Flight MH370: Search is over but the farce continues

The search is over and the champagne corks are popping in Kuala Lumpur as the Malaysian government has dodged a bullet: as efforts to locate MH370 have been suspended, evidence from the cockpit voice recorder and data flight recorder will not become available.

We now know where the Boeing 777 is not. The hi-tech sonar equipment employed by the Fugro search vessels can detect objects less than 2sq m so a 170-tonne wreckage longer than 60m almost certainly would have been found had it been in the search area.

This area was based on the theory of an unresponsive pilot, which had absolutely no evidence to support it, and I am still waiting for an explanation from former transport minister Warren Truss why this was so.

I was informed 2½ years ago of the confidential deleted information obtained from pilot Zaharie Shah’s home computer simulator. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau dismissed this as a practice flight by a highly competent pilot with 18,000 hours of experience. As if!

The report I saw was a flight plan with six defined waypoints, with the final waypoint deep in the southern Indian Ocean at latitude 45 degrees south and zero fuel.

The interesting fact is that MH370 actually flew the first four waypoints as it tracked over northern Malaysia and up the Straits of Malacca to the turn point north of Sumatra, obviously under pilot control, when it turned south to head deep into the southern Indian Ocean, so why was a search not conducted along that final track?

In January 2015, Simon Hardy, a former British Airways pilot with, like me, thousands of hours in command of 777s, informed the ATSB that MH370 could not be within 30 nautical miles of the seventh arc on which it was basing its search. The Times contacted me for verification of Hardy’s calculations. Again, the ATSB was dismissive of input from experts. So we have the nearly three years of wasted effort searching in an area pushed by the ATSB and its supporting cast of armchair experts, who have never flown a jet airliner, based on the bizarre theory of an unresponsive pilot.

This theory is totally at odds with the views of proper experts — highly qualified airline pilots and overseas crash investigators — who contend that a responsive pilot was in control until the final turn south, after which only speculation is available.

The families of the deceased have every right to feel very angry at this farcical saga.

Byron Bailey is a former RAAF fighter pilot and trainer and was a senior captain with Emirates for 15 years, during which he flew the same model 777 as Flight MH370.