The Hunt for MH370

by Ean Higgins

  As the hijacker turned his gun on the sergeant and told him to shut up, the martial-arts instructor jumped to his feet, and grabbed the hijacker in a headlock as the sergeant tried to seize the gun. The gun went off, and the bullet blew a hole in the window, causing rapid decompression. In the struggle the hijacker fell over the seated and strapped-in passengers beside the shattered window and got sucked out of the aircraft, as the oxygen masks dropped.

  The cabin turned foggy from the rapid decompression, and as the hijackers in the cockpit turned their attention back towards the cabin upon hearing the shot, Zaharie and Fariq sprang to their feet and grappled with them. Fariq tore the gun from the hand of the woman jihadist, and shot both her and one of the male hijackers dead. But the other male terrorist shot Fariq, grievously wounding him, and killed Zaharie. Fariq got off one last shot before he collapsed, killing the remaining hijacker.

  It was all over in seconds. The cockpit of MH370 was awash with blood, with two dead pilots, three dead hijackers, and the cockpit door closed and locked as ordered by the terrorists to prevent any counter-hijack attempt. MH370, with the autopilot set on the track south, well away from any mobile phone coverage, flew on. After 12 minutes, the chemically generated oxygen ran out for those passengers who had got their oxygen masks on. A couple of flight attendants had reached the portable oxygen bottles, but after a time they too ran out. MH370 was a ghost flight, exactly as per the ATSB’s theory, crashing down after running out of fuel, but just outside the area searched by only about a nautical mile.

  Among those who like this theory – a lot – is Geoffrey Dell. Dell had an extensive career as a transport accident investigator, before moving to Central Queensland University as an associate professor. To him, this is the only scenario that ‘doesn’t require a string of implausible simultaneous unrelated failures and errors’. Given the pilots’ known penchant for attractive women, Dell said, ‘the would-be hijackers wouldn’t have to threaten a flight attendant . . . just simply include a young woman in the hijack team and just ask for a photo opportunity with the captain on the flight deck.

  ‘If the crew did then find an opportunity to try to regain control of the flight and a fight ensued, it’s plausible that it could easily have resulted in the death or incapacitation of everyone who can fly the aircraft,’ Dell said. ‘Then the [autopilot] would have continued to fly the aircraft.’

  Again, there’s an excellent precedent for this theory: famously, of course, the ‘flight that fought back’ on 9/11, United Airlines Flight 93. The Boeing 757-222 was on its way from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco on 11 September 2001 with 44 people on board when four Al-Qaeda terrorists claimed to have a bomb. Having smuggled box cutters on board, they took over the aircraft, killing the pilots. Flight 93 was the last of the four airliners hijacked that day as part of the monstrous plot hatched by Osama bin Laden.

  After the hijackers, one of whom had learnt to fly, took over the aircraft, some passengers contacted loved ones on their mobile phones. They learnt that New York’s World Trade Center twin towers had already been taken out in airliner murder-suicide attacks, along with a section of the Pentagon, and could see the writing on the wall. A group of them met in the galley, decided the bomb was probably a fake, and resolved to launch a counter-attack against the terrorists to retake the aircraft.

  Armed with cutlery, fire extinguishers and other improvised weapons, and using a drinks cart as a battering ram, they overpowered at least one terrorist, and tried to smash their way through to the cockpit. The cockpit voice recorder was recovered and the transcript revealed the shocking last few minutes.

  ‘Roll it!’ passenger Tom Burnett is heard shouting.

  ‘In the cockpit!’ screams another passenger. ‘If we don’t, we’ll die!’

  At 10:01am, a hijacker shouts, ‘Allah is the greatest!’ and asks another jihadist in the cockpit, ‘Is that it? I mean, shall we put it down?’

  As the passengers continued their ram raid, Flight 93 nose-dived into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, about 20 minutes’ flying time from Washington, DC, where the target was the US Capitol building where Congress was in session that day.

  So, it’s yet another case of fact being at least as strange and dramatic as what might have happened on MH370.

  NINE

  ‘X’ MARKS THE SPOT

  The failed efforts by the ATSB and the JACC to restrict The Australian’s quest to get to the truth of MH370 only made the editors more keen that I should dig deeper.

  The next logical phase for me was to try to get to the bottom of whether the experts on the Search Strategy Working Group had, or had not, supported the ATSB’s ‘death dive’ theory based on the satellite data – was there really a consensus? The revised line from the ATSB was that ‘all the members of the Search Strategy Working Group have reviewed DST Group’s analysis and no objections to the analysis have been provided’. But it is one thing to say there were ‘no objections’, and another to say there was a positive ‘consensus’ that the analysis was right. Which was it?

  The views of the international experts were of critical importance: the ATSB had based its whole search strategy on the premise MH370 ended in a rapid, accelerating, uncontrolled descent, and that assumption was in turn predicated on the interpretation of the satellite data. Once again, FOI was the way to go; either you get the truth, or you can report the truth is being suppressed, and who suppressed it. I asked for ‘the formal responses on this topic from each of the following members of the Search Strategy Working Group: Air Accidents Investigation Branch (UK); Boeing (USA); Department of Civil Aviation (Malaysia); Inmarsat (UK); National Transportation Safety Board (USA); Thales (UK).’

  The ATSB found these documents, no problem. They sent me a letter listing each of them as email exchanges – a dozen in all – with the dates they were sent in July and August, 2016. But while the ATSB found them and catalogued them, they were not going to release them to The Australian because, the ATSB seemed to suggest, to do so might annoy the government of another country.

  ‘I have decided to exempt the documents . . .’ the ATSB’s then general manager of strategic capability, Colin McNamara, wrote, ‘because disclosure of those documents would, or could reasonably be expected to, cause damage to the international relations of the Commonwealth, or would divulge information communicated in confidence by or on behalf of a foreign government or an authority of a foreign government.’

  McNamara also said ICAO Annex 13 investigation standards required that governments not release information ‘unless the competent authority designated by that State determines, in accordance with national laws, that their disclosure or use outweighs the likely adverse domestic and international impact such action may have on that or any future investigations’.

  The wording of McNamara’s letter of refusal said a lot about the mindset of the ATSB. The letter itself said a ‘competent authority’ could in fact release such documents if ‘their disclosure or use outweighs the likely adverse domestic and international impact’. Many would have thought public transparency would have outweighed any niggle about displeasing a foreign government – the documents sought were fundamental to whether $200 million of Australian, Malaysian, and Chinese taxpayers’ money had been wasted on a search based on false assumptions. Many would have also thought that if for no other reason, the documents should have been released to show the ATSB had nothing to hide, and that is exactly what the families of the MH370 victims thought, and said. On the third anniversary of the loss of MH370 The Australian published a story about McNamara’s refusal of the FOI request, naming him as the decision-maker.

  ‘Three years after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared, Australian officials refuse to release related documents because this could damage international ties, apparently with countries including Malaysia,’ the story ran.

  When the families of the Chinese nationals on MH370 read the stor
y, they were outraged, and the association representing them issued a media statement.

  ‘China families of the missing of flight MH370 react with displeasure at the refusal of access under Freedom of Information by The Australian to documents relating to the search for MH370,’ the association’s statement said. ‘Is avoiding offending the Malaysian authorities more important than discovering the truth?’

  For the Chinese families, it was another case where, in their view, the truth was being suppressed and, they claimed, data manufactured to support what they saw as a false conclusion of what happened to MH370.

  ‘The world has been misled into a delay of almost three years,’ the families’ statement said.

  If an FOI request is refused, the applicant has the right to seek an internal review. I did so, quoting the statement from the Chinese families, and asking: ‘Does the ATSB actually know that the members of the Search Strategy Working Group would object to the release of the communications I seek, or does it just assume it?’

  Internal reviews of FOI requests are usually carried out by senior officers, and in this case, the new ATSB chief commissioner, Greg Hood, took it on himself. Hood upheld the rejection of the FOI request by McNamara, but focused more on draconian laws which can put public servants and consultants in jail for two years if they release information about an air crash investigation. Hood’s letter rejecting the FOI request said documents connected with Australia’s assistance to Malaysia in looking for MH370 were ‘classified as restricted information’ covered by subsection 60(2) of the Transport Safety Investigation Act 2003, stating ‘that a person commits an offence if: (a) the person is, or has been, a Commissioner, staff member or consultant; and (b) the person discloses information to any person or to a court; and (c) the information is restricted information’.

  On the face of it, this is pretty extraordinary legislation in a democracy – even in a murder trial, under the TSI Act if a public servant or consultant were called to give evidence under oath and disclosed restricted information about an air crash investigation, he or she could be jailed for two years for doing so. (On the other hand, if for that reason the person called to give evidence refused to do so, they could presumably be jailed for contempt of court.)

  The ATSB website has an explanation of the statutes under which it operates, and says there are some exceptions to the information ban.

  ‘The ATSB has the power to disclose restricted information if he or she considers that it is necessary or desirable for transport safety,’ the website says. The nagging suspicion among the MH370 families is that the net result of the various laws is that the ATSB releases information when it serves its own interests, and does not release it when it works against its own interests.

  The Australian reported on the ATSB’s refusal of the FOI request in April 2017.

  Victor Iannello, an engineer and one of the leading members of the Independent Group of MH370 watchers, also criticised the ATSB’s suppression of the expert opinions on the satellite data.

  ‘Why would the information about MH370 requested by The Australian cause damage to international relations?’ Iannello asked on his blog. ‘With the failure of the underwater search to locate [MH370], it is essential that we reassess what assumptions went into the analysis.’

  At this point, Hood wrote a long letter to the editor posted on the ATSB’s ‘Correcting the Record’ section, in late April 2017.

  ‘It is particularly regrettable that Mr Higgins’ articles have now led to some of the MH370 next-of-kin expressing doubts about the ATSB’s conduct of the search, and by implication, our commitment to finding the aircraft,’ Hood wrote.

  Regrettable for whom, the ATSB? As has been shown and will be shown again, the families and the aviation community have, as interested individuals, used their right of free speech to express doubts about the ATSB’s conduct of the search because it may have been based on wrong assumptions.

  Hood did not stop there: he then went on to issue yet another comment, this time public in the same post on ‘Correcting the Record’.

  ‘You can perhaps now understand why I find Mr Higgins’ approach to attacking the credibility of the search unwarranted. The ATSB reserves its rights not to interact with Mr Higgins,’ Hood wrote.

  There has been some speculation that the ‘consensus’ of the Search Strategy Working Group was a pretty soft one, that the views varied as to whether the satellite data was good enough to really conclude MH370 was in a rapid and accelerating ‘death dive’ at the end. In August 2016 The Australian asked one of the most experienced and respected air crash investigators in the US, former airline captain John Cox who served on many big National Transportation Safety Board investigations, what he thought.

  ‘I do not believe there is sufficient data in the Inmarsat data to draw any conclusion on the rate of descent,’ Cox said.

  Later, Cox expanded on his views.

  ‘The satellite data is very helpful, but the axis of greatest ambiguity is the vertical axis. Therefore, it is difficult to get an accurate descent rate. This is particularly true when looking at short time intervals. At this time I think the satellite data is valuable but not conclusive. It is possible that the airplane descended at rates other than what the satellite data indicates in the last minutes of flight.’

  An Inmarsat spokesman declined to comment, but a source close to the company said it was aware of the debate.

  ‘The data logs from the satellite “pings” do not, in themselves, provide a measure of absolute altitude,’ the source said. ‘The logs are just one of a number of variables (including direction of flight and speed) that the international investigation team has used to determine the most likely flight path.’

  At the Institute of Public Administration seminar in 2017, the man who had led the research into this part of the satellite handshakes, mathematician Neil Gordon, himself spoke of the limitations of the data, saying it only provided ‘vague hints’. Gordon, who heads the DSTG’s data and information fusion group told the audience:

  ‘The key thing to remember: there is lots of uncertainty feeding into this . . . you’re never going to end up with an “X” marks the spot.’

  Referring to the Doppler effect analysis, as mentioned back in Chapter Six, Gordon said there was ‘a piece of metadata attached to this which you can use to give some vague hints about the speed and direction that the aircraft was doing’.

  The ATSB has never answered the key question implied in Iannello’s comments: why is it able under the law to release information from the MH370 investigation which it claims supports its theory of what happened, but not release information which might go against it? The double standard became quite apparent when, in September 2016, as more heat was coming on the ATSB, Foley gave an interview to the Australian Associated Press. He told the news agency Australian analysis suggested the MH370 flap recovered had not been deployed when it hit the water but was retracted inside the wing.

  ‘The rate of descent combined with the position of the flap – if it’s found that it is not deployed – will almost certainly rule out either a controlled ditch or glide,’ he said. ‘If it’s not in a deployed state, it validates, if you like, where we’ve been looking,’ Foley told AAP.

  Now, at that stage, the Malaysian investigation was still underway, the flap was being tested by Boeing, and the official findings about the flap had not been released. The ATSB had clearly decided it wanted to reveal the preliminary information regardless.

  As 2016 entered its last weeks, the ATSB was in a fix. There were only a few thousand square kilometres of the 120,000 square kilometre search zone yet to cover and, as mentioned, in July the transport ministers had said if MH370 were not found in that remaining patch, the search would be suspended unless and until ‘credible new evidence leading to the identification of a specific location of the aircraft’ emerged.

  So, in early November,
the ATSB again gathered the best and the brightest. The Search Strategy Working Group experts were called to a three-day meeting in Canberra. The bureau called it a ‘First Principles Review’, going back to basics on the fundamentals of the hunt thus far. Transport Minister Chester opened the closed-door summit, and issued a statement saying the international panel of experts would ‘inform the remainder of the search effort, and develop guidance for any future search operations’.

  At the opening of the conference on 2 November, the ATSB also released a new report, titled MH370 – Search and debris examination update.

  That report included a few new details from further drift-modelling, debris examination, and satellite data analysis, but in essence purported to reinforce the ATSB’s ‘death dive’ theory and where it was looking. Additional analysis of the burst frequency offsets, the ATSB said in the report, ‘is consistent with the aircraft being in a high and increasing rate of descent at that time’. The wing flap debris analysis ‘reduced the likelihood of end-of-flight scenarios involving flap deployment’. Preliminary results of the CSIRO’s drift analysis indicated it was ‘unlikely that debris originated from south of the current search area’, which tended to go against pilots Hardy’s and Bailey’s proposed target zone.

  Now, the timing, form and build-up to the First Principles Review – not to discount the quality and impartiality of the members of the Search Strategy Working Group – smacked of being a last-ditch attempt by the ATSB to come up with a plan supported by an international panel of experts to continue the search in a new area. It had the aura of providing the scientific-sounding ‘credible new evidence’ the ministers demanded of where MH370 might be found.

  At the time of the meeting, the ABC ran a report in which the journalist said he had talked to sources who told him that was precisely the objective of the First Principles Review – to develop a case for the ATSB to go to the three governments to seek further funding to expand the search area beyond 120,000 square kilometres.