The Hunt for MH370

by Ean Higgins

  The story was widely read and drew nearly 100 comments. A commenter named ‘Christopher’ wrote:

  ‘I think it’s time to thank the Chinese very much for their efforts in locating MH370 and escort their vessel with all appropriate pomp and ceremony that should be shown to such a good neighbour and trading partner back to the South China Sea.’

  A particularly amusing element to all this was that the Australian government had hailed the deployment of Dong Hai Jiu 101 as a sign that the Chinese were prepared to put skin in the game, with a press statement thanking the Chinese government ‘for its contribution and the captain and crew for their efforts in the search for MH370’.

  It took them a few days, but the Chinese embassy eventually issued a statement which did not actually deny Dong Hai Jiu 101 was spying, but described the suggestion as ‘wild speculation’.

  A few months later, after doing just a little bit of actual searching for MH370 after The Australian broke the story it had likely been spying rather than hunting, Dong Hai Jiu 101 dropped off its underwater robot in Fremantle and headed home to Shanghai.

  As the hunt for the Boeing 777 registered as 9M-MRO kept drifting along with no result, the international club of MH370 watchers started looking back at earlier theories, including the more mysterious.

  Early on, there had been reports that locals on some tiny islands in the Maldives, an independent archipelago nation in the Indian Ocean south-west of Sri Lanka, had seen a big aircraft flying low soon after 6:00am on the morning of 8 March 2014. Somehow, a year later, journalists decided to revisit the reports, some flying to the extremely remote coral atolls. The Weekend Australian’s national chief correspondent, Hedley Thomas, got to the 60-hectare island of Kuda Huvadhoo, and talked to locals including Abdu Rasheed Ibrahim, 47, a court official and keen fisherman.

  ‘I watched this very large plane bank slightly and I saw its colours – the red and blue lines – below the windows,’ he told the newspaper in a story published in April 2015.

  Even though Thomas was cautious and balanced in his reporting, canvassing countervailing opinions suggesting the aircraft could not have been MH370, the story created a huge stir, being picked up by several British and US newspapers.

  But it got shot down pretty quickly – most effectively by French daily Le Monde’s Asia-Pacific correspondent Florence de Changy, who published a story two months later headlined ‘The Plane which Wasn’t MH370’.

  De Changy observed locals had the mystery aircraft flying in what would have been a different direction from a line from the Straits of Malacca – rather than coming in from the east, they said, it arrived from the north-west.

  De Changy determined there was another island 50 kilometres south-east of Kuda Huvadhoo called Thimarafushi, which had a new airport opened six months before MH370 disappeared.

  On the morning of 8 March 2014, civil aviation records showed a flight touched down on Thimarafushi at 6:33am, a twin-engined De Haviland Dash 8 carrying 50 people. It was operated by Maldivian, an airline whose livery is red, white, and blue, like Malaysia Airlines.

  So, de Changy put paid to the Maldivian option.

  But just a month after her story came out, MH370, or at least a chunk of it, did show up on another island in the Indian Ocean.

  Reunion, about 6000 kilometres north-west of Perth, is one of those tropical Indian Ocean islands east of Madagascar which, like Mauritius and the Seychelles, the British and French kept fighting over during the Napoleonic wars.

  In 1810 the British Royal Navy seized it off the French for a few years, but France got it back under the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and it’s a French overseas department to this day. Reunion is known for its big, active volcano Piton de la Fournaise, its sugar cane and rum, and a rich ethnic mix of descendants from mainland Africa, India, China, Madagascar and France who make up its 900,000 inhabitants.

  It was on a beach on the island’s north-east at Saint-Andre in late July, 2015, that local council worker Johnny Begue and his team of eight had started their regular job at 7:00am of keeping the local coastline clean. Begue had taken his morning break a bit before 9:00am and went for a stroll to look for a suitable stone to grind up some spices. He saw a piece of debris washed up on the pebbles, and realised it had some sort of significance. About two metres long, it had a distinctive curve and length, and there were screws on it that had not gone rusty.

  ‘I knew immediately it was part of an aircraft,’ Begue told the Associated Press. It just didn’t occur to him it might be from the greatest aviation mystery of modern times and help solve it.

  Begue got his workmates to help him bring the thing farther up the beach so it wouldn’t wash away again. The question then was, what to do with this interesting piece of plane? Begue’s initial thought was that he and the blokes he worked with could do something local. Maybe make it into a memorial to whomever it involved – he and the boys could set it on the lawn and plant some flowers around it. Begue resolved to call his favourite local radio station and tell them about how he’d found this thing that looked a lot like a part of a big plane.

  It was pretty soon afterwards that the French gendarmes arrived in force at the beach. They cordoned off the area, securing the piece of debris. The French did not waste any time: keeping it under tight security at all points and the media away, they bundled the piece up and put it on a plane to Toulouse to be examined by a military aviation laboratory. The French and aviation experts around the world had no doubt, once the first few photographs hit the media, what the interesting piece of junk Begue had stumbled on actually was: a flaperon from MH370.

  The possible implications were immediate, obvious and huge.

  If it were a piece of MH370, it meant, conclusively, that the aircraft had come down in the ocean and everyone had to be dead. Those next-of-kin, particularly in China – egged on by conspiracy theorists – who had sadly but understandably held out hope that the plane had somehow flown the other way to land in a remote location in central Asia, would now have tragic solid evidence to the contrary.

  Jayden Burrows, the son of Rodney and Mary Burrows, told News Corp he had struggled with mixed emotions since the plane’s disappearance.

  ‘After 16 months of no information it will be a bit of a relief if it does turn out to be the plane . . . it’s been extremely challenging.’

  In a touching move by the Reunionnais locals in Saint-Andre, that weekend residents held a special mass to pray for all those aboard MH370. Father Guy Hoareau led parishioners at Cambuston Catholic Church in an evening mass.

  Eighteen-year-old student Sophie Ingra said the mass, attended by about 200 people, was a positive move after all the grief for the families.

  ‘It’s important for us to share the bad feelings and look forward with hope,’ she said.

  It took only a week for the French to confirm the piece of debris had been a part of MH370 – it was a flaperon from a Boeing 777 and one of the serial numbers matched 9M-MRO. No doubt the French moved fast, since the discovery was, for all but the most devoted conspiracy theorists, the final proof that the aircraft and the people on board could be no more. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak again took it upon himself to break the news.

  ‘Today, 515 days since the plane disappeared, it is with a heavy heart that I must tell you that an international team of experts have conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris found on Reunion Island is indeed from MH370,’ he told the media.

  The second implication of the discovery was that the working assumption that MH370 had come down in the southern Indian Ocean now appeared sound – the arrival of the flaperon at Reunion was consistent with the pattern of current and drift in that vast body of water.

  The ATSB, which had all the drift-modelling from the surface search, quickly ran through it and issued a statement on its website – it was no doubt happy to do so since it supported its working hypo
thesis. The discovery of the flaperon at Reunion, it said, was ‘consistent with the currently defined search area.’

  The third implication was that the discovery of the flaperon enabled drift-modelling gurus around the world to get to work. These scientists try to work out where things will drift to if you know where they start from, dubbed drift-modelling. Then there is ‘reverse drift-modelling’: working out where objects started from if you know where they drifted to and ended up.

  The ATSB got the experts at the CSIRO to start the reverse drift-modelling exercise, but independently, a European group of oceanographers began such an exercise, as did a team at the University of Western Australia.

  Those were the initial implications, but there were two more which were to play out importantly over time: the French getting their own bit of MH370 and hence a valuable piece of currency in the overall bid to find out what happened to the aircraft; and a new concrete challenge for the ATSB and its ‘ghost flight/death dive’ theory.

  From the start the French had a stake in MH370: four of their nationals were on the flight. Laurence Wattrelos, 52, was returning from a beach holiday in Malaysia with two of her three children, Hadrien, 17, and Ambre, 14. Hadrien’s girlfriend, Zhao Yan, 18, was also on the flight. The teenagers had reportedly been attending the French school in Beijing. The Wall Street Journal reported that Laurence’s husband, affluent engineer and business executive Ghyslain Wattrelos, flew into Beijing from Paris the same day flight MH370 went missing, and was expecting to be reunited with his family. He was instead met by two French diplomats, who broke the news of the missing flight.

  The French had a different and, to many observers, better approach to MH370 than the Australians. Whereas Australian government agencies timidly asked where MH370 might have come down, avoiding embarrassing the Malaysians by making any inquiries about what actually happened on board, the French set themselves the task of determining who or what had killed its four citizens.

  From the start, French authorities treated the disappearance of MH370 as a matter for judicial inquiry into the deaths of Wattrelos’ family group. The flaperon, found on French sovereign territory, was going to be securely held by French judicial authorities to that end, and not turned over to either the ATSB or the Malaysians.

  When it came to the debate of whether MH370 came down in an unpiloted crash, as the ATSB maintained, or was flown to the end and ditched as many in the professional aviation community believe, the flaperon was and remains central.

  Flaperons on airliners sit on each wing, and serve two functions. For take-off and landing, they operate as flaps: the pilots deploy them to configure the aircraft for greater lift and slower speeds. When lowered, they sit in line with the flaps. In cruise, the flaperons serve a different function: they are moved up and down in conjunction with the ailerons to enable the pilots or autopilot to bank the aircraft in turns. A passenger with a view over the back of the wing can see the flaperon move – not much, up and down in cruise flight, keeping the wings level, and at a slightly higher deflection in a turn.

  Even just the photographs printed in the media of what the flaperon had looked like when it was sitting on the beach and then being manhandled by French officials made a number of things abundantly clear. Firstly, it was no longer attached to the aircraft. While that might seem pretty obvious, it meant some force had torn it from its mountings – either in the air or when the aircraft hit the water.

  Secondly, it was mostly in one piece. That became a critical element in the ensuing debate: if the aircraft had come down in a pilotless crash, why wasn’t it smashed to bits on impact?

  Thirdly, the flaperon had clear damage to the trailing edge, that is, the part in line with the back of the wings. Sufficient force must have been applied to do that damage.

  It wasn’t long before one of the world’s leading air crash investigators, Canadian Larry Vance, expressed a view on exactly what all that meant: MH370 must have been flown to the end and ditched. It was, in his view, the only explanation for the pattern of damage to the flaperon, and the fact it existed intact rather than in dozens of tiny bits.

  Vance, about whom a great deal will be said in the later chapters of this book, concluded the only possible explanation for the damage to the trailing edge of the flaperon was that it had been lowered for a controlled ditching, and only a pilot alive at the end of the flight could have made that happen.

  ‘I do some general media here in Canada to do with accident investigation, and when I was asked about the flaperon that was recovered from MH370 I expressed my opinion that it proved that the flaps were extended, with all the ramifications of that regarding the intentional act,’ Vance said.

  Vance maintained that if the aircraft had come down in a high-speed dive, all its hollow component parts including the flaperon would have been exploded into dozens of pieces by the hydrodynamic force, and not left pretty much intact. Conversely, the trailing-edge damage was only consistent with it having been lowered with the flaps by a pilot, and dragged through the water on ditching, before being torn off altogether, he said.

  The search kept going, the ships ‘mowed the lawn’, and each week the JACC put out its operational bulletins on the progress. By December 2015, 75,000 square kilometres of the expanded 120,000 square kilometre target zone had been covered. That month, the ATSB issued a report which explained some of the continuing work which had been done, but also, between the lines, tried to defend the assumptions that had been made in using the ‘unresponsive crew/hypoxia’ scenario as the basis for the search strategy.

  In a section titled ‘Ditching Considerations’, it said: ‘A controlled ditching scenario requires engine thrust to be available to properly control the direction and vertical speed at touchdown and to provide hydraulic power for the flight controls including the flaps.’

  As per its previous report, the December report said the analysis of the satellite data unit transmissions suggested the aircraft had run out of fuel.

  ‘This evidence is therefore inconsistent with a controlled ditching scenario,’ the ATSB said.

  But this was one of several aspects of the ATSB report the former fighter pilot and Boeing 777 captain Byron Bailey took to task as being wrong and, he claimed, the sort of conclusion a government agency might come to if it did not have professional pilots familiar with the aircraft advising it. Bailey pointed out that with the automatic deployment of the auxiliary power unit, after both engines flamed out, the flaps could still be lowered.

  Famously, one of the first things Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger did when he lost both engines in flight and had to ditch his aircraft in the Hudson was tell the first officer, Jeff Skiles, to start up the auxiliary power unit which, among other things, enabled him to lower flaps.

  After the famous interchange where Sullenberger told air traffic controllers ‘we’re gonna be in the Hudson’, the transcript specifically refers to the flaps being down.

  ‘Got flaps two, you want more?’ Skiles asked Sullenberger in the minute before landing on the river, referring to the second of several options for how far to deploy the flaps.

  ‘No, let’s stay at two,’ Sullenberger said.

  Sullenberger did exactly what the ATSB report said could not be done after dual engine flame-out on MH370: he lowered the flaps and conducted a controlled ditching, in his case getting all 155 people on the aircraft off it in one piece.

  In January 2016, now writing in The Australian, Bailey again dissected the ATSB’s search strategy, and repeated his claim that he had been told by a government source that the FBI had found evidence that Zaharie had ‘flown’ a similar flight to the southern Indian Ocean on his home computer simulator.

  When I put that to the ATSB, its MH370 spokesman Daniel O’Malley said:

  ‘The ATSB cannot comment on the accuracy of an alleged conversation . . . the ATSB is not responsible for the investigation of the accident; t
hat . . . belongs to the Malaysian government.’

  The ATSB, and Transport Minister Truss, did their best to marginalise Bailey, the former writing an extensive piece on the ‘Correcting the Record’ section of its website, and the latter writing letters to the editor of The Australian.

  The ATSB set up its ‘Correcting the Record’ site in June 2015 to attack critics in the media of its hunt for MH370, and of 11 posts over the next two years, all but two of them related to MH370.

  The ATSB maintained its line that ‘for search purposes, the relevant facts and analysis most closely match a scenario in which there was no pilot intervening in the latter stages of the flight’.

  It was not just The Australian that started asking questions as to whether the ATSB was looking in the right place. On ABC radio, ATSB chief Martin Dolan was asked by reporter Sarah Dingle: ‘So is it worthwhile, then, changing the search parameters to consider whether the pilot deliberately took MH370 down?’

  Dolan said: ‘We have certainly considered that as a possibility; all the evidence we have at the moment says that that is very unlikely.’

  The problem for the ATSB was that if its ‘ghost flight/death dive’ theory was right, surely it should be able to find MH370?

  The months passed, and it didn’t. There was a bit of excitement here and there, such as when one of the search ships lost its towfish when it crashed into an underwater mud volcano. It was recovered in early February using a marine robot that plucked it from a depth of 2550 metres. Mostly, though, the gruelling, monotonous business of hunting for MH370 continued without spectacle – but the debate about whether the hunters were looking in the right spot heated up. After seven years as ATSB chief commissioner, Dolan retired in the first half of 2016. He was replaced on 1 July that year by Greg Hood, who had started out a career in aviation as an air traffic controller in the RAAF. Hood, who held glider and private pilot licences, had been head of air traffic control at Airservices Australia before moving to head up the ATSB.