The Hunt for MH370

by Ean Higgins

  If a new hunt were launched of their proposed 7000 square kilometres, and they are right, MH370 could be found in a week at the rate Ocean Infinity searched.

  There’s no guarantee of success – there are still too many unknowns in the equation. But thus far the searches based on other approaches have failed. At the time of writing the pilots had the most developed and authoritative alternative theory of where to look. With the expertise of people like Vance and Stevens added in, they have a vast range and depth of practical and professional experience in aircraft, navigation, engineering, aerodynamics and air crash investigation.

  In the absence of any national government agency from Malaysia, Australia or anywhere else having a new search plan, and with the fifth anniversary of the loss of MH370 approaching, that informal professional team makes a compelling case that their analysis deserves a shot to offer hope of closure to the families where others have tried and failed.

  For those who might lose hope MH370 will one day be found, let’s finish with the story of the Australian submarine HMAS AE1. The boat and the 35 men on board disappeared at the start of World War I on 14 September 1914, patrolling for German Imperial Navy warships in the waters of what was then German New Guinea. The first search, by Allied warships, started within hours of AE1 not returning to base at its appointed time.

  For another 60 years, AE1 and its secrets lay dormant. But then a whole series of individuals and organisations could not resist the attraction of trying to solve it. In the 1970s a Royal Australian Navy officer who had been posted as deputy defence attaché at the Australian High Commission in Papua New Guinea, Commander John Foster, took an interest in the AE1 saga.

  Foster trawled through Australian archives to try to work out where AE1 might have gone down. In 1976, having come up with a target area, Foster persuaded the RAN to let him lead an expedition to examine it with side-scan sonar deployed from the hydrographic survey ship HMAS Flinders. This was four decades ago, and such equipment was not what it is today. That effort was unsuccessful, although Flinders continued to do some ad-hoc searching when it was deployed in the region.

  Then the world-renowned French undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau’s curiosity was piqued, and in 1990 he conducted a hunt with his famous research ship Calypso, but ran into technical problems. A number of other searches followed, one involving a Royal New Zealand Navy vessel and some organised by Foster in collaboration with a film company, and another with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. By this stage, Foster had been working on a new angle: talking to locals to seek oral history which might provide new leads.

  He heard reports that two locals, while diving for shells on Mioko Island’s Wirian Reef in the Duke of York Islands group, had discovered a wrecked submarine. In 2003 scuba divers under Foster’s direction went hunting for AE1 from a utility boat owned by the Rabaul Hotel, but got warned off by big sharks. Then Foster heard of another local legend: Mioko islanders talked of a gigantic ‘Devil Fish’ which had appeared one night at the time of the loss of AE1, then hid back in the sea.

  Various other searches led by Foster or the RAN looked unsuccessfully for AE1 over the years – one in 2007 based on reports of a sighting of a submarine wreck which turned out to be just a geological formation, then another search in 2009.

  Foster died in 2010, but the legacy of his dogged efforts to find the submarine was carried on by a group of researchers and supporters who set up the organisation Find AE1 Ltd. The RAN had another unsuccessful search for AE1 in 2014.

  Then in 2017 a group including serving and former RAN officers, members of Find AE1 Ltd, and maritime archaeologists from the Australian National Maritime Museum, had another look at all the evidence. In December that year, with financial backing from the federal government and corporate donations, the group launched its expedition – the thirteenth search for AE1. The expedition chartered a ship owned by the Dutch Fugro undersea survey group, Fugro Equator, one of the vessels used in the unsuccessful underwater search for MH370. It was equipped with an autonomous underwater vehicle.

  A century and three years after it disappeared, the undersea robot found AE1 in the first hours of its pre-programmed passes around the Duke of York Island group. The crystal-clear pictures of the wreck, with the odd pink fish swimming around it, captivated world attention. Not only did they find it, but the searchers carried out meticulous underwater photography and three-dimensional scanning of the submarine, bringing the material back for examination by naval experts.

  The analysts concluded that AE1 suffered a catastrophic failure, probably during a practice dive, and at high speed struck a rocky bottom at a depth of 300 metres. The structure of the damage indicated the forward compartment had imploded when the submarine descended below crush depth, which would have meant a sudden death for the crew.

  ‘When the end came for the men of AE1, it would have been very fast; they may well have not known what hit them,’ expedition leader Rear Admiral (retired) Peter Briggs told The Australian.

  It might have been luck in part, but mostly the discovery of the AE1 hinged on the searchers coming up with the right theory of what happened to the submarine. They worked on a new scenario: not that it had been destroyed on the surface by gunfire, for example, because no survivors or flotsam had been found by the first search, nor any prisoners of war taken. Rather, they designed the hunt on the premise that AE1 had suffered a diving accident after it was last sighted by a companion Australian warship on the patrol.

  Most professionals in the aviation community believe someone or some group will, similarly, yet again review the available material, or find new information, and establish what happened to MH370.

  Using powers of deduction, just as the searchers for the AE1 did, they will work out where to look in a new area which has not been searched already, mount a new hunt, find the aircraft, and unlock its mystery.

  That’s going to be as important whenever it happens as it has been since 8 March 2014 when MH370 and the 239 souls aboard vanished into thin air.

  Finding the aircraft will enable air crash investigators to work out what happened and develop strategies to stop whatever it was from happening again. That’s what air crash investigation is all about, and after about a century of passenger aviation it has made flying the safest form of transport on earth.

  Secondly, cracking the mystery of MH370 will resolve the controversy of whether the ATSB did or did not adopt a strategy based on a false premise, possibly due to political concerns, resulting in the waste of $200 million of Australian, Malaysian and Chinese taxpayers’ money on a search which had little chance of succeeding. By extension, it will reveal whether the ATSB’s and the JACC’s secrecy and failed attempts at repression of journalistic endeavour were motivated by fear of exposure of what they knew to be their errors.

  Finally, the discovery of the resting place of the Boeing 777 registered 9M-MRO will help bring closure to the families of the 239 missing, easing a travail which continues to this day.

  EPILOGUE

  In the living room of her home in Brisbane, Jeanette Maguire has a small shrine, of sorts, to Cathy and Bob.

  The little collection has a photo of her sister and brother-in-law on their wedding day, a couple of purple candles, and one of the China dolls Cathy used to collect. A small wooden plaque has the word ‘Sister’ on it and the words, ‘God made us sisters, our hearts made us friends’. There is also a small hand-painted candle-holder showing butterflies darting around flowers, and the words ‘Butterfly Wishes . . . believe in the beautiful, amazing woman you are’.

  The candle-holder was, Jeanette said, what ‘one of my beautiful old work colleagues bought me for Christmas in 2014 after Bob and Cathy’s disappearance. It was an amazing present and represented all that she saw me go through that year.’

  Those MH370 next-of-kin I’ve interviewed have carried on, coping with their grief and lack of knowing, each in
their own way. As a family, Jeanette said, ‘we are very loving, very strong.’

  ‘To get through in our world, we have a lot of humour between us.’

  But the MH370 families still struggle every day with the unhealed emotional wounds.

  ‘I am still gutted inside,’ Jeanette said. ‘A big part of me is lost with them. Bob was like my big brother. I was 11 when Cathy met Bob.’

  In her case, Jeanette’s job as a payroll manager has been her refuge.

  ‘My safe haven was to go to work and lead a different life.’

  But, Jeanette said, she just cannot escape MH370.

  ‘Dealing with Cathy’s girls and grandchildren . . . I am here, but I am not here. At least if we know where they are, at least we have their burial area,’ Jeanette said. ‘At least we will have the place.’

  In the latter part of 2018, I met with Danica Weeks at the Maleny Hotel on the Sunshine Coast to talk about her life and MH370. She did not want to meet at her home because the discussion would upset her two young sons, Lincoln, now aged eight, and Jack, five.

  ‘You can’t let it go. As much as you can take little breaks from it, it never goes away,’ Danica said. ‘It’s a surreal world.’

  Danica stuck it out in Perth for a couple of years, but then decided to move to the Sunshine Coast to be near her mother and live in a place which is, more than anywhere else, home. She has returned to full-time work as finance manager for Suncoast Gold Macadamia Nuts in Gympie – she says the honey-roasted ones are particularly delicious and the process makes them smell great.

  At the time of writing, Danica had not been able to sell the Perth house she and Paul bought due to a legal snarl – she lacks a death certificate for him, and she needs one for the deeds.

  ‘The Western Australian coroner can’t give me one, he’s not running the investigation,’ Danica said.

  Asked if she could get one from Malaysian authorities, Danica said: ‘I am not going to ask for a death certificate from the government of the country that killed my husband.’

  Danica has various health issues; she has been prescribed anti-depressants and sleeping pills, and has no problems letting this be known.

  ‘At the end of the day, it is what it is,’ she told me. ‘I have no qualms in saying yes, I have to get help. I have nothing to hide.’

  Danica can’t get over the fundamentally bizarre quality of MH370.

  ‘The logic of a Boeing 777 just disappearing . . . loved ones being sent off on a commercial plane, and they just disappear.’

  She says she imagines Paul would have thought the same thing.

  ‘As a mechanical engineer, he was never deluded that planes don’t crash, but he could not have believed that one could never be found.’

  Danica says she knows she is far from an island in experiencing tragedy; other families who lose a loved one by sudden misadventure such as a car accident suffer shock, grief and dislocation. But, she said, at least they know what happened, and can reach closure.

  ‘With MH370, we don’t get to, because there is no finality,’ Danica said. ‘It’s very hard to come to grips with it because there are no facts. It’s that not knowing.’

  The purple candles in Jeanette’s shrine to Cathy and Bob came from the memorial service the federal government put on in Brisbane – in keeping with most of the Australians on the flight and their relatives being Queenslanders – on 8 March 2017. The date marked the third anniversary of the loss of MH370, and followed the end of the ATSB-led search a couple of months earlier.

  Transport Minister Darren Chester and Angus Houston were among around 100 who attended the private ceremony at St John’s Anglican Cathedral, along with diplomats from Malaysia, China and New Zealand. It was not a particularly easy task for Chester to get the message and tone right; many next-of-kin resented his place among the trio of Australian, Chinese and Malaysian ministers who had decided not to continue the search for the aircraft without new evidence of its location.

  ‘While to date we have been unsuccessful, we remain hopeful that at some stage in the future, there will be a breakthrough, the aircraft will be found, and we will be able to answer more of your questions,’ Chester told the congregation.

  Sadly, however, the ATSB and the JACC still show no inclination to answer questions about MH370 which might help the families at least know more about what happened in the hunt for the aircraft and what might be done in a new one. In the lead-up to writing this book in mid-2018, I contacted ATSB head Greg Hood, ATSB search leader Peter Foley, and JACC head Judith Zielke asking each for an interview, pointing out that with the Malaysian government Annex 13 safety investigation completed, there could be no residual concern of compromising it. Hood, Zielke and Foley did not respond.

  I also advised dozens of middle-ranking and junior ATSB and JACC officials that the book was coming out, where relevant outlining how they fitted into it, and asked if they would like to present their side of the story. I asked Hood and Zielke if they would support any staff who did grant an interview, or threaten sanctions against them. Zielke did not respond. Hood had Patrick Hornby, the ATSB’s chief legal officer, do so on his behalf.

  ‘As this is a legal issue, I am responding,’ Hornby wrote in an email to me. ‘I refer you to previous correspondence and the ATSB’s correcting the record posts on its website.’

  The latter element refers to the bureau’s diatribes against The Australian in its ‘Correcting the Record’ website section. Hornby would not say what the legal issue was, nor what specific correspondence he was referring to.

  I also reached out to Neil Gordon, the distinguished mathematician from the Defence Science and Technology Group who had led the sophisticated work on the satellite data. Gordon initially indicated he thought it would not be a problem, but said I had to contact Defence Media, who turned down the interview request without explanation in an unsigned email. Defence Media did not respond to emails asking why, who I could talk to, or who the head of the unit was. I tracked that last piece of information down through a source, and rang the head of the unit, Amy Hawkins, who would not say why Gordon could not talk to me but said the decision had been taken at a high level.

  I also approached Fugro’s Paul Kennedy, who had always been happy to talk in the past, who told me he had to ask the ATSB for permission to speak to me for the book. A few days later Kennedy told me he’d been gagged, but ATSB spokesman Paul Sadler would not tell me why. Around this time Teresa Liddle decided something had to be done about the ATSB’s culture of secrecy when it came to MH370. For years since the aircraft vanished with her sister Mary Burrows on it, Teresa had delved into everything about the flight. She taught herself how to read aviation charts by finding a manual about them. She pored over each and every report from the ATSB and the Malaysians, looking for inconsistencies – and often found them. In the process, she had her own run-ins with the ATSB. She was outraged at the refusal of the ATSB to meet some of the key FOI requests I’d made. In the middle of 2018 Teresa called for an inquiry, possibly a royal commission, into the ATSB’s failed search and its handling of MH370 issues, and condemned its suppression of information.

  ‘They should not hide behind Freedom of Information [exemptions] and not provide the documents on the basis that they did not want to upset Malaysia,’ Teresa said, quoted in The Australian.

  ‘It is critical to the aviation industry.’

  To all those at the ATSB, the JACC, Defence, the Search Strategy Working Group, the organisations making up the panel of Annex 13 accredited representatives and of course the Malaysian investigation itself: if you have been discouraged from revealing the truth, it is not too late to do so. I will continue to investigate MH370, write stories about it in The Australian, and there may be a second edition of this book. I encourage those who know more to come forward. It’s an invitation to get on the right side of history, and democracy.

 
As with the Pentagon Papers, government agencies can try to restrict and threaten the press, but the pattern is that the press prevails and the truth finally comes out. Anyone who has watched the excellent movie The Post, about The Washington Post’s courageous campaign to publish the Pentagon Papers against legal action from the Nixon administration, can see the analogy. Ultimately the US Supreme Court upheld freedom of the press. Hugo L. Black, one of the Supreme Court justices, wrote in an opinion supporting The Washington Post and the New York Times:

  ‘In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam War, the newspapers nobly did that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do.’

  There are little private shrines to those lost on MH370 in the homes of next-of-kin all over the world.

  Intan Maizura has one to her husband Mohammed Hazrin. Knickerbockerglory’s brilliant documentary MH370: Inside the Situation Room had some particularly moving interview segments with Maizura, a Malaysia Airlines flight attendant who had fallen in love with and married Hazrin, a flight steward on the airline, and had two children with him. Like Danica Weeks, Maizura had driven her husband to the airport to board MH370.