MH370 mystery rivals Azaria, Mary Celeste, Lord Lucan

The Indian Ocean seems slowly, fragment by fragment, to be yielding up the doomed Malaysia Airlines flight 370.

The Indian Ocean seems slowly, fragment by fragment, to be yielding up the doomed Malaysia Airlines flight 370, now 764 days overdue at Beijing’s Capital International Airport.

The latest piece of what appears to be MH370, found (on March 30) on a beach on ­Rod­rigues Island, near Mauritius, is widely reported as having been from the inside of a Boeing 777, suggesting that even if the plane didn’t break apart on landing in the southern Indian Ocean, it may well be breaking apart now. It had, as you’d know, embarked on a strange, erratic, inexplicable ­odyssey.

Scheduled to fly (for five hours and 34 minutes) from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, it suddenly veered left — or west — as it entered Vietnamese airspace.

It doubled back over northern Malaysia then headed due south, flying for a total estimated seven hours and 39 minutes, a calculation based on the known volume of fuel the Boeing had on board.

The world loves a mystery. The media thrives on mysteries. Not that the fate of MH370 is a cheerful, breezy mystery with any likelihood of a happy solution. It doesn’t quite equate with a jolly, expenses-fuelled hunt for Lord Lucan. There were 239 passengers and crew aboard MH370 and it’s not possible to see how their discovery would engender too much bonhomie among their families and friends. Equally, such a discovery would be an improvement on simply not knowing their fate. Australia, leading the seabed search mission to locate MH370, keeps saying it remains hopeful the aircraft will be found. That may not sound terribly encouraging for loved ones who’ve been waiting 764 days for concrete information. Yet the fact is that the signs have been encouraging.

The locations of the Boeing ­debris found so far, the Rodrigues Island piece, two pieces apparently from the outside of the plane found (in December and February) in Mozambique, and a piece picked up on a South African beach, all conform to CSIRO and other Indian Ocean current models which seem to indicate most buoyant material would swirl to the west, toward the east African coast.

Only one piece of possible debris, a plastic-sealed Malaysia Airlines-stamped moisturised towel, found on a beach (Thirsty Point) about 200km north of Perth and exclusively reported by the Nine Network’s Liam Bartlett, seems to have drifted in the opposite direction. But ocean current models also show some currents moving to the east. A wing flap found on Reunion Island last July has long been identified by a range of experts as from a Boeing 777, only one of which has gone missing over the Indian Ocean: MH370.

The missing aircraft is what grizzled, hard-bitten old journos and sub-editors used, back in another era, to call “a real story”. They meant it wasn’t about airy-fairy stuff like politics. It wasn’t about sport. It wasn’t about a ­romantic lottery win. It didn’t ­involve opinion and speculation. There was nothing confected about it. It was nitty-gritty “real”. And the pre-internet old-timers would have been right about MH370.

It is a truly extraordinary story, comparable with the mysterious 1980 disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain, the 1872 loss of the captain, his family and the crew of the Mary Celeste and, of course, the 1974 disappearance of the seventh Earl of Lucan, one Richard John Bingham. Four mysterious stories but with only two of the mysteries anywhere near solved. We now know baby Azaria was taken by a dingo. After Trevor Morling’s royal commission into the Chamberlain case, that’s irrefutable. And a documentary shown on the ABC a few years ago put forward a fairly compelling theory as to what happened aboard the Mary Celeste.

Your ancient correspondent can’t remember who made the film, what its title was, nor even which year it was screened. But he can recall its contents as well as the fact that pretty well nobody rushed to discredit the theory. Briefly: the brigantine’s cargo was denatured alcohol (basically methylated spirits) and a couple of the barrels started giving off gas and threatening to explode. Fearing the whole lot would go up the captain, Benjamin Briggs, directed his wife, Sarah, his two-year-old daughter, Sophie, and the seven crew to get into the lifeboat. He lashed the boat to the mother ship.

But the rope broke during a minor storm and Briggs couldn’t get back on board. The Mary ­Celeste was discovered adrift off the Azores Islands (Portugal), sans its lifeboat, its captain and passengers missing, with two of its hatches open but with its potentially volatile cargo largely intact.

Neither Briggs and his nine passengers, nor the lifeboat, were ever seen again. For the record, the Mary Celeste subsequently had a miserable, trouble-plagued life and ended up being delib­erately run aground.

Lord Lucan? The mind boggles. The scribe watched a well-made film a while back, simply entitled Lucan, directed by Adrian Shergold. It was close to excellent: well acted, well written and seemingly staying close to the facts as we know them. But the film ended abruptly, just as police discovered the missing Lucan’s car the morning after he’d apparently bludgeoned his children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett, to death. So, whether he went to France, Africa, Switzerland, Australia, back to Britain (in disguise) or topped himself was left very much up in the air.

Lucan is now “officially” dead though it might be worth noting that the detective who led the Lucan investigation, Roy Ranson, only initially subscribed to the suicide theory. Ranson has since gone on the record as believing Lucan did nothing of the kind and actually went to live “in southern Africa”.

It may also be worth noting that if, if — just if — Lucan is still with us, he’s now 81. All of which leaves us, in terms of mysteries, with MH370. The Australian (via Ean Higgins and, last year, Hedley Thomas), Four Corners (via Caro Meldrum-Hanna) and the BBC have all done their considerable best with the story, without being able to totally unravel it. That makes the mystery just that bit more mysterious and tantalising. Where, just where, is that plane? And why, why, did it end up there?