The Disappearing Act

The register of messages logged between the control towers of Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh City reflects a remarkable string of failures. From 01:20 onwards, Vietnamese air traffic control knows that MH370 should be arriving in its zone. But it waits 19 minutes before alerting Kuala Lumpur about the strange silence of the Kuala Lumpur–Beijing flight. It should have reacted within three to four minutes at most. And meanwhile the Kuala Lumpur control tower does not receive any news either; MH370 has not returned to the local frequencies.

At around 01:30, on instruction from Vietnamese air traffic control, the pilot of a flight to Tokyo that was theoretically close to MH370 succeeds in contacting the aircraft on the emergency frequency (121.5 MHz), and asks if the flight has made its transfer to Vietnamese air traffic control.

‘There were [sic] a lot of interference … static … but I heard mumbling from the other end,’ said the captain. ‘That was the last time we heard from them, as we lost the connection. If the plane was in trouble, we would have heard the pilot making the Mayday distress call. But I am sure that, like me, no one else up there heard it,’ he told the Malaysian newspaper The New Sunday Times the following day.

The conversation is interrupted, which often happens. The pilot has to continue along his flight path to Japan; he does not try again. He has the job of flying the plane, after all. According to several investigators who have tried to find out which planes were close to MH370 in its final moments, it could be the pilot of Flight JAL750 or of Flight MH88. The conversation has not been made public by the authorities, even though, according to the pilot – who gave his testimony anonymously – all the other aircraft and ships in the zone at that time must also have heard it. However, the provisional report indicates that at around 01:54, Ho Chi Minh City also asks the pilots of Flight MH386, on its way from Shanghai to Kuala Lumpur, to try to contact MH370. No further details are given. The statement of the ‘Duty Executive Despatch Operation’ (sic) recorded by the Royal Malaysian Police mentions that Flight MH52 was also asked to try to contact MH370. The pilots of both MH52 and MH88 were interviewed by the police – according to their statements, both tried many times but failed to reach MH370.

At 01:46, Ho Chi Minh City tells Kuala Lumpur that the aircraft disappeared from the radar screens just after passing the next waypoint, BITOD, 37 nautical miles (approximately 68.5 kilometres) away.9 At 02:03, after several fruitless exchanges between the controllers of the two neighbouring zones, the Kuala Lumpur control tower informs its Vietnamese counterpart that the operations centre of Malaysia Airlines has located the plane … in Cambodia. This is good news, but also rather strange. Why would MH370 have left its flight path without warning the local air traffic controllers? And what is it doing in Cambodia? Ho Chi Minh asks the Malaysians for more details. Half an hour later, at 02:37 precisely, the operations centre of Malaysia Airlines sends the Vietnamese, who are somewhat dubious, the coordinates of the aircraft’s alleged new position in the skies of Cambodia. A satellite call is attempted at 02:39 but without success. Once again, why do they wait so long? About one hour later, the operations centre of Malaysia Airlines corrects its earlier message; the position given in Cambodia was based on a ‘projection’ rather than the actual location of the aircraft. In other words, no one – not the airline, nor the air traffic controllers, nor anyone else – knows where MH370 has gone.

The airliner has, essentially, vanished for 2 hours and 10 minutes, somewhere between two hesitant and perplexed control towers, confused by a false indication supplied by the airline’s own operations centre. The Vietnamese then try to contact Hong Kong and the Chinese island of Hainan, to see if by any chance they have seen the missing aircraft fly past.

It is discovered about two weeks later, thanks to a radar image from Thailand, that at 02:22 the aircraft is already north-east of Sumatra (Indonesia) on the other side of Malaysia. It has radically changed its route and clearly abandoned its initial destination. Why? Where is it going?

MAS does not raise the official alert until 05:30, an hour before its scheduled arrival time.

At Beijing Airport, the main display board in the airport concourse shows Flight MH370 as ‘Delayed’. Both in Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, people are growing impatient; they have not received the customary ‘arrived in Beijing’ text, nor any reply from a mobile phone. When no one emerges from arrivals at the scheduled time, worry starts to set in. At 07:24, one hour after the scheduled landing time at Beijing, Malaysia Airlines issues an evasive news release, announcing that Subang Air Traffic Control lost contact with Flight MH370 at 2.40 am today (8 March). The waiting family and friends are terrified and panic-stricken. For all the families of the 239 people on board the flight, an interminable ordeal begins. What has been lost is not contact, but an airliner.

For many months, almost nothing would be known of the crucial details about the flight path actually taken by the plane, between its last point of contact with Malaysian air traffic control and the last indication of its presence at 02:22 on a Thai military radar. The details were reconstituted by trial and error, and assembled like a jigsaw puzzle over subsequent weeks, months and years, in the light of information that was released in dribs and drabs, for the most part diluted in an ocean of false or inaccurate data.

The first interim investigation report, dated 1 May 2014, provided very little information. ‘Even if you have your wallet stolen, you get a longer report than that,’ the brother of a female Chinese passenger said to me in disgust. Over the course of the following years, several reports, as well as various studies by the ATSB (Australian Transport Safety Bureau), tried to bring together in a coherent way most of the information known about the flight. But several independent investigations carried out since then by experts fascinated by the case, with whom I have been in regular contact, suggested that errors, inconsistencies and false information may have found their way even into the official reports on which this account of the aircraft’s final hours was based.

It took me two years to first spot the many flaws and inconsistencies of the official narrative and another three years, approaching witnesses, searching for traces – as well the traces of erased traces – to put together a much more plausible version of what truly happened that night.

1 According to Factual Information: Safety Investigation for MH370 (8 March 2015), the planned flight duration was 5 hours and 34 minutes.

2 In February 2015, Jeff Wise published The Plane That Wasn’t There online at www.jeffwise.net.

3 There are some question marks over some other passengers, including the sole Russian. In fact, all the countries that had nationals on the flight cleared them of any possible links to terrorism, with the exception of Russia and Ukraine, who ignored the requests made by the Malaysian police.

4 See www.klia.com.my.

5 This aircraft also has the following Boeing references: block number WB-175 and line number 404. These identification numbers are referred to in the investigation.

6 The sky is virtually divided into different airspaces (called Flight Information Regions or FIR), where traffic control and flight assistance are provided by the designated ACC (Area Control Centre) or ATCC (Air Traffic Control Centre). In this case, MH370 is leaving the airspace controlled by Malaysia (KL ATCC) and is due to enter the airspace controlled by Vietnam (HCM ATCC).

7 Flight paths pass through a series of virtual waypoints, which are given five-letter names for ease of identification.

8 Since the night in question, thousands of Boeing 777 pilots, of all ages and nationalities, have tried to find out how this is done, and have succeeded. But why is this procedure possible, if it can never be justified, whatever the in-flight situation? The best explanation I have heard, after consulting pilots, members of the military and other experts on this intriguing question, is that an aircraft ‘cannot and should not be designed to fight its pilot’. This is indeed a very good argument. The aircraft is a tool in the hands of the pilot, who is completely in charge of everything on board.

9 Aviation uses nautical miles as a standard measurement of distances. One nautical mile is equivalent to 1,852 metres.

2

Where Is the Plane?

‘It’s best to stay at the Sama-Sama Hotel next to the airport. That’s the journalists’ headquarters and there are press briefings every day at 5.30 pm. But the investigation is going nowhere. It looks like a dead-end assignment, if you ask me.’

So said a friend and colleague from RFI (Radio France Internationale) even before I arrived in Kuala Lumpur a week and a half after the aircraft went missing. More than 160 media crews had been dispatched from around the world to cover the story in the immediate aftermath of the disappearance, and almost all of them had descended on the Sama-Sama Hotel. Camera tripods and assorted bags of equipment littered the corridors, while the huge but soulless, tasteless lobby of this luxury hotel hummed with activity. Some of the crews had set up their little company flags, surrounded by improvised groupings of tables and sofas. Others had laid claim to a column, stuck their corporate logos on it and set up camp nearby. The news-hungry throng was like an army of ants swarming over freshly fallen fruit.

Were it not for its slapdash organisation and the prickly tension that prevailed, this high-density media colony would have seemed much like the press gatherings at many international summit meetings and major sporting events. But there was a difference here. In the corridor leading to the auditorium used for press briefings, the press room was adjacent to the family room. When its door was ajar, wails of despair or bursts of anger sometimes escaped – a reminder of the human drama underlying this compelling mystery. The Chinese families, especially, were at the end of their tethers. Some family members had gathered at the Lido Hotel in Beijing, but many had made the trip to Kuala Lumpur, hoping to be on hand as soon as any new shred of information became available. A simple misunderstanding or awkward question by a journalist could trigger a fit of rage. Encounters with the authorities would frequently degenerate into shouting matches, walk-outs, bottles of water being hurled at spokespersons and so on. The anguish suffered by these men and women who had lost a loved one was mounting with each passing minute; they had been haunted ever since Huang Huikang, China’s ambassador to Malaysia, came to see them a few days after the disappearance and said, probably at a loss for words, ‘This is very complicated, you cannot understand.’

How can he tell us it is ‘complicated’ when at the same time they are telling us they don’t know anything? 1

The celebrity news anchors of the major global networks were on hand as well. Notwithstanding Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Putin’s intentions for the rest of Ukraine, the disappearance of Flight MH370 was considered the most newsworthy story of the hour. The topic was ideally suited to the demands of live television, with ‘breaking news’ reports and updates running 24/7 in wall-to-wall coverage. In the early days following the plane’s disappearance, coverage consisted of a series of statements, contradictions, denials, rumours, confirmations, retractions and clarifications … a vortex of information that gave rise to a nebula of hypotheses.

Within hours, China, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, Australia, the Philippines and the United States made search teams available to Malaysia. Backed by its experience with Flight AF447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, which went down in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Brazil on 1 June 2009, France dispatched a delegation from its air accident investigation bureau, the BEA. As required under Annex 13 of the Convention on International Civil Aviation, also known as the Chicago Convention, a joint investigation team was quickly formed. At its head was a former Malaysian director general of civil aviation. The team called on the expertise of specialist organisations in a number of countries in addition to the BEA (France): the NTSB2 (US), the AAIB3 (UK), the AAID4 (China) and the ATSB5 (Australia), along with accredited representatives from Singapore and Indonesia. Boeing, Rolls-Royce and the British satellite company Inmarsat – of whom much more later – were also invited to take part. In accordance with the Chicago Convention, Hishammuddin Hussein, the Malaysian Minister of Defence and Transport, declared:

The main purpose of the international investigation team is to evaluate, investigate and determine the actual cause of the accident so similar accidents could be avoided in the future. It is imperative for the government to appoint an independent team of investigators that is not only competent and transparent but also highly credible.

A person close to the investigation told me, ‘Americans from the NTSB, the FBI and the FAA6 were on the scene immediately. The British also sent two investigators. They went to see the people at Malaysia Airlines and requested access to all the data.’

As logic demanded, the starting point of the investigation was the last point of contact with the plane. This was in the South China Sea, midway between north-eastern Malaysia and the southern tip of Vietnam. At first, that was all anyone knew; contact with the plane had been lost over the Gulf of Thailand, along the interface between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace, just after the plane had crossed waypoint BITOD. The Malaysians carefully refrained from saying that they knew the plane had executed a U-turn to the left. Instead, they ordered that search missions be confined to this single area.

On the first day of the search, a Singaporean plane was sent out to overfly the area. We were subsequently told that 9 planes and 24 ships had gone out for the search, although we never saw a detailed list of them, nor were we given the precise location of the search areas. From one day to the next, the numbers kept rising. It was hard to keep up. When the search area was expanded to include the other side of Malaysia, representing a total area of nearly 100,000 square kilometres, the media was told that 42 ships and 39 planes were deployed. At the peak of the search operation, 26 countries were involved.

In the dead of the night of the disappearance, a few witnesses reported the unusual presence of a plane overflying the Gulf of Thailand. They described noises out of the ordinary: white lights, a low-flying plane and even a plane on fire. These accounts bore no resemblance to the ‘business as usual’ ballet of long-haul jetliners between Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Taipei or Beijing that were barely visible because they flew at much higher altitudes.

Along the north-eastern coast, villagers in Pantai Seberang Marang declared that they had heard a very loud noise coming from the direction of Pulau Kapas, a resort island. Under the headline ‘Villagers heard explosion’, the 12 March issue of Free Malaysia Today confirmed that the Terengganu police had taken statements from several villagers who reported hearing a loud explosion during the night of 7 to 8 March. Without consulting one another, the villagers gave the following independent accounts: at about 1.20 am, Alias Salleh,7 36, was sitting with friends a few hundred metres from the sea when they all heard a very loud noise, ‘like the fan of a jet engine’. Another villager, Mohd Yusri Mohd Yusof, 34, stated that when he heard the strange noise, he thought a tsunami was about to hit. Other inhabitants of the area claimed to have seen weird lights above the ocean. In Kelantan State, 66-year-old fisherman Azid Ibrahim noticed a very low-flying plane ‘below the clouds’8 at around 1.30 am. The plane was in view for nearly five minutes. His fishing boat was about 10 miles off Kuala Besar. It would have been impossible to miss the plane, he said, as ‘its lights were as big as coconuts’. Unfortunately, everyone else on the boat was fast asleep.

More or less at the same time, about 30 kilometres from Kota Bharu,9 the young businessman Alif Fathi Abdul Hadi, 29, also noticed bright white lights. He insisted on reporting what he had seen to the MMEA (Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency)10 because the plane was flying ‘opposite to the usual direction’. In the same area but much further out to sea, south-east of Vietnam, a 57-year-old New Zealand oil rig worker named Michael J. McKay, who had gone outside to have a smoke in the middle of the night, insisted he saw an aircraft on fire at high altitude due west. ‘I believe I saw the Malaysia Airlines plane come down. The timing is right,’ he wrote in an email that he sent to his employers, after Malaysian and Vietnamese officials ignored his initial message.

Meanwhile the Vietnamese press was publishing some interesting information, but it went virtually unnoticed in the pandemonium of those first few days. As early as the morning of 8 March 2014, the daily newspaper Tuoi Tre News quoted a statement issued by the Vietnamese Navy, announcing that ‘the plane went down 153 nautical miles [283 kilometres] from Tho Chu Island’. On Sunday, 9 March, a large oil slick stretching over a distance of 80 kilometres was spotted from the air about 150 kilometres south of Vietnam. ‘This is the first and – for the moment – only potential sign of the missing plane,’ reported the search plane’s pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Hoang Van Phong.

Another highly surprising report was published by China Times, a pro-China news website based in Taiwan, as well as by the Chinese news website China.com. It told of ‘an urgent distress signal from Flight MH370 picked up [by] the US Army unit based in U-Tapao, Thailand’. In his message, the pilot said the aircraft was about to disintegrate and he needed to make an emergency landing.11 This information, if true, struck me as being extraordinarily important and intriguing, but at the time we learnt nothing further and it was generally ignored by the Western media.

There were other reports that corroborated the immediate and local crash scenario. Peter Chong, whom I met a year later during another assignment in Kuala Lumpur, was a friend of the missing pilot and had initially been told that the plane had crashed in the Gulf of Thailand. Flying business class on Malaysia Airlines on his way back from Bangkok on the evening of Monday, 10 March, he asked the air hostesses to convey his condolences to the pilots of his own flight. ‘I just wanted to express my solidarity in these trying circumstances,’ he explained to me. To his very great surprise, a message scribbled on a paper napkin came back to him a few minutes later. In the note, which he tucked away for safekeeping, the captain thanked him and added, ‘Wreckage to your left’. At the time, the plane was flying over the southern part of the Gulf of Thailand. Peter Chong peered out the window and saw a clearly lit area at sea where he said he was able to make out intensive search operations. Chong took this as evidence that, ‘at that stage, Malaysia Airlines believed the plane to have gone down in that area and had informed its crews’.

Moreover, the day after the last contact with the plane, Chinese satellites detected three large floating objects believed to indicate ‘a suspected crash sea area’ for Flight MH370. The location of this debris – 105.63°E and 6.7°N – was compatible with the last point of contact with the jetliner. The images were supplied by Sastind12 and dated Sunday, 9 March at 11 am. They showed the objects as small white spots against a background of grey sea. The dimensions of the three objects were given as 18 × 13 metres, 19 × 14 metres and 24 × 22 metres for the largest. It was not every day that one came across such large floating objects of a size comparable to that of a Boeing 777, which is 64 metres in length, with a wingspan of 61 metres. And three objects at once! Clearly, this was the first serious lead that had turned up since the searches began. Several news channels rushed to announce that the plane had been found. But Xinhua, China’s official news agency, had waited three full days, until Wednesday, 12 March, to release these images. More surprising still, Minister Hishammuddin then asserted without batting an eyelid that the images had been made public ‘by mistake’. If this were indeed the case, it was undoubtedly the first time ever that the People’s Republic of China had shared satellite images by mistake. The minister added that a Malaysian surveillance plane had patrolled the site and found nothing there.

The search effort in this area was dominated by two American warships equipped with helicopters, and one Singaporean P-3 Orion maritime surveillance aircraft. Numerous other vessels were supposedly patrolling these waters as well. This part of the sea is encircled by the Gulf of Thailand and the coast of Vietnam and China to the north, the Philippine archipelago to the north-east, the large island of Borneo along with Java and Sumatra to the south, and finally, Malaysia and Thailand to the west. Surely a jetliner – even one smashed to pieces – and dozens of bodies should have been noticed sooner or later.

The fact that the Chinese satellite images were released simultaneously with a new revelation that the plane had allegedly made a virtual U-turn to the west meant that the images did not attract as much attention as they otherwise might have. From that point, despite the mounting pile of clues, attention shifted completely away from the South China Sea.

Eyewitness accounts, reports by the Vietnamese Navy and Chinese satellite images, as telling as they may have seemed, quickly faded into oblivion, relegated to the large and increasingly crowded box of ‘as-yet unexplained temporary clues’ like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that must be kept in a corner of the table until they can be made to fit into the overall picture.

Accordingly, from Tuesday, 11 March, scenarios other than a plane crash into the South China Sea began to take shape. In an apparently ill-advised burst of transparency, Rodzali Daud, the Royal Malaysian Air Force Chief, told the local newspaper Berita Harian (Today’s News) that at 2.40 am that Saturday – one hour and 21 minutes after the last radio and radar contact with the plane – the aircraft had been detected by the Royal Malaysian Air Force Base at Butterworth near Pulau Perak. This minuscule island at the northern end of the Strait of Malacca13 was actually on the western side of Malaysia, the opposite side to the search area. That the Air Force had detected a plane was a fact. Or at least it would be confirmed as such later on. What it was at the time, however, was a gaffe. The poor guy had spoken too soon and spent the following days attempting to deny his own claims. He released a statement saying that Butterworth had in fact received an unidentified signal at 2.15 am. The next day, the time was advanced to 2.30 am. Soon enough, no one had any idea what the Air Force had seen, or where, or at what time. If the Malaysian response was a mission to obfuscate, it was already well underway.

This did not stop Malaysia from secretly deploying two of its ships and a military aircraft to search along the country’s western coast, even though the north-eastern coast was still the designated search area. The New York Times, citing American officials familiar with the investigation, reported that the missing plane had climbed to 45,000 feet, which is above the plane’s service limit, then descended to 23,000 feet, well below a normal cruising altitude, as it approached Penang.14 The newspaper later reported that a mobile phone tower had picked up a brief signal from the co-pilot’s phone around this time. None of these elements were subsequently confirmed, but nor were they explicitly denied.