Investigator says Malaysia ‘doesn’t want’ cause of MH370 crash known

A leading investigator into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 says he does not believe the Malaysian government wants the cause of its demise exposed, so will not commit to a new search.

Two separate reports in the past four months have proposed new areas in the southern Indian Ocean as search areas for the wreck of the plane, which vanished on March 8, 2014, with 239 crew and passengers on board.

A woman walks past graffiti of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in Kuala Lumpur in 2016.Credit: Getty

United States-based marine technology company Ocean Infinity has also expressed eagerness to deploy a new fleet of unmanned vessels to finally locate the Boeing 777 aircraft and solve one of aviation’s greatest mysteries.

But it is up to the Malaysian government, whose sovereign wealth fund owns Malaysia Airlines, to green-light another search mission six years after the last one was suspended, and British aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey does not believe it has an interest in doing so.

Godfrey said it was his view that the Malaysian government did not want “to spend any more money” tracking down MH370, saying debris handed over by his colleague Blaine Gibson to officials in Madagascar in 2022 was still on the island off the coast of Africa because Malaysia did not pay the air cargo fees to have it repatriated.

“In my view, the Malaysian government does not want another underwater search for the main wreckage of MH370,” says Godfrey, an independent investigator on the case who co-authored a study using newly developed Weak Signal Propagation Reporter technology, or amateur radio waves, to map the doomed plane’s flight path.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) led the initial search for MH370.Credit: ATSB

“In my view, the Malaysian government does not want the cause of the crash of MH370 to be known. It does not help to speculate what the motives of the Malaysian government might be with regard to MH370.”

Godfrey and his team presented their findings as “credible new evidence”, suggesting the plane may have gone down in an expanse of ocean about 1500 kilometres west of Perth, only half of which was covered by earlier underwater searches.

Another investigative group, fronted by retired French airline and air force pilot Patrick Blelly and aeronautics expert Jean-Luc Marchand in September, also called for the hunt to resume, telling the Royal Aeronautical Society in London they had pinpointed an unexplored area of the sea floor that could be inspected in as few as 10 days.

In a third case, retired fisherman Kit Olver recently revealed to this masthead that his trawling net pulled up the wing of a “big jet airliner” off the coast of South Australia in late 2014. Underwater surveyor Peter Waring – an expert in surveying and mapping sea floors who was brought in to help with the initial search for MH370 – said Olver’s claim was worth investigating.

The fate of MH370 has been the subject of a range of unfounded conspiracy theories, including that it was hijacked by Russians, that it landed at a US military base on the remote island of Diego Garcia, and one posited by former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad that the US Central Intelligence Agency had knowledge of what happened but was covering it up.

The latest analyses have given further weight to what investigators say is a far more plausible suggestion: that the plane was deliberately brought down by an experienced pilot adept at avoiding detection.

Marchand says while he and Blelly cannot directly accuse MH370 pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, he can’t be excluded from responsibility for the “fully piloted, fatal one-way journey”.

Analysing previously released satellite, fuel and speed data and the damage sustained to debris found as far afield as Mozambique and Tanzania, Marchand’s team concluded that MH370 was purposefully ditched rather than descended by freefall and exploded, gliding just beyond the waters that have been searched.

Marchand says he hopes Malaysian authorities will take their findings seriously.

In an email to this masthead, Godfrey says the Malaysian government had received copies of various papers his team had published and personally delivered to past and present transport ministers by a relative of a person on the flight, but they had never received a reply.

The Malaysian government has previously said it would be willing to reopen the search, but only if there was compelling new information. Malaysia’s Ministry of Transport declined to comment on Friday.

The flight’s pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

Family members of those who were on board, among them six Australians, have been left in limbo for almost a decade, with the main body of the aircraft never recovered.

An overnight service from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, MH370 disappeared from radar 40 minutes after departing, having performed an unexplained U-turn back across peninsular Malaysia before pivoting sharply again towards the Indian Ocean.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) led the initial search with the backing of Malaysia and China, whose 153 citizens on the plane constituted the largest number of passengers. Some 120,000 square kilometres of sea floor were scoured at a cost of $200 million, of which $90 million each was provided by the Australian and Malaysian governments, before the search was called off in 2017.

In 2018, Ocean Infinity undertook its own operation to discover the resting place of MH370, trawling over a nearby section of the deep and treacherous southern Indian Ocean.

“We remain interested in returning to the search for MH370 and are actively engaged in trying to make this happen,” Ocean Infinity chief executive Oliver Plunkett says.

“At this stage, we are unable to say definitively when a new search will take place as discussions are ongoing and there is still much work to be done. We are hopeful that our experienced team and marine robotics will be instructed in 2024.”

A spokesman for Australia’s national transport safety investigator says it was for Malaysia to scrutinise any solid new pointers to the plane’s whereabouts.

“In the first instance any new and credible information as to the location of the aircraft would be a matter for the Malaysian government and their accident investigation agency to assess and consider,” he says.

“Following the conclusion of our involvement in the search in 2017 we’ve had no role in assessing other parties’ analysis of where the missing aircraft may be.”

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