Was MH370 a murder-suicide?

Authorities must come clean on what they knew and when.

On January 9 in this newspaper Byron Bailey, a former airline captain of great experience, broke news potentially decisive for solving the riddle of the lost Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. The FBI, he reported, had uncovered information consistent with the theory that MH370 was a case of murder-suicide engineered by its captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah. Now that FBI analysis has been made public by New York magazine.

The question put in January remains the same: why did authorities discount the rogue pilot theory in favour of the less probable hypothesis that the crew was “unresponsive” (perhaps because of lack of oxygen) and therefore played no part in controlling the jet’s final minutes? The answer is important not only for deciding the search area for wreckage but for determining the truth of a tragedy that claimed 239 souls, six Australians among them.

Yesterday, Malcolm Turnbull deflected questions to Malaysia’s government. Its handling of the case has been erratic and opaque; its media organisations are cowed and compliant. Malaysia Airlines is government-controlled and could face collapse were it proven that Zaharie did indeed hijack his own jet. It is naive to expect a sudden conversion to transparency in Kuala Lumpur.

Australian authorities — especially the Air Transport Safety Bureau — cannot evade demands for accountability. It was an Australian government source who told Mr Bailey of the FBI report. And it is Australia that has led the search for MH370 — at Malaysia’s request — and spent tens of millions of dollars in an exercise based on the now largely discounted assumption of an unresponsive flight crew. If, as the flight simulator material from his home computer suggests, Zaharie were in control until the bitter end, the jet could have glided well beyond the official search area.

When did relevant Australian authorities learn of the FBI report? Why did they discount it? Until there are answers, speculation is inevitable. We depend on Kuala Lumpur for co-operation in counter-terrorism and border security. Might Australia have underplayed the rogue pilot theory to keep Malaysia on side? This may be far-fetched but we expect — and the families of Australian victims deserve — more transparency than has been displayed during the MH370 affair.