Courtesy of the Weekend Oz:
The Maldive islanders who say they can help find MH370
![[Image: hedley_thomas.png]](http://media.theaustralian.com.au/authors/images/hedley_thomas.png)
National Chief Correspondent
Brisbane
Did locals see MH370?1:57![[Image: promo252291361&width=650&api_key=kq7wnrk...z9c5xuj3mc]](http://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/external?url=http://content6.video.news.com.au/lvM21idDpDWmT-Yu36kQSbYXQ7i5B3EH/promo252291361&width=650&api_key=kq7wnrk4eun47vz9c5xuj3mc)
Residents of a small island in the Maldives claim to have seen a plane similar in appearance to Malaysia Airlines MH370 shortly after the plane went missing. Footage: Lyndon Mechielsen
![[Image: 748677-46ff8aee-d9f3-11e4-8461-b7104adad679.jpg]](http://resources1.news.com.au/images/2015/04/03/1227290/748677-46ff8aee-d9f3-11e4-8461-b7104adad679.jpg)
Looking for MH370. Source: TheAustralian
The tiny Indian Ocean island of Kuda Huvadhoo is the sleepy fishing community that the world forgot. Some of its villagers believe an aircraft they saw on the morning of March 8 last year could hold the key to modern aviation’s most confounding mystery — the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
Some of the locals on the 60ha of sand and coral in the Maldives chain do not understand why, after more than a year, investigators involved in the search for the Boeing 777 have not come to hear first-hand about the large, low-flying passenger jet they insist they saw that fateful morning.
They wonder why the year-long search has not ventured here to listen to accounts from witnesses who were surprised by the unidentified aircraft. Two told The Weekend Australian they could see distinctive red and blue markings — similar to the striping on the missing plane which was heading west towards the Maldives when last spotted on radar after departing Kuala Lumpur.
Their suspicions are no match for the highly sophisticated calculations based on satellite connections with MH370, which have put its likely crash zone along an arc about 1800km southwest of Perth.
Intriguingly, however, acoustics scientists are not ruling out the possibility that a distinctive high-energy noise they measured about the time of the presumed crash might have come from the aircraft hitting the ocean or imploding at depth in an area near the Maldives.
A speck on the atoll of Dhaalu in the Maldives chain, the island receives few visits from outsiders. Wealthy tourists, some of whom arrive by private jet at the airport near the country’s capital, Male, and then take a sea plane about 180km south to the pampered luxury of a resort costing more than $2000 a night, sometimes charter a small boat to briefly look at the modest lives here.
But, for most of the time, the area is left alone. The villagers’ days revolve around fundamental needs — their food (the fish and occasional lobster pulled from the turquoise waters), Islamic prayer five times a day, family, work and friends.
An interesting event on Kuda Huvadhoo is a small twin-prop sea plane swooping nearby. An unusual event is seeing the contrails of a large jet at high altitude — they seldom cross the southern atoll. A remarkable event, something the locals relate to us with the intensity of people who fear they are doubted, is watching a large passenger jet, like a Boeing 777, flying low about the time MH370 would have been close to running out of fuel.
“I watched this very large plane bank slightly and I saw its colours — the red and blue lines — below the windows, then I heard the loud noise,’’ says Abdu Rasheed Ibrahim, 47, a court official and the island’s keenest hobby fisherman, as he speaks of what he saw from the beach that morning. “It was unusual, very unusual. It was big and it was flying low. It was a holiday (Saturday) and most people had gone to bed after praying.”
When he went home with his catch, a barracuda tied to his bicycle’s handlebars, Abdu spoke to other villagers about the strange, large aircraft. Some saw it. Others only heard it. They say they were talking about it hours before they knew MH370 had gone missing. Later that morning, at an extra-curricular class at school, Humaam Dhonmamk, 16, talked excitedly to Abdu’s daughter, Aisath Zeeniya, about seeing it — he also described the distinctive blue and red striping. It flew over as he took his clothes from the outside line.
“I saw the blue and red on a bit of the side,’’ Humaam says. “I heard the loud noise of it after it went over. I told the police this too.”
The Australia-led search has been focused for the past year on a lengthy arc in the southern Indian Ocean, more than 5000km away, as a result of complex calculations of probable weather conditions, fuel exhaustion, distances, time of impact and other variables.
All of this has been primarily driven by a handful of “electronic handshakes”, or pings, that were transmitted between a satellite and MH370 as it flew for hours, undetected by radar and in radio silence after departing Kuala Lumpur and deviating from its intended Beijing-bound flight path with a series of unexplained turns.
There were no mayday transmissions from Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah or first officer Fariq Abdul Hamid. No frantic mobile telephone attempts. No claims of responsibility by hijackers.
Unofficial theories are led by the one thought most plausible, mass murder-suicide by one of the crew, possibly the captain, determined to ensure the aircraft crashed where its secrets would lie undiscovered. Another theory suggests a sudden cockpit fire could have knocked out communications and overcome the crew, and that the aircraft had been on autopilot until it fell from the sky.
Amid mounting concern over the costs of the search and the lack of a single fragment of wreckage, there is still a “high degree of confidence” that the official investigation is looking in the right part of the planet. Sophisticated modelling supports the proposition which hinges on the satellite’s data — but if this data is wrong or defective, the search zone co-ordinates will be too.
Prior to the extensive modelling that produced the search zone, the last “sighting” of MH370, according to military radar, had it on a westerly heading — a flight path towards the Maldives. Its seemingly purposeful turn west was a radical deviation from the heading north it should have taken to its scheduled destination, Beijing. Although no radar shows it altering course radically again to the south, where the search is now concentrated in the bleakness of the southern Indian Ocean, analysis of the “pings” suggests this is where MH370 had headed. It is why the Australian Transport Safety Bureau oversees a massive operation in a vast area some 1800km southwest of Perth, with about half of the priority area being combed so far.
The technology and logistics matter little, however, to the villagers of Kuda Huvadhoo, the capital of an atoll lacking radar in a country with outdated and severely limited defence and air traffic equipment. Several people we spoke to believe they saw MH370 about 6.30am (9.30am in Malaysia) that day.
Zuhuriyya Ali, 49, who watched it from her home’s courtyard, still “feels strange when thinking about the people on it”. “I consider it a lot,’’ she says. “I am concerned there is a connection to the Malaysia plane.”
Ahmed Shiyaam, 34, an IT manager at the local medical clinic who was riding with his daughter, Uyoon, 6, along one of the island’s sandy paths that morning, stopped and looked up on March 8 last year — they had never seen such a large plane fly so low.
“I’m very sure of what I saw on a very clear and bright day, and what I saw was not normal — the plane was very big, and low. I did not know until later that other people saw it too. I don’t know if it’s the Malaysia plane.”
Ahmed Ibrahim, 40, who saw it from his garden, also described it to us in confident detail.
“This was not a normal sight — the plane was different,’’ he says. “It was very big, very noisy, flying low. Later that afternoon on the beach I was told the news about the missing plane. I think this is the same flight.”
Back on the exact spot where he was standing on March 8 last year when he saw the aircraft, Abdu Rasheed Ibrahim says: “First, I saw the plane flying towards me over water. When it was over my head I saw it starting to turn away. At first glance, I did not know it was a missing plane. I didn’t know that a plane was missing. I went straight home and told my wife about it. I told my family, ‘I saw this strange plane’. This is the biggest plane I have ever seen from this island. My family says, ‘It might be the Malaysian plane’. I have seen pictures of the missing plane — I believe that I saw that plane. At the time it was lost, I strongly felt those people who were searching should come here.”
The Weekend Australian spent three days interviewing locals, all of whom described the incident in a similar way. Six of the key witnesses we spoke to were interviewed last year by police at the direction of authorities in Male, and each signed statements of their versions. A senior source familiar with the police probe confirmed the witness accounts were regarded as truthful and consistent. The office of the new President in Male declined to comment; his immediate predecessor is languishing in a nearby prison.
“These people were not seeking attention and they did not go to the police about it, the police went to them after hearing about this,’’ the source says. “They are not dishonest and they have no motive to lie. They all told the police it was big, low and noisy. If it was not the missing plane, then which plane was it? We do not see planes close and low to Kuda Huvadhoo. Nobody knows what has really happened.”
There were other reasons the people of Kuda Huvadhoo were not taken seriously. The Maldives National Defence Force, responsible for guarding the security and sovereignty of the low-lying country, issued a statement in March last year ruling out any such aircraft movement over its air space. The locals were surprised and felt humiliated. Several of those we spoke to in Kuda Huvadhoo were scornful, accusing their defence chiefs of seeking to save face and not wanting to admit to their people or the world that the limitations of Maldives radar and other equipment could not detect such flights.
Around this time, Malaysian authorities agreed that the aircraft’s “pings” — like breadcrumbs being left in a trail — meant MH370 should have crashed somewhere along one of two potential arcs. The arcs are in opposite hemispheres, but the most probable extended in the Indian Ocean west of Perth where vessels and aircraft are engaged in a search across a massive haystack for an infinitesimally small needle.
Another wildcard is the little-known work of Alec Duncan and fellow scientists from Curtin University’s Centre for Marine Science and Technology, whose monitoring of sensitive underwater acoustics equipment, known as hydrophones, identified “a clear acoustic signal at a time that was reasonably consistent with other information relating to the disappearance of MH370”.
The scientists knew the crash of a large aircraft in the ocean would be a “high energy event and expected to generate intense underwater sounds” — either from the impact with the ocean or a subsequent implosion of sinking wreckage. In their initial location estimates, Dr Duncan placed the noise’s source in the ocean relatively close to the Maldives and Kuda Huvadhoo. However, he cautions it could have been a geological event. The official ATSB search team for MH370 carefully considered the acoustics data.
After months of further analysis, Dr Duncan told The Weekend Australian this week: “Unfortunately the reality is that there are so many ifs, buts and maybes involved in all this that it would be more correct to say that our team has identified an approximate possible location for the origin of a noise that is probably of geological origin, but cannot be completely ruled out as being connected with the loss of MH370.” Dr Duncan explained that two key factors “make us reluctant to completely rule out the possibility that these signals are related to MH370”.
One is “the calculated time of the acoustic event, shortly after the final “partial handshake” between the satellite and the aircraft”, the other is that if the sound was generated by the implosion of some part of the aircraft as it sank ... (and) at a depth of about 1000m then the resulting sound would propagate effectively in the deep sound channel and could conceivably be detected at ranges of thousands of kilometres”.
However, like the island of Kuda Huvadhoo, “the calculated position is completely inconsistent with the satellite handshake data that is the basis of the current search area”.
If the satellite handshake data ever “proved to be seriously flawed”, says Dr Duncan, further acoustics analysis should be done. And if this eventuates, the people of a tiny island in the Maldives might be asked again about the large passenger jet they insist they saw on the morning of March 8 last year.
Nine weeks ago, Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, described the loss of MH370 as an accident: “We have concluded that the aircraft exhausted its fuel over a defined area of the southern Indian Ocean and that the aircraft is located on the sea floor close to that defined area. This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is also an area with adverse sea conditions with known depths of more than 6000m.”
MTF...P2
The Maldive islanders who say they can help find MH370
- by: HEDLEY THOMAS
- From: The Australian
- April 04, 2015 12:00AM
National Chief Correspondent
Brisbane
Did locals see MH370?1:57
Residents of a small island in the Maldives claim to have seen a plane similar in appearance to Malaysia Airlines MH370 shortly after the plane went missing. Footage: Lyndon Mechielsen
Looking for MH370. Source: TheAustralian
The tiny Indian Ocean island of Kuda Huvadhoo is the sleepy fishing community that the world forgot. Some of its villagers believe an aircraft they saw on the morning of March 8 last year could hold the key to modern aviation’s most confounding mystery — the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
Some of the locals on the 60ha of sand and coral in the Maldives chain do not understand why, after more than a year, investigators involved in the search for the Boeing 777 have not come to hear first-hand about the large, low-flying passenger jet they insist they saw that fateful morning.
They wonder why the year-long search has not ventured here to listen to accounts from witnesses who were surprised by the unidentified aircraft. Two told The Weekend Australian they could see distinctive red and blue markings — similar to the striping on the missing plane which was heading west towards the Maldives when last spotted on radar after departing Kuala Lumpur.
Their suspicions are no match for the highly sophisticated calculations based on satellite connections with MH370, which have put its likely crash zone along an arc about 1800km southwest of Perth.
Intriguingly, however, acoustics scientists are not ruling out the possibility that a distinctive high-energy noise they measured about the time of the presumed crash might have come from the aircraft hitting the ocean or imploding at depth in an area near the Maldives.
A speck on the atoll of Dhaalu in the Maldives chain, the island receives few visits from outsiders. Wealthy tourists, some of whom arrive by private jet at the airport near the country’s capital, Male, and then take a sea plane about 180km south to the pampered luxury of a resort costing more than $2000 a night, sometimes charter a small boat to briefly look at the modest lives here.
But, for most of the time, the area is left alone. The villagers’ days revolve around fundamental needs — their food (the fish and occasional lobster pulled from the turquoise waters), Islamic prayer five times a day, family, work and friends.
An interesting event on Kuda Huvadhoo is a small twin-prop sea plane swooping nearby. An unusual event is seeing the contrails of a large jet at high altitude — they seldom cross the southern atoll. A remarkable event, something the locals relate to us with the intensity of people who fear they are doubted, is watching a large passenger jet, like a Boeing 777, flying low about the time MH370 would have been close to running out of fuel.
“I watched this very large plane bank slightly and I saw its colours — the red and blue lines — below the windows, then I heard the loud noise,’’ says Abdu Rasheed Ibrahim, 47, a court official and the island’s keenest hobby fisherman, as he speaks of what he saw from the beach that morning. “It was unusual, very unusual. It was big and it was flying low. It was a holiday (Saturday) and most people had gone to bed after praying.”
When he went home with his catch, a barracuda tied to his bicycle’s handlebars, Abdu spoke to other villagers about the strange, large aircraft. Some saw it. Others only heard it. They say they were talking about it hours before they knew MH370 had gone missing. Later that morning, at an extra-curricular class at school, Humaam Dhonmamk, 16, talked excitedly to Abdu’s daughter, Aisath Zeeniya, about seeing it — he also described the distinctive blue and red striping. It flew over as he took his clothes from the outside line.
“I saw the blue and red on a bit of the side,’’ Humaam says. “I heard the loud noise of it after it went over. I told the police this too.”
The Australia-led search has been focused for the past year on a lengthy arc in the southern Indian Ocean, more than 5000km away, as a result of complex calculations of probable weather conditions, fuel exhaustion, distances, time of impact and other variables.
All of this has been primarily driven by a handful of “electronic handshakes”, or pings, that were transmitted between a satellite and MH370 as it flew for hours, undetected by radar and in radio silence after departing Kuala Lumpur and deviating from its intended Beijing-bound flight path with a series of unexplained turns.
There were no mayday transmissions from Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah or first officer Fariq Abdul Hamid. No frantic mobile telephone attempts. No claims of responsibility by hijackers.
Unofficial theories are led by the one thought most plausible, mass murder-suicide by one of the crew, possibly the captain, determined to ensure the aircraft crashed where its secrets would lie undiscovered. Another theory suggests a sudden cockpit fire could have knocked out communications and overcome the crew, and that the aircraft had been on autopilot until it fell from the sky.
Amid mounting concern over the costs of the search and the lack of a single fragment of wreckage, there is still a “high degree of confidence” that the official investigation is looking in the right part of the planet. Sophisticated modelling supports the proposition which hinges on the satellite’s data — but if this data is wrong or defective, the search zone co-ordinates will be too.
Prior to the extensive modelling that produced the search zone, the last “sighting” of MH370, according to military radar, had it on a westerly heading — a flight path towards the Maldives. Its seemingly purposeful turn west was a radical deviation from the heading north it should have taken to its scheduled destination, Beijing. Although no radar shows it altering course radically again to the south, where the search is now concentrated in the bleakness of the southern Indian Ocean, analysis of the “pings” suggests this is where MH370 had headed. It is why the Australian Transport Safety Bureau oversees a massive operation in a vast area some 1800km southwest of Perth, with about half of the priority area being combed so far.
The technology and logistics matter little, however, to the villagers of Kuda Huvadhoo, the capital of an atoll lacking radar in a country with outdated and severely limited defence and air traffic equipment. Several people we spoke to believe they saw MH370 about 6.30am (9.30am in Malaysia) that day.
Zuhuriyya Ali, 49, who watched it from her home’s courtyard, still “feels strange when thinking about the people on it”. “I consider it a lot,’’ she says. “I am concerned there is a connection to the Malaysia plane.”
Ahmed Shiyaam, 34, an IT manager at the local medical clinic who was riding with his daughter, Uyoon, 6, along one of the island’s sandy paths that morning, stopped and looked up on March 8 last year — they had never seen such a large plane fly so low.
“I’m very sure of what I saw on a very clear and bright day, and what I saw was not normal — the plane was very big, and low. I did not know until later that other people saw it too. I don’t know if it’s the Malaysia plane.”
Ahmed Ibrahim, 40, who saw it from his garden, also described it to us in confident detail.
“This was not a normal sight — the plane was different,’’ he says. “It was very big, very noisy, flying low. Later that afternoon on the beach I was told the news about the missing plane. I think this is the same flight.”
Back on the exact spot where he was standing on March 8 last year when he saw the aircraft, Abdu Rasheed Ibrahim says: “First, I saw the plane flying towards me over water. When it was over my head I saw it starting to turn away. At first glance, I did not know it was a missing plane. I didn’t know that a plane was missing. I went straight home and told my wife about it. I told my family, ‘I saw this strange plane’. This is the biggest plane I have ever seen from this island. My family says, ‘It might be the Malaysian plane’. I have seen pictures of the missing plane — I believe that I saw that plane. At the time it was lost, I strongly felt those people who were searching should come here.”
The Weekend Australian spent three days interviewing locals, all of whom described the incident in a similar way. Six of the key witnesses we spoke to were interviewed last year by police at the direction of authorities in Male, and each signed statements of their versions. A senior source familiar with the police probe confirmed the witness accounts were regarded as truthful and consistent. The office of the new President in Male declined to comment; his immediate predecessor is languishing in a nearby prison.
“These people were not seeking attention and they did not go to the police about it, the police went to them after hearing about this,’’ the source says. “They are not dishonest and they have no motive to lie. They all told the police it was big, low and noisy. If it was not the missing plane, then which plane was it? We do not see planes close and low to Kuda Huvadhoo. Nobody knows what has really happened.”
There were other reasons the people of Kuda Huvadhoo were not taken seriously. The Maldives National Defence Force, responsible for guarding the security and sovereignty of the low-lying country, issued a statement in March last year ruling out any such aircraft movement over its air space. The locals were surprised and felt humiliated. Several of those we spoke to in Kuda Huvadhoo were scornful, accusing their defence chiefs of seeking to save face and not wanting to admit to their people or the world that the limitations of Maldives radar and other equipment could not detect such flights.
Around this time, Malaysian authorities agreed that the aircraft’s “pings” — like breadcrumbs being left in a trail — meant MH370 should have crashed somewhere along one of two potential arcs. The arcs are in opposite hemispheres, but the most probable extended in the Indian Ocean west of Perth where vessels and aircraft are engaged in a search across a massive haystack for an infinitesimally small needle.
Another wildcard is the little-known work of Alec Duncan and fellow scientists from Curtin University’s Centre for Marine Science and Technology, whose monitoring of sensitive underwater acoustics equipment, known as hydrophones, identified “a clear acoustic signal at a time that was reasonably consistent with other information relating to the disappearance of MH370”.
The scientists knew the crash of a large aircraft in the ocean would be a “high energy event and expected to generate intense underwater sounds” — either from the impact with the ocean or a subsequent implosion of sinking wreckage. In their initial location estimates, Dr Duncan placed the noise’s source in the ocean relatively close to the Maldives and Kuda Huvadhoo. However, he cautions it could have been a geological event. The official ATSB search team for MH370 carefully considered the acoustics data.
After months of further analysis, Dr Duncan told The Weekend Australian this week: “Unfortunately the reality is that there are so many ifs, buts and maybes involved in all this that it would be more correct to say that our team has identified an approximate possible location for the origin of a noise that is probably of geological origin, but cannot be completely ruled out as being connected with the loss of MH370.” Dr Duncan explained that two key factors “make us reluctant to completely rule out the possibility that these signals are related to MH370”.
One is “the calculated time of the acoustic event, shortly after the final “partial handshake” between the satellite and the aircraft”, the other is that if the sound was generated by the implosion of some part of the aircraft as it sank ... (and) at a depth of about 1000m then the resulting sound would propagate effectively in the deep sound channel and could conceivably be detected at ranges of thousands of kilometres”.
However, like the island of Kuda Huvadhoo, “the calculated position is completely inconsistent with the satellite handshake data that is the basis of the current search area”.
If the satellite handshake data ever “proved to be seriously flawed”, says Dr Duncan, further acoustics analysis should be done. And if this eventuates, the people of a tiny island in the Maldives might be asked again about the large passenger jet they insist they saw on the morning of March 8 last year.
Nine weeks ago, Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, described the loss of MH370 as an accident: “We have concluded that the aircraft exhausted its fuel over a defined area of the southern Indian Ocean and that the aircraft is located on the sea floor close to that defined area. This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is also an area with adverse sea conditions with known depths of more than 6000m.”
MTF...P2