We know where MH370 went down, we just don’t want to look

If the Australian Transport Safety Bureau had not turned a blind eye and tin ear to all the advice coming from aviation professionals, then Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 would probably have been found four years ago.

It could still be found now and fairly quickly, if Malaysian and Australian authorities who might fund a new search started listening to the professionals in the industry and looking where we think the aircraft is.

That’s a relatively small area of the southern Indian Ocean about 39 degrees south latitude, about 70 to 100 nautical miles south of the southern boundary of where the ATSB’s search ended.

That’s where we believe MH370’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, ditched the aircraft in a controlled fashion to make it disappear in as few pieces as possible, having flown it under power or glided it farther than the ATSB allowed for. The ATSB did not search farther south than 38 degrees because its bureaucrats wrongly assumed, or chose to assume so as to not embarrass Malaysia, that the pilots were unconscious at the end and the plane flew on autopilot until it crashed down steeply after fuel exhaustion.

All the evidence had always pointed to Zaharie hijacking his own aircraft 40 minutes into the scheduled flight on March 8, 2014, from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. He depressurised the Boeing 777 to kill everyone else on the flight while he enjoyed the long oxygen supply of the pilots, and flew it to the end, ditching it.

Professional airline pilots have long said this is the only possible explanation for the controlled flight, which made several course adjustments over some hours, while radio communications were cut and the aircraft’s radio transponder turned off. Now one of the world’s leading air-crash investigators, Canadian Larry Vance, in a new book, MH370: Mystery Solved, has added his huge experience and forensic mind to look at high-definition photographs of the pieces of MH370, particularly the right flap and flaperon, discovered on islands off the coast of Africa, and determined conclusively the damage was consistent only with a controlled ditching.

He also concludes, conversely, that the ATSB’s theory that MH370 went down in an unpiloted, steep spiralling dive is not at all consistent with the state of the flap and flaperon.

Vance points out that a high-speed dive as envisaged by the ATSB would have resulted in millions of small pieces of debris as it impacted the ocean, the same as the Swissair Flight 111 crash off Nova Scotia in 1998 for which he was the deputy lead accident investigator.

I have over the past two years been in regular contact with Mike Keane, former chief pilot of Britain’s largest airline, easyJet, and British Boeing 777 senior captain Simon Hardy.

We were joined six months ago by English engineer/mathematician Robin Stevens, who supplied me with calculations that showed MH370 fuel exhaustion coincided with sunrise at latitude 38 south, which is also the position of the final satellite “ping” identified in the tracking data.

This would have enabled Zaharie, who ordered far more fuel than he would need to fly to Beijing with a reasonable safety margin, to minimise the possibility of being spotted by passing ships. The four of us believe MH370 was intentionally ditched in a position 70 to 100nm south of the satellite “hotspot”.

Stevens’s assertion is a ditching position of S39.20 E88.36 with a search radius of 20nm, giving a search area of only 4300sq km compared with the 120,000sq km original ATSB target zone.

During the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes program on Sunday, former ATSB head Martin Dolan stated there was no need to continue the search as we all knew what had happened. When questioned by Tara Brown, he said: “This was planned, this was deliberate.”

Where was the oversight of the ATSB when it was conducting this farce over the past four years?

The Transport Minister needs to do some explaining.