The Hunt for MH370

by Ean Higgins

  ‘Australia is understood to be using the meeting to put together the best scientific thinking, along with a sound and reasonable business plan that will make it impossible for Malaysia and China to back away from,’ the ABC claimed.

  It was another case where the ATSB denied the story, and again used the ‘Correcting the Record’ section of its website to say the ABC had published ‘misleading media reporting on the First Principles Review into the search for MH370’.

  The suggestion that the purpose of the meeting was to mount a new bid for funds and to continue the hunt and make it impossible for China and Malaysia to resist was ‘not correct’, the ATSB said in ‘Correcting the Record’. ‘This is not the purpose of the meeting and the agenda is not to expand the search area,’ the ATSB said.

  Well, guess what. The First Principles Review came up with a plan to expand the search area by 25,000 square kilometres farther north along the Seventh Arc, which would have required a further injection of funds and the support of Malaysia and China. The report of the review sounded pretty much like a spruik for a renewed search, saying it had ‘identified a remaining area of high probability between latitudes 32.5°S and 36°S along the 7th arc’.

  That report was published on 20 December 2016. At that stage, the search of 120,000 square kilometres was nearing its end by a matter of weeks. But sources have suggested that by this time – as the ABC report implied – the ATSB was fairly confident, based on the optimism expressed in the First Principles Review that the aircraft lay to the north, that the three governments would approve continuing the hunt. The feeling at the ATSB was said to be that the ministers would regard the findings of the report to be just that ‘new evidence’ they said they needed to extend the search.

  The ATSB confidently mapped out the new 25,000 square kilometre search zone in its December report.

  To the ATSB’s surprise, and the disappointment of the families and the international aviation community, the governments didn’t budge. In mid-January 2017, the last ship on the ATSB-led hunt for MH370, the Fugro Equator, pulled in its towfish for the last time, and headed back to Perth, ending the search. A few days later, Liow and Chester visited the vessel in port, and held a media conference. They stuck to the script of the July meeting: the search would not resume without a new breakthrough. Liow said his government needed ‘more empirical evidence before we move to the next search area’.

  Hood was present and it was pretty clear from his body language that he was, quite understandably, a bit upset to have had to announce the ATSB had failed, and that the governments had decided to not proceed to the new target zone identified by the Search Strategy Working Group. Asked why the ATSB wouldn’t expand the search area further north, he said, ‘That’s a question for the governments’.

  ‘It’s highly likely the area now defined by the experts contains the aircraft but that’s not absolutely for certain,’ he said.

  Hood later said ATSB would have liked to continue searching to bring closure to the families.

  ‘Everybody wants to do the right thing – everybody’s got hopes,’ Hood said. ‘Having met a number of family members personally, they continue to have protracted and prolonged grief. I’m profoundly sorry for these people.’

  I arranged to have the following question asked of Hood at the press conference by Victoria Laurie, one of The Australian’s reporters in Perth: Was it time to revisit theories that one of MH370’s pilots had hijacked the plane, piloting it to the end? Hood repeated the usual line: analysis of the wing flap suggested it was retracted, and the satellite data had shown a rapid rate of descent ‘which is suggestive of the aircraft not being in control at the end of the flight’.

  The ATSB had spent $198 million of taxpayers’ funds: $115 from the pockets of Malaysians; $63 million from Australians; and, notionally, $20 million from Chinese – Beijing’s main contribution was the supposed cost of the deployment, mainly in Fremantle, of the suspected spy ship Dong Hai Jiu 101.

  An interesting question is whether Hood and Foley regret they did not search all of the relatively small area that the highly experienced Boeing 777 captains Simon Hardy and Byron Bailey identified as being where MH370 would be had Zaharie flown it to the end and ditched it. Hood did not respond to that question when I put it to him in late 2018.

  Hardy had given the ATSB every opportunity to explore his theory of where to look. He told me he spoke ‘at length’ to the ATSB in January 2015, and visited Foley and his colleagues in Canberra and Fremantle in May 2015 and again in May 2016. He said he ‘continued exchanges until end of search in January 2017 and beyond’.

  Had Foley directed that the search vessels cover about 7000 more square kilometres based on the alternative theory that Zaharie had glided the aircraft (or taken it down with engines just turning over) about 100 nautical miles farther across the Seventh Arc, he and Hood would have won either way. Had they searched those 7000 square kilometres and found MH370, they would have been heroes. If it were not found, they could have put paid to Hardy and Bailey by saying they had looked where they suggested and it wasn’t there.

  But to do that, the ATSB would have had to at least implicitly, and perhaps publicly, say it believed a serious possibility was that a Malaysian pilot hijacked a government-owned airliner and flew 238 people of diverse nationalities to their death. That was perhaps politically a bridge too far at least at that time, so that alternative 7000 square kilometres where the senior pilots believe MH370 lies remains unsearched to this day.

  Next, it was up to the private sector to have a go at finding MH370.

  TEN

  NO CURE, NO FEE

  At first glance, upper-crust Englishman Anthony Clake would seem an unlikely candidate to want to set up a Texas-based underwater survey company and risk about $100 million to try to find MH370.

  The fact he did reflects the powers of addiction to the mystery and the urge to solve it.

  Clake studied philosophy, politics and economics at Queen’s College, Oxford. He then went to what Britons call ‘the City’, or the financial markets hub in London, where he was instantly acknowledged as a wunderkind. He joined hedge fund Marshall Wace in 2001 and was co-developer of the Trade Optimised Portfolio System (TOPS) which somehow sorts through investment ideas to pick winners. He was made partner in 2004 and was among those to benefit in 2015 when US private equity firm KKR bought a 25 percent stake in Marshall Wace.

  By 2017, and at the tender age of 37, Clake was filthy rich, and could spend a fortune on things and causes that interested him. Clake made news in 2017 when he reportedly gave £50,000 to a 23-year-old fashion student to spend on supporting the Brexit campaign (he was perfectly entitled to do so).

  Clake and some other British investors somehow developed a fascination with marine undersea survey technology and, as you do if that’s the case and you are swimming in pounds sterling, they decided to not just learn about it and follow it as a hobby, but put hundreds of millions of dollars into setting up a company to do it. That company is Ocean Infinity, based in Houston.

  Ocean Infinity’s website describes the company as ‘ocean explorers mapping the unknown’.

  ‘We go to unmapped locations to survey the seabed using the most advanced fleet of autonomous vehicles in the world,’ it says.

  Clake and his well-heeled mates decided they needed someone to run the show, and chose another unlikely Brit with a posh accent, Oliver Plunkett, to be chief executive of Ocean Infinity. Plunkett told me in an interview he is, by profession, a barrister, but somehow worked out that what he really likes to do is negotiate big deals.

  Ocean Infinity’s owners decided it would be fun to try to find MH370, and sent Plunkett to talk to the Malaysian government with the aim of doing a deal to make it happen. He did, and as a result, in January 2018 a futuristic scene was played out in a remote swath of the southern Indian Ocean in a new quest to find the Boeing 777 registere
d 9M-MRO.

  An impressive but somewhat bizarre-looking ship with a massive helipad perched over its bridge and a gigantic crane on the rear deck stopped dead in it tracks. One after another, the crew launched eight orange torpedo-like unmanned mini-submarines. And with that, a new, audacious capitalist bid to find MH370, after the previous search run by Australian bureaucrats failed, was on.

  The people who work for Ocean Infinity are a crack international team of engineers, information technology gurus, hydrographic surveyors, underwater robot submarine experts and others. The company’s shareholders took a big gamble on their own ability. A few months earlier Plunkett had put a juicy offer to the Malaysian government. Ocean Infinity proposed to launch a new hunt for the aircraft on a ‘no find, no fee’ basis – the Malaysian government would agree to pay a sizeable sum if the company found it. But if no wreckage was found, the owners of Ocean Infinity would have gone to all that effort for not a penny’s compensation, and have blown their dough.

  Malaysia’s talkative Deputy Transport Minister Abdul Aziz Kaprawi had given some indication of the size of the deal. The government’s cabinet, he said in October 2017, had agreed ‘to prepare a special allocation to the Ministry of Transport amounting to between $US20m and $US70m if MH370 aircraft wreckage is successfully found within 90 days’. The sliding scale of reward was based on where the aircraft was found – $US20 million if it were discovered in the first section of the search plan agreed with the Malaysian government; $US70 million if it were tracked down in the last section.

  So keen were the people who run Ocean Infinity to get started they ordered the captain of the vessel they had leased, the Seabed Constructor owned by the Swire group, to set sail from Durban in South Africa for the new search zone, even though a final contract with the Malaysian government had yet to be signed.

  David Griffin, a CSIRO drift-modelling scientist, met the Ocean Infinity people in London, where a lot of the company’s brains are located, to brief them on where he thought they should look.

  ‘It’s a very impressive organisation,’ Griffin said. ‘They have got terrific equipment.’ Ocean Infinity planned to deploy eight top-of-the-range autonomous underwater vehicles at a time on independent search missions, enabling it to scan the seabed for MH370 much faster than in the ATSB search. Just as the new search was about to begin, Plunkett granted me an exclusive interview. On the way from its last port of call in Durban, Plunkett said, the crew and scientists had conducted some trial dives.

  ‘We have had some pretty good results, as far as I can tell, a dive down to 5800 metres, which is pretty cool,’ he said.

  Ocean Infinity is a pretty serious mob. Putting them side-by-side against the search led by the ATSB, what Ocean Infinity was doing made the previous hunt look like kids’ stuff. Where the ATSB-led search had used at best three ships at a time, each with a single towfish or autonomous underwater vehicle, Ocean Infinity used eight AUVs simultaneously. Ocean Infinity also had the option to guide the AUVs using eight robot surface boats, but in the end decided they were not required. The issue, however, was this: no matter how sophisticated the technology, one is unlikely to find what one is looking for unless one has the right strategy of where to look. Plunkett more or less said as much:

  ‘I think assuming all of the aviation analysis is right, then I think we have a realistic prospect of finding it.’

  The search strategy for Ocean Infinity was, in essence, pretty simple: look progressively farther north up the Seventh Arc from where the ATSB search had finished its failed hunt. The plan had been developed in conjunction with the client, the Malaysian government, the ATSB and the CSIRO drift-modelling experts. The first area to be searched would, in fact, be the 25,000 square kilometres to the immediate north of the ATSB’s original 120,000 square kilometres where it looked for, and didn’t find, MH370.

  Since the first search, a lot of new work had been done by the drift-modelling gurus. Helping them do so was the fact that more and more bits of MH370 had been found washed up on the other side of the Indian Ocean, some by the aforementioned Blaine Gibson, who had become a sort of self-styled Indiana Jones figure.

  Gibson, an American lawyer, spent three years combing beaches of Africa and islands off it looking for pieces of MH370, often sporting a hat very much like the fedora worn by actor Harrison Ford when he played professor of archaeology Henry Walton ‘Indiana’ Jones in the swashbuckling films. Gibson, who worked with locals in various countries to find debris from the plane, loved the sense of drama and mystery he said surrounded his quest. In an interview with The West Australian in 2018, Gibson said he encountered intimidation, stalking, death threats, defamation and assassination as he walked the beaches.

  ‘For whatever reasons, some people are very upset that I and other private citizens are finding pieces of the plane,’ he told the newspaper.

  There was at least one really murky event that certainly did happen. In 2017, Houssenaly Zahid Raza, the Honorary Malaysian Consul in Madagascar, was gunned down in the capital Antananarivo in an apparent assassination. Raza had been due to deliver what were claimed to be more pieces of MH370 to investigators in Kuala Lumpur. The assassination fed suggestions from Independent Group blogger Victor Iannello among others of a dark conspiracy to stop MH370 wreckage being recovered. However, others speculated that Zahid, of French Malagasy ethnicity, was murdered as a revenge for yet another bizarre plot: his alleged involvement in the 2009 abduction of several residents of Indo-Pakistani descent. At the time of writing, an investigation into Zahid’s death was still underway.

  By 2017, 18 pieces of MH370 had been identified as being ‘very likely’ or ‘almost certain’ to originate from MH370, with another two assessed as being ‘probably’ from the aircraft. These are shown overleaf.

  FIGURE 7: ITEMS RECOVERED THAT WERE IDENTIFIED AS VERY LIKELY, ALMOST CERTAIN OR PROBABLY FROM MH370

  © Ministry of Transport Malaysia

  The ATSB relied on the fact that some items were from within the fuselage, and that the debris indicated ‘there was a significant amount of energy at the time the aircraft impacted the water’ to conclude the pattern was ‘not consistent with a successful controlled ditching’.

  However, those who support the controlled ditching theory insist there is no suggestion on their part that it would leave an aircraft wholly intact – rather, it would break into a few main chunks which would sink, leaving some debris but far less than in an uncontrolled high-speed crash. This is what happened to Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, a Boeing 767 which was hijacked on 23 November 1996, en route from Addis Ababa to Nairobi. The three Ethiopian hijackers ordered the captain, Leul Abate, to fly to Australia where they intended to seek asylum. Abate told them it was impossible, the aircraft did not have anywhere near enough range, but the hijackers ignored him.

  The aircraft ran out of fuel and Abate ditched it just off a resort in the Comoros Islands off the eastern coast of Africa. There is spectacular vision on the web of the cartwheeling aircraft breaking up. While 125 of the 175 passengers and crew on board along with the hijackers died – many because they inflated their life jackets prematurely and it made it more difficult for them to get out – Abate was still praised for saving as many lives as he did.

  The value of the wreckage to the drift-modellers was in where all the bits of it were found. It was, in fact, over quite a wide geographical area, from the southern tip of South Africa up to an island off northern Tanzania, and also including Mozambique on the African mainland, plus the islands of Madagascar, Reunion and Mauritius.

  FIGURE 8: THE ITEMS FROM MH370 WERE RECOVERED FROM MOZAMBIQUE, TANZANIA, SOUTH AFRICA, MAURITIUS, MADAGASCAR AND REUNION ISLAND

  © Edi Sizgoric

  Also of significance was where debris was not found: not one piece was discovered in Australia even though there were many efforts to track some down. According to the drift-modelling expert David Griffin,
this actually restricted how far south MH370 could be, because at a certain point south debris would have been expected to have washed up on Australian beaches.

  Relatively early on in the piece, drift-modellers working independently from the CSIRO came to the view the ATSB was looking too far south. The Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change in Italy, and scientists at the University of Western Australia, working separately from each other, both said it should have been clear to the ATSB early on that they should have moved their ships much farther north.

  The University of Western Australia scientist who led that institution’s independent drift-modelling study, Charitha Pattiaratchi, said as soon as the flaperon was discovered in July 2015, it was pretty obvious the ATSB was looking in the wrong place.

  ‘We got time on the supercomputer in Perth, which is the fastest computer in the southern hemisphere,’ Pattiaratchi explained. It showed clearly that the aircraft must have been farther north, because it would have taken another three months for the flaperon to get to Reunion had it started as far south as where the ATSB was searching.

  ‘We said that in September 2015,’ Pattiaratchi said.

  It took the ATSB another 15 months to come to the same conclusion, during which time it had stuck to its original search strategy focusing on the southern band of the Seventh Arc. That was the call of the ATSB; it does not discount the fact CSIRO drift-modellers had been doing a lot of very sophisticated work over that time.

  The trick with drift-modelling, it turns out, is that items of different shape, size and weight drift differently with the same winds and ocean currents. The drift models have been developed from US tracking buoys over 30 years, which may not move the same way or speed as parts of an aircraft wing like a flaperon or a flap. So, the CSIRO built some Boeing 777 flaperon replicas and cut them down to resemble the damage found on the one discovered on Reunion. The researchers also got their hands on a real Boeing 777 flaperon, and set them all adrift with radio transmitters off Tasmania, beside free-floating buoys. The goal was to see how differently a damaged flaperon drifts, and refine the model to get a more accurate picture of where the starting point lies. The ATSB released the new drift-modelling in April 2017, and said, ‘We are now even more confident that the aircraft is within the new search area identified’.