In April 2013, and again in June, several company auditors looking at the flight operations discovered a number of problems with the airline’s compliance with government and international aviation standards. Most significant was that on Malaysia’s wide-body, long-haul Boeing 747s5 and 777s, which would include the plane flying as MH-370, flights could be tracked only every half hour, even though the airline was required to know on a more frequent basis the whereabouts of each plane.
In a presentation to the executives in August, the auditors from Quality Assurance and Regulatory Affairs said that flight following and flight watching could “not be achieved . . . at intervals stated” in the flight dispatch manual. According to the auditors, by law the planes should not have been dispatched.
In a warning that was prescient, the auditors reminded executives that airlines were required to actively watch and track their airplanes “throughout all phases of the flight to ensure that the flight is following its prescribed route, without unplanned deviation, diversion or delay,” in order to satisfy government regulations.
So while the rest of the world was shocked that a plane carrying 239 people could just vanish, it could not have been totally surprising to those within the airline’s flight operations office, who had been warned seven months earlier.
In the chaotic months that followed MH-370’s disappearing act, information about these audits was presented to Hishammuddin Hussein, who was the acting transport minister at the time, by airline employees who were concerned about the implications for future flights. When I was given the audit documents, which are marked “Confidential,” I was told it was because Hussein and others in government, even after being told about the issue, had failed to respond.
Malaysia Airlines and the Department of Civil Aviation also failed to reply to my inquiries about the audits, despite repeated requests.
Certainly, an investigation means the arrival of countless busybodies just like me asking all sorts of questions about what would not necessarily be public information absent an accident.
Another example is the five hundred pounds of lithium-ion batteries that were packed onto the Malaysia flight. There is much interest in whether this highly flammable cargo might have contributed to the crash. The pallets of Motorola walkie-talkie batteries were not declared hazardous because the Malaysians said they had complied with international guidelines for the safe transport of dangerous goods. But had they? And what about the curiously large amount of mangosteens also in transit to China? Some five tons of this tropical fruit were loaded into the hold. No matter how scrumptious they are or how large the appetite for them in China, they are a notably large item on the cargo manifest, because mangosteens were at the tail end of the small and secondary fruiting season in Malaysia, which runs from November to February.
If the plane hadn’t gone missing, the contents and veracity of the airline’s cargo manifest, and even the airline’s failure to meet standards for knowing where its planes are during flight, would have remained the airline’s business. Now the world is demanding answers.
How much attention could the airline and the government have been paying if they failed to notice a Boeing 777 flying off course over the country’s most populated cities? For all anybody knew, the plane might have been on its way to fly, 9/11-like, into the pride of Kuala Lumpur, the Petronas Towers. Then there is the embarrassing revelation that after MH-370 stopped communicating, it took five hours for controllers to raise an alarm and begin a search for the plane.
Global attention paid to these questions did not bring out the best in Malaysia’s leaders, who were alternately confused and combative, and mostly nonresponsive to questions about their investigation. At the time, all information was provided by Hishammuddin Hussein, who had the most reason not to be forthcoming. When the jetliner disappeared, Hussein was not only the acting minister of transportation but also minister of defense. The performance of both departments on March 8 could be kindly described as deficient or, less kindly (if more accurately), derelict. When it came to hyperbole, however, the minister was a master. At one point he described the search as “the most difficult in human history.” So one has to wonder if the daily press conferences, conducted in three languages but delivering little new information, were intended to obfuscate, or whether that was just an unintended side benefit.
A lack of transparency leads to one thing: “You’re going to have conjecture,” explained Jesse Walker, an editor at Reason magazine and the author of the 2014 book The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory. “When you have a blank slate to play with, people will fill in the blanks with stories that interest and excite and feel plausible to them—even apart from the evidence, because this is the way they expect the world to work,” he said. “They draw on the narratives they know and find appealing.”
After studying a number of accidents with intransigent conspiracy theories attached, I’ve come to the conclusion that there can be no better tactic for an investigator with something to hide than to encourage those theories. The story doesn’t have to be convincing; it need only gain a toehold, after which the public does the rest.
When McInerney, the Fox News commentator, worried about the “Stans” on the one-year anniversary of the loss of MH-370, the ATSB had long ago discounted the Reuters report that the plane had engaged in a series of altitude climbs and descents in an attempt to hide from radar. The length of the plane’s flight indicated that it had operated at maximum fuel efficiency. That simply doesn’t allow for those kinds of gas-guzzling up-and-down maneuvers, or it would have run out of fuel earlier. Yet there was McInerney, with the credibility of a military general, describing the pilot’s intentional acts to the network’s 1.6 million viewers.
“He makes his turn at the checkpoint, and all of a sudden he climbs to forty-five thousand feet, which means he’s depressurizing the airplane, then he goes down to twenty-three thousand feet and then back to thirty-five [thousand] again,” McInerney said, while a simulation of the flight he was describing was shown on the split screen. “He eliminated the people in the back to be a threat,” he said, by which I assume he meant to tell his audience that the pilot planned to kill the passengers by depressurizing the airplane. “And now,” McInerney continued, “all of a sudden the airplane disappears.”
Jesse Walker describes fill-in-the-blanks conjecture as the inevitable result of an information vacuum. The airplane’s roller-coaster flight is one example. I’m not suggesting that creating stories was a premeditated effort by Malaysia, but the effect, intended or not, was to create uncertainty about the facts that lingers to this day.
The first major accident I wrote about was the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, which I covered as a correspondent for CNN. My book Deadly Departure dealt largely with what caused the plane to explode while climbing out of New York airspace on a flight to Paris. One could not write about TWA 800 without getting into alternative theories, including that it had been shot down by the U.S. Navy or by an Iranian submarine.
On the seventeenth anniversary of the crash, an online television network released a documentary that would, the advertising promo claimed, “blow the lid off an alleged multi-agency cover-up of what really happened.” According to the ninety-minute program, objects fired at the plane caused it to blow up, though what, how, and why were not explained. The point of the film was to suggest that two hundred thirty people were murdered and the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Bureau of Investigation hid the truth from the public.
The documentary was part of a salvo that included a petition that the NTSB reconsider its probable cause report on the disaster. The safety board had spent four years and twenty million dollars investigating. It had consulted thousands of people from academic, commercial, and research organizations and concluded that the 747’s design had allowed the vapors in the plane’s center fuel tank to get so hot that the tank could explode. This hazard existed on many airliners during normal flights. From the test
s performed by the safety board at a lab at the California Institute of Technology, the NTSB determined that the amount of time a jetliner fuel tank could be in this volatile state, just a spark away from going kaboom, was about one-third its operational time.
While the NTSB never determined exactly what set off the blast on TWA 800, the realization that airliners were at considerable risk prompted the Department of Transportation to order changes.
The NTSB denied the request to reopen the TWA Flight 800 investigation, but all the news hype had served its purpose, driving traffic to the online channel where the documentary6 was posted.
Deadly Departure was published years before the documentary was produced, and suggested a different kind of cover-up, the cover-up of a design flaw you will read about later in this book and one that is now recognized in the industry. But if you ask people what they remember about TWA 800, most will say something about a missile shooting it down.
Lost at Sea
Theories about what happened to the Hawaii Clipper and Malaysia 370 have another element in common: provincialism. Malaysia’s largely Muslim population caused some nervousness in the West that the loss of MH-370 might be the work of Islamic extremists. In 1938, when the Hawaii Clipper disappeared, the Japanese were suspected of having played a role.
Between World Wars I and II, the Pacific Ocean was a zone of geopolitical intrigue. America was eager to strengthen its presence in the Pacific, but was prevented by the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty from any military buildup on the islands west of Hawaii. So when Pan American Airways applied to the U.S. government to develop facilities for civilian seaplane service on Midway, Wake, Guam, and the Philippines, the airline’s and the military’s interests were aligned. Pan Am would build bases complete with radio stations, power plants, fuel supplies, maintenance operations, and housing, so it could have stopover points for its transpacific flights. After the treaty restrictions expired in 1936, the military could take advantage of that infrastructure.
America was also eager for land-based airfields in the region, a project of aviation pioneer Gene Vidal, director of America’s Bureau of Air Commerce. Vidal had already participated in the creation of three airlines—Eastern, Trans World, and Northeast—and he thought that flying boats had a limited future. In 1935 he oversaw the colonization of three small islands that could provide southern Pacific air access to Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore, and he arranged federal funding for an airfield to be built on one of them, Howland Island.
The first use of this airfield would be to provide a refueling stop for the upcoming around-the-world journey of Amelia Earhart. The much-anticipated flight provided perfect justification for building a runway with fuel and service support in an area where Japan had a strong presence.
Combine the star power of Angelina Jolie with the ceaseless trending of the Kardashians to get an idea of the level of celebrity adoration Earhart enjoyed during the 1930s. She was a woman in what was perhaps the first extreme sport of the industrial age.
Sure, within the small world of early aviators, there was grumbling about her flying skills, her occasional errors in judgment, and her pushing on when waiting might have been wiser. She also never became fluent with the radio, which was critical because it was more than a form of communication; it was a source for determining direction. Still, these are ordinary shortcomings. Amelia Earhart made history because of her extraordinary strengths, tenacity and fearlessness among them. And she married a man willing to do more than support her unconventional career. George Putnam was Mr. Amelia Earhart, devoted to promoting the First Lady of Flight.
Earhart was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean and the first pilot to cross the Pacific solo from Honolulu to the U.S. mainland. While she was not the first woman pilot, she was the one who most famously used her career in the sky to promote women’s equality on the ground.
Always pushing to accomplish one more feat, Earhart set out from Miami on June 1, 1937, to circle the globe at the equator. It was an undertaking punctuated with problems, one of which was that her navigator, Fred Noonan, had a drinking problem. Well into the endeavor and one week before crossing the Pacific, the most difficult part, she complained about Noonan’s drinking to her husband. In his book, Amelia Earhart: The Final Story, author Vincent Loomis said Earhart told Putnam on June 26 that Noonan was “hitting the bottle again, and I don’t even know where he’s getting it!”
Noonan had been Pan Am’s chief Pacific navigator, a licensed pilot and a master mariner, charting and mapping the routes pilots would use to Asia. He navigated the Hawaii Clipper on its first flight with fare-paying passengers. So his drinking must have been pronounced for it to have cost him his job at Pan Am, which several accounts claim it did. Yet his leaving Pan Am made him available for Earhart’s round-the-world flight.
Noonan’s direction-finding skill was top-notch. It would need to be, because the last portion of the exhausting trip would be the 7,000-mile transpacific flight to Vidal’s new airstrip on Howland Island, one by two miles in size. From Lae, New Guinea, it was a 2,556-mile, eighteen-hour journey.
After two days preparing the plane and waiting for suitable weather, Earhart and Noonan took off from the jungle runway at Lae at 10:00 a.m. on July 2. In her diary of the trip, published posthumously as Last Flight, Earhart wrote that she was still hoping to arrive in California in time for the Fourth of July.
Earhart and Noonan flew through the day and into the night, crossing the international dateline and passing a ship that confirmed to radio operators on the ground that the plane was right on course.
At 2:45 a.m., the radio operator on the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca, which was waiting by the island to guide Earhart’s Lockheed Electra to land, began receiving radio messages. By 7:42 a.m., which was close to Earhart’s estimated arrival time, the messages were getting disturbing. We must be on you but cannot see you. But gas is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at altitude one thousand feet. The next was also troubling: We are circling but cannot hear you.
Earhart and Noonan never found Howland Island. Their last message was sent at 8:44 a.m.
By circumnavigating the equator east to west, Earhart knew she had left the most difficult part of the trip for last. “Howland is such a small spot that every aid to locating it must be available,” she wrote. She would be “glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us.”
Earhart was not expressing just her own concerns. During the planning stages, others advised that her plan was not workable. Navigator, explorer, and Harvard professor Brad Washburn spent an evening reviewing details with Earhart. He worried about her trying to find Howland without radio signals to home in on. Mark Walker, the Pan Am first officer who would go missing on the Hawaii Clipper one year later, said the challenge was insurmountable. In a letter to Shipmate, the alumni magazine of the U.S. Naval Academy, Walker’s cousin Robert Greenwood wrote that early in 1937, Walker was assigned by Pan Am to help Earhart and Noonan in planning the Pacific phase of the trip. Greenwood said his cousin urged Earhart not to risk “such a foolhardy publicity stunt,” and that “her equipment was barely adequate.”
In addition to his concern that Earhart was ill-equipped, Walker was especially troubled about Japanese kidnappers and hijackers. Okay, maybe he was a worrywart. He told his younger sister, Mary Ann Walker, that his role in protecting newsreel footage taken of a Japanese air attack on the U.S. gunboat Panay in 1937 had resulted in personal threats from the Japanese. Even so, he was not the only person to imagine a sinister turn of events when Earhart failed to arrive at Howland Island.
Earhart and Noonan had personal histories that, from a skeptic’s point of view, suggest that they could have been carrying out a secret agenda during the flight. Charles Hill, author of Fix on the Rising Sun, proposes that Earhart defected to Japan, delivering Noonan, his valuable navigational skills, and insider knowledge of Pan Am’s Pacific air routes as a gift to the Japanese. Other
theories suggest the opposite: that Earhart was an American spy, having accepted a mission to fly over the Japanese islands in the Pacific to photograph them and assess troop buildup.
Regardless of how preposterous the theories, they demonstrate that people were already on edge and prepared to believe practically anything when the Pan Am Hawaii Clipper vanished in the Pacific just as Earhart had less than a year earlier. Beyond the basic facts of the flight (the who, the when, and the where), there was little information about what happened to the flying boat, and that fueled speculation.
Horace Brock was in Manila awaiting the arrival of the Hawaii Clipper. As he tells the story in his autobiography, Flying the Oceans, when he heard that the plane was overdue and probably down, he took a cab to the U.S. Army air base at Clark Field. He barged into the commander’s office, wanting to know why B-16s weren’t being sent to search for the missing plane. The commander was apologetic but firm, according to Brock. “Son, my men have families, too, wives and children. They have no navigation experience. I doubt if any one of them could find his way back.” Flying over vast amounts of ocean in the decades before GPS was not for the fainthearted.
As far as Brock was concerned, a combination of bad weather and Captain Terletsky’s lack of the right stuff was to blame for the tragedy. All over Manila, however, Pan Am crews were accosted by people insisting that the Japanese had taken the plane.
The search for the Clipper was still under way on August 4, 1938, when the Hearst International News Service reported a blockbuster story. FBI agents had been undercover at the Pan Am Alameda base since January in an attempt to “thwart any sabotage” at the company and “protect the nation’s most ambitious private air route.” A memo to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover dated February 5, and obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Clipper researcher and documentary film-maker Guy Noffsinger in his ongoing effort to find out what happened, confirms that seven months before the Hawaii Clipper went missing, the bureau was investigating the possibility of vandalism of Pan American Airways flying boats. After the loss of the Martin 130, the acting secretary of commerce sent a letter to Hoover thanking him for information “relative to possible sabotage in connection with Pan American Airlines [sic] ships.” Through it all, Pan Am was circumspect; “all lines of merit” were being investigated, the company told the Hearst reporter.
The Crash Detectives Page 6
