The Hunt for MH370

by Ean Higgins

  The misinformation reflected a grievously wrong assumption at the Malaysia Airlines operations centre. The officers there were confident they knew where MH370 was because the aircraft was able to exchange signals with the Flight Explorer aircraft tracking website, or so they thought.

  Communications between the Malaysian and Vietnamese controllers sometimes ran into difficulties, the Malaysian safety investigation report found. Kuala Lumpur asked whether Ho Chi Minh was taking ‘radio failure action’ but, the investigation report said, ‘the query didn’t seem to be understood by the personnel’.

  Malaysia Airlines operations officers repeatedly expressed confidence they could track MH370 even if radio communications and satellite phone and fax contact was lost, and insisted it was still steadily moving on Flight Explorer. At 2:20am, the Ho Chi Minh controller said that was all very well, but from where they sat, MH370 had ‘disappeared’. The Kuala Lumpur controller replied ‘Disappeared, okay,’ but a couple of minutes later added, ‘Nah, I am not sure, but the company already sent a signal to the aircraft to contact the relevant air traffic control unit’. This refers to another element confusing the controllers – not only did Malaysia Airlines tell them MH370 was still flying and sending tracking signals to Flight Explorer, but that they had sent a signal to the aircraft which the equipment showed had been successfully transmitted, even if there was no reply.

  The Kuala Lumpur controllers started to recognise this was more than a glitch, and in turn worried about whether Malaysia Airlines’ operations officers fully appreciated the gravity of the situation. They urged the pursuit of every possible means to contact the pilots, including by satellite phone and fax.

  In an exchange at 2:34am, more than an hour after contact was lost, a controller contacted Malaysia Airlines (MAS) operations.

  KL: This is MAS Operations, is it?

  MAS: Ya ya.

  KL: Okay . . . regarding your Malaysian Three Seven Zero . . .

  MAS: Herha.

  KL: Ho Chi Minh said still negative contact.

  MAS: Haa.

  KL: And the no radar target at all.

  MAS: Okay.

  As the night wore on, the Malaysians started using a uniquely Malaysian English quirk: ending sentences with ‘la’. It has various uses, but most often is used for emphasis, to communicate that something is serious and you want to the listener to pay attention. It’s used in a similar way to how in some English-speaking countries one might use the word ‘man’ – ‘If you have your own best interests at heart, you’ll do it, man!’

  KL: Can you, I mean is there . . . any possible for the aircraft to answer you?

  MAS: Eer . . .

  KL: Any way aircraft can answer you?

  MAS: Do know . . . you have to try the satcom, la, Sir.

  KL: Hmm.

  MAS: Will try the satcom and see.

  KL: Okay . . . see whether they can, I am sure, whether the position or whether they contact with anyone and the estimate for landing or anything.

  MAS: Okay.

  KL: Okay and, okay, because, Ho Chi Minh still worry because they have completely no contact at all, either radio or radar.

  At 2:36am, when the aircraft had been out of contact for an hour and 15 minutes, Malaysia Airlines operations said MH370 was ‘somewhere in Vietnam’ and gave coordinates based on Flight Explorer to Kuala Lumpur controllers, who in turn relayed them to Ho Chi Minh.

  Fuad Sharuji, Malaysia Airlines’ crisis director, got a call at about 2:30am. Being woken up to deal with one problem or another was a regular part of the job, but being told a Boeing 777 had disappeared altogether was not.

  Sharuji opened up his laptop, accessed the flight systems, saw there were four other aircraft that were in the vicinity of where MH370 was supposed to be, and to his shock and amazement, found MH370 just wasn’t there at all.

  At 2:40am, Malaysia Airlines operations made a satellite telephone call to the pilots – it went unanswered. Malaysia Airlines was starting to realise it had a serious problem – it just didn’t know what.

  Just before 3am, 30 minutes after that first phone call, Sharuji declared a code red emergency.

  ‘You really need three people to agree to declare code red because that is the most serious crisis for us. But because my CEO was not available and the director of operations was not immediately contactable, I had to make the big decision by myself,’ Sharuji told StrategicRISK Asia-Pacific in 2016.

  With the airline’s crisis procedure protocol put into action, within an hour most of its top officers had arrived to set up shop in its Emergency Operations Centre in Kuala Lumpur. They looked at the aircraft maintenance log, and it recorded no known technical problems. They checked whether MH370 was carrying any dangerous goods – that too came up blank.

  What flummoxed the Malaysia Airlines officials was that Flight Explorer kept showing the aircraft blithely tracking on its planned course towards Beijing.

  Then the penny dropped.

  Perhaps a senior Malaysia Airlines officer, woken up and called in during the middle of the night, was told by his subordinates something like, ‘It’s all right, sir, Flight Explorer shows MH370 is on course’, to which the senior officer might have replied, ‘You bloody idiots . . .’

  In any event, at 3:30am, the Malaysian safety investigation report says, the operations officers at Malaysia Airlines told the Kuala Lumpur control shift supervisor they now realised ‘the flight tracker information was based on flight projection and was not reliable for aircraft positioning’.

  In other words, Flight Explorer was not tracking where MH370 actually was in real time at all, but rather where it should be if the flight had proceeded normally.

  And it had not proceeded normally for some time. By this stage, MH370 had flown back across the Malay Peninsula to Penang, turned north-west up the Straits of Malacca, gone out of radar range, and at some point turned south on a track to the southern Indian Ocean.

  There were other communications among Malaysian and Vietnamese controllers, Malaysia Airlines and controllers in other countries over the next couple of hours. Kuala Lumpur asked Ho Chi Minh, have you contacted Hainan, the next air traffic control sector? Had Hong Kong or Beijing heard anything? Singapore air traffic control, on behalf of Hong Kong, asked if there had been any news of MH370.

  At 5:20am, four hours after the aircraft’s disappearance, the Malaysian safety investigation report says when a senior Malaysia airlines captain asked for information on MH370, he opined that based on known information, ‘MH370 never left Malaysian airspace’.

  It was in some respects the most sensible, logical observation of the night, and it may be what finally prompted Malaysian controllers to belatedly accept the obvious and act on it. Ten minutes later, the Malaysian control watch supervisor contacted the Kuala Lumpur Aeronautical Rescue Coordination Centre to say Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 was missing. Azharuddin later said the four-hour delay in sounding the alarm was primarily the fault of Vietnamese controllers, who were responsible for the aircraft after the planned handover at IGARI.

  The scheduled arrival time for MH370 in Beijing was 6:30am, and Malaysian authorities were still hoping that, by some miracle, it might just land safely and report some malfunctions in the communications systems. Ahmad Jauhari said in MH370: Inside the Situation Room:

  ‘Six-thirty was the time the aircraft was supposed to land at Beijing, we are still hoping the aircraft will appear. But 6:30 came, and there’s no aircraft. You know, we felt terrible – sick, really.’

  Two minutes later, at 6:32am, the Rescue Coordination Centre issued what’s known as a DETRESFA message, shown below.

  FIGURE 2: DETRESFA MESSAGE

  © Ministry of Transport Malaysia

  DETRESFA is the code word used to designate a ‘distress phase’ in aviation. It’s defined under ICAO protocols as ‘a situat
ion wherein there is a reasonable certainty that an aircraft and its occupants are threatened by grave and imminent danger and require immediate assistance.’ It takes the form of an international coded message – almost impossible for a layman to decipher – with a set of information according to an established protocol. In the MH370 DETRESFA message, the key word is ‘MISSING’. It listed the type of aircraft, the airline and flight number, the aircraft’s registration number 9M-MRO, the last contact at IGARI, and finished off with a brief description of the plane’s livery: ‘GREY A/WHITE WITH RED AND BLUE STRIPE’. The DETRESFA signal went out nearly six hours after MH370 took off, and more than five hours after it disappeared from radar screens around South-east Asia, and from radio and ACARS communications.

  At 7:14am, when MH370 would have had only about an hour’s fuel left, Malaysia Airlines operations tried another satellite telephone call to the pilots – it too went unanswered. MH370 had covered most of its track to its end point in the southern Indian Ocean. If, in the Theory One ‘Rogue Pilot to the End’ scenario, Zaharie was still flying the plane, he would no doubt have been thinking ‘it worked . . . I’ve done it . . . they don’t know where I am.’

  The Malaysian Air Force hadn’t shown up, the radio transmissions asking him to respond, including from Ho Chi Minh controllers and aircraft flying in the general area where he should have been but was not, showed the authorities were clueless about where he really was and what he was doing.

  If he had hijacked the plane, Zaharie must have thought he’d got away with it.

  THREE

  THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS

  The situation of a big airliner with more than 200 people on board not showing up at its destination on time is not, of itself, unusual. But if an aircraft does not show up on time, and the airline cannot tell those waiting at the airport for loved ones when or even if it will arrive, that is highly unusual.

  At Beijing’s Capital International Airport on Saturday, 8 March 2014, at the top of the big ‘arrivals’ board all morning, a line of red text read: ‘Flight MH370, from Kuala Lumpur, STA 6:30. Delayed.’

  People started gathering below the board – friends and relatives of those waiting for those on MH370 to arrive, journalists who had heard whispers and then shouts the aircraft was missing, and policemen keen, in the Chinese communist way, to keep order.

  ‘I’m very, very worried now,’ Zhai Le, who was to meet a group of friends off MH370 and then set off on holidays with them, told reporters at the scene.

  Some relatives started becoming hysterical when no-one could tell them what was going on. A cameraman was reported punched by one of them.

  Chinese authorities don’t like such scenes, and got buses to load up relatives and take them to a hotel about 15 kilometres away, to be out of sight and briefed if and when new information arrived.

  Just after 1:00pm, the line of red text saying MH370 was ‘Delayed’ just disappeared without explanation.

  It was clear to Malaysian authorities they had to say something official. Late morning, Malaysia Airlines issued a statement saying the aircraft was missing, and that it would hold a news conference soon. Like other major media groups, CNN didn’t wait for the press conference – they went straight to air.

  ‘This is Piers Morgan live. Breaking news tonight, a Malaysia Airlines plane carrying 239 people, bound for Beijing, is missing,’ the bulletin started. ‘According to a statement from the airline, air traffic control lost contact with Flight MH370, from Kuala Lumpur at 2:40am, about two hours after take-off. We are awaiting a press briefing from the airline, which of course we will bring you live when it happens.’

  It was the chief executive of Malaysia Airlines, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, who had the horrifying task of fronting up and officially breaking the extraordinary news at the press conference.

  ‘We are deeply saddened this morning,’ Ahmad Jauhari told journalists.

  He outlined details of the flight and who in general terms was known to be on it, who the captain and first officer were, and said the focus was to work with the emergency response.

  ‘Our thoughts and prayers are with all affected passengers and crew and their family members.’

  It was an extraordinary story: a big airliner, 239 people, and the operative words ‘missing’ or ‘disappeared’.

  ‘An international search and rescue operation is underway after a passenger jet disappeared over the South China Sea early this morning,’ was how one British presenter broke the news to her television audience.

  But not everyone is glued to television or radio news, or internet news sites. For some of those whose husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, and in a few cases children, came to disappear on a regular scheduled flight, the horror of what had happened came in ways they still break down in telling.

  For Danica and Paul Weeks, 7 March 2014 was the day all their luck seemed to be going the right way.

  ‘Everything was great,’ Danica told me in an interview near her home on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. ‘We had two little boys, I had a beautiful husband, he had this great job.’

  The couple lived in Perth, and Paul was headed to Beijing for induction to a big assignment for a major mining project in Mongolia. It was his big break as an engineer.

  Danica and Paul had been together for 14 years. They first hooked up when they were both young, expatriate Antipodeans, doing the usual ‘grand tour’ of living in Britain on two-year working visas and seeing Europe.

  ‘We met at the Munich Beer Fest,’ Danica said of how she first found her husband. With a bit of a smirk, she added, ‘I moved in with him two weeks later.’ That lovenest was in Turnpike Lane, London, N8 0DU, in the year 2000.

  Paul had grown up in Christchurch, and been a mechanic in the New Zealand army. After the sojourn in Europe, he wanted to go home and enrol in university to study mechanical engineering. Though her family had moved to Queensland’s Sunshine Coast when she was 10, Danica was also originally a New Zealander, having been born in the North Island town of Napier, so the move to Christchurch was to familiar territory.

  The couple lived in Christchurch for 10 years, with Danica, a chartered professional accountant, putting Paul through university, after which he made a good living doing energy audits on buildings. Then the family’s first external calamity arose.

  ‘I had Lincoln during the first earthquake,’ Danica explained. ‘After that they didn’t need energy audits on buildings because the buildings were collapsing.’

  So, the couple moved to Perth, just as the mining boom started to get into gear. After working in the sector for some years, Paul was made an extraordinary offer. A contact at Rio Tinto was heading to Mongolia to work on the Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold mine in the Gobi Desert. He invited Paul to come to Oyu Tolgoi to work as a supervisor, Danica said, as the company was having challenges on the site.

  ‘He wanted Paul to come and sort it out,’ Danica said. ‘He was really excited, it was his dream job.’

  The deal was that Paul would work 28 days on, 14 days off. Given how hard he worked in Western Australia, Danica said, though the absences would be long, the fortnight of concentrated family time sounded good.

  For the Weeks family, it looked like the start of a dream run. Danica drove Paul to the airport, with her sons Lincoln, aged three and a half at the time, and Jack, 11 months, in the back getting ready to head on to Lincoln’s soccer training.

  ‘I dropped him off, we told each other we loved each other,’ Danica recounted. ‘I remember crying, because it was a change for us – he was going for 28 days. I bawled my eyes out.’ Danica observed that all couples have their own sayings – some trite, some schmalzy. Theirs was ‘the cream always rises to the top’, and they said it to each other before Paul headed onto the flight to Kuala Lumpur. Danica says she stills sees Paul’s departure in her mind’s eye.

  ‘He just walks out that door, and that’s
that.’

  ‘To me, March 8, 2014 was like yesterday,’ Danica said.

  The television in the kitchen wasn’t working, so while she might have kept an eye on it otherwise, she was just pottering around with household chores and having coffee with her mum as she did most Saturdays at the local shopping centre.

  Later that afternoon the phone rang. A woman on the other end of the line asked after Paul. When Danica said he wasn’t there and she hadn’t spoken with him, the woman on the phone – a reporter from the New Zealand Herald – then asked: ‘You haven’t heard there has been an incident with the plane?’

  ‘I just dropped the phone, I went into hysterics, I just ran out the door and fell on the grass,’ Danica related. ‘I thought it had crashed.’ Paul’s mother was living just down the road and heard the shrieks, recognised Danica’s voice, and rushed over. Danica tried to get a grip.

  ‘The plane’s missing. I thought, okay, it’s just missing. Gather yourself.’

  Paul’s brother Peter was staying with their mother down the road, and was assigned to check that the flight in question, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, was indeed Paul’s flight.

  ‘He just came back and said yes, it’s his plane.’

  Fortunately, Danica’s mother and stepdad were living in their caravan in Perth at the time, as part of their five-year travels around Australia.

  ‘She’s the only one who got me through all this,’ Danica said. ‘Mum and I just sat on the couch crying and screaming.’

  Danica said later in the day Lincoln came into the bathroom while she was in the shower and asked, ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I said “Daddy is missing darling”. He said “don’t worry, Mum, I find him”.’