by Ean Higgins
‘Australian investigators have defended their search . . . saying it was unlikely the pilot performed a controlled ditching,’ the Australian Associated Press reported.
By contrast, the Chinese official news agency Xinxua’s headline was: ‘Australian search chief admits MH370 “rogue pilot” possibility.’
It wasn’t long before Foley’s testimony before Senate Estimates started to be dissected by the professional aviation community. The curious new line from Foley about a pilot suffering from high altitude ‘decompression sickness’ was branded a red herring by, among others, Mike Keane, who told me: ‘Suffice to say that “altitude sickness” is totally irrelevant to the MH370 event.’
Bailey said, ‘I have done explosive decompressions in the RAAF pressure chamber and experienced an actual event in a fighter at 40,000 feet but never had any decompression effects.’
Simon Hardy countered the claim that the ATSB had fully explored the area farther south off the Seventh Arc that he and the other pilots had recommended. ‘Mr Foley tried to accommodate my workings by going 42 nautical miles and not 100 nautical miles,’ Hardy told me. ‘When I visited the ATSB in May 2015 I was aware that the offices were five miles from Canberra airport. Had I tried to accommodate Mr Foley by going only half of that distance, I would not have found the ATSB. In the same way, Mr Foley has not found MH370.’
Vance suggested the idea that MH370, with no pilot in control, somehow managed to land on the water, wings level, at a comparatively low speed so that the flap and flaperon managed to remain largely intact, was absurd. The chances of an out-of-control spiralling aircraft being in that precise attitude just when it arrived at the surface of the ocean were infinitesimal, he said, but in any event, the logic of the phugoid would not make it possible for it to be at low speed. The high-speed dive portion of a phugoid cycle would indeed be followed by a climb and slowing of airspeed, but the aircraft had to go down fast to build up speed before it could come back up, and it could not come back up once it hit the water.
‘Foley’s scenario of the aircraft being on the slowing, climbing part of the phugoid cycle at the end would require it to go underwater first, and then fly up underwater back to the surface,’ Vance said.
Apart from the Senate Estimates appearance, the ATSB did not publicly take any steps to further counter the material exposed by Vance. What it did in the shadows to try to suppress media coverage was extraordinary.
In the days after The Australian published extracts of MH370: Mystery Solved, the newspaper ran follow-up stories with comments from, among others, Mike Keane, saying it was time for the ATSB to accept Vance’s theory was right. Otherwise, the former easyJet chief pilot alleged, Australia would be part of an overall international failure to do everything possible to get to the truth of what he claimed was on circumstantial evidence a mass murder.
Again, as usual, I gave the ATSB the chance to comment on Keane’s claims before going to press, and again, as usual, it passed up the opportunity. But behind the scenes, the reaction of the ATSB to this and other stories in the wake of Vance’s book was its most extreme to date. At considerable expense to Australian taxpayers, the agency hired a big-end-of-town legal firm to issue warnings to the editors of The Australian.
‘Our client requests that you refrain from publishing any further articles regarding this incident or our client without first considering the concerns raised in this letter, particularly with respect to naming individual employees,’ MinterEllison wrote to the editors and the newspaper’s legal counsel in a letter dated 18 May 2018. In particular, the law firm expressed concern that Sadler, who signs his emails as the ATSB’s Senior Media Advisor, and Foley, who has appeared before public Senate Estimates committee hearings as head of the search for MH370, were named in the articles as not commenting.
The reaction of the editors of The Australian was, once again, to reject the warnings from the ATSB and its lawyers, and instruct me and other reporters on the newspaper to write more, harder stories to reveal the truth about MH370 and the role of the ATSB, the JACC, and their officers.
In late October 2018, The Australian revealed these failed efforts by the ATSB to restrict the newspaper’s coverage using MinterEllison to issue warnings to the editors.
Accompanying the news story was a comment piece by Byron Bailey, who wrote that the bureau’s ‘attempts at using high-priced lawyers to suppress coverage of its failures in its search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 are a disgrace, and a threat to the democratic principles of free speech and press freedom’.
Bailey called on Transport Minister Michael McCormack to ‘hold the ATSB to account.’
Businessman and aviator Dick Smith, himself a former publisher who established the highly successful magazine Australian Geographic, described the repressive behaviour of the ATSB towards the media as ‘outrageous’.
‘They are basically a secret, secret organisation. They are so insecure.’
Smith, a former chairman of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, said he believed it was time for the minister to take charge and demand the ATSB bring itself up to the levels of efficiency, timeliness and transparency that Australians expect for their taxpayer dollars, and in a fashion consistent with a democracy that values both free speech and freedom of the press.
Theory Five: Rapid Decompression
Zaharie Ahmad Shah had enjoyed several non-alcoholic drinks with his latest mistress at his favourite Kuala Lumpur nightspot earlier in the evening.
So, 40 minutes into the flight, with co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid well settled and in control as part of his training, and after signing off to Kuala Lumpur controllers with ‘Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero’, Zaharie decided to leave the flight deck for a ‘biological break’. Just a minute later, faulty cabin door seals broke and the aircraft suffered rapid decompression. Fariq, well trained to deal with such an emergency, immediately put his oxygen mask on, but the young co-pilot was unsettled at the rush of air out of the cockpit, the cold creeping in, the fogging up of the cockpit, and the fact his veteran and trusty captain was not there.
His first reactions were professional; he knew the drill – aviate, navigate, communicate, in that order. With his oxygen mask on, and having established the flight controls worked normally, Fariq turned the aircraft around on a heading to Kota Bharu, with a view to making an emergency landing there. But the first officer’s oxygen mask had an undetected fault which prevented him from getting the full supply. His brain got some oxygen but not enough to work properly, leading him to still fly the aircraft but make irrational decisions such as not making a distress call. With the flight deck thrown into confusion, Fariq tried to send a distress signal on the radar transponder, but instead accidentally switched it to ‘standby’, which effectively turned it off.
Zaharie meanwhile, occupied with the matter at hand in the toilet at the precise moment the crisis erupted, initially took a few breaths from the drop-down mask, but decided it was his duty to try to get back to the flight deck. He made a dash for it, but Fariq was already too hypoxic to unlock the cockpit door quickly enough. Zaharie started to lose useful consciousness, and tried but missed the chance to get to the portable oxygen bottles and masks, and soon passed out.
Fariq was in control, but groggy from partial hypoxia and not thinking straight. He did not put the aircraft into a rapid descent as he should have, and at 35,000 feet, the chemically produced 12 minutes of oxygen supplied through the drop-down masks for the passengers ran out before the aircraft got back over land and into mobile coverage. Fariq, thinking in the fuzzy-headed way of partial hypoxia that he was dealing the emergency magnificently, flew MH370 first towards Penang, then in the general direction of Langkawi where he had done flight training and met his girlfriend, then tried to vaguely turn around, but ended up setting the aircraft on a course almost due south before he passed out altogether. And with that, MH370 became a ghost flight.
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This scenario is based on a theory developed by Christine Negroni, an American aviation journalist, who in 2016 published The Crash Detectives. As mentioned, there have been several precedents of hypoxia on commercial flights – Helios Flight 522 being the all-time classic. In that case, there was a period, though only a short one, where the pilots were still conscious, but not making rational decisions or communicating sensibly with the engineer on the ground. In some cases, air traffic controllers have recognised by the slow and not quite right tone of pilots that they are partly hypoxic, and successfully persuaded them to take corrective action.
Negroni has also written that in private aviation there have been several hypoxia cases including the ghost flight of a Socata TBM 700 that killed Laurence and Jane Glazer in 2015. The Glazers, prominent American real estate developers and philanthropists, had taken off from Greater Rochester International Airport heading for Naples, Florida, where they had a holiday home. Laurence Glazer was an experienced pilot, and flying the plane at 28,000 feet, he radioed air traffic controllers to report ‘an indication that is not correct in the plane’ and asked to descend to 18,000 feet. Controllers initially cleared him down to 25,000 feet, but when they instructed him to descend to 20,000 feet a few moments later, his speech had become slurred and he didn’t respond.
Faulty oxygen delivery systems are a notorious problem facing military pilots including when they get some supply, but not enough.
There are also some pretty spectacular cases of rapid decompression: one which beats them all for drama is British Airways Flight 5390 which left Birmingham Airport in England for Málaga in Spain on 10 June 1990. All of a sudden, a windscreen panel for which an aircraft mechanic had used the wrong bolts to install blew out, along with the captain, who was sucked half way out of the cockpit and was flapping around on the roof. A quick-acting flight attendant who happened to be in the cockpit grabbed the captain’s belt and held on, while the co-pilot put the aircraft into rapid descent.
In the intense cold the cabin crew took turns holding onto the captain. They all thought he must be dead – his head could be heard banging around against the fuselage in the slipstream, but the co-pilot wanted to keep him frozen on the roof rather than let go because his body could have taken out the left engine if it were sucked in and got gobbled up. The co-pilot performed an emergency landing at Southampton Airport and all 87 on board survived – including, extraordinarily, the captain, who after several months’ recovery flew again.
Again, several moving parts have to operate in unison here to make Negroni’s theory work, but there have been a number of cases of rapid decompression of one sort or other, and it is the case that there is a period, though not usually long, where pilots can be partly hypoxic and have a degree of consciousness to fly the plane but not rationally. So it’s another theory with elements of solid precedent.
TWELVE
‘YOU CAN ALWAYS GO IN WITH A KNIFE’
The day MH370 vanished, Kok Soo Chon was at the cinema in Petaling Jaya with his wife, watching the new airline hijack movie Non-Stop.
Non-Stop features heaps of action and excellent acting by Liam Neeson, who courageously saves this otherwise ridiculous film. A world-weary US federal air marshal, alcoholic Bill Marks played by Neeson, boards a British Aquatlantic Airlines Boeing 767 from New York City to London. As one would expect if you fly an airline with such a silly name, after take-off Marks receives a text on his secure phone from an unidentified hijacker claiming someone will die every 20 minutes unless a $US150 million ransom is paid into a specified overseas bank account.
The movie has every conceivable violent and spectacularly dramatic aviation crisis imaginable. Someone uses a blowpipe to fire a tiny poison dart from a hole in the first-class bathroom to kill the captain. There are onboard gunfights, a bomb, an RAF jet fighter interception threatening to shoot down the airliner with rockets, and stabbings and martial arts galore. The bad guys plan to parachute out of the plane, there’s a big bag of cocaine in a briefcase, and somebody shoots out a window causing rapid decompression and the oxygen masks to drop down. There’s a conspiracy to frame Marks and discredit the federal air marshal service because it let the 9/11 attacks happen, and, of course, Marks still has time in all that for what in the film industry is called a ‘meet cute’ in which he finds the new love of his life. All of this and more in just 106 action-packed minutes.
As this chapter will explore, one wonders whether four years on from watching Non-Stop, that plot was still in Kok’s mind when as chief investigator into the disappearance of MH370, he brought down the Malaysian government’s final report of his safety investigation.
Kok had a pretty good resumé for the job. He had an engineering degree, and also a law degree from the University of London and a practising certificate from the Legal Board of Malaysia. Kok had joined the Malaysian civil service as an electrical engineer in a hospital, and had enjoyed a stellar career from there, including spending four years as general manager for the construction of Kuala Lumpur International Airport where he also helped build air traffic services. From 1999 to 2007 he was director-general of the Department of Civil Aviation, and had been a former permanent representative of the International Civil Aviation Organisation council in Montreal.
So when MH370 disappeared, Kok, who had technical and legal knowledge, a solid grounding in aviation, and an impeccable record of public service, looked to be the logical choice to lead the Malaysian government’s ICAO Annex 13 aviation safety investigation into the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 registered 9M-MRO.
As mentioned, the way such Annex 13 investigations work on big international cases it’s usual practice for the host nation to invite experts from other countries to appoint what are called ‘accredited representatives’ to the investigation panel. This case was just about as big, as well publicised, and as difficult as it gets, and so the Malaysian government established a substantial panel with accredited representatives from the ATSB, the US National Transportation Safety Board, China’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Department, Britain’s Air Accidents Investigations Branch, France’s BEA, Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee and Singapore’s Transport Safety Investigation Bureau.
An important part of the Annex 13 system is that the accredited representatives don’t have to go along with the final report; they can write comments or even a dissenting report. The preferred option for the host government, though, is to reach a consensus with all the accredited representatives supporting the final report without comment. That was one of Kok’s key goals as he took up the reins of the complex task.
While there was to emerge significant controversy about the findings and conclusions of Kok’s investigation, all the evidence suggests it was by the book and technically ticked off all the boxes of international air crash investigation procedure.
Apart from the seven foreign accredited representatives, Kok had 19 Malaysians on the investigation team – airline captains, medical doctors and other professionals from different fields. Kok and his team homed in on seven areas of investigation.
They looked at the airworthiness and maintenance schedule of the Boeing 777-200 to see if there were any mechanical issues which could have caused the strange developments on the flight. This found that repairs had been made to its wing tip after it got sliced off on the tail fin of a China Eastern Airlines A340–600 in Shanghai in 2012.
With the help of a report by the Royal Malaysian Police, the team delved into the background of the pilots and cabin crew, their medical and professional records, and looked for any anomalies around the time of the flight.
The investigators looked at the air traffic control transcripts.
They assessed the cargo on the flight, particularly what constituted about half the total: 4566 kilograms, or what some might call a lifetime supply, of fresh mangosteens, and 221 kilograms of lithium-ion batteries.
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sp; Kok’s team delved into the military radar data.
They worked with Inmarsat on the seven satellite handshakes.
They looked at the organisational structure and information management of the Department of Civil Aviation and Malaysia Airlines.
The investigators interviewed more than 120 people – pretty much anyone who might have had something vaguely relevant to say. That included aircraft refuellers, administrators in the Department of Civil Aviation, caterers, cargo loaders, freight-forwarders, airline officials, mangosteen growers, cleaners and, of course, the crew’s next-of-kin. (The Royal Malaysian Police had also interviewed Zaharie’s various women friends including Fatima Pardi, and the ones he hoped in vain would be his friend, such as the 18-year-old twin model Jasmin Min.)
The pilots on the team got into Boeing 777 simulators and tried out the flight as it was known, and all the scenarios that might have befallen the aircraft.
Kok and his team, by all reports including his own, did a lot. To stay in touch with the accredited representatives and Boeing and Inmarsat in the other time zones, Kok told the Malaysian news agency Bernama, he had to work all hours – in fact, non-stop.
‘We are trying our best to find whatever truth we can find in our report so that everyone will know what happened on that fateful day,’ he said.
The release of the final report of Kok’s Malaysian-led ICAO Annex 13 Safety Investigation had been hugely anticipated, but when it came to the next-of-kin in Australia, it was pretty poorly organised. The date, 30 July 2018, was set and announced publicly weeks in advance, mainly to give the international media time to prepare and fly to the Malaysian capital for the press conference if they so chose, and to give next-of-kin the chance to attend their own briefing.
Danica Weeks would have gone if Malaysian authorities had got their act together a bit sooner. She was told about a week in advance by a Malaysian support group that the report would be coming down, but she was informed at that stage that next-of-kin would have to pay for their own airfares and accommodation. Then, the Thursday before the Monday the report was to be released, an offer came through to pay her way, but that just didn’t allow enough time for the single mother to organise such a trip.
