Will the mystery of MH370 ever be nearer to solving?

In one punch, Tony Abbott demolished the public pretence of Malaysian government officials about what really happened aboard MH370.

A man walks past a mural of missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 plane. Picture: AFP

Six years on from when Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went rogue and disappeared, the international fascination with the aviation ­mystery remains unabated.

Revelations in a high-rating Sky News documentary broadcast this week, MH370: The Untold Story, sparked a chain reaction of developments here and in Malaysia, including calls for a fresh inquiry­ and a new search for the aircraft.

The flight vanished from air traffic­ controllers’ screens 40 ­minutes into a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014.

A playback of Malaysian ­military radar and analysis of automatic satellite “handshakes” from the aircraft show that it flew back over Malaysia and turned south, ending up somewhere on a band in the southern Indian Ocean.

Two underwater searches have failed to find the aircraft.

Is momentum building for a third hunt?

What’s changed?

There’s a different tone of debate about what happened on MH370.

In one punch, Tony Abbott knocked over the public pretence of Malaysian government officials that what happened on the flight was something other than pilot hijack­. The then prime minister’s words in the Sky News documentary were, as he put it, “crystal clear”.

“My very clear understanding, from the very top levels of the Malaysi­an government, is that from very, very early on here they thought it was murder-suicide by the pilot,” Abbott said.

His revelation started a cascade effect. Within hours of the story coming out, the former Malaysian prime minister in office when MH370 disappeared, Najib Razak, told the Free Malaysia Today news site “this possible scenario was never ruled out during the search effort and investigations”.

He said the suspicions were not disclosed because it would have been “irresponsible since the black box and cockpit recorder had not been found”.

Najib’s intervention represents an acceptance that the most likely explanation for what happened on MH370 is a big loss of face for Malaysi­a: that a highly trusted Malaysian pilot on a government-owned airline, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, took 238 innocent people to their deaths in an act of mass ­murder.

Then Prime Minister Tony Abbott, right, shakes hands with Malaysia’s then Prime Minister Najib Razak during a visit to Australia in 2014

Najib went further, laying out the evidence that has been there all along: someone switched off the secondary radar transponder 40 minutes into the flight, and whoever was at the controls knew exactly what he was doing with some tricky flying of a commercial airliner. He noted Zaharie was a supporter of then opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, who was given a second politically motivated jail term the day before the flight.

The admissions stand in marked contrast to the spin of the head of the Malaysian government’s official investigation into the loss of MH370, Kok Soo Chon. In releasing his report in 2018 he said there was no suspicion that Zaharie had hijacked his own plane and pointed instead to a “third party” being responsible.

Najib’s admissions mark the first healthy dose of truth in Malay­sia when it comes to MH370 — the question is how the current government reacts.

Will the Malaysian government come clean?

In the next phase of the domino effect­, Lim Kit Siang — the head of the Democratic Action Party, which is a member of the ruling coalit­ion — called for an inter­national inquiry into the dis­appearance, and for former Najib government members to reveal what they know about MH370.

“The highest levels of the former­ Malaysian government who believed from very early on that the MH370 tragedy was a murder-suicide plot must now speak up,” Lim said.

Malaysia’s official investigation into MH370 copped significant criticism for not paying enough attention to Zaharie’s back­ground, and disregarding the pattern of damage to a flap and flaperon­ from MH370 found washed up on the other side of the Indian Ocean.

An inquiry with a panel including top air-crash investigation exper­ts from different countries, and public hearings where Australian, Malaysian and other officials involved could give evidence, would give Malaysia a chance to redeem credibility on MH370.

It could be the catalyst and venue for all the material kept secre­t about the flight to be ­publicly released.

Will the Australian Transport Safety Bureau come clean?

ATSB chief commissioner Greg Hood and his senior officers have refused several Freedom of Information requests from The Australian, including for the opinions of international experts on critical satellite data.

There’s now a chance, though, that Hood and his lieutenants could be forced to testify under oath and provide subpoenaed documents in an open courtroom.

As revealed by The Australian this week, two veteran pilots aided by a barrister have asked Queensland Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath to exercise her power to order the state Coroner to launch an inquest into the deaths of four Queenslanders on MH370, and she says she’ll consider it.

Sky News used a scheduled ­interview this week to ambush Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk on the topic, and extracted­ what comes close to a commitment.

“It’s obviously a big issue and of course there were a lot of families right across Australia that were deeply impacted,” Palaszczuk said.

“If the Attorney-General, our government, can help in any way, we would be more than happy to do so.”

Hood is also now under pressure to say whether he still believes in the strategy behind the ATSB’s failed search, which he inherited from his predecessor Martin Dolan, because Dolan now thinks it may have been wrong.

The ATSB based its two-year search on the assumption that by the end MH370 was a ghost flight with “unresponsive” pilots, crashing down after running out of fuel flying on autopilot.

The ATSB did not cover a relatively small area farther south where senior airline pilots believe the aircraft lies — the pilots think the evidence shows Zaharie flew the plane until it ran out of fuel and glided it 100 nautical miles or more beyond the search zone.

In a bombshell admission, Dolan told Sky News he now thinks the pilots may have been right, and the ATSB wrong.

He appears to have been influenced by a determination by ­independent experts including French government officials that the pattern of damage on the flap and flaperon shows they were deploy­ed by a pilot for a controlled ditching.

A recovered Boeing 777 wing flap identified to be part of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, on display in Kuala Lumpur in 2019.

“We just now have some addition­al information which has been brought to bear … that means there’s an increasing likelihood that there was someone at the ­controls at the end of flight,” Dolan said.

Will there be a new search?

There are plenty of logical places to look further for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean, such as the area just a bit farther south as suggested by the pilots, or farther north along what’s known as the seventh arc, or either side along it.

Ever since its search in 2018 failed to find MH370, undersea survey company Ocean Infinity has said it would like to strike anothe­r “no find, no fee” deal with the Malaysian government to have another crack.

The Malaysians say they’re open to it but need fresh credible evidence to justify a new search. That could come in the form of material from an international inqui­ry or possibly a Queensland coronial inquest.

Beyond that, this week’s revelations provide both a moral imperative and a political opportunity for the government of Mahathir Mohamad. It’s now out there that the previous Malaysian government privately accepted that a Malaysian pilot almost certainly committed mass murder of 238 people from all over the world, and their families and governments more than ever want answers.

Wouldn’t Mahathir like, as the highlight of his long political career­, to provide those answers by finding MH370?

Senior journalist on The Australian Ean Higgins, author of The Hunt for MH370, spent years investigating the mystery and worked with the Sky News team on MH370: The Untold Story.