Theory One: Rogue Pilot to the End

A couple of minutes before signing off with ‘Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero’ MH370 pilot-in-command Zaharie Ahmad Shah sent his co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid out of the cockpit on an errand.

‘Hamid, would you mind getting me a cup of coffee while I attend to some paperwork? Many thanks.’

Zaharie would, as per standard operating procedure (SOP), have locked the cockpit door once Fariq was out. But what would not have been SOP was the series of actions Zaharie initiated next.

The minute after the acknowledgement ‘Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero,’ Zaharie reached to the central console and turned off the secondary radar transponder, making the aircraft vanish from air traffic control screens.

The Malaysian safety investigation report released in July 2018 says the symbol for MH370 dropped off from radar display at 1:20am. ‘The Malaysian military radar and radar sources from two other countries, namely Viet Nam and Thailand, also captured the disappearance of the radar position symbol of MH370,’ the report says.

At the same time, Zaharie turned off the aircraft’s automatic transmission of flight data to ground stations. The report shows the final Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) transmission was made through the MH370 satellite communication system just 13 minutes earlier, at 1:07am.

Then Zaharie took out his flight crew bag, containing a few ostensibly innocuous items of clothing – a jumper, scarf, insulated jacket, light gloves and wool cap. Nothing odd there – Beijing can still be very cold in early March. But then, in what was at that stage a comfortable warm cockpit, Zaharie put those items of clothing on.

Then, Zaharie donned his oxygen mask which had hours of oxygen supply in case of depressurisation or fire. Moments thereafter, Zaharie turned off the electrical circuit for the cabin lights, plunging the passenger cabin into darkness in the middle of a moonless night. Zaharie then quickly reached up above his head to the upper control console and pressed a button to turn off the cabin pressurisation system, which is run by power from the engines and keeps the air in the cabin at near ground level pressure.

With the pressurisation turned off, the aircraft went into rapid decompression – this option is available for pilots to deal with an onboard fire by sucking out the smoke and exposing the cabin to the lack of oxygen and cold of high altitudes. Immediately after that, Zaharie took the aircraft off autopilot, and made a brief right-hand turn followed quickly by a sharp but long left-hand turn, turning the aircraft almost 180 degrees back towards Malaysia. The safety investigation report says that at 1:21am, a playback of Malaysian military radar ‘showed the radar return of MH370 turning right but shortly after, making a constant left turn to heading of 273 degrees’.

The Malaysian investigators later determined the turn was too abrupt to have been made on autopilot, and had to have been performed by a pilot with his hands on the yoke manually moving the controls. The turn was so sharp, with such a high angle of bank, that it set off alarms and required Zaharie’s full concentration as a highly skilled pilot to accomplish. The turn took two minutes and eight seconds, and Zaharie negotiated his way through it despite an audio ‘bank angle’ warning and ‘stick shaker’ stall warning.

The rapid combination of Zaharie’s actions sent the 238 souls in his charge into mortal fear and in many cases outright panic. The oxygen masks dropped automatically due to the loss of cabin pressure, but the passengers, cabin crew and Fariq were enveloped in darkness, fogginess from rapid decompression and increasing cold. The quick right-left extremely banked turns threw those standing, including the cabin crew and Fariq, off their feet, many crashing into the passengers. The cabin filled with screams of confusion and terror.

Like all airliners, MH370 would have had portable oxygen bottles and masks stored in lockers for the cabin crew or pilots to use in the event of rapid decompression or fire. But it was too difficult for Fariq or the cabin crew, during the sharply banked turn of more than two minutes, to make their way in the darkness to the lockers to deploy them.

The young and agile Fariq somehow negotiated his way to the cockpit door in the difficult conditions, clamouring from one row to another taking the occasional breath of oxygen from masks fallen to vacant seats. At that stage he thought his duty was to assist his captain in dealing with a life-threatening calamity of some sort. Zaharie kept the door locked, and after a period Fariq banged on it, saying, ‘Captain, please let me in, what’s wrong?’

Seconds after that, Fariq passed out and collapsed at the foot of the cockpit door. The effects on humans of rapid decompression and hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation, at high altitude are well known. Most military pilots and many civilian ones go through simulations in decompression chambers. For those readers interested, there are some excellent YouTube videos showing them. The cabin quickly goes foggy as the moisture condenses out of the air, and the cold from outside starts to seep in. People who go through the process in simulation report different symptoms, but ironically, the most common is a sort of drunken sense of feeling good. That insidious process is well established throughout aviation history.

‘One does not suffer in any way; on the contrary,’ French scientist and experimental balloonist, Gaston Tissandier, wrote in 1875. ‘One feels an inner joy, as if filled with a radiant flood of light . . . one becomes indifferent, one thinks neither of the perilous situation nor of any danger.’ Tissandier wrote those words about hypoxia after he and two fellow adventurers, journalist Joseph Crocé-Spinelli, and naval officer Théodore Henri Sivel, attempted an altitude record in a balloon. They did well, reaching 28,000 feet, but Crocé-Spinelli and Henri Sivel died of hypoxia; Tissandier is said to have gone deaf as a result of the experience. He wrote that he wanted to reach the oxygen bags, but couldn’t, and then didn’t really care.

After the oxygen got sucked out of MH370 during rapid decompression, for the first 30 seconds or maybe a bit longer, passengers could have maintained what’s called useful consciousness – the ability to know what’s going on and perform basic functions like putting on an oxygen mask. But then all those who did not get an oxygen mask on within that short time would see their blood oxygen levels drop dramatically. Their fingertips would have started to tingle and they would have become lightheaded. But ironically, and catastrophically, those passengers who did not get their oxygen masks on in 30 seconds of total darkness and steep bank probably stopped worrying about that or anything else. If you have ever wondered why during the pre-flight passenger safety briefings on airliners the message is to put on your own oxygen mask first before helping others, that’s why: if you spend more than 30 seconds or a bit longer trying to put the oxygen mask on your rambunctious child before putting your own mask on, you probably won’t succeed, and pretty soon, you won’t even care.

By the time Zaharie finished the steeply banked turns – more than two minutes – the period of useful consciousness would have expired for anyone who did not have an oxygen mask on. Within three or four minutes at most they would have passed out. While their hearts would likely have stayed beating for a while, after several minutes of unconsciousness they would have started to suffer brain damage. Some passengers would have become brain dead, others would have died.

For those who somehow did manage to find the drop-down masks in the darkness and sharp bank angle and got them on during the short period of useful consciousness, it would only be a temporary reprieve. The oxygen from the drop-down masks is designed purely to keep passengers alive long enough for the pilots to put the aircraft into a rapid descent to lower altitudes where there is enough oxygen for them to breathe, usually about 10,000 feet if the terrain allows it.

On the Boeing 777, the oxygen in the drop-down masks for the passengers does not come from oxygen bottles, the way it does for the pilots, but is chemically generated. How long it lasts depends on altitude. In a normal scenario of a rapid descent, the passenger oxygen would last 22 minutes, but if the aircraft stayed at 35,000 feet it would only last about 12 minutes.

That makes the timing of Zaharie’s murderous plan ruthlessly effective. The elapsed time from the moment the aircraft made the turn at waypoint IGARI at 1:21am, until it appeared back over the east coast of the Malay Peninsula at 1:37am, was 16 minutes. The oxygen from the drop-down masks would have expired about four minutes earlier, and any passengers or crew who had them on would have lost useful consciousness or passed out altogether in those four minutes.

That would explain why there were no text messages or cell phone calls of alarm, distress or final words from any of the passengers or crew once the aircraft passed near or over built-up areas like Kota Bharu or Penang: they were all unconscious or dead. It has been established that had anyone been conscious when MH370 passed near Penang, they may have been able to make a mobile phone call. At 1:52am, first officer Fariq’s phone made contact with the Penang mobile service; Malaysian authorities say it was just an automatic log-on, not an attempt to make a call or send a text message.

To be even more sure, Zaharie flew higher after the initial turn – the oxygen would have run out even faster and the hypoxia would have been more severe at 40,000 feet. The Malaysian safety investigation report quotes a publication Basic Flight Pathology as saying useful consciousness is between 30 seconds and one minute at 35,000 feet, but only 15 to 20 seconds at 40,000 feet.

Zaharie waited half an hour in all after depressurising the aircraft, to be sure the 238 passengers and crew in his charge were neutralised and he was flying an airliner of the unconscious, brain-dead and dead. Then he again reached up and pushed the pressurisation button to ‘on’, and within a few minutes the cabin was back to near ground level air pressure, and warm. In a leisurely fashion Zaharie took off his jacket, gloves, scarf and cap and comfortably settled back to proceed with the rest of his elaborate murder-suicide plan.

The aircraft tracked along the airspace border between Malaysia and Thailand – a deliberate ploy by Zaharie to further confuse authorities; Thai and Malaysian controllers might have thought the aircraft was the other’s responsibility. This was indeed the case, it later emerged: Thai primary radar detected the aircraft, but Thai controllers did not alert Malaysian controllers because, Thai officials said, the Malaysians did not ask about it.

Malaysian military radar then tracked MH370 to Penang, a bustling island city on peninsular Malaysia’s west coast. At 1:52am, the Malaysian safety investigation report says, the radar ‘blip’ was ‘observed to be at 10 nautical miles south of Penang Island on a heading of 261 degrees.’ It gave Zaharie a good look at the lights of the city where he was born and grew up – for him the slow, curving turn he made around it marked final salute to his happy boyhood memories.

After Penang, the playback of primary radar shows MH370 headed up the Straits of Malacca on Airway Route N571. Zaharie selected that segment of regular, normal commercial airliner flight because had the Malaysian or Thai military been actively watching MH370 on primary radar on that phase of the flight, it would have appeared unremarkable: an aircraft proceeding steadily in a north-westerly direction along a conventional air route, passing through waypoints, likely on its way to India or beyond.

The primary radar tracked MH370 passing through the waypoint VAMPI, then MEKAR, beyond the northern tip of Sumatra. At 10 nautical miles beyond MEKAR, and before it got to the next waypoint, NILAM, MH370 disappeared from primary radar; it had simply gone beyond the usual 250 kilometres radar range, at 2:22am.

Zaharie had planned this part of the flight as a ruse, knowing searchers would, in real time or on playback, consult the primary radar, and see MH370 flying on a straight north-westerly track and official airway until it dropped from radar coverage. Anyone trying to find the aircraft after it disappeared would therefore look on that track – and, at one point in the subsequent search and rescue mission, they did.

But that’s not where MH370 actually went.

After flying about 15 minutes farther along the north-west N571 route just to be absolutely sure he had been out of primary radar range for a while, Zaharie turned the aircraft left on a track going almost due south, to the middle of nowhere in the southern Indian Ocean – just like the imaginary flight he had practised on his home computer flight simulator. Zaharie punched into the Flight Management System, or autopilot, a true heading for it to steer of 188 degrees, which would take him far to the south.

At that point, Zaharie thought he had achieved his complex plan of avoiding detection and interception, and could hide the aircraft and the 238 souls in his charge forever. But there was one thing he didn’t know – hardly any commercial airline pilots did at that time since it is not used for navigation. Automatic satellite ‘handshakes’ are sent, in the case of MH370 roughly hourly, from the aircraft to a ground station via a satellite so as to transmit, in this case, engine performance data to aircraft maintenance engineers. Through some clever deduction, scientists were later able to use the satellite handshakes to establish the general direction the flight took south, but not the final resting place of the aircraft.

Over the next nearly six hours, Zaharie had little to do since the autopilot was taking the aircraft where he wanted it to. There was no-one on board to talk to – the passengers and crew he was responsible for were piled like rag dolls over one another in their seats in the cabin or lying sprawled out in the aisles. There was no mobile phone coverage, and he made no radio transmissions.

But Zaharie wanted to have a look at his deadly handiwork. One of the mysteries of the flight is that the automatic satellite signals stopped for a period, then started broadcasting again at 2:25am with a ‘log-on request’.

As mentioned, Zaharie at the start of the hijack disabled the circuit which powered the cabin lights. But without realising it, he also switched off the automatic satellite communication system known as the satellite data unit or ‘SATCOM’. To have a look back in the passenger cabin, he repowered the same circuit, turning the lights back on but also, again unwittingly, reconnected the satellite data unit.

There is a hint in the ATSB reports that this is what happened. It says the SATCOM went down somewhere between the last ACARS message at 1:07am, and an unsuccessful automatic attempt by the satellite ground station to re-establish contact with the aircraft occurred, about an hour later, at 2:03am. An interruption of the SATCOM, the ATSB said, could be due to engines flaming out, or ‘intermittent technical failures’. But it could also be the result of pilot intervention, by changing the electrical routing system using switches located in the overhead panel in the cockpit, or via the circuit breakers in the electronic equipment bay being pulled and later reset.

The ATSB concludes the reason the satellite data unit went off in this phase of the flight and then came back on with a log-on request at 2:25am was likely due to a power interruption.

‘As this power interruption was not due to engine flame-outs, it is possible that it was due to manual switching of the electrical system,’ the ATSB said.

Of course, once Zaharie made the final turn and set the autopilot for the long track south, he knew he could have ended his involvement right there and then. He could have just again reached up and pressed the button turning off the pressurisation; he would know death by hypoxia is a fairly painless, even pleasant way to go in a manner of minutes.

But Zaharie had a very calculated, pre-planned and complex strategy from start to finish to make sure the aircraft would never be found. He wanted to finish the job: fly the aircraft to the end and ditch it in a controlled fashion to see it break up into only a few pieces and sink, rather than create a big debris field by crashing the plane in an uncontrolled dive and hitting the water at high speed. A debris field from an unpiloted crash would have been visible to searching aircraft, or on satellite photo playback.

Zaharie also wanted to run the aircraft out of fuel or very close to it, to avoid an oil slick which, like a debris field, could also give away its final resting place to search aircraft or satellites. Gliding an aircraft to a controlled ditching is entirely doable, especially if the question of whether the pilots, cabin crew and passengers survive is not a concern.

At a bit after 8:00am, having travelled for around seven-and-a-half hours since take-off, MH370 was close to running out of fuel. At that stage, having started in the northern hemisphere, Zaharie had taken the plane to about 38 degrees south, about the latitude of Bass Strait. Zaharie had set the fuel in ‘cross feed’ mode, in which fuel could flow from the fuller tank to the less full one, so the time taken for the second engine to flame out after the first died from fuel exhaustion was not long.

By that stage, at 40,000 feet, having flown all night, the sun was coming up in the east – not at ground level yet, but at the altitude MH370 was cruising. After both engines flamed out, Zaharie wanted to get the aircraft considerably lower for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, and very practically, with no engine power he would have to get the nose down quickly to maintain a safe airspeed and avoid an aerodynamic stall where he would fall out of the sky. Secondly, although he would again have donned his oxygen mask, without engine power the aircraft would again rapidly decompress, making the cockpit uncomfortably cold and foggy. Thirdly, while any ships below him would still be in darkness, at dawn MH370 would shine out brightly at 40,000 feet; better to again get below the sun and back into the cover of night. Zaharie took manual control of the aircraft and put it into a steep accelerating dive of 20 degrees, equal to an initial descent of 17,500 feet per minute, before converting the kinetic energy of the dive into a glide to take him about 90 nautical miles further before reaching the ocean surface.

Two things happened automatically when MH370 ran out of fuel. The ram air turbine, a fan-like device, deployed from the fuselage into the slipstream, generating just enough hydraulic power and electricity to operate the control surfaces and power the main instruments, but not enough to lower the flaps. But then, a minute or so later, the auxiliary power unit automatically powered up.

The auxiliary power unit is another, smaller jet engine, used not to propel the aircraft forward but to generate enough power to operate the aircraft’s primary systems. Pilots have the option of firing it up on the ground before flight to run the plane’s basic systems like air conditioning, without having to start the engines. On some aircraft, to start the main engines pilots have to first get the auxiliary power unit going. Importantly, with the auxiliary power unit running, the flaps can be lowered even when the engines have run out of fuel; it is designed to run for a period of some minutes after main engine fuel exhaustion. That enabled Zaharie to complete his plan.

Zaharie ordered the extra fuel and planned the flight precisely so that when he was gliding towards the surface of the ocean, the sun was just coming up at sea level. By the time Zaharie was in the last few thousand feet of his descent, it was not long after dawn but clear daylight.

The weather and sea conditions in that part of the southern Indian Ocean on the morning of 8 March 2014 are fairly well established from satellite reports. Zaharie turned the aircraft into the south-westerly wind. He saw the primary three- to four-metre swell radiating its usual direction northwards from the deep low-pressure weather systems far to the south. There is a well-established protocol professional pilots know when it comes to ditching an aircraft at sea, the aim being to give the aircraft the best chance of minimising damage and staying afloat long enough to get passengers off into life rafts. That involves trying to land the aircraft parallel with the direction of the swell, and on the back of a wave. Zaharie ditched at the top back side of the swell which was running at the time.

A ditching in this direction, with the receding swell on the aircraft’s right, meant the right wing hit the swell first. Even with flaps lowered, which enables aircraft to land at lower speeds, the ditching speed was around 250 kilometres per hour, and first the right then the left engines were torn off as they dragged through the water. The right flaps and flaperons, having been fully lowered by Zaharie, progressively dragged along the surface of the water, eroding their trailing edges, before the pressure became too great and they too broke off altogether.

The fuselage broke wide at the weakest part – the forward wing junction – and separated. The aircraft sank with the fuselage in two main chunks. Zaharie was knocked out on impact, nearly dead, and quickly drowned, as he had expected.

And with that, at around 8:30am on 8 March 2014, Zaharie achieved exactly what he wanted to do when he first started modelling it on his home computer flight simulator: in an act of mass murder-suicide, he had made a jetliner, himself and the 238 innocent souls on board vanish without a trace in one of the world’s deepest, wildest and most remote stretches of sea.

There have been many confirmed cases of pilot hijack/suicide on commercial airliners, and quite a few other suspected ones. The most infamous in recent years was the 2015 Germanwings Flight 9525, which left Barcelona on 24 March heading for Dusseldorf with 150 people on board. Co-pilot Andreas Lubitz waited until the captain left the cockpit for the toilet, then locked the door and flew the Airbus A320 into the French Alps, killing himself and everyone else.

Spookily, in the 10 minutes from the time Lubitz set the flight management system for 100 feet, until the aircraft crashed, the cockpit voice recorder revealed he did not say a word and his breathing remained normal. This was all while air traffic controllers repeatedly tried to engage with him and the captain banged on the cockpit and shouted. During the very last moment of the cockpit voice recording, passengers can be heard screaming.

The air crash investigation found the young Germanwings first officer had psychological issues that had not been picked up. He apparently feared he was losing his vision, but hid the fact from his employers. In such cases, there’s often a big difference between the public persona and the demons that lurk within. Friends and neighbours who knew Lubitz described him as ‘quiet’ but ‘fun’, and said he loved flying – just like Zaharie loved flying.

Another prominent case was SilkAir Flight 185. The Boeing 737 took off from Jakarta bound for Singapore, and crashed almost vertically down into the Musi River in southern Sumatra on 19 December 1997, killing all 97 passengers and seven crew on board. In that case, attention focused on the captain, Tsu Way Ming. He had dropped more than $US1.2 million in losses in high-risk securities trading, and taken out a $US600,000 life insurance policy that took effect the day of the crash. His possible stressors were many. Six months earlier Tsu had faced disciplinary action by SilkAir, an airline majority-owned by the Singapore government, for turning off a cockpit voice recorder.

The 19th of December was also the anniversary of a tragedy still haunting Tsu. On that day in 1979, four of his Singapore Air Force colleagues had crashed into a mountain. The ace flyer Tsu had been due to lead the training exercise but pulled out when his Skyhawk developed a fault – the suggestion is that he blamed himself for not being with his colleagues.

The Indonesian government investigation found there was not enough evidence to determine the cause of the crash, but the US National Transportation Safety Board said it was most likely murder-suicide, committed by Tsu.

A similar disagreement between two investigating bodies occurred in EgyptAir Flight 990, flying from Los Angeles to Cairo via New York, on 31 October 1999. It crashed into the ocean off Nantucket Island. The black boxes were recovered, and they record first officer Gameel Al-Batouti repeatedly saying, ‘I rely on God,’ in Arabic as he pushed the control column forward and shut off the engines, while the captain repeatedly asked, ‘What’s happening?’ The NTSB concluded Batouti deliberately crashed the plane for motives unknown, while the Egyptian investigation settled on elevator failure, something the NTSB said was not consistent with the facts.

This leads on to the big question which has to be asked in the case of MH370: is there anything in Zaharie’s background to explain why he would have taken himself and 238 souls in his charge to a watery grave deep in the southern Indian Ocean?

The dominant, though certainly not unanimous, opinion in the international professional aviation community is that the disappearance of MH370 was most probably a case of pilot hijack by Zaharie.

The general view is that most other scenarios, such as terrorist hijack gone wrong, rapid decompression, and onboard fire, require an extraordinarily large number of individual and unlikely occurrences to happen in a certain sequence. Although the promoters of those theories all posit an explanation for why there was no distress call, that element is problematic in the eyes of many professional pilots and air crash investigators. By contrast, the ‘pilot hijack’ theory basically requires just one thing – for Zaharie to want to do it – and all the other known facts, including the lack of a distress call, fit neatly into place.

But this remains the biggest enigma: what would have motivated Zaharie to meticulously plan, then carry out, such a heinous crime?

There is no one clear answer, but a few tantalising clues.

While there was a lot of good journalistic work done by Malaysian and international reporters investigating Zaharie in the first days and weeks after 8 March 2014, it yielded more smoke than flame as to motive. He was said to have split from his wife, but she denied it, making it another murky case of ‘he said/she said’.

An examination of his many social media posts showed Zaharie liked cooking, particularly noodle dishes, though not as much as he liked aviation: one post shows him with some mates playing with a model flying boat on a lake. There was nothing jihadist; he actually posted condolences to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. He seemed to have some interest in debates about atheism and rationalism. There was nothing coming even close to a smoking gun in terms of suicidal, political or terrorist motive. All the interviews with his friends and colleagues described him as a genial, easygoing, fun guy.

The most promising lead was the link with Anwar Ibrahim, the opposition figure and de facto leader of the People’s Justice Party in Malaysia, and the fact that hours before the flight Anwar had been convicted of sodomy and sentenced to five years in jail in what was widely seen as a political trial. There were some reports Zaharie had attended the court hearing, but that was never conclusively established. Anwar, who was free in the days after the disappearance of MH370 pending appeal, was grilled by media outlets about the connections.

Anwar said Zaharie was certainly a supporter, as a member of his political party, and he recognised him from photos of party meetings. He said he had been unable to establish whether Zaharie had been in court on the day, but said friends had said the pilot had been upset and disgusted by the conviction. Finally, Anwar said he had determined Zaharie was a distant relative of his daughter-in-law. But Anwar said the suggestion Zaharie had taken 238 people to their deaths as a protest against his conviction was absurd and grossly unfair.

The Australian’s South-east Asia correspondent, Amanda Hodge, spoke to Sivarasa Rasiah, a People’s Justice Party MP and long-time lawyer for Anwar.

In a joint article, Hodge and I reported Sivarasa saying he had befriended Zaharie after he joined the party 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 told The Australian. ‘I knew he had marital issues. Everyone in his circle knew.’

Sivarasa also dismissed the idea that his friend might have hijacked the plane in fury at Anwar’s second sodomy conviction, handed down just five hours before MH370 took off. 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 became airborne. Sivarasa said he was ‘quite sure’ Zaharie was not present in court on the day Anwar was convicted.

The other nagging problem with the theory that Zaharie hijacked the plane as a protest is that whoever was at the controls issued no public communication of any sort that this was a political statement.

Malaysian political scientist Wong Chin Huat told CNN at the time that while it was quite reasonable to query the motivations of everyone possibly involved, he thought any link with Malaysian domestic politics was ‘a red herring’.

‘Had the captain intended to cause this incident in protest, there should be clearly some clue. It’s pointless to make a political statement in silence,’ he said.

A mentionable fact in the mix is that among those Australian next-of-kin with whom I have spoken, there is no resolve to blame Zaharie. Danica Weeks said she was reluctant, in the absence of concrete evidence, to accept Zaharie took down MH370, and with it her husband Paul.

‘I just think it’s unfair to crucify someone without the proof,’ she said.

Like Danica, Zaharie’s wife had lost her husband. Danica said to further heap innuendo on the family by alleging pilot hijack would be unfair.

The next-of-kin have become hunters of their own for MH370. They have been studying aviation, the Boeing 777 and precedents, and following the theories. Danica favours another scenario canvassed later in the book, of onboard fire.

‘I believe there was an incident on the plane, possibly exploding oxygen tanks, and the pilot tried to turn the plane back to Kuala Lumpur. Hypoxia set in and the plane flew on for seven hours,’ Danica said. She said if the plane had been hijacked, Paul would have intervened. ‘He’s a big strong guy, he’s from the army. He’d be there. He would have fought tooth and nail.’

Jeanette Maguire, whose sister Cathy Lawton disappeared on MH370, has similar inclinations.

As to Zaharie, she said, ‘I can’t lay blame. I feel for the families when there is no proof. It’s unfair to blame someone who can’t defend themselves.’ Rather, Jeanette said, ‘my first thought was fire. The ACARS has to be shut down if there’s a fire. There was something which happened on board, they had to turn everything off to isolate this fire,’ she said. ‘I thought of a hijacking, but no-one was coming forward, and that sort of scenario would be harder to comprehend after 9/11.’

Jeanette said she spent a lot of time talking to ATSB officials and they were, she said, ‘very good with my theories and understanding airplanes and how they work’.

‘That’s how I spent the first couple of years, investigating, trying to do my own type scenarios. I have done nothing but google airplanes since that day.’

One good practice in journalism is to, months or even years after the immediate circus of a massive international story with a mystery to it breaks, revisit it to see with the passage of time who will now talk, and what might now be found out.

In late 2018, multi award-winning journalist Paul Toohey, with whom I worked at The Australian, had another look at Zaharie’s social media activity, particularly on Facebook. What he found and published in Sydney’s The Sunday Telegraph suggested two of the characteristics already known about the pilot – that he intensely liked younger women and intensely disliked the Malaysian Prime Minister – were far more pronounced than had previously been made out.

‘Zaharie was not merely politically active, as some have said,’ Toohey wrote. ‘He was virulent, at one point labelling then prime minister Najib Razak a “moron” on his Facebook page.’

More salaciously, Toohey revealed, in 2013 Zaharie had apparently developed an obsession with Penang-based model Qi Min Lan, also known as Jasmin Min, who had turned 18 that year.

Zaharie did not know the young woman personally – and she never responded to his posts – but he was ‘fixated’, Toohey wrote.

The pilot’s posts on Facebook directed at the model included ‘you’re hot’, ‘tasty’, and ‘gorgeous’.

Toohey quoted psychologists who said the pattern of behaviour demonstrated obsessiveness and recklessness.

Two years earlier, The Australian’s Amanda Hodge had found a woman Zaharie did know personally, and was clearly deeply involved with in one way or other. Through good old-fashioned journalistic legwork, Hodge in September 2016 got the sensational break on Zaharie which opened up a new direction for the MH370 debate.

Hodge tracked down Fatima Pardi, a former kindergarten teacher and then a worker with the People’s Justice Party. She told Hodge she met Zaharie when he joined the party and began attending political events. Pardi said Zaharie had become her mentor and a father figure for her children, one of whom suffers from severe cerebral palsy.

She insisted it was not a sexual affair.

‘Of course there was gossip, people will always talk whether you’re good or you’re bad,’ Pardi told Hodge. ‘People think I am the “other woman”. But we were close because the children loved him.’

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

‘That last conversation was just between me and him. I don’t want to talk about it,’ Pardi told Hodge.

‘I’m afraid what I say will be misunderstood,’ she said. ‘It was a personal matter, a private issue.’

She added that Zaharie had not seemed stressed.

Hodge’s interview with Pardi was, literally, a world exclusive; the Malaysian woman had not spoken to the media before. Pardi told Hodge the only reason she did so was to dispel any thought Zaharie was the sort of man who would take 238 people to their deaths; she said he was fine and generous.

‘We both wanted to make a change for our country. That’s why we were involved in politics,’ she said.

‘We talked about family, we talked about interests and that’s how he got close with me and my children.’

Zaharie himself had three grown-up children, in their 20s at the time of MH370’s vanishing.

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

She acknowledged, in an interview with Hodge, that her brother and his wife, Faizah, had ‘normal’ marital problems, but said he wore his troubles lightly. 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 said. ‘He was naughty, I admit that, but at the end of the day he always went home.’

So, when it comes to one clear, decisive, indisputable reason or motive for Zaharie to hijack his own aircraft and kill all on board, the professional investigators, the journalistic community and the international MH370 club addicts are still looking for one.

The thing about a lot of truly dreadful crimes, though, is that the driver may be hidden, even to the perpetrator. While modern society likes to find clear explanations, believes they must be there, and feels better when they are found, sometimes, experts say, they just aren’t.

In a story looking at the Germanwings case, the BBC explored what motivates aviation mass murder-suicide. The broadcaster quoted Simon Wessely, president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, saying sometimes it’s just too hard to tell.

‘It’s possible something will emerge, but in most suicides people leave clues or a message. Incredibly extreme events like this are sometimes just inexplicable.’

The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 remains baffling today, just as it was to Malaysian authorities in the early hours of 8 March 2014, and the days after that.