by Ean Higgins
About The Hunt for MH370
“A staggering, meticulous and frequently spine-chilling work of longform journalism.” Trent Dalton
Somewhere deep beneath the wild seas of the southern Indian Ocean, perhaps in the eerie underwater canyons of Broken Ridge along the Seventh Arc satellite band, lies the answer to the world’s greatest aviation mystery.
Why, on the night of 8 March 2014, did Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 suddenly U-turn, zig-zag up the Straits of Malacca, then vanish with 239 souls on board?
Was it an elaborate murder-suicide by a rogue pilot? A terrible accident such as onboard fire, rapid decompression or systems failure? A terrorist hijacking gone wrong? Or something else entirely?
Award-winning journalist Ean Higgins has led the world media’s coverage of this incredible saga and draws on years of interviews with aviation experts, victims’ families, air crash investigators and professional hunters across land, sea and sky to dissect the riddle of MH370’s fate.
To those who hunt for MH370 including the families
of the disappeared whose quest continues.
Contents
PROLOGUE
ONE: ‘GOOD NIGHT, MALAYSIAN THREE SEVEN ZERO’
Theory One: Rogue Pilot to the End
TWO: INTO THIN AIR
THREE: THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS
FOUR: ‘STILL, THERE WAS NOTHING. TOTALLY NOTHING’
Theory Two: Elope by Parachute
FIVE: A PING FROM THE DEEP
SIX: NOWHERE TO HIDE
Theory Three: Onboard Fire
SEVEN: ‘GRIEF RETURNS WITH THE REVOLVING YEAR’
EIGHT: AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
Theory Four: Terrorist Hijacking Gone Wrong
NINE: ‘X’ MARKS THE SPOT
TEN: NO CURE, NO FEE
ELEVEN: KING AIR, A WING, A PRAYER
Theory Five: Rapid Decompression
TWELVE: ‘YOU CAN ALWAYS GO IN WITH A KNIFE’
THIRTEEN: REACH FOR THE SKY
EPILOGUE
GLOSSARY
FURTHER READING
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT EAN HIGGINS
DIGITAL IMPRINT PAGE
PICTURE SECTION
PROLOGUE
Somewhere out in the southern Indian Ocean, maybe in one of the underwater canyons of Broken Ridge but beyond the Seventh Arc, lies the answer to the world’s greatest aviation mystery.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 was on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when some very strange things happened on the Boeing 777. They caused a pilot to turn around, fly a zigzag course back over Malaysia, up the Straits of Malacca, then south to vanish literally in the middle of nowhere, all without a word from anyone on board.
Five years after it disappeared, the aircraft is still there, probably in very deep and cold water, well preserved along with the 239 souls, but just not yet found. Once it is discovered – and most aviation experts believe it will be one day – the mystery can be solved. The flight data recorder, the cockpit voice recorder, the identity and disposition of anyone in the cockpit at the controls, the configuration and nature of damage to the different parts of the aircraft, and, macabre though it is, the pathology of those on board, will provide the clues.
We will learn why the aircraft turned around about 40 minutes into the flight. We will glean insight as to why at that time the secondary radar transponder was turned off, the aircraft flew a deliberate route back over Malaysia roughly following the Malaysia-Thailand airspace border, over Penang, then north-west, and finally on the long track south.
Over the years since MH370 went missing on 8 March 2014, there has been no shortage of speculation about what happened – some theories wild and outlandish, some well informed and within the realms of the possible. Some believe it may have been a hijacking gone wrong. Others think there may have been a fire on board, possibly caused by the combination of cargo including lithium-ion batteries and a massive supply of the tropical fruit mangosteens, which have a hard, deep-purple casing outside, and inside succulent white segments which are little explosions of sweet delight.
There are those who look at accidental depressurisation, in which the pilots became a bit hypoxic, or light-headed because of a faulty oxygen supply – not enough to pass out, but enough to make silly and illogical decisions and fly the aircraft in a strange way. It’s happened before – some air accidents have been recorded where the pilot is conscious but drunkenly happy with the reduced amount of oxygen.
Then there are the more extreme theories: that a rogue nation such as North Korea hacked into the aircraft’s control systems and electronically ‘captured’ it, perhaps making use, ironically, of a new remote system said to be designed to counteract a hijack. Even more out there, something like a scene from the old US television series The Twilight Zone, some suggest MH370 was taken over by aliens.
Others, including some families of the Chinese passengers on the flight, say the official interpretation of the direction the aircraft took on the last leg is wrong, and it was in fact hijacked and flown north-west over the Maldives to central Asia and landed at an Islamic rebel airbase, its passengers and crew still held hostage to this day.
And there is one theory that the captain, his marriage having collapsed, took a parachute on board in his flight crew bag, and depressurised the aircraft to kill all else on board. He then set the aircraft on a course on automatic pilot, bailed out, and was picked up in a boat by his mistress. He and the mistress, so promoters of this theory say, are living happily under new, stolen identities in another country, maybe Australia.
Most professionals in the aviation business, though, believe the evidence best points to the flight’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, having hijacked his own aircraft in a complex and cunning act of mass murder-suicide. The only debate there is whether, as the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) maintains, MH370 was a ‘ghost flight’ by the end, flying on autopilot with no-one conscious, and crashing down rapidly after fuel exhaustion. Or did Zaharie fly the aircraft to the end, making a controlled ditching to try to keep as much of MH370 intact as possible and sink it with a minimal debris field?
If the ATSB had worked on the premise that a pilot flew the aircraft to the end, they would effectively have had to say they believed MH370 was most likely hijacked by its captain, Zaharie. By saying instead, as they did, that MH370 had an ‘unresponsive crew’ and was not controlled by a pilot at the end, they could avoid making such a call publicly – whatever they themselves thought had happened earlier in the flight.
Many veteran airline captains and top air crash investigators suspect the ATSB, even if subconsciously, came up with what became known as their ‘ghost flight’ and ‘death dive’ theory to avoid having to publicly embarrass the Malaysian government and its government-owned national flag carrier airline.
Did the ATSB, even without realising it, look for anything that might support a theory which would mean they would not have to say a trusted Malaysian pilot hijacked his own aircraft and took himself and 238 innocent people from around the world to their deaths? Did they, again subconsciously, read that bias into the later evidence as it came in, including when parts of the aircraft washed up on the other side of the Indian Ocean which many experts believe point to a controlled ditching?
The ATSB says, emphatically, no: the bureau’s officers have told Senate Estimates they worked objectively on facts, science and logic, consulting the best Australian and overseas experts in the field to establish their target search area, without bias or subjective influences.
The debate is not academic; it has a fundamental imp
act on working out where the aircraft might be, and where to look. If the ATSB is right, the aircraft came pretty much straight down after it ran out of fuel, producing a relatively narrow search zone. If Zaharie flew the aircraft to the end and ditched it, either under power or gliding it after it ran out of fuel, he could have taken it a much longer distance, perhaps 100 nautical miles or more according to the ATSB, and well outside the search area the bureau defined. In that case, the ATSB-led undersea hunt never had a serious chance of success, and it blew almost $200 million of Australian, Malaysian and Chinese taxpayers’ money on what was always going to be a lost cause.
In my efforts to get to the truth of MH370 as a reporter for The Australian, the ATSB, and the federal government’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC), which was set up to orchestrate the MH370 search, engaged in some repressive media practices not usually consistent with public sector agencies in a democracy. They tried to have me taken off the story for persisting with questions they didn’t want to answer, an attempt the editors rejected as an unacceptable bid by a government agency to undermine their independent authority and hobble freedom of the press. Eventually, as it became more desperate to suppress The Australian’s reportage of criticism of its search strategy, the ATSB hired a top law firm to issue warnings to the editors to ‘refrain’ from its style of coverage – warnings the editors tossed aside and exposed.
The ATSB and the JACC have usually, but to their credit not always, declined Freedom of Information requests about MH370.
These actions raise serious questions about the integrity of Australia’s democratic system, of which key elements are transparency in government, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
It adds to the mystery of the hunt for MH370. The families of the MH370 victims, and many in the international aviation community, have asked: why would federal bureaucrats, who are paid by taxpayers to serve the interests of the general public, behave in such a defensive and secretive way and engage in what to some looks like a cover-up? What agenda, and whose agenda, are they serving?
This book is the story of the international effort to work out what happened on board MH370, and the four hunts so far to find it. It’s also the story of the individuals involved, many courageous and well intentioned. It’s the back story of Australian authorities’ progression towards a conclusion on what happened on MH370 which many professionals in the aviation sector believe to be predetermined and wrong, and possibly motivated, if only subliminally, by international political concerns. And it’s an insight into the restrictive media tactics taken by the ATSB and the JACC to try to put a lid on such coverage by targeting the commentators who make such claims and the journalists who canvass them.
The public appetite, both in Australia and internationally, for MH370 remains insatiable – it’s a mystery, and mysteries become addictive. Substantial stories on MH370 tend to go straight to the top of the most read online lists, and often stay there for a day or more – they go viral and are read voraciously by thousands of people internationally. The Nine Network’s 60 Minutes program ran two one-hour specials on MH370 in May 2018, more than four years after the disappearance. That same month, the Melbourne Theatre Company staged ‘Hungry Ghosts’, a live production based on the MH370 mystery. Reviewing it in The Age, Cameron Woodhead described it as ‘a polyphonic piece’.
‘For starters, there’s the disappearance of the plane and all the fallout – from wild conspiracy theories to the desolated voices of grieving families, and the interminable search for the wreckage and the clickbait it generates.’
Any significant news story about MH370 gets taken up by news websites around the world. An international community has developed, a sort of MH370 addicts club, which includes professional airline pilots, aerospace engineers, air crash investigators, and a host of fascinated amateur tragics. In various online forums and email exchanges, the MH370 club analyses and debates every new development in the saga, with everyone in the club knowing what the Seventh Arc is and where Broken Ridge is located.
I’m a member of that international club of MH370 addicts. I have been ever since the day I was assigned to check out a story in the Sunday Times about a British angle on the search for aircraft. The mystery got me immediately, along with the extraordinary technology and detective work that had gone into the hunt, like the satellite data producing the Seventh Arc. Since then, I have followed every twist and turn of the MH370 saga, writing many, many news stories and features. Perhaps a further interest for me was that I spent a bit of time in Malaysia as an adolescent, including going to a local school in the peninsular east-coast town of Kuantan, and have been back since.
I have been fortunate to get to know some of the families of those missing on MH370; they are fine people still struggling with their loss, haunted by not knowing the truth of what happened on board the flight, and where their loved ones lie.
This book aims to inform and explain, taking the reader through the known facts. It’s a piece of long-form reportage journalism: it recounts what is established, and reports the alternative views of credible, well-versed professional people about what those facts might mean and what conclusions might logically be drawn.
Four searches, the first on the surface, the second a combined surface/undersea operation, and two sea-floor surveys – all mammoth efforts – have failed to find MH370. But the Malaysian government, for one, has vowed to not give up. In some of his first remarks to journalists after newly elected Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad appointed him transport minister, Anthony Loke said ‘a major issue for the ministry . . . is to continue searching for MH370 . . . this I think is very important not only for family members but also the aviation industry’.
The pattern of history in big lost-at-sea enigmas is that governments, companies, associations, adventurers and wealthy individuals with a passion will over time mount new searches until the source of the mystery is found. Examples include the German battleship Bismarck, the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney, and, of course, the ill-fated British cruise liner Titanic. Bismarck and Sydney were sunk in combat in the Second World War, and found in 1989 and 2008 respectively. The Titanic went down, famously, when it had a run-in with an iceberg in the North Atlantic on the ship’s maiden voyage in 1912, and was found in 1985. Intriguingly, the discovery of famous shipwrecks has tended to be led by private individuals or organisations rather than governments. Both Bismarck and Titanic were found by expeditions headed by Robert Ballard, a retired US Navy officer and a professor of oceanography.
The fact a long period of time had passed between the sinking of these ships and their discovery – and the fact they were found at all – reflect several dynamics. There is no question that earlier generations of wreck-hunters would have loved to have found these vessels whose loss was hugely famous, or infamous, at the time and thereafter. It took decades for the right undersea search technology to develop. But also, in each case, it took generations for the hunters to develop the right analysis of what was known about the circumstances of the ships’ disappearance to work out just where the vessels ended up.
Many keen and highly trained observers in the aviation, engineering and scientific professions believe the ATSB officials relied on the wrong theory of where MH370 lies, and that’s why they didn’t find it. Those aviators, engineers and scientists also think they know the relatively narrow area where the aircraft and the 239 souls aboard do rest, where the ATSB did not look even when it was extensively briefed by proponents of the theory and had the chance. That’s based on a vision of what happened different from the one employed by the ATSB. That chilling, but well-evidenced, scenario is outlined in the coming chapter. It’s the first of five theories canvassed in this book about what might have happened to MH370, those theories selected as being the most credible, internally consistent, and possible against the known facts.
We don’t know for sure what happened to MH370, the same way we don’t
know for certain what fate befell American aviator Amelia Earhart in 1937 over the Pacific Ocean. We won’t know until MH370 is found. But we know a lot, and this book outlines that which we do, and the shocking possibilities which stem from it.
ONE
‘GOOD NIGHT, MALAYSIAN THREE SEVEN ZERO’
Zaharie Ahmad Shah loved flying.
Growing up in Penang in a big family in a country which, while getting more affluent was still not rich, he’d considered himself fortunate to get a traineeship as a pilot with Malaysia Airlines.
By 2014, after 33 years as a pilot, Zaharie was flying Boeing 777-200ER airliners. They are big, wide-bodied, twin-engine beasts with extended range, boasting a wingspan of 61 metres, and a length of 64 metres. They can carry up to 300 passengers, with a maximum take-off weight of 300 tonnes.
But that wasn’t enough flying for Zaharie. He flew model airplanes for fun, and went paragliding. He set himself up at home with a fairly sophisticated flight simulator using his desktop computer. He flew various simulated routes on the home computer, including one which was rather odd: it started out in Kuala Lumpur, headed north-west up the Straits of Malacca to the Andaman Sea, then turned left on a long track south to finish in the southern Indian Ocean.
The zigzag route made no sense – there was no logic to it and it ended up far from anywhere one could land an aircraft, in a very remote stretch of ocean. But to many airline pilots who have studied MH370, the imaginary flight on Zaharie’s home computer flight simulator made absolute sense in relation to what they believe to be his cunning, malevolent intent. The professional aviators think it was a route Zaharie wanted to practice, to make a Boeing 777 with him at the controls vanish, along with its passengers and crew, to never be found.
Zaharie was politically active. He had in recent years joined the political party of opposition figure Anwar Ibrahim who had been deputy to former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Zaharie also happened to be distantly related by marriage to Anwar. Anwar had fallen out with Mahathir, and then faced a long prosecution on sodomy charges which were widely regarded as politically motivated and trumped up. In a Kuala Lumpur courtroom on the afternoon of Friday, 7 March 2014, Anwar’s acquittal in an earlier trial was overturned, and he was convicted.
