Why Hasn't MH370 Been Found?

Nearly three years after the disappearance of MH370, theories abound as to what caused the Boeing-777 to change course and fly more than six hours with its satellite and navigation systems turned off, then dissappear. Now, with the conclusion of the largest and most expensive underwater search effort in history, the governments of Malaysia, China and Australia have stopped looking.

At a media conference in Melbourne, the Australian transport minister, Darren Chester, said the mission led by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau had been at the “cutting edge of science and technology, and tested the limits of human endeavor”.

Why did such an extraordinary effort fail?

Chester stressed that “very limited data” had been available in the months after the plane’s disappearance on 8 March 2014. But independent investigators who have been following the search closely say the ATSB made crucial errors in determining where to look.

The Independent Group is a network of about 20 pilots, scientists, engineers and experts around the world united by an interest in solving the mystery of MH370. With members based in the US, the UK, Germany, Sweden, France, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand and Hong Kong, members communicate mostly over email and analyse publicly available information.

Over the past two years some have occasionally conferred with the ATSB; in March 2016 the then-chief commissioner, Martin Dolan, told the Guardian that the IG provided valuable “criticism and questioning”.

The ATSB and the IG “by and large” agree, according to Richard Godfrey, an aerospace engineer and IG member based in Frankfurt. “It’s a lot to get your mind around, all of the data in its significance.”

But there are also crucial gaps, even in the data that was used to determine the underwater search area.

The Turn South

The ATSB’s underwater operation began in early October 2014, nearly six months after the aerial and surface search had concluded without success, with a 60,000 sq. km “priority area” determined by analysis of the plane’s last radar and satellite communications.

The critical disagreement between the IG and the ATSB is over the estimation of the moment that MH370 turned south.

At 2.22am local time the Malaysian military’s primary radar said the plane was bound north-west along the Malacca Strait. That was reiterated by Inmarsat satellite data at 2.25. But just after 2.22, the plane was abruptly lost from the radar – and by 3.41 the satellite data showed it had inexplicably changed course to track in a southerly direction.

MH370’s final resting place depended – still depends – on when it made that all-important turn, and how far south it flew before running out of fuel and crashed.

Malaysia Airlines’ operational centre, having noticed the plane had “gone dark” on radar and was not responding on radio, called its satellite phone at 2.39 and again at 2.40. There was no answer.

The ATSB believes the plane had turned south by the point of the first attempted call. “But it could have taken place much later, and that changes things enormously in terms of how far south the plane could have flown,” Godfrey said.

He and the rest of the IG believe that the plane was descending by 2.39, at a rate of about 2,000 feet a minute towards an air force base in India’s Nicobar Islands. This would suggest MH370 could have turned south as late as 3.36 – almost an hour after the attempted phone call.

If the satellite data was interpreted to show a descent, the plane would have run out of fuel and crashed up to 870km further north than the northernmost point of the area searched by the ATSB.

The Search Area Increases

In April 2015, with some 40% of the priority area yet to be searched, there was a tripartite announcement that the search zone would be extended by a further 60,000 sq. km, “thereby covering the entire highest probability area identified by expert analysis”.

This 120,000 sq. km total area was a remote stretch of water almost twice the size of Tasmania, nearly 2,500km off the coast of Western Australia.

Over almost two and a half years, eight search vessels scoured depths of up to 6km in waves of sometimes up to 20 metres. Greg Hood, the ATSB’s chief commissioner, said at the recent press conference they were “some of the most extreme ocean conditions anywhere in the world”.

The likely location of MH370’s wreck is a narrow stretch of water known as “the seventh arc” – a line connecting seven so-called “handshakes” with the plane recorded by the Inmarsat satellite. In doubling the search area, the ATSB committed to searching 40 nautical miles of seafloor either side of it.

“That is the one single, huge mistake in this whole exercise,” Godfrey said.

As long ago as September 2014, he and 12 other members of the IG co-authored a report recommending that the width of the search area be reduced but its length be extended northwards. He stands by that analysis today.

The ATSB had been guided by the so-called “glide theory”: that with a pilot in control, the plane flew a further 100 nautical miles after running out of fuel in a controlled ditching. But this was disputed from the start by Inmarsat satellite data that showed that the plane was in a steep dive in its final moments, “accelerating into the ocean at quite a horrendous rate”, said Godfrey – up to 15,000 feet a minute.

The only other aviation disaster akin to MH370was Air France flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009. That recovery operation was stop-start as evidence came to light.

But the ATSB’s analysis of debris that eventually came to be found on beaches in the Indian Ocean and on the east coast of Africa, starting with a flaperon on Réunion Island in late July 2015, occurred at the same time of its search of the seventh arc.

The Next Best Guess

The ATSB expressed confidence right up until the search’s final stages. Before the second anniversary of the plane’s disappearance, Dolan said it was “very likely” to be in the remaining 30,000 sq. km area.

It only publicly expressed misgivings in December, after a three-day summit of experts in Canberra reviewed the findings so far. In its subsequent report, it announced a “high degree of confidence” that the plane was north of the seventh arc, in a patch of ocean of approximately 25,000 sq. km.

Malaysia’s Investigation

Criticism of the Malaysian investigation for a perceived lack of urgency and transparency has been voiced by the IG, journalists and passengers’ next of kin. Communication and reporting has been haphazard and deficient in detail, with a thousand-page report kept confidential within Malaysian police (but leaked to the IG).

Australian authorities have not joined the criticism but they have been somewhat hamstrung in their role leading search and recovery when Malaysia, as the country in which MH370 was registered, holds responsibility for the investigation, as well as the analysis of debris.

The Flight Simulator Mystery

Last July the journalist and commentator Jeff Wise reported in New York Magazine that the home flight simulator of MH370’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, had been used to plot a course to the southern Indian Ocean – one month before the plane vanished along a similar route.

Liow, Malaysia’s transport minister, said Malaysian authorities were “not aware” of the simulated route, nor the FBI analysis of it outlined by Wise – even after the ATSB confirmed both.

The significance of the simulation is another point of contention between the IG and the ATSB, with the latter stressing that it did not show intention to fly; it was not necessarily plotted by Zaharie; and there were only six points relevant to the course apparently taken by MH370.

“I personally don’t think it’s the kind of simulation that people do every day on a flight simulator,” Godfrey said. Taken as fact, he said, it gave “tremendous clues” to the whereabouts of MH370, narrowing it down to an area of below 10,000 sq. km much further north of the search area – “that hasn’t been searched at all”.

His personal view, not unanimous within the IG, he said, was that Zaharie crashed MH370 in an act of murder-suicide – a “politically unsavoury” opinion to hold. If found to be true, it has enormous implications for families’ ongoing battles for compensation from Malaysia Airlines, which was placed in government administration in May 2015 after the MH370 and subsequent MH17 air disasters.

The two most advanced of these cases, lodged in the Kuala Lumpur high court and the Australian federal court, have reached an impasse after the airline refused to hand over logbooks, flight crew’s medical records and other documentation.

“You have to ask the question, when you know that someone has information they are keeping secret, is why – why don’t they want to divulge,” Godfrey said. “It is for me rather obvious that they are scared of compensation claims that will go into the billions, not into millions … It’s not just in [Malaysia’s] interest to admit that this was a result of a crime.”

Sucked into the Black Hole

If Malaysia wants the mystery of MH370 to just go away, public opinion is on its side – particularly in Australia, which is perceived to have gone above and beyond given that it had only six citizens on board. Wise, the journalist who describes himself as “abnormally obsessed” with MH370, said the public had “lost interest in the story” – his wife included.

Guardian:   MH370: Pilot Committed Suicide & Killed Everyone Else: