[Peetwo]

MH370 2nd Anniversary -  'That Man' kicks off the Weekend Oz expose on the, soon to be terminated, search effort for the tragically still missing flight MH370:

Rogue or romantic, Malaysian flight MH370 pilot stays in picture

• Ean Higgins
  
• The Australian
  
• March 5, 2016 12:00AM
  

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak, centre, briefs the media on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
Elements of an extraordinary hijack plan have been carried out before, most notably this Northwest Airlines 727 flight that was hijacked in 1971 by DB Cooper.

Two years on from the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, some have it that its captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, is happily ensconced with his new lover somewhere, living under a new identity, having engaged in an elaborate scheme to fake his own death.

“I surmised that the aircraft descended to a lower altitude and circled over Penang as the captain’s lover, or his rescuer, lived there,” Qantas’s former manager of flight training, veteran airline pilot David Shrubb, says in corres­pondence with The Weekend Australian.

“He then set the auto flight system to take the aircraft to a destination where he hoped the world would never find it,” says Shrubb, a former president of the Australian Federation of Air Pilots as well as a former board member of Air­services Australia.

“He then reduced speed and with his parachute, which he had put on board, opened an over-wing exit and jumped out. He had arranged to fall into the water and that he would be picked up.”

As Shrubb correctly points out, elements of such an extraordinary plan have been carried out before.

On November 24, 1971, on a Northwest Orient Airlines flight from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington, an unassuming man in a business suit called over a flight attendant and showed her what was in his briefcase: a collection of wires, switches, and other objects.

He threatened to blow up the aircraft if he did not get four parachutes and a $US200,000 ransom.

When the plane landed in Seattle, the man, since known as DB Cooper, let the passengers and two of the flight attendants off the plane, and officials handed over the money in $US20 bills plus the parachutes.

Once the aircraft took off again, Cooper told the pilots to “fly to Mexico” — real slow and real low.

At some point soon thereafter Cooper bailed out of the lowered rear stairway of the Boeing 727, having left behind in the cabin his clip-on tie.

He remains missing, despite an extensive manhunt and an ongoing investigation.

Like other MH370 theories, this one includes a motive for why Zaharie would have attempted such a feat. “He wanted to leave his wife — quite a big deal for a Muslim,” Shrubb says.

He also posits a motive for why the aircraft was directed to one of the most remote and deepest corners of the seven seas, the southern Indian Ocean.

“If ever found there, it would show no captain on board and a door open.”

Some might find Shrubb’s explanation for the disappearance of MH370 farfetched.

For K -"But it can’t be ruled out any more than the other, more popular, theories out there."

Pretty much everyone agrees that whatever happened on MH370, it involved deliberate human intervention, so any ­credible explanation has to include some bizarre motives and behaviour.

The scenarios all have elements of precedent and are consistent with the known facts, which, in brief review, are as follows.

On March 8, 2014, on a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the last radio communication from the Boeing 777 came from Zaharie an hour into the night flight as Malaysian air traffic control handed over to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam:
“Good night. Malaysian three seven zero.”

After that the radar transponder was turned off, the aircraft turned back and flew over the Malaysia-Thai border as picked up by military radar, passed over Zaharie’s home island of Penang, and then turned south on a long final leg.

Automatic hourly electronic “handshakes” with a satellite tracked its movements to the southern Indian Ocean for seven hours, the last producing a notional flight path along what’s known as the “seventh arc”.

A flaperon, or controllable part of the trailing edge of the wing, washed up on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion in July last year and has been identified as part of MH370.

And just this week, it emerged that a 1m-long piece of material, thought by some aviation observers to be consistent with being part of the tail of MH370, was found on a beach in Mozambique. It is being transferred to Australia for examination.

Transport Minister Darren Chester issued a release saying “the location of the debris is consistent with drift modelling commissioned by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau and reaffirms the search area for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean”.

The established facts are enough for a range of propositions to be possible, but insufficient to rule any of them out, creating the ideal circumstances for informed speculation in the aviation community.

The most popular theory among airline pilots and aviation experts is that Zaharie hijacked his own aircraft and flew it right to the end, possibly as an act of protest against what is widely seen as the politically inspired prosecution of his relative and idol, Malaysian opposition figure Anwar Ibrahim.

At least a half dozen such pilot suicides on airliners have occurred over the past 30 years or so, the scenario usually involving the pilot or co-pilot locking the other out of the cockpit.

One proponent of the “rogue pilot” theory, Australian airline captain Byron Bailey, argues the discovery of the flaperon and the new debris, if it does turn out to be part of MH370’s tail, supports the controlled ditch theory because they could have been the pieces that broke off and remained afloat before the otherwise intact aircraft sank, leaving little debris.

Bailey has fought a running battle with the ATSB, which has described the rogue pilot theory as “very unlikely”. Critics say this is a ploy designed to avoid embarrassing the Malaysian government.

The ATSB has based its search strategy on a “ghost flight” model of the pilots being unconscious.

A related suggestion is that after the last turn south, Zaharie depressurised the aircraft and sent himself and the 238 other people on board to what in some respects is a relatively painless, even pleasant, death through hypoxia, or lack of oxygen.

There are cases of aircraft slowly losing cabin pressure at high altitude, sending the passengers and crew to sleep, with the aircraft flying on via autopilot — but not involving big airliners, which have cabin pressure alarms.

And there’s a YouTube video of a Royal Air Force depressurisation simulation in which the subject officer becomes light-headed, then drunk-like, with a silly smile on his face and unable to perform simple tasks like putting pegs into holes.

After the exercise, the video shows the officer saying he felt it was all quite fun and amusing as he started to drift towards unconsciousness.

Deliberate depressurisation also fits into Shrubb’s theory, but in a different way.

He suggests Zaharie locked the co-pilot out of the cabin, put on his oxygen mask, depressurised the aircraft, and allowed the passengers to run out of their limited oxygen and pass out while he enjoyed the longer supply available to ­pilots, and then bailed out from a safe over-wing exit.

Another construct, put forward by the ATSB recently in what critics say is a way of working on the “rogue pilot” theory without having to say so publicly, is that a ­hijacker among the passengers, who knew how to fly, took over the aircraft and glided it to the end after fuel ran out.

Again, there’s a well-established precedent for part of it: the al-Qa’ida terrorists in the 9/11 hijacks had learned to fly, and flew the planes after taking them over.

The pattern in the past has been that air crash investigators continue their search for lost aircraft — and eventually find them, as in the case of Air France flight 447, whose black boxes took two years to retrieve after it crashed into the Atlantic on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009.

But two years on, MH370 remains a mystery.

As former US airline captain John Cox, who now runs an international air safety consultancy and has participated in several major air crash investigations, tells The Weekend Australian, this is almost unheard of in the modern age.

“I do not know of any case of a jet airliner with fare-paying passengers on board that has been lost and not found,” Cox says.

“We, as a society, have made an effort to find and solve aviation accidents. In some cases it has taken years and millions of dollars, but we have done it.”

The fact the riddle of MH370 remains unsolved renders it an engrossing subject for media, the aviation community, and the general public — the ultimate barbecue stopper.
It also means that for those close to the victims, there is no closure.

“For the families and friends of those on board, the last two years have been nothing short of harrowing, intensified by the protracted uncertainty around the circumstances in which the aircraft disappeared,” Chester said in a statement this week ahead of Tuesday’s anniversary.

Jeanette Maguire, who lost her sister, Queenslander Cathy Lawton, on MH370, is one Australian still going through the anguish of not knowing.

“You have a lot of faith in the search program (but) the realisation is that you have this thought in the back of your head: What happens if they don’t find it?” Maguire tells The Weekend Australian. She has resisted falling in behind any particular theory.

“In our own mind, we have to stay completely neutral,” she says.
“You could end up with a lot of trouble mentally.”

In the next few months Chester is going to have to lead a discussion with China and Malaysia — and Australian taxpayers — on an excruciating decision.

The underwater search, being conducted primarily by three vessels of the Dutch Fugro marine survey group, commissioned by the three countries in an operation expected to cost $180 million, is due to end in June once the target search zone of 120,000sq km has been covered.

This week an international group of relatives and friends of victims, under the banner Voice370, issued an anguished plea to the governments to keep going.

“We believe that they should not throw in the towel, close this case and simply chalk it up as an unsolvable mystery,” the statement says.

Maguire says she would, of course, prefer the hunt to keep going. “I would totally love them to be able to do that, to continue on the search,” she says.

But she also gives an indication that in her heart, she’s bracing for Chester to say he cannot in good conscience commit more Australian taxpayer dollars to the project, and that China and Malaysia also think it’s time to call it quits.

“It does have a limit to the resources,” Maguire says.

“You have to be realistic: who is going to fund this?”

 
MTF...P2  

Ps Good to see Higgins put some effort into that one, with comments across a wide spectrum of MH370 DIPs & NOKs - good effort 'that man'...