Missing pieces: the fallout from lost flight MH370

A man walks past a mural of missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 in Shah Alam.

The paradox of the disappearance of MH370 is that although we now know much more about the circumstances, we are no closer to knowing the cause than we were on the morning of March 8, 2014, when, after six hours of confusion and mounting alarm, Malaysia Airlines confirmed its Boeing 777 and 239 people were missing.

It is unique in the annals of civil aviation that five years after a loss of this scale none of the primary questions is settled. Not why or how the ­catastrophe unfolded; not who or what was responsible; not when precisely the aircraft crashed; and not, critically, where under wild seas to locate the broken ­fuselage that surely holds the answers.

But we now know enough, Sydney-based journalist Ean Higgins argues in The Hunt for MH370, to suspect the flight was hijacked by captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and that he murdered 227 passengers, including six Australians, and 11 crew.

We don’t know enough, however, to discard different possibilities: that Zaharie and first officer Fariq Abdul Hamid struggled heroically to save the aircraft from a crippling on-board fire, a decompression accident or a terrorist ­hijacking.

Malaysian Airlines captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

These are among the scenarios Higgins considers and imaginatively “reconstructs”. None as convincingly as the pilot hijack thesis ­because no other explains the aircraft’s bizarre course, apparently under human control at least until after it had turned towards the ­Southern Ocean.

What was known at 7.24am in Kuala Lumpur when Malaysia Airlines announced MH370 was missing (but macabrely still flying, we now believe) was that it “went dark” about 39 minutes into a scheduled 5½-hour flight to Beijing, over the South China Sea.

Two minutes after KL air traffic control last heard the pilot — “Good night, Malaysian three seven zero” — the aircraft transponder, which regularly transmits an identity code and bursts of flight data, was switched off or otherwise disabled. No alarms were raised from the aircraft; passengers made no mobile phone calls.

It was about this point — in the thesis Higgins puts forward that is backed by many airline industry and air safety professionals — that Zaharie isolated himself in the cockpit with an oxygen supply and depressurised the aircraft.

Even those crew and passengers who managed in 30 seconds to don drop-down masks would have run out of oxygen and been ­fatally disabled by hypoxia within 15 minutes if the aircraft remained at 35,000 feet.

The Hunt for MH370 by Ean Higgins.

Military radar recordings show MH370 made a tight, steeply banked turn, only manageable by an accomplished pilot, travelled southwest back over peninsular Malaysia, performed another turn around Penang, Zaharie’s home town, and then flew northwest through the Malacca Strait until, at a point off northern Sumatra, it passed beyond radar ­detection.

What we know about the remaining five hours and 15 minutes, during which we now have every reason to believe the aircraft turned south to the Southern Ocean, is initially due to technicians at satellite company Inmarsat. They realised that the arcs of distance MH370 travelled could be deduced from automated hourly contacts, “handshakes”, relayed by their satellite from the plane to ground stations.

Higgins, a long-time journalist at The Australian, is no great prose stylist. But he has the valuable talent of unknotting complex technical issues to explain lucidly, for instance, how the electronic handshakes were used to identify the “Seventh Arc” in the Southern Ocean as the zone to search for the aircraft hulk.

However, as Higgins acknowledges at the outset of this substantial work of extended ­reportage, we cannot conclusively know what happened aboard MH370 until the main wreckage and human remains are found in the deep ocean reaches, probably about 2500km west of Perth.

A confirmed location of the aircraft and then, decisively, recovery of its flight data ­recorder and voice recorder would settle the question that resonates through this book, and other (sensible) accounts: how did Flight MH370 end? Did it finish in a “rapidly escalating uncontrolled descent” — a death dive, as Higgins calls it — after the 777’s fuel-starved twin engines had flamed out, with all crew “unresponsive”, the violent high-velocity crash into the ocean breaking the aircraft into thousands of pieces? This scenario has been doggedly maintained by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau since mid-2014.

Or did someone remain functional — if so, circumstantial evidence points to ­Zaharie — guiding the descent from 35,000 feet with dead engines to glide, more or less horizontally, into the ocean, where impact and water inrush would kill anyone still breathing, tear off ­engines and wings but leave the fuse­lage to sink to the ocean floor, possibly still in one piece?

The critical difference between the two scenarios is that by a controlled descent a skilled pilot could glide the aircraft an extra 100 nautical miles or more. Taken together with earlier events, it would leave little doubt ditching was the culmination of a criminal design: hijacking, mass murder and finally suicide.

Circumstantial evidence implicating Zaharie includes Malaysian investigators finding on a flight simulator at his home a route plotted that was similar to MH370’s extraordinary course. During preparations for the flight the captain ­ordered extra fuel: not merely sufficient to get safely to the next nearest airport to Beijing, but two hours’ worth.

Higgins is guided in his preference for the pilot hijack hypothesis by assessments of experienced aviators and ­investigators, including former fighter pilot and 777 captain Byron Bailey, former RAF squadron leader and easyJet airline chief pilot Mike Keane and noted Canadian air crash investigator Larry Vance.

Vance’s analysis of damage to the aircraft’s right flaperon and adjoining section of aft flap, recovered from the shores of Reunion Island and Tan­zania, concluded that it proved beyond doubt they had been torn off in a controlled ditching. Indignant that the ATSB excluded the possibility, he published a book last year, MH370: Mystery Solved.

But why Zaharie would conceive such a ghastly plan, or go to such extraordinary lengths to have the plane vanish without trace, seems beyond the deductive powers of anybody concerned with MH370 inquiries, official or otherwise.

The Malaysians, who were responsible for the International Civil Aviation Organisation annex 13 ­investigation, showed little interest in assaying the captain’s possible motivations. Their final report, last July, concluded: “The Team is ­unable to determine the real cause for the disappearance of MH370.”

Higgins tries out several sort-of explanations — marital issues, the criminal conviction on the day previous to the flight of then opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, whom Zaharie followed — but soon drops the matter with a figurative shrug. He scrupulously records that the Australian next-of-kin don’t favour the pilot murder/suicide proposition.

The ATSB, which managed and delineated the margins of a second, intensive Southern Ocean underwater hunt — the first Australian-led southern search at Malaysia’s request having failed completely — insisted throughout it was not responsible for determining “the actual factors involved in the loss of MH370”. That was for Malaysia.

The challenge was, as Higgins insists strenuously, that to mount the most effective search, ATSB had to decide whether it was worthwhile to investigate the wider area ­indicated by the controlled descent thesis. Or, as he puts it, whether to pre-empt the Malaysian ­investi­gatory panel’s judgment on pilot culpability.

The bureau, advised by an expert Search Strategy Working Group. chose conserva­tively: it decided to define the search area more narrowly, consistent with the “unresponsive crew” scenario.

That search also failed. As did a privately funded quest by contractor Ocean Infinity, which never disclosed the ­uncompensated, but obviously multi-million-dollar, cost. The second and third searches covered about 250,000sq km of ocean floor. In aggregate, they cost Malaysia, Australia, China (if one accepts Beijing’s valuation of its rather dubious help-in-kind) and Ocean Infinity well over $200 million.

ATSB senior officers shunned Higgins’s ­requests to contribute to the telling of this story. The reciprocal hostility is a striking sub-theme of the book.

In an April 2017 letter to The Australian, chief executive Greg Hood accused Higgins of undermining the credibility of the ATSB search, misrepresenting its “best possible science” approach and of harassing his staff. He concluded the bureau “reserves its right not to interact with Mr Higgins”. This and other complaints can be found at ATSB’s online newsroom under “Correcting the Record”.

Higgins returns the blaming with interest, accusing the bureau not only of disregarding the most viable end-of-flight scenario, and thus setting the search margins too narrowly, but of withholding legitimately sought information and threatening and obstructing his reporting.

Whatever the provocations, it is hard to see how the public interest would not have been better served by the bureau engaging, even combatively, with the writing of this book.

The ATSB’s response would have been particularly interesting to Higgins’s final entreaty, on behalf of his like-minded experts and the ­bereaved families, for another search. To prove, or disprove, those experts’ calculations, according to Higgins, would require searching only 7000sq km of ocean floor on the southern margins of the previous Seventh Arc searches.

In the meantime, he’s not going to stop writing MH370 stories.

Peter Alford is a journalist and a former colleague of Ean Higgins at The Australian.

The Hunt for MH370: The Mystery, the Cover-Up, the Truth

By Ean Higgins. Pan Macmillan, 296pp, $32.99