What really happened to missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370?

FIRE, terrorism, pilot suicide - the theories go on. Patrick Carlyon hunts for answers to MH370 and finds a woman who won’t give up until she finds out what happened.

JEANETTE Maguire was readying her two boys for Saturday morning soccer when she got the call that her sister had vanished.

She knew Cathy and her husband Bob had been flying to China — only last night, Maguire had sent a “have a great trip” message on Facebook. She knew Cathy was very excited about China, whereas Bob was a nervous flyer who faced a sleepless night.

But she did not know the flight details, not when her niece Glenda called about 10am with information that Maguire could not process.

Maguire had the itinerary on her phone. Her husband, Shaun, turned on the TV as she trawled her text messages for a flight number.

“Home — Bugger” Cathy’s message ended. Confusion and unrest filled the TV screen, and it matched Maguire’s rising panic.

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Perhaps for the first and last time, she was speechless. She did not want Declan and Caleb to see her like this.

The boys went to soccer. Their mother retreated to a neighbour’s and fell apart.

The family would gather at Cathy’s parents’ Brisbane home.

Cathy’s daughter Amanda had been asleep when the calls started, Cathy’s older other sister, Eileen, had been out with her family. Now they huddled as one, lost. Who do you call when loved ones board a plane and disappear?

Maguire rang Malaysia Airlines. Had Cathy and Bob Lawton boarded MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing? There were many inquiries, she was told. They would call back.

She called DFAT. She buckled up for the “complete limbo of nothingness”, the emotional fog that thickens on some days and clears on others, but never clears altogether. Maguire had flicked the switch. She had embarked upon
her “mission”.

The pattern of the next 12 months was forming. She had tapped her “work mode”, a “defensive mechanism” that seeks order in chaos and separates logic from emotion. She has applied it to endless memorials and countless conversations with scientists, investigators and well-meaning friends. She needed facts. Her family needed answers.

She thought of the childhood jigsaws she once adored. They were a kind of practice for the bigger puzzle ahead. As a girl, she would wake with an answer and attend to the growing picture on the timber board on her bedroom floor.

She tackled the jigsaws with patience and tenacity. Maguire has always been laid-back, a quality sometimes levelled at her as an accusation. She giggles easily, and does not rush to judgment.

More striking, perhaps, is her absence of anger: if she sees conspiracies and cover-ups, and Maguire has an open mind, the unfairness of her loss has not reduced her to a victim.

Her lightness may be her greatest strength.

At 49, Maguire still wakes in the night, sometimes after bad dreams about Cathy and Bob. She is still nutting out puzzles.

The unconscious meanderings of her mind, the “chats” she has had with Bob, and the scenes of a broken plane lying vertical on the sea floor, go to her search.

Facts are her friends. The pursuit of them offers recourse from the paralysis that has engulfed others. It’s how she seeks to unpick the greatest mystery, as she puts it, since the Titanic.

She needs to do this.

She must solve the biggest puzzle of all and resolve her family’s grief.

THE “new normal” goes like this. Each Monday and Thursday, at 4pm, Maguire receives a phone call. Brian, from Malaysia Airlines, always begins the same way: “Sorry, Jeanette, I have no news …” Maguire feels for Brian — he feels the strain, too.

There are weekly calls from DFAT. “They’re great,” even if they too rarely have little to add. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau Centre sends weekly search emails to decipher. Maguire has cried with search leaders and offered, half in jest, to help.

“Everyone has a different way of dealing with the situation,” Maguire says. “Well, mine is knowledge.”

The MH370 void insinuates every day. The chats recall the once nothing moments: Cathy’s avocado on toast for the kids, or her pre-trip excitement, tinged with her persistent questions about Malaysia Airlines. There are the tedious realities of acronyms and bureaucracies, now coupled with a growing fear that the world will forget before the plane is found.

Before Christmas, Maguire and niece Amanda, one of Cathy and Bob Lawton’s three daughters, gave DNA samples to the federal police.

The family has applied for death certificates and fended off hungry lawyers.

Last May, the day after the memorial service, Maguire’s father, David, went down with heart and kidney failure. In his 80s, he had always been fit.

Maguire blames the stress of a lost child. “Don’t you dare take him,” Maguire said, casting skywards. “Don’t you dare take him as well.”

The ATSB rang Maguire in the second week. By then, the search had shifted from the Gulf of Thailand. Malaysia had belatedly released military radar data. Everyone wondered why the radar operators had done nothing about the unidentified blip on the screen.

MH370’s passengers had been doomed to a dozen or more conspiracy theories. The cargo had been pinched or the flight hijacked by Chinese terrorists who had gone on a stabbed frenzy in a railway station days earlier. The plane had been “sighted” on fire off the coast of Vietnam and flying low over the Maldives about 4000km away. The Malaysians fudged and bristled in response to the international media’s howls at their tin pot notions of accountability.

HAVE you any questions, the ATSB asked Maguire.

“Actually, yes,” she replied. She knew little about aviation, except from her increasingly expensive habit for Google searches on her Samsung Galaxy. Maguire’s memory is hazy, though she clearly recalls the clouds forming two hearts when the family released balloons on Cathy’s birthday, March 15.

She thinks she was speaking with Martin Dolan, the head of the ATSB, when she first raised black boxes.

Where do black boxes sit on a plane? Can they be tampered with? Maguire wanted to know who serviced black boxes. They must need servicing, after all.

The black boxes are everything, she now says. Not the cockpit voice recording, which will contain only the last two hours, but the other box, which records something like 17,000 measurements a minute.

At first, Maguire subscribed to the on-board fire theory. It gained currency with an online summation by former pilot Chris Longfellow. She wanted to know about tyres blowing out. A smouldering tyre can smoke and flame. On board, sparks feed electrical faults

and catastrophes.

Yet the fire theory was soon discounted. There were no radio calls from the cockpit. And the Inmarsat satellite data released (again, belatedly) after almost a week made fire unlikely.

MH370 made seven satellite “handshakes” and flew for seven hours after losing radio contact. Barring aliens, the plane’s journey was more ghostly than imagined.

MH370 appears to have been airborne when the Lawtons’ family heard they had disappeared. The satellite revelations led Maguire to the transponder, which transmits the plane’s flight number and position to the ground.

How is it turned off? Why is it switched off?

Then the ACARS system.

How does a plane communicate with a satellite? Does it have individual codings? “My little brain runs rampant,” Maguire explains. “Once I get on there I can’t stop.”

Maguire spent the first four days after MH370’s disappearance at her parents’ place. She watched the sea search with her father, David.

They pondered an oil slick off the coast of Vietnam.

“I don’t know why, but the plane’s gone left,” she said. How do you know, he asked. “It’s just my gut,” she replied.

The MH370’s first left turn — proof of manual intervention from the cockpit — was revealed a few days later. It was about the same time that the family started counselling sessions. They still go.

There, Maguire reveals selected information snippets to the family.

Early on, as a coping measure, family members were encouraged to imagine a peaceful fate for Cathy and Bob. Maguire chose a going-to-sleep scenario, a cabin decompression.

It is an unknowing and painless death.

Central Queensland University’s head of aviation, Ron Bishop, still believes the uninterrupted manner of MH370’s final path suggests those on board were overcome.

For Maguire, however, hypoxia now conflicts with her accumulated facts.

“I have this comfortable ending, whereas the other side of me, the factual side, is working on something else,” she says. “I’m split in half.”

TWO decades separate niece and aunty, Jeanette and Amanda.

Cathy Lawton always said they were alike, and Maguire jokes that she knows what Amanda will do before she does. Throughout last year, they stayed up chatting until 6am, night after night.

They are fine lunch company, the only blot a companion who draws them back to their shared sadness.

The difference between them lies in their response to unresolved loss.

Maguire is motivated by her sister’s disappearance: there is no question and no dream too silly to mention. Amanda dreams, too: in them, she has chatted with her mother. She knows her parents would want her to fulfil that independent streak of hers. But she’s stuck.

Maguire returned to work a week after the MH370 disappearance: Amanda has not returned to work with Queensland’s Economics Development Office. Not yet.

“I think a lot of people expected once the memorial had been and done that we would be able to move on, which clearly I haven’t,” she says.

Amanda needs the answers but she no longer seeks the updates. She is across the theories, and the pair agree.

Some, such as pilot involvement, are more likely than others, such as cargo theft or a terrorist attack.

Amanda assumed a crash at first. The Malaysian government’s odd handling of information raised her suspicions. She doesn’t want to imagine the possibilities, mainly because she suspects the end “wasn’t pretty”.

Over time, both she and Maguire have been shaped by the lack of new information.

Where once Maguire discarded literature about MH370 and Chinese terrorism, the possibility now remains “on the table”. Last week, she was back profiling the passengers, seeking clues that may have been overlooked. She tracks relatives’ gossip about a lack of passenger communication, and ponders chatter about spy satellites. Still, she is steered by the experts.

She knows enough about Boeing 777s to grasp triplicate systems (including autopilot). The loss of radio contact meant three systems were manually switched off. She is mindful of the flight path and its shift soon after MH370 farewelled Malaysian air traffic control.

And yet still she resists the obvious default conclusion. Maguire is forensic but she is also kind. Without black boxes, she lacks the corner pieces of the jigsaw. “It’s very easy to blame someone when they can’t talk for themselves,” Maguire says of chief suspect Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

“However, it may be true.”

DUNCAN Steel was still working the numbers in his Wellington, New Zealand, office last week. What was the precise line of sight speed between the satellite and the plane as it sat at Kuala Lumpur airport? The answer bears on the Doppler Shift, he explains, and the tiniest tweak in its measure throws the projected MH370 splash site a few kilometres or more.

Steel isn’t your usual astrobiologist geek. He knows that most people don’t grasp a Doppler Shift — the change in frequency from a moving source. His CV references a “bad-ass” scientist. He speaks of “lies” and “cover-ups”, he says, because he is free to say “whatever the hell he wants”.

He is dismissive of those cloaked in corporate or government robes. If the truth has not been muddled by their conflicting priorities, he argues, a collective torpor has slowed the search. His singular pursuit partly explains Steel’s perch in the MH370 mystery — unimpeachable credentials don’t hurt either.

The space scientist has been “bloody annoyed” by what he describes as incomplete data from Malaysia Airlines and Inmarsat. His complaints, as spokesman for the so-called Independent Group, date back almost a year, and his contempt spreads to search agencies, such as the ATSB.

Steel is still miffed that the IG’s recommendations last June — to move the Indian Ocean search southwest — went unheeded for months. He still demands Malaysia Airlines performance degradation figures for the plane’s jet engines, as well as the cost index input for the automatic pilot.

“We keep going round and round in circles,” he says. “Are they searching in the right place? The answer is, yes, they are — now. However, we believe we could refine our estimate of exactly where it came down if we had access to other pieces of information, which for some reason just haven’t been made public.”

The IG’s final estimate for the plane’s “splash position” is South 37.7. East 88.8. The IG has interpreted a sudden change in Doppler Shift in the final satellite handshake to mean a sudden drop in the plane’s altitude. It says the plane plummeted, nose down and almost vertical, at 287km/h.

“That tells you the thing would have smashed to pieces,” Steel says. “You might as well have hit a brick wall. It also means it crashed very, very close to the 7th (satellite) arc, not up to 100km away (as theorised), which narrows down the region you need to search on the ocean bottom.”

Australia took over the search on March 18 last year. Planes crisscrossed seas where satellite images had picked up floating debris. On March 28, the search shifted to the northwest, where the detection of acoustic pings would offer false hope of black boxes.

LATER, the search shift analysis — based in part on remaining fuel estimates — was shown to be flawed. A shrillness grew in scientific circles. The search attracted a climate change edge — the projections sounded neat, but the details doubled as weapons for professional combat.

In October, the search parameters, or “priority search areas”, were again adjusted. In December, a 777 pilot, Simon Hardy, “reverse engineered” navigation geometry to alight on a splash site in the same region of ocean.

His conclusion is one of dozens considered plausible. It’s of the type that validates Steel’s demand for every scrap of information. Hardy’s co-ordinates fall near — but outside — the core target area of the ATSB search.

It’s almost 11 months since Prime Minister Tony Abbott said he was “very confident” the black boxes had been found. Other statements have been more illuminating.

Under the ATSB auspice, separate methodologies, based on differing flight modes, have split the priority into two overlapping search zones. The divergence reflects the uncertain and unprecedented nature of the search.

It is possible — Steel hazards “likely” — that search equipment has encountered and missed evidence of the MH370.

Such misses occurred with the Air France Flight 447 disaster in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, when only a third pass of the wreckage site turned up evidence. That search, over 22 months in an area slightly more than a quarter the size of the MH370 search, was also marked by bickering.

More than 24,000sq km of sea floor has been searched of a planned 60,000, due to be completed in May. The ATSB speaks of thoroughness in its approach — Steel laments months of wasted time and resources.

ATSB head Martin Dolan speaks of “cautious optimism” for a search always destined to seem at times slow. “Our expectation is that we will find something in the area by the end of May,” Dolan says.

Logically, Maguire understands why evidence may take far longer to find. She can speak, in bowing to the seven-decade search for the Titanic,

to the uncomfortable notion that the equipment may yet to be developed.

But she hopes they find that plane in 2015. She calls it the “year of answers”. She stares at the Indian Ocean whenever she sees a map or globe. The family “can’t just keep going along”.

EVERYONE was dreading December 25. Maguire had been preparing for Christmas since July.

The family gathered in her parents’ lounge in the morning. Maguire produced tea lights — one for Cathy’s sisters, one for her parents, one for her daughters — which were lit for a small ceremony. The family “sucked up” the pain to liberate the rest of the day for kids and laughter, and it mostly worked.

Amanda Lawton had recently arrived home from four months in Asia. She had taken the trip her parents had intended to take, and had been swamped by Chinese who marvelled at her blonde hair. She had confronted the family’s fear of flying: Maguire, a scotch in hand, tracked her Vietnam-China plane leg on FlightAware.

Amanda met MH370 passengers’ relatives in Kuala Lumpur and China, and exchanged views on sinister scenarios. Maguire greeted her niece’s return with her own conclusion of “foul play”.

Maguire had fired lots of questions at an ATSB briefing earlier in the month. MH370’s left turns convinced her of cockpit choices, yet she wanted to apply goodness to the unknowns. Why end a crime in the nothingness of the Indian Ocean? Had an on-board good Samaritan foiled a diabolical act?

Christmas had been “conquered”. Then AirAsia Flight QZ8501 vanished in a storm over the Java Sea on December 28. Amanda describes the sight of oil slicks as a kind of flashback. Her Asia trip had zapped the lethargy of her grief. The story of QZ8501 numbed her back into limbo.

Jeanette studied the QZ8501 search and discovery for clues.

One search was over but hers would go on. She looks to separate emotion and logic, as always, in lifting truth from disaster.

There was little wreckage on the surface from QZ8501, she explains. The plane was found upside down. The cargo was on top, which kept the fuselage weighed down.

“Well, hello,” she said. “You’re thinking, OK, could this have happened to us, to our plane?”