The Hunt for MH370

by Ean Higgins

  They weren’t okay. The pilots tried to make Mauritius, but the plane went down, killing all 159 people on board. The wreckage was found, at a depth of nearly 5000 metres, after a long search using side-scan sonar.

  And when it comes to finding someone in the water in the dark, even a small torch can make all the difference. In the middle of the night of 18 November 2009, pilot Dominic James had to ditch his Westwind twin-engine jet off Norfolk Island because appalling weather made it impossible to find the airport and he was running out of fuel; once in the water, he got his pocket penlight out and shone it into the darkness. Incredibly, a fireman saw the light from shore, and was able to relay directions to a rescue boat, which picked up all six souls from the medical evacuation flight.

  Shrubb’s ‘elope by parachute’ theory includes a motive for why Zaharie would have attempted such a feat. ‘He wanted to leave his wife – quite a big deal for a Muslim,’ Shrubb told me.

  He also posited a motive for why the aircraft was directed to one of the most remote and deep corners of the seven seas, the southern Indian Ocean – it was essential to Zaharie’s plan that it never be found.

  ‘If ever found, it would show no captain on board and a door open,’ Shrubb said.

  That, of course, would have been a problem for the secret elopement.

  Like just about every aviation professional around the world, Shrubb wants the international community to continue to hunt for MH370.

  ‘When it is found we should look immediately to see if the captain is strapped in his seat,’ Shrubb said. ‘If he isn’t, start an Interpol search to find him!’

  FIVE

  A PING FROM THE DEEP

  It was 24 September 1979, and Flight-Lieutenant Angus Houston was on standby as an RAAF search and rescue helicopter pilot.

  He was flying Iroquois from Amberley air force base in Queensland, and down south off the NSW coast it was blowing a gale.

  ‘We were called out because there had been a Mayday call close to a place called Evans Head, which had a bombing range,’ Houston told me in an extensive interview in Canberra.

  ‘The winds were so strong that we had a very low ground speed to get down there. We deployed down to Evans Head and waited for a C130 to get there.’

  The distress call had come from a cabin cruiser, Nocturne II, with five people on board. It had been hit by a large wave and sunk, and those on board had taken to the water. In the afternoon a RAAF P3 Orion came in to join the search.

  ‘Miraculously, they had found them,’ Houston said.

  The Orion crew dropped equipment to the people in the water, and Houston and his Iroquois crew flew out to try to winch up the survivors.

  ‘Because there was so much spray, visibility wasn’t the best,’ Houston said. ‘In order to get to the search area, we were given radar vectors. We said yeah, we got through, we can see the smoke flare. It was extraordinarily difficult to pick up people in the water. We saw them, and one by one we picked them up. There were three survivors, and we picked them up from very heavy seas.’

  Once on board, Houston, knowing there were supposed to be five people on board, asked after the other two. It turned out they had got into a small lifeboat and, the survivors told Houston, ‘we saw them disappearing off very fast downwind’.

  Houston flew a squared ‘S’ shaped search pattern downwind to try to find the remaining survivors.

  ‘I couldn’t find them. It was getting close to sunset and unfortunately we had to return and refuel.’

  The two who took to the boat were found washed up on a beach a couple of days later. They were dead.

  In 1980 Houston was awarded the Air Force Cross for his role in the rescue. The citation said of Houston:

  ‘His display of outstanding skill, resolution and leadership undoubtably provided inspiration for his crew in effecting this most difficult rescue.’

  Houston is one of those classic, old-style Australian gentlemen; a military officer of great competence, decency and devotion to traditional values like honesty, transparency and duty. In 2015, when Prime Minister Tony Abbott reintroduced knighthoods to modern Australia and honoured Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Prince Philip, there was an uproar; but at the same time, he also knighted Houston, and there was not a word of complaint.

  Born in Scotland, Houston emigrated to Australia aged 21, and worked as a jackaroo on a sheep and wheat property in Western Australia before joining the RAAF as a trainee pilot.

  Houston moved steadily up the ranks having flown, and instructed, on a wide range of helicopters and fixed wing aircraft. He flew long range maritime search and rescue missions, and as a senior officer, he helped plan Australia’s military contribution in the first Gulf War.

  Houston served as Chief of Air Force from 2001 and then as the Chief of the Defence Force from 2005. He retired from the military in July 2011.

  For many years Houston was chairman of Airservices Australia which is the federal government authority which runs the country’s air traffic control and airport fire and rescue services.

  I caught up with Houston on a frosty Canberra morning in the winter of 2018 in a small meeting room at the Department of Veterans Affairs. At the age of 71, Houston still serves – he has a role in that department which, one gets the impression, he wants to do but keep low-key. His tall, lanky frame strode in, as usual conservatively dressed in a blue suit, to join me and his media adviser.

  I had had some considerable run-ins with Houston some years earlier when he was Airservices Australia chairman and I was investigating that organisation over, among other things, how the executives (not Houston as chairman) seemed to be paying themselves huge bonuses when financial performance was declining. But Houston felt those encounters were surpassed by a duty to have the history of the search for MH370 most accurately recorded, and that the correct thing to do, on my request for an interview, was to grant a full hour of his time.

  ‘You are writing a book . . . I felt it was important,’ he told me.

  Houston did not want to canvass his views of the different theories of what happened to MH370 – he said that once after giving a public address he had been approached by six individuals who each put a different theory to him. But he was prepared to talk about the maritime, air and underwater search he had coordinated, and that’s what I wanted to hear about from him.

  On Saturday, 29 March 2014, Angus Houston was driving down to Melbourne to deliver a car to his son, when he got a call from Transport Minister Warren Truss. Would he be willing to head up a new federal government coordinating body to find MH370? Houston said yes, he would.

  Houston had had some inkling this might be coming. ‘I got a sense late in March that the government was looking for somebody to coordinate the search,’ he said. ‘On a Friday afternoon I had a bit of a chat with some bureaucrats.’

  The day after the approach from Truss, Sunday, 30 March, Houston joined Prime Minister Abbott, who had been attending to duties in Melbourne, on the prime ministerial plane to Perth, where the new organisation was to be established.

  The transfer of responsibility for the search and rescue operation had shifted to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority almost as soon as the Malaysian government made the request.

  The world’s oceans are divided up under an international protocol into zones for which different countries with coastlines have responsibility for search and rescue. Australia’s is enormous, and it covers that part of the southern Indian Ocean where MH370 was thought to have come down. At a press conference announcing Houston’s appointment to the search coordination role, Abbott said Australia would bear the cost.

  ‘It’s an act of international citizenship on Australia’s part,’ he said.

  Long range Australian patrol aircraft had started flying missions almost immediately, and Royal Australian Navy ships were deployed to the search area. But the feeling in the
federal government was that there were so many moving parts building up – military, civilian, state and federal, and international – that a coordinating body was required to orchestrate the effort.

  So it set up the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, and put Houston at the head of it as chief coordinator. Houston and his team got straight to work when he arrived in Perth – the first job was to set up shop. The best location turned out to be a floor on top of the Western Australian Premier’s department, in the Dumas building. The top floor had been set aside by the state government to be available as an emergency situation room.

  ‘What we did when we got in there is that we configured that big open space. We had desks put in and stationed the communications agencies and liaison officers,’ Houston said. ‘Malaysia had two officers from the Department of Transport. There was a Chinese individual who was a delightful fellow.’

  There were officers from AMSA, the ATSB, the Australian Defence Force, the US Navy and the Western Australian government.

  ‘They were all in a room – that was the means by which we effected coordination,’ Houston said. ‘I was there to coordinate over the top of the whole thing.’

  Houston said the then premier, Colin Barnett, was particularly helpful.

  ‘Barnett said, “whatever you need, if you can’t get it through normal channels, contact me and I’ll take care of it”.

  ‘A key role for the state government would have been if we found the aircraft, accommodating all of the relatives of those lost. Chinese culture is such that the relatives come to the nearest place where the aircraft crashed. They need to be there because this is their way of gaining closure.’

  The aerial and sea surface search was hugely difficult. The search zone was so far away from Perth – between about 1500 and 3500 kilometres – that aircraft spent hours flying to it and flying back, leaving little time on station actually searching.

  Speaking to reporters in Tokyo, Abbott described the hunt as the most difficult in human history. ‘While we certainly are throwing everything we have at it, and while the best brains and the best technology in the world will be deployed, we need to be very careful about coming to hard and fast conclusions too soon.’

  The assets for the search quickly mounted up.

  On 31 March, the day after the JACC officially opened its doors, it issued a press release about the plan for the search that day.

  ‘The Australian Maritime Safety Authority has determined a search area of about 120,000 square kilometres, west of Perth,’ the press release said. ‘Ten military planes – two Royal Australian Air Force P3 Orions, two Malaysian C-130s, a Chinese Ilyushin IL-76, a United States Navy P8 Poseidon, a Japanese Gulfstream jet, a Republic of Korea P3 Orion, a Royal New Zealand Air Force P3, a Japanese P3 Orion – will assist in the search, with a civil jet providing a communications relay.

  ‘Nine ships have been tasked to search in four separate areas. Australian Defence Vessel Ocean Shield departed HMAS Stirling on Monday night.’

  The next day, April Fools’ Day, Danica Weeks decided to have a sticky beak.

  She was working at an office just up the road from RAAF Pearce, and her route took her past the air base.

  ‘I said to myself, you know what, I want to go in there and see what they are doing,’ Danica told me.

  In the three weeks since she put her husband on the plane towards Mongolia only to see him vanish, Danica had continued to try to get a grip on her life and pull it out of the blur.

  She had sent Lincoln to stay with the mother of one of his friends; for days she grappled with how to bring him home and explain what had happened.

  ‘Mum and I, we were just lost,’ Danica said. ‘I needed to bring Lincoln home, but what do I tell him?’

  Apart from a phone call from a volunteer, who had no information, she had no real support from Malaysia Airlines, and only five days later did an airline representative show up on her door, who was sympathetic but not of much help. In the end, Danica hired her own counsellor to help guide her through the next moves.

  At that point, she was employed part time, and after a brief respite she was ‘showing up; when I was supposed to’ even though, she said, she was ‘not really there’.

  ‘Pauly used to come out and have lunches with me . . . it was so surreal, it wasn’t happening any more.’

  Seeing the Pearce air base that April Fool’s Day, Danica decided here was one thing she could practically do – seek more information from those conducting the search.

  After talking her way in, Danica got to one of the top Australian military officers guiding the search, Group Captain Craig Heap, who spent the next two hours answering her questions as best he could.

  ‘In the middle of it I just broke down and I hugged him, and I just said, “I’m just so glad that you are looking for Pauly”,’ Danica said.

  That party-crash had the unintended, but delightful, consequence of hijacking the end of a press conference Houston was holding that day. A reporter said Danica had said ‘the families weren’t being told enough’.

  Houston replied: ‘Well, that’s one of the principal reasons for setting up the Joint Agency Coordination Centre. I heard this morning, I got a call from Group Captain Heap, who’s running the operation out at Pearce that Mrs Weeks had turned up at the gate. He is taking care of her at the moment, and I have told him to give her my phone number and also to give her assistance to get her down to us so that we can fully brief her on what we’re up to and what’s happening.’

  Officially, the operation was a search and recovery mission, looking for wreckage from MH370 and bodies. With the passage of time, Houston observed, it would have been an extraordinary miracle to find anyone still alive and, presumably, clinging to life rafts.

  ‘I don’t think there was any hope for survivors at that stage,’ Houston said.

  As mentioned earlier, the search area had been defined based on the Inmarsat satellite data analysis showing MH370 came down somewhere along the Seventh Arc of automatic electronic handshakes, in the southern Indian Ocean in a band running roughly 1250 to 2000 kilometres west of the coastline of Western Australia. The section of the band to be searched was initially determined by a calculation of several variables indicating when MH370 would have run out of fuel and come down. Those calculations changed over time as new information and analyses came to light, and the target area moved up and down the arc. It was a long band, going from well into the tropics down to south of Perth.

  While AMSA was in charge of the day-to-day direction of the search, and Houston’s JACC responsible for overall coordination, the science guiding where to look was developed by an international collaborative group designated the Joint Investigation Team, based in Kuala Lumpur but including US and UK investigation agencies and their technical advisers, with representatives from China and France. The strategists brought a couple of intriguing elements into the equation, including one which your average individual would probably be unlikely to know even existed. It turns out that there is an international hydrophone system which listens to sounds underwater around the world, including the Indian Ocean, established as part of the United Nations Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation or the Integrated Marine Observing System. The hunters sought and obtained recordings of low-frequency underwater acoustic signals from data loggers and hydrophones off the Western Australian coast.

  Experts at Curtin University’s Centre for Marine Science and Technology and at the Defence Science and Technology Organisation were asked by the ATSB to try to ‘detect and localise underwater sounds that could be associated with the impact of the aircraft on the water or with the implosion of wreckage as the aircraft sank’.

  Incredibly, something did come up.

  ‘One acoustic event of interest was identified that occurred at a time that may have potentially linked it to MH370,’ an ATSB report said. ‘A detailed anal
ysis of these signals has resulted in an approximate localisation for the source that was compatible with the time of the last satellite handshake with the aircraft, but incompatible with the satellite to aircraft range derived from this handshake.’

  So, that novel avenue of inquiry did not yield the resting place of MH370: the signals matched the established time but not the established search zone. AMSA’s search and rescue manager Alan Lloyd later said of the mysterious sonic event: ‘That turned out to be a landslide in Mauritius.’

  Lloyd, speaking at a small Institute of Public Administration seminar in Canberra in 2017 where he and other senior officials involved in the search reflected on the experience, added: ‘It just shows you the level of new technology that was being utilised to try and define which of the routes was most credible.’

  The investigators also considered a few airway routes which intersected with the Seventh Arc in the target zone in the southern Indian Ocean. One airway route, M641, crossed the Seventh Arc quite far north, at about latitude 21 degrees south, above the Tropic of Capricorn. While still no-one knew what happened on MH370, one conceivable scenario was that whoever was flying the plane set the autopilot on a track to Perth on an airway, and M641, which runs from Colombo in Sri Lanka to the Western Australian capital, might just have been it.

  The target area was divided up into sectors, and some sectors subdivided with different colours indicating priorities. It was in the part of the defined priority ‘red zone’ at 21 degrees south that the search was thought best to start. This came from the convergence of the most likely routes MH370 might have flown based on different assumptions of speed, when the aircraft made the final turn south and so on, and where route M641 passed over the Seventh Arc.

  From the start, there were two fundamentally separate elements to the hunt: the surface search for debris and bodies by aircraft and ships, and the below surface hunt for the underwater locator beacons attached to MH370’s ‘black box’ flight recorders.