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Four years ago this month, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared, and as you read this, a ship with eight unmanned mini-submarines is scouring more of the southern Indian Ocean looking for it โ in the wrong place, because the searchers are using the same flawed theory.
Itโs extraordinary that four years on, and despite more and more evidence to the contrary from an ever-growing number of independent experts, the hunt for MH370 is still based on the false premise that no one was flying the plane at the end.
Thatโs the line still being run by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
No professional airline pilot I know, and few if any top-level international air-crash investigators, believes that scenario: everything points to captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijacking his own aircraft, flying it to the end and ditching it to disappear it farther southwest than the first search covered.
The new hunt, farther north from the previous target zone, is being undertaken by a Houston-based, British-owned deep-sea survey company, Ocean Infinity, on a โno find, no feeโ basis, but the search strategy is still based on the ATSBโs misconceived theories.
Last weekโs report on the search by the Malaysian government showed the vessel Seabed Constructor has covered ยญalmost all of Site 1, the area the ATSB and the CSIRO identified as likeliest to mark the resting place of the Boeing 777 and its 239 passengers and crew, and is now moving north.
The ATSBโs โghost flightโ ยญtheory of pilots being made unresponsive, possibly through depressurisation, and its โdeath diveโ corollary of the aircraft crashing down rapidly after fuel exhaustion, are all based on an eight-second satellite communication โpingโ.
But that one skerrick of โevidenceโ the ATSB uses for its โdeath diveโ theory can be explained easily by a pilot being at the controls and pointing the nose down. The problem with the ATSB is that not only does it lack professional senior airline pilots in its ranks, but it appears to have not even consulted any.
MH370 departed Kuala ยญLumpur after midnight on March 8, 2014, for a scheduled flight to Beijing. Less than an hour after ยญdeparture over the South China Sea, the aircraft suddenly disappeared from secondary radar. This disappearance occurred two minutes after the captain had said goodnight to Kuala Lumpur air traffic control.
This resulted in a frantic search during the next week for MH370 in the South China Sea.
However, strange events came to light.
Subsequent Malaysian military primary radar analysis revealed the aircraft had turned around and flown a course back across northern peninsular Malaysia, swinging past the beautiful island of Penang up the Strait of Malacca, around the northern tip of Sumatra and into oblivion.
It was apparent this aircraft was under the control of a highly qualified person, otherwise the aircraft would have flown itself to the programmed destination, Beijing, which means someone reprogrammed the flight management system computers.
In his first official statement live on television Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak stated โthis is a case of deliberate human interventionโ. The Malaysian authorities subsequently went rather quiet on this.
Strange, therefore, that when the ATSB became involved it immediately went with an event that rendered the pilots unresponsive, such as depressurisation or fire โ events that professional airline ยญpilots are well trained to handle and are subjected to every six months in simulators.
Then came the brilliant work by a group of scientists in Britain who discovered hourly satellite automatic log-on pings to and from the aircraft that showed it was flying for another seven hours.
Zaharie in all likelihood never knew about these hourly โhandshakesโ.
Brilliant deductive work by these scientists calculated the MH370 position line arcs, ending with the final and vital seventh arc on which the search area could be calculated knowing the amount of fuel on board and therefore flight time.
Under international law, ยญMalaysia is responsible for the ยญinvestigation. Australia was asked and agreed to be responsible for the first search and this is where it gets baffling.
Why did the ATSB plan the survey area based on an end-of-flight scenario of unresponsive pilots when the mass of circumยญstantial evidence pointed to Zaharie having hijacked his own aircraft?
The ATSB has steadfastly ยญrefused to respond to these points from me, British airline captain Simon Hardy and New Zealand-born captain Mike Keane, the ยญformer chief pilot of Britainโs largest airline, easyJet.
Hardy is a former British Airways Boeing 777 pilot who calculated accurately the final position of MH370 based on Zaharie being in control, and that was farther southwest than the ATSB searched.
We professional pilots look at the fundamental logic: Zaharie came up with a very thorough, complex plan to ensure no one ever found the aircraft. This included turning off the secondary radar transponder, flying the unusual route to a deep stretch of very remote ocean, and ceasing radio contact.
Having sent the co-pilot to the passenger cabin on an errand early on, Zaharie would have depressurised the cabin to put everyone else to sleep and then death after their short supply of oxygen ran out and he enjoyed his longer supply. That would have stopped anyone alerting authorities by mobile phone when the aircraft flew back over Malaysia. With everyone dead, Zaharie would have re-pressurised the aircraft and flown the rest of the trip in comfort.
It stands to reason that having gone to all this trouble and planning, Zaharie would have flown the plane to the end and ditched it to maintain full control of the outcome, including sinking it in as few pieces as possible.
Many former US National Transportation Safety Board air crash investigators, and Larry Vance, a top Canadian investigator who is writing a book about MH370, also had their views ยญdiscarded by the ATSB.
Vanceโs work is critical and new. He got his hands on detailed, high-resolution photographs of the flaperon and the flap that were found washed up on the other side of the Indian Ocean. They clearly show they were in the lowered position. Lowering the flaps can be done only by a pilot, and itโs solid evidence that Zaharie did so in a bid to ditch the plane.
The ATSBโs bosses and media flacks have dug themselves even more deeply into their cave of ยญsilence, refusing to discuss Vanceโs findings, apparently feeling no ยญobligation to answer reportersโ questions aiming to inform the taxpaying public who pay their ยญsalaries.
I was amused to read that when The Australianโs Ean Higgins asked the ATSBโs spokesman Paul Sadler whether the bureau still ยญbelieved its โghost flightโ and โdeath diveโ theory, he referred the inquiry to the federal governmentโs Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre, headed by senior public servant Judith Zielke.
Zielkeโs spokesman said the questions โshould be directed to Malaysian officialsโ.
So thatโs what itโs come to: you ask Australian government agencies what they think, and get told you have to ask the Malaysians.
The ATSB, after staunchly ยญdefending its decision to go with an unresponsive pilot scenario, much later begrudgingly admitted that Zaharie might have hijacked the aircraft but was unresponsive at the end of the flight. Really! So Zaharie was responsive two hours into the hijack when he turned MH370 south at the north end of Sumatra and became unresponsive when?
This absolutely does not make sense.
Then we know from flight plan information recovered by the FBI from Zaharieโs home computer flight simulator that he plotted a similar course; clearly this was carefully thought out from start to finish.
He would not have risked the aircraft on fuel exhaustion spiralling uncontrolled into a 1000km/h dive that would produce masses of debris, some of which would float for months. Rather, he would have tried a controlled ditching, which in those rough seas would most likely kill him and wreck the aircraft but leave it substantially ยญintact to avoid floating debris.
English scientist Robin Stevens, an independent MH370 investigator, calculated the time of MH370 fuel exhaustion coincides with the local mean time of sunrise. This means Zaharie would minimise the time in daylight to avoid any detection from passing ships yet would have daylight available for a controlled ditching.
The sole argument the ATSB has pointing to an unresponsive pilot is an increasing doppler shift during the eight-second snapshot of the last satellite ping, which it says shows a rapid and accelerating descent โ an uncontrolled dive. OK, so where is the debris and flotsam from such an impact?
And if the ATSB had bothered to ask any airline pilot about ยญimmediate action by a pilot suffering double engine failure at high altitude, they would get the same result. A pilot would stuff the nose down to initially lose altitude ยญrapidly and increase airspeed for a variety of reasons, some of which are related to pressurisation. Flying at 40,000 feet is a dangerous place โ the time of useful consciousness is about 10 seconds, and without engines running the aircraft will steadily depressurise.
Such a sharp descent ยญmanoeuvre would show up as an increasing doppler shift.
The ATSB also states in one of its reports that โa controlled ditching scenario requires engine thrust to be available to properly control the direction and vertical speed at touchdown and to provide ยญhydraulic power to the flight ยญcontrolsโ.
โThis evidence is therefore ยญinconsistent with a controlled ditching scenario.โ
The ATSB investigators shot themselves in the foot with this one.
A Boeing 777 pilot, as I was, could have told them that with both engines flamed out, the ram air turbine automatically emerges from the body of the aircraft and extends into the slipstream. It uses the wind speed of the descending aircraft to drive a generator and hydraulic pump to power the flight controls. A pilot could easily ditch a Boeing 777 using this emergency hydraulic and electrical power.
The problem, of course, is that as the ATSB itself pointed out, if it was under the control of a pilot, after fuel exhaustion the aircraft had the capability to glide for a further 125 nautical miles โ about 200km โ and out of the search area defined by the bureau.
This raises the question of why the ATSB would not consider extending the search south to cover the pilot controlled glide theory, as extolled by many aviation experts.
This is where a possible deeper and darker motive begins to ยญsurface. Some aviation experts have pointed out that it is not in Malaysiaโs interest to have MH370 found.
The liability and political ramifications would be enormous if it is proved that the MH370 captain meticulously planned and executed this hijack and the homicide of 238 innocent people. There is ยญalready enough circumstantial evidence to warrant a major criminal investigation.
When the Ocean Infinity search at more northerly latitudes concludes, this will enable the ยญMalaysian government to issue a final report and call the case closed.
This is why I say there should be a proper inquiry into the conduct of the ATSB. Former transport minister Warren Truss and former ATSB chief commissioner Martin Dolan should be asked whether there was any agreement with Malaysia to deliberately stay with the death dive theory so the more likely southern pilot-controlled ditching area was not searched.
The final result of the ATSB sticking with the erroneous death dive theory was that the search was unsuccessful, at a cost of $200 million of which $60m was funded by Australian taxpayers. The hi-tech search equipment used, and the 175-tonne, 64m target means it would have been found if the right area had been searched.
The Malaysian government ยญreally had no choice but to accept Ocean Infinityโs offer โ a no find, no fee search. Some overseas ยญexperts consider the revised CSIRO drift modelling results on which the search is being based as intrinsically unreliable.
The fear is that this new search will be unsuccessful because Ocean Infinity has linked itself to the ATSB stance and will pack up and go home at the completion of the agreed 25,000sq km search area, expected in June or July.
Surely the Australian government could ask Ocean Infinity to try the southerly area where a pilot controlled ditching likely occurred.
As independent MH370 investigator Dawna Kaufmann points out, it needs a brave politician to step forward and shake the tree. Only a proper investigation will suffice.
Byron Bailey, a veteran commercial pilot with more than 45 yearsโ experience, is a former RAAF fighter pilot and trainer. He was a senior captain with Emirates for 15 years, during which time he flew the same model B777 as MH370
