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That Man 'Iggins back on MH370 -  

Via the Oz:

MH370: Ill-fated flight we can’t forget

EAN HIGGINS
@EanHiggins
12:00AM JANUARY 12, 2019

It’s approaching five years since payroll manager Jeanette Maguire’s secure life with her husband Shaun and their children in a quiet Brisbane suburb imploded under the force of something still unknown which happened 35,000 feet over the South China Sea.

At 1.19am on March 8, 2014, the captain of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, acknowledged a Kuala Lumpur air traffic controller’s instruction to switch radio frequency to Vietnamese controllers for the next stage of the flight to Beijing, saying: “Goodnight, Malaysian Three Seven Zero.”

They were the last words heard from any of the 239 souls on board MH370, one of whom was Maguire’s sister Cathy Lawton, who was travelling with her husband, Robert, and their close friends Mary and Rod Burrows on the trip of a lifetime to Asia.

After that last radio transmission at 1.19am, what is known is that within a couple of minutes the secondary radar transponder on MH370 was turned off, so the aircraft disappeared from air traffic controllers’ screens. A massive, wide-bodied Boeing 777 had vanished into thin air.

Military primary radar and automatic satellite “handshakes” later revealed MH370 turned around sharply to fly back over the Malaysia-Thai airspace border, and then made a lazy turn around Penang to fly northwest up the Straits of Malacca.

At some point, after it dropped out of primary radar range, the aircraft turned almost due south to end up somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean.

That much is known. What still isn’t known five years on is why all that happened on MH370 instead of what was supposed to, which was that the aircraft should have arrived in Beijing at 6.30am that day, with the Lawtons, the Burrows and the other 235 people on board safe and sound.

In that case, Cathy Lawton would still be alive today and Jeanette Maguire would not be struggling not only with the loss of her sister and brother-in-law, but also with the torment of not knowing where they are and why.

Maguire says she remains “gutted inside”.

“For me, I’m not going to know anything until they find that plane, and I have said that from day one. You can’t come up with any other evidence, so you have got to keep searching for that plane.”

Over the past five years there’s been a lot of excellent work done by a lot of people around the world — oceanographers, mathematicians, engineers, aviators, satellite experts — to try to establish what might have happened to MH370.


Jeanette Maguire is hoping for answers. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Armed with that knowledge, others have mounted some audacious efforts to find the aircraft. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau hunted for MH370 on the bottom of the southern Indian Ocean for more than two years, covering 120,000sq/km at a cost of $200 million to Australian, Malaysian and Chinese taxpayers.

Last year a British-owned, Houston-based private undersea survey company, Ocean Infinity, searched farther north across a similar-sized stretch of ocean from where the failed ATSB search left off, and also came up with naught.

Since MH370 was registered in Malaysia, the Malaysian government has responsibility for finding out what happened to the plane. Last July it released its much-­anticipated safety investigation report, 500 pages long, with another 1000 pages of appendices.

The Malaysian-led investigation concluded somebody had deliberately flown the aircraft off course 40 minutes into the flight, and there were no signs of mechanical failure.

But, chief investigator Kok Soo Chon said, it was impossible to determine what actually happened without finding the wreckage and the black box flight data and cockpit voice recorders.

“The team is unable to determine the real cause for the disappearance of MH370,” he told the world media.

So, five years on, although a fair bit more is known, the fundamental cause of the disappearance of MH370 is not.

The question being widely asked is what to do next. The families of those lost on MH370, here and overseas, have a straightforward view: keep investigating, keep analysing, keep looking.

“I think they should start searching again,” Sunshine Coast woman Danica Weeks, who lost her husband Paul on MH370, says.

“This year has to be the year that something happens, I need some action with the Malaysian government.”

There was a foretaste of a renewed international campaign in Malaysia in late November when next of kin presented Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke with what were claimed to be five new pieces of MH370 wreckage found off Madagascar.

One piece, a section of floor panel, was this week determined by Malaysian authorities to be likely from MH370.



Danica Weeks’s husband Paul was on the MH370 flight when it vanished. Picture: Facebook.

Grace Nathan, whose mother, Anne Daisy, was on MH370, said at the time: “The fact debris is still washing up now means the investigation should still be live … it shouldn’t be closed.”

It’s a view widely held in the aviation community.

“MH370 is one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history. I would like it solved,” former US airline captain and air crash investigator John Cox tells Inquirer.

“We know what happened and to a near certainty that it was a deliberate action,” Cox says.

“We do not have the wreckage or the recorders. To bring closure to the victims’ families would be a good thing.”

The Malaysian government says it is not unsympathetic to reopening the search, but it would need something new to go on.

“We are open to proposals, but we must have some credible leads before we decide,” Loke said at the November media event.

The best evidence towards where MH370 came down is what’s known as the Seventh Arc: a band off Western Australia on which MH370 is thought to have been at the seventh and last roughly hourly automatic satellite communication “handshake” relaying data from MH370’s engines to Malaysia Airlines engineers via a ground station in Perth.

The question is where up and down the Seventh Arc to look, and how far off it. The ATSB based its search on the assumption that at the end MH370 was a “ghost flight” with unconscious or dead pilots, and that it crashed in an uncontrolled dive after running out of fuel on autopilot.

A significant number of senior pilots, engineers, and air crash investigators believe the ATSB theory is wrong, and that MH370 was hijacked by Zaharie, flown to the end and ditched, taking the aircraft perhaps 100 nautical miles farther than the ATSB allowed for.

Mike Keane, the former chief pilot of Britain’s largest airline, easyJet; Simon Hardy, a serving senior British Boeing 777 captain; Australian former fighter pilot and Boeing 777 captain Byron Bailey; and veteran Canadian air crash investigator Larry Vance: they are all of this view. Last year Vance published a book supporting it with a detailed analysis.

Keane, Hardy and Bailey all believe MH370 lies just outside the southwestern edge of where the ATSB search ended and, though each of them has slightly different picks of latitude and longitude, a search across about 10,000sq km, which an outfit like Ocean Infinity could cover in a week or two for a ballpark figure of $10 million to $20m, would encompass them.

Other observers think MH370 lies the other way along the Seventh Arc — farther north.

It’s a possibility not excluded by David Griffin, the CSIRO oceanographer who led the complex drift modelling work that sought to determine where MH370 came down, based on where and when parts of the aircraft were found on and off the coast of Africa.


MH370 pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah passes through security just before boarding the ill fated flight.

The first piece of debris to be recovered was a 2m-long mostly intact flaperon, a movable part of the wing, discovered on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion in July 2015.

If MH370 had come down farther north along the Seventh Arc than had been searched, Griffin says, the currents suggest debris would have reached the far side of the Indian Ocean earlier — but that is not to be ruled out, he says.

“One possible explanation was no one was looking,” Griffin says.

What he means is that while French authorities were able to identify and recover what was pretty obviously a large part of a big aircraft, the same might not have been true for smaller, less identifiable pieces that might have been found earlier on African beaches by locals who might not have made the association with a plane, let alone MH370.

Even now, Griffin believes, it might be worth trying to retrieve more pieces of the aircraft that may have washed up, and searching for oral history on when they arrived.

It is one of several avenues of scientific and forensic exploration, Griffin suggests, which could yield new leads as to where to search for MH370, rather than just immediately sending more ships out to blindly scour more seabed around the Seventh Arc.

Looking back, he says the drift modelling studies done by the CSIRO and other oceanographers were good work for the time ­available, but there has never been a comprehensive, dedicated international collaborative project to this end. “I would like to get several modelling groups on to the job. They all did it in their spare time,” Griffin says.


Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

Similarly, he says although there was some examination of the crustaceans found on the flaperon, there had been very little scientific work done on their life cycle, which might have provided more clues to where it had started its journey across the southern Indian Ocean. He adds that many believe more investigation of Zaharie could unearth new pointers.

The issue, of course, is who should pay for more research, investigation, or undersea hunting. Malaysia bore the brunt of the cost of the ATSB-led search, picking up $115m of the tab, followed by Australia at $63m.

China, whose nationals accounted for two-thirds of the passengers, notionally put up $20m in kind including in the shape of a government vessel that, security experts claim, in fact spent most of its time in Fremantle spying on Australian military activity.

Vance has proposed the UN body the International Civil Aviation Organisation establish a fresh and independent air accident investigation team with a panel of highly qualified experts from several countries.

And a lot of people are pointing to Boeing, the manufacturer of the aircraft, which enjoyed a record $US10 billion in earnings in its last full financial year.

Boeing’s strategy has been to say as little as possible about MH370, resisting suggestions it should contribute funds to a search. Weeks launched what snowballed into a major international lawsuit against Boeing in the US, which failed in November on jurisdictional grounds.

She says she took the action only to get the aircraft manufacturer to do what its European arch rival, Airbus, did when Air France 447 went down in the Atlantic in June 2009 with the loss of all 228 on board. It took two years to find the Airbus A330’s wreckage in an undersea hunt similar to those mounted for MH370, and Airbus put up about €12m towards it, plus technical and logistical support such as supplying a transport plane and ship.

“What I wanted was for Boeing to say, ‘OK, we want to prove we are not negligent, we are going to find this plane’,” Weeks says.

Asked if Airbus thought Boeing should follow the lead it set with AF447 and cough up some millions in cash towards a new search, Airbus spokesman Justin Dubon says: “It is imperative for the entire aviation sector to learn as much as possible from accidents by understanding the root causes of these events in order to prevent them happening again.”

The families of those lost on MH370 believe, in the broader scheme of things, there are enough interested parties with deep pockets, such as Boeing, to fund a new search, and more than enough justification on grounds of both aviation safety and sheer compassion for the families of the disappeared.

The association representing the Chinese next of kin, MH370 China Families, is still not convinced Malaysia is telling the whole story, and many of its members have some lingering thoughts that the aircraft may have flown the other way and landed in Central Asia, perhaps as part of a hijacking involving hostages.

“We have not abandoned hope for the return of our loved ones,” the association says in a statement toInquirer.

“The search for the truth is not something money can buy.”

Ean Higgins’s book The Hunt for MH370 will be published by Pan Macmillan next month.

MTF...P2