady streams of traffic flowing to the north, south, east, and west, but a void here. The reason most flights avoid the area is that if they suffer accidental depressurization there they won’t be able to descend to the mandated altitude of 10,000 feet. Much of the Tibetan plateau lies above 15,000 feet in elevation, so that even on the ground crew members acclimatized to sea level would need supplemental oxygen. There is one route across far western China that Lufthansa uses to connect Frankfurt and Hong Kong, but it can only be flown by specially trained crews in specially equipped aircraft.

  Due to the lack of air traffic, there is no radar coverage in this part of China. Planes flying the route are required to stay in touch with air traffic control via satellite datalink. Then, once the flight clears the plateau and passes over more populated, lower-lying areas in the eastern part of the country, air traffic control become normal again: “As soon was we are out of this area we are on radar,” says Lufthansa pilot Peter Klant, who has flown the route extensively.

  The same conditions that discourage civilian aviation also make the region inhospitable for military aircraft and air defense. Its huge size, remoteness, high altitude, and fierce weather make it difficult to defend; the fact that it is largely empty further means there’s little to attack anyway. The region remains a backwater of Chinese strategic air defence.

  “The real threats that China faces are east, along the coast,” says Timothy R. Heath, a senior defense research analyst at the RAND corporation who studies Chinese military aviation. “They have air defenses down south, facing Taiwan and Vietnam, and up near the Korean peninsula, which makes sense because all of those are countries with aircraft and missiles that can harm China. The Indian border is primarily a ground infantry situation, due to the terrain— it’s hard for aircraft to locate and target anything.”

  Three Chinese airbases lie on or near MH370’s route.

  The first, Ngari Gunsa, is a remote 15,000-foot airstrip laid out along a broad, barren valley in the Gandise range. Its altitude of 14,000 feet makes it the fourth-highest altitude airport in the world. Intended for both military and civilian use, its construction was begun in 2007 and completed in 2010. But fighter deployment since then has been infrequent. According to a 2017 article in Indian Defence Review, since 2010 the Chinese air force has been deploying jets only “twice every year for two-week deployment periods.”

  About 125 miles after Ngari Gunsa the plane would have crossed from Tibet into Xinjiang. Its path would have taken it about 100 miles west of Hotan, also known as Hetian, an ancient silk road town on the southwestern edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Hetian appears to have been used as a temporary staging area for fighter planes. There are no military aircraft visible in the Google Earth satellite image of the site taken in February, 2013; in September of that year 26 jets and two helicopters can be seen. The following month the ramp is again bare. Then in October, 2014, 16 military jets are visible.

  This kind of temporary staging is “what I’d expect,” says Heath. “Some of these environments are really hard on the equipment. They’ll move the air defence out there for a while, do some exercises, and then they’ll pull it back.”

  Just before it left Chinese airspace, MH370 would have passed almost directly over the oasis city of Kashgar, also known as Kashi. Google Earth imagery shows that in March of 2014 construction had begun on a new ramp area at the eastern end of the city’s commercial airport. This would ultimately become the home of a fighter squadron. But the first planes wouldn’t arrive for another three years.

  Interestingly, in the wake of MH370’s disappearance, China stepped up its overall air defense capabilities in the region, in particular flying “confrontation drills” and “paying much attention to the training of air battle at night,” according to a 2017 story in Delhi Defence Review. In 2015, the Chinese air force deployed its most advanced anti-aircraft missile system, the HQ-9, to Hotan. “It’s kind of odd that they would even have HQ-9s out in Xinjiang,” Heath says. “What’s the threat?”

  Six hours after diverting from its planned route, MH370 would have been nearing the border of the former Soviet Union. If the hijacking had been commanded by the Kremlin, then the perpetrators would now be home safe. Directly ahead would be the first of the former Soviet states, Kyrgyzstan. Twenty minutes later, the Russian airbase at Kant would lie abeam the starboard wing. Ahead would stretch the expanse of Kazakhstan’s Betpak-Dala desert. And off to the left, a half-hour’s flying distance away, would lie the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

  Chapter 18

  February 2016

  If there was one piece of debris, there must have been a lot more out there somewhere. Yet month after month went by without any further discoveries. Then, on February 28, 2016, I received an email from an independent researcher named Blaine Alan Gibson.

  Dear Jeff

  Please read my post in The Longest Journey [a members-only Facebook discussion group] about the debris my friend and I found in Mozambique. I will be attending the two year commemoration in Kuala Lumpur March 6. I still hope you and I can meet in person soon to discuss MH 370. I am increasingly doubtful about the validity of the Inmarsat data and its interpretation.

  Best wishes,

  Blaine Gibson

  I’d first become aware of Gibson the previous June. Another MH370 researcher who went by the handle Nihonmama had posted a comment on my web page naming Gibson as a retired Seattle lawyer on a self-financed trip around the Indian Ocean region looking for clues about the missing plane. Gibson had just been on a trip to the remote island of Kudahuvadhoo in the Maldives, Nihonmama said, where villagers reportedly had seen a plane in red-and-blue livery fly low overhead the morning after MH370’s disappearance.

  This was one of those “fog” stories which serious researchers had always ignored. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, and there was no way the Inmarsat data was compatible with the plane’s appearance over Maldives. But Gibson was convinced that the villagers really had seen MH370, perhaps as it headed toward a suicide mission at Diego Garcia. To me, this idea marked him instantly as a crank.

  Then in September, Gibson had reported on Facebook that he’d visited Réunion and hunted down Johnny Begue to learn more about the discovery of the flaperon. This was more interesting to me, so I reached out to him and we exchanged a few messages. In one-on-one exchanges he struck me as affable, coherent, and concise, as well as a competent speller, which means a lot when you’re dealing with people on the internet.

  Two months later Gibson popped up again. He’d posted on Facebook about a shadowy meeting that supposedly took place in a remote corner of Vietnam two months before MH370 disappeared. In his account, an unidentified arms broker had produced a mysterious Soviet chemical warfare agent, a clear liquid in a glass-lined bottle, and melted a plastic water bottle down to a puddle with a single drop. The locals supposedly had dubbed the stuff “water dissolves metal.” Now Gibson was proposing that MH370’s hijackers had tried to use it to break through the cockpit door but had accidentally caused the hull to depressurize, leading to a hypoxic ghost flight to oblivion.

  I mentally re-filed him in the lunatic fringe.

  Nevertheless, when I got his February email about debris in Mozambique, I took it seriously enough to click through. I found pictures of a triangular slab of composite with a honeycomb interior, and a note saying that Gibson had found the piece the previous day on a sand bar near the town of Vilankulo. The piece bore the words “No Step.”

  Gibson shared his information with some members of the Independent Group, but made everyone swear to secrecy, for reasons that weren’t clear to me. Within a few days the find was made public anyway. Malaysia’s transport minister, Liow Tiong Lai, tweeted that there was a “high possibility debris found in Mozambique belongs to a B777.”

  Overnight, a man who’d lurked on the farthest fringes of the story becam
e a worldwide celebrity. Television networks scrambled to interview him. Due our past association, he graciously granted me one of the first interviews, and I talked to him over the phone for 30 minutes for New York magazine. Among the surprising details he revealed was that he’d had the idea to go to Vilankulo after asking Charitha Pattiaratchi, an Australian oceanographer who was working with the ATSB, where the highest probability search area would be. Pattiaratchi had recommended the coast of Mozambique.

  Gibson had gone out to a sandbar with local boatmen and found “No Step” after only 20 minutes—an incredible stroke of luck.

  The publicity surrounding Gibson’s find triggered a wave of debris-reporting. On March 11, a South African teenager named Liam Lötter told local reporters that he’d found something similar on a beach near the resort town of Xai Xai in southern Mozambique in December. Only after he’d seen Gibson’s story did he have any idea what it could be. Approximately a meter long, it carried the stencilled code “676EB,” which identified it as a right-hand outboard flap faring from a Boeing 777. Two weeks later, a man strolling on a beach in Mossel Bay in South Africa found a piece of an engine cowling, and a week after that a vacationing couple on Rodrigues Island in Mauritius found a chunk of an interior cabin panel.

  This sudden wave of debris was a remarkable turn of events. Now, many felt, there was no doubt that the plane had flown into the southern Indian Ocean.

  But as I examined photographs of the newly discovered debris, something struck me as odd. Most of the pieces were remarkably clean.

  When man-made material is immersed in an oceanic ecosystem, any number of plant, animal, and microbial species will begin to settle and grow upon its surface, a process known as “marine biofouling” because historically the process has attracted the most attention as a nuisance to mariners. “The first thing that settles is microalgae, which looks like a slimy brown scummy scuzz,” says Cathryn Clarke Murray, a marine biologist who studies floating debris at the North Pacific Marine Science Organization. Out in the open ocean, microalgae is followed by bryozoans—moss-like filter feeders—and goose barnacles of the genus Lepas.

  Given the great size of the Earth’s oceans, and the relatively slow speed at which objects drift (on the order of dozens of miles per day), objects encountered on the open sea have plenty of time to become colonized by these species. During a survey of debris in the Pacific, marine biologist Miriam Goldstein of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography collected 242 objects and found that all had organisms growing on them, except for two that were one square inch in size. University of Florida biologist Mike Gil conducted a similar survey in the eastern Pacific and “didn’t find any clean debris, bottle cap size and larger.”

  The mix of species present on an object can yield clues about how it has drifted, a process that renowned invertebrate biologist James Carlton, director of the Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program in Mystic, Connecticut, has labeled “bioforensics.” In his study of marine debris, including fishing boats, that washed out to sea during the Japanese tsunami of 2011, Carlton found that he could track how they traveled across the ocean using two species of bryozoans. “One’s cold water, one’s warm water,” Carlton says. “When I get a boat that lands in Washington or Oregon and has the warm-water bryozoan, it tells me that it went well south before turning north.” Similarly, Carlton has been able to identify debris that traveled south along the coast of Japan before crossing the Pacific by the presence of sea life endemic to that area.

  ​Yet all the pieces that Gibson turned up, and most of the others, looked—at least in photographs, to the naked eye—to be free of marine life. The biologists I spoke to said that if an object is washed ashore, it can become dried out and get picked clean by scavenging animals so that little evidence of fouling remains. But “No Step” had been found on a tidal shoal, and others had been found shortly after they washed ashore. They just shouldn’t have been that clean.

  Chapter 19

  May 2016

  Out of the clear blue sky, a major break landed in my lap. A reader who said he was connected to some of the Chinese next-of-kin forwarded me what looked like cellphone pictures taken of an unreleased French document, “Rapport d’étude Dérive à rebours de flaperon” (“Flaperon Reverse Drift Study Report”), dated February 8, 2016.

  The author, Pierre Daniel, was the head of the marine drift modeling unit at France’s meteorological authority. He had been brought into the MH370 investigation to conduct a reverse-drift analysis. Using historical current and wind data, French investigators hoped to “rewind the tape” on drift simulations to generate a probability map showing where the piece most likely started out.

  The reverse drift calculations would only work, however, if Daniel had a key parameter to plug in: the flaperon’s windage. In other words, when it was floating in the ocean, how far above the water’s surface did it stick up? If it was flush with the surface, the wind would hardly have made a difference, but if it floated high in the water, then the force of the wind would have changed its path considerably.

  Scientists at the DGA put the flaperon in a large tank of water and found that it floated high. This meant that the wind would indeed have played a large role in the path that the flaperon would have taken. Daniel’s resulting calculations found that the flaperon could have started its drift from anywhere within a large swath of the Indian Ocean, starting at Cape Leeuwin in Australia and stretching southwestward. This area included the current seabed search zone.

  There was a catch, however. When the French investigators took a careful look at the flaperon, they noticed the same thing that I had: The whole flaperon was covered in Lepas barnacles.

  “The presence of crustaceans of the genus Lepas on two sides of the flaperon suggests… a piece that was totally immersed,” the report concluded.

  This, at last, was confirmation of the “entre deux eaux” claim.

  The French scientists were baffled as to how reconcile these two seemingly irreconcilable facts. Throwing up their hands, they resigned themselves to performing two separate simulation runs. They found that, if the flaperon floated as the tank tests suggested, it could have come from the current search area. But if was fully submerged, as the Lepas distribution suggested, it most likely started out in the tropics northwest of Australia, 1,000 miles or more from the search zone.

  Chapter 20

  June 2016

  So much about about the debris just didn’t make sense.

  The high-speed impact of a 777 with the ocean surface would create a vast amount of floating debris. But that material would quickly disperse, as the swirls and eddies of the ocean currents pulled it in random directions. According to an animation produced by David Griffin’s team at CSIRO, crash debris that started at the presumed impact zone, near 35° south, would by mid-2016 stretch from Cape Horn to Western Australia and as far north as the Horn of Africa, an area of some 10 million square miles. Much of it would have sunk; much of it would still be circulating in the eddies and gyres of the central ocean; the pieces that came ashore would be dispersed across 10,000 miles of coastline. Anyone beachcombing for MH370 debris would find better odds playing Powerball.

  That didn’t stop people from trying, of course. People all around the world were fascinated by MH370. In South Africa and Australia, in particular, many beachgoers were on the lookout for debris.

  Each year, a nonprofit organization called the Tangaroa Blue Foundation holds an event called the Western Australia Beach Cleanup. Some 1500 volunteers comb 130 beaches up and down the western coast collecting plastic rubbish and other debris, well aware that they might stumble upon evidence that could help solve history’s most puzzling aviation mystery. “When [MH370] first happened, and they said where they thought it went down, I said to myself, ‘Oh crap,” because I knew this is where it would come,” event organizer Renee Mouritz told me. With those drift patterns in mind, the organization set up an informal protocol to pass along reports of any suspected MH370
debris. But so far, Mouritz says, “nobody has fed anything back to us.”

  A similar organization conducts beach cleanups in South Africa. Each year the 20,000 participants are given a flyer reminding them to keep an eye out for potential pieces of aircraft debris. No one has yet found anything. Likewise, I talked to boatmen and fishing guides who spend most of their time in the waters of the western Indian Ocean, and they told me they’ve spotted nothing despite keeping a constant vigil.

  So the many, many people who have deliberately looked for debris over the years have never found any—except one man. Over and over—a dozen times or more. That man is Blaine Alan Gibson.

  After receiving a whirlwind of press attention for his first find, Gibson traveled to Ile Ste Marie, Madagascar, in June accompanied by a crew from France 2 TV. There, according to the online publication Seattle Met:

  They rode quads along the beach, and at the north end he signaled for the party to stop. The camera crew had a good reason to follow him: He is, to this day, still the only person to find a piece of Flight 370 while actually looking for it. And he’d done enough research to have a good idea where he might find more. But come on, it was still a one-in-a-million find. There’s no way he’d actually uncover another.

  Right?

  With the cameras trained on him, Gibson dismounted and started walking. And as he got closer to the object that had caught his eye, he could see that it was gray fiberglass. It was almost a clone of No Step. Later, he found a handful of other pieces, one of which looked exactly like the housing for a seat-back TV monitor. He couldn’t be sure, but he had a pretty good idea they came from Flight 370.