Australian Transport Safety Bureau faces grilling over failed $200m search for MH370

Pressure is growing for a full investigation, maybe a royal commission, into the ATSB’s handling of the two-year hunt.

Children write messages of hope for passengers of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on June 14, 2014. Picture: Reuters

Australian Transport Safety Bureau bosses face an intense Senate interrogation next week over claims they allegedly ignored clear evidence their theory of how Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went down was wrong, leading their $200 million underwater search for the aircraft to fail.

Centre Alliance senator Rex Patrick told The Australian he would be asking questions of the ATSB about MH370 at a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday.

The move comes as pressure grows for a full investigation — some airline pilots want a royal commission — into the ATSB’s handling of the two-year hunt.

“In any circumstance where $200m of taxpayer money has been spent and credible sources raise questions as to the approach or efficacy, some form of inquiry is worthy,” Senator Patrick said.

The heightened scrutiny on the ATSB follows a new forensic analysis of MH370 wreckage by leading Canadian air-crash ­investigator Larry Vance published in The Australian this week.

A new book by Mr Vance, MH370: Mystery Solved, says the structure of the damage to the right flap and flaperon of MH370 found on islands off Africa clearly shows a pilot performed a controlled ditching of the aircraft, and rules out the ATSB’s theory of a high-impact pilotless steep dive.

 

Which scenario is correct is crucial to where MH370 lies, with Vance and several veteran airline pilots saying it was flown outside the 120,000sq km original search zone designed by the ATSB, which assumed the pilots were incapacitated at the end of the flight.

Airline pilots have called for a new search a bit south of the southern border of the ATSB target zone, claiming captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah could have flown the Boeing 777 further than would have occurred on ­autopilot.

Mr Vance writes that the ATSB’s failure to properly re-evaluate its search strategy after the flaperon was found in July 2015, realise the new evidence meant its “ghost flight-death dive” theory no longer worked, and redesign or call off the hunt, is unconscionable. “If that evidence was actually discovered and brought forward, and then suppressed, that would be intentional deception,” he writes. “If nobody discovered the evidence, that was incompetence. I believe it was incompetence.”

MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, with primary radar and automatic satellite tracking showing it ended up in the southern Indian Ocean.

The former chief pilot of Britain’s largest airline, easyJet, Mike Keane, this week said that if the ATSB had knowingly ignored evidence which showed its search strategy was wrong, it would be complicit in covering up the mass murder of 238 people.

Queensland legal expert Greg Williams has said if supporting material becomes available he will help develop a case for prosecution under section 142.2 of the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act, under which federal public servants who engage in “dishonesty … according to the standards of ordinary people” can be jailed for five years.

The leader of the ATSB’s failed search for MH370, Peter Foley, and ATSB media spokesman Paul Sadler, did not respond to emails from The Australian.