ATSB bulletin jumped gun on MH370 death dive ‘consensus’

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau was wrong to say it had consensus on a “death dive” theory for flight MH370.

The ATSB had repeatedly refused to say why it had deleted the ‘consensus’ claim.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau issued a bulletin falsely claiming it had “consensus” from a team of international experts for its “death dive” theory that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went down fast in a pilotless crash, before two overseas agencies had a chance to express a view.

The ATSB made the claim as its chief commissioner Greg Hood joined the Malaysian government and Malaysia Airlines in a media campaign to hose down an alternative “rogue pilot” ­theory that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijacked his aircraft and flew it to the end outside the search area chosen by the ATSB.

Internal ATSB documents obtained by The Australian show that while a senior investigator drew the incorrect “consensus” statement to the attention of colleagues only minutes after the bulletin was released, the organisation never issued a correction and instead secretly deleted the claim from its website the next day, after it had been widely ­reported internationally.

The ATSB repeatedly refused to say why it had deleted the “consensus” claim, and falsely denied doing so in a subsequent post.

Internal ATSB emails ­obtained under Freedom of Information statutes by The Australian reveal the truth behind the organisation’s media manoeuvres.

The revelations come amid doubts expressed by independent experts about the reliability of the Inmarsat satellite data the ATSB uses for its rapid descent assumption, and claims the agency has, to avoid embarrassing Malaysia, steered away from the “rogue pilot” theory.

MH370 vanished on a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board. Its radar transponder was turned off and radio contact was broken.

Radar and automatic satellite tracking data indicate the Boeing 777 reversed course early in the flight, and flew along the ­Malaysia-Thailand border and out over the Andaman Sea before making a sharp turn south to end up in the southern Indian Ocean.

The ATSB designed the search zone based on its “ghost flight” theory that the pilots were incapacitated, and that after flying on autopilot, the aircraft came down quickly after running out of fuel.

In July, two developments led to international debate about the ATSB’s strategy.

Reuters reported the project director of the underwater search, Paul Kennedy of Dutch survey group Fugro, said the rogue pilot theory might be right after all.

“You could glide it for further than our search area is, so I believe the logical conclusion will be, well, maybe, that is the other scenario,” Mr Kennedy told Reuters.

The same weekend, New York magazine revealed a Malaysian police report indicated the FBI had determined Zaharie had charted a similar route on his home flight simulator.

Days later, the ATSB issued a bulletin in the name of the federal government’s Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre for the MH370 search, downplaying the rogue pilot theory. The ATSB claimed in its July 27 bulletin the satellite data showed MH370 came down “most likely in a high rate of descent”. As originally released, the bulletin said: “This is indeed the consensus of the Search Strategy Working Group,” referring to experts including from the US and British air crash investigation.

The documents obtained under FOI show that just a few minutes after the bulletin was ­issued, an ATSB senior investi­gator warned colleagues by email this was an “error” and that the sentence should be taken down.

“It is certainly not yet the consensus position of the SSWG … 2 parties are yet to make a formal response on the subject,” the investigator said.

The email chain shows another ATSB senior investigator agreed and gave instructions for the sentence with the “consensus” line to be removed from the ATSB’s and the JACC’s websites.

But the ATSB did not retract the sentence until the next day, by which time it had been reported internationally, including in Mal­aysian and Chinese publications.

As earlier revealed by The Australian, the deletion of the “consensus” line was discovered by British aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey, a member of the independent group of aviation experts who on their own initi­ative have been reviewing the MH370 scientific data.

When, at the time, The Australian rang the ATSB spokesman who had issued the July 27 bulletin to ask why the deletion had been made, the spokesman hung up and JACC director Annette Clark declined to respond.

Subsequently, ATSB MH370 spokesman Daniel O’Malley and JACC chief co-ordinator Judith Zielke would also not say why the “consensus” line had been secretly disappeared.

When The Australian reported the deletion of the sentence, the ATSB issued a denial on its website, saying the report “falsely ­accuses the ATSB of ‘secretly retracting’ information”.

In a statement after it had been made aware of the FOI material, the JACC said: “The information was retracted when it was learned not all working group members had, at that stage, provided formal responses. Subsequently a consensus view was reached.”