Theory Two: Elope by Parachute

Zaharie Ahmad Shah had enjoyed several mistresses over the years, but none, he found, came close to Rina. She had long, lustrous hair, a sensuous figure, and looked even younger than her 28 years. Rina came from a family of fishermen on the coast who had done very well and now owned a number of vessels; she had just come into a handsome inheritance. In the meantime, to enjoy life in the big smoke, she had moved to Kuala Lumpur and found work running one of the security scanners at the airport. There she met the dashing airman Zaharie, and fell in love.

The love tryst couple decided on an elaborate plan to elope, and secretly establish a new life in another, obscure but pleasant, Asian country. Zaharie used a criminal connection to acquire two stolen passports – not that hard; as mentioned earlier, two Iranian would-be illegal migrants to Europe had done just that in order to get on MH370.

On the evening of 7 March 2014, Zaharie packed his flight crew kit with some extra warm clothing, a very bright waterproof torch, a referee’s whistle and his paraglider parachute. If anyone at security asked he’d say – truthfully – that skydiving was his recreational pastime, and he’d heard of a great venue for it, the China GreatSky Skydiving Club at Beijing’s Shahe Airport.

In this scenario, as in the one outlined in Theory One, 40 minutes into the flight, having sent his co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid back to get him a cup of coffee, Zaharie did a number of things in quick succession. He put on the warm clothing, turned off the ACARS system and the secondary radar transponder, tripped the circuit for the lights in the passenger cabin, put his oxygen mask on, depressurised the aircraft, and made a quick right-hand turn, immediately followed by a sharp and long highly-banked turn to the left.

Zaharie flew the Boeing 777 back over the Malay Peninsula, made a slow right turn just south of Penang, and set the autopilot on a course on Airway N571 up the Straits of Malacca. By this time all the passengers and crew had fallen comatose from hypoxia, or were dead. He turned the cabin lights circuit back on, opened the cockpit door, and stepped over the body of Fariq, into the passenger cabin. Zaharie then systematically but quickly went through the passengers’ and crew members’ wallets and purses and emptied cash into a waterproof container then into a haversack he’d brought for the purpose – notwithstanding Rina’s inheritance, he’d like to do the right thing and contribute financially to their joint future together. At about 2:30am, when he knew he was out of primary radar range, Zaharie returned to the cockpit, took the plane down to 3000 feet and reduced speed. Seeing the lights of the fishing boat he was expecting, just as planned at the precise agreed coordinates, Zaharie made a pass over it, turned a couple of times and lined up for a second pass heading south, setting the autopilot to head for an imaginary waypoint far away in the southern Indian Ocean.

Zaharie put a deflated life jacket on along with his parachute, and slung the haversack with the cash, torch and whistle over his head. He returned to the passenger cabin, and opened one of exit doors just behind the wings, after pushing a lifeless flight attendant who had collapsed there out of the way. He waited until he again saw the lights of the fishing boat approaching, and bailed out.

At the helm of one of her family’s fishing boats, Rina had watched the Boeing 777 pass overhead, kept an eye on the strong beam from Zaharie’s torch as he descended, and set a heading for it. She saw the beam as Zaharie waved the torch in the water, and heard the whistle. Within 15 minutes the love of her life was safely aboard and in her arms, ready to secretly elope overseas to start a new life, the cash from the inheritance secure in the hold.

As the months and years passed, and in the absence of finding MH370 or any more new fundamental information, the international MH370 club of fascinated addicts of the mystery began a new round of debate about what happened on the aircraft. Some scenarios were pretty wild, some reasonably credible. Some were put forward by people with serious aviation knowledge and experience. When I first started writing about MH370, I received, unsolicited, a number of theories.

All but the first of them, ‘Rogue Pilot to the End’, outlined after Chapter One, do, in fact, produce the final outcome relied upon by the ATSB for its search strategy: that MH370 finished up as an unpiloted ghost flight, crashing down after fuel exhaustion after flying on autopilot.

Theory Two ‘Elope by Parachute’, came from a very authoritative source, Qantas’s former manager of flight training, veteran airline captain David Shrubb, who is also a past president of the Australian Federation of Air Pilots and a former board member of Airservices Australia. There is, in fact, a precedent in aviation history for every key element required to make Shrubb’s theory seem plausible. First, the bail out.

There is only one unsolved case of air piracy in US history, what’s known as the D. B. Cooper hijacking. In Portland, Oregon, on the afternoon of 24 November 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper used cash to buy a one-way ticket on Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, bound for Seattle, Washington. Cooper was the quiet, unassuming type, looking like your average mid-40s insurance agent, wearing a business suit with a black tie and white shirt. Once on board, he ordered a civilised drink – a bourbon and soda. A bit after 3:00pm, he handed the stewardess a note indicating he had a bomb in his briefcase and wanted her to sit with him.

Cooper showed her what was in the briefcase: a collection of wires, switches, red-coloured sticks, and other objects. He threatened to blow up the aircraft if he did not get four parachutes and a $US200,000 ransom – a huge amount of money back then. When the plane landed in Seattle, the man let the passengers and two of the flight attendants off the plane, and officials handed over the money in $US20 bills plus the parachutes. Once the aircraft took off again, Cooper told the pilots to ‘fly to Mexico’ – real slow and real low.

At some point thereafter, at night, Cooper lowered the rear stairway of the Boeing 727 – one of the few aircraft which had such a feature, which enabled the crew to independently embark or disembark the passengers from the rear. Then Cooper bailed out into the darkness, having left behind in the cabin, neatly on a seat, his clip-on tie – like a calling card. He remains missing to this day, despite an extensive manhunt which the FBI only gave up in 2016. The FBI never conclusively established his identity – it’s not even known if Dan Cooper was in fact his real name – but the media dubbed him D. B. Cooper, and both the name and legend stuck.

Other elements of the elopement theory also have precedents. At lower altitudes and speeds, the passenger cabin doors of big airliners can be opened, usually for the purpose of clearing smoke and getting fresh air in case of fire. This is exactly what the flight attendants did on South African Airways Flight 295 in November 1987. The Boeing 747 Combi – a special design in which space normally used to carry passengers is sectioned off to carry freight – began the flight in Taipei, Taiwan, bound for Johannesburg via Mauritius. A catastrophic fire broke out in the cargo section, and while the flight attendants fought it, the smoke, through a flawed design in the air circulation system, entered the passenger cabin. Towards the end of the flight, the air traffic control transcript records a pilot telling a controller at the airport in Plaisance, Mauritius:

‘Eh, Plaisance, Springbok 295, we’ve opened the door(s) to see if we (can?) . . . we should be OK.’

They weren’t okay. The pilots tried to make Mauritius, but the plane went down, killing all 159 people on board. The wreckage was found, at a depth of nearly 5000 metres, after a long search using side-scan sonar.

And when it comes to finding someone in the water in the dark, even a small torch can make all the difference. In the middle of the night of 18 November 2009, pilot Dominic James had to ditch his Westwind twin-engine jet off Norfolk Island because appalling weather made it impossible to find the airport and he was running out of fuel; once in the water, he got his pocket penlight out and shone it into the darkness. Incredibly, a fireman saw the light from shore, and was able to relay directions to a rescue boat, which picked up all six souls from the medical evacuation flight.

Shrubb’s ‘elope by parachute’ theory includes a motive for why Zaharie would have attempted such a feat. ‘He wanted to leave his wife – quite a big deal for a Muslim,’ Shrubb told me.

He also posited a motive for why the aircraft was directed to one of the most remote and deep corners of the seven seas, the southern Indian Ocean – it was essential to Zaharie’s plan that it never be found.

‘If ever found, it would show no captain on board and a door open,’ Shrubb said.

That, of course, would have been a problem for the secret elopement.

Like just about every aviation professional around the world, Shrubb wants the international community to continue to hunt for MH370.

‘When it is found we should look immediately to see if the captain is strapped in his seat,’ Shrubb said. ‘If he isn’t, start an Interpol search to find him!’