MH370: Plane truth still unclear

Australia could be complicit in Malaysia’s notion of a third hand being involved in the mystery disappearance of MH370.

Sarah Nor, the mother of Norliakmar Hamid, a passenger on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. Picture: AFP

If Kok Soo Chon, the Malaysian chief investigator into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, was trying to run a protection racket for the government-owned airline and the plane’s two pilots, he used a standard defence lawyer’s trick: suggest somebody else did it.

That’s what critics think of Kok’s blockbuster suggestion on Monday that an unknown “third party” might have hijacked the Boeing 777, rather than captain ­Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

They also believe the Malaysians started working on that line right from the start more than four years ago and stuck to it regardless of the evidence as it came in, along with rejecting the suggestion that Zaharie flew the aircraft to the end and ditched it.

The question is whether Kok’s narrative can create enough reasonable doubt in the court of world opinion to acquit the pilots in the eyes of the general public.

If it does, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau will share responsibility because it was an integral part of the Malaysian investigation all the way along, and officially signed off on the conclusions in its report.

Major sections of MH370 found so far

It was high drama in the Malaysian administrative capital of ­Putrajaya when Kok made three sensational statements about what the four-year investigation had found.

First, he made clear only a pilot gripping the yoke and deliberately flying the plane the wrong way could have led the aircraft to make a radical turn 40 minutes into its flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 souls on board.

“The autopilot has to be disengaged,” Kok told journalists in describing the first steep banked turn, which took MH370 on an ­almost reversed course back over the Thai-Malaysia airspace border and towards Penang.

“We have carried out seven simulator tests. We found the turn was made indeed under a manual (control input), not autopilot.”

Similarly, Kok says it almost had to be a pilot who knew the intricacies of the plane’s communications systems who at about the same time as the course change turned off the automatic flight data transmissions and the secondary radar transponder. This caused the aircraft to vanish off the screens of air traffic controllers just as responsibility for tracking the flight shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Ho Chi Minh City.

“It is possible that the absence of communications prior to flight path diversion was due to the systems being manually turned off,” Kok said. “The route followed by the aircraft, the height at which it flew, did not suggest any mechanical problem with the aircraft’s control system, fuel or engines.”

So, point one is that what led MH370 to fly the wrong way and later south into oblivion in the southern Indian Ocean is human intervention.

Kok’s point two, however, goes against what has become the conventional wisdom among most, though not all, experts in the professional aviation and air crash investigation industry.

Captain Zaharie

This is that one of the two pilots, most likely Zaharie, was the hijacker, taking control when co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid was out of the cockpit. The scenario holds that Zaharie depressurised the aircraft to deprive the other 238 people on board of oxygen while he enjoyed the ­pilots’ long oxygen supply, putting them first to sleep and then death.

No one thinks Fariq, 27, a knockabout who was set to marry his sweetheart, was the culprit.

Zaharie, on the other hand, at 53 had a lot of things going on. His elder sister revealed to The Australian that the “naughty” Zaharie had a series of female friends and “normal” marital problems.

A close female friend of Zaharie’s, who denied they were having an affair, had sent him a message a couple of days before the flight, The Australian earlier revealed.

And he was a supporter of then opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, who just before the flight had been convicted of sodomy in a retrial widely seen as politically ­motivated.

But on Monday, Kok employed a similar line to what the defence lawyer in OJ Simpson’s murder trial, Johnnie Cochran, famously used: “If it doesn’t fit, you must ­acquit.”

Kok did not use that precise phrase, but he said the investigation had found there was not a skerrick of evidence pointing to motive, diabolical tendency or craziness that would have led Zaharie to commit mass murder and suicide. “He has no conflict issues with friends or family and had shown no signs of social isolation, self-neglect, no abuse of alcohol or drugs, no change of habit or interest, no stress or anxiety was detected in his audio recordings and no signs of significant behavioural changes as observed in the CCTV footage,” Kok says.

“He was a very competent pilot, almost flawless in the records, able to handle work stress very well. We are not of the opinion it could be an event committed by the pilot.”

So who, the question arose, flew the aircraft to its doom?

That’s where Kok came up with the clincher in the thriller-like narrative: it could have been the Third Man.

He says the investigators can “not exclude the possibility that there’s unlawful interference by a third party”.

The chief investigator says the culprit did not even have to be a pilot.

“You can always go in with a knife.”

Final Communications MHdfkjh dfjh fd h

It was gripping stuff, and resurrects one of big theories of what happened to MH370: a hijacking gone wrong.

Geoff Dell, a transport accident investigator who is now an associate professor at Central Queensland University, is one of the few aviation professionals who prefers the theory.

As Dell says, Zaharie had published a video of him allowing young women on to the flight deck, and he regularly posted where he was flying on social media.

“Simply include a young woman in the hijack team and just ask for a photo opportunity with the captain on the flight deck,” Dell told this newspaper two years ago.

The hijackers then might have commanded the crew to head towards Afghanistan, for example, where the Taliban might hold runways long enough to land such an aircraft, and hold to ransom all on board and the aircraft itself.

But the flight crew might have bravely tried to regain control of the plane, and if a fight ensued, Dell says, “it’s plausible that it could easily have resulted in the death or incapacitation of everyone who can fly. Then the (auto­pilot) would have continued to fly the aircraft.”

The theory has gained new life; Dell was interviewed on ABC radio promoting it yesterday.

Most aviation professionals think the failed hijack theory far-fetched, and claim it was promoted by Kok to distract attention from Zaharie.

“The third-party stuff is exactly that — the only way left to put doubt on who was carrying this out,” veteran Canadian air crash investigator Larry Vance says.

Most professional observers say the effort to make the aircraft disappear involved an extra­ordinarily high degree of planning, knowledge of aircraft systems and flying skill, and had to be executed in a precise sequence just seconds after Zaharie calmly said to Kuala Lumpur air traffic controllers: “Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero.”

Co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid.

As Kok himself says, the background of all the passengers was scrupulously investigated by the authorities in their countries, coming up with “a clean bill of health for everybody”.

Vance and Mike Keane, the former chief pilot of Britain’s largest airline, easyJet, also say Kok spun one conclusion beyond what was even in the investigation report when he said analysis of an MH370 flap and flaperon found washed up on the other side of the Indian Ocean showed they had not been lowered for a controlled ditching by a pilot.

“When we examined the wreckage, the debris, we found that the right flaperon was in the neutral position, whereas the outward flap was in the retracted position,” Kok says.

As Keane says, there is not that degree of confidence in the report itself, which says the flap “was most likely” in the retracted position and the flaperon was “probably at, or close to, the neutral position”.

Vance says the Malaysian report reveals for the first time the findings of the French government analysis of the flaperon, found on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion.

He says the French found the flaperon was most likely “deflected” at the time of impact.

“They include a diagram showing pretty much full deflection,” Vance says.

“This French ‘finding’ is very significant, and it is amazing that it has not been included in the Australian discussion of flap position,” he points out.

Kok repeatedly pointed out that his investigation had been held under what is known as the International Civil Aviation Organisation Annex 13 protocol, and it had seven international experts on the panel as “accredited representatives”, including one from the ATSB, and they all officially signed off, supporting the report.

The leader of the first failed underwater search for MH370 conducted by the ATSB, Peter Foley, did not respond to questions about whether he agrees with Kok’s assessment that Zaharie most likely did not hijack the aircraft but a “third party” might possibly have.

Critics of the ATSB have pointed out the bureau has a big reputational interest in Kok’s conclusions being right, particularly the claim that there was no controlled ditching.

The bureau based its search strategy on MH370 being a “ghost flight” at the end with “unresponsive pilots”, and that it crashed down rapidly in an uncontrolled “death dive” after it ran out of fuel on autopilot.

If that theory is wrong and Vance and Keane are right and a pilot flew it outside the search area and ditched it, it means the ATSB blew $200 million of Australian, Malaysian, and Chinese taxpayers’ money on a search that probably had no chance of success.