The Taking of MH370

by Jeff Wise

  The Taking of MH370

  Jeff Wise

  ©Jeff Wise

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

  Cover photo: Celine Marchbank / Millennium Images UK

  To Sandra, Rem, and Seb.

  Contents

  Part I: The Triple-Disappearing Airplane

  Chapter 1: March 8, 2014

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part II: The Search

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part III: Capitulation

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  A Speculative Scenario

  It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

  Albert Einstein

  Part 1: The Triple-Disappearing Airplane

  Chapter 1

  March 8, 2014

  The first 40 minutes, at least, everyone can agree on.

  At 41 minutes past midnight, the wheels of the redeye bound for Beijing lifted off from runway 32R at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. As its landing gear curled up into its belly, the Boeing 777 climbed through 2,000 feet, then banked to the right and leveled out as it rose into the starry night.

  Twenty-seven minutes later, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 crossed the east coast of the Malay Peninsula at 35,000 feet and headed out to sea. Cruising into a light headwind, it clocked a ground speed of approximately 470 knots. Soon after, it approached the edge of Malaysian-monitored airspace.

  When a plane transitions from one zone of control to another, the controller calls up the plane on the radio and gives the pilot the name and radio frequency of the authority he or she will be speaking to next. And so, 38 minutes after takeoff, the following exchange took place:

  LUMPUR RADAR: Malaysian Three Seven Zero contact Ho Chi Minh 120 decimal 9. Good Night.

  MH370: Good Night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero.

  The plane was operating normally, and the weather was fair. The moon was just setting; the sun would not rise for another six hours. Far below, a warm breeze ruffled the surface of the South China Sea. Two minutes after the final transmission, the plane passed the last waypoint in Malaysia, a spot named IGARI, and turned slightly to the right, heading toward its next navigational fix inside Vietnamese airspace.

  Five seconds later, the radar signal on the controller’s screen winked out. To this day, no one can say precisely what had gone wrong. The stars continued to shine, the wind continued to blow. But the plane was no longer on its route.

  ✽✽✽

  Inside the tower at Ho Chi Minh City’s Tan Son Nhat airport, controllers were working the graveyard shift. When inbound flights are stacked up, air traffic control is a fast-paced, high-stakes game of 3D chess. Not tonight. From time to time, one of the controllers would get on the radio to acknowledge a plane’s arrival or give it a new altitude clearance. But mostly, they just watched clusters of numbers inch across the screen, as time unspooled in that glacial middle-of-the-night way.

  At 1:21am local time, the controllers were expecting MH370 to enter their control zone. A minute passed, and there was still no sign of it. This was odd: modern commercial aircraft operate with an extreme precision enabled by satellite navigation, computer control, and atomic clocks. Routes are planned and flown with laserlike accuracy. The plane should have been visible by a number of electronic means. Its transponder, a system called ADS-B, a messaging system called ACARS—all three should have continuously been sending information about the plane to ground control. But all three had fallen silent as the plane left Malaysian airspace.

  Now three minutes had passed. By international convention, the Ho Chi Minh City controllers were supposed to start calling their counterparts in the neighboring air traffic control zones to find out what had happened to the plane. But tonight that didn’t seem necessary. There was surely a reasonable explanation for the hiccup. Five minutes went by, then ten. Nothing. Fifteen minutes. This was getting ridiculous.

  Finally, at 1:39am, a controller picked up the landline to Kuala Lumpur and reported that they still hadn’t heard from MH370. Kuala Lumpur advised that they couldn’t see it on their screens, either. Two minutes later, Ho Chi Minh City called again and asked if the plane had turned back into Malaysian airspace. The answer was no.

  Very strange. For twenty minutes, both Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh City kept radioing the plane, but neither got a response. Over the next few hours, with increasing urgency, air traffic controllers around the region phoned back and forth to one another, and to the airline, trying to establish where the plane might have gone.

  At first, the airline’s operations center reported that their tracking system showed that the plane was over Cambodia. After some confused calls to Phnom Penh, the airline realized that its software was wrong. The plane wasn’t there, either.

  At 5.20am, a Malaysia Airlines staffer asked a Kuala Lumpur controller whether the plane had been successfully handed off to Ho Chi Minh City. The controller had to wake up his supervisor to ask. Ten minutes later, the supervisor activated a search-and-rescue response. In Beijing, relatives arriving to meet their loved ones received grim news: MH370 was missing.

  Soon news of the disappearance was ricocheting around the global media sphere. This was big. It wasn’t just that 227 passengers and 12 crew were missing and possibly dead. There was a whiff of strangeness. Commercial airliners don’t just disappear. The 777 in particular is an advanced and extremely robust airplane. Introduced by Boeing in the 1990s, it was the company’s first fly-by-wire airplane, controlled entirely by a powerful computer system. The aircraft had proven remarkably safe. No 777 had ever suffered an inflight mishap before. What could have gone wrong?

  In the days that followed, no clear answers emerged. Nor did they in the following weeks, months, or years. Distilling a set of possible flight paths from a handful of clues, search officials launched a long and intensive effort to scan a remote swath of seabed in the southern Indian Ocean. They found nothing.

  For a time, the disappearance of MH370 was the biggest story in the world. Millions of people found themselves obsessed. In an age of 24/7 global connectivity it seemed inconceivable that a state-of-the art airliner could simply vanish. Speculation and conspiracy theories swirled. Today, half a decade later, little has changed. The public remains baffled, and the authorities can offer no credible explanation.

  It’s an oft-voiced fear that the mystery of MH370 will never be solved. Having pored over every emerging detail since the day the plane went missing, however, I don’t share that point of view. While all of the evidence is circumstantial, and much of it is highly technical in nature, there is a considerable amount of it. Taken together it allows us to piece together the circumstances of the incident in some detail.

  People have a natural yearning for simple solutions. Occam’s razor, they say. But i
f there is one thing that has become abundantly clear about MH370, it is that the solution is neither simple nor easy. In order to gain useful insight, we must roll up our sleeves and dive deep into the science and mathematics underpinning the evidence. We must take detours into such seeming arcana as prefrequency calibration algorithms, Bayes’ theorem, and the lifecycles of goose barnacles and tube worms.

  Having dived headlong into this technical minutiae, I can report that once all the noise and fog is cleared away, there is only one plausible explanation for what happened to the missing plane. It is no exaggeration to say that the story it reveals stretches our understanding of what human beings are capable of, both technologically and morally.

  Chapter 2

  March 10, 2014

  I don’t remember where I was when I first heard about MH370. As a science journalist and a private pilot, I write about aviation a lot, and half the time that means covering crashes.

  I do remember, however, the moment I fell into the bottomless hole. I was sitting in my car on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, waiting for my parking spot to become legal. I took out my phone and checked my email. An editor at Slate, the online magazine, had written to ask if I would write about the Malaysian airliner that had gone missing. I tapped out a response accepting her offer, with mixed emotions—I was already past deadline on a story about helicopters for Popular Mechanics.

  “The most telling detail so far,” I wrote, “being the total absence of automatic signals sent by the plane. So things either became catastrophic very quickly (bomb?) or the automatic reporting was turned off deliberately or … ? (Crazy question: Do we even know for sure that it has crashed?)”

  By the time I filed my copy, that question seemed less crazy. Search and rescue teams had spent the better part of a week looking for wreckage and hadn’t found a trace.

  In my article, I enumerated the electronic systems that a plane uses to stay in touch with the outside world, and described a case from a few years before that bore some eerie similarities. On June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Because its flight crew had already said goodbye to air traffic controllers in Brazil, and were still out of radar range of controllers in Africa, it was many hours before anyone realized the plane was missing. MH370, too, had vanished between zones of control. In this case, however, the gap between contacts was much smaller: a matter of minutes, rather than hours. Was the resemblance just bad luck? Or did it suggest that someone had maliciously exploited the gap?

  My Slate piece ran on March 12th. At 6am the next morning I went on CNN. Before I knew it, I was going on air as many as six times a day. Network head Jeff Zucker had decided the network would go all in. Producers wound up trying to book pretty much anyone who’d ever written or talked about airplanes. As time went by they winnowed their expert pool down to a dozen or so regulars who earned the title “CNN aviation analyst”: airline pilots, ex-government honchos, aviation lawyers, and me. We’d appear solo, or in pairs, or larger groups for panel discussions—whatever it took to vary the rhythm of the perpetual chatter.

  There was plenty to talk about. The story just kept getting stranger. Malaysian officials revealed, then denied, then finally admitted that their military had tracked the plane for an hour after it disappeared from air traffic controllers’ radar screens just five seconds after passing the last waypoint in Malaysian airspace. Evidently someone had turned off the plane’s electronic communication systems, but the plane had still been visible to the so-called “primary” radar used in air defense. The system had watched as MH370 pulled a U-turn so aggressive that it must have been flown manually. It then climbed and accelerated to the limit of its flight envelope as it headed back across the Malay Peninsula before turning northwest and flying up the middle of the Malacca Strait toward the Andaman Islands. But at 18:22 Universal Time (2:22am local time), 60 nautical miles north of the western tip of Sumatra, it reached the limits of the system’s range and the signal winked out.

  In effect, MH370 had disappeared twice: once from air traffic control radar, and then again an hour later from military radar.

  This revelation changed the picture dramatically. Suddenly the disappearance didn’t look at all like an accident. The plane had not circled or followed a twisting path, as it would if maneuvering for an emergency landing; nor had it headed unswervingly on a single course, like a plane on autopilot whose human pilots had become incapacitated through smoke inhalation or cockpit depressurization. It had flown a zig-zag series of segments from waypoint to waypoint, implying that whoever was in control understood how to operate and navigate a commercial aircraft. What’s more, the plane had flown quickly, faster than planes normally cruise.

  Malaysian authorities realized that what they were dealing with was clearly a deliberate act. Someone had taken the plane. But who? To me, the fact that the plane had gone dark just five seconds after leaving Malaysian airspace, and then had turned around in what looked to be a high-performance maneuver, implied that whoever was in control of the plane had an advanced understanding of both airliner operations and air traffic surveillance. Either the plane had been taken by its own flight crew, or it had been commandeered by sophisticated hijackers.

  Of the two possibilities, initial evidence strongly favored the first. Only one minute had elapsed between the calmly enunciated “Goodnight, Malaysia 370” and the start of the 180-degree turn. That’s very little time for hijackers to get through a locked cockpit door, overpower the flight crew, turn off all communications equipment, and reprogram the flight computer. And anyway, how could hijackers do all that without the flight crew sending out a distress signal? It seemed much more plausible that either the captain or the co-pilot had absconded with the plane.

  Digesting the new evidence, officials moved the priority search area from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean, focusing their efforts near MH370’s last known position over the western end of the Malacca Strait.

  But their work there had scarcely begun when another bombshell dropped.

  Chapter 3

  March 15, 2014

  The new revelation had to do with the plane’s satellite communication system. Because radar and radio don’t work once a plane is more than a few hundred miles from the nearest ground-based antenna, airliners are equipped with radio antennas that can link with satellites orbiting above the equator. As these satellites orbit the Earth exactly once per day, they effectively remain in a fixed position relative to the surface. MH370 was communicating with a satellite called 3F-1 that was operated by the London-based firm Inmarsat.

  On March 15, Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak held a press conference to confirm rumors that had been circulating for days: that Inmarsat’s computers had logged a series of signals automatically exchanged between MH370 and 3F-1 after the plane had disappeared from military radar.

  Airlines primarily use Inmarsat’s service to carry phone calls and electronic data such as text messages. The signals received from MH370, however, did not contain any such information; whoever was in control of the plane during those last six hours did not intentionally use the satcom system to contact the outside world.

  The system is designed, however, such that if a user remains inactive for a certain amount of time—in this case, an hour—then Inmarsat’s ground station automatically transmits a brief signal to see if the user is still logged on. Inmarsat calls such signals “electronic handshakes” or “pings.” If there is no reply, then the user is presumed to have either turned the system off or to have left the coverage area. But that’s not what happened in the case of MH370. For six hours after it vanished from primary radar, its satcom system kept responding.

  Even though the handshakes’ content offered no insight into what was happening aboard the plane, their mere existence proved that the plane had not crashed in the vicinity of the Malacca Strait, as had been widely presumed, but stayed aloft for quite a long time. Long enough, indeed, to
have flown 3000 nautical miles or more.

  In which direction, though? Unfortunately, Malaysia Airlines did not subscribe to Inmarsat’s premium brand of service, SwiftBroadband, which automatically includes position data in all its signals. Instead, the airline subscribed to a cheaper version called ClassicAero, and because of that the transmissions logged by Inmarsat contained no information such as location, speed, or altitude. They did, however, include metadata—that is to say, data about the data—such as the time each transmission was sent, the frequency at which it was received, and so forth. One of the parameters they had logged was something called the Burst Timing Offset, or BTO, a measure of the time elapsed between the satellite’s query and the plane’s reply.

  Because light travels at a finite speed, and the plane’s electronics require a certain amount of time to generate a response, there’s always a gap in time that correlates with the physical distance between the plane and the satellite. The set of all the points on the earth’s surface which lie at this precise distance from the satellite makes a ring. If you exclude the portions of the ring to which the plane could not possibly have flown because they lie too far away, what you have left is an arc.

  During its last six hours MH370 transmitted seven pings. The plane presumably ended its flight somewhere near the last one—the 7th arc—an enormous curve that runs from Central Asia through China, Vietnam, and Indonesia and winds up in the ocean west of Australia.

  How to even contemplate searching such a vast area? As they thought about it, Imarsat scientists realized that the plane was much more likely to be on some parts of the arc than others.