by Ean Higgins
But the ATSB decided to use the logic the other way round: to exclude the possibility that a pilot flew the aircraft to the end because it would be too expensive to mount a credible search on that basis. Instead, it decided to ‘assume’ the plane was unpiloted at the end.
As will be outlined later in the book, many veteran professional pilots, engineers, scientists and air crash investigators believe the evidence available to the ATSB at the time it first decided on its search strategy pointed most strongly to a pilot flying MH370 to the end and ditching it. They think the ATSB locked into the alternative ‘ghost flight’ and ‘death dive’ scenario irrationally from the start, and possibly, though perhaps subliminally, to avoid offending Malaysia.
Some suggest the ATSB effectively gave that game away in its line that because ‘a maximum glide distance of 100+ NM would result in an impractically large search area, the search team considered that it was reasonable to assume that there were no control inputs’. Once committed at the start to the ‘ghost flight/death dive’ theory, many aviation professionals consider that the ATSB ignored – either deliberately or subconsciously – all subsequent evidence that went against that theory.
The decision to assume no-one was piloting the plane at the end enabled the ATSB to complete its search plan. All the information – the last known position in the Straits of Malacca, the estimates of speed and possible courses from there based on the satellite data, calculations of when the aircraft would run out of fuel – was put into a grand equation. While the point at which the aircraft turned south was still unknown, the analysis of the satellite data narrowed the range of possibilities considerably. All of these elements were fed into the computer, and what spat out at the other end was a band of probabilities along the Seventh Arc. With the help of the Defence Science and Technology Group scientists, the ATSB worked out a probability ‘hotspot’, a sort of bulls-eye where the most likely tracks were concentrated. The hotspot was considerably farther south-west along the arc than determined in the surface search.
The tricky last part of the equation was this: how wide to make the search band along the Seventh Arc. Obviously, the wider the search band, the bigger the chances of finding the aircraft, but there was only a certain budget available, allowing a maximum search area of 60,000 square kilometres at that point. Every nautical mile wider along the Seventh Arc the target area was defined, the less far up and down the arc the search could go.
The ATSB drew up an interesting spreadsheet on this calculation. At one extreme, it looked at what would happen if the width along the Seventh Arc covered the possibility of an absolute maximum 125 nautical mile pilot-controlled glide either way, or a total width of 250 nautical miles. In that case, only 70 nautical miles along the Seventh Arc could be searched – the target area would be much wider than it was long. The ATSB said, ‘these search widths give impractically small search lengths along the arc.’
At the other end, the investigators referred to a study done by the ATSB and the French air crash investigation authority, the BEA, of previous cases where aircraft had plunged down uncontrolled. It found that in the case of an ‘upset’ followed by a loss of control, all the impact points occurred within 20 nautical miles from the point at which the emergency began and, in the majority of cases, within 10 nautical miles.
Eschewing buffers for margin of error, the calculation was made of what a target zone with a width of 30 nautical miles would look like. That produced a very long, very narrow search area going 583 nautical miles up and down the Seventh Arc.
In the end, the ATSB team decided on a formula somewhere in the middle. They used the premise that after fuel exhaustion and with no pilot at the controls, the aircraft would descend and spiral.
The team settled on a search width of 50 nautical miles – 20 to the left and 30 to the right of the Seventh Arc. That division was based on some geometric calculations about the angle at which MH370 would have crossed the Seventh Arc at the end of the flight. It enabled a search distance of about 350 nautical miles, or 650 kilometres, vertically along the arc.
The ATSB produced a map which showed the ‘priority’ search area in orange, along with a ‘medium’ search area in blue, and a ‘wide’ area in grey – the last one representing the sort of search one would do taking in the controlled glide scenario and if resources were many times that budgeted.
With that, Foley was all set to get the ships under his control to the target search area and their towfish in the water as soon as enough of the bathymetric study had been completed to enable them to do so safely.
The deductions looked sound, and confidence was high that Foley and his team would find MH370 – so long as the assumption that no-one was flying the plane at the end was correct.
Byron Bailey had a fair bit of practical experience in areas relevant to the disappearance of MH370.
His more than half century career in aviation involved stints as an air force flying boat navigator, fighter pilot, air traffic controller and Boeing 777 captain. He also taught aerodynamics in the RAAF. Bailey is today a commercial pilot flying various corporate twin-engine jets. So, when it comes to MH370, Bailey told me in an interview, ‘All this stuff that they are talking about, I know that stuff.’
That’s why he couldn’t believe what he regards as the lack of professional aviation knowledge demonstrated by the ATSB, which he attributes to the bureau’s officers not having his sort of experience or expertise.
Bailey was born in the early hours one night in 1944, in Worthing in West Sussex, not too far from the Royal Air Force’s Tangmere air base, amid huge explosions in the distance.
‘My mother told me there was a bombing raid going on – the Germans were trying to hit Tangmere,’ Bailey said.
Seven years later, Bailey’s family migrated to New Zealand as ‘ten-pound Poms’, and he went to a Kiwi school but, he said, in fact ‘spent most of that time building model airplanes’.
At 17, Bailey joined the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a cadet navigator. He spent three-and-a-half years as a navigator on Sunderland flying boats. The missions varied enormously: from searching for vessels in distress, to intercepting Russian whaling fleets. Bailey navigated the last ever military Sunderland flight, from Fiji to Auckland, in April 1967. It had been great fun, but coming to the end of his six-year ‘short service’ commission, he could see the writing on the wall.
‘There is no future in being a navigator,’ Bailey said.
So, like many young men from New Zealand in those years, Bailey ‘crossed the ditch’, and on the first working day after the Christmas/New Year’s break in 1968, headed for the RAAF recruiting office in Sydney.
‘I walked in and said I would like to join the RAAF.’
Next thing he knew, Bailey was in a pilot’s course where he graduated first in flying, and first academically, at Point Cook in Melbourne. By the end of 1968, Bailey was deployed to the RAAF’s Pearce base in Perth to learn to fly the de Havilland Vampire, a distinctive-looking twin boom jet fighter.
Bailey spent a decade in the RAAF, moving from Vampires to Sabres and then Mirages, of which three years were at Butterworth in Malaysia. A highlight of his air force career was performing as a member of the Mirage aerobatic team in 1975. Bailey left the RAAF in 1977; there was a promotion on offer to a desk job, but he wanted to keep flying.
‘I had been passed over several times for promotion because of my rambunctious attitude,’ Bailey said. ‘I was a good flyer, not a good officer.’ To his surprise, at the age of 33, Bailey was ignored by the major Australian airlines on the basis he was too old. Needing a job, he took a five-month course as an air traffic controller, and spent 18 months working in Sydney as a tower and area controller. But it wasn’t for him.
‘I found the whole job way too stressful and demanding,’ Bailey said.
Hanging round the airport, Bailey discovered there was work to be had moonlighting
as a pilot on piecemeal jobs, starting off on a Nomad.
‘Disguising my voice as a pilot when I had to talk to air traffic control, I started building multi-engine hours,’ Bailey said.
He got a full-time job flying a Learjet on night cargo operations for six years, then decided to have another go at landing an airline job. Bailey went back to his native England, re-sat his exams, and flew as a first officer for three airlines, including Dan Air. Then a friend told him about a new airline in Dubai, Emirates.
‘I applied, got in on the 727, and became a captain shortly thereafter,’ Bailey said.
He spent 15 years with Emirates, seven of them flying the Boeing 777. By the time MH370 disappeared, Bailey had 26,000 hours in his log book. Like all professional aviators, he developed an immediate and deep fascination in the MH370 saga right from the start.
‘When it disappeared over the South China Sea I was very interested,’ said Bailey. ‘Then came the revelation of the Seventh Arc – I thought great, they’ll find it fairly quickly. But then the months started rolling by, and the ATSB were publishing absolute rubbish.’
Bailey had no doubt whatsoever that there was only one possible explanation for what happened to MH370: pilot hijack – it was the only scenario where all the pieces of the puzzle fitted together. He assumed the ATSB would come to the same conclusion.
Bailey knew someone in government who had some knowledge of the MH370 investigation. ‘I rang this guy, I said, what the hell is going on? He said, “it’s just a joke – the FBI have supplied us with deleted flight plan information from the captain’s home flight simulator, and they think the captain did it.”
‘I thought great, they are going to announce that,’ Bailey said.
The ATSB made no such announcement – in fact, though the bureau had the knowledge of what the FBI had found, Truss had if anything cast doubt on it at the media conference announcing the search plan.
Bailey was amazed and rang his contact. By this time, though, the ATSB and the JACC had started holding back key information about MH370 and instilling fear in the ranks.
‘I asked him again, and he said, “Please don’t mention me again, one guy here has been fired because he leaked information”.’
That might have been the end of Bailey’s involvement in the fight to reveal the truth about MH370, but for the serendipitous fact he and the then editor of the Sydney Daily Telegraph, Paul Whittaker, were in the same tennis club and got to know each other.
‘I kept saying, this is ridiculous, so he said, write an article, and so I did.’
In fact, Bailey wrote lots of articles on MH370, first for the Daily Telegraph, and then The Australian, after Whittaker moved to the national morning daily as editor-in-chief.
Like other major MH370 stories, Bailey’s features in The Australian went straight onto the top ten most read online list, often going to number one, and stayed there a good length of time. In his articles, Bailey systematically took to task what he regarded as the flawed logic of the ATSB’s reports.
To suggest the pilots could have been overcome by decompression and hypoxia was absurd, Bailey wrote. If the decompression was slow, alarms would have gone off and they would have reacted; if rapid, they would have immediately initiated emergency action according to protocol.
That would have involved rapidly putting on oxygen masks and selecting the transponder setting which would immediately notify air traffic controllers of an emergency.
The flight path of MH370 was also completely inconsistent with the ‘unresponsive crew/hypoxia’ scenario chosen by the ATSB, Bailey said. If the aircraft had decompressed and the pilots lost consciousness, Bailey said the aircraft, which would have been on autopilot, would, like Helios Airways Flight 522, have flown itself to its programmed destination, in MH370’s case, Beijing. But MH370 did not do anything like that – after radio contact was lost, it flew in a deliberate fashion with several turns before the last turn and long track south. Only a pilot could have made that happen.
The ATSB’s reliance on there being no control inputs – changes in course or direction – on the final long leg, Bailey said, was ignorant of the fact that this is standard operating procedure for modern airliners: they are flown almost entirely on autopilot.
Bailey said it’s actually quite difficult to fly a Boeing 777 manually at high altitude, and for this reason, pilots are generally instructed to put the aircraft on autopilot after getting airborne and just a few hundred metres above the ground.
Bailey also argued that the early part of the flight showed a skilled aviator was in control. To alter course several times in such a clearly deliberate manner would require a pilot who knew exactly what he was doing and had a reason to do it.
For all those reasons, Bailey wrote in articles going right back to 2014, the ATSB’s ‘unresponsive crew/hypoxia’ theory simply didn’t stack up.
Now, over the following months and years, the ATSB, initially in off-the-record briefings to journalists, and later in oblique statements to Senate Estimates, seemed to accept that a pilot probably did hijack the aircraft. But the bureau never adequately explained why it concluded that pilot would not, and did not, fly it to the end to make sure the manifest objective of disappearing the plane was achieved. At that point in 2014 Bailey was critiquing what the ATSB had publicly stated in its own precise words: that the ‘unresponsive crew/hypoxia’ general class of accident was the basis for its search strategy.
Bailey was far from alone among professional aviators in identifying the ‘pilot hijack’ theory from pretty much the start as the most likely, and rejecting the ATSB’s assumption to this day that it was a ‘ghost flight’ with no pilot flying it at the end. As will be outlined in later chapters, senior British captain Simon Hardy, who trains pilots on Boeing 777s, did an extensive analysis early on that asserted the only logical conclusion from the known facts was that Zaharie hijacked his own plane and ditched it. Hardy gave extensive briefings to the ATSB, starting in January 2015 and including visits to Canberra and Fremantle, on his findings. He told them exactly where he had deduced Zaharie ditched the aircraft – it was not that far off the target area defined by the ATSB, but the ATSB did not go that small extra distance to search it.
Just four weeks after MH370 went missing, former Malaysia Airlines captain Dick Evans told news media only one scenario ‘ticked all the boxes’. Evans, a Western Australian, was so sure straight up that he sent emails to news outlets. One sent on 9 April 2014 said:
‘Could not the lack of detectable surface debris be consistent with the aircraft making a successful planned ditching at sea when fuel was low and power available, in daylight and without significant damage, but depressurised to allow quicker water ingestion, all exits closed, then sinking intact?’
Undeterred, the ATSB instructed ships to sail to search some of the most difficult seas in the world based on the premise that the professional pilots were wrong, and conversely that the assumption that MH370 was a ghost flight at the end, with no-one flying the plane, was right.
Theory Three: Onboard Fire
About 40 minutes into the flight, having settled onto cruise altitude, MH370 first officer Fariq Abdul Hamid was regaling Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah of his marriage plans.
Fariq’s fiancée was the beautiful Nadira Ramli, whom he had met at Langkawi flying school about nine years earlier; she was a pilot on Malaysia Airlines’ budget rival, AirAsia. Just as Fariq was mid-sentence extolling the many virtues of his beloved Nadira, the left, pilot-side windshield heater caught fire, burning out some circuits including that of the secondary radar transponder and ACARS system. Well trained for such emergencies, both pilots immediately donned their oxygen masks and Zaharie ordered Fariq to turn off the left electrical AC bus to cut power to the short-circuiting heater. In the process, though they were not to know it, the pilots turned off the satellite data unit that makes the electronic handshakes
with Inmarsat.
As Fariq concentrated on controlling the aircraft, Zaharie fought the fire with an extinguisher, both pilots waiting until the immediate crisis was in hand before making a radio distress call. Pilots are trained that radio communication is the third priority in such an in-flight emergency, after flying the aircraft and setting a heading to the nearest suitable airport. The drill is ‘aviate, navigate, communicate’, and Fariq did just that by making sure he had control of the aircraft by making a short initial turn right, then quickly turning back towards Malaysia and setting the autopilot on course for Kota Bharu.
Then, disaster. While reaching with the extinguisher, Zaharie accidentally pulled the tube from his oxygen mask out of its socket. With nothing to stop it, the pilot’s oxygen bottle started dumping the highly flammable gas at a huge rate into the cockpit, creating a violent fire impossible to control. Zaharie, since he was not in his seat, managed to make it out of the cockpit alive, but badly burnt. Fariq, still strapped in, perished in the inferno.
Then the crisis compounded. The fire weakened the bottom of the windshield and dislodged it, leading to the air rushing out of the cockpit and a sharp fall in temperature, putting out the fire. The decompression of the aircraft, still at high altitude, would cause the oxygen masks to drop, providing about 12 minutes of breathing for the passengers – not quite enough time for the aircraft to get over Kota Bharu and enable them to make a mobile phone call.
Zaharie got to one of the portable oxygen bottles and masks available to the crew before hypoxia set in. Once the fire was out, though badly injured but with the help of a flight attendant, he returned to the cockpit, but found a scene of devastation. Apart from killing his co-pilot, the fire had partly, but not completely, gutted the flight deck. Some elements, including the radio, satellite phone and ACARS system, had melted, cutting off all forms of communication.
