by Jeff Wise
It was hard to make a plausible case that MH370 had gone anywhere.
Part 3: Capitulation
Chapter 24
October 2017
It had now been more than three years since MH370 had disappeared, and the investigation was in shambles. The Australian, Chinese, and Malaysian governments had spent more than $150 million and had nothing to show for it. The ATSB continued to insist that the plane must have impacted the southern Indian Ocean near the 7th arc, refusing to acknowledge any of the evidence that undermined that conclusion.
By my own reckoning I was the only professional journalist still regularly working on the story, but I was doing so largely under the radar. Reporters from the mainstream media who parachuted in from time to time were so overwhelmed by the topic that they either simply parroted the ATSB position or fell into the clutches of the numerous conspiracy theorists who constantly circled the topic. It was enormously frustrating and discouraging.
Still, I pressed on, sifting through the evidence and probing for weak spots that might yield a breakthrough. I had accumulated a lot of evidence, but I wasn’t sure how reliable all of it was. Some of it, for instance, had come from leaked reports of uncertain providence. And I knew that there were many things the Australians knew that I did not. I kept hoping that they would open the doors to their treasure trove of data. Under international aviation treaties, they were supposed to issue a final report after their investigation concluded.
Finally, three years, six months, and 26 days after the disappearance, the ATSB officially declared its investigation over. In its final report, a 440-page behemoth entitled The Operational Search for MH370, it stated that “we share your profound and prolonged grief, and deeply regret that we have not been able to locate the aircraft.”
For the next of kin, and for many onlookers around the world, this was a depressing announcement. Personally, though, I saw it as a good thing. For a long time, I’d been frustrated by the ATSB’s unwavering optimism, by their insistence in the face of all evidence to the contrary that their efforts were going well. Now, at least, they were admitting they had a problem.
I was also excited to dive into a trove of new evidence relating to many aspects of the case. Particularly interesting was a report in the appendix about the marine organisms found growing on recovered debris. Researchers at Geoscience Australia, a government body devoted to the scientific study of the earth and its oceans, had scrutinized four pieces: the flap fairing found by Liam Lötter in Mozambique, the fragment of horizontal stabilizer with the words “No Step” found by Blaine Alan Gibson in Mozambique, the piece of engine cowling found in Mossel Bay, South Africa, and a section of an interior wall found on Rodrigues Island. The scientists first examined the exteriors of the objects in order to identify any visible marine organisms attached there, then washed the pieces and ran the water through a sieve to collect any small organisms that might have been trapped in the interior or in crevices. What they found had been kept under wraps until now.
Their results ran contrary to official expectations. Given the ATSB’s confidence that the plane had crashed in the southern Indian Ocean at the start of the southern autumn near 36° south, the researchers should have found marine life endemic to the temperate zone. But the scientists found no such thing. Instead, every single specimen they were able to identify was native to the tropical zone of the Indian Ocean. “No Step,” which had seemed in photographs to be virtually free of biofouling, turned out to have a particularly rich assemblage of marine organisms hidden in its nooks and crannies. “Identified mollusc species,” the report noted, “suggest that the item originated from, or picked up, [marine life] from the tropical Indo-Pacific Ocean.”
Two-thirds of the species found on this fragment live only close to shore. “The natural habitat of the recovered molluscs is shallow water, on clean coral sand or in seagrass meadows,” the investigators reported. “None of them could or would ever attach to drifting debris.” The only way the investigators could make sense of this was to assume that it had picked up the shells of these creatures from the sand when it had come ashore.
The age of the organisms was odd, too. The largest of the Lepas barnacles on the Rodrigues item had a shell less than an inch long, which, given the temperature of the water, implied an age of 45 to 50 days. Likewise, the one-third of the molluscs found on “No Step” that plausibly could have attached in the open water were all “juveniles at approximately two months old.”
Only two specimens found on “No Step” looked to be older than that. The first was a sea snail of the species Petaloconchus renisectus, the second a tube worm of the serpulid family. The former appeared to be six to eight months old; the latter, eight to 12 months old. Strangely, both are usually found living on the seabed. Petaloconchus is only rarely found attached to objects on the ocean surface, and serpulids even less so. “I would never expect to find serpulids on floating debris in the middle of the ocean,” said Harry ten Hove, one of the world’s leading experts on these animals. “If in the middle of the ocean you would find floating debris with an animal attached, it has to come from anywhere in the world near the coast.”
That means that in order to have acquired the tube worm, the item must have crossed quickly across the breadth of the southern Indian Ocean, then lingered in coastal waters near Africa for up to a year—a tough proposition, given that drift modelers already struggled to explain how the object got from the search zone to Mozambique so quickly.
Another appendix of the ATSB report detailed the work of Patrick De Deckker, a marine biologist at Australia National University in Adelaide. De Deckker had obtained a barnacle shell taken from the flaperon and analyzed its chemical composition in hopes of determining what part of the ocean it had floated from. The shell was 2.5 centimeters long—close, I was pleased to note, to what I’d calculated using my improvised image-analysis technique. Based on its size, De Deckker wrote, “It could be assumed the specimens analysed here were quite young, perhaps less than one month.” This was even younger than what I’d surmised. The brief duration of the specimen’s life meant that it had nothing to tell about where the flaperon had entered the water 16 months before its beaching.
Taken together, the evidence revealed in Australia’s final report fit poorly with the idea that MH370 crashed into the southern Indian Ocean.
Chapter 25
January 2018
Everyone assumed that the search for MH370 was finished for good. But if we’ve learned anything about MH370, it’s to expect the unexpected. Months after Australia threw in the towel, a previously unknown US-registered company called Ocean Infinity stepped up and offered to restart the search. Remarkably, it offered to carry out the work on its own dime, with the Malaysian government only obligated to pay if the company succeeded in finding the plane.
Malaysia was hesitant at first, but after months of negotiation finally inked a deal in which they would pay Ocean Infinity anywhere from $20 to $70 million depending on how much seabed was searched.
It was a high-stakes gambit for Ocean Infinity. The potential payout was not very large considering that the effort probably cost tens of millions of dollars to mount. Yet if the ATSB’s most recent evaluation was correct, the odds would be in their favor. Malaysia’s transport minister, Liow Tiong Lai, stated that there was an 85 percent chance that the plane’s wreckage would be found within the latest 25,000 square kilometer search zone that the ATSB had demarcated.
Ocean Infinity moved quickly. Its search vessel, the Seabed Constructor, was already steaming across the Indian Ocean when the contract with Malaysia was inked on January 10, 2018. It arrived at the survey area five days later and deployed its high-tech flotilla of eight robot subs to scan the seabed in a grid pattern.
By the beginning of April, Seabed Constructor had searched the entirety of the ATSB’s 25,000 square kilometer target area. As I’ve noted, Australia’s stated position at the time was that if the plane was not found in this area, it
could offer no rationale for looking anywhere else.
Undaunted, the searchers continued to work their way further up the 7th arc. They reached Broken Ridge, an area of craggy underwater terrain, and zipped right over it, scarcely breaking stride. This feat was a testament to the capability of Ocean Infinity’s technology. It also ruled out an idea that had been promoted by certain MH370 theorists, to the effect that the captain abducted the plane and headed for Broken Ridge in the hope that the wreckage would never be found amid the unsearchable peaks and gullies.
But for all its technological prowess, Ocean Infinity found nothing. Week after week the search pressed on. Finally, on May 29, Ocean Infinity pulled the plug. Instead of the promised 25,000 square kilometers, they had scoured more than four times that amount, in an elongated rectangle whose furthest edges stretched more than 500 miles beyond the ATSB’s recommended area.
For those who’d labored for years refining their end-point calculations, this final failure was the most demoralizing of all. They’d been so sure they were on the right track. Yet all their meticulous efforts had been for naught. As they mulled over what had gone wrong, they reasoned that there were three possible reasons why the plane hadn’t been found.
The first was that the plane had indeed hit the water within the scanned area, but the wreckage had somehow been overlooked. Perhaps it had tumbled into a gulley, or sank into soft seabed mud. Independent Group member Victor Iannello, who had close ties to the official investigation, was skeptical of this explanation. “Sources close to the previous search effort believe [this] is very unlikely,” he wrote on his blog, “as there was a thorough review of the sonar data by multiple parties with high levels of experience, and because any ‘points of interest’ were scanned multiple times to ensure the resolution was adequate to make a determination with a high level of confidence.”
The second possibility was that the plane had made its final transmission further north along the 7th arc. But there was no plausible scenario in which the plane could have flown that far, and what’s more such an endpoint would be inconsistent with the drift analysis.
The third possibility was that the plane had crossed the 7th arc within the search zone, but had then managed to glide beyond it after fuel exhaustion. This, you’ll recall, would be hard to reconcile with the recorded BFO values, which showed a steep and accelerating decent during the final transmissions. Iannello wrote that this would be “possible only if the aircraft first was in a rapid descent (producing the final BFO values), and then the pilot skillfully recovered from the rapid descent and glided some distance away from the 7th arc beyond the width of the subsea search, and then later the aircraft again descended at high speed and impacted the sea (producing the shattered debris). This sequence of dive-glide-dive is considered by many to be a very unlikely sequence of events.”
I had long ago called MH370 the triple disappearing airplane because it had successively vanished from secondary radar, then primary radar, and then from Inmarsat. Now, it seemed, the plane had vanished a fourth time.
Chapter 26
July 2018
Australia had already thrown in the towel. Now that Ocean Infinity had abandoned its seabed scan, it was time for Malaysia to do the same. All that remained of the international effort to find MH370 was a criminal investigation by the research section of France’s Air Transport Gendarmerie.
By international aviation treaty, once Malaysia ended its inquiry it was obligated to produce a final report summarizing its findings. And so on July 2, 2018, the Ministry of Transport released its Safety Investigation Report, a document that weighed in at some 1,500 pages. The report contained new information on a huge range of topics, from the mangosteens in the cargo hold to the flotation characteristics of the flaperon. (French investigators still couldn't figure out how an object that floated so high in the water could be completely covered in Lepas barnacles.)
The most interesting revelation was to be found within a report by Boeing that appeared in the appendix. Entitled “Aircraft Performance Analysis,” the 8-page document discussed how various combinations of speed, direction, and altitude matched the Inmarsat ping rings. Matching previous analyses, the paper found that the routes that fit best were high, fast, and straight.
Of more novel import, however, was the report’s depiction of the plane’s path just after it disappeared from military radar.
As you’ll recall, MH370 was observed by primary radar as it crossed back over the Malay Peninsula and flew up the middle of the Malacca Strait. It left the radar-coverage zone at 18:22:12. Three minutes later it logged back onto the Inmarsat network and generated the 1st ping arc. It turns out that if you extrapolate the speed and bearing flown before 18:22 and extend it in a straight line for three minutes, you wind up at a point well inside the 1st arc. This means that in order to be on the 1st arc at the moment the 1st ping was transmitted the plane must have turned. Specifically, it must have turned to the right.
A chart on page four of the Boeing report shows this turn. It is a modest one, just 15 degrees. But it is unmistakable. Recall that when the DSTG generated a huge set of routes that matched the BTO data, these fell into two clusters: those that took a slight turn to the right and headed north, and those that took a big turn to the left and headed south.
We now know that as MH370 disappeared from military radar it was turning right and heading north.
Chapter 27
Clarity
To the general-interest media MH370 was a black-hole mystery, a whodunnit of unfathomable dimension. Every few months, the tabloids would run a new, fantastical story: about a satellite image showing a downed plane in the Cambodian jungle; about an amateur mathematician with a home-brew interpretation of the satellite data; about a fisherman who’d seen the plane come down near an island. All these stories added to the fog that had swirled around the case from the beginning.
But for the die-hards who toiled over the technical minutiae of the case the details had grown gradually clearer. It had become evident, first, that someone deliberately took control of the plane and then flew it in an evasive manner until it disappeared from primary radar. But who? A further review of the evidence suggested that there were only two plausible options. Either the captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, had taken the plane, or it had been commandeered by hijackers working from outside the cockpit.
Many observers were convinced that Shah had to be the culprit. The recovery of debris from the ocean seemed irrefutable evidence that the plane really had gone south. The discovery of the flight sim data apparently offered an additional layer of proof. But after the seabed search proved convincingly that the plane wasn’t there, certainty gave way to befuddlement. Two irreconcilable truths stood in opposition to one another. What we had was a paradox.
A state of befuddlement is not what the authorities had promised. From the moment the search ships first steamed off over the horizon, officials in charge of the investigation had made a clear implicit promise: we have figured out where the plane went and all that remains for us to do is a brute-force search. We are all but guaranteed to find the wreckage.
As I saw it, their conception of MH370’s disappearance fell under the category of normal mystery. That is to say, the outlines of what had happened were understood, so to nail down the details all that was required was a little work. Misplacing your car keys is another kind of normal mystery. You know that you left the keys somewhere in the house, so all you need to do is keep searching until you find them.
The failure of the seabed search, though, suggested that MH370 was not a normal mystery after all but something of quite a different character. Think of a stage magician who puts his assistant in a box, waves a wand, and reopens the box to reveal that it is empty. As an audience member your perplexity goes deeper than simply not knowing where the assistant is. You are unable to make sense of what happened.
Every magic trick depends upon a gap between reality and viewers’ expectations. The means by which a magi
cian does this is called the “gimmick.” A gimmick might be a hollow coin, an invisible wire, or a misleading gesture.
Somehow, too, in the case of MH370 there existed a gap between reality and expectation. Investigators expected to find the plane on the seabed of the southern ocean; it wasn’t there, and they had no good explanation as to why.
Let’s take a look at the evidence and see if there’s any place where a gap between expectation and reality might have been created. Where was an assumption too hastily made? Where did investigators’ attention wander long enough for perpetrators to slip in a sleight of hand?
One feature of the case has always stood out to me: The 18:25 reboot. This was the event that had led directly to the creation of the Inmarsat data. It was the analysis of this data that led investigators to conclude that the plane had gone south. Yet no one has been able to explain where it came from.
If we're looking for a place where investigators lost track of the details, this seems a good place to start. Indeed, there are so many reasons to be suspicious of the 18:25 reboot that I find it helpful to divide them into four categories.
1) IT CAME OUT OF NOWHERE. Recall that at 18:22:12, MH370 disappeared from Malaysian military radar, heading to the northwest. At that point, the aircraft was completely invisible. The plane could have flown anywhere in the world and no one would have been the wiser. But that’s not what happened. Instead, approximately two minutes later, at 18:24:27, someone turned the power back on to the SDU and MH370 reconnected with the Inmarsat network.