The Hunt for MH370

by Ean Higgins

  ‘The oscillator sits inside a miniature oven. Whenever the SDU is depowered, the oven and crystal oscillator cool down. When the power is put back on, the oven heats up, but there can be a time lag of several minutes before the oscillator is at the proper temperature again. The electronics controlling this process is not particularly precise, the result being that the SDU can start transmitting before the oscillator has reached the correct temperature, and consequently, the SDU transmissions will gradually vary in frequency (drifting) before the correct temperature is reached.’

  Under normal circumstances, Stevens explained, such warm-up drift was not a problem. But with MH370, he said, it was a big issue because the investigators did not know enough about how it worked under such unique circumstances to be confident about interpreting the data when the SDU came back online at the end of the flight. ‘This was the worry that some of the SSWG participants evidently had,’ Stevens said.

  Stevens said the inclusion of the alternative explanation for the BFO offset changes was very revealing, and ‘implies that a piloted glide shouldn’t be ruled out’.

  In its update report published in November 2016, the ATSB downplayed the warm-up drift issue, saying that if the power outage were brief, its effect would be negligible, or alternatively, small and calculable. But Stevens suggested the Malaysian investigators, to get consensus among the accredited representatives on the panel, had agreed to incorporate the lingering doubts of at least some of the international experts.

  ‘There were certain members of the Search Strategy Working Group who were never totally happy with the descent rate explanation, and they appear to have gotten the Malaysians to spread their bets,’ Stevens said.

  If Stevens is right, this could also explain the strange deletion of the ‘consensus’ line from the JACC bulletin of 27 June 2016, and provide a motivation for why the ATSB suppressed the opinions on the satellite data when I sought them under FOI.

  Stevens is another expert and close observer of the MH370 saga who believes the ATSB, at least subconsciously, fell into the trap of bias against the ‘rogue pilot to the end’ theory for fear of upsetting the Malaysians, displaying motivated cognition in how it interpreted the available data.

  ‘The Malaysian authorities have, from day one, consistently played down or ignored any suggestion of deliberate, pre-meditated pilot involvement,’ Stevens said. ‘Any suggestion of a piloted, end-of-flight glide was and still is strictly taboo. The ATSB were thus constrained by outside political influence, to assume an unpiloted final descent, and so naturally enough they were happy to interpret the final BFOs as a death dive. It was convenient to the narrative.

  ‘If this was the way the flight ended, then the ATSB search would have found the aircraft near the Seventh Arc.’

  So, at the end of the day, the Malaysian-led ICAO Annex 13 safety investigation report into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 contained – almost between the lines – two major findings which seriously weakened the theory that the aircraft went down unpiloted in a rapid, uncontrolled descent. Firstly, that the French analysis of the flaperon had determined it had been deployed for a controlled ditching. Secondly, that the last two satellite transmissions might have indicated MH370 was in a rapid and increasing descent, but might not have indicated that at all, but rather the quirk of warm-up drift.

  So, in the end, Kok’s team decided that without the wreckage and the black boxes, they could not say what happened to MH370 – neither mechanical nor human factors had presented as decisive explanations. The report itself said somebody deliberately made the turn back, did not exclude pilot hijack, but just said there were no signs pointing to it, and also did not rule out hijack by someone else. But the way Kok presented it at the press conference, the impression was left that the investigators had cleared Zaharie and Fariq, and were more inclined towards external intervention.

  Kok employed a similar approach to what the defence lawyer in O.J. Simpson’s murder trial, Johnnie Cochran, famously used: ‘If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.’

  Kok said the investigation had found there was no evidence pointing to motive or mental instability that would have led either Zaharie or Fariq to commit mass murder.

  ‘We are quite satisfied with their background, with their training, with their mental health, mental state,’ Kok said.

  And as for Zaharie:

  ‘He was a very competent pilot, almost flawless in the records, able to handle work stress very well. We are not of the opinion it could be an event committed by the pilot,’ Kok told journalists.

  So, the question had to be asked: since the investigators had concluded a pilot flew MH370 off course, who, if not Zaharie, made that first steep manual turn and flew on? That’s where Kok came up with the clincher in the thriller-like narrative: it could have been the Third Man. He said the investigators could ‘not exclude the possibility that there’s unlawful interference by a third party’.

  ‘We cannot deny the fact that there was an air turnback,’ Kok told the press conference. ‘We cannot deny the fact that, as we have analysed, the systems were manually turned off with intent or otherwise. So we feel that there’s also one possibility that could account for all these . . . No matter what we do, we cannot exclude the possibility of a third person or third party or unlawful interference.’

  One wonders how many times Kok watched Non-Stop.

  ‘Even if you don’t fly a plane, you can still engage in unlawful interference,’ he told the press pack. ‘You can always go in with a knife.’

  But asked what was known about the passengers, Kok said all had been checked and cleared.

  Kok insisted the conclusions were not the Malaysian government’s alone, noting that because the investigation was held under the auspices of the Annex 13 convention, the seven international accredited representatives had to sign off on it. None, including the ATSB representative, had dissented from the main report or even made their own comments, as they could have under the convention.

  ‘Maybe it will not be satisfactory to a lot of people,’ Kok admitted, but added, ‘I have seven stalwarts in aviation who are with me. We have finally reached consensus.’

  A lot of professionals in the aviation industry, including those who see some deficiencies in the investigation, take the view that the Malaysian-led team’s failure to arrive at a conclusion was fair enough. Veteran US airline captain, air crash investigator and aviation safety expert John Cox, mentioned earlier, said he thought more work could have been done to establish where the aircraft came down, and a more thorough examination of the washed-up pieces of the aircraft would have provided more transparency. But he said: ‘The criticism of the report and the investigators in some cases is driven because there is not irrefutable proof of the cause of the event, nor was the aircraft located.’

  Where the Malaysian investigation got into real trouble in terms of credibility was how Kok spun his conclusions beyond the report itself.

  ‘One needs to draw a distinction between the report and the person that presented it,’ Cox said. ‘There is criticism of how the Chief Investigator explained it. When reading the report, the reader must draw their own conclusions, which may differ from the Chief Investigator.’

  Many people in the professional aviation industry did just that, and came to very different conclusions as to what happened on MH370.

  THIRTEEN

  REACH FOR THE SKY

  When Mike Keane was growing up in Hamilton, New Zealand, he read the classic fighter pilot book Reach for the Sky, the remarkable true story of Battle of Britain hero Douglas Bader.

  Bader, by all accounts an extraordinarily skilled pilot, joined the RAF, and took up a dare to do some low-level aerobatics one day in 1931. He made the following entry in his logbook after that exercise. ‘Crashed slow-rolling near ground. Bad show.’

  It was the ultimate in the English art of understa
tement. In fact, Bader lost both his legs and nearly his life in the accident and for a period was invalided out of the RAF.

  But he was recommissioned at the start of World War II and, with no legs, was able to withstand greater G-forces without passing out. He emerged one of the most successful fighter aces and top RAF leaders of the conflict.

  After 24 confirmed victories, Bader’s Spitfire was chopped in two by a German ME 109 fighter in a mid-air collision, and he tried to bail out. One of his prosthetic legs caught, and he was half-outside the cockpit as the aircraft plummeted down in a slow spin at disturbingly low height above the ground. Bader pulled the rip cord, his parachute opened, and the force ripped the retaining strap on the prosthetic leg and Bader and his one remaining leg were free. Despite a few escape attempts, Bader spent the rest of the war as a POW, including in the famous Colditz Castle.

  After the war, Keane got to meet his boyhood flying hero. In the intervening three decades, Keane had enjoyed a successful military flying career himself.

  ‘None of my family had ever flown, but my siblings said I was lucky because I knew what I wanted to do,’ Keane said. ‘I wanted to fly an aircraft.’

  Keane joined the Royal New Zealand Air Force in 1960 but, he said, having wanted to be a pilot, ‘I mistakenly put down a second choice, navigator’.

  He spent six years as a navigator in the RNZAF, including three years based in Singapore and dropping supplies to British forces during the conflict between Malaysia and Indonesia known as Konfrontasi, and he also engaged in ‘taking stuff up to Vietnam’. He spent six months at a base in Thailand used by the US Airforce in strikes against North Vietnam.

  ‘This gave me my first flight in a jet aircraft, the F105 fighter. Among other things we did strafing and dive bombing and a supersonic run. I was hooked, I wanted to be a fighter pilot.’

  The problem, Keane explained in an interview with me at his home in the hinterland of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, was that ‘they told me, “wait another two years – subject to a flight grading”. I thought stuff that, and I applied to the RAF, and they accepted me as a pilot.’

  In 1970 he started flying Phantoms which the RAF had recently brought into service. By 1974, Keane was in charge of a flight of four Phantom fighters at the RAF base of Bruggen in what was then West Germany. There had, Keane said, been a few problems with the British version of the Phantom; the RAF had wanted to use British Rolls Royce Spey engines rather than the standard American General Electric J79 turbojets.

  The Spey had been a very reliable engine in civil aviation, but in a military fighter bomber it was subjected to far more frequent and dramatic throttle changes including to full power, and the pressures on it were far more intense and it had trouble coping.

  Keane found that out one grey Cold War November morning when he took off from Bruggen leading his flight on a low-level ground attack training exercise.

  ‘We had just become airborne when a loud explosion rocked the aircraft. In less than 10 seconds the fire lights were on for all three sections of the engine. The aircraft became difficult to fly and there was a total loss of electrics, including the radio and intercom. I knew we were in trouble in a big way. I pushed a button, which was powered by a torch battery, that illuminated an EJECT light in the back seat. My navigator promptly ejected.’

  The Spey engine had exploded and the disintegrating turbine blades tore into the fuel tanks and the aircraft caught fire. Keane guided the crippled plane away from built-up areas, but soon after reaching open countryside it pitched and rolled into a steep inverted dive.

  ‘I pulled the bottom ejection handle, and nothing happened. I could see the ground through the cockpit canopy coming up. I pulled it again, nothing happened, I went for the top handle and pulled, nothing happened. Just before the aircraft hit the ground the seat fired and a fraction of a second later there was stillness as the parachute opened. The whole aircraft was just a ball of fire from the cockpit back and it exploded in a black and orange ball of fire on impact.’

  An hour later a German helicopter picked Keane up. He was later awarded a Queen’s Commendation for staying with the aircraft long enough to steer it out of built-up areas.

  The failure of the ejection seat, Keane said, was caused by the fact the navigator had ejected first, and the combination of the aircraft manoeuvres and the suck from the vacant cockpit prevented the canopy from separating. Without separation the seat could not fire. American Phantoms had explosive bolts to ‘punch’ the canopy off, but as a cost-saving the UK Phantoms did not; however, as a result of this accident all RAF Phantoms were retrofitted with explosive bolts.

  As it happened, Keane’s hero Bader came to visit Bruggen a couple of weeks later – after a career as an executive with oil company Shell, flying himself from job to job, Bader had begun visiting RAF bases and was much sought after as an inspirational figure. The station commander introduced the two spectacular bail-out survivors to each other.

  ‘Bader said to me, jokingly, “So I hear you’re the lily-livered chap who bailed out”,’ Keane said.

  Keane continued to do well in the RAF, rising to squadron leader and commanding a squadron at the Advanced Training Flying School. He took a course in intelligence and, as a secondary duty while still a fighter pilot, served as an intelligence officer.

  As he approached the age of 38 – which in the RAF is a decision-point of whether to leave with an honourable discharge or carry on, normally to age 55 – he was offered the chance to rise to wing commander. But that, Keane said, would have involved taking up a desk job in the Ministry of Defence.

  Keane decided he wanted to keep flying, left the RAF, and joined Orion Airways to fly Boeing 737s.

  Before long he was fleet captain in charge of the B737s before going on to fly Boeing 757s and 767s. Then a head-hunter approached Keane: would he be interested in taking up the post of chief pilot at a start-up airline, easyJet?

  It was then a fledgling operation – 35 pilots and three aircraft – but, although the money was pretty much the same, there was an equity stake on offer and Keane liked the business model. He accepted, and what followed was, he said, ‘seven years of sheer, bloody, grinding hard work’.

  It was, at the same time, exciting and professionally challenging. The growth of easyJet was exponential; including in the number of aircraft and pilots. It was difficult to find experienced pilots who would join a start-up airline, particularly those who were qualified civil aviation examiners, and Keane found himself doing a considerable amount of training and checking of easyJet pilots, in addition to a demanding office schedule.

  ‘I just wanted to make sure nothing went wrong, safety was paramount,’ Keane said.

  By the time Keane retired from easyJet it had become the biggest airline in Britain – with further expansion, it has today over 250 aircraft and 3000 pilots. Keane had clocked up 25,000 flying hours by the time he, his Australian wife Judy and their children, moved to the Sunshine Coast and built a magnificent house on 15 acres of beautifully landscaped hilltop with a lake, orchard and garden. He’d had 45 years in aviation, as a navigator, fighter pilot, intelligence officer, airline pilot and chief pilot.

  So when he saw the ATSB come up with its theory that by the end of the flight MH370 had no responsive pilots, his experience told him it was wrong. He also thought the various theories about some sort of accident like a fire or rapid decompression simply didn’t stack up against the known facts.

  ‘I followed this right from the very start,’ Keane said. ‘I said in the first couple of weeks to Judy, “It’s almost certainly a hijack by the captain”.’ Keane had been involved in one air crash investigation himself, involving a Red Arrows Gnat aircraft on a training flight. The engine had ‘run down’ forcing both pilots to eject. Keane was one of the three officers on the Board of Inquiry into the accident. At the time he was a squadron commander flying the Gnat and his select
ion to the Board brought firsthand knowledge of the aircraft and its systems.

  The first few weeks were dominated by interviews of the two pilots and dozens of others who were involved directly or indirectly with the aircraft on the day and even weeks before. Eyewitnesses gave conflicting accounts which provided an element of confusion.

  ‘Initially, we felt the most likely cause was a serious malfunction of the engine but that theory was knocked on the head after we received the engine technical report,’ Keane said.

  The Gnat was a small and complicated aircraft with a disproportionate number of fuel tanks and a complex feed system, with small side tanks supplying a collector tank. The technical tangle created a possible anomaly in which the fuel gauge would show the total amount of fuel in the aircraft, rather than the amount available to the engine, which could be less.

  Keane talked to aircraft refuellers about how the system on the Gnat worked, and while the factors were complicated, the answer to what had happened was simple: the engine ran out of fuel, even though some fuel remained in the tanks. ‘The important lesson I learnt about an investigation is to keep an open mind and consider the small detail as it often provides the pieces of the jigsaw that paint the picture,’ he said.

  A couple of years after the disappearance of MH370, Keane decided he had to plunge into the international debate about the mystery. He had started reading the stories Byron Bailey and others had been writing for The Daily Telegraph and The Australian, and entered the lively online comment sparring match. Keane got in touch with Bailey, a fellow former fighter pilot, and they started corresponding about MH370. At the suggestion of Bailey, on a visit to Sydney Keane met with me, and I suggested he write a feature-length piece for The Australian about his analysis of the facts surrounding MH370. The published piece was another top billing article on the newspaper’s website, and attracted nearly 100 published comments. It came out four days before the third anniversary of the loss of MH370.