The Hunt for MH370

by Ean Higgins

  Still hysterical and in a daze, it was then Danica called Lincoln’s best friend’s mother and asked if she could have Lincoln over to stay for a few nights as she feared the emotional toll it would take on her young son as the whirlwind of reporters descended on her house.

  Danica debated what to do about the journalists camped outside – there were not, all up, that many Australian next-of-kin whose family members had disappeared on MH370, making those who were, prime targets for media interviews.

  Danica said she sought counsel from friends from her London days who were in Perth as to whether she should speak to the media, and they put to her, ‘if you are up to doing it, I think you should’.

  Danica went out to talk to the media scrum, saying to herself, ‘I am doing it for Pauly, I want him found. I think this is the way to do it.’

  She says it was one of the best moves she made, empowering her both immediately and over the coming years.

  Danica described the media as ‘totally respectful’ and ‘amazing with me’.

  ‘Here I am a housewife, working part time,’ she said. ‘I didn’t have a voice to talk, the media gave that to me.’

  It helped a bit in dealing with the extraordinary circumstances of having sent her husband off on a trip on a major airline one day, and learning a day later he had disappeared on a big modern airliner which just vanished without explanation.

  ‘Everything since then is like a blur, and there is nothing more I know from that day.’

  ‘I made Mum sleep in my bed for four months afterwards.’

  For Brisbane couples Cathy and Bob Lawton, and Mary and Rodney Burrows, it was to be the ultimate break: a five-week overseas trip in which each of the four of them got to tick off at least one item on their ‘bucket list’ of places they wanted to see in their lifetimes.

  The Lawton and Burrows families had become deeply intertwined over many years; the link began when the Lawtons’ second of three daughters, Amanda, became friends at school with the Burrows’ eldest son, Jayden. The itinerary of the trip the two middle-aged couples planned to take together reflected an aggregate of circumstances, special longings and cost considerations.

  ‘Originally Cathy really wanted to go to Alaska, and it was the money that put her off such an expensive trip,’ Cathy Lawton’s sister Jeanette Maguire said in an interview at her home in the Brisbane western suburb of Forest Lake where she lives with her husband Shaun and their children.

  Cathy and Jeanette’s nephew had married a Vietnamese girl and they lived in Vietnam. Cathy had really wanted to go to the wedding, but couldn’t make it.

  ‘She decided, “I never got to visit Vietnam then, so let’s go”,’ Jeanette said.

  The plan was to fly to Beijing, travel to Hong Kong, and take a ‘celebrity millennium cruise’ to Vietnam.

  ‘That was a last-minute decision to go to China; Cathy wanted to see the Great Wall, and the Burrows said sure, we’ll go there as well,’ Jeanette said.

  Kuala Lumpur was then tacked on because Bob’s cousin lived there. All up, it had the lot.

  ‘They were so excited,’ Jeanette said of her sister and brother-in-law’s anticipation. ‘They had been talking about it constantly. They were coming up to their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.’

  It had been an at times hard road for the couple, who married as childhood sweethearts when Cathy was 19. Bob worked for a plywood company, and Cathy as a commercial artist – until some tragic quirks of health stopped her.

  ‘Cathy was born blind with glaucoma,’ Jeanette said. ‘They operated on her when she was a baby, and she gained full sight in one eye. They scarred the other eye.’ Cathy grew up very visually impaired. She had to wear glasses, and she struggled in the classroom.

  Over the course of her life, Cathy’s eye colour changed slightly, three times: she had to have three cornea transplants, and the matches to the original were the best available but naturally a bit different.

  ‘Her glaucoma was under control until it came back when she fell pregnant with their first child,’ Jeanette said. ‘That was the horrific part. She couldn’t go back to work after she had Glenda. She couldn’t see well enough, although she used a big magnifying glass.’

  ‘She never had any self-pity . . . She was always clear on what she wanted and how to get there.’

  The last time Jeanette saw her sister was on the Sunday before MH370 disappeared.

  ‘We celebrated her birthday. Went out for lunch,’ Jeanette said.

  The following Saturday, Jeanette was preparing to attend her children’s first soccer game of the season. ‘The phone rang, it was my niece Glenda, and she said, “Mum and Dad’s plane has gone missing.”

  ‘I said, “How do you know?”

  ‘She said, “Mum and Dad’s close friend was working and saw a live post come up. They knew the itinerary.”

  ‘I said, “Shaun, turn the TV on, turn the TV on.”’

  Jeanette asked if her mother – Glenda’s grandmother – had been told. Then she instructed Glenda to gather everyone together at her grandmother’s house. ‘Shaun was asking me what was going on, and I couldn’t get the words out,’ Jeanette said. She checked the itinerary to make sure they had the right flight. ‘Then I lost it. It was tough.’

  Jeanette was determined to keep life normal for her family until more was known, and insisted Shaun take the boys to soccer.

  Cathy and Jeanette’s elder sister Eileen was on a family day trip to Mount Tambourine, and she asked them to pick her up on their way back through.

  ‘I couldn’t drive, I think I had gone into a state of shock. I was just falling apart, minute by minute.’

  Jeanette and Shaun Maguire had a particularly good set of neighbours.

  ‘We knocked on the door and I couldn’t speak. I felt like I’d been drugged.’

  One neighbour made calls on Jeanette’s behalf, including to the Department of Foreign Affairs. Then Eileen arrived with her family, and took Jeanette to their mother’s house.

  ‘Cathy’s face came up on the TV – they had hacked her Facebook page, it was devastating.’

  Jeanette spent the first four days at her parents’ house, ringing Malaysia Airlines and asking if Cathy had boarded the plane.

  ‘They told us they couldn’t tell us anything.’

  One evening, while sitting in recliners and watching the initial stages of the search on TV, Jeanette said, ‘I don’t know why they are searching there, the plane’s gone left. I don’t know, I just felt it.’

  FOUR

  ‘STILL, THERE WAS NOTHING. TOTALLY NOTHING’

  When Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak ordered authorities to launch a full-on search and rescue mission to find MH370 and the 239 souls aboard, the question was where to look.

  The authorities did not have a lot to go on. They did not know what had happened to the aircraft – no distress call had been issued advising of any onboard problems. They did not know where it was – it disappeared over water in the middle of the night, and there were no eyewitness accounts of an aircraft coming down. And they did not know whether or not some or all of those on the flight might still be alive.

  What they did know was that at 1:19am, Zaharie had transmitted his final words, ‘Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero’, and then the aircraft had passed through waypoint IGARI in the South China Sea. And they knew that moments thereafter, MH370 disappeared from controllers’ screens, meaning its secondary radar transponder must in some way have been disabled. With so little information to hand, the Malaysian authorities decided there was no other logical course of action than to start looking in the last place the aircraft was heard from by radio and secondary radar: the South China Sea around IGARI.

  Malaysia’s defence minister and acting transport minister at the time, Hishammuddin Hussein, thought that while the disappearance of MH370 was tragic, fi
nding it or its remains would be relatively straightforward.

  ‘I wasn’t too worried because you have got fishermen, you have liners,’ he said in MH370: Inside the Situation Room. ‘This is an area that is reasonably easy to identify where, if the plane did go down, where it went down.’ Hishammuddin’s thought process was entirely logical, but as with everything else that followed, logic was overturned several times when it came to MH370.

  The international search effort geared up big and fast, with aircraft and ships from Malaysia and its regional neighbours weighing in, along with the US and Australia.

  Australia sent two RAAF AP-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft to join the search.

  ‘This is a tragic mystery as things stand but Australia will do what it can to help get to the bottom of this,’ Prime Minister Tony Abbott said.

  China deployed two well-equipped warships, Jinggangshan and Mianyang, adjusted its satellites to help focus in on the search area, and sent more ships.

  Vietnam sent surveillance aircraft and ships and, in a move reflecting the cooperative international quality of the effort, allowed China, an on-off enemy, to sail its ships into Vietnamese waters.

  The Philippine Navy sent Gregorio del Pilar, Emilio Jacinto, Apolinario Mabini and search and rescue aircraft.

  Indonesia announced that it would send five ships, while launching fast patrol vessels straight away.

  Singapore’s Air Force got a C-130 Hercules in the air, and two more C-130s on Sunday, and the government dispatched several ships.

  The US Seventh Fleet deployed a P-3C Orion craft from Kadena Base in Okinawa, two destroyers with helicopters on board, and a support vessel.

  The immediate search area was a 50 nautical mile radius around the last point of contact at IGARI.

  It was a massive international search effort, but all it turned up was a series of false alarms.

  An oil slick was spotted, a ship was deployed to take samples, but it tested as not being aviation fuel. What looked from the air to possibly be the tail of a Boeing 777 turned out to be a big piece of white canvass happily drifting around.

  The crew from a Vietnamese jet reported seeing a ‘possible life raft’ floating in the sea around 400 kilometres off the country’s southern coast, and when helicopters were deployed for a closer look, it was found to be just ‘a moss-covered cap of cable reel’.

  The international media rapidly descended on Kuala Lumpur, and Najib decided he himself should head the panel of officials at the press conference they were clamouring for. Scenes in television shows and movies of press conferences with a pack of journalists chaotically jostling to shout out questions above each other are usually over-egged, but this one was exactly that. Already, there had been scores of rumours about what might have happened to MH370, and journalists’ demands for clarification of the facts were insatiable. It was a rare case where the phrase ‘media circus’ was entirely apt.

  ‘What is the most likely theory?’ a journalist asked.

  ‘No, that’s too speculative,’ Najib responded. ‘We cannot indulge in speculation at this stage.’

  Another journalist wanted to confirm that there was no wreckage, to which Azharuddin responded, ‘We have not found any.’

  ‘Is there a possibility of terrorism?’ another journalist asked.

  ‘We are looking at all possibilities, but it is too early to make any conclusive remarks,’ Najib replied.

  The international media pack were frustrated – how were they going to file informative stories if the Malaysian officials produced no answers?

  Some of the best insights into the thought processes of the government and airline leaders who dealt with the MH370 crisis came in the aforementioned 2018 television documentary MH370: Inside the Situation Room, produced by independent British film group Knickerbockerglory. The filmmakers spent a considerable amount of effort securing access to the key players, including Najib. In the documentary, Najib explained the dilemma for his government.

  ‘People were hungry for information, but at the same time, as the government, we have to be responsible, and I decided we would only be issuing statements that were verified and corroborated.’

  March 8 had been a torrid, difficult day for all concerned, but behind the scenes, different sets of experts were looking at every available piece of data, and as the day moved into night, they were stunned by what they found. Ahmad Jauhari, the Malaysia Airlines chief executive, got a bizarre call from the company’s engineering department.

  As mentioned in Chapter One, a fact known to very few people including airline pilots – at least before MH370 disappeared – is as follows. Aside from the communications systems available to the pilots – radio, satellite telephone and fax, ACARS, the secondary radar transponder – airliners are separately equipped with various types of automatic communications transmission systems via satellite. These systems are usually designed to enable aviation engineers and logistics experts to keep track of the status and performance of individual aircraft and their major components. Jet engine manufacturers and the airline engineers who maintain them, for example, like to get data from the engines they may have to service or replace directly, as it can help speed up their processes.

  What his engineers told Ahmad Jauhari left him gobsmacked, but with renewed hope. While the last radar transponder signal had been received at 1:21am, the automatic satellite signals from another transmitter on MH370 were received until well after 8:00am – another seven hours.

  What could it possibly mean? Could MH370 have flown on after it disappeared and landed somewhere safely? That time frame was close to when the aircraft would have reached fuel exhaustion – could that mean it simply flew until the tanks ran dry?

  Because of the uncertainty of the implications, this was one piece of information the Malaysian leadership decided to not immediately make public; the fear again was that it could create false hopes among the families. The automatic satellite signals work roughly like this: a transmitter on the aircraft – in this case the Rolls Royce engines – sends an electronic ‘handshake’ to a satellite, and that signal is relayed to a ground station and in turn to the client seeking the data.

  FIGURE 3: BASIC SATELLITE COMMUNICATION

  © Inmarsat / Australian Transport Safety Bureau

  The electronic satellite ‘handshakes’ from MH370 were roughly hourly. In this case, the satellite relaying the data on the day in question was one positioned in geostationary orbit pretty much plumb bang over the middle of the Indian Ocean. That satellite belonged to the British company Inmarsat. What the Malaysians then asked Inmarsat to do was nigh impossible: use the satellite data to find MH370.

  Inmarsat told the Malaysians it was not going to be easy – the satellite was not designed to track anything, just relay communications – but they would give it their best shot.

  As this was going on, another astounding discovery was unfolding. As discussed in Chapter One, there are two main types of radar for the purposes of tracking aircraft: secondary (transponder), and primary. While MH370’s secondary transponder stopped broadcasting at 1:21am, primary radar systems in Malaysia and its neighbours were operating constantly. They can’t tell which aircraft is which – sometimes they can’t even know for sure if the bounce-back ‘blip’ on the screen is actually an aircraft or an anomaly. But primary radar can detect something in the air, and in modern systems, the reports are automatically recorded and can be played back.

  The Malaysian military had been going over those recordings from its radar installations. General Rodzali Daud, Malaysia’s Chief of Air Force at the time, got an astounding message from the operational commander, saying a strange track had shown up. The track started where and when MH370 had disappeared at IGARI, then headed back over the Malay Peninsula towards Penang, and then north-west up the Straits of Malacca.

  If the aircraft making that track had been MH370
, the implications were enormous. Could MH370 have experienced some technical problems and turned back, having suffered some serious malfunction which damaged its communications systems? In that case, why did it not land at Kota Bharu or Penang? Or could it be a coincidence – was the track that of some private jet aircraft with a flight plan filed but yet to be matched? Or could it just be what are known in the radar profession as ‘ghosts’ – false readings that can be produced by anomalies such as reflections off clouds? But if the mysterious track had indeed been made by MH370, it meant it had not come down in the South China Sea – it was more likely on the other side of the Malay Peninsula, possibly in the Straits of Malacca or farther north.

  It was a huge conundrum for the Malaysian authorities. What to do: take the military radar track to be that of MH370 and drop the search in the South China Sea and move it to the Straits of Malacca? Stick with the current search zone and wait until there was more certainty about what the military radar really did show? How long could that take?

  The government concluded there was only one responsible way forward.

  ‘There was no textbook to say what was the correct thing to do, but I wanted to find the plane at all costs, so I immediately instructed for an additional search and rescue to be done on the western side,’ Najib said in MH370: Inside the Situation Room. ‘But because they were not sure it was MH370, we had to continue the search in the South China Sea.’

  The result was that what was already an extraordinary international effort to find a missing aircraft became even more ambitious. At its height, 42 ships and 39 aircraft from 12 countries were scouring huge tracks of the Straits of Malacca to the west, and the South China Sea to the east. As the search zones were divided up and assigned to the ships and aircraft of different participating countries, highly sophisticated new aircraft like the US Air Force Poseidon P-8 were looking in one sector, while ageing Soviet-era Vietnamese Air Force aircraft were looking in others.