ATSB boss Greg Hood firm on refusal to release full MH370 data

Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief Greg Hood has declined to release key documents on the search for MH370.

ATSB staff examine a piece of debris from Malaysian Airlines MH370. Picture: ATSB

Australian Transport Safety ­Bureau chief commissioner Greg Hood has declined to accede to pleas from families of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 victims to release key documents about the bureau’s fruitless search for the aircraft.

Danica Weeks, who was left a single mother looking after two young boys when her husband Paul disappeared with MH370 three years ago, has claimed “Mr Hood has simply denied families throughout the world the information we so desperately need about what happened to our loved ones.”

The call came as a second relative of the six Australians lost on MH370, Teresa Liddle, and the association representing the families of the 153 Chinese victims, joined Ms Weeks in urging journalists to continue to probe for answers in the face of Mr Hood’s public attacks on The Australian for reporting critiques of the ATSB’s failed search by independent scientists and aviation experts.

After The Australian reported scientists in Europe and the University of Western Australia had long ago warned that drift modelling of MH370 debris showed early on in the two-year underwater search that the ATSB was looking too far south, Mr Hood, who took up his role in July after a career at Airservices Australia and the RAAF, criticised the reports in a letter to this newspaper and on the ATSB website.

Flight MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014 on a scheduled trip from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with its radar transponder turned off and radio contact cut 40 minutes into the flight.

Primary radar and automatic electronic satellite tracking data showed the aircraft double backed over Malaysia to the Andaman Sea, then took a long track south to the southern Indian Ocean.

Ms Weeks and the group known as MH370 China Families called on Mr Hood to reverse his rejection of a freedom of information request from The Australian for international assessments of satellite tracking data.

An ATSB spokesman said this week that the data “has been painstakingly analysed by leading experts in their fields, who form the MH370 Search Strategy Working Group, to determine the aircraft’s most likely flight path”.

But Colin McNamara, the ATSB’s general manager, strategic capability, refused The Australian’s initial FOI request for the SSWG analyses, saying its public release “would, or could reasonably be expected to, cause damage to the international relations of the Commonwealth”.

In reviewing and rejecting the FOI request, Mr Hood invoked the Transport Safety Investigation Act, which makes it a crime for current or former ATSB staff to release material deemed restricted, punishable by two years in prison.

While independent experts generally agree that the satellite data gives a good indication of the track of the Boeing 777, they differ on whether it can accurately say how the aircraft finally came down.

The ATSB maintains that the satellite data shows MH370 went down in what’s become known as a “death dive”, or unpiloted crash.

Top US air crash investigator John Cox has said he does not believe the satellite data is good enough to conclusively support the ATSB’s rapid descent theory. Several senior airline pilots and air crash investigators maintain the evidence suggests Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijacked his own aircraft and flew it to the end and outside the ATSB’s 120,000 square kilometre target search area, which it had defined based on the “death dive” theory.

In a letter to the The Australian published this week, Ms Weeks wrote that if Mr Hood continued to put “diplomatic niceties” ahead of “the sensitivities of the families and friends of 239 people”, he should stand down so a replacement could be appointed who would “release the FOI immediately”.

Speaking of the ATSB’s definition of the search area based on its interpretation of the satellite data, the Chinese families association noted that “the search based on this data has failed”.

“We would welcome the ­release of any additional information which highlights inconsistencies in the official ex­planation,” the association told The Australian.

“We are disappointed in (the ATSB’s) explicit and implicit endorsement and their acting as proxy communicators for the ­Malaysian authorities,” the Chinese families said.

The Chinese families spoke of their difficulties in campaigning in authoritarian China.

“There are more than 350 of us, who communicate by social media aliases,” the association said.

“We meet informally in small groups, or in larger approved groups attended by police.”

Mr Hood did not respond to questions from The Australian about whether he would seek permission from members of the SSWG to grant the FOI request, and whether Malaysian authorities had asked for this and other material to be suppressed.

An ATSB spokesman said the bureau was “very conscious of, and deeply saddened by, the prolonged and profound grief suffered by the families of those on board MH370” and remained willing to brief family members “on all aspects of the search”.