The Hunt for MH370

by Ean Higgins

  The many aircraft from many nations whose crews had tirelessly searched the ocean’s surface went back to whatever they had been doing before, as did the ships.

  The JACC itself closed up shop in Perth, and moved to Canberra where most of the federal public servants returned to their regular jobs, while maintaining the coordination role for the next phase of the search.

  It had, the Australian government said, been the biggest maritime search in history. It had involved 345 aerial sorties, 3500 flying hours by 26 aircraft, and 23 ships of nine nations.

  Ocean Shield and Bluefin-21 kept going with the seabed search for some weeks, looking at adjacent areas after covering the original target area based on the four ‘pings’. It made sense to absolutely exclude the possibility that those contacts revealed MH370’s final resting place.

  Eventually, that valiant effort also had to be brought to a close. On 29 May, the JACC issued its last statement on this phase of the hunt.

  ‘Yesterday afternoon, Bluefin-21 completed its last mission . . . no signs of aircraft debris have been found by the autonomous underwater vehicle since it joined the search effort,’ it said.

  The noble vehicle, the private technicians who ran it, and the Australian crew which sailed Ocean Shield from which it day to day went down to the deep, had scoured over 850 square kilometres of the ocean floor looking for signs of the missing aircraft.

  Ocean Shield, the JACC said, had departed the search area and headed home.

  Houston soon went on to his next duty; in July, Prime Minister Abbott asked if he would take up another tough assignment – sorting out Australia’s interests in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine by Russian-backed rebels, in which some 40 Australian citizens and residents perished. The mission statement was for Houston to ‘lead Australia’s efforts on the ground in Ukraine to help recover, identify and repatriate Australians killed in the MH17 crash’. Zielke took over from Houston as chief coordinator of the JACC.

  There was one truly tragic aspect of the ‘pings’ saga yet to unfold. As Houston explained, after some time ‘a different version of the interpretation of the acoustic contacts came through.’

  ‘The ATSB basically got the scientists from the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, as it was then, to also do an analysis on all of the data. Sometime later we got the results back that the scientists determined it was not from a flight data recorder. I understand that what can happen is that the locator can sometimes pick up its own signal.’

  So, the pings which had raised so much promise, and led to such a heroic undersea search effort, were never possibly from a black box; they were from the locator pinging itself. It was the ultimate heartbreak for the hunters on that stage of the grail quest – all that hope, and all that effort, involved in the underwater search had been doomed to fail from the start.

  Despite everything, Houston said he was sure that during the phase of the hunt for MH370 he coordinated, all that could have been done had been done, and more.

  ‘The surface search went on longer than would normally be the case, and that was because of sensitivities from our partners,’ Houston said, without elaborating. ‘When we got to the end point we thought we had done everything we could do.’

  Danica Weeks said of Houston, ‘He was amazing. He just did an amazing job, but he was just tasked with an impossible mission.’

  SIX

  NOWHERE TO HIDE

  When Peter Foley went to sea in 1983 as a young cadet marine engineer with the Australian National Line, it’s unlikely he thought that three decades on he would be in charge of a massive international underwater search to find a missing Malaysian jetliner.

  Foley knew the ocean – before joining the ATSB in 1999, he had 16 years of seagoing experience, and he holds two engineering degrees. With the ATSB, Foley had investigated several of Australia’s big maritime disasters: the grounding of Chinese coal carrier Shen Neng 1 on the Great Barrier Reef in 2010; the Pasha Bulker coal carrier beaching on Newcastle’s Nobbys Beach in 2007; and 2001’s Nego Kim ballast tank explosion off Dampier, which killed eight members of the crew.

  Foley had no illusions about just how hard a hunt for MH370 would be.

  ‘On the surface, it’s a hard place to be for any vessel, with swells of up to 15 metres,’ he told the shipping industry journal IHS Fairplay. ‘When a big blow is coming, you’re out in middle of nowhere and there’s nowhere to hide. All you can do is heave to and pick the best heading.’

  It was a big ask to be assigned the job of finding MH370 where others had failed, but clearly somebody had to take on the task and Foley did have extensive maritime and investigation experience. The boss of the ATSB at the time, chief commissioner Martin Dolan, who would have appointed Foley to the task, was certainly not an expert in the skill sets required; Dolan studied French at university and became a career public servant.

  The new effort to find MH370 was at that stage set as an underwater search along the Seventh Arc roughly 700 kilometres by 80 kilometres.

  Tony Abbott said the project would cost some $60 million, and take about eight months.

  ‘This is so important not just to the families but to everyone who travels by air,’ Abbott said.

  The new mission started to take shape in a series of meetings among the three governments which would combine their resources for the new undersea search: Australia, Malaysia and China.

  On 5 May 2014 in Canberra, Australian Transport Minister Warren Truss called a press conference with his Malaysian counterpart, Hishammuddin, and China’s Minister for Transport, Yang Chuantang, to announce the way ahead.

  After the previous failed aerial, maritime and subsea effort, the idea was to go back to the drawing board and have another look at all the available evidence. Truss said international experts would re-analyse all the data and information likely to identify the path of MH370.

  The search plan, using primarily side-scan sonar ‘towfish’ which are tethered to a ship on a very long cable and don’t have the in-built automatic collision-avoidance capabilities of the autonomous underwater vehicles, required a switch of approach: before the actual searching for MH370 could begin, the seafloor had to be mapped. That way, the depth with which to send down the towfish, and ways to avoid crashing them into undersea terrain, could be established.

  ‘Much of this area has never been mapped,’ Truss said.

  The three ministers made a show of force to drive home the unity of their governments in the task of finding MH370, and to reinforce that they had a determined plan to make it happen.

  ‘What was discussed this morning is very structured, it is very focused, and I believe that we are on the right track,’ Hishammuddin said, adding, ‘there is a sense of urgency.’

  Then it was Yang’s turn to make a prepared statement to the media which he did in Chinese; the translation might have made it even more eloquent than the original – it was certainly promising of all things good.

  ‘During the whole course of the search, the Chinese Government has been sticking to the principles of people orientation, positive participation, and proactive contribution, and maintaining very good collaboration and cooperation with all parties involved, which laid down a solid foundation for continuing the full ops search activities,’ the translator said Yang had said.

  ‘It is my firm belief that so long as we three countries closely collaborate with each other, materialise the joint communique seriously, could we, with our pragmatic work, respond to the great expectations of the international community, provide closure to the families of the people on board, and discharge our duties and responsibilities.’

  As will be canvassed in greater detail in Chapter Eight, for the Chinese government, ‘pragmatic work’ would include using the guise of hunting for MH370 to spy on Australian military activity, security experts believe.

  While Foley k
new the difficult logistics of hunting for MH370 in the wild seas of the southern Indian Ocean, as program director of the ATSB-led subsea search he also realised the most crucial part of the job came before a single vessel dangled its towfish to catch the aircraft: working out where to look.

  That wasn’t easy: there was some data to work with, but, as Troadec had said in one media interview, a lot less than there had been with the infamous doomed flight, AF447. Ultimately, some assumptions had to be made about what happened to the aircraft at the end of the flight.

  Foley had lots of help – an international team of experts from Boeing, Inmarsat, the US National Transportation Safety Board, European aerospace group Thales, the British Air Accident Investigation Branch, and the Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation. That panel was named the ‘Search Strategy Working Group’. On top of that, Foley was able to draw on the expertise of the CSIRO; the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (later ‘Group’), which is a branch of the Department of Defence with some of the best and the brightest scientists and engineers; and Geoscience Australia, which knew how to map the seabed.

  In his public appearances, including before a Senate committee, Foley insists he and his colleagues approached the challenge with dispassionate logic. The starting point went back to the same elements with which the Houston-coordinated surface search had begun: the early military primary radar data showing MH370’s last confirmed position in the northern part of the Straits of Malacca and heading north-west; the Inmarsat metadata of the seven satellite handshakes which provided the band upon which – but not the precise point where – the aircraft had likely ended up; and the calculations of when the plane would have run out of fuel.

  The calculations and re-calculations of these variables had never stopped among the team in Kuala Lumpur and their international advisors, with refinements always being made as new information and interpretation came in.

  The initial job of mapping the sea floor – known as ‘the bathymetric survey’ – got underway almost immediately by deploying the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy ship Zhu Kezhen, though it had to spend a couple of weeks in the Western Australian port of Fremantle repairing its equipment. As will be discussed in the next chapter, Chinese government vessels spent much time in Fremantle, where a lot of Australian naval and special forces activity happens.

  In early June, the Dutch deep-water marine survey company Fugro won the private sector tender for the bathymetric work, and soon after the contract for the actual search for MH370, and its ship Fugro Equator was deployed.

  The two vessels were anticipated to take around three months to complete the bathymetric survey of the 60,000 square kilometre search zone, the JACC, which still retained primary responsibility for media relations, said on 10 June.

  The main equipment on the vessels used for the purpose were multi-beam echo-sounders, which collected the raw data used by Geoscience Australia to produce stunning three-dimensional images of the often dramatic bottom of the Indian Ocean.

  Meanwhile, the ATSB, the Defence Science Technology Group, and the Search Strategy Working Group got down to the task of determining the new target zone.

  On 26 June, the ATSB published a paper outlining in some detail its initial search plan and the rationale behind it, titled MH370 – Definition of Underwater Search Areas. It’s an interesting document – it shows the detective work and logic the ATSB and its allies used to determine where to look, while at the same time admitting the very nature of it made it an imperfect science. It said three factors were important in defining the search area along the Seventh Arc: the position of the final turn to the south from the previous north-west heading along the Straits of Malacca; aircraft performance limitations; and analysis of the satellite communications data.

  Going through each of these issues, the ATSB report noted the last contact from primary radar when the aircraft was heading north-west on airway N571 was at 2:22am. The satellite handshake three minutes later, at 2:25am, suggested it was still on the same track. But, the ATSB determined, the satellite handshake at 3:41am ‘indicated that the aircraft was tracking in a south/south-easterly direction.’

  The problem here is clear: those calculations meant there was no way of knowing, within the one hour and 16 minutes when the aircraft was out of radar range and between satellite handshakes, just when the plane turned south. So, the ATSB said in its report, it had adopted two approaches in its calculations. The first was to just use a range of possible locations for the turn. The second, the ATSB report said, was ‘to analyse the satellite data independently without assuming where the turn occurred’.

  So, the idea was to in parallel work out the whole range of random possibilities, and separately establish what the satellite data itself suggested was the most likely track.

  On the second critical issue, aircraft performance or, essentially, the calculation of when and where MH370 would have run out of fuel, the ATSB report said altitude, airspeed and wind were the important factors.

  The investigators had a couple of solid clues about these variables in the early phase of the flight. The last ACARS transmission from the aircraft, at 1:07am, provided the total weight of the fuel remaining on board. Between then and 2:22am, while the aircraft was being tracked by primary radar, its speed and consequently fuel burn could be estimated. But, the ATSB said, during the period the aircraft tracked to the south, there was no altitude or speed data available.

  While there was wind information available, the ATSB said, that varied against time, altitude and location, so the only reasonable approach was to match it against a variety of possible altitudes, speeds and possible routes of the aircraft. So, again, without the data to determine just when MH370 splashed down along the Seventh Arc, the way forward was, to use a poker player’s term, to work the percentages: rate the probabilities of a variety of different routes and fuel exhaustion times against known data, and identify a probability ‘hot spot’.

  There was, however, another critical line of thinking involved in this determination. This related to a particularly clever part of the sleuth work about what happened to MH370 at the end of the flight. The last few handshakes were of particular interest to the investigators. The sixth handshake at 8:11am was initiated by the ground station and appeared to be the last of the normal, reciprocated, roughly hourly requests from the ground station for an update of data from the aircraft. The seventh handshake eight minutes later at 8:19am was different; it was initiated by the aircraft and took the form of a ‘log-on request’.

  As the ATSB commented, this was highly unusual. It meant the regular communication between the ground station and the aircraft had suffered a disruption, then been restored. There were only a few explanations for such a break, the ATSB said:

  ‘These include a power interruption to the aircraft satellite data unit (SDU), a software failure, loss of critical systems providing input to the SDU or a loss of the link due to aircraft attitude.’

  Analysis showed the scenario which worked best, the ATSB said, was a power interruption to the SDU.

  The modelling of the fuel and aircraft performance data indicated MH370 would have reached fuel exhaustion at about this time, and the engines would have flamed out one after the other. But then, when that happened, as mentioned in Chapter One, after about a minute, the auxiliary power unit, the small jet engine designed to provide power for the aircraft’s basic systems, would have automatically started.

  The ATSB’s theory was that in those eight minutes between the sixth handshake and the log-on request, the engines had flamed out, and since the engines power the electrics of the aircraft, a power interruption would have cut the satellite communication link. But after about a minute, the auxiliary power unit would have had automatically powered up, leading the SATCOM to come back on line, and initiate the log-on request at 8:19am.

  And there was a further key clue in the equation.

 
As mentioned in Chapter One, there had been what the ATSB took to be an earlier break in the satellite transmissions, in that case, it said, most likely when somebody turned off the electrical circuit which powered them, then later turned it back on. That time, the ATSB said, there had also been a log-on request from the aircraft at 2:25am, and about 90 seconds later, ‘communications from the IFE (In Flight Entertainment) system on the aircraft were recorded in the SATCOM log’.

  Then the clincher: ‘Similar messages would be expected after the [8:19am] log-on request, however none were received.

  ‘This could indicate a complete loss of generated electrical power shortly after the 7th handshake. Because the location of the [8:19am] arc is also consistent with estimates of the aircraft range calculated from the remaining fuel quantity provided by the last ACARS transmission, the 7th arc is the focus of the search area.’

  What the ATSB was saying, in its usual diplomatic tones, was that within about 90 seconds from the precise time of 8:19am, something must have happened on the aircraft to stop the satellite data unit from logging on the inflight entertainment system again. The ATSB did not spell it out then – it did a bit more in subsequent reports – but logic suggests two possibilities.

  One is that within those 90 seconds the auxiliary power unit had itself run out of fuel, and power was again cut off to the SATCOM. The other possibility, of course, is that within those 90 seconds, the aircraft hit the water and blew to bits the satellite data unit and everything else on MH370. It meant that within 90 seconds of the precise time of 8:19am, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 was either in its death dive going down, or had already hit the ocean.

  It was good detective work, and hugely increased the ATSB’s confidence that the Seventh Arc marked a narrow band upon which the aircraft went down.