MH370: That man 'Iggins in the Oz
Via the Oz today:
MH370: the plane truth is out there
![[Image: ean_higgins.png]](https://media.theaustralian.com.au/authors/images/bio/ean_higgins.png)
EAN HIGGINS @EanHiggins
12:00AM FEBRUARY 28, 2019
![[Image: 6ec2fe71b360d2f046745ed5f2905f27?width=650]](https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/6ec2fe71b360d2f046745ed5f2905f27?width=650)
MH370 pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah.
![[Image: efd2853c3dbc0f361d45627860495382?width=650]](https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/efd2853c3dbc0f361d45627860495382?width=650)
![[Image: 95980e10b0614dd3a7094346ef353069?width=650]](https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/95980e10b0614dd3a7094346ef353069?width=650)
![[Image: bcb124351012eaf080d503a928803608?width=650]](https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/bcb124351012eaf080d503a928803608?width=650)
![[Image: d83171faf079ff498d74f11e979a0089?width=650]](https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/d83171faf079ff498d74f11e979a0089?width=650)
A Malaysia Airlines plane parked on the tarmac at Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
Somewhere out in the southern Indian Ocean, maybe in one of the underwater canyons of Broken Ridge, but beyond the Seventh Arc, lies the answer to the world’s greatest aviation mystery.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when some very strange things happened on the Boeing 777. They caused a pilot to turn around, fly a zigzag course back over Malaysia, up the Straits of Malacca, then south to vanish in the middle of nowhere, all without a word from anyone on board.
Five years after it disappeared, the aircraft is still there, probably in very deep and cold water, well preserved along with the 239 souls on board, but just not yet found.
Once it is discovered the mystery can be solved. The flight data recorder, the cockpit voice recorder, the identity and disposition of anyone in the cockpit at the controls, the configuration and nature of damage to the different parts of the aircraft and, macabre though it is, the pathology of those on board will provide the clues.
We will learn why the aircraft turned around about 40 minutes into the flight. We will glean insight as to why at that time the secondary radar transponder was turned off and there was no further radio contact after the captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, delivered the last transmission: “Good night, Malaysian three seven zero.”
Extreme theories
Over the years since MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, there has been no shortage of speculation about what happened. Some believe it may have been a hijacking gone wrong. Others think there may have been a fire on board, possibly caused by the combination of cargo including lithium-ion batteries and the tropical fruit mangosteens.
There are those who look at accidental depressurisation, in which the pilots became a bit hypoxic, or light-headed, because of a faulty oxygen supply — not enough to pass out but enough to make silly and illogical decisions and fly the aircraft in a strange way.
Then there are the more extreme theories, such as that a rogue nation such as North Korea hacked into the aircraft’s control systems and electronically “captured” it.
Others, including some families of the Chinese passengers on the flight, say the official interpretation that MH370 flew south is wrong, and the aircraft was in fact hijacked and flown northwest to Central Asia and landed at an Islamic rebel air base, its passengers and crew still held hostage to this day.
And there is one theory that the captain, his marriage having collapsed, took a parachute on board in his flight crew bag, and depressurised the aircraft to kill everyone else.
He then set the aircraft on a course on automatic pilot, bailed out, and was picked up in a boat by his mistress to find a new life under stolen identities in another country.
![[Image: a5daa510f49ef3bff588b3314dcdcce8?width=650]](https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/a5daa510f49ef3bff588b3314dcdcce8?width=650)
Mass murder
Most professionals in the aviation business, though, believe the evidence best points to Zaharie having hijacked his own aircraft in a complex and cunning act of mass murder-suicide. The only debate there is whether, as the Australian Transport Safety Bureau maintains, MH370 was a “ghost flight” by the end, flying on autopilot with no one conscious and crashing down rapidly after fuel exhaustion. Or did Zaharie fly the aircraft to the end, making a controlled ditching to try to keep as much of MH370 intact as possible and sink it with a minimal debris field?
If the ATSB officials had worked on the premise that a pilot flew the aircraft to the end, they would effectively have had to say they believed MH370 was most likely hijacked by Zaharie. By saying instead, as they did, that MH370 had an “unresponsive crew” at the end, they could avoid making such a call publicly.
Many veteran airline captains and top air crash investigators suspect the ATSB officials, even if subconsciously, came up with what became known as their “ghost flight” and “death dive” theory to avoid having to publicly embarrass the Malaysian government and its government-owned national flag carrier by saying one of their pilots took 238 passengers and crew of many nationalities to their deaths.
The ATSB says, emphatically, no: the bureau’s officers have told Senate estimates they worked objectively on facts, science and logic, consulting the best experts in the field to establish their target search area, without bias or subjective influences.
If the ATSB is right, the aircraft came pretty much straight down after it ran out of fuel, producing a relatively narrow search zone. If Zaharie flew the aircraft to the end and ditched it, he could have taken it a much longer distance, perhaps 100 nautical miles and well outside the search area the bureau defined.
Where to look
There have been two extensive searches of the seabed, the first led by the ATSB at the Malaysian government’s request, the second by the British-owned, Houston-based private undersea survey company Ocean Infinity. Both came up with naught.
The MH370 mystery will not finally be solved until the aircraft is found and the black boxes recovered.
The question would be where to look. The best clue on where to find MH370 remains the satellite data, which tracked seven roughly hourly automatic electronic “handshakes” over the course of the flight.
The seventh and last handshake has given searchers a long arc upon which MH370 is thought to have come down, but not the point on the arc where it lies.
One obvious option would be to search a progressively wider stretch around the Seventh Arc beyond that already covered, or farther north or a little farther south.
The problem with such an approach is that it would still be based on the ATSB’s assumptions about how the flight ended, which have been progressively challenged by new facts and independent expert analysis.
Between the ATSB-led search, which cost $200 million of Australian, Chinese and Malaysian taxpayer money, and that of Ocean Infinity, about 250,000sq km of seabed in the southern Indian Ocean were covered.
An increasing number of aviation professionals are asking: since the search based on the ATSB’s theory failed to find the aircraft, why not consider a new hunt based on the alternative scenario that Zaharie flew the aircraft to the end?
Pilots’ conclusions
Byron Bailey, Simon Hardy and Mike Keane are three highly experienced aviators who started their careers as military officers and went on to the top of their profession as senior airline captains.
The trio have each studied the MH370 saga and concluded that the evidence shows only one possible conclusion: Zaharie flew the aircraft to the end and ditched it.
They have each pursued their own calculations of where MH370 lies, producing different outcomes but all in a relatively small area just outside the southern end of where the ATSB searched.
Hardy identified this search zone in 2015. He used the same radar and satellite tracking data to develop a mathematical formula based on similar calculations of speed, wind, direction and endurance along the Seventh Arc as the ATSB employed, but with the additional assumption of a controlled glide or engines-running descent of about 100 nautical miles at the end and a ditching by Zaharie.
Hardy spoke with me from Mumbai, where he had arrived after piloting a Boeing 777 from London. In addition to his lengthy flying experience, he also has a large amount of engineering and track-plotting expertise.
He took up a Royal Navy flying scholarship aged 17, and the British navy put him through university to earn a design engineering degree.
He served as a senior design engineer working on torpedo guidance systems.
Hardy’s process followed basic geometry, solving simultaneous equations, and fundamental navigation techniques such as taking three bearings to work out a position. He used the seven arcs to make calculations of simple logic of distances and speed. Like the geometry one learns at school, Hardy’s analysis had a very satisfying end: a logical “QED” showing MH370’s likely resting place.
Hardy’s reckoning puts the most likely co-ordinates at 40 degrees South and 086.5 degrees East. But allowing for some elasticity in the variables, he proposes a search area of 7000sq km.
Hardy put his findings to the ATSB but the bureau did not search where he proposed.
Keane started his flying career as a navigator in the Royal New Zealand Air Force, before moving to the Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot.
He then went into civilian aviation, retiring as chief pilot of Britain’s largest airline, easyJet.
Keane likes the idea of searching the deep underwater canyons known to be in this area, where he thinks Zaharie would have tried to sink the plane, including the Geelvinck Fracture Zone. His best guess is 38 degrees 15 minutes South, 86 degrees 48 minutes East.
Bailey also began his aviation career as a navigator in the RNZAF, switched to the RAAF as a fighter pilot, and then became an airline captain, including flying Boeing 777s for Emirates.
He points out that he and his colleagues’ calculations are not very different from those of the ATSB’s early search plan based on the Defence Science and Technology Group’s original “hot spot” of probability.
Bailey’s estimate puts MH370 gliding after pursuing a true track of 188 degrees. He puts MH370 at 39 degrees, 10 minutes South, 88 degrees 15 minutes East.
If a new hunt were launched in their proposed 7000sq km search zone, and the pilots are right, MH370 could be found in a week or two at the rate Ocean Infinity searched, at a cost of perhaps $10m to $20m.
There’s no guarantee of success — there are still too many unknowns. But thus far the searches based on other approaches have failed. At the time of writing, the pilots had the most developed and authoritative alternative theory of where to look.
With the fifth anniversary of the disappearance of MH370 approaching, that informal professional team makes a compelling case that their analysis deserves a shot to offer the families hope of closure where others have tried and failed.
The is an edited extract from Ean Higgins’s book The Hunt for MH370, published this week.
&..
![[Image: e688ce0898ef1c68fd690f88d5491297]](https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/e688ce0898ef1c68fd690f88d5491297)
Jeanette awaits MH370 answers
EAN HIGGINS
Not knowing the whereabouts of the remains of her beloved sister and brother-in-law compounds the grief for Jeanette Maguire.
In the living room of her home in Brisbane, Jeanette Maguire has a small shrine, of sorts, to Cathy and Bob Lawton, her sister and brother-in-law, lost on MH370.
The little collection has a photo of the couple on their wedding day, a couple of purple candles from the memorial service for the MH370 disappeared, and one of the china dolls Cathy used to collect.
A small wooden plaque has the word “Sister” on it and the words, “God made us sisters, our hearts made us friends”.
There is also a small handpainted candleholder showing butterflies darting around flowers, and the words: “Butterfly Wishes … believe in the beautiful, amazing woman you are.” The candleholder was, Jeanette said, what “one of my beautiful old work colleagues bought me for Christmas in 2014, after Bob and Cathy’s disappearance. It was an amazing present and represented all that she saw me go through that year.”
Those MH370 next of kin I’ve interviewed have carried on, coping with their grief and lack of knowing, each in their own way.
As a family, Jeanette said, “we are very loving, very strong”.
“To get through in our world, we have a lot of humour between us.”
But the MH370 families still struggle every day with the unhealed emotional wounds.
“I am still gutted inside,” Jeanette said. “A big part of me is lost with them. Bob was like my big brother. I was 11 when Cathy met Bob.”
In her case, Jeanette’s job as a payroll manager has been her refuge.
“My safe haven was to go to work and lead a different life.”
But, Jeanette said, she just cannot escape MH370.
“Dealing with Cathy’s girls and grandchildren … I am here, but I am not here. At least if we know where they are, at least we have their burial area,” Jeanette said. “At least we will have the place.”
MTF...P2
Via the Oz today:
MH370: the plane truth is out there
12:00AM FEBRUARY 28, 2019
MH370 pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah.
A Malaysia Airlines plane parked on the tarmac at Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
Somewhere out in the southern Indian Ocean, maybe in one of the underwater canyons of Broken Ridge, but beyond the Seventh Arc, lies the answer to the world’s greatest aviation mystery.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when some very strange things happened on the Boeing 777. They caused a pilot to turn around, fly a zigzag course back over Malaysia, up the Straits of Malacca, then south to vanish in the middle of nowhere, all without a word from anyone on board.
Five years after it disappeared, the aircraft is still there, probably in very deep and cold water, well preserved along with the 239 souls on board, but just not yet found.
Once it is discovered the mystery can be solved. The flight data recorder, the cockpit voice recorder, the identity and disposition of anyone in the cockpit at the controls, the configuration and nature of damage to the different parts of the aircraft and, macabre though it is, the pathology of those on board will provide the clues.
We will learn why the aircraft turned around about 40 minutes into the flight. We will glean insight as to why at that time the secondary radar transponder was turned off and there was no further radio contact after the captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, delivered the last transmission: “Good night, Malaysian three seven zero.”
Extreme theories
Over the years since MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, there has been no shortage of speculation about what happened. Some believe it may have been a hijacking gone wrong. Others think there may have been a fire on board, possibly caused by the combination of cargo including lithium-ion batteries and the tropical fruit mangosteens.
There are those who look at accidental depressurisation, in which the pilots became a bit hypoxic, or light-headed, because of a faulty oxygen supply — not enough to pass out but enough to make silly and illogical decisions and fly the aircraft in a strange way.
Then there are the more extreme theories, such as that a rogue nation such as North Korea hacked into the aircraft’s control systems and electronically “captured” it.
Others, including some families of the Chinese passengers on the flight, say the official interpretation that MH370 flew south is wrong, and the aircraft was in fact hijacked and flown northwest to Central Asia and landed at an Islamic rebel air base, its passengers and crew still held hostage to this day.
And there is one theory that the captain, his marriage having collapsed, took a parachute on board in his flight crew bag, and depressurised the aircraft to kill everyone else.
He then set the aircraft on a course on automatic pilot, bailed out, and was picked up in a boat by his mistress to find a new life under stolen identities in another country.
Mass murder
Most professionals in the aviation business, though, believe the evidence best points to Zaharie having hijacked his own aircraft in a complex and cunning act of mass murder-suicide. The only debate there is whether, as the Australian Transport Safety Bureau maintains, MH370 was a “ghost flight” by the end, flying on autopilot with no one conscious and crashing down rapidly after fuel exhaustion. Or did Zaharie fly the aircraft to the end, making a controlled ditching to try to keep as much of MH370 intact as possible and sink it with a minimal debris field?
If the ATSB officials had worked on the premise that a pilot flew the aircraft to the end, they would effectively have had to say they believed MH370 was most likely hijacked by Zaharie. By saying instead, as they did, that MH370 had an “unresponsive crew” at the end, they could avoid making such a call publicly.
Many veteran airline captains and top air crash investigators suspect the ATSB officials, even if subconsciously, came up with what became known as their “ghost flight” and “death dive” theory to avoid having to publicly embarrass the Malaysian government and its government-owned national flag carrier by saying one of their pilots took 238 passengers and crew of many nationalities to their deaths.
The ATSB says, emphatically, no: the bureau’s officers have told Senate estimates they worked objectively on facts, science and logic, consulting the best experts in the field to establish their target search area, without bias or subjective influences.
If the ATSB is right, the aircraft came pretty much straight down after it ran out of fuel, producing a relatively narrow search zone. If Zaharie flew the aircraft to the end and ditched it, he could have taken it a much longer distance, perhaps 100 nautical miles and well outside the search area the bureau defined.
Where to look
There have been two extensive searches of the seabed, the first led by the ATSB at the Malaysian government’s request, the second by the British-owned, Houston-based private undersea survey company Ocean Infinity. Both came up with naught.
The MH370 mystery will not finally be solved until the aircraft is found and the black boxes recovered.
The question would be where to look. The best clue on where to find MH370 remains the satellite data, which tracked seven roughly hourly automatic electronic “handshakes” over the course of the flight.
The seventh and last handshake has given searchers a long arc upon which MH370 is thought to have come down, but not the point on the arc where it lies.
One obvious option would be to search a progressively wider stretch around the Seventh Arc beyond that already covered, or farther north or a little farther south.
The problem with such an approach is that it would still be based on the ATSB’s assumptions about how the flight ended, which have been progressively challenged by new facts and independent expert analysis.
Between the ATSB-led search, which cost $200 million of Australian, Chinese and Malaysian taxpayer money, and that of Ocean Infinity, about 250,000sq km of seabed in the southern Indian Ocean were covered.
An increasing number of aviation professionals are asking: since the search based on the ATSB’s theory failed to find the aircraft, why not consider a new hunt based on the alternative scenario that Zaharie flew the aircraft to the end?
Pilots’ conclusions
Byron Bailey, Simon Hardy and Mike Keane are three highly experienced aviators who started their careers as military officers and went on to the top of their profession as senior airline captains.
The trio have each studied the MH370 saga and concluded that the evidence shows only one possible conclusion: Zaharie flew the aircraft to the end and ditched it.
They have each pursued their own calculations of where MH370 lies, producing different outcomes but all in a relatively small area just outside the southern end of where the ATSB searched.
Hardy identified this search zone in 2015. He used the same radar and satellite tracking data to develop a mathematical formula based on similar calculations of speed, wind, direction and endurance along the Seventh Arc as the ATSB employed, but with the additional assumption of a controlled glide or engines-running descent of about 100 nautical miles at the end and a ditching by Zaharie.
Hardy spoke with me from Mumbai, where he had arrived after piloting a Boeing 777 from London. In addition to his lengthy flying experience, he also has a large amount of engineering and track-plotting expertise.
He took up a Royal Navy flying scholarship aged 17, and the British navy put him through university to earn a design engineering degree.
He served as a senior design engineer working on torpedo guidance systems.
Hardy’s process followed basic geometry, solving simultaneous equations, and fundamental navigation techniques such as taking three bearings to work out a position. He used the seven arcs to make calculations of simple logic of distances and speed. Like the geometry one learns at school, Hardy’s analysis had a very satisfying end: a logical “QED” showing MH370’s likely resting place.
Hardy’s reckoning puts the most likely co-ordinates at 40 degrees South and 086.5 degrees East. But allowing for some elasticity in the variables, he proposes a search area of 7000sq km.
Hardy put his findings to the ATSB but the bureau did not search where he proposed.
Keane started his flying career as a navigator in the Royal New Zealand Air Force, before moving to the Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot.
He then went into civilian aviation, retiring as chief pilot of Britain’s largest airline, easyJet.
Keane likes the idea of searching the deep underwater canyons known to be in this area, where he thinks Zaharie would have tried to sink the plane, including the Geelvinck Fracture Zone. His best guess is 38 degrees 15 minutes South, 86 degrees 48 minutes East.
Bailey also began his aviation career as a navigator in the RNZAF, switched to the RAAF as a fighter pilot, and then became an airline captain, including flying Boeing 777s for Emirates.
He points out that he and his colleagues’ calculations are not very different from those of the ATSB’s early search plan based on the Defence Science and Technology Group’s original “hot spot” of probability.
Bailey’s estimate puts MH370 gliding after pursuing a true track of 188 degrees. He puts MH370 at 39 degrees, 10 minutes South, 88 degrees 15 minutes East.
If a new hunt were launched in their proposed 7000sq km search zone, and the pilots are right, MH370 could be found in a week or two at the rate Ocean Infinity searched, at a cost of perhaps $10m to $20m.
There’s no guarantee of success — there are still too many unknowns. But thus far the searches based on other approaches have failed. At the time of writing, the pilots had the most developed and authoritative alternative theory of where to look.
With the fifth anniversary of the disappearance of MH370 approaching, that informal professional team makes a compelling case that their analysis deserves a shot to offer the families hope of closure where others have tried and failed.
The is an edited extract from Ean Higgins’s book The Hunt for MH370, published this week.
&..
Jeanette awaits MH370 answers
EAN HIGGINS
Not knowing the whereabouts of the remains of her beloved sister and brother-in-law compounds the grief for Jeanette Maguire.
In the living room of her home in Brisbane, Jeanette Maguire has a small shrine, of sorts, to Cathy and Bob Lawton, her sister and brother-in-law, lost on MH370.
The little collection has a photo of the couple on their wedding day, a couple of purple candles from the memorial service for the MH370 disappeared, and one of the china dolls Cathy used to collect.
A small wooden plaque has the word “Sister” on it and the words, “God made us sisters, our hearts made us friends”.
There is also a small handpainted candleholder showing butterflies darting around flowers, and the words: “Butterfly Wishes … believe in the beautiful, amazing woman you are.” The candleholder was, Jeanette said, what “one of my beautiful old work colleagues bought me for Christmas in 2014, after Bob and Cathy’s disappearance. It was an amazing present and represented all that she saw me go through that year.”
Those MH370 next of kin I’ve interviewed have carried on, coping with their grief and lack of knowing, each in their own way.
As a family, Jeanette said, “we are very loving, very strong”.
“To get through in our world, we have a lot of humour between us.”
But the MH370 families still struggle every day with the unhealed emotional wounds.
“I am still gutted inside,” Jeanette said. “A big part of me is lost with them. Bob was like my big brother. I was 11 when Cathy met Bob.”
In her case, Jeanette’s job as a payroll manager has been her refuge.
“My safe haven was to go to work and lead a different life.”
But, Jeanette said, she just cannot escape MH370.
“Dealing with Cathy’s girls and grandchildren … I am here, but I am not here. At least if we know where they are, at least we have their burial area,” Jeanette said. “At least we will have the place.”
MTF...P2