The Disappearing Act

Inmarsat shared its two deductions with Malaysia on Wednesday, 12 March. There was no reaction from Kuala Lumpur. ‘Clearly they’ve got all sorts of information coming in. They were also probably sent information that the plane was in the Pacific by other people,’ said Schuster-Bruce. On Thursday, 13 March, The Wall Street Journal announced that the plane allegedly flew for several hours after radio contact was lost.20 For two days, Defence and Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein denied the new information as vigorously as possible. This was his consistent attitude throughout the crisis, to the point where he could easily wear the moniker ‘Mr No-No’.

The day The Wall Street Journal came up with their breaking news that the flight had continued to fly on for several hours, the Malaysian TV news station Astro Awani was pursuing a very different lead. An Astro Awani reporter asked Hishammuddin if there was still a possibility that passengers on MH370 had communicated with people on the ground around 2 am, 30 minutes after the plane had last been spotted. The TV station said they had seen a screenshot of some messages supposedly sent on the Kik messaging service by the only American adult on the flight, IBM employee Philip Wood, to a contact of his in Beijing, whose username on Instagram was Hun_l. Astro said they had verified the identity of Hun_l, and had talked to two people in Malaysia who knew him personally. In the SMS conversation, Wood mentioned to Hun_l that he was using his phone secretly, that the temperature in the cabin was ‘warm’ and that there seemed to be a problem with the aircraft’s air-conditioning system. More worryingly, he also mentioned having ‘difficulty to breathe’, but he seemed to be in no panic because in his last message he said he’d be in contact once he arrived in Beijing. Mr No-no completely dismissed this question. This troubling text message was soon to be replaced by another one, also supposedly sent by Wood, though it was much more headline-grabbing, as we’ll see later on. The Kik app has now closed shop and I am not sure what to do with this other clue, whether it was genuine or not. Why would anyone make up such a message? I’d love to be in contact with Hun_l for confirmation and to know the exact time and content of the messages he said he received from Philip Wood.

On Friday, 14 March, news broke from an unlikely source – a White House spokesman announced ‘new information’ and ‘a new search area’, referring to the southern Indian Ocean. In this manner, Washington forced Kuala Lumpur to emerge from its silence, but left it up to the Malaysians to disclose the details.

On Saturday, 15 March, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak finally made his first public statement since the start of a crisis that had thrust his country into the international limelight in a way that no other event had ever previously done. He stated that the situation was ‘without precedent’, corroborated the story that the plane had indeed changed course, as had been discussed over the preceding five days but denied until that moment, and confirmed that the data transmission systems of the Boeing 777 (ACARS and transponder) had been ‘disabled’ and that Inmarsat’s theory that the plane flew until 8.19 am along a northerly or southerly corridor was correct. He also advanced the theory of ‘a deliberate act by someone on the plane’, with the proviso that whoever seized control of the aircraft would have to have had solid flying experience. After making his one and only statement to the press, Prime Minister Najib took no questions from journalists. The disappearance of Flight MH370 and its 239 passengers and crew had just entered a new phase. It had been planned – seemingly quite masterfully. So was it a hijacking, then, and if so, to what end?

After allowing its neighbours, allies and partners to search for the plane in the wrong place for a week, Malaysia had just waited two further days before officially confirming a major piece of information and setting in motion the appropriate response. Some people viewed this as sheer incompetence. Others suspected a deliberate tactic intended to hide an embarrassing truth. And as important as they were, the Inmarsat pings did not provide the definitive key to the mystery. On the other hand, they did increase the search area tenfold.

With no new information coming to light, the second week bore a strong resemblance to the first. The authorities used the press briefings above all to deny the information going around – the false as well as the true. No, the plane was not seen over the Maldives. No, the plane did not make a U-turn 12 minutes before the now infamous sign-off message by the captain: ‘Good night, Malaysian three seven zero.’ No, we do not yet have any intention of apologising to the families. No, we are not going to disclose the data received from the radars of neighbouring countries. No, we do not know what is contained in the pilot’s flight simulator. No, we still do not know the plane’s flight path.

Every evening at 5.30, Defence and Transport Minister Hishammuddin, the Executive Officer of Malaysia Airlines, the Inspector-General of Police and the Director General of Civil Aviation, arms by their sides, would line up to face the music in the press conference auditorium. With each passing day they looked a little bit more sheepish, a little bit more hemmed in by a room packed to the gills with cameras taking live footage, flashes snapping and journalists who were themselves becoming ever more frustrated as time dragged on. A tall, imposing Sikh acted as the MC, choosing which of the journalists got to ask their question.

On 19 March, a BBC journalist asked the Director General of Civil Aviation to confirm whether the Boeing had crossed this or that waypoint. The answer came back: ‘We are still investigating.’ Still investigating? This was the one piece of information that everyone had believed to be ‘clearly established’! The Director General pointed out that it was no longer crucial to know ‘which way’ the plane had travelled, since attention was now focused exclusively on where it ended up. Eleven days after the plane went missing, the response from the media was a collective gasp of bewilderment.

At another evening briefing, a journalist with the Financial Times pointed out to Hishammuddin that Kazakhstan, mentioned a day earlier as being ‘at the heart of the search mission along the northerly arc’, did not seem to be aware of its own role in this operation. According to the journalist, this major Central Asian republic had not received a single request for assistance from Kuala Lumpur. But the press briefing was already coming to a close. The tall Sikh escorted the officials out the back door. They were rushed away from the conference room, leaving numerous raised hands and even more unanswered questions behind them.

The Malaysian authorities were regularly caught out by such blatant examples of incoherence or incompetence in this investigation. Journalists discovering Malaysia for the first time were dumbfounded, wondering in what kind of Kafkaesque country they had landed.

1 Sometime in 2016 I met a young man who had lost his father in the flight. He recalled that during the third briefing (the first one he was able to attend), the Malaysian lieutenant told the families present, ‘We know things we can’t tell you.’

2 National Transport Safety Board, United States.

3 Air Accidents Investigation Branch, United Kingdom.

4 Aircraft Accident Investigation Department, China.

5 Australian Transport Safety Bureau.

6 The FAA is the American Federal Aviation Administration, the regulator of civil aviation in the US.

7 Quoted by Bernama, Malaysia’s official press agency.

8 Quoted by the New Straits Times, a pro-government English-language daily in Malaysia.

9 Kota Bharu is the capital of Kelantan State.

10 This was the principal government agency tasked with maintaining law and order, and coordinating search and rescue operations in the Malaysian Maritime Zone and on the high seas.

11 See www.chinatimes.com/realtimenews/20140308003502-260401 (a Chinese-language website).

12 Sastind is China’s State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence.

13 The Strait of Malacca is the sea lane between the island of Sumatra (Indonesia) and the Malaysian peninsula.

14 ‘Radar Suggests Jet Shifted Path More Than Once’, The New York Times, 15 March 2014.

15 The Captain was qualified to double-act as supervisor.

16 Putrajaya is the administrative capital of Malaysia, 30 kilometres south of Kuala Lumpur. Anwar’s five-year prison sentence for sodomy was upheld by the Federal Court, Malaysia’s highest court, in February 2015.

17 The Sunday Times, 22 June 2014.

18 Factual Information: Safety Investigation for MH370, 8 March 2015.

19 The BBC Two Horizon documentary Where Is Flight MH370? aired on 17 June 2014.

20 ‘Missing airplane flew on for hours. Engine data suggests Malaysia flight was airborne long after radar disappearance’, The Wall Street Journal, 13 March 2014.