SEVEN

‘GRIEF RETURNS WITH THE REVOLVING YEAR’

By early October 2014, the secret topography of the southern Indian Ocean had been revealed, the search ships were getting ready to sail, and the ATSB needed a dashing figure to front its new hunt for MH370.

Paul Kennedy was their man.

Kennedy was the lean, British-born, Perth-based project director of the Fugro survey group team whose vessels were to lead the next valiant effort to find the holy grail of aviation. The ATSB media unit produced a video, watchable on YouTube, featuring Kennedy on board Fugro Discovery, presumably docked at, or sailing off, Perth. He responded to some questions from an interviewer about the new underwater search for MH370. The remoteness of the search zone in the southern Indian Ocean, and the stormy seas meant the challenge was tough, Kennedy said in the video, shot by Chris Beerens from the Royal Australian Navy.

‘We’re more than seven days’ sail from the nearest civilisation, which is Western Australia, so that’s an awful long way if things go wrong,’ he said. ‘It’s rough where we are, it’s terribly rough, so you don’t sleep particularly well, so fatigue is one of our biggest issues offshore.’

But Kennedy also stressed the sophistication of the search effort.

‘The deep tow on board the vessel is called “Dragon”. It’s got three forms of sensors on board. The way I like to make an analogy: it’s got ears, it can listen – that’s the acoustic sensors on board; it’s got eyes, that’s the cameras; and it’s got a nose, it’s got a sniffer – it can sniff jet fuel. People say, will you find it? The answer is: if it’s in the area we’re searching, we will find it.’

It was derring-do, Boys’ Own stuff, just the message the ATSB wanted to get out there to suggest Australian taxpayers’ money was in the best hands for the task of finding MH370 and its precious black box flight data and cockpit voice recorders. Funnily enough, a bit later in the piece, it was Kennedy who by speaking truth to power caused the biggest single embarrassment for the ATSB – more about that later this chapter.

The underwater search directed by Peter Foley for the ATSB at the strategic level, and Kennedy at the operational level for the big Dutch-based international underwater survey group Fugro, started with great enthusiasm. No-one could doubt the degree of hard work and dedication of those who designed and supervised the new search, but as Foley told the IPA seminar, ‘the heroes are the guys who are on the search vessel’.

The bathymetric work had been hard enough, involving Fugro Equator, the Chinese vessel Zhu Kezhen, the Malaysian survey ship KD Mutiara, and two support ships, the Malaysian naval vessel Bunga Mas 6 and the Chinese government ship Haixun 01. The Haixun 01 seemed to have to spend a fair bit of time in port; the 10 September 2014 JACC operational bulletin said it had been ‘stationed at the Port of Fremantle’. The operational bulletin two weeks later said ‘the Chinese support vessel Haixun 01 continued to be stationed at the Port of Fremantle for repairs’.

While some of the main features of the seabed in this part of the Indian Ocean were known, particularly a massive escarpment known as Broken Ridge, most of it was not. What was discovered, and later released in stunning simulated colours showing elevation, was an extraordinary world of undersea mountains, volcanoes, valleys, depressions and canyons.

It was going to be very tricky to get the towfish low enough, about 100 metres above the sea floor on its 10 kilometre armoured fibre-optic cable, to perform the sonar imaging without hitting terrain. The autonomous underwater vehicle with its capacity to independently dodge obstacles was going to be crucial for some parts of the search.

By early October 2014, about 120,000 kilometres of seabed along the Seventh Arc had been surveyed.

The weather was getting better, so the search ships and their crews readied for action, including the vessel GO Phoenix chartered by the Malaysian government, with equipment and experts from Phoenix International. The JACC bulletin made the low-key announcement on 8 October: the new search was on.

‘On Monday, 6 October 2014, GO Phoenix arrived in the vicinity of the search area and, following system checks and vehicle deployment, underwater search operations commenced on the Seventh Arc.’

Foley had told the IPA seminar his greatest fear was that in the massive seas, someone would be killed. It was a long, grinding job for both the crews out on the water, and the planners in Canberra and Perth. Foley got up early enough to review the sonar reports at 5:30am every day. The JACC team met to discuss the progress of the search each day, with a Malaysian representative present.

Out on the ocean, the multinational crew of Fugro Discovery worked 12-hour shifts seven days a week, for periods of six weeks. And week by week, the JACC issued its operational bulletins, which reported the coming and going of ships, the difficulties of the weather, the steady rise in the number of square kilometres searched, and the lack of any sign of MH370.

By the start of March 2015, with the first anniversary of the disappearance of MH370 looming, 24,000 square kilometres, or more than 40 per cent of the 60,000 square kilometre target zone, had been searched. The Australian, Malaysian and Chinese governments had always said that while finding MH370 was essential in order to determine what went wrong, as with all air crash investigations, they also said the search effort’s key objective was to provide closure for the families of those lost. The first anniversary was, therefore, a big deal.

‘We all got taken down to Canberra, 25 of us, all the rest of the extended family,’ said Danica Weeks.

The government set up a briefing session, with Transport Minister Truss, Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop and ATSB boss Dolan. Prime Minister Abbott showed up for morning tea.

‘I’m firing questions at Martin Dolan,’ Danica said of the briefing session, saying she also engaged in sparring matches with Zielke. ‘Judith has been wonderful, but we do fire each other up. I was asking, what are they doing? There was really no directive of where to search. Did they leave on a wild goose chase?’

Danica has a favourable impression of how the ATSB dealt with her, and particularly Foley.

‘Peter Foley is an incredible man,’ she said.

After the briefing, the families were then brought into the House of Representatives to hear the speeches. Abbott’s speech, according Danica’s assessment, was ‘weak and nul and void’.

‘My pledge is that we are taking every reasonable step to bring your uncertainty to an end,’ Abbott, in remarks addressed to the families, told Parliament.

But in a remark he probably didn’t really have to add on that occasion, Abbott said, ‘I can’t promise that the search will go on at this intensity forever. But I do reassure the families of our hope and our expectation that the ongoing search will succeed.’

By contrast, Danica said, opposition leader Bill Shorten’s speech was ‘wonderful’. It was certainly more ambitious. He started out quoting the English poet Shelley.

Winter is come and gone.

But grief returns with the revolving year.

‘Shelley wrote those words nearly 200 years ago when mourning the loss of his friend John Keats,’ Shorten said. ‘Today, as we pay our respects to the 239 souls lost aboard MH370, we offer our heartfelt condolences to those for whom a year has come and gone yet their grief abides.

‘Our hearts go out to you, the people they loved. None of us will know your sorrow.’

The session finished with a minute’s silence. Then, the families went home, the politicians went back to politics, and Foley went back to reviewing the sonar reports every morning at 5:30am.

It was pretty monotonous for the search crews, as they made one long pass towing the towfish, then another long pass. It was, Kennedy had said, what the crews called ‘mowing the lawn’. There was, however, the rare moment where something actually happened, like finding a shipwreck. The first such discovery, in May 2015, must have caused huge initial excitement for those on the ship in question, Fugro Equator.

Foley said in a media statement at the time that the sonar imaging returns, at 3900 metres, had ‘aspects that generated interest, multiple small bright reflections in a relatively small area of otherwise featureless seabed’.

The autonomous underwater vehicle was deployed for a low-level pass with a camera, and came back with intriguing images of an anchor and a scatter of small, cricket ball-sized black objects taken to be pieces of coal.

It was a fascinating find, but not what they were looking for.

‘On the optimistic side,’ Foley said, ‘it’s shown that if there’s a debris field in the search area, we’ll find it.’

A second shipwreck was discovered later on, and the clear image of its outline in the strange brass-tinged tones of the sonar imaging was released, showing surprising detail with the ship’s bowsprit, or pole on the bow, clearly visible.

By April 2015, 60 per cent of the target 60,000 square kilometres had been searched, and the hunt was due to come to a finish by the end of May if MH370 were not found.

It was a hard one for the governments; no-one wanted to stop the search, but the issue was where to draw the line.

It was time for the three governments to decide the next move. Truss; the new Malaysian transport minister, Liow Tiong Lai; and Chinese Transport Minister Yang met in Kuala Lumpur.

The decision was taken to double the search area to 120,000 square kilometres if the existing 60,000 were found to not contain the aircraft.

‘Ministers recognise the additional search area may take up to a year to complete given the adverse weather conditions in the coming winter months,’ they said in a statement.

There was an implied suggestion, though, that this would be the end of the trail.

‘Upon completion of the additional 60,000 sq km, all high-probability search areas would have been covered,’ they said.

The Australian and Malaysian governments agreed they would share the cost of the search – China, even though it had by far the most nationals on the aircraft, would not cough up any cash, but Yang continued the fine words of moral support.

‘The Chinese side is ready to stand by, as always, by our fellow friends Australia, as well as our Malaysia friends,’ he said.

The Chinese also insisted, however, that they were contributing to the search in kind, by supplying vessels. But a bit later on, while reading the weekly JACC search report bulletins, I noticed something a bit odd: the Chinese government ship Dong Hai Jiu 101 almost always seemed to be docked in, or lying just off, Fremantle, not searching. Dong Hai Jiu 101 just kept having extraordinarily bad luck, forcing it to return to port. At one stage it lost its towfish, due, the JACC said, to the ‘failure of a tow cable connector’. Then a crewman was injured, forcing another trip back to port. Eventually, it seemed the boat just gave up and returned to hang around Fremantle.

‘Projected weather conditions for the next several weeks preclude the effective deployment of search equipment from this vessel,’ the JACC reported. ‘Dong Hai Jiu 101 will remain at anchor off Fremantle until weather conditions improve.’

When I put questions to the new head of the JACC, Judith Zielke, who as mentioned took over from Houston after he moved to deal with MH17 in Ukraine, she would not reveal how many days the Chinese vessel had spent conducting actual underwater search operations. (For the record, the battles I had with the JACC, which was clearly suppressing information to the media, only occurred well after Houston left the JACC.)

Faced with a brick wall from the JACC, I instead did an analysis of weekly operational bulletins, and had it crossed checked by another journalist. The Australian broke the story that, in the more than six months since it joined the search for the missing airliner, Dong Hai Jiu 101 had its equipment in the water looking for MH370 for somewhere between a minimum of 17 days, to a maximum of 30 days.

Throughout the coverage of the MH370 saga, I went through a three-stage process in trying to establish the truth. The first was to ask the ATSB and the JACC what the truth was. When they would not answer that question, the next stage was to submit an FOI request for that information. If the agencies refused to release the information sought under FOI, the next stage was to report that it had been suppressed, and name the officer who had suppressed it. (Sometimes there was a fourth stage: getting a senator to ask the same officers the same questions in Senate Estimates.)

The FOI request was made for documents revealing how many days the Dong Hai Jiu 101 had spent looking for MH370. Not long after, The Australian reported the first of many failures by the ATSB and the JACC to be transparent about the search – a document existed, the JACC said, but would be suppressed. The Australian reported that the JACC knocked back the Freedom of Information request, stating that to release the document ‘would cause harm to the Australian government’s relationship with other governments’. The JACC had decided to use the exemption under the FOI Act relating to ‘documents affecting national security, defence or international relations’.

So, just what was Dong Hai Jiu 101 doing while its sailors were sitting around, twiddling their thumbs, in or just off Fremantle? According to some of Australia’s leading security experts, the answer is pretty simple: the Chinese ship was spying. Western Australia is home to the Australian submarine base near Perth at HMAS Stirling; the elite Australian army Special Air Service Regiment, also in a suburb of Perth; the Australian Defence Satellite Communications electronic spying station at Kojarena near Geraldton; and the North West Cape naval communications station near Exmouth. The Australian broke the story.

‘From my past intelligence experience I would be surprised if a vessel like the Dong Hai Jiu 101 did not have an intelligence collection role,’ said Clive Williams, a former Australian army officer and former Director of Security Intelligence told The Australian. ‘WA is of course a target-rich environment in terms of various Australian defence activities. The People’s Liberation Army Navy has a strong interest in the Indian Ocean where “research” activity is conducted by Chinese ships including its hospital ship, the Peace Ark.’

Australian Strategic Policy Institute executive director Peter Jennings also said the Dong Hai Jiu 101 ‘would as a matter of routine be noting any activity into and out of Fremantle and HMAS Stirling, which all adds to a database of ship movements and observed capabilities.’ But Jennings said the real value of the Dong Hai Jiu 101’s activities was ‘learning first-world techniques, tactics and procedures’ from Western experts.

Greg Barton from Deakin University said the ship would probably be spying ‘as a matter of course’.

‘Apart from actual intel, it would also represent an opportunity to gauge their signals intelligence capacity in terms of working out what they can pick up at that sort of distance, such as working out how well their hydrophone instrumentation can track submarine movements,’ he said.

The story was widely read and drew nearly 100 comments. A commenter named ‘Christopher’ wrote:

‘I think it’s time to thank the Chinese very much for their efforts in locating MH370 and escort their vessel with all appropriate pomp and ceremony that should be shown to such a good neighbour and trading partner back to the South China Sea.’

A particularly amusing element to all this was that the Australian government had hailed the deployment of Dong Hai Jiu 101 as a sign that the Chinese were prepared to put skin in the game, with a press statement thanking the Chinese government ‘for its contribution and the captain and crew for their efforts in the search for MH370’.

It took them a few days, but the Chinese embassy eventually issued a statement which did not actually deny Dong Hai Jiu 101 was spying, but described the suggestion as ‘wild speculation’.

A few months later, after doing just a little bit of actual searching for MH370 after The Australian broke the story it had likely been spying rather than hunting, Dong Hai Jiu 101 dropped off its underwater robot in Fremantle and headed home to Shanghai.

As the hunt for the Boeing 777 registered as 9M-MRO kept drifting along with no result, the international club of MH370 watchers started looking back at earlier theories, including the more mysterious.

Early on, there had been reports that locals on some tiny islands in the Maldives, an independent archipelago nation in the Indian Ocean south-west of Sri Lanka, had seen a big aircraft flying low soon after 6:00am on the morning of 8 March 2014. Somehow, a year later, journalists decided to revisit the reports, some flying to the extremely remote coral atolls. The Weekend Australian’s national chief correspondent, Hedley Thomas, got to the 60-hectare island of Kuda Huvadhoo, and talked to locals including Abdu Rasheed Ibrahim, 47, a court official and keen fisherman.

‘I watched this very large plane bank slightly and I saw its colours – the red and blue lines – below the windows,’ he told the newspaper in a story published in April 2015.

Even though Thomas was cautious and balanced in his reporting, canvassing countervailing opinions suggesting the aircraft could not have been MH370, the story created a huge stir, being picked up by several British and US newspapers.

But it got shot down pretty quickly – most effectively by French daily Le Monde’s Asia-Pacific correspondent Florence de Changy, who published a story two months later headlined ‘The Plane which Wasn’t MH370’.

De Changy observed locals had the mystery aircraft flying in what would have been a different direction from a line from the Straits of Malacca – rather than coming in from the east, they said, it arrived from the north-west.

De Changy determined there was another island 50 kilometres south-east of Kuda Huvadhoo called Thimarafushi, which had a new airport opened six months before MH370 disappeared.

On the morning of 8 March 2014, civil aviation records showed a flight touched down on Thimarafushi at 6:33am, a twin-engined De Haviland Dash 8 carrying 50 people. It was operated by Maldivian, an airline whose livery is red, white, and blue, like Malaysia Airlines.

So, de Changy put paid to the Maldivian option.

But just a month after her story came out, MH370, or at least a chunk of it, did show up on another island in the Indian Ocean.

Reunion, about 6000 kilometres north-west of Perth, is one of those tropical Indian Ocean islands east of Madagascar which, like Mauritius and the Seychelles, the British and French kept fighting over during the Napoleonic wars.

In 1810 the British Royal Navy seized it off the French for a few years, but France got it back under the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and it’s a French overseas department to this day. Reunion is known for its big, active volcano Piton de la Fournaise, its sugar cane and rum, and a rich ethnic mix of descendants from mainland Africa, India, China, Madagascar and France who make up its 900,000 inhabitants.

It was on a beach on the island’s north-east at Saint-Andre in late July, 2015, that local council worker Johnny Begue and his team of eight had started their regular job at 7:00am of keeping the local coastline clean. Begue had taken his morning break a bit before 9:00am and went for a stroll to look for a suitable stone to grind up some spices. He saw a piece of debris washed up on the pebbles, and realised it had some sort of significance. About two metres long, it had a distinctive curve and length, and there were screws on it that had not gone rusty.

‘I knew immediately it was part of an aircraft,’ Begue told the Associated Press. It just didn’t occur to him it might be from the greatest aviation mystery of modern times and help solve it.

Begue got his workmates to help him bring the thing farther up the beach so it wouldn’t wash away again. The question then was, what to do with this interesting piece of plane? Begue’s initial thought was that he and the blokes he worked with could do something local. Maybe make it into a memorial to whomever it involved – he and the boys could set it on the lawn and plant some flowers around it. Begue resolved to call his favourite local radio station and tell them about how he’d found this thing that looked a lot like a part of a big plane.

It was pretty soon afterwards that the French gendarmes arrived in force at the beach. They cordoned off the area, securing the piece of debris. The French did not waste any time: keeping it under tight security at all points and the media away, they bundled the piece up and put it on a plane to Toulouse to be examined by a military aviation laboratory. The French and aviation experts around the world had no doubt, once the first few photographs hit the media, what the interesting piece of junk Begue had stumbled on actually was: a flaperon from MH370.

The possible implications were immediate, obvious and huge.

If it were a piece of MH370, it meant, conclusively, that the aircraft had come down in the ocean and everyone had to be dead. Those next-of-kin, particularly in China – egged on by conspiracy theorists – who had sadly but understandably held out hope that the plane had somehow flown the other way to land in a remote location in central Asia, would now have tragic solid evidence to the contrary.

Jayden Burrows, the son of Rodney and Mary Burrows, told News Corp he had struggled with mixed emotions since the plane’s disappearance.

‘After 16 months of no information it will be a bit of a relief if it does turn out to be the plane . . . it’s been extremely challenging.’

In a touching move by the Reunionnais locals in Saint-Andre, that weekend residents held a special mass to pray for all those aboard MH370. Father Guy Hoareau led parishioners at Cambuston Catholic Church in an evening mass.

Eighteen-year-old student Sophie Ingra said the mass, attended by about 200 people, was a positive move after all the grief for the families.

‘It’s important for us to share the bad feelings and look forward with hope,’ she said.

It took only a week for the French to confirm the piece of debris had been a part of MH370 – it was a flaperon from a Boeing 777 and one of the serial numbers matched 9M-MRO. No doubt the French moved fast, since the discovery was, for all but the most devoted conspiracy theorists, the final proof that the aircraft and the people on board could be no more. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak again took it upon himself to break the news.

‘Today, 515 days since the plane disappeared, it is with a heavy heart that I must tell you that an international team of experts have conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris found on Reunion Island is indeed from MH370,’ he told the media.

The second implication of the discovery was that the working assumption that MH370 had come down in the southern Indian Ocean now appeared sound – the arrival of the flaperon at Reunion was consistent with the pattern of current and drift in that vast body of water.

The ATSB, which had all the drift-modelling from the surface search, quickly ran through it and issued a statement on its website – it was no doubt happy to do so since it supported its working hypothesis. The discovery of the flaperon at Reunion, it said, was ‘consistent with the currently defined search area.’

The third implication was that the discovery of the flaperon enabled drift-modelling gurus around the world to get to work. These scientists try to work out where things will drift to if you know where they start from, dubbed drift-modelling. Then there is ‘reverse drift-modelling’: working out where objects started from if you know where they drifted to and ended up.

The ATSB got the experts at the CSIRO to start the reverse drift-modelling exercise, but independently, a European group of oceanographers began such an exercise, as did a team at the University of Western Australia.

Those were the initial implications, but there were two more which were to play out importantly over time: the French getting their own bit of MH370 and hence a valuable piece of currency in the overall bid to find out what happened to the aircraft; and a new concrete challenge for the ATSB and its ‘ghost flight/death dive’ theory.

From the start the French had a stake in MH370: four of their nationals were on the flight. Laurence Wattrelos, 52, was returning from a beach holiday in Malaysia with two of her three children, Hadrien, 17, and Ambre, 14. Hadrien’s girlfriend, Zhao Yan, 18, was also on the flight. The teenagers had reportedly been attending the French school in Beijing. The Wall Street Journal reported that Laurence’s husband, affluent engineer and business executive Ghyslain Wattrelos, flew into Beijing from Paris the same day flight MH370 went missing, and was expecting to be reunited with his family. He was instead met by two French diplomats, who broke the news of the missing flight.

The French had a different and, to many observers, better approach to MH370 than the Australians. Whereas Australian government agencies timidly asked where MH370 might have come down, avoiding embarrassing the Malaysians by making any inquiries about what actually happened on board, the French set themselves the task of determining who or what had killed its four citizens.

From the start, French authorities treated the disappearance of MH370 as a matter for judicial inquiry into the deaths of Wattrelos’ family group. The flaperon, found on French sovereign territory, was going to be securely held by French judicial authorities to that end, and not turned over to either the ATSB or the Malaysians.

When it came to the debate of whether MH370 came down in an unpiloted crash, as the ATSB maintained, or was flown to the end and ditched as many in the professional aviation community believe, the flaperon was and remains central.

Flaperons on airliners sit on each wing, and serve two functions. For take-off and landing, they operate as flaps: the pilots deploy them to configure the aircraft for greater lift and slower speeds. When lowered, they sit in line with the flaps. In cruise, the flaperons serve a different function: they are moved up and down in conjunction with the ailerons to enable the pilots or autopilot to bank the aircraft in turns. A passenger with a view over the back of the wing can see the flaperon move – not much, up and down in cruise flight, keeping the wings level, and at a slightly higher deflection in a turn.

Even just the photographs printed in the media of what the flaperon had looked like when it was sitting on the beach and then being manhandled by French officials made a number of things abundantly clear. Firstly, it was no longer attached to the aircraft. While that might seem pretty obvious, it meant some force had torn it from its mountings – either in the air or when the aircraft hit the water.

Secondly, it was mostly in one piece. That became a critical element in the ensuing debate: if the aircraft had come down in a pilotless crash, why wasn’t it smashed to bits on impact?

Thirdly, the flaperon had clear damage to the trailing edge, that is, the part in line with the back of the wings. Sufficient force must have been applied to do that damage.

It wasn’t long before one of the world’s leading air crash investigators, Canadian Larry Vance, expressed a view on exactly what all that meant: MH370 must have been flown to the end and ditched. It was, in his view, the only explanation for the pattern of damage to the flaperon, and the fact it existed intact rather than in dozens of tiny bits.

Vance, about whom a great deal will be said in the later chapters of this book, concluded the only possible explanation for the damage to the trailing edge of the flaperon was that it had been lowered for a controlled ditching, and only a pilot alive at the end of the flight could have made that happen.

‘I do some general media here in Canada to do with accident investigation, and when I was asked about the flaperon that was recovered from MH370 I expressed my opinion that it proved that the flaps were extended, with all the ramifications of that regarding the intentional act,’ Vance said.

Vance maintained that if the aircraft had come down in a high-speed dive, all its hollow component parts including the flaperon would have been exploded into dozens of pieces by the hydrodynamic force, and not left pretty much intact. Conversely, the trailing-edge damage was only consistent with it having been lowered with the flaps by a pilot, and dragged through the water on ditching, before being torn off altogether, he said.

The search kept going, the ships ‘mowed the lawn’, and each week the JACC put out its operational bulletins on the progress. By December 2015, 75,000 square kilometres of the expanded 120,000 square kilometre target zone had been covered. That month, the ATSB issued a report which explained some of the continuing work which had been done, but also, between the lines, tried to defend the assumptions that had been made in using the ‘unresponsive crew/hypoxia’ scenario as the basis for the search strategy.

In a section titled ‘Ditching Considerations’, it said: ‘A controlled ditching scenario requires engine thrust to be available to properly control the direction and vertical speed at touchdown and to provide hydraulic power for the flight controls including the flaps.’

As per its previous report, the December report said the analysis of the satellite data unit transmissions suggested the aircraft had run out of fuel.

‘This evidence is therefore inconsistent with a controlled ditching scenario,’ the ATSB said.

But this was one of several aspects of the ATSB report the former fighter pilot and Boeing 777 captain Byron Bailey took to task as being wrong and, he claimed, the sort of conclusion a government agency might come to if it did not have professional pilots familiar with the aircraft advising it. Bailey pointed out that with the automatic deployment of the auxiliary power unit, after both engines flamed out, the flaps could still be lowered.

Famously, one of the first things Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger did when he lost both engines in flight and had to ditch his aircraft in the Hudson was tell the first officer, Jeff Skiles, to start up the auxiliary power unit which, among other things, enabled him to lower flaps.

After the famous interchange where Sullenberger told air traffic controllers ‘we’re gonna be in the Hudson’, the transcript specifically refers to the flaps being down.

‘Got flaps two, you want more?’ Skiles asked Sullenberger in the minute before landing on the river, referring to the second of several options for how far to deploy the flaps.

‘No, let’s stay at two,’ Sullenberger said.

Sullenberger did exactly what the ATSB report said could not be done after dual engine flame-out on MH370: he lowered the flaps and conducted a controlled ditching, in his case getting all 155 people on the aircraft off it in one piece.

In January 2016, now writing in The Australian, Bailey again dissected the ATSB’s search strategy, and repeated his claim that he had been told by a government source that the FBI had found evidence that Zaharie had ‘flown’ a similar flight to the southern Indian Ocean on his home computer simulator.

When I put that to the ATSB, its MH370 spokesman Daniel O’Malley said:

‘The ATSB cannot comment on the accuracy of an alleged conversation . . . the ATSB is not responsible for the investigation of the accident; that . . . belongs to the Malaysian government.’

The ATSB, and Transport Minister Truss, did their best to marginalise Bailey, the former writing an extensive piece on the ‘Correcting the Record’ section of its website, and the latter writing letters to the editor of The Australian.

The ATSB set up its ‘Correcting the Record’ site in June 2015 to attack critics in the media of its hunt for MH370, and of 11 posts over the next two years, all but two of them related to MH370.

The ATSB maintained its line that ‘for search purposes, the relevant facts and analysis most closely match a scenario in which there was no pilot intervening in the latter stages of the flight’.

It was not just The Australian that started asking questions as to whether the ATSB was looking in the right place. On ABC radio, ATSB chief Martin Dolan was asked by reporter Sarah Dingle: ‘So is it worthwhile, then, changing the search parameters to consider whether the pilot deliberately took MH370 down?’

Dolan said: ‘We have certainly considered that as a possibility; all the evidence we have at the moment says that that is very unlikely.’

The problem for the ATSB was that if its ‘ghost flight/death dive’ theory was right, surely it should be able to find MH370?

The months passed, and it didn’t. There was a bit of excitement here and there, such as when one of the search ships lost its towfish when it crashed into an underwater mud volcano. It was recovered in early February using a marine robot that plucked it from a depth of 2550 metres. Mostly, though, the gruelling, monotonous business of hunting for MH370 continued without spectacle – but the debate about whether the hunters were looking in the right spot heated up. After seven years as ATSB chief commissioner, Dolan retired in the first half of 2016. He was replaced on 1 July that year by Greg Hood, who had started out a career in aviation as an air traffic controller in the RAAF. Hood, who held glider and private pilot licences, had been head of air traffic control at Airservices Australia before moving to head up the ATSB.

By the start of July 2016, Foley’s team had searched 110,000 of the 120,000 square kilometre target zone.

Then, all at once, the public relations war shifted against the ATSB.

The ATSB’s efforts to steer around Bailey’s claim that the FBI had found the critical flight simulator data on Zaharie’s computer, and that Australian investigators had known about it, were blown out of the water. New York magazine revealed it had obtained a secret Malaysian police report on the findings of the FBI analysis of the hard disk drives on Zaharie’s flight simulation computer, which showed waypoints for a simulated flight eerily similar to the zigzag route MH370 actually took. The simulated flight, conducted only a month or so before MH370’s disappearance, also flew up the Straits of Malacca to the Andaman Sea, then took a sharp turn south before ending in the southern Indian Ocean.

New York magazine quoted one excerpt from the report that showed investigators regarded the find as significant: ‘Based on the Forensics Analysis conducted on the 5 HDDs obtained from the Flight Simulator from MH370 Pilot’s house, we found a flight path, that lead [sic] to the Southern Indian Ocean, among the numerous other flight paths charted on the Flight Simulator.’

Then, around the same time in July, there was another blow to the ATSB’s effort to defend its ‘unresponsive crew/hypoxia’ theory.

The news agency Reuters reported the ATSB’s pin-up boy, Fugro’s Paul Kennedy, now thought the whole premise of the $200 million search had been wrong from the start. The way Reuters reported it, Kennedy had decided the ATSB had erred in determining the search area based on its ‘ghost flight’ and ‘death dive’ scenario.

Reuters reported Fugro now thought it had been ‘scouring the wrong patch of ocean for two years.’ Kennedy said he now believed the ‘rogue pilot’ theory, in which a fully conscious pilot glided the aircraft down to the sea, was probably right after all.

‘If it’s not there, it means it’s somewhere else,’ Kennedy told Reuters. ‘If it was manned, it could glide for a long way. You could glide it for further than our search area is, so I believe the logical conclusion will be, well, maybe that is the other scenario.’

Kennedy went into specifics of the ‘other scenario’; he said a skilled pilot could glide the plane approximately 193 kilometres from its cruising altitude after running out of fuel.

The Reuters story went viral – like other big new breaks on MH370, everyone ran it. It can still be found through a Google search on the ABC News website, dated 21 July 2016, headlined, ‘MH370 may have been gliding in its final moments, leaving wreckage outside search zone, experts say’.

As a case of biting the hand that feeds, it doesn’t get better than this. For about 18 months the ATSB had been fighting a running battle against senior airline pilots including Bailey, Hardy and Evans who had promoted the theory that Zaharie hijacked his own aircraft and flew it right to the end and ditched it in a deliberate effort to disappear it. Meanwhile, the ATSB and Transport Minister Truss had consistently described the controlled glide scenario as ‘very unlikely’ and stuck to the bureau’s preferred ‘unresponsive crew/hypoxia’ end-of-flight model.

So now, the ATSB’s $200 million action man, Kennedy, seemed to be siding with the enemy – Bailey and the other pilots – in supporting the ‘rogue pilot to the end’ theory. To make matters worse, the story came out just a few days before ministers from Australia, Malaysia and China were to meet again to discuss the next move.

Fugro went into full PR damage control mode to try to mitigate the distinct impression implied by Kennedy that the pilots were right all along.

‘Fugro wishes to make it very clear that we believe the search area to have been well defined based on all of the available scientific data. In short, we have been thoroughly looking in the most probable place – and that is the right place to search,’ Fugro said in a statement.

The statement did not, however, claim Reuters misquoted Kennedy.

Between Kennedy’s suggestion that the ‘pilot hijack’ theory was right, and the confirmation of the FBI discovery of the simulated flight, Bailey claimed he had been vindicated and that the ATSB and Truss had been hiding the truth for two years while sledging him.

‘How is it that a taxpayer-funded government department can be so devious?’ Bailey asked in The Australian.

By late July 2016, with only about 10 per cent of the designated search area of 120,000 square kilometres yet to be covered, the three governments backing the search had to decide what their next move would be if that were completed and the aircraft not found. It was a tough call, and as the country officially in charge of the investigation into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, and the one putting up the most money to find it, the Malaysian government held the whip hand in making it. While Malaysia is no longer a poor country, the government faced a dilemma in whether it could write a blank cheque in the hunt for the aircraft when that money could otherwise go to, for example, schools, health or economic development.

The government’s new Transport Minister, Liow Tiong Lai, brought his counterparts together in the Malaysian administrative capital of Putrajaya on 22 July. At the end of the meeting, Liow announced the verdict at a press conference: ‘In the absence of new credible evidence, Malaysia, Australia and China have collectively agreed to suspend the search upon completion of the 120,000 kilometres.’

‘I must emphasise that this does not mean that we have given up on locating MH370. If there are any new credible news, or credible new evidence, we will continue to work together,’ he said. ‘The families and loved ones of the passengers and crew of MH370 remain a priority.’

The new Australian Transport Minister, Darren Chester, said every effort had been made to find the aircraft with the best minds and the best technology.

‘This decision has not been taken lightly nor without some sadness and we want to emphasise our work is continuing.’

The final stage of the ATSB-led hunt was caught in a pincer movement of governments saying they had to find MH370 within the remaining search area or call it quits, and more and more independent observers saying they were not finding it because they had the wrong theory of what happened.

Then commercial television, and its huge popular impact, weighed in against them. It was one of the Nine Network’s star reporters, Ross Coulthart, on its flagship program 60 Minutes Australia, who started putting all the pieces together that the ATSB might have got it wrong with its ‘ghost flight/death dive’ theory. Coulthart had watched an episode of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s nightly news show The National, and on it was Vance talking about the flaperon and what it meant. Coulthart immediately appreciated the international implications.

Here was one of the world’s most experienced and applauded air crash investigators who, if correct, had pointed out the elephant in the room missed, or ignored, by the ATSB. Coulthart decided to do a story for 60 Minutes on Vance’s findings and other aspects of the MH370 debate.

By this time, there had been a few other major developments. The discovery of the flaperon by chance by Johnny Begue on Reunion prompted huge interest among the official investigators, but also the international club of MH370 devotees, as to whether other parts of the aircraft might have washed up. Some members of the MH370 families, but others who were not next-of-kin including the high-profile American lawyer Blaine Gibson about whom more will be said later, started campaigns to recover them by visiting countries on and off the south-east coast of Africa. In May 2016, the rear edge of the left outboard flap was found and recovered on an islet off Mauritius.

The following month, an even bigger and more significant part of the aircraft, the right flap, was discovered on Tanzania’s Pemba Island, mostly intact, and was sent to the ATSB for analysis in Canberra. Again, dates and letters and numbers enabled a conclusive determination it was from MH370. The flap showed trailing edge damage very similar to that of the flaperon.

Coulthart’s story aired, prime time, on Nine on Sunday, 31 July. It quoted Vance saying, in stark terms, the ATSB’s ‘ghost flight/death dive’ assumption was wrong.

‘Absolutely. Somebody was flying the airplane at the end of its flight. Somebody was flying the airplane into the water,’ Vance said.

Coulthart went through the FBI findings that Zaharie had practised a similar flight on his home simulator. He brought out the details of the evidence of the flap and flaperon. He also interviewed Danica Weeks, who said, ‘If you look back over the last two-and-a-half years and the actions of the Malaysians, it just tells me that they are hiding something. Something is not right here. I have been patient. I have given them the benefit of the doubt. For me the gloves are off now.’

Coulthart, a fellow aggressive journalist I’ve known since we were both young reporters covering NSW state politics in the 1980s, had not lost his touch. He grilled Foley, asking him if, in fact, he had known all along about the FBI finding that Zaharie had practised a death flight to the southern Indian Ocean on his home flight simulator.

Coulthart: You don’t deny the existence of that report, do you?

Foley: Absolutely, it exists.

Coulthart: We have it here.

Foley: Yeah, yeah.

Coulthart: We found a flight plan that leads to the southern Indian Ocean.

Foley: Mmm. Correct.

Coulthart: As a taxpayer, who has seen an enormous amount of money spent on an investigation – not least the victims – I would want to know about this report, showing that the captain tracked a flight path into the southern Indian Ocean. Don’t you think the public has the right to know this?

Foley: I think, as we would strongly argue, it should form a part of the final report.

Coulthart: What about the interim factual analysis, why wasn’t it put into the interim factual analysis?

Foley: That’s a question for the Malaysians, Ross.

Incredibly, Foley admitted to Coulthart – while he was still directing the search on the basis that no-one was flying the plane at the end – that the French analysis of the flaperon suggested the contrary.

‘We have also seen some analysis from the French that suggests that it’s a possibility that it was in a deployed state,’ Foley admitted.

Then Coulthart asked, ‘Doesn’t the visual evidence on the flaperon suggest that the flaperon was extended?’

Foley responded, ‘Yes.’

It was extraordinary. Coulthart had got Foley to admit, effectively, that a key part of the evidence suggested the ‘ghost flight/death dive’ theory was wrong. But the ATSB stuck with the search plan, regardless.

The reaction of the ATSB and the JACC to the adverse media was to suppress what families of those lost thought should have been public information, in what was a clear attempt to sideline journalists who sought to unveil the truth about their likely errors in the hunt for MH370.