Enduring mystery to be solved

The families and friends of the 239 people — including 28 Australians and eight permanent residents — who died when Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared from radar over the South China Sea en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, are entitled to some answers from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau. They can only wonder, in sadness and frustration, why ATSB bosses appear to have ignored strong leads about how and why the tragedy occurred.

Australian taxpayers, who have funded much of the $200 million search, also will be looking for answers when ATSB bosses face a grilling at a Senate estimates committee hearing next week.

Today, veteran commercial pilot Byron Bailey, who flew the same model Boeing 777 passenger jet as MH370 when he was a senior captain for Emirates, argues the aircraft wreckage could have been found four years ago had ATSB heeded the advice of numerous aviation professionals.

It is not unreasonable, as he suggests, that Malaysia and Australia fund a new search, centred in a small area of the southern Indian Ocean. That is where experienced professionals believe the wreckage lies: about 70 to 100 nautical miles south of where the ATSB’s search ended. As well as providing satisfaction for those who still wonder about what happened to their loved ones, the security questions at stake are too serious for Transport Minister Michael McCormack not to endeavour to have them resolved.

One of the key issues, as Ean Higgins writes today, is whether MH370’s captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah flew the aircraft to the end, ditching it in a way that it disappeared in as few pieces as possible, or whether, as the ATSB appeared to assume, the pilots were unconscious at the end and the plane flew on autopilot until it crashed after running out of fuel.

Interest in the mystery has been heightened by a new analysis of MH370 wreckage by Canadian air crash investigator Larry Vance, published in The Australian this week. Vance’s book, MH370: Mystery Solved, says the damage to the right flap and flaperon of MH370, found on islands off Africa in July 2015, point to a pilot performing a controlled ditching.

That view rules out the ATSB’s theory of a steep pilotless dive. Vance, like several veteran pilots and engineers, believes MH370 was flown outside the 120,000sq km search zone designed by the ATSB.

Yesterday Mr McCormack reiterated his predecessors’ faith in the ATSB investigation into the fate of MH370 which, he said in a statement, “included co-ordination and input of the best expertise and the best technology from around the world”. But Centre Alliance senator Rex Patrick, to his credit, is not prepared to let the matter rest. In a case where so much has been spent and credible sources raise questions about the approach or the efficacy of an investigation, an inquiry is warranted, as he says.