The desperate search for answers

It was November 4, 2010, when shrapnel from an exploding engine pierced the wing and fuselage of a Qantas A380, severely disabling the plane carrying 469 people shortly after take-off from Singapore.

As its pilots worked against the odds to prevent the Qantas superjumbo from becoming one of the world's worst air disasters, thousands of kilometres away in Canberra another mission was under way.

Technicians inspect the damaged engine on QF32 in 2010.Credit: Reuters

By the time QF32 had made an emergency landing at Singapore's Changi Airport less than two hours after the explosion, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) had mobilised a team of engineers, pilots and other aviation specialists. A short time later, they would be on a Qantas passenger jet bound for Singapore.

"We were able to use a special [Qantas] flight up there to get our preliminary team on the ground in Singapore where the aircraft [QF32] eventually landed," ATSB chief commissioner Martin Dolan recalls.

The tale of QF32 highlights the frantic efforts which go on behind the scenes when authorities scramble to get a handle on a major emergency. It gives an insight into what the Malaysians will have endured this week – only on a bigger scale, as the world demands answers to why a Malaysia Airlines plane carrying 239 people disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

"It is another level up," Dolan says of the mysterious disappearance of flight 370. "We always say we hold resources and plan and train for the big one – the one we hope never happens. That is the one that the Malaysians are currently facing."

In a world of 24-hour news and social media, people expect explanations of tragic events within hours of them occurring. "Social media, and particularly Twitter, means that it is likely that the fact of an event is going to be made public before we are formally aware of it," Dolan concedes.

"But there is no way we should come up with half-arse theories about what is going on. Our emphasis is on very clearly describing process, and only promulgating known facts, and leaving hypothesising to others."

In the case of QF32, the ATSB led a multinational team in Singapore which included experts from its French and British equivalents, as well as plane maker Airbus and engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce.

At one point, the team reached almost 100, which was on top of a battalion of engineers at Rolls-Royce headquarters in Derby, Britain.

The pressure on investigators to pin down the problem and find a fix was intense. Importantly, they had to ensure the flying public was correctly informed.

As aviation experts from around the world focused on putting the pieces of the QF32 puzzle together, Dolan was in high-level talks with regulators from other countries, as well as Qantas, to ensure the safety of flights was maintained.

Within a month of QF32's near disaster, the ATSB had released a preliminary report detailing the immediate problem with its Rolls-Royce engine, the basic facts of the incident and a recommendation of what needed to be done to fix it in order to ensure similar aircraft were safe to fly.

But it would be more than 2 1⁄2 years before the ATSB released its final report into QF32.

While the ATSB has offered support to help find answers to flight 370, the Malaysian investigators' first task remains locating the Boeing 777 and retrieving vital flight-data recorders.

"Those initial stages, which are when you get most of your important information, are key to the rest of the investigation," Dolan says.

"We think where we can most offer capability [to the Malaysians] is in the technical analysis side of the business – the data recorders and materials failure."

The demands on air-safety investigators are enormous in the aftermath of a major crash. The whole point of their work is to find holes in the system, and ensure it does not occur again.

"If they don't get it right, there is hell to pay," says Jason Middleton, the head of the University of NSW's School of Aviation, citing the ongoing political fallout from the ditching of a Pel-Air plane off Norfolk Island in 2009. The search for answers to the crash of Air France 447, which was carrying 228 people on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009, tied up France's air-crash investigative unit for two years.

Flight 447 is regarded as the nearest incident to the disappearance of the Malaysia Airways passenger jet.

While the first debris from the Air France plane was found within several days, it would be two years before the black box which held answers to the crash was recovered from the depths of the South Atlantic.

The big question in the latest tragedy is how can a modern aircraft just disappear?

The Air France crash prompted work internationally on finding other ways to transmit information from planes, rather than relying on black boxes or other onboard data recorders. Proposals are afoot in some circumstances to transmit flight information to ground sites via satellite.

Dolan believes the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines' flight 370 will lead to a greater emphasis on this, and how authorities can make planes easier to locate in the event of a crash.

But he concedes that "because it is about developing international standards, it never happens quickly".

He adds: "We will always have a mismatch between being careful and methodical, which is our job, and providing the speed of response that is expected from both social media and the modern news media."