The Hunt for MH370

by Ean Higgins

  This stability had been based on a sort of tacit agreement among the racial groups. The Malays would be first among equals, hold primary political power, and enjoy some degree of affirmative action. But there would be opportunity for all and power sharing. For six decades, that power sharing was orchestrated through the Barisan Nasional coalition, made up of the dominant United Malays National Organisation and other ethnically defined political groupings, including the Malaysian Chinese Association and the Malaysian Indian Congress.

  By 2013, the winds of change were blowing. At elections in May that year, the Barisan Nasional and Najib were returned with the most seats in the first-past-the-post electoral system, but lost the popular vote. Five years after that, Najib and his government found themselves even more out of favour. The government had introduced a deeply unpopular six per cent goods and services tax, and Najib had become mired in a scandal involving billions of dollars in an allegedly embezzled Malaysian state-owned investment fund. Najib strenuously denied any wrongdoing, but the whiff of alleged corruption was in the air.

  Although it would be impossible to measure, some Malaysian political observers also said the loss of MH370, and just four months later, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, might have had some impact on the national mood.

  The two tragedies were, of course, in essence quite different and there is absolutely no common causal link between the two. But they both had the elements of malevolence, bizarre ill fate and lack of closure.

  Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 took off from Amsterdam on 17 July 2014, bound for Kuala Lumpur, with 298 aboard. Three hours later the Boeing 777-200ER – a sister airliner to MH370 – was flying over what was known to be dangerous territory: rebel-held eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists had been fighting a messy war of independence. ICAO had warned airlines of the risks of flying over that disputed patch – just a month earlier, a Ukrainian Air Force Ilyushin Il-76 aircraft was shot down, showing the pro-Russian rebels had anti-aircraft weaponry. Some carriers had heeded ICAO’s warning and decided to avoid the conflict zone, but not Malaysia Airlines.

  At 4:20pm local time, a Buk surface-to-air missile blew MH17 apart, and what was left of the aircraft and the passengers and crew fell to the ground in flames. One passenger was found wearing an oxygen mask, suggesting the horrifying scenario some were conscious for a period after the missile hit.

  International investigators got on the case, and the Netherlands and Australia announced in May 2018 they believed the missile was transported to Ukraine from a military unit in the Russian city of Kursk.

  Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly denied his country’s involvement in the shooting down of MH17; the Russians have come up with various imaginative theories such as that a Ukrainian jet fighter took it out. While international investigators are working on a case for prosecution, Putin’s stone-walling against any suggestion his citizens, or the Ukrainian separatists effectively under his protection, were involved will make bringing the guilty to justice difficult.

  Although the cause of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has yet to be conclusively determined, deliberate human intervention to take the aircraft down trumps any sort of accident such as fire or mechanical failure as the most likely cause.

  Angus Houston, having been involved deeply in both tragedies, observed in my interview with him that five years on, the common element is unfinished business for the families of those lost on MH17 and MH370.

  ‘They have not reached closure yet,’ Houston told me. ‘Both suffered greatly, it’s a very unfortunate sets of circumstances. I hope at some stage MH370 is found, and as for MH17, I hope whoever ordered the firing of that missile is held to account in the International Court of Justice.’

  Neither MH17 nor MH370 could seriously be said to be the Malaysian government’s fault in any direct sense. But some commentators suggested that so close together and in combination, they somehow produced a feeling that while the gods had smiled on an independent Malaysia for more than half a century, something must have displeased them enough to smile no more. When Flight MH17 was shot down, Najib declared the date ‘a tragic day in an already tragic year’.

  At the end of 2014, the Malay Mail wrote in a comment piece that the two Malaysia airline tragedies ‘managed to galvanise a nation torn by the divisive 13th general election the year before, as people came up with independent campaigns to express their solidarity with the stricken carrier and with each other’.

  In 2018 the Malaysian political opposition to Najib got its act together, and in a many ways peculiar, but highly successful move, went back to the future in selecting a leader. That was Mahathir Mohamad, the charismatic but controversial Prime Minister from 1981 to 2003. During those two decades, Mahathir had overseen a period of prolonged and strong economic growth and modernisation, but also a crackdown on civil rights and the media and a campaign of annoying western countries including Australia. When in 1993 Mahathir boycotted an APEC summit in Seattle, Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating called him a ‘recalcitrant’, and Mahathir in turn talked about running a ‘buy Australian last’ campaign.

  At the age of 92, Mahathir came back as the leader of the opposition coalition Pakatan Harapan, heading into the national elections. Even more extraordinarily, Mahathir said that if elected, he would seek a royal pardon for his former deputy with whom he had fallen out and had persecuted, Anwar Ibrahim, and ultimately hand over power to him. You may recall from Chapter One, Anwar was the distant relative by marriage of MH370 pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and was convicted of sodomy hours before Zaharie captained the Boeing 777 into the sky. If, as some suspect, Zaharie had hijacked MH370 as a political protest over the conviction of Anwar, it would be a bewildering closing of the circle.

  There was a big personality element to the election campaign. Mahathir had groomed a young Najib for office, but now called that mentorship ‘the biggest mistake of my life’. While Mahathir and Pakatan Harapan were popular in the polls, election analysts were not convinced they could win because the government had engaged in a redrawing of electoral boundaries which favoured Najib’s coalition.

  The Australian’s South-east Asia correspondent, Amanda Hodge, got an interview with Mahathir during the election campaign, and as an aside, asked if he had any thoughts about MH370. Did he ever. He said he did not think the Najib government had engaged in a cover-up, but he did think the aircraft might have been taken over remotely using technology said to be installed to thwart a hijack.

  ‘It was reported in 2006 that Boeing was given a licence to operate the takeover of a hijacked plane while it is flying so I wonder whether that’s what happened or not,’ Mahathir told Hodge.

  So it was against this volatile backdrop of a sensational election campaign in the first part of 2018 that Seabed Constructor calmly plied the waves of the southern Indian Ocean looking for MH370 with the eight orange autonomous underwater vehicles. By the end of April 2018, the Ocean Infinity search had covered more than 70,000 square kilometres, or two thirds of the total target zone and, again, had not found any bit of an aircraft. The company had kept a low profile, getting on with the job.

  The election on 9 May, was electrifying. Mahathir’s coalition romped in with 121 seats, enough to form a simple majority and take control of parliament. Barisan Nasional’s vote collapsed, leaving it with 79 seats compared to 133 at the 2013 election. It was the first change of government since independence. Mahathir was sworn in as prime minister the next day, making him a role model and pin-up boy for those in their 90s around the world – the oldest national world leader by a long shot.

  Mahathir’s ministers were sworn in over the days after that, and right from day one, the new government started issuing some conflicting remarks about the hunt for MH370. The new transport minister, Anthony Loke, in his first remarks in the role, told journalists his first priority was to find MH370.

  ‘Of course
a major issue for the ministry . . . is to continue searching for MH370,’ Loke said.

  But Mahathir seemed to have a different view – he was worried the Ocean Infinity deal might be another big-spending project of Najib’s that the new government needed to quash, or at least examine.

  ‘We want to know the details of this, the necessity of this, and if we find it is not necessary, we will not renew,’ Mahathir said after chairing his first cabinet meeting.

  ‘We are reviewing the contract and we need to terminate it if not useful,’ he said.

  Loke changed his tune accordingly and, referring to the contract with Ocean Infinity, told journalists hours later: ‘This morning I raised this in cabinet and agreed to extend to 29 May.’

  Asked if that meant no more extensions, he said: ‘Yes.’

  The reality was, though, that it was all a bit academic. By that stage Ocean Infinity had covered its target search area, and its hunt had not found MH370. It was time for the Seabed Constructor to move on to its next assignment. Clake and his British investor mates had made a brave effort at public interest entrepreneurship to solve an aviation mystery, given it their best shot, and blown their dough.

  It had been a noble, private sector venture using brilliant technology which had worked superbly, and shown how such a search could be done expeditiously. In four months, Ocean Infinity had covered about the same amount of territory as the ATSB had covered in more than two years. The company was gracious in announcing the end of its unsuccessful grail quest. In a statement, chief executive Plunkett said:

  ‘While clearly the outcome so far is extremely disappointing, as a company we are truly proud of what we have achieved in terms of both the quality of data we’ve produced and the speed with which we covered such a vast area, the likes of which has not been seen before.

  ‘There has not been a subsea search of this scale and we hope that in the future we will be able to again offer our services in the search for MH370.’

  It had, indeed, been a massive subsea hunt – but again, it had been based on the extension of the theory that the aircraft was unpiloted at the end, and crashed down rapidly after running out of fuel while flying on autopilot. Like the ATSB, Ocean Infinity had not looked in the relatively small search area farther south proposed by Boeing 777 airline captains Simon Hardy and Byron Bailey based on their alternative scenario of a pilot flying the aircraft to the end, and ditching it.

  Just as the Ocean Infinity search ended, an authoritative new independent assessment claimed to have determined once and for all that the ATSB’s ‘ghost flight’ theory was wrong, and the pilots’ claim MH370 ended in a controlled ditching was right.

  ELEVEN

  KING AIR, A WING, A PRAYER

  It was a night training flight out of Ottawa to quiet airspace beyond North Bay on a Beechcraft King Air a couple of decades ago, and Larry Vance was in command with an equally experienced fellow Canadian air crash investigator flying the plane as co-pilot.

  ‘We were about 20 minutes flying time north-west of North Bay, at an altitude of 10,000 or 12,000 feet, when suddenly the airplane started to shake violently, and the right wing dropped,’ Vance told me.

  ‘My co-pilot kept control with left rudder and aileron. The aileron control started oscillating back and forth. We had no idea what had gone wrong, and the shaking was very bad.’

  Vance had a long history flying the King Air, a twin turboprop, including as a trainer for a number of years. One thing he knew about it he found rather disturbing at that moment.

  ‘A sister airplane to the one we were flying had shed a wing a few years previously, and the pilots were killed,’ Vance said.

  As a result, all the King Airs in the Canadian government fleet had had their wings reinforced with a support strap on the wing spars, and Vance’s brain immediately went to a suspicion that the strap on the aircraft’s right wing had given way.

  ‘I remember that when the wing had fallen off the other King Air we had concluded that the initial violent gyrations of the airplane would have broken the necks of the pilots. We comforted ourselves with the thought that at least they would not have had to ride the airplane down to impact alive. While our airplane was still shaking violently, I remember consciously forcing myself to untighten my neck muscles.’

  As the terrifying moments ticked by, the wing was still there, and Vance and his co-pilot decided they needed a plan to keep it that way.

  ‘We decided that we would do everything we could to keep the same flight profile that we were at – the same airspeed and power setting – the same flaps up, gear up configuration – so as not to disrupt anything aerodynamically.’

  After what was probably less than a minute, the shaking, which Vance immediately as a veteran air crash investigator identified as what in aviation is known as ‘flutter’, subsided to something less than what he thought would break the airplane apart.

  The pilots got a clearance and radar vectors to North Bay, and started their descent, keeping their airspeed steady.

  ‘My co-pilot was flying, and I was helping her by pushing on the left rudder, to keep the airplane from yawing to the right,’ Vance said. ‘It took anywhere from three quarters to full rudder, and I remember my leg getting tired so I put both feet on the left rudder to hold it.’

  Vance could have used the rudder trim – a compensation system that would have reduced the pressure he had to use on the rudder – but gut feel told him it was best to leave all the controls as they were.

  During the descent, the severe flutter came back. Vance and his co-pilot were again sure the plane would come apart, but within about a minute, it again subsided somewhat.

  ‘I remember thinking that if that violent flutter were to happen one more time, that would be it.

  ‘We lined up on final and selected the gear down, but we left the flaps up, again with the idea of not changing anything. We briefed about what might happen on the landing, given that we had almost full left rudder applied. The left rudder would mean that the nose wheel would be turned to the left on touchdown.

  ‘In the end, that was a non-issue – as soon as the main wheels touched the runway the shaking stopped.’

  Vance and his co-pilot taxied in and shut down, and went into the terminal building to call back to home base. His bosses sent another King Air over to North Bay to pick them up.

  ‘One thing that I recall is that when I tried to fill in the logbook, to leave it with the damaged airplane, at first I could not get my hand to work to write the information. I remember how weird that felt.

  ‘On the way home in the recovery airplane my co-pilot and I talked it over some. We shared how nice it felt knowing that we were both going home to our families instead of having our TSB comrades trying to figure out what had happened to cause us to crash.’

  Vance’s fellow Canadian air crash investigators did determine the cause of the near-fatal flutter: a bolt holding the rudder trim had broken, allowing the rudder trim to vibrate out of control.

  ‘As it turned out, our decision to not use rudder trim was a good one, because what was causing the severe flutter to stop was that a piece of the broken bolt had aligned itself at an exact position where our constant foot pressure on the rudder was holding it steady,’ Vance said.

  ‘If we had moved the trim, and the bolt had fallen out completely, it might have been game over for us.’

  Vance knows a lot about planes – a lot about flying them and a lot about finding out why they crash.

  So when he saw the ATSB stick with its ‘unpiloted aircraft/high-speed dive’ theory about MH370 when the aircraft’s flaperon and flap were examined, photographed and analysed, he just couldn’t believe it. He felt compelled to write a book, MH370: Mystery Solved, which transformed the international debate about what happened to the aircraft.

  Vance started flying in 1967 at the age of 18 by winning a cov
eted flying scholarship through the Canadian Air Cadet Program. After getting his commercial licence, instrument rating and instructor rating, he worked as a flying instructor for nine years at what was then the Moncton Flying Club in New Brunswick, spending most of that time as chief instructor.

  In 1978 Vance joined Transport Canada, the federal regulator equivalent to the US Federal Aviation Administration and Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority, as a civil aviation inspector.

  ‘TC had its own fleet of aircraft, which included various types of light twin engine aircraft, including light turboprops, and I flew all of those,’ Vance said. ‘They also had DC-3s, and I was a captain on the DC-3 – that ages me, I guess, there are not many of us left.’

  In 1984 Vance, by then an accomplished pilot who had flown for 17 years, joined what was then the Canadian Aviation Safety Board, now the Transportation Safety Board of Canada.

  He was an air crash investigator, but he still flew himself; to get from A to B as part of doing his job and also to maintain proficiency as a flyer.

  ‘With CASB and TSB it was mostly transporting people – including me – to various accidents,’ Vance said. ‘We all did that type of flying, because it was part of keeping our flying currency, which was a job requirement.’

  One of the advantages of this rule was that when TSB air crash investigators, who were pilots like Vance, flew themselves and their colleagues to an accident site, it provided immediate street cred when they stepped out of the captain’s seat to meet airline or other representatives.

  ‘They see you at the controls, and you get out and introduce yourself, and they think, well, this guy is for real,’ Vance said.

  Vance believes in accuracy – he makes clear he was never an airline pilot, though he did learn to fly an airliner.

  ‘The closest I got to flying a transport category was training to pilot proficiency status on the Boeing 737 – I completed a full training course on that aircraft with an airline,’ he said.