by Ean Higgins
When it comes to air crash investigation in Canada, Vance literally wrote the book – several in fact. He was the principal author of several of the TSB’s original investigation manuals – everything from its ‘Site Safety and Biohazard Manual’, and its ‘Accredited Representative Manual’ for foreign investigations, to its ‘Major Investigation Manual/Checklist’.
Vance now runs a private aviation consultancy in Ottawa, HVS Aviation, where among other things he teaches air crash investigation techniques, and accepts commissions from legal firms to investigate accidents. He’s been involved in more than 200 air crash investigations over his career as field investigator in charge. In the 1985 crash of an Arrow Air DC8 with 256 fatalities in Gander, Newfoundland, he conducted studies to determine how airframe icing may have been involved. In 1991, he went to Saudi Arabia to lead the investigation of the operational and human factors involved in the crash of a Nationair DC-8 where 261 died – in that case, a tyre known to be underinflated but not dealt with caused an onboard fire. The plane came down with flaming bodies falling out along the way as the cabin floor collapsed.
The most famous air crash investigation Vance worked on was Swissair 111. It’s one of the best known in the air crash business – that the investigation team found the originating cause was extraordinary; they were working in some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable. Vance was the deputy lead investigator on Swissair 111 and wrote the TSB’s final report on the 1998 crash off the coast of Nova Scotia. He was also the one to give briefings to the families.
‘People accuse me of being insensitive to families,’ Vance told The Ottawa Citizen.
‘I don’t mind taking the question . . . How many grieving families have you talked to after an airplane accident? I’ve done it by the hundreds. Don’t tell me that I don’t have any sympathy. I’ve had people faint in my arms.’
Swissair 111 took off from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport in the evening of 2 September 1998, bound for Geneva with 229 passengers and crew on board. The flight was known as ‘The United Nations Shuttle’ for regularly transporting UN staff from UN headquarters in New York to Geneva which has many UN agencies. About an hour into the flight, the pilots noticed an odour in the cockpit; it got worse, and it was not long before they knew they had a fire on board. Canadian air traffic control offered the pilots a vector to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and they headed for it. But they were too high and had too much fuel to land safely, so the Swissair pilots requested a dump; Halifax controllers turned them around back over open water at St Margaret’s Bay. As Vance described the procedure: ‘Every airport, or at least every “sophisticated” airport, has areas designated for potential fuel dumping. It is not that dumping fuel is particularly dangerous – it typically dissipates before reaching the ground – but it is more logical to dump fuel over unpopulated areas or over water than to do it over built-up areas.’
Minutes later, the fire started to engulf the electrical systems, and one by one they collapsed. Lights progressively went black on the cockpit dashboard as the autopilot stopped working and instruments went dead. The captain went back to fight the blaze, as the co-pilot tried desperately to fly the plane manually. Eventually, all the control systems were knocked out, and the aircraft plunged into a steep dive into St Margaret’s Bay.
The investigation determined the Swissair pilots never had a chance.
‘It turned out that the decision to dump fuel made no difference in the outcome of the accident,’ Vance said. ‘No matter what, once the fire started they had no chance of making the airport because of the speed the fire spread. Given the location including the high altitude of the aircraft that they were starting from, they could not have landed in time.’
The air crash investigation by Vance and his colleagues was long and tedious. When the McDonnell Douglas MD-11 hit the water, it did so at 560 kilometres an hour, at 350 times the force of gravity, and was pulverised into two million pieces. An exhaustive dredging operation, bringing up more and more small pieces, enabled Vance and the other investigators to painstakingly chart the course of the fire. It took five years in all, but the Canadians eventually worked it out.
The fire ignited from an arcing event – a short circuit – in a wire feeding the inflight entertainment system. It was a tiny wire running through the ceiling above the rear of the cockpit, and it chaffed against a metal bracket until its insulating material wore through to the copper conductor.
It was a small short circuit, but big enough to set fire to the nearby metallised mylar insulation blankets, which were very flammable.
The fire spread at a ferocious rate and progressively disabled the plane.
‘We recovered 98 per cent of the wreckage, including over 200 miles of wiring,’ Vance said. ‘From that mass of wiring we found the specific arc that started the fire, an arc that was too small to see with the naked eye. Quite an achievement.’
Vance’s final report made a variety of recommendations, particularly about the lack of wisdom in having insulating material which, rather than retarding fires, accelerated them. The proposals were taken up by the international aviation community – one of the key principles of air crash investigation is that, although it may be long, labour-intensive and costly, finding out the cause of an accident can ultimately make flying safer.
In 2001, Vance and his team received a Government of Canada Certification of Recognition ‘for overwhelming compassion, humanity and dedication to duty in the aftermath of the Swissair tragedy’.
The Swissair 111 investigation was a triumph of meticulous recovery and analysis of aircraft wreckage. While the technical data from the flight data recorder, and the exchanges on the cockpit voice recorder were useful, it was the wreckage which proved the key to unlocking what happened on Swissair 111.
And that’s why, when wreckage from MH370, including a right flap and right flaperon, washed up on the other side of the Indian Ocean, Vance was astounded that the ATSB kept going with its theory that the pilots were incapacitated at the end of the flight and it crashed down rapidly from a high altitude into the sea, just like Swissair 111. Vance saw instantly, comparing photos of the MH370 flap and flaperon with what happened to Swissair 111, that MH370 did not go down in a high-speed crash. The two pieces of the plane were both mostly intact – they would have been smashed into tiny bits had MH370 gone down the way Swissair 111 did.
‘There wasn’t anything remotely big enough or intact enough in Swissair 111 to be even recognisable as a flap,’ Vance said.
But both the flap and flaperon of MH370 had trailing edge damage, consistent with being dragged against the waves when lowered in a controlled ditching. Vance thought the ATSB should have right then and there abandoned its search strategy because, he believed, the premise on which it was based was clearly wrong. But it didn’t: the ATSB continued with it for another 18 months when, according to Vance, it should have known it had almost no chance of finding MH370. As he wrote in his book MH370: Mystery Solved:
‘To me, it is inconceivable that any investigator, or anyone who claims to have investigation expertise, would not automatically think their way through this, and do the calculations. They should realize that the high-speed diving crash theory supported by the official investigation simply does not make sense, based on this evidence alone.’
Vance’s book published in May 2018 had a massive impact on the MH370 debate. But what enabled Vance to get his hands on the high-resolution photographs of the wreckage to make a detailed determination involved another case of a determined journalist pushing the ATSB to reveal the evidence it initially said wasn’t there. Vance explained:
‘The original thoughts about writing the book came when I was preparing material for my investigation courses, where we were coming up with findings that were different from what was coming from the official investigation.’
Ross Coulthart, the Nine Network reporter mentioned earlier who pr
esented the Australian edition of 60 Minutes story in 2016 looking at whether the ATSB’s ‘ghost flight’ theory was wrong, a year later decided to have another crack at it. He wondered if more high-quality images of the MH370 wreckage parts could be found. Those could be shown to Vance, who could use his professional eye to examine them in more detail. While the ATSB had released some photographs of the wreckage, Coulthart suspected there might be more, and contacted the bureau.
‘Initially they tried to tell me that all the photographs I needed were already publicly released, but I said I wanted a copy of ALL the high-res images taken of any of the recovered wreckage confirmed as MH370, assuming, correctly, that they had such images,’ Coulthart explained. ‘I did have to FOI the photographs that Larry used to do his analysis.’
‘It lasted a few months and the ATSB were initially toey on the phone about my request but – to be fair – they did eventually honour the law and they released them – onto their website!’
Coulthart had Vance delve into the photos of the wreckage, looking for what in the air crash investigator trade are known as ‘witness marks’.
‘After the ATSB put those high-resolution photos of the flap section and other wreckage pieces on their website, we were off to the races, investigation-wise,’ Vance said.
What he found further astounded him.
‘I honestly thought that the official investigation would be able to figure it out from that flaperon, and then the section of flap that became available,’ Vance said. ‘When they failed to see the evidence, my team and I put together some pretty extensive technical notes – to be used for the training courses. It was when I was working extensively with those technical notes that I decided that the only way to put the whole mass of evidence together in an understandable way was to put it in a book form – in language that could be understood by most people.’
Vance worked on the book with two of his colleagues who like him had enjoyed long careers with the TSB as air crash investigators and now work as independent consultants: scientist and engineer Terry Heaslip, and aircraft maintenance engineer Elaine Summers.
Ted Parisee, who did the graphics work for Vance’s book, specialises in the study of crash dynamics.
‘Collectively, we have well over one hundred years of continuous service in professional aviation accident investigation,’ Vance wrote.
While Vance corresponded with me over the time he was writing, he kept the totality of his findings intact to be released at a time, and in a fashion, of his choosing, in one hit. That was, Vance said, to be when the search by Ocean Infinity ended, because he did not want to have the book publicly cast doubt on the rationale of hunt while it was still going.
In early May 2018, as it looked like the search for MH370 by Ocean Infinity was approaching its end, Vance executed his media strategy for the release of his findings.
Vance gave me first go at his book, providing a worldwide scoop. On 14 May, The Australian published a news story about MH370: Mystery Solved.
‘One of the world’s leading air-crash investigators has produced compelling evidence that a pilot on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 hijacked his own aircraft and flew it to the end to perform a controlled ditching, contrary to the assumptions of the Australian investigators who led the first failed underwater search for the aircraft.’
The Australian ran two edited extracts from Vance’s book. The main one got to number two on the newspaper’s most read online list, and stayed in the top 10 for more than a day, indicating an extraordinary readership and interest. The main extract, of about 2000 words, meticulously mounted a case that the ATSB had made the wrong assumptions about what happened on MH370 during the latter part of the flight.
Vance wrote straight out that his and his colleagues’ analysis showed the ‘ghost flight’ and ‘death dive’ theories were wrong.
‘The evidence shows that the aeroplane was under the complete control of a pilot throughout the flight, and at the end of its flight, MH370 was intentionally ditched (landed in a controlled way) on the ocean surface,’ Vance wrote.
It was a pretty big call: if Vance was right, it meant the ATSB had blown huge amounts of Australian, Malaysian and Chinese taxpayers’ money. The implication, Vance wrote, was that they should have stopped burning public cash once the flaperon washed up on Reunion.
‘The physical evidence available from examining the flaperon should have proved to the ATSB that the aircraft’s flaps were extended (down) when it entered the water, and that the aeroplane was at a speed consistent with a pilot-controlled ditching.’
Vance knew from the start that he was going to have to prove his case beyond reasonable doubt before a sort of undeclared international tribunal of aviation experts who, as part of the MH370 club, would critically assess it and comment on it via mainstream and social media. The main extract in The Australian outlined the gist of his argument. Vance drew on his direct experience with hundreds of air crash investigations, including Swissair 111.
‘If MH370 had experienced a high-speed diving crash, it would have produced tens of thousands of pieces of floating debris,’ Vance wrote. ‘Only about 20 pieces of wreckage confirmed to be from MH370 have been recovered to date.’
Had MH370 come down the way the ATSB says it did, hundreds of additional wreckage pieces with honeycomb-type construction would have been created and washed up, along with seat cushions, luggage pieces, life jackets, neck pillows and other floating items, and this would have arrived on the coast of Africa in significant amounts.
‘The reason that more floating debris has not appeared is that it was never created in the first place. There was no high-speed diving crash.’
This part of Vance’s analysis tallied with the argument put forward by international airline pilots Bailey, Keane and Hardy: it holds that Zaharie flew the aircraft to the end to ditch it, in order to sink it in as few pieces as possible and limit the debris field.
Vance rejected suggestions by some observers that the flap and flaperon might have fallen off in a high-speed dive as a result of flutter and, drifting down on their own at a lower speed, escaped the more catastrophic damage that would have resulted had they been attached at the time of impact. There would have been signs of repeated pounding on the flap and flaperon in a high-speed diving crash, and there were no such marks found on those parts.
Vance then turned to the parts of the flap and flaperon which did exhibit damage. There was some damage to the flaperon, and the flap, on the trailing edges, that is once again, the rear of those parts when assuming the orientation of the aircraft flying forward. Noting that the flaperon is made primarily of composite material, Vance wrote, ‘we see at the trailing edge that it has been shredded away progressively, from the back towards the front . . . it looks like it has been eaten away, or eroded’.
This did not fit with the theory of a high-speed diving crash, but was fully consistent with a pilot flying the aircraft to the end, flaps extended, to ditch it.
Vance said MH370 would be in a slightly nose up attitude, flying at about 140 knots (259 kilometres per hour), and slowing down. The force of the water contact would rip the engines off very quickly, and the flaps and flaperons would be next, their trailing edges touching the tops of the swells and waves which would erode them, until the entire flap system would be dragged through the water, and ripped off.
The trailing edge damage on the flaperon and the flap, which would have been lowered in parallel, was very similar, Vance observed.
In the book itself, Vance turned to other witness marks of a more complex nature, looking at the high-resolution photographs of the flap, rather than the flaperon. As he pored over the photographs, Vance noticed what were, to a seasoned air crash investigator, interesting potential clues: some cracks, and some smudges. Vance noted that the two parts recovered on the other side of the Indian Ocean, the right flap and the right flaperon, would have been ad
jacent to each other on the aircraft, the flaperon more inboard, but separated by a small gap to allow free individual movement. The two aircraft parts are hollow, with a cavity known as a ‘seal pan’ contained by end plates on either side.
Vance looked at a very clear photo of the left end plate of the flap, which would have been adjacent to the right end plate of the flaperon.
Even a casual observer can detect a V-shaped smudge on the end plate near the trailing edge, a small crack near it, and a large crack in the widest part of the flap near the middle. The cracks were not evidence of puncture, Vance noted, but compression fracture.
To Vance, those witness marks were clear indicators of the direction of the forces involved in the final moments: the flap and flaperon had been pushed into each other sideways, or ‘spanwise’, when the aircraft made progressive contact with the water. While the pilot would have landed wings level, as he lost airspeed one wing – it turned out to be the right – would have dipped and touched the ocean, forcing it back and inwards and causing those cracks as the flaperon impacted the flap spanwise. It provided further evidence, Vance argued, that MH370 had been ditched; the witness marks were consistent only with that scenario, and not a high-speed unpiloted dive.
The smudge marks backed up this assessment, Vance wrote. Fixed to the edges of the flaperon are synthetic rubber ‘rub strips’ which fill some of the gap between it and the flap to improve aerodynamic flow. Vance says it is plain that the V-shape marks on the flap match the shape of the rub strips, and further show a pivoting sideways force pushed the flap into the flaperon when the right wing hit the water.
Vance also came up with an alternative explanation for the damage around the entry hole for the flap support track, which the ATSB claimed indicated the flap was retracted. He believes the damage came about when the support track and the carriage assembly were violently pulled out of the hole in the flap when the extended flap hit the water, and they were left attached to the aircraft.
