The Hunt for MH370

by Ean Higgins

  But there was no sign of MH370, not a skerrick.

  After a few days of searching both areas, Hishammuddin and other officials fronted an increasingly hostile international media. It was a tough performance to pull off given the inherent nature of the script.

  ‘Where is the focus of your search, can you confirm if the plane has turned back?’ a journalist asked.

  ‘We are focusing both in the South China Sea, and in the Straits of Malacca,’ Hishammuddin replied.

  Another journalist put to Hishammuddin, ‘You’re searching east, you’re searching west, you don’t seem to know what you have seen on radar, and it has taken you now, five days later . . . this is utter confusion now, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Hishammuddin replied. ‘I think it is far from it. It is only confusion if you want it to be seen to be confusion. We have made it very clear that we have been very consistent in our approach . . . we are still not sure it is the same aircraft, that is why we are searching in two areas.’

  One question was: ‘Why is it that Malaysia lacks the transparency and are very stingy with information?’

  Hishammuddin came up with a rather elegant response to that one: ‘Because the information is far between.’

  The media contingent was obviously doubtful the full story was being told. A journalist who sounded American asked, ‘Why not release the raw radar data? Are there any plans to do that?’

  There weren’t. It’s a controversy to this day, with associations representing the MH370 families and international aviation professionals demanding the release of all the available primary information.

  Hishammuddin told the filmmakers of MH370: Inside the Situation Room: ‘Behind the scenes there were massive discussions between me and my military generals and the security experts to discuss what we are able to reveal . . . Military radar will never be released. Try and get that from the Pentagon.’

  The search planes kept flying out to the east, and flying out to the west, the search ships kept sailing around looking for anything to do with MH370, and no-one found anything.

  Najib could not believe it.

  ‘I was completely flabbergasted,’ he said in MH370: Inside the Situation Room. ‘I had countless sleepless nights, thinking, where on earth is the plane? We had the best minds to advise us and still, there was nothing. Totally nothing.’

  The search effort was in desperate need of a new lead, and it came a couple of days later from Inmarsat, and took the whole story into another new, extraordinary direction. Azharuddin got a call from the London-based British satellite company, which had been poring over the raw data from the satellite transmissions.

  The Inmarsat official had some stunning news: they might be able to provide some guidance on where MH370 went. Azharuddin asked if a delegation from Inmarsat could come to Kuala Lumpur on the next available flight, and they were picked up by his officers and brought straight to the Sama-Sama Hotel where he was staying.

  The Inmarsat officer talked about all sorts of strange things like burst frequency offset, burst timing offset, and the first, second, third, right up to Seventh Arc. Even to aviation experts such as Azharuddin, it was esoteric to the point of being alien, but once explained, the implication was huge. By analysing the seven roughly hourly electronic satellite ‘handshakes’ from MH370, and looking at how long they took to go out and come back between the aircraft and the satellite, Inmarsat had been able to establish seven rings around the Asia-Indian Ocean region upon which the aircraft would have been at the time of each of the seven handshakes.

  So it was not the actual location of the aircraft that Inmarsat could provide – the satellite was not tracking MH370 per se. Nor were the rings even the actual flightpath of the aircraft; they were the arcs of distance somewhere along which the aircraft would have been from the satellite at the hourly handshakes.

  FIGURE 4: POSITION RING DEFINED BY BURST TIMING OFFSET MEASUREMENT

  © Inmarsat / Australian Transport Safety Bureau

  It was all rather confusing, but the takeaway message was huge. Working with the British government’s Air Accident Investigation Branch, Inmarsat had plotted the maximum endurance distance the aircraft could have travelled from its last known position either way along the arc indicated by the seventh and last satellite handshake – what would come to be known as ‘the Seventh Arc’. From that it was possible to size down MH370’s possible resting place to two bands, one curving north-west and one south-west.

  The first problem was that Inmarsat could not say which way along the Seventh Arc MH370 flew – north to central Asia, or south to the southern Indian Ocean. The second problem was that both bands were massive – the one to the north-west extended all the way across central Asia to the Caspian Sea; the one to the south-west a good part of the way towards Antarctica.

  It was, like the military radar tracking, a difficult one to explain convincingly to the media and the families. On 15 March, a week after MH370 disappeared, Najib again took it upon himself to drop the bombshell to the media.

  ‘Today we can confirm MH370 did indeed turn back consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane,’ the PM said. ‘We are unable to confirm the precise location of the plane; however, the aviation authorities have determined the plane’s last communication with the satellite was in one of two possible corridors.’

  The ‘corridors’ were, in fact, huge swathes of the globe. The southern corridor just covered vast, empty ocean. The northern corridor spanned millions of square kilometres of land across a dozen countries from Vietnam to Turkmenistan.

  FIGURE 5: THE CORRIDORS OF MH370’s LAST COMMUNICATION WITH A SATELLITE

  © Ministry of Transport Malaysia

  There was no way one could possibly even think of mounting a search and rescue operation systematically across such huge areas. The only way forward would be via a process of elimination, and a doable exercise would be to see if any of the countries in the northern corridor had picked up MH370 flying through their territory. Najib contacted national heads of government along the northern corridor to ask them to check to see if an aircraft matching MH370’s description had been detected moving through their territory.

  Along the southern corridor, there was nothing but ocean, and the closest country to it was Australia. On 18 March, the Australian government agreed to start looking at an enormous stretch, based in only very loose terms in the early days on where the satellite data indicated MH370 might be.

  The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) said the search zone would cover 600,000 square kilometres of ocean in an area 3000 kilometres south-west of Perth. Initially, it was just a needle-in-haystack token operation: one RAAF Orion began searching the Indian Ocean to the north and west of the Cocos Islands, while another Orion continued to search west of Malaysia.

  As part of the switch in the search strategy, the hunt in the South China Sea was called off – whatever else it did, MH370 was now fully confirmed as having turned back over Malaysia.

  Since it was clear that whichever way MH370 had gone, it was at least for the first couple of hours under the control of a pilot, attention again came back to the possibility of a hijacking. The Royal Malaysian Police investigated what was known about both the passengers and crew, with assistance from Interpol. No-one suspicious emerged. The two Iranians travelling on stolen passports were looked at particularly carefully, but were also cleared of any known terrorist links; their sole motive seemed to be illegal immigration to Europe by a roundabout route.

  The next piece of the MH370 jigsaw again came from Inmarsat, just over two weeks after MH370 disappeared. The tech-heads at the British satellite company had kept grinding down the data and working out new ways to unlock its meaning. They posed the question: what do the automatic satellite handshakes from similar flights going roughly along the northern and southern corridors – or as close to them
as can be reasonably compared – indicate might be different between them?

  Inmarsat’s conclusion was, if correct, effectively the final death knell for the 239 people on board MH370: the analysis indicated the aircraft had flown not north-west over land, but south to the middle of nowhere in the southern Indian Ocean where it could only have run out of fuel.

  Najib was shocked, saw the implications immediately, and knew an appalling decision and announcement lay before him.

  On 24 March, Najib again confronted the international media pack.

  ‘This evening, I was briefed by the representatives from the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch. They have been able to shed more light on MH370’s flight path. Inmarsat and the AAIB have concluded that its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean west of Perth.’

  Then, Najib delivered the coup-de-grâce.

  ‘This is a remote location far from any possible landing site.’

  Some family members at the venue had to be taken out on stretchers.

  Relatives of those on board received the news in a Malaysia Airlines SMS message which said: ‘We have to assume beyond all reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and none of those on board survived.’

  Despite the fact the Malaysian leaders knew how dim the chances were of finding any floating wreckage – let alone survivors – in the tumultuous seas of the southern Indian Ocean more than two weeks after the aircraft disappeared, the search had to be moved there exclusively, with the hunt anywhere else now concluded to be pointless. The Malaysians formally asked the Australian government if it would take over the major responsibility of leading such a search, and Tony Abbott agreed.

  Although the Malaysian government’s involvement in the hunt for MH370 went on for another four years and notionally continues to this day, this point marked the end of the first chapter in the saga where it had made every call on its own. In MH370: Inside the Situation Room, Hishammuddin said, ‘Tell me one government that would not be confused.’ It would be hard to argue against Hishammuddin’s assessment: the bizarre initial disappearance of MH370 over the South China Sea, the primary radar tracking showing it turned back over Malaysia, the satellite data showing it turned again, south, and kept flying for hours without any communication to oblivion in the southern Indian Ocean – it was all completely inexplicable and confusing.

  Hishammuddin said, ‘We know that we have tried our best, that is all that we can say. We have done our best, and we will continue to do our best.’

  Next, it was up to the Australians to try.

  Theory Two: Elope by Parachute

  Zaharie Ahmad Shah had enjoyed several mistresses over the years, but none, he found, came close to Rina. She had long, lustrous hair, a sensuous figure, and looked even younger than her 28 years. Rina came from a family of fishermen on the coast who had done very well and now owned a number of vessels; she had just come into a handsome inheritance. In the meantime, to enjoy life in the big smoke, she had moved to Kuala Lumpur and found work running one of the security scanners at the airport. There she met the dashing airman Zaharie, and fell in love.

  The love tryst couple decided on an elaborate plan to elope, and secretly establish a new life in another, obscure but pleasant, Asian country. Zaharie used a criminal connection to acquire two stolen passports – not that hard; as mentioned earlier, two Iranian would-be illegal migrants to Europe had done just that in order to get on MH370.

  On the evening of 7 March 2014, Zaharie packed his flight crew kit with some extra warm clothing, a very bright waterproof torch, a referee’s whistle and his paraglider parachute. If anyone at security asked he’d say – truthfully – that skydiving was his recreational pastime, and he’d heard of a great venue for it, the China GreatSky Skydiving Club at Beijing’s Shahe Airport.

  In this scenario, as in the one outlined in Theory One, 40 minutes into the flight, having sent his co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid back to get him a cup of coffee, Zaharie did a number of things in quick succession. He put on the warm clothing, turned off the ACARS system and the secondary radar transponder, tripped the circuit for the lights in the passenger cabin, put his oxygen mask on, depressurised the aircraft, and made a quick right-hand turn, immediately followed by a sharp and long highly-banked turn to the left.

  Zaharie flew the Boeing 777 back over the Malay Peninsula, made a slow right turn just south of Penang, and set the autopilot on a course on Airway N571 up the Straits of Malacca. By this time all the passengers and crew had fallen comatose from hypoxia, or were dead. He turned the cabin lights circuit back on, opened the cockpit door, and stepped over the body of Fariq, into the passenger cabin. Zaharie then systematically but quickly went through the passengers’ and crew members’ wallets and purses and emptied cash into a waterproof container then into a haversack he’d brought for the purpose – notwithstanding Rina’s inheritance, he’d like to do the right thing and contribute financially to their joint future together. At about 2:30am, when he knew he was out of primary radar range, Zaharie returned to the cockpit, took the plane down to 3000 feet and reduced speed. Seeing the lights of the fishing boat he was expecting, just as planned at the precise agreed coordinates, Zaharie made a pass over it, turned a couple of times and lined up for a second pass heading south, setting the autopilot to head for an imaginary waypoint far away in the southern Indian Ocean.

  Zaharie put a deflated life jacket on along with his parachute, and slung the haversack with the cash, torch and whistle over his head. He returned to the passenger cabin, and opened one of exit doors just behind the wings, after pushing a lifeless flight attendant who had collapsed there out of the way. He waited until he again saw the lights of the fishing boat approaching, and bailed out.

  At the helm of one of her family’s fishing boats, Rina had watched the Boeing 777 pass overhead, kept an eye on the strong beam from Zaharie’s torch as he descended, and set a heading for it. She saw the beam as Zaharie waved the torch in the water, and heard the whistle. Within 15 minutes the love of her life was safely aboard and in her arms, ready to secretly elope overseas to start a new life, the cash from the inheritance secure in the hold.

  As the months and years passed, and in the absence of finding MH370 or any more new fundamental information, the international MH370 club of fascinated addicts of the mystery began a new round of debate about what happened on the aircraft. Some scenarios were pretty wild, some reasonably credible. Some were put forward by people with serious aviation knowledge and experience. When I first started writing about MH370, I received, unsolicited, a number of theories.

  All but the first of them, ‘Rogue Pilot to the End’, outlined after Chapter One, do, in fact, produce the final outcome relied upon by the ATSB for its search strategy: that MH370 finished up as an unpiloted ghost flight, crashing down after fuel exhaustion after flying on autopilot.

  Theory Two ‘Elope by Parachute’, came from a very authoritative source, Qantas’s former manager of flight training, veteran airline captain David Shrubb, who is also a past president of the Australian Federation of Air Pilots and a former board member of Airservices Australia. There is, in fact, a precedent in aviation history for every key element required to make Shrubb’s theory seem plausible. First, the bail out.

  There is only one unsolved case of air piracy in US history, what’s known as the D. B. Cooper hijacking. In Portland, Oregon, on the afternoon of 24 November 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper used cash to buy a one-way ticket on Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, bound for Seattle, Washington. Cooper was the quiet, unassuming type, looking like your average mid-40s insurance agent, wearing a business suit with a black tie and white shirt. Once on board, he ordered a civilised drink – a bourbon and soda. A bit after 3:00pm, he handed the stewardess a note indicating he had a bomb in his briefcase and wanted her to sit with him.

  Cooper showed her what was in the briefcase: a collection of wires, switche
s, red-coloured sticks, and other objects. He threatened to blow up the aircraft if he did not get four parachutes and a $US200,000 ransom – a huge amount of money back then. When the plane landed in Seattle, the man let the passengers and two of the flight attendants off the plane, and officials handed over the money in $US20 bills plus the parachutes. Once the aircraft took off again, Cooper told the pilots to ‘fly to Mexico’ – real slow and real low.

  At some point thereafter, at night, Cooper lowered the rear stairway of the Boeing 727 – one of the few aircraft which had such a feature, which enabled the crew to independently embark or disembark the passengers from the rear. Then Cooper bailed out into the darkness, having left behind in the cabin, neatly on a seat, his clip-on tie – like a calling card. He remains missing to this day, despite an extensive manhunt which the FBI only gave up in 2016. The FBI never conclusively established his identity – it’s not even known if Dan Cooper was in fact his real name – but the media dubbed him D. B. Cooper, and both the name and legend stuck.

  Other elements of the elopement theory also have precedents. At lower altitudes and speeds, the passenger cabin doors of big airliners can be opened, usually for the purpose of clearing smoke and getting fresh air in case of fire. This is exactly what the flight attendants did on South African Airways Flight 295 in November 1987. The Boeing 747 Combi – a special design in which space normally used to carry passengers is sectioned off to carry freight – began the flight in Taipei, Taiwan, bound for Johannesburg via Mauritius. A catastrophic fire broke out in the cargo section, and while the flight attendants fought it, the smoke, through a flawed design in the air circulation system, entered the passenger cabin. Towards the end of the flight, the air traffic control transcript records a pilot telling a controller at the airport in Plaisance, Mauritius:

  ‘Eh, Plaisance, Springbok 295, we’ve opened the door(s) to see if we (can?) . . . we should be OK.’