The Hunt for MH370

by Ean Higgins

  ‘The three-year mark is a good point to review whether the search strategy drawn up by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau was soundly based but unlucky, or whether it was established on the wrong premise and doomed from the start to fail,’ Keane wrote.

  Keane’s approach followed step-by-step logic, going down the same pathway as Simon Hardy and Bailey before him but with several new elements and a particularly forensic approach.

  Keane worked through the range of possibilities by reviewing and excluding one or another onboard emergency, the counter-indicators being that those flying the aircraft made no distress call, and flew over suitable airfields without making an emergency landing.

  By contrast, Keane wrote, each clue pointed to a meticulously planned murder-suicide. The turning off of the secondary radar transponder just at the point of switching from Malaysian to Vietnamese airspace aimed to confuse air traffic controllers – and succeeded, hampering the initial search for the aircraft.

  The evidence suggested Zaharie depressurised the aircraft at the start of the hijack, Keane maintained, because no-one made a mobile telephone call or sent a text during the whole of the flight.

  Keane has noted MH370 took a track to 10 nautical miles south of Penang Island, where Zaharie grew up, and made a lazy turn to the right. Zaharie would have had a good view of the lights of his home town, and Keane believes that part of the flight could be interpreted as a last, emotional farewell.

  The next clue was the location where the aircraft ended up, which was extremely remote, and offered a number of deep and challenging seabed features. This indicated a deliberate and well-researched plan to hide the aircraft where it would never be found.

  Zaharie would have wanted to run the aircraft nearly out of fuel to avoid an oil slick for the same reason, Keane deducted, and fly the aircraft right to the end to give his vanishing-an-aircraft plan the best chance of success including being sure of placing the aircraft in one of the deep-water spots that are common in that area.

  It all fitted together by powers of deduction, Keane maintained.

  ‘The circumstantial evidence points to a pilot hijack and the most likely suspect is the captain,’ Keane concluded.

  As Keane observed during our interview, in many big murder cases, the accused is found guilty only on circumstantial evidence. Back in 2016, I covered the murder trial of former NSW police detectives Roger Rogerson and Glen McNamara. The two were accused of the shooting death of university student and would-be big-time drug dealer Jamie Gao. No murder weapon had been discovered, no eyewitness account or CCTV footage existed of the actual shooting inside a storage shed, the gunshot forensic evidence was disputed and inconclusive, and each man presented the court with a dramatic story about how the other had pulled the trigger.

  Crown Prosecutor Christopher Maxwell QC had told the court he could not prove whether it had been Rogerson or McNamara who fired the gun, but said he did not have to. This was because, he argued, Rogerson and McNamara were part of a ‘joint criminal enterprise’ to murder Gao and then steal the 2.78 kilograms of the drug known as ‘ice’ he had brought to sell to them. The jury found both men guilty.

  The corollary of Keane’s analysis on MH370 was that he found the approach, and outcome, of the Malaysian-led Annex 13 safety investigation report deeply flawed in process, and in steering away from the conclusion that Zaharie hijacked the aircraft and flew it to the end.

  In another feature in The Australian after Kok Soo Chon delivered his report, Keane took the Malaysian chief investigator’s ‘Third Man’ hijack scenario to task. How credible was it, Keane asked, that a third party could have gained access to the cockpit, disabled the aircraft’s electronic equipment, ‘neutralised’ the two pilots, then seated himself before flying the aircraft through a demanding turning manoeuvre in the space of two minutes?

  ‘It beggars belief,’ Keane wrote.

  The report also ‘conflicts with its own content’, Keane observed. He noted that on page six it stated:

  ‘On the day of the disappearance of MH370, the military radar system recognised the “blip” that appeared west after the left turn . . . was that of MH370. Therefore, the military did not pursue to intercept the aircraft since it was “friendly” and did not pose any threat to national airspace security, integrity and sovereignty.’

  Keane wrote that ‘in my fighter pilot days there would have been a scramble to intercept the aircraft to find out what was happening.’

  But then, Keane saw, on page 337 of the report, it said:

  ‘In interviews . . . controllers informed that they were unaware of the strayed/unidentified aircraft (primary radar target) transiting.’

  The contradiction between the two statements created an element of doubt about other sections of the report, Keane believes. He says the report’s dismissal of any significance in the flight path to the southern Indian Ocean on Zaharie’s home computer ‘makes it difficult to take the Royal Malaysian Police report as a serious contribution to the investigation’.

  In regard to fuel, Keane disagreed with the report’s statement that Zaharie ordered no more than a reasonable amount, saying an experienced captain would not have imposed the extra cost on the airline of carrying 3000 kilograms of additional fuel above what was required, which equated to a further 30 minutes of flight and an extra range of 250 nautical miles.

  Keane observed that Zaharie was said to be upset about Anwar Ibrahim’s conviction on sodomy charges on the eve of the flight, but there was no weight or even serious consideration given to Zaharie’s involvement in politics.

  For Keane, if the pilot hijack theory were correct – and he believed the circumstantial evidence proved it was beyond reasonable doubt – it meant MH370’s resting place had to be treated as a crime scene, and finding it should be a matter of priority for a criminal investigation of a prima facie case of mass murder of 238 people.

  Keane claimed the ATSB was complicit in what he called the ‘deeply flawed’ Malaysian government MH370 safety investigation, by granting Australian government endorsement to the final report without comment.

  He concluded: ‘Transport Minister Michael McCormack should demand the ATSB publicly account for why it did so – the families of the six Australians on board MH370 deserve nothing less.’

  Keane was joined by other highly experienced aviation and other experts around the world in pointing to deficiencies in the Malaysian-led, Australian-endorsed report.

  Larry Vance who is, once again, one of the world’s most experienced air crash sleuths, called for a new, independent international investigation to be established by ICAO.

  ‘This deficient investigation cannot be allowed to stand as the last word on what happened to MH370,’ Vance said.

  In correspondence, Vance told me the report was not all bad. It had put to rest some of the more ‘far out there’ theories that have circulated about what might have happened, such as a battery fire or remote act from outside the airplane. Conversely, Vance said, it made clear the disappearance of MH370 was the result of human intervention.

  The key weakness of the Malaysian-led investigation, Vance said, was its ‘failure to properly assess the physical evidences on the recovered pieces of wreckage, and to put an analysis together that explains that the flaps were extended during a controlled ditching’.

  ‘That makes this report a tremendous disappointment, and a disservice to the industry and to those who perished, and their survivors.’

  Vance noted that the report revealed for the first time, publicly, that the French had determined the flaperon was lowered, consistent with his findings and the ‘controlled ditching’ theory.

  The only people who are confirmed as being engaged in an on-going criminal investigation into the disappearance of MH370 are the French. A few days after the Malaysian investigation report came out, the big French daily newspaper Le Parisien reported tha
t, while all the other countries which lost nationals on MH370 had given up, France’s ‘gendarmerie des transports aériens’, or aviation transport police, were renewing their efforts to investigate the death of the four French citizens.

  ‘As of this day, France is the only and last country to try to understand how Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 could have disappeared on 8 March 2014,’ the newspaper suggested.

  Le Parisien described French authorities as viewing the Malaysian report as ‘imprecise and ambiguous’ for downplaying the possibility of pilot hijack. In particular, Le Parisien said, French investigators wanted to review the satellite data from Inmarsat, to independently determine the likely flight path of the aircraft, and the British satellite company later confirmed it had been approached and was cooperating.

  There were some immediate consequences flowing from the report within Malaysia. The country’s civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman – he who had famously not waited for his phone to charge up on the night MH370 went missing and told his wife the next morning ‘something is not right’ – fell on his sword over the failings of the Kuala Lumpur air traffic control centre he was ultimately responsible for, and resigned.

  Transport Minister Anthony Loke said he had established a committee to investigate and take action against any misconduct based on the report findings, focusing on the controllers.

  But the international aviation community, and many beyond it, say while those actions relating to air traffic control are correct and appropriate, the issue remains that the MH370 mystery will not finally be solved until the aircraft is found and the wreckage and black boxes recovered. Another famous air crash investigator in the US, John Goglia, told me the recordings from the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder would still be recoverable – they are designed to last, and at great depth the cold and lack of oxygen would help preserve them. The most important thing, aviation professionals say, is to keep looking. Ocean Infinity maintains it would like to have another go one day; presumably it would want a further ‘no find, no fee’ deal with the Malaysian government. Ocean Infinity, incidentally, went on to solve another mystery: it was employed by the government of Argentina to look for its lost submarine ARA San Juan, and in November 2018 found it in the Atlantic Ocean at a depth of 800 metres.

  An interesting issue when it comes to mounting a new search is who might fund it. One fact revisited by The Weekend Australian in early 2019 was that the two-year undersea hunt for Air France 447 was largely paid for by the manufacturer of the A330 aircraft, the European aviation giant Airbus. It put up 12 million towards the seabed search, plus technical and logistical support, such as supplying a transport plane and ship.

  Danica Weeks launched what snowballed into a major international law suit against Boeing in the US that failed in November 2018 on jurisdictional grounds. She says she only took the action to get Boeing to do for MH370 what its arch rival Airbus did for AF447.

  ‘What I wanted was for Boeing to say, okay, we want to prove we are not negligent, we are going to go out and find this plane,’ Danica told me in January 2019.

  Boeing’s strategy when it comes to its Boeing 777, which flew Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, has been to do and say as little as possible beyond insisting it has provided full technical support for the investigators.

  Asked if Airbus thought Boeing should follow the lead Airbus set with AF447 and cough up some millions in cash towards a new search, Airbus spokesman Justin Dubon said: ‘It is imperative for the entire aviation sector to learn as much as possible from accidents by understanding the root causes of these events in order to prevent them from ever happening again.’

  At the time this book went to press, the pressure to renew the search was building in the lead-up to the fifth anniversary of MH370’s disappearance.

  There was a foretaste of a renewed international campaign in Malaysia in late November 2018, when next-of-kin presented Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke with what were said to be five new pieces of MH370 wreckage found off Madagascar.

  Grace Nathan, whose mother Anne Daisy was on MH370, said at the time: ‘The fact that debris is still washing up now means that the investigation should still be live . . . it shouldn’t be closed.’

  In January 2019, it was reported Malaysian authorities had declared at least one of the pieces was likely from MH370, a section of floor panel.

  The Malaysian government says it is not unsympathetic to re-opening the search, but insists it would need something new to go on.

  ‘We are open to proposals, but we must have some credible leads before we decide,’ Loke said at the November 2018 media event.

  The question, if a new search for MH370 were to be launched, would be where to look.

  The best piece of information on where to find MH370 remains the satellite burst timing offset data which produced the seven handshakes and the Seventh Arc. The reverse drift-modelling is also of use, but that has proved to be a rather inexact science. One obvious option would be to search a progressively wider stretch around the Seventh Arc beyond that already covered. The hunters could also go farther north along it, and maybe a bit farther south-west, though the aircraft’s endurance is finite and there is no point searching too far in that direction.

  The problem with such an approach is that it would still be based on the ATSB’s same assumptions about how the flight ended, which have been progressively challenged by new facts and independent expert analysis.

  Between the ATSB-led search, and that of Ocean Infinity, about 250,000 square kilometres of seabed in the southern Indian Ocean were covered, based on the bureau’s insistence that no pilot was flying the plane at the end. An increasing number of aviation professionals are asking: since the search based on the ATSB’s theory failed to find the aircraft, why not consider a new hunt based on the alternative scenario that Zaharie flew the aircraft to the end, which its proponents say would involve covering no more than about 7000 square kilometres or less?

  As the former ATSB boss Martin Dolan eventually conceded on the 60 Minutes episode, there are ‘two viable theories’ and if the plane were not found based on the bureau’s ‘unresponsive crew/hypoxia’ theory, ‘then the conclusion is that we focused on the wrong set of priorities’.

  Pilots Bailey, Hardy and Keane; engineer Stevens; and air crash investigator Vance have been liaising for years now on MH370. Vance, as discussed earlier, has doubts about the merits of continuing to search at all because if a pilot flew the aircraft to the end, it could have been over an unmanageably wide area. But he said if he had to search, he would next go where the others propose.

  That is in an area just outside of where the ATSB search along the southern end of where the Seventh Arc ended. Hardy identified this search zone in 2015. He used the same radar and satellite tracking data to develop a mathematical formula based on similar calculations of speed, wind, direction and endurance along the Seventh Arc as the ATSB employed, but with the additional assumption of a controlled glide or engines-running descent of about 100 nautical miles at the end and a ditching by Zaharie. Hardy said whether this was done after fuel exhaustion, or with a small amount of fuel left and the engines just barely turning over to keep them alive if needed, made little difference to the modelling.

  Hardy spoke with me from Mumbai, where he had arrived after piloting a Boeing 777 from London. In addition to his extensive flying experience, he also has a large amount of engineering and track-plotting expertise. He took up a Royal Naval flying scholarship aged 17, and the navy put him through university to earn a design engineering degree.

  He served as a senior design engineer working on torpedo guidance systems. He came up with his analysis of where MH370 ended up using the same sort of simple draughtsman techniques he had acquired.

  There is a fascinating three part YouTube video series in which Hardy describes exactly how he made the calculation of where he believes MH
370 most probably is, easily findable on the web. In it, Hardy is very logical and persuasive. Using the same basic information as the ATSB had, he combined the basic skills he learnt as a naval officer, engineering design draftsman, and pilot to draw it all out on a series of big charts with a ruler, rather than enter it all into a computer.

  Hardy’s process followed basic geometry, solving simultaneous equations, and fundamental navigation techniques such as taking three bearings to work out a position. He used the seven arcs to make calculations of simple logic of distances and speed. Like the geometry one learns as a school boy or girl, Hardy’s analysis had a very satisfying end: a logical ‘Q.E.D.’ showing MH370’s likely resting place.

  Hardy said that when Ocean Infinity chief executive Oliver Plunkett arrived London to talk with key staff and the ATSB, Hardy outlined his calculations over two-and-a-half hours.

  ‘He was pretty impressed with it, but then he saw the ATSB people who put him off.’

  Hardy says for his part, he would ‘not bet my house’ on whether the pilots’ preferred new search zone would find the resting place of MH370. But he thinks it has an excellent chance, and statistically has a vastly better probability of success than the vagaries of the drift-modelling.

  Hardy’s reckoning puts the most likely coordinates of the aircraft at 40 degrees South, and 086.5 degrees East. But allowing for some elasticity in the variables, Hardy still proposes a search area of 7000 square kilometres.

  Keane likes the idea of searching the deep underwater canyons known to be in this area, where he thinks Zaharie would have tried to sink the plane, including the Geelvink Fracture Zone. His best guess is 38 degrees 15 minutes South, 86 degrees 48 minutes East.

  Byron Bailey, for his part, thinks he could narrow down the area even more on his variation of the end of flight which involves a ditching even closer to the area searched by the ATSB, based on Zaharie turning into the south-westerly wind a little earlier. He points out he and his colleagues’ calculations are not much different from that of the ATSB early search plan based on the Defence Science and Technology Group’s original ‘hot spot’ of probability. The pilots’ estimate just puts MH370 gliding a bit further along a true track of 188 degrees South. Bailey puts MH370 at 39 degrees, 10 minutes South, 88 degrees 15 minutes East. The original DSTG hot spot, the track, the pilots’ preferred search area, and just where Bailey, Hardy and Keane believe to be the most likely location of the aircraft is, are shown in the picture section.