The latest on the disappearance of Flight MH370
It’s been five years since MH370 and all its souls on board seemingly vanished from the face of the earth, and although the mystery remains unsolved, we have plenty of information. This Atlantic article presents an overview of what’s known so far.
One thing in the article that is no surprise whatsoever is that the Malaysian government’s response has been inadequate at best and perhaps even negligent. Another is that the disappearance of MH370 has provided perfect fodder for conspiracy theories. Just a few of them are described here:
On the internet you will find claims that the airplane has been found intact in the Cambodian jungle, that it was seen landing in an Indonesian river, that it flew into a time warp, that it was sucked into a black hole. One scenario has the airplane flying off to attack the American military base on Diego Garcia before getting shot down. A recent online report that Captain Zaharie had been discovered alive and was lying in a Taiwanese hospital with amnesia won sufficient acceptance that Malaysia angrily denied it.
That Atlantic article summarizes what we actually do know, based on the data. Most of it conforms to what I’ve read elsewhere, and most of it makes sense to me—if such an act can be said to “make sense”:
In truth, a lot can now be known with certainty about the fate of MH370. First, the disappearance was an intentional act. 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. 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.
Second, despite theories to the contrary, control of the plane was not seized remotely from within the electrical-equipment bay, a space under the forward galley. Pages could be spent explaining why. Control was seized from within the cockpit. This happened in the 20-minute period from 1:01 a.m., when the airplane leveled at 35,000 feet, to 1:21 a.m., when it disappeared from secondary radar. During that same period, the airplane’s automatic condition-reporting system transmitted its regular 30-minute update via satellite to the airline’s maintenance department. It reported fuel level, altitude, speed, and geographic position, and indicated no anomalies. Its transmission meant that the airplane’s satellite-communication system was functioning at that moment.
By the time the airplane dropped from the view of secondary—transponder-enhanced—radar, it is likely, given the implausibility of two pilots acting in concert, that one of them was incapacitated or dead, or had been locked out of the cockpit. Primary-radar records—both military and civilian—later indicated that whoever was flying MH370 must have switched off the autopilot, because the turn the airplane then made to the southwest was so tight that it had to have been flown by hand. Circumstances suggest that whoever was at the controls deliberately depressurized the airplane. At about the same time, much if not all of the electrical system was deliberately shut down…
An electrical engineer in Boulder, Colorado, named Mike Exner…has studied the radar data extensively. He believes that during the turn, the airplane climbed up to 40,000 feet, which was close to its limit…Exner believes the reason for the climb was to accelerate the effects of depressurizing the airplane, causing the rapid incapacitation and death of everyone in the cabin.
Much much more at the link. It makes for fascinating albeit depressing reading. It’s depressing because of what happened to all those people. It’s depressing that it was almost certainly done deliberately. It’s depressing that the perpetrator was almost certainly a member of the crew and most likely the captain. And it’s depressing that it’s still largely unsolved despite all the evidence.
The article goes into quite a bit of technical detail as to why a hijacker was not the culprit, and why the crew member most likely responsible for the plane’s disappearance and the deaths of all aboard was the captain Zaharie:
In the case of MH370, it is difficult to see the co-pilot as the perpetrator. He was young and optimistic, and reportedly planning to get married. He had no history of any sort of trouble, dissent, or doubts…
…The police discovered aspects of Zaharie’s life that should have caused them to dig more deeply. The formal conclusions they drew were inadequate…
…The truth, as I discovered after speaking in Kuala Lumpur with people who knew him or knew about him, is that…[h]is wife had moved out, and was living in the family’s second house. By his own admission to friends, he spent a lot of time pacing empty rooms waiting for the days between flights to go by. He was also a romantic. He is known to have established a wistful relationship with a married woman and her three children, one of whom was disabled, and to have obsessed over two young internet models…There is a strong suspicion among investigators in the aviation and intelligence communities that he was clinically depressed…
Forensic examinations of Zaharie’s simulator by the FBI revealed that he experimented with a flight profile roughly matching that of MH370—a flight north around Indonesia followed by a long run to the south, ending in fuel exhaustion over the Indian Ocean. Malaysian investigators dismissed this flight profile as merely one of several hundred that the simulator had recorded. That is true, as far as it goes, which is not far enough. Victor Iannello, an engineer and entrepreneur in Roanoke, Virginia, who has become another prominent member of the Independent Group and has done extensive analysis of the simulated flight, underscores what the Malaysian investigators ignored. 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…
…[T]here is some suspicion, from fuel-exhaustion simulations that investigators have run, that the airplane, if simply left alone, would not have dived quite as radically as the satellite data suggest that it did—a suspicion, in other words, that someone was at the controls at the end, actively helping to crash the airplane…We know from that descent rate, as well as from…shattered debris, that the airplane disintegrated into confetti when it hit the water.
I don’t think we will ever know any more than this. And I doubt any of this will change the mind of a single conspiracy theorist.
The families of the victims have gone through one of the worst nightmares possible, and there’s no end in sight. I hope they’ve found some sort of peace and comfort, but I can’t imagine that most of them have.
RIP.
Oh hell, it’s Mahatir’s Malaysia. They’ll just blame the Jews.
Here’s an interesting counter to the Atlantic article:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-atlantics-william-langewiesche-dusts-off-discredited-conspiracy-theory-to-accuse-mh370-pilot-of-hijacking?ref=scroll
I’m not sure which is correct. The first article makes good points, but so does the second one.
I’d say the 2d one identifies the weaknesses in Langewieche’s thesis.
I found Langewieche’s attitude repulsive, especially the repeated insults directed at Malaysia. Few 3d world countries in the post-war period have been as accomplished as Malaysia, and he paints it as some sort of worthless kleptocracy. It isn’t. The older I guess, the more I loathe journalists.
Hunter S Thompson would have a field day with this stuff.
I blame this on bad disco, and weather.
Works for Cleveland.
Cappy first of Mahathir was not Prime Minister at the time.
It was another guy named Najib. The same guy who last year lost a General Election to Mahathir.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/opinion/malaysia-election-mahathir-mohamad.html
https://time.com/5272113/mahathir-mohamad-defeats-najib-razak-malaysia-2018-election/
Get your facts straight.
Arguably it was Najib and the ruling party’s bungling of the MH370 affair that lead directly to their fall from power. To many Malaysians it was the straw that broke the camels back.
Art Deco I’m more inclined towards the Daily Beast article than the Atlantic article due to how it read. For one thing at least the Irving cites the actual investors reports while Langewieche’s doesn’t. On top of Langewieche’s tone about my country doesn’t help me like the guy more. At least Irving doesn’t go into blaming an entire nation, just the ruling government at the time.
Also Langewieche said he talked to a friend of the flights captain and then said he cannot name him because the guy is afraid of repercussions. That’s so much like left wing new’s constant citing of anonymous sources in Trump’s white house to emphasize their lie.
I assume Langewieche invented the conversation with the ‘friend’ out of whole cloth.
Has RIchard Quest weighed in on this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0NsxGlTBBc
All these Ground Based Positioning stuff isn’t very global.
So everything the Atlantic claims to be “known” is just speculation. It may be speculation with decent reasoning behind it, but it’s just speculation.
Richard Quest? You mean there’s a crystal meth and butt plug angle to this story too?
Wm. Langewieche is a highly respected writer on aviation technology, politics, and crash investigations, and his article some years ago (also in the Atlantic Monthly, IIRC) on the brand new Egypt Air plane that the pilot intentionally —not a shadow of a doubt otherwise— drove into the Long Island Sound just minutes after takeoff, while chanting Islamic prayers (as recorded on the speedily-recovered black box) was superb. (Apparently that flight had on-board a number of very senior Egyptian military officers en route back home who had been closely cooperating with and were being trained by the US military, which no doubt greatly displeased the jihadi Muslim Brotherhood factions).
Where Langewieche misses the boat very significantly here, is that there was most likely an major political dynamic at work beyond the MH370 pilot apparently having personal and psychological issues, and which if true would go far towards explaining why the Malaysian apparatchiki are still putting the kabosh on this investigation.
Here are the details, which may be readily corroborated in whole or in part:
Dr. Mahathir had been mentoring a golden boy protegé and likely successor named Anwar Ibrahim, who was something of a populist Islamist intellectual. In due course, he and Mahathir had a major falling out, and somehow Anwar was indicted and duly convicted of sodomy/criminal homosexuality; denied future political rights; and jailed in harsh conditions.
Anwar subsequently appealed the conviction, and had a retrial, of which the outcome was that his original conviction for sodomy was upheld by the court and he was packed off again to prison.
The MH370 pilot was apparently quite an Anwar supporter and he was evidently in the courtroom gallery for the failed retrial, which in fact occurred only a day or two before the MH370 catastrophe.
Since then, following the collapse of the phenomenally corrupt and incompetent Nazik Rajab regime, somehow Mahathir and Anwar reconciled, and when he ran again, as a nonagenarian (!) for the top position —a four year term— the arrangement was that Mahathir would serve only the first two years, and the second two years of his term would be filled by Anwar Ibrahim, no less!
This required, of course, springing Anwar from jail, and formally pardoning/reversing his two sodomy convictions. The peculiar political situation of Malaysia is that there is an inherited Sultanate, of which the incumbent is nominally the country’s highest legal official. And in an act that had no precedent whatever in post-colonial Malaysia, the Sultan stepped forth and issued his full Royal Pardon of Anwar.
So far Anwar hasn’t moved into position for the second two years of Mahathir’s term. But I believe the arrangement is still on track.
I have several times posted online this body of speculative and generally fact-checkable material, but nobody seemed to have yet picked up the ball on it.
I suspect that whatever marital and depressive problems the MH370 pilot may have had, he was likely rabid with rage over the evident framing, railroading, and mis-treatment of Anwar, and devised an elaborate scheme —worked out in great detail on his very high end home flight simulation hardware and software— to successfully disappear the aircraft and create thereby maximum embarrassment and humiliation for both the national flag carrier airline —which may have been de-nationalized after the phenomenally stupid loss of a second new Boeing plane with 300 aboard, by MH7 flying nonchalantly over the Ukrainian rebellion war zone, around which most other airlines had prudently re-routed— and the Malaysian government itself at the highest levels.
But the pilot was apparently unaware that even after manually shutting down all the navigational pingers and air traffic control indicators, the engines themselves continued to routinely provide coded positional, performance, and operational data to their manufacturer — I believe GE in this case— through the Inmarsat commercial satellite communication system.
Alan Potkin, thanks very much.
Langewieche’s extended investigative article (in “The Atlantic”) on the EgyptAir suicide crash was indeed masterful.
Whether Zaharie’s decision to crash the plane he was piloting was due to personal problems or political issues is impossible to ascertain with any certainty. The question is whether it is a combination of both personal and political that triggered him to murder innocent people. The political motivation that you describe seems very likely to have contributed and may have pushed him over the edge.
It is likely, but I’m not sure there is any way of knowing this absolutely.
A huge question mark in your post, for me, is the final paragraph: If the engine manufacturer DID KNOW (via the Inmarsat system) the precise flight path of the pilot-hijacked plane, then why was there so much speculation and uncertainty—and resulting expensive searching and exploration—regarding the plane’s flight path after it disappeared?
Or more precisely, if the Malaysian government was given this information and then proceeded to stonewall for political reasons (as I understood from your post), then why wasn’t this information also provided to other—international—agencies?
That is, it doesn’t seem possible—or at least sensible—that a government should have sole discretion over how to handle information of this kind.
Thanks for the kind words, Mr. Meislin… The nature of the dataset provided by the engines to GE via Inmarsat had the peculiar quality of being potentially correct but 180º in directional error. I don’t quite understand what that was all about, but it took quite some time to piece together the most probable course of the plane, and the problem seems to be that while it’s predicted final position may be more or less correct, the water depth in which the fragmentary wreckage evidently lies is something like -14,000 ft. This outcome was almost certainly intentional on the pilot’s part.
Barry Meislin,
The maintenance transmissions did not include position data nor any engine data for the most part, since some aircraft subsystems were shut down for a large part of the flight. The transmissions were only attempts to establish programmed automated communication. Position was roughly calculated based on the timing and frequency shifts of the messages received by the satellite.
Each single transmission established a circle of possible positions on the face of the earth (or really at aircraft altitude), similar to the way GPS calculates position. This is the arc mentioned in the Atlantic article. Other data allowed reasonable estimates of which of those points was likely to be correct.
These positions allowed an approximate interpolation of the flight path. The degree of precision is low, but enough to determine the plane flew over the Indian Ocean, not to Vietnam or Africa or wherever.