[Peetwo]

Update: Oz wrap up of OI search and calls for inquiry?

Via the Oz:

Pilot’s U-turn to oblivion
EAN HIGGINS, AMANDA HODGE
After another failed search, the mystery of MH370 persists.

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MH370: pilot’s U-turn to oblivion

Zaharie Ahmad Shah loved flying. He came from a large family that was not particularly privileged; he considered himself very lucky when as a young man he was one of the few to get a ­traineeship as a pilot with Malaysia Airlines.

Thirty years later, Zaharie was flying Boeing 777-200ER airliners for Malaysia Airlines. They are big, wide-bodied, twin-engined beasts with extended range, boasting a wingspan of 61m, a length of 64m, and carrying up to 300 passengers.

But even that wasn’t enough flying for Zaharie. He flew drones for fun, and he set himself up at home with a sophisticated flight simulator, using his desktop computer with multiple screens.

Zaharie flew various simulated routes on the home computer, including one which was rather odd: it started out in Kuala Lumpur, headed northeast, but turned around over the South China Sea and then back over Malaysia.

The route turned again on a long track south to finish in the southern Indian Ocean. The zigzag route did not make any sense: there was no logic to it and it ended thousands of kilometres from anywhere anyone could land an aircraft, in a remote stretch of ocean.

But to professional airline ­pilots, Zaharie’s imaginary flight on his home computer flight simulator made absolute sense, if his motive was what they thought it was. It was a route he might have wanted to practise to make a ­Boeing 777 vanish, along with its passengers and crew, never to be found.

When New York magazine’s Jeff Wise broke the story, Australian and Malaysian authorities confirmed the leaked information but said the simulated route showed only the “possibility of planning”.

Some uncertainty later crept in when Wise corrected the story on his personal blog post, saying it now appeared more ­likely the information was from “two or possibly three separate flights” and not one single flight plot to the southern Indian Ocean.

On the evening of March 7, 2014, Zaharie arrived at the city’s airport in good time before he was to captain Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 to Beijing.

Zaharie commanded considerable respect among his colleagues at Malaysia Airlines. At 53, he had been a pilot with the airline for 33 years and had clocked up 18,423 hours of flight time, including 8659 hours on the Boeing 777.

So when he ordered the ground staff to load extra fuel for the flight (it’s a difficult balance because more weight loaded means the aircraft burns more fuel), no one thought twice about it. The planned flight time to Beijing was five hours, 34 minutes, and Zaharie ­ordered enough fuel for a flight of seven hours and 31 minutes.

The first officer on flight MH370 was, compared to Zaharie, a youngster and a rookie. Fariq Abdul Hamid was 27 and had everything to live for. His friends say he was set to propose to his girlfriend Nadira Ramli, who was also a pilot.

Around midnight or a bit before, Zaharie, Fariq and the 10 cabin crew came on board, and then the 227 passengers took their seats. There were 14 nationalities among the passengers including 153 Chinese, 38 Malaysians, seven Indonesians and six Australians.

Zaharie and Fariq taxied the plane to the runway threshold, made a couple of standard last-minute checks, and pushed the throttles forward.

At 41 minutes past midnight local time on March 8, flight MH370 lifted off, its wheels never to touch the ground again.

As is well known, MH370 never made it to Beijing. Instead, it flew to the middle of nowhere in the southern Indian Ocean.

About 40 minutes into the flight, just after Zaharie radioed in to Malaysian air traffic control for a standard sign-off before switching to Vietnamese ATC, where he famously said “Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero”, the aircraft reversed course back over Malaysia, flew over Penang and up the Malacca Strait, then turned on a long track south.

Those words were the last heard from anyone on MH370. Radio contact ceased and the plane’s radar transponder was turned off.

Yesterday, the second subsea search for MH370 ended when the British-owned, Houston-based Ocean Infinity marine survey company packed up its eight torpedo-like unmanned mini-submarines on its leased ship Seabed Constructor.

It was a noble endeavour of private enterprise and high technology: in about four months, Ocean Infinity had searched almost as much of the southern Indian Ocean as the first, Australian ­bureaucrat-led hunt had in 2½ years.

The owners of Ocean Infinity have done their dough: under the “no cure, no fee” deal with the ­Malaysian government, they would have got up to $US70 million if they had found the plane.

In a gracious media statement yesterday, Ocean Infinity chief executive Oliver Plunkett said: “While clearly the outcome so far is extremely disappointing, as a company we are truly proud of what we have achieved in terms of both the quality of data we’ve produced and the speed with which we covered such a vast area, the likes of which has not been seen before.

“There has not been a subsea search of this scale and we hope that in the future we will be able to again offer our services in the search for MH370.”

The failure of the second search has left everyone — the aviation community, the families of the victims, and the general population — still fascinated by the mystery, wondering where the saga goes from here.

The new Malaysian government’s position is a bit ambiguous; when he was appointed, new Transport Minister Anthony Loke said he would make finding MH370 one of his top priorities, but in subsequent days he has talked about the need for “closure”.

A further complication is that Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has promised to hand over power to the man he wrongly had jailed on sodomy charges, Anwar Ibrahim, and for whom he has now won a pardon.

Anwar’s position on a new search is also not clear, but he has committed to getting to the bottom of some of the more glaring contradictions that arose from the early Malaysian investigation into the disaster.

Over the more than four years since it disappeared, theories of what happened to MH370 have ranged from an on-board fire to one that North Korea hacked into its guidance system and stole it. But any scenarios based on an in-flight accident fall down fairly quickly because no distress call was sent from the aircraft, and it kept flying off course, with several changes of direction, for many hours.

Which brings it all back to the conclusion the professional aviation community around the world came up with on day one: the captain did it.

After doing his best for four years to avoid the issue, in public at least, the head of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s underwater search for MH370, Peter Foley, last week came his closest to saying Zaharie must have hijacked the aircraft. It was flown deliberately for about 1½ hours after it deviated off course, Foley told a Senate estimates hearing, and “it’s absolutely evident … an aircraft doesn’t turn itself”.

Foley still stuck to the ATSB’s “ghost flight” and “death dive” theory — that whatever happened earlier in the flight, it ended with incapacitated pilots, the aircraft flying on ­autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed down rapidly.

But he hedged it by saying this was the most likely interpretation, and said a rogue pilot might have flown it to the end and ditched it outside the search area.

“We haven’t ever ruled out someone intervening at the end,” Foley said.

Which focuses attention on what happened after Zaharie and Fariq pulled up the landing gear, and started heading for Beijing.

There’s been some pretty out-there reporting in the Malaysian media, including a social media post by a Mohaza Mohaza, said to be “a close friend of Zaharie”.

“Zaharie … if this is what your fate is … now I understand what you were trying to say to me … last year at Jalan Perak cemetery, Penang. It was actually a hint that you would be leaving all of us,” he reportedly wrote in the post.

“Zaharie told me (jokingly) that I would not ever see his grave. This was what he meant. Now I understand. His grave is in the Indian Ocean.”

There was also a British tabloid newspaper report, discounted by Malaysian police, of a mysterious, untraceable two-minute phone call Zaharie made from the cockpit just before the flight.

There have been at least a dozen cases of suspected pilot murder-suicide hijackings of airliners, of which at least eight are confirmed, including the 2015 German­wings flight where the co-pilot waited until the captain left the cockpit for the toilet, then locked the door and flew the Airbus 320 with 150 people on board into the French Alps.

The young Germanwings co-pilot was found to have had psychological issues but they were not picked up — and in some other cases of pilot hijackings none were detected, even retrospectively.

Some things are known: Zaharie was a supporter of then opposition leader Anwar.

Anwar was convicted on what were widely regarded to be trumped up charges at a court hearing only hours before the crash. He also had marital issues, although their severity has been the subject of debate.

Relatives and friends say despite these question marks about the space Zaharie might have been in at the time, they can’t believe he would kill himself and 238 passengers in his charge.

Sivarasa Rasiah, a People’s Justice Party (PKR) MP and long-time lawyer for Anwar, said he had befriended Zaharie after he joined the PKR ahead of the 2013 elections, in which Anwar’s party won the popular vote but lost the ­election.

The two men bonded after belting out a particularly tortured karaoke duet of Hotel California at a party fundraising effort in 2012 and Sivarasa says they just “sort of took to each other”.

The last time he remembers catching up with the amiable pilot was when Zaharie dropped in with a bottle of Chivas Regal for the Indian Malaysian MP during the Hindu festival of Deepavali.

“Pilot suicide is rubbish as far as I’m concerned. Absolutely no way,” Sivarasa tells The Australian. “I knew he had marital issues. Everyone in his circle knew.”

Sivarasa has also dismissed the idea that his friend might have ditched the plane in fury at Anwar’s second sodomy conviction, which was handed down just four hours before MH370 took off.

Few had expected Anwar to be convicted, given how blatantly political the trial had been, and there would have been no time to plan for such an event from the time Anwar was convicted at 7.30pm to the time the Beijing-bound flight took off.

Sivarasa says he was “quite sure” Zaharie was not present in court on the day Anwar was convicted.

Zaharie’s elder sister Sakinab Shah has described her brother — the eighth of nine children and the family favourite — as an enormously affectionate “man who loved life, loved fun”.

She acknowledged her brother and his wife, Faizah, had “normal” marital problems, but said he wore his troubles lightly.

Fatima Pardi, a worker with the PKR party, which is now part of the ruling coalition, told The Australian in September 2016 that she met Zaharie when he joined the party and began attending political events.

Pardi said he had become her mentor and a father figure for her children, one of whom suffers from severe cerebral palsy.

The relationship ended a few months before the plane went missing, but she claimed to have had a WhatsApp social media exchange with Zaharie two days before the flight.

She refused to say what they spoke about for fear it would be misinterpreted.

Sakinab Shah confirmed Pardi had contacted her after MH370 went missing and that the two had met, but she was one of several of her brother’s women friends she had met over the years.

“Honestly, I have met many, many other friends of his. A lot of times I gave him a telling-off about this. It was never anything serious,” she says.

“He was naughty, I admit that, but at the end of the day he always went home.”

But New Zealand-born aviator Mike Keane, a former Royal Air Force fighter pilot and intelligence officer who later became chief pilot of Britain’s largest airline, easyJet, says one has to take a hard look at what all this might have meant for Zaharie’s state of mind.

“From an observer’s view point, it would be reasonable to assume that the relationship between Pardi and Zaharie was closer than has been admitted by Pardi,” Keane says.

“Their relationship may have had a bearing on the disappearance of MH370.”

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 Sister urges inquiry into search
EAN HIGGINS
An MH370 victim’s sister wants a full inquiry into authorities’ handling of the failed search for the aircraft.

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MH370: victim’s sister wants full inquiry into failed search

A Queensland woman who lost her sister on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has called for a full inquiry up to a royal commission into Australian and Malaysian authorities’ handling of the ­failed search for the aircraft.

Teresa Liddle was speaking as the second subsea search for the Boeing 777, by British-owned and Houston-based marine survey company Ocean Infinity, came to an end without success.

Ms Liddle, whose sister Mary Burrows was among the 239 people on MH370, also called on the Australian Transport Safety ­Bureau to release key documents. “They should not hide behind Freedom of Information (exemptions) and not provide the documents on the basis that they did not want to upset Malay­sia,” she said. “It is critical to the aviation industry.”

Last year, the ATSB’s then general manager for strategic capability, Colin McNam­ara, rejected an FOI request from The Australian to release analyses of satellite tracking data on MH370 by international experts.

The bureau said the opinions supported its “ghost flight” and “death dive” theory of the aircraft flying with incapacitated pilots at the end and crashing after running out of fuel on autopilot, but would not make them public.

In his letter of refusal, Mr McNamara said if the documents were released, that could “cause damage to the inter­national relations of the ­commonwealth”.

In a review of Mr McNamara’s decision requested by The Australian, ATSB chief commissioner Greg Hood also rejected the FOI application. In his letter, Mr Hood said information on the search work done to help Malaysia had been declared restricted, and was subject to the Transport Safety ­Investigation Act, under which if any current or former ATSB staffer releases restricted information to a journalist or a judge in open court, he or she could be jailed.

Totally agree with Ms Liddle's call for some form of either an independent parliamentary or judicial inquiry. However given the perceived COI by the RRAT Legislative Committee Chair O'Obfuscation - see HERE - I would rather that the RRAT committee not conduct this inquiry until such time that BO has recused himself from the committee...  


MTF...P2