Inquiry into MH370 to probe ‘years of wasted effort’

Two and a half years have elapsed since the Boeing 777 of flight MH370 “mysteriously” disappeared over the South China Sea.

After satellite pings revealed the Malaysia Airlines plane had flown for more than seven hours towards the southern Indian Ocean, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau decided on an unresponsive pilot scenario and, instead of asking the advice of aviation professionals, they passed the baton to a group of scientists.

These scientists with qualifications more suited to esoteric pursuits of gravitational waves and dark matter analysed the final satellite ping based on an unresponsive pilot scenario.

Meanwhile aviation professionals were baffled by the ATSB decision to ignore the obvious pilot input into the three minutes when captain Zaharie Shah said goodnight to Kuala Lumpur air traffic control and the aircraft turned (as subsequently revealed by military radar), obviously under pilot control — and was still under control 90 minutes later. Why did the aircraft not continue to its destination, Beijing? Someone had to reprogram the flight management computers so the autopilot could navigate along an airway.

We were told two years ago by the FBI of deleted data from Zaharie’s home computer that showed he had constructed an airway from north of Sumatra to the southern Indian Ocean. This data would be necessary to feed into the flight management computers.

A very experienced and competent 18,000-hour pilot such as Zaharie would not do this for fun, and logic suggests this data is circumstantial evidence Zaharie planned a hijack. The ATSB chose to ignore this.

So here we are at the end of a search that has revealed nothing, probably because it has been conducted in the wrong area based on the unresponsive pilot scenario.

Recently the ATSB, again trying to twist suggested “evidence” to fit its unresponsive pilot theory, concluded MH370 had dived in its final descent at 12,000 feet per minute. This was based on the Doppler shift of the final satellite ping. Crash investigators at the US National Transportation Safety Board have said the data is insufficient to draw any conclusion.

At that point the direction of MH370 was unknown and a turn away from abeam of the satellite several thousand kilometres away would produce the concluded Doppler red shift — but the tiny vertical component of essentially a two-axis mathematical problem is very inaccurate.

Also, Zaharie was trying to hide the resting place of MH370 and would attempt a controlled ditching in those heavy seas to limit debris — although it does appear the engines, as expected, and the flaps or flaperons were torn off from the down position, as concluded by overseas experts. To ensure he had engines running and hydraulic power, he may have cut his descent planning a bit tight, wanting to extend his range as far south as possible on the fuel remaining. It has been reported Zaharie put on much more fuel than was needed for the flight to Beijing.

Realising his need to descend quickly so he still had fuel for an attempted ditching, he may have deployed speedbrakes and nose- down VMO speed which would produce about 12,000 feet/minute descent — that is what we achieve in simulators when we practise rapid descent scenarios.

The ATSB is a taxpayer-funded organisation that deals with road, rail, ship and aviation safety. It has no in-house aviation professionals, but is staffed by bureaucrats. I suggest an inquiry is needed into why it went with an unresponsive pilot scenario that ended in 2½ years of wasted effort.

Byron Bailey is a commercial pilot with more than 45 years’ experience and 26,000 flying hours, and a former RAAF fighter pilot. He was a senior captain with Emirates for 15 years.