March 19, 2024

TEN YEARS AGO this month, Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared during a routine flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing. The wreckage was never found.

There’s a solid chance the wreckage will never be found. That’s unfortunate, but there are clues to work with. And those clues have, over time, led me to believe that the plane was intentionally brought down by one of the pilots, most likely the captain, in an act of murder-suicide. It was ditched somewhere in the Indian Ocean — landed, if you will, on the surface of the sea — where it sank to to the bottom and rests today, undetected but mostly intact.

Early on, I was open to a number of theories popular at the time: fire, depressurization, and so on. Accidents. I’ve come around since then. My opinion is based on the evidence, both as it exists and, just as importantly, doesn’t exist.

If we assume an accident, we must also assume the plane crashed into the ocean. We know from electronic satellite “pings” that the jet continued on for some time after its last appearance on radar. Having suffered some catastrophic malfunction that rendered the crew dead or unconscious, the thinking goes, the plane continued on autopilot until running out of fuel, at which point the engines failed. Without pilots to control the glide, it plunged into the sea.

The problem with this idea is the absence of pieces. There is no way for a jetliner to crash “gently” into the ocean. A Boeing 777 in an out-of-control impact would have effectively disintegrated, producing tens of thousands of fragments: aircraft parts, human remains, luggage, and so on. Much of this debris would have sunk, but much would not have. Eventually, borne by currents, it would’ve washed up.

So why didn’t it?

A small number of pieces did come ashore, but that’s the thing: of the few parts recovered, almost all of them are consistent not with an out-of-control crash, but with a controlled and deliberate ditching. (Even the most textbook ditching at sea is going to cause serious damage and the likely shedding of parts.) The flaperon discovered in 2015 on Reunion Island, for example, and the trailing edge flap that washed up on Mauritius, both from the same wing.

The parts themselves are evidence enough; a thorough post-mortem on them reveals even more. The forensics are complicated, but they’re solid. Use your Google and check out the analysis by former Canadian crash investigator Larry Vance. These pieces tell a story.

For these particular parts to have been found, together with a complete absence of the myriad flotsam a full-on crash would have produced, is to me a smoking gun.

And thus, the biggest reason the submerged wreckage hasn’t been found is because the location of the search area has been based almost entirely on the fuel exhaustion theory. The search-zone calculations, extrapolating from the satellite pings, are based on when and where, approximately, the 777’s tanks would’ve run dry.

Except maybe the tanks didn’t run dry, and the plane went — was taken — somewhere else. What if that was the intent all along — to vanish?

Those pings are still important, and give us hints. Chances are the actual location of the wreckage isn’t far away. But it’s far enough away to have missed it.

I’ve been saying from the start that we should prepare for the possibility of the plane not being found. It happens this way sometimes. If it helps you feel better, the air crash annals contain numerous unsolved accidents. What makes this one different, maybe, is how we’ve come to expect easy and fast solutions to pretty much everything these days, with a fetishized belief that “technology,” whatever that means anymore, can answer any question and fix any problem.

Oh sure, radios, transponders, emergency locator transmitters, GPS, real-time position streaming, satellite tracking. But all of that is fallible, one way or another.

Sometimes nature wins. And that’s what this is about, ultimately: nature. The immensity of the ocean versus the comparative speck of a 777. It’s out there somewhere, in the ink-black darkness beneath thousands of feet of seawater. We’ll probably never find it.

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Photos courtesy of Unsplash.

November 19, 2022

LAST WEEK, a court in Holland found three men responsible for the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 eight years ago.

Back in 2014, operating in eastern Ukraine, they were part of a separatist group under Russian control, responsible for firing the “Buk” rocket that struck the Boeing 777 at 33,000 feet during a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Cruising just above restricted commercial airspace, the plane had been misidentified as a military target. The men — Igor Firkin, Sergei Dubinsky, and Leonid Kharchenko — were found guilty in absentia and sentenced to life. Currently free and living in Russia, it’s unlikely they ever will serve time.

MH17 was carrying 298 people from 17 countries, including 80 children. That ghastly total puts MH17 at number seven among the deadliest air disasters of all time. In the Netherlands, where 196 of the victims lived, the catastrophe was and remains front-page news. Strangely, the rest of the world seems to have forgotten about it. It never stayed in the headlines for especially long, and shortly thereafter it ceased to be much of a topic, even in aviation circles. It’s peculiar how many lesser disasters, even those that occurred decades ago, are fresher in our minds. Ask a pilot about MH17 and you’re liable to get a blank stare. “Which one was that?”

Is that a symptom of our diminished attention spans, or something else? Maybe it was the certain-ness of the accident, and the ugly brutality of it. Unlike many crashes, there was no mystery or mystique surrounding this one. From the very first day it was clear what had happened, and it was pretty grotesque.

It’s also true that Malaysia Airlines had already earned its fifteen minutes of infamy. It’s the carrier’s other major mishap, earlier that same year, that is more widely remembered and discussed. That’d be MH370, of course, the vanished 777, only a few parts of which have ever been found, washed up on beaches on Mauritius and Reunion islands. That one gets people talking, albeit nonsensically much of the time.

MH17 wasn’t the first commercial jet downed by the Russians. Many of you will remember the tragedy of Korean Air Lines flight 007 in 1983. The Boeing 747 was on a flight from New York to Seoul when it strayed off course and was blown up by a Soviet fighter jet. The worldwide outrage the followed was a lot more intense than anything stoked by MH17.

Ditto after the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes accidentally shot down an Iran Air jetliner in July, 1988, killing 290 people.

The Iran Air incident sits at number eight on that list of deadliest disasters. KAL 007 was, until 2014, the tenth worst, nudged to number eleven by MH17. This means that three of history’s eleven worst crashes were planes brought down by missiles. Add in Lockerbie (number 10), plus the 1985 Air India bombing (number 5), and five of the worst eleven — nearly half — were either missiles or bombs.

It’s not entirely fair, lumping those together. The bombings were deliberate; the shoot-downs were cases of mistaken identity. We will save for later the bigger and deeper conversation over what does or doesn’t constitute an “accident,” and the sticky applications of culpability. MH17, Iran Air, KAL 007; each of these involved a certain amount of recklessness. At what point, though, does an error become criminal?

And this isn’t the first time someone has been convicted in absentia for destroying a commercial plane. In 1999, a court in Paris found six Libyans guilty for the bombing of UTA flight 772 ten years earlier, including the brother-in-law of Moammar Khadafy. None of the six stood trial. The explosion, over a remote part of the Sahara, killed 170 people. A U.S. judge later ordered Libya to pay $6 billion in damages on behalf of seven Americans who’d been on board.

Some of my U.S. readers have asked why the Malaysia Airlines flights are always referred to alpha-numerically: MH17 and MH370. Most Americans don’t realize that flight numbers are prefixed by a two-character airline code. The code for Malaysia Airlines is MH. In the United States we normally drop these prefixes, but they are used routinely elsewhere. This is discussed in more detail in chapter seven of my book.

And the name of the airline is Malaysia Airlines. It’s not “Malaysian Airlines,” and certainly not “Malaysian Air.”

Malaysia Airlines was formed in the early 1970s after its predecessor, Malaysia-Singapore Airlines (MSA), split to become Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines. Both carriers are renowned for their outstanding service, and cabin crews of both airlines wear the iconic, floral-pattern “Sarong Kabaya” batik — an adaptation of the traditional Malay kebaya blouse.

Malaysia Airlines’ logo, pictured above, is an indigenous kite known as the Wau. True story: In 1993 I was in the city of Kota Bahru, a conservative Islamic town in northern Malaysia close to the Thai border, when we saw a group of little kids flying Wau kites. At the time I didn’t realize where the airline’s logo had come from, but I recognized the pattern immediately. It was one of those airline/culture crossover moments that we aerophiles really savor.

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June 18, 2019

WILLIAM LANGWEISCHE, long one of the country’s preeminent journalists, has hit one out of the park with his story in the most recent Atlantic about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370. It’s by far the best-written, best-researched, and all-around most compelling piece one can read on the topic. It also has brought me to terms as to what most likely happened on the night of March 8, 2014.

From the beginning I’ve been afraid of the rogue pilot theory — the idea that one of the pilots, presumably Captain Zaharie Shah, was responsible for the flight’s disappearance. I suppose this is partly out of pride. I don’t want it to have been Zaharie, because the idea of the captain hijacking his own aircraft and killing over two-hundred people shames the entire profession.

I’ve instead been noncommittal, usually taking the “two main possibilities” route. After acknowledging at least the chance of Zaharie being the culprit, I propose a second, more complicated scenario in which both pilots became incapacitated:

First, there’s a rapid or explosive cabin decompression. The decompression is caused by an explosion of the crew oxygen bottle, down in the avionics compartment. This not only knocks out the pilots’ oxygen supply, but causes many of the plane’s electronics to fail as well, thus explaining the loss of transponder contact, etc. Zaharie and first officer Hamid commence an initial turn-back toward the airport on the island of Penang (this is the hairpin turn seen on the plots), and enter an initial waypoint or two in the navigation system. They’ve donned their masks, but of course there’s no oxygen flowing, and within seconds they’re unconscious. Minutes later, as the drop-down masks are depleted, so is everyone in the cabin.

After passing Penang, the plane turns right, up the Strait of Malacca and past the northern end of Sumatra — again, in accordance with what’s seen on the satellite plots. It does this because… well, who knows what waypoints may have been in the FMS at that juncture. Maybe, in the throes of losing consciousness, the pilots had typed in nonsense. Heck, there could have been a whole sequence of irrelevant waypoints in the box. Or, is there an arrival procedure or an approach into Penang that might trace a similar outline? Later, the plane defaults to heading mode, and off it goes southwards on a long straight line to oblivion.

Of course, while such a theory explains some of the evidence, it doesn’t explain all of it. For example, it doesn’t account for the plane’s electrical systems later powering up again. Neither can it explain, my thoughts above notwithstanding, why certain course changes occurred precisely where and when they did. The flight path. Langeweische takes this to the limit:

“It is inconceivable that the known flight path, accompanied by radio and electronic silence, was caused by any combination of system failure and human error,” he writes. “Computer glitch, control-system collapse, squall lines, ice, lightning strike, bird strike, meteorite, volcanic ash, mechanical failure, sensor failure, instrument failure, radio failure, electrical failure, fire, smoke, explosive decompression, cargo explosion, pilot confusion, medical emergency, bomb, war, or act of God — none of these can explain the flight path.”

The problem with my scenario is that it requires further and further layering to make sense. Not just this happened, but also that — and so on.

The only thing that easily and neatly accounts for all of it is Zaharie.

Occam’s Razor. And I think the author has changed my mind, particularly after revealing what other people said and knew about the captain and his personal life — things the Malaysian government has been all too keen on concealing.

Then there’s Zaharie’s home simulator. The idea of a 777 captain owning and spending time on a home simulator in the first place is rather strange. What they found inside it is stranger still. Explains Langeweische:

“Of all the profiles extracted from the simulator, the one that matched MH370’s path was the only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight — in other words, taking off on the simulator and letting the flight play out, hour after hour, until it reached the destination airport. Instead, he advanced the flight manually in multiple stages, repeatedly jumping the flight forward and subtracting the fuel as necessary until it was gone.”

While this mystery will never be conclusively solved, that’s about the closest thing to a smoking gun we’re liable to find. As Langeweische puts it, rather understatedly,”The simulator flight cannot easily be dismissed as random coincidence.”

Does locating the wreckage even matter anymore? The voice and data recorders are out there somewhere, nestled invisibly in some immense undersea fissure or canyon, in the ink-black darkness beneath thousands of feet of seawater. The search vessels may have swept right over them. But from the start, they were never likely to tell us much. Malaysian investigators, meanwhile, bumbling and obfuscating from the outset, operating on behalf of a corrupt and secretive regime, want only for the entire story to, if you’ll pardon the irony, vanish forever.

“The important answers probably don’t lie in the ocean but on land, in Malaysia,” Langeweische concludes. “That should be the focus moving forward. The riddle may not be deep. That is the frustration here. The answers may well lie close at hand, but they are more difficult to retrieve than any black box.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE.

March 14, 2022

I WAS AT A WINERY outside Porto, Portugal, when the phone rang. I took the call and walked out front to the parking lot. It was a Sunday afternoon, March 9th, 2014. The sun was out.

It was a woman from the BBC. A Malaysia Airlines plane had gone missing, she explained. It had vanished the night before, somewhere over the ocean near Vietnam. That’s all anyone knew, really.

With almost nothing to go on, I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sure they’ll find it within a day or two,” I told her. Other accidents came to mind — planes that had fallen into the ocean. Just a few years earlier had been the Air France crash off Brazil, for instance. It took a little while, but they found it.

But then a day became two days, became three days, became a week. The possibility struck me that the jet might never be found.

Eight years later and MH370 is still missing. Only a few scattered pieces have ever been retrieved, washed ashore on the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and Reunion, presumably hundreds or even thousands of miles from the actual, unknown spot were the flight met its end.

If it helps you feel better, the air crash annals contain numerous unsolved accidents. What makes this one different, maybe, is that we live in an age that expects easy and fast solutions to pretty much everything, with a fetishized belief that “technology,” whatever that even means anymore, can answer any question and fix any problem — and therefore locate any plane.

But it can’t. Sometimes nature wins. And that’s what this is about, ultimately: nature. The immensity of the ocean, both in breadth and depth, versus the comparative speck of a 777. Oh sure, radios, transponders, emergency locator transmitters, GPS, real-time position streaming, satellite tracking. All of that is fallible, one way or the other. The wreckage is out there somewhere, nestled invisibly in some immense undersea fissure or canyon, in the ink-black darkness beneath thousands of feet of seawater. The search vessels may have swept right over it.

Consider this: We’ve all watched airplanes high in the sky. A plane flying 12,000 feet above you (that’s the average depth of the Indian Ocean) appears as just the smallest gray speck, its profile visible but indistinct. Now, imagine you’re looking down at that same plane. Except, you’re looking down not through clear sky, but through 12,000 feet of murky seawater. Indeed, for most of that depth you’re staring into aphotic blackness. And the airplane you’re looking for is, in all likelihood, no longer in the shape of an airplane; it’s in thousands of fragments scattered across miles of rugged seabed.

As the saying goes, good luck with that, even with sophisticated imaging equipment. That’s an anecdotal analysis, ignorant of the science of whatever fancy scanners are used to search the ocean floor, but I have a sinking suspicion (pardon the wording), the jet is lost forever.

And if it were to be discovered, what then? What good is a voice or data recorder that’s spent the last eight years under water?

There are a number of theories, two of which are the most plausible: Did the plane wander off course after a mishandled cabin depressurization, its crew and passengers unconscious, until running out of fuel? Or did captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijack his own flight? While I lean towards the latter, my insights aren’t any better than anyone else’s.

And that’s about as far as we’re going to get. Solving this mystery has become, I’m afraid, all but impossible. We’ll have to make do with our hunches.

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