by Ean Higgins
By the start of July 2016, Foley’s team had searched 110,000 of the 120,000 square kilometre target zone.
Then, all at once, the public relations war shifted against the ATSB.
The ATSB’s efforts to steer around Bailey’s claim that the FBI had found the critical flight simulator data on Zaharie’s computer, and that Australian investigators had known about it, were blown out of the water. New York magazine revealed it had obtained a secret Malaysian police report on the findings of the FBI analysis of the hard disk drives on Zaharie’s flight simulation computer, which showed waypoints for a simulated flight eerily similar to the zigzag route MH370 actually took. The simulated flight, conducted only a month or so before MH370’s disappearance, also flew up the Straits of Malacca to the Andaman Sea, then took a sharp turn south before ending in the southern Indian Ocean.
New York magazine quoted one excerpt from the report that showed investigators regarded the find as significant: ‘Based on the Forensics Analysis conducted on the 5 HDDs obtained from the Flight Simulator from MH370 Pilot’s house, we found a flight path, that lead [sic] to the Southern Indian Ocean, among the numerous other flight paths charted on the Flight Simulator.’
Then, around the same time in July, there was another blow to the ATSB’s effort to defend its ‘unresponsive crew/hypoxia’ theory.
The news agency Reuters reported the ATSB’s pin-up boy, Fugro’s Paul Kennedy, now thought the whole premise of the $200 million search had been wrong from the start. The way Reuters reported it, Kennedy had decided the ATSB had erred in determining the search area based on its ‘ghost flight’ and ‘death dive’ scenario.
Reuters reported Fugro now thought it had been ‘scouring the wrong patch of ocean for two years.’ Kennedy said he now believed the ‘rogue pilot’ theory, in which a fully conscious pilot glided the aircraft down to the sea, was probably right after all.
‘If it’s not there, it means it’s somewhere else,’ Kennedy told Reuters. ‘If it was manned, it could glide for a long way. You could glide it for further than our search area is, so I believe the logical conclusion will be, well, maybe that is the other scenario.’
Kennedy went into specifics of the ‘other scenario’; he said a skilled pilot could glide the plane approximately 193 kilometres from its cruising altitude after running out of fuel.
The Reuters story went viral – like other big new breaks on MH370, everyone ran it. It can still be found through a Google search on the ABC News website, dated 21 July 2016, headlined, ‘MH370 may have been gliding in its final moments, leaving wreckage outside search zone, experts say’.
As a case of biting the hand that feeds, it doesn’t get better than this. For about 18 months the ATSB had been fighting a running battle against senior airline pilots including Bailey, Hardy and Evans who had promoted the theory that Zaharie hijacked his own aircraft and flew it right to the end and ditched it in a deliberate effort to disappear it. Meanwhile, the ATSB and Transport Minister Truss had consistently described the controlled glide scenario as ‘very unlikely’ and stuck to the bureau’s preferred ‘unresponsive crew/hypoxia’ end-of-flight model.
So now, the ATSB’s $200 million action man, Kennedy, seemed to be siding with the enemy – Bailey and the other pilots – in supporting the ‘rogue pilot to the end’ theory. To make matters worse, the story came out just a few days before ministers from Australia, Malaysia and China were to meet again to discuss the next move.
Fugro went into full PR damage control mode to try to mitigate the distinct impression implied by Kennedy that the pilots were right all along.
‘Fugro wishes to make it very clear that we believe the search area to have been well defined based on all of the available scientific data. In short, we have been thoroughly looking in the most probable place – and that is the right place to search,’ Fugro said in a statement.
The statement did not, however, claim Reuters misquoted Kennedy.
Between Kennedy’s suggestion that the ‘pilot hijack’ theory was right, and the confirmation of the FBI discovery of the simulated flight, Bailey claimed he had been vindicated and that the ATSB and Truss had been hiding the truth for two years while sledging him.
‘How is it that a taxpayer-funded government department can be so devious?’ Bailey asked in The Australian.
By late July 2016, with only about 10 per cent of the designated search area of 120,000 square kilometres yet to be covered, the three governments backing the search had to decide what their next move would be if that were completed and the aircraft not found. It was a tough call, and as the country officially in charge of the investigation into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, and the one putting up the most money to find it, the Malaysian government held the whip hand in making it. While Malaysia is no longer a poor country, the government faced a dilemma in whether it could write a blank cheque in the hunt for the aircraft when that money could otherwise go to, for example, schools, health or economic development.
The government’s new Transport Minister, Liow Tiong Lai, brought his counterparts together in the Malaysian administrative capital of Putrajaya on 22 July. At the end of the meeting, Liow announced the verdict at a press conference: ‘In the absence of new credible evidence, Malaysia, Australia and China have collectively agreed to suspend the search upon completion of the 120,000 kilometres.’
‘I must emphasise that this does not mean that we have given up on locating MH370. If there are any new credible news, or credible new evidence, we will continue to work together,’ he said. ‘The families and loved ones of the passengers and crew of MH370 remain a priority.’
The new Australian Transport Minister, Darren Chester, said every effort had been made to find the aircraft with the best minds and the best technology.
‘This decision has not been taken lightly nor without some sadness and we want to emphasise our work is continuing.’
The final stage of the ATSB-led hunt was caught in a pincer movement of governments saying they had to find MH370 within the remaining search area or call it quits, and more and more independent observers saying they were not finding it because they had the wrong theory of what happened.
Then commercial television, and its huge popular impact, weighed in against them. It was one of the Nine Network’s star reporters, Ross Coulthart, on its flagship program 60 Minutes Australia, who started putting all the pieces together that the ATSB might have got it wrong with its ‘ghost flight/death dive’ theory. Coulthart had watched an episode of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s nightly news show The National, and on it was Vance talking about the flaperon and what it meant. Coulthart immediately appreciated the international implications.
Here was one of the world’s most experienced and applauded air crash investigators who, if correct, had pointed out the elephant in the room missed, or ignored, by the ATSB. Coulthart decided to do a story for 60 Minutes on Vance’s findings and other aspects of the MH370 debate.
By this time, there had been a few other major developments. The discovery of the flaperon by chance by Johnny Begue on Reunion prompted huge interest among the official investigators, but also the international club of MH370 devotees, as to whether other parts of the aircraft might have washed up. Some members of the MH370 families, but others who were not next-of-kin including the high-profile American lawyer Blaine Gibson about whom more will be said later, started campaigns to recover them by visiting countries on and off the south-east coast of Africa. In May 2016, the rear edge of the left outboard flap was found and recovered on an islet off Mauritius.
The following month, an even bigger and more significant part of the aircraft, the right flap, was discovered on Tanzania’s Pemba Island, mostly intact, and was sent to the ATSB for analysis in Canberra. Again, dates and letters and numbers enabled a conclusive determination it was from MH370. The flap showed trailing edge damage very similar t
o that of the flaperon.
Coulthart’s story aired, prime time, on Nine on Sunday, 31 July. It quoted Vance saying, in stark terms, the ATSB’s ‘ghost flight/death dive’ assumption was wrong.
‘Absolutely. Somebody was flying the airplane at the end of its flight. Somebody was flying the airplane into the water,’ Vance said.
Coulthart went through the FBI findings that Zaharie had practised a similar flight on his home simulator. He brought out the details of the evidence of the flap and flaperon. He also interviewed Danica Weeks, who said, ‘If you look back over the last two-and-a-half years and the actions of the Malaysians, it just tells me that they are hiding something. Something is not right here. I have been patient. I have given them the benefit of the doubt. For me the gloves are off now.’
Coulthart, a fellow aggressive journalist I’ve known since we were both young reporters covering NSW state politics in the 1980s, had not lost his touch. He grilled Foley, asking him if, in fact, he had known all along about the FBI finding that Zaharie had practised a death flight to the southern Indian Ocean on his home flight simulator.
Coulthart: You don’t deny the existence of that report, do you?
Foley: Absolutely, it exists.
Coulthart: We have it here.
Foley: Yeah, yeah.
Coulthart: We found a flight plan that leads to the southern Indian Ocean.
Foley: Mmm. Correct.
Coulthart: As a taxpayer, who has seen an enormous amount of money spent on an investigation – not least the victims – I would want to know about this report, showing that the captain tracked a flight path into the southern Indian Ocean. Don’t you think the public has the right to know this?
Foley: I think, as we would strongly argue, it should form a part of the final report.
Coulthart: What about the interim factual analysis, why wasn’t it put into the interim factual analysis?
Foley: That’s a question for the Malaysians, Ross.
Incredibly, Foley admitted to Coulthart – while he was still directing the search on the basis that no-one was flying the plane at the end – that the French analysis of the flaperon suggested the contrary.
‘We have also seen some analysis from the French that suggests that it’s a possibility that it was in a deployed state,’ Foley admitted.
Then Coulthart asked, ‘Doesn’t the visual evidence on the flaperon suggest that the flaperon was extended?’
Foley responded, ‘Yes.’
It was extraordinary. Coulthart had got Foley to admit, effectively, that a key part of the evidence suggested the ‘ghost flight/death dive’ theory was wrong. But the ATSB stuck with the search plan, regardless.
The reaction of the ATSB and the JACC to the adverse media was to suppress what families of those lost thought should have been public information, in what was a clear attempt to sideline journalists who sought to unveil the truth about their likely errors in the hunt for MH370.
EIGHT
AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
Daniel O’Malley sounds just like what Americans call ‘a regular guy’.
He has a solid American accent, and is well spoken and courteous, even to the point of calling journalists, or this one anyway, ‘Mr Higgins’. He ends conversations with, ‘Thanks for your call, Sir, good to hear from you,’ even when you’ve been corresponding with him for years. In fact, O’Malley is a dinkum Aussie who went to Canberra Grammar School. But he spent time in the US, graduating with a master’s degree in medieval history from Ohio State University.
When I was researching a story on US-born then NSW Premier Kristina Keneally’s failed bid to lose her Toledo, Ohio accent in favour of an Aussie drawl through speech lessons, speech experts explained that some accents are dominant, and the American accent is one of them. Australians who go to the US pick up the American twang and can’t easily lose it when they return; but Americans coming to Australia keep their American accent and can’t learn to speak ‘Aussie’.
So, O’Malley, like Keneally, is stuck with talking Yank.
O’Malley’s an accomplished science-fiction writer – his first novel, The Rook, was released in 2012 and won the Aurealis Award that year for Best Science Fiction Novel. But O’Malley’s day job was as media officer for the ATSB, and for a period he had the specific title of spokesman for the MH370 search.
O’Malley had started off with a helpful, bright and open approach to journalists when it came to MH370. To my eye, in the US he had acquired not just an American accent but an American view of democracy: that government agencies and those who work for them have a duty to serve the public and release information about what the government, paid for by American citizens, is doing. O’Malley was initially very cooperative and tried to release as much information to me as he reasonably could.
But by the time his second novel, Stiletto, came out in 2016, things were starting to get a bit hairy. The ATSB was coming under serious pressure about whether its ‘ghost flight/death dive’ theory was right. There were suggestions, denied by the bureau, that some within its own ranks were having second thoughts – the alternative theory of a controlled ditching put forward by more and more professional pilots and some air crash investigators was gaining sway in the media.
It’s not hard to see from where O’Malley got some of his inspiration for his novels. One reviewer wrote of O’Malley’s ‘mixture of characters with superpowers and bureaucratic paranoia’.
As the pressure grew on the ATSB, O’Malley and his colleagues in the media unit found themselves having to dodge questions about MH370 – not of their own choosing, of course, but because the bureau would either not pass information on to them, or order them not to pass it on to journalists.
The flight simulation revelation from Zaharie’s home computer was a classic. When New York magazine broke the story of Zaharie’s simulated flight, opposition transport spokesman Anthony Albanese told The Australian the government had a duty to the families of the victims to explain what information it had. Instead, the ATSB failed to reveal the existence of the flight simulation, then downplayed its significance, saying it showed ‘only the possibility of planning’.
The degree to which the ATSB, and then Transport Minister Truss, had obfuscated in June 2014 when the flight simulation death flight story first came out was starkly revealed much later, by the bureau itself.
It had received the information right at the time the FBI did the analysis in early 2014, took it seriously, and used it in considering where a ditched aircraft might be found. The admissions came out in the ATSB final report on the search, released in October 2017. It admitted that ‘data from the Pilot-in-Command’s (PIC) home flight simulator was recovered and analysed in March/April 2014. This information was provided to the ATSB on 19 April 2014.
‘Six weeks before the accident flight the PIC had used his simulator to fly a route, initially similar to part of the route flown by MH370 up the Straits of Malacca, with a left-hand turn and track into the southern Indian Ocean. There were enough similarities to the flight path of MH370 for the ATSB to carefully consider the possible implications for the underwater search area.’
O’Malley could have said that on 8 January 2016, when I asked about it, but he either wasn’t told or was instructed not to discuss it. Clearly the full facts did not fit the ATSB policy of: trying to discredit Bailey and other critics of their search strategy; sticking in lockstep with the Malaysians in not releasing information; and downplaying the possibility of pilot hijack.
The new key to defending the ATSB’s working proposition that MH370 ended up in a ‘ghost flight’ and ‘death dive’ was the interpretation that the satellite data suggested a rapid and accelerating descent. It was all based on eight seconds of data.
The work on the Inmarsat automatic electronic ‘handshakes’ with MH370 had kept going, even as Foley’s undersea search continued. The Defence Scie
nce and Technology Group had been looking at the last log-on request from MH370’s satellite data unit at 08:19:29am. It was followed eight seconds later, at 08:19:37am by a log-on request acceptance – the return of the handshake from the ground station to the satellite and back to the aircraft. The team led by an eminent mathematician at DSTG, Neil Gordon, used the burst frequency offset analysis to see what those two signals said about whether the aircraft was in level flight, or ascending or descending. Gordon’s team came to the conclusion the aircraft was descending at a rate of between 2900 feet per minute and 15,200 feet per minute when the Seventh Arc was crossed. Eight seconds later the rate of descent had increased to between 13,800 feet per minute and 25,300 feet per minute.
The ATSB concluded in early 2016 that such rates of descent ruled out a controlled unpowered glide with the intent to extend range. But Bailey and other professional aviators said this rate of descent could easily be explained by a pilot wanting to point the nose down on fuel exhaustion to avoid a stall, rapidly descend to a warm and breathable level, and get out of the early sun at altitude. Additionally, other aviation experts said that, while they believed the satellite data was solid in establishing the Seventh Arc, they held doubts about its reliability in measuring ascent or descent.
The ATSB decided it had to do something publicly to suggest this element was right, and that others thought so. So, it turned once again to those it had hailed – rightly – as the best and the brightest, the experts of the Search Strategy Working Group. The JACC bulletin of 27 July 2016, sought to discredit the increasingly popular ‘controlled ditching’ theory, saying that ‘for the purposes of defining the underwater search area, the relevant facts and analysis most closely match a scenario in which there was no pilot intervening in the latter stages of the flight’.
