The Hunt for MH370

by Ean Higgins

  That night Zaharie arrived at Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 10:50pm, appropriately an hour or so before he was to board a Boeing 777, this one carrying the registration 9M-MRO. He was to take it to Beijing as pilot-in-command of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. It’s not known whether he had kissed his wife goodbye, or one of the mistresses his sister told The Australian he took up with from time to time. Zaharie reported in to Malaysia Airlines’ operations centre, and received the computerised flight plan for the trip, and read through any relevant Notices to Airmen, known as NOTAMS, relating to weather or other issues of concern.

  Zaharie commanded considerable respect among his colleagues at Malaysia Airlines. At 53, he had clocked up 18,423 hours of flight time, including 8659 on the Boeing 777. Because of his experience and excellent flying record, he was designated as a Type Rating Instructor on the 777, and a Type Rating Examiner, meaning he could train, and test, other pilots seeking to qualify to fly that type of aircraft.

  So, when he ordered the ground staff to load extra fuel for the flight, no-one thought twice about it. The planned flight time to Beijing was five hours, 34 minutes. A fuel reserve of an hour would have been standard to allow for contingencies, such as if there were bad weather or air traffic congestion at Beijing and Zaharie had to go into a holding pattern or head to an alternative airfield.

  But there’s a trade-off with aviation fuel: the more fuel, the more weight, and the more power and hence fuel consumed to keep the aircraft in the air. Zaharie ordered 49,100 kilograms of fuel, giving MH370 an endurance of seven hours and thirty-one minutes, or almost two hours of what pilots call ‘contingency fuel’. This was a lot, especially considering there were no particular weather concerns in Beijing at the time he planned the flight.

  The first officer on flight MH370 was, compared to Zaharie, a youngster and a rookie. Fariq Abdul Hamid was just 27 years old, and had everything to live for. He was engaged to be married to his sweetheart, who was also a pilot, whom he had met at flight school on the resort island of Langkawi. Fariq had been a pilot with Malaysia Airlines for seven years, and had clocked up 2813 flying hours. Fariq was going through the process of qualifying to fly 777s – he had 39 hours on the type, and on this trip Zaharie, as Type Rating Instructor, was to guide him through his final training flight before his ‘check ride’ on his next scheduled flight.

  Around midnight, either Zaharie or Fariq would have boarded the aircraft to start running through pre-flight procedures from the cockpit, while the other would have done a walk around the aircraft making sure it all looked in order. The 10 cabin crew came on board, and then the 227 passengers took their seats. There were 14 nationalities among the passengers: 153 Chinese, 38 Malaysians, seven Indonesians, six Australians, five Indians, four French, three Americans, two each from New Zealand, Ukraine, and Canada, one each from Russia, Taiwan, and the Netherlands; finally, there were two Iranians – travelling on stolen Italian and Austrian passports.

  Among those 227 passengers, New Zealander Paul Weeks, 39, having the previous day kissed goodbye to his wife Danica and young sons Lincoln and Jack in Perth, where they lived, slid his way into window seat 2K in business class on the aircraft’s right-hand side. He was on his way to a new fly-in, fly-out mining job in Mongolia.

  In economy, Australian Li Yuan, 33, took his place in the central set of seats at 14E, while his wife Gu Naijun, 31, settled in to hers in 14H. The couple, who divided their lives between Sydney and China, were on their way to re-join their two young daughters, who were staying with extended family.

  In a cluster of four seats on the left-hand side of the aircraft, four Queenslanders from Brisbane got ready to fly out on a holiday of a lifetime. Rodney Burrows, 59, sat in 20A, his wife Mary, 54, in 20C beside him. Behind them were Catherine Lawton, 54, in 21A, and her husband Robert, 58, in 21C.

  FIGURE 1: MH370 SPECIFICATIONS AND SEATING PLAN

  © The Malay Mail Online

  When they were both in the cockpit, Zaharie and Fariq would have continued through the pre-departure checklist. One would have read out the item on the list to be checked; the other would check the action had been done and all was in order. The ‘Pre-Flight’ Boeing 777 checklist starts with ‘Oxygen’, and the correct response is ‘Tested, 100 per cent’. Zaharie and Fariq would have each got their oxygen masks out, made sure they were working, and put them back.

  Next would have been the ‘Before Start’ checklist:

  One of the pilots would have read out ‘Flight Deck Doors’ to which the other would, after checking, responded ‘Closed and Locked’, meaning no-one could enter the cockpit without permission from the pilots.

  Zaharie and Fariq would then have gone through some procedural checks to make sure the computerised flight settings looked right, like take-off speeds, and ticked off that the taxi and take-off briefing had been done and that the plane’s bright taxi anti-collision beacon was on.

  With the engines now running, Zaharie and Fariq would have run through the ‘Before Taxi’ checklist:

  ‘Autobrake?’ one of them would have prompted.

  ‘RTO,’ the other would have confirmed, meaning the automatic braking system was set to heavy, in case of a ‘Rejected Take-off’.

  ‘Flight Controls?’ one pilot would have asked.

  ‘Checked.’

  In the old days, and still on smaller aircraft, pilots would move the yoke and rudder pedals and look out the windows to see that the rudder, ailerons and elevator were working; today pilots make that check against computer displays showing the positions of the control surfaces.

  ‘Ground Equipment?’ would have been the next prompt on the list.

  ‘Clear.’ That hasn’t changed – just a visual check that the aircraft is not still attached to any piece of equipment and nothing’s in the way.

  Malaysia Airlines’ standard operating procedure requires that radio communications on the ground are handled by the first officer. So, at 27 minutes past midnight, Fariq requested a pushback and start clearance from Kuala Lumpur Area Control Centre. After completing the ‘Before Taxi’ check, Zaharie and Fariq taxied the plane to the threshold of runway 32 Right. The last item on the ‘Before Take-off’ checklist would have been:

  ‘Flaps?’

  To which the other pilot would have responded ‘Set’, meaning confirmation that the flaps on the wings were lowered to the correct degree to provide extra lift for take-off.

  At 40 minutes past midnight, controllers cleared MH370 to head into the sky.

  ‘370 32 Right for take-off,’ is the recorded interchange between the pilots and the control tower.

  The pilots pushed the throttles forward.

  At 42 minutes past midnight local time on 8 March 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 lifted off, its wheels never to touch the ground again.

  Once comfortably airborne and with a check that the rate of climb was positive, the pilots would have raised the landing gear, and brought the flaps back to the retracted position in line with the rest of the wings. They would have gone through the two-item ‘After Take-off’ checklist:

  ‘Landing Gear?’

  ‘– Up.’

  ‘Flaps?’

  ‘– Up.’

  Just after take-off, Kuala Lumpur control cleared MH370 to climb to 18,000 feet, and to track for waypoint IGARI in the South China Sea. Waypoints are part of the complex international air traffic control and navigation system that keeps aircraft flying safely without danger of smashing into each other. The waypoints, whose names all consist of five capital letters made up to be easily pronounceable, exist only on air-navigation maps; they are just points of latitude and longitude, placed on official airway routes which are numbered and which commercial airliners are generally required to follow.

  At 43 minutes past midnight, with MH370 in the air, Kuala Lumpur controllers rang Ho Chi Minh Area Control Centre in Vietna
m relaying the estimated time of arrival of MH370 for waypoint IGARI at 1:22am, and the secondary radar transponder code A2157.

  There are two basic types of radar in air traffic control: primary and secondary. Primary radar is the original which dates back to the Second World War: it bounces electronic pulses off objects to create a ‘blip’ on a screen – it does not tell the controller which aircraft is which.

  Secondary radar involves an aircraft emitting an electronic signal via what’s known as a ‘transponder’ which identifies it by a unique code, and the transponder relays the aircraft’s altitude, speed and position in real time to air traffic controllers. With this tool, controllers can know exactly where each aircraft is at any time as the coded signals move steadily over their big display screens.

  Primary radar is still used, including by the military because a hostile foreign aircraft pilot planning an attack during a conflict would be disinclined to tip off their position, altitude and speed to an enemy air traffic controller by emitting a transponder signal so they could be picked up by secondary radar. Military primary radar was to have a critical role in the MH370 drama.

  The communication from Kuala Lumpur controllers to Ho Chi Minh controllers was important because IGARI was close to where the handover of responsibility for MH370 from Malaysian air traffic control to Vietnamese control was to take place. The world’s airspace is divided up into different air traffic control sectors know as Flight Information Regions, and pilots and controllers are required to acknowledge each other when the aircraft moves from one sector to another.

  A couple of other routine communications between Kuala Lumpur controllers and the pilots of MH370 took place: at 47 minutes past midnight the flight crew was cleared to climb to 25,000 feet, and a minute later got clearance to 35,000 feet. At 56 minutes past midnight the flight crew said they were maintaining that altitude.

  At 1:19am, the official Malaysian safety investigation report into the loss of MH370 says the pilots were ‘instructed to contact Ho Chi Minh Air Control Centre on the radio frequency 120.9 MHz’.

  Four seconds later, Zaharie acknowledged the instruction with ‘Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero’.

  ‘This was the last recorded radio transmission from MH370,’ the report says. In fact, it was the last time anyone on the aircraft was heard from.

  A minute later, MH370 passed through waypoint IGARI.

  From that point, 40 minutes into the flight, some things are known about what happened on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, but many are not, which is why the ultimate mystery of the lost aircraft remains unsolved. What follows is one possible scenario – like other theories to be outlined later in this book, it is a dramatised reconstruction of a theory based on fact, detective work, deduction and informed speculation. It is not purporting to be what happened, but one version of what could have happened consistent with what is known about the flight and the aircraft.

  Theory One: Rogue Pilot to the End

  A couple of minutes before signing off with ‘Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero’ MH370 pilot-in-command Zaharie Ahmad Shah sent his co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid out of the cockpit on an errand.

  ‘Hamid, would you mind getting me a cup of coffee while I attend to some paperwork? Many thanks.’

  Zaharie would, as per standard operating procedure (SOP), have locked the cockpit door once Fariq was out. But what would not have been SOP was the series of actions Zaharie initiated next.

  The minute after the acknowledgement ‘Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero,’ Zaharie reached to the central console and turned off the secondary radar transponder, making the aircraft vanish from air traffic control screens.

  The Malaysian safety investigation report released in July 2018 says the symbol for MH370 dropped off from radar display at 1:20am. ‘The Malaysian military radar and radar sources from two other countries, namely Viet Nam and Thailand, also captured the disappearance of the radar position symbol of MH370,’ the report says.

  At the same time, Zaharie turned off the aircraft’s automatic transmission of flight data to ground stations. The report shows the final Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) transmission was made through the MH370 satellite communication system just 13 minutes earlier, at 1:07am.

  Then Zaharie took out his flight crew bag, containing a few ostensibly innocuous items of clothing – a jumper, scarf, insulated jacket, light gloves and wool cap. Nothing odd there – Beijing can still be very cold in early March. But then, in what was at that stage a comfortable warm cockpit, Zaharie put those items of clothing on.

  Then, Zaharie donned his oxygen mask which had hours of oxygen supply in case of depressurisation or fire. Moments thereafter, Zaharie turned off the electrical circuit for the cabin lights, plunging the passenger cabin into darkness in the middle of a moonless night. Zaharie then quickly reached up above his head to the upper control console and pressed a button to turn off the cabin pressurisation system, which is run by power from the engines and keeps the air in the cabin at near ground level pressure.

  With the pressurisation turned off, the aircraft went into rapid decompression – this option is available for pilots to deal with an onboard fire by sucking out the smoke and exposing the cabin to the lack of oxygen and cold of high altitudes. Immediately after that, Zaharie took the aircraft off autopilot, and made a brief right-hand turn followed quickly by a sharp but long left-hand turn, turning the aircraft almost 180 degrees back towards Malaysia. The safety investigation report says that at 1:21am, a playback of Malaysian military radar ‘showed the radar return of MH370 turning right but shortly after, making a constant left turn to heading of 273 degrees’.

  The Malaysian investigators later determined the turn was too abrupt to have been made on autopilot, and had to have been performed by a pilot with his hands on the yoke manually moving the controls. The turn was so sharp, with such a high angle of bank, that it set off alarms and required Zaharie’s full concentration as a highly skilled pilot to accomplish. The turn took two minutes and eight seconds, and Zaharie negotiated his way through it despite an audio ‘bank angle’ warning and ‘stick shaker’ stall warning.

  The rapid combination of Zaharie’s actions sent the 238 souls in his charge into mortal fear and in many cases outright panic. The oxygen masks dropped automatically due to the loss of cabin pressure, but the passengers, cabin crew and Fariq were enveloped in darkness, fogginess from rapid decompression and increasing cold. The quick right-left extremely banked turns threw those standing, including the cabin crew and Fariq, off their feet, many crashing into the passengers. The cabin filled with screams of confusion and terror.

  Like all airliners, MH370 would have had portable oxygen bottles and masks stored in lockers for the cabin crew or pilots to use in the event of rapid decompression or fire. But it was too difficult for Fariq or the cabin crew, during the sharply banked turn of more than two minutes, to make their way in the darkness to the lockers to deploy them.

  The young and agile Fariq somehow negotiated his way to the cockpit door in the difficult conditions, clamouring from one row to another taking the occasional breath of oxygen from masks fallen to vacant seats. At that stage he thought his duty was to assist his captain in dealing with a life-threatening calamity of some sort. Zaharie kept the door locked, and after a period Fariq banged on it, saying, ‘Captain, please let me in, what’s wrong?’

  Seconds after that, Fariq passed out and collapsed at the foot of the cockpit door. The effects on humans of rapid decompression and hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation, at high altitude are well known. Most military pilots and many civilian ones go through simulations in decompression chambers. For those readers interested, there are some excellent YouTube videos showing them. The cabin quickly goes foggy as the moisture condenses out of the air, and the cold from outside starts to seep in. People who go through the process in simulation report different sym
ptoms, but ironically, the most common is a sort of drunken sense of feeling good. That insidious process is well established throughout aviation history.

  ‘One does not suffer in any way; on the contrary,’ French scientist and experimental balloonist, Gaston Tissandier, wrote in 1875. ‘One feels an inner joy, as if filled with a radiant flood of light . . . one becomes indifferent, one thinks neither of the perilous situation nor of any danger.’ Tissandier wrote those words about hypoxia after he and two fellow adventurers, journalist Joseph Crocé-Spinelli, and naval officer Théodore Henri Sivel, attempted an altitude record in a balloon. They did well, reaching 28,000 feet, but Crocé-Spinelli and Henri Sivel died of hypoxia; Tissandier is said to have gone deaf as a result of the experience. He wrote that he wanted to reach the oxygen bags, but couldn’t, and then didn’t really care.

  After the oxygen got sucked out of MH370 during rapid decompression, for the first 30 seconds or maybe a bit longer, passengers could have maintained what’s called useful consciousness – the ability to know what’s going on and perform basic functions like putting on an oxygen mask. But then all those who did not get an oxygen mask on within that short time would see their blood oxygen levels drop dramatically. Their fingertips would have started to tingle and they would have become lightheaded. But ironically, and catastrophically, those passengers who did not get their oxygen masks on in 30 seconds of total darkness and steep bank probably stopped worrying about that or anything else. If you have ever wondered why during the pre-flight passenger safety briefings on airliners the message is to put on your own oxygen mask first before helping others, that’s why: if you spend more than 30 seconds or a bit longer trying to put the oxygen mask on your rambunctious child before putting your own mask on, you probably won’t succeed, and pretty soon, you won’t even care.