The Hunt for MH370

by Ean Higgins

  It then became a battle of gruesome desperation and bravery, with a badly injured Zaharie returning for brief periods to the freezing, wind-blasted cockpit to try to regain control, with the aid of the flight attendant. The flight management system was sufficiently intact to set new headings, although the fire had knocked out the auto-throttle so Zaharie could not set it to descend.

  On a dark night, with a smoky windscreen and some non-functioning instruments, taking over manual control would be problematic and risky. As Zaharie flew over Penang he decided to turn north-west up the Straits of Malacca, away from built-up areas, to continue the troubleshooting process, during which time he turned the left electrical AC bus back on, repowering the satellite data unit. But then, with his own and his assistant’s portable oxygen tanks running out, and all the passengers and the rest of the cabin crew either comatose or dead, Zaharie accepted the game was up. He briefly removed his oxygen mask, and told the flight attendant, ‘It’s two of us versus the danger of killing a whole lot of people in a busy shipping channel’.

  Zaharie turned the autopilot to a southerly heading, pointing the aircraft to nowhere in the southern Indian Ocean, and soon MH370 became a ghost flight, again exactly as the ATSB said.

  There are a lot of attractions with this theory, which was put to me by former RAAF supply officer, retired logistics manager with Ansett, private pilot and amateur aviation sleuth, Mick Gilbert. Among other elements, it deals with the sub-mystery of why the satellite data unit was turned off for a time, then came back on.

  There are plenty of precedents of onboard fires. South African Airways Flight 295, mentioned earlier, is one. Another, discussed in more detail in coming chapters, is Swissair Flight 111 which came down in 1998 off the coast of Nova Scotia as a result of a rapidly spreading fire started by an electrical short circuit, killing 229 people. Yet another example, also discussed later on, is the 1991 in-flight fire and crash in Saudi Arabia of a Nationair DC-8 in which 261 died.

  The one which Gilbert focused on, though, was EgyptAir Flight 667, an accident involving a Boeing 777 in Cairo in 2011. The aircraft was, fortunately, still on the ground at the time, rather than in the air on the way to its scheduled destination of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. As the crew were waiting for a late passenger, an oxygen fire, the result of a suspected electrical fault, broke out and spread quickly from a rupture in the tube to the first officer’s oxygen mask. The blaze melted many, but not all, control features in the cockpit. The captain immediately ordered the first officer to leave the cockpit and evacuate the passengers while he fought the fire with an extinguisher, but the damage was extensive. There are photos on the web of the EgyptAir Flight 667 cockpit, showing the blackened features from the oxygen fire with some communications and navigation equipment melted, but others not.

  The ‘Onboard Fire’ theory does rely on a lot of things happening in sequence, but air accidents very often do involve not just one improbable event, but several.

  SEVEN

  ‘GRIEF RETURNS WITH THE REVOLVING YEAR’

  By early October 2014, the secret topography of the southern Indian Ocean had been revealed, the search ships were getting ready to sail, and the ATSB needed a dashing figure to front its new hunt for MH370.

  Paul Kennedy was their man.

  Kennedy was the lean, British-born, Perth-based project director of the Fugro survey group team whose vessels were to lead the next valiant effort to find the holy grail of aviation. The ATSB media unit produced a video, watchable on YouTube, featuring Kennedy on board Fugro Discovery, presumably docked at, or sailing off, Perth. He responded to some questions from an interviewer about the new underwater search for MH370. The remoteness of the search zone in the southern Indian Ocean, and the stormy seas meant the challenge was tough, Kennedy said in the video, shot by Chris Beerens from the Royal Australian Navy.

  ‘We’re more than seven days’ sail from the nearest civilisation, which is Western Australia, so that’s an awful long way if things go wrong,’ he said. ‘It’s rough where we are, it’s terribly rough, so you don’t sleep particularly well, so fatigue is one of our biggest issues offshore.’

  But Kennedy also stressed the sophistication of the search effort.

  ‘The deep tow on board the vessel is called “Dragon”. It’s got three forms of sensors on board. The way I like to make an analogy: it’s got ears, it can listen – that’s the acoustic sensors on board; it’s got eyes, that’s the cameras; and it’s got a nose, it’s got a sniffer – it can sniff jet fuel. People say, will you find it? The answer is: if it’s in the area we’re searching, we will find it.’

  It was derring-do, Boys’ Own stuff, just the message the ATSB wanted to get out there to suggest Australian taxpayers’ money was in the best hands for the task of finding MH370 and its precious black box flight data and cockpit voice recorders. Funnily enough, a bit later in the piece, it was Kennedy who by speaking truth to power caused the biggest single embarrassment for the ATSB – more about that later this chapter.

  The underwater search directed by Peter Foley for the ATSB at the strategic level, and Kennedy at the operational level for the big Dutch-based international underwater survey group Fugro, started with great enthusiasm. No-one could doubt the degree of hard work and dedication of those who designed and supervised the new search, but as Foley told the IPA seminar, ‘the heroes are the guys who are on the search vessel’.

  The bathymetric work had been hard enough, involving Fugro Equator, the Chinese vessel Zhu Kezhen, the Malaysian survey ship KD Mutiara, and two support ships, the Malaysian naval vessel Bunga Mas 6 and the Chinese government ship Haixun 01. The Haixun 01 seemed to have to spend a fair bit of time in port; the 10 September 2014 JACC operational bulletin said it had been ‘stationed at the Port of Fremantle’. The operational bulletin two weeks later said ‘the Chinese support vessel Haixun 01 continued to be stationed at the Port of Fremantle for repairs’.

  While some of the main features of the seabed in this part of the Indian Ocean were known, particularly a massive escarpment known as Broken Ridge, most of it was not. What was discovered, and later released in stunning simulated colours showing elevation, was an extraordinary world of undersea mountains, volcanoes, valleys, depressions and canyons.

  It was going to be very tricky to get the towfish low enough, about 100 metres above the sea floor on its 10 kilometre armoured fibre-optic cable, to perform the sonar imaging without hitting terrain. The autonomous underwater vehicle with its capacity to independently dodge obstacles was going to be crucial for some parts of the search.

  By early October 2014, about 120,000 kilometres of seabed along the Seventh Arc had been surveyed.

  The weather was getting better, so the search ships and their crews readied for action, including the vessel GO Phoenix chartered by the Malaysian government, with equipment and experts from Phoenix International. The JACC bulletin made the low-key announcement on 8 October: the new search was on.

  ‘On Monday, 6 October 2014, GO Phoenix arrived in the vicinity of the search area and, following system checks and vehicle deployment, underwater search operations commenced on the Seventh Arc.’

  Foley had told the IPA seminar his greatest fear was that in the massive seas, someone would be killed. It was a long, grinding job for both the crews out on the water, and the planners in Canberra and Perth. Foley got up early enough to review the sonar reports at 5:30am every day. The JACC team met to discuss the progress of the search each day, with a Malaysian representative present.

  Out on the ocean, the multinational crew of Fugro Discovery worked 12-hour shifts seven days a week, for periods of six weeks. And week by week, the JACC issued its operational bulletins, which reported the coming and going of ships, the difficulties of the weather, the steady rise in the number of square kilometres searched, and the lack of any sign of MH370.

  By the start of March 2015, with the first anniversar
y of the disappearance of MH370 looming, 24,000 square kilometres, or more than 40 per cent of the 60,000 square kilometre target zone, had been searched. The Australian, Malaysian and Chinese governments had always said that while finding MH370 was essential in order to determine what went wrong, as with all air crash investigations, they also said the search effort’s key objective was to provide closure for the families of those lost. The first anniversary was, therefore, a big deal.

  ‘We all got taken down to Canberra, 25 of us, all the rest of the extended family,’ said Danica Weeks.

  The government set up a briefing session, with Transport Minister Truss, Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop and ATSB boss Dolan. Prime Minister Abbott showed up for morning tea.

  ‘I’m firing questions at Martin Dolan,’ Danica said of the briefing session, saying she also engaged in sparring matches with Zielke. ‘Judith has been wonderful, but we do fire each other up. I was asking, what are they doing? There was really no directive of where to search. Did they leave on a wild goose chase?’

  Danica has a favourable impression of how the ATSB dealt with her, and particularly Foley.

  ‘Peter Foley is an incredible man,’ she said.

  After the briefing, the families were then brought into the House of Representatives to hear the speeches. Abbott’s speech, according Danica’s assessment, was ‘weak and nul and void’.

  ‘My pledge is that we are taking every reasonable step to bring your uncertainty to an end,’ Abbott, in remarks addressed to the families, told Parliament.

  But in a remark he probably didn’t really have to add on that occasion, Abbott said, ‘I can’t promise that the search will go on at this intensity forever. But I do reassure the families of our hope and our expectation that the ongoing search will succeed.’

  By contrast, Danica said, opposition leader Bill Shorten’s speech was ‘wonderful’. It was certainly more ambitious. He started out quoting the English poet Shelley.

  Winter is come and gone.

  But grief returns with the revolving year.

  ‘Shelley wrote those words nearly 200 years ago when mourning the loss of his friend John Keats,’ Shorten said. ‘Today, as we pay our respects to the 239 souls lost aboard MH370, we offer our heartfelt condolences to those for whom a year has come and gone yet their grief abides.

  ‘Our hearts go out to you, the people they loved. None of us will know your sorrow.’

  The session finished with a minute’s silence. Then, the families went home, the politicians went back to politics, and Foley went back to reviewing the sonar reports every morning at 5:30am.

  It was pretty monotonous for the search crews, as they made one long pass towing the towfish, then another long pass. It was, Kennedy had said, what the crews called ‘mowing the lawn’. There was, however, the rare moment where something actually happened, like finding a shipwreck. The first such discovery, in May 2015, must have caused huge initial excitement for those on the ship in question, Fugro Equator.

  Foley said in a media statement at the time that the sonar imaging returns, at 3900 metres, had ‘aspects that generated interest, multiple small bright reflections in a relatively small area of otherwise featureless seabed’.

  The autonomous underwater vehicle was deployed for a low-level pass with a camera, and came back with intriguing images of an anchor and a scatter of small, cricket ball-sized black objects taken to be pieces of coal.

  It was a fascinating find, but not what they were looking for.

  ‘On the optimistic side,’ Foley said, ‘it’s shown that if there’s a debris field in the search area, we’ll find it.’

  A second shipwreck was discovered later on, and the clear image of its outline in the strange brass-tinged tones of the sonar imaging was released, showing surprising detail with the ship’s bowsprit, or pole on the bow, clearly visible.

  By April 2015, 60 per cent of the target 60,000 square kilometres had been searched, and the hunt was due to come to a finish by the end of May if MH370 were not found.

  It was a hard one for the governments; no-one wanted to stop the search, but the issue was where to draw the line.

  It was time for the three governments to decide the next move. Truss; the new Malaysian transport minister, Liow Tiong Lai; and Chinese Transport Minister Yang met in Kuala Lumpur.

  The decision was taken to double the search area to 120,000 square kilometres if the existing 60,000 were found to not contain the aircraft.

  ‘Ministers recognise the additional search area may take up to a year to complete given the adverse weather conditions in the coming winter months,’ they said in a statement.

  There was an implied suggestion, though, that this would be the end of the trail.

  ‘Upon completion of the additional 60,000 sq km, all high-probability search areas would have been covered,’ they said.

  The Australian and Malaysian governments agreed they would share the cost of the search – China, even though it had by far the most nationals on the aircraft, would not cough up any cash, but Yang continued the fine words of moral support.

  ‘The Chinese side is ready to stand by, as always, by our fellow friends Australia, as well as our Malaysia friends,’ he said.

  The Chinese also insisted, however, that they were contributing to the search in kind, by supplying vessels. But a bit later on, while reading the weekly JACC search report bulletins, I noticed something a bit odd: the Chinese government ship Dong Hai Jiu 101 almost always seemed to be docked in, or lying just off, Fremantle, not searching. Dong Hai Jiu 101 just kept having extraordinarily bad luck, forcing it to return to port. At one stage it lost its towfish, due, the JACC said, to the ‘failure of a tow cable connector’. Then a crewman was injured, forcing another trip back to port. Eventually, it seemed the boat just gave up and returned to hang around Fremantle.

  ‘Projected weather conditions for the next several weeks preclude the effective deployment of search equipment from this vessel,’ the JACC reported. ‘Dong Hai Jiu 101 will remain at anchor off Fremantle until weather conditions improve.’

  When I put questions to the new head of the JACC, Judith Zielke, who as mentioned took over from Houston after he moved to deal with MH17 in Ukraine, she would not reveal how many days the Chinese vessel had spent conducting actual underwater search operations. (For the record, the battles I had with the JACC, which was clearly suppressing information to the media, only occurred well after Houston left the JACC.)

  Faced with a brick wall from the JACC, I instead did an analysis of weekly operational bulletins, and had it crossed checked by another journalist. The Australian broke the story that, in the more than six months since it joined the search for the missing airliner, Dong Hai Jiu 101 had its equipment in the water looking for MH370 for somewhere between a minimum of 17 days, to a maximum of 30 days.

  Throughout the coverage of the MH370 saga, I went through a three-stage process in trying to establish the truth. The first was to ask the ATSB and the JACC what the truth was. When they would not answer that question, the next stage was to submit an FOI request for that information. If the agencies refused to release the information sought under FOI, the next stage was to report that it had been suppressed, and name the officer who had suppressed it. (Sometimes there was a fourth stage: getting a senator to ask the same officers the same questions in Senate Estimates.)

  The FOI request was made for documents revealing how many days the Dong Hai Jiu 101 had spent looking for MH370. Not long after, The Australian reported the first of many failures by the ATSB and the JACC to be transparent about the search – a document existed, the JACC said, but would be suppressed. The Australian reported that the JACC knocked back the Freedom of Information request, stating that to release the document ‘would cause harm to the Australian government’s relationship with other governments’. The JACC had decided to use the exemption under the FO
I Act relating to ‘documents affecting national security, defence or international relations’.

  So, just what was Dong Hai Jiu 101 doing while its sailors were sitting around, twiddling their thumbs, in or just off Fremantle? According to some of Australia’s leading security experts, the answer is pretty simple: the Chinese ship was spying. Western Australia is home to the Australian submarine base near Perth at HMAS Stirling; the elite Australian army Special Air Service Regiment, also in a suburb of Perth; the Australian Defence Satellite Communications electronic spying station at Kojarena near Geraldton; and the North West Cape naval communications station near Exmouth. The Australian broke the story.

  ‘From my past intelligence experience I would be surprised if a vessel like the Dong Hai Jiu 101 did not have an intelligence collection role,’ said Clive Williams, a former Australian army officer and former Director of Security Intelligence told The Australian. ‘WA is of course a target-rich environment in terms of various Australian defence activities. The People’s Liberation Army Navy has a strong interest in the Indian Ocean where “research” activity is conducted by Chinese ships including its hospital ship, the Peace Ark.’

  Australian Strategic Policy Institute executive director Peter Jennings also said the Dong Hai Jiu 101 ‘would as a matter of routine be noting any activity into and out of Fremantle and HMAS Stirling, which all adds to a database of ship movements and observed capabilities.’ But Jennings said the real value of the Dong Hai Jiu 101’s activities was ‘learning first-world techniques, tactics and procedures’ from Western experts.

  Greg Barton from Deakin University said the ship would probably be spying ‘as a matter of course’.

  ‘Apart from actual intel, it would also represent an opportunity to gauge their signals intelligence capacity in terms of working out what they can pick up at that sort of distance, such as working out how well their hydrophone instrumentation can track submarine movements,’ he said.