The Plane That Wasn’t There: Why We Haven’t Found Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

100 Pages·2015·2.78 MB·English

by  Wise

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
ONE
Lost Comms
TWO
Ping Rings
THREE
Fatal Math
FOUR
Dead Ends
FIVE
Reverse Engineering
SIX
Narrowing the Search
SEVEN
Floating Debris
EIGHT
A Way Out
NINE
Inspiration
INTERLUDE
A Speculative Scenario
TEN
Where
ELEVEN
Motive
TWELVE
People on the Plane
THIRTEEN
MH17
EPILOGUE
APPENDIX
Determining the Speed of MH370
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, COPYRIGHT, & AUTHOR BIO
INTRODUCTION
AS A RULE, airline crashes are unsubtle things. Tons of metal, thousands of
gallons of fuel, hundreds of human lives, all hurtling along at tremendous speed
thanks to the contrivance of engineering: when the plan unravels, it tends to do
so catastrophically. Most loss-of-control aircraft accidents unfold in less than
five minutes, and result in impact within 20 miles. As a rule, if there is a
mystery, it is how and why, not where or if; the evidence for the latter is usually
all too gruesomely profuse.
The case of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is different. When the Boeing 777-
200ER disappeared shortly after midnight, local time, on March 8, 2014, it did
something that no passenger jet had ever done before: it stayed missing. In the
months that followed, tens of millions of dollars were spent and hundreds of
ships, aircraft, and submersibles were deployed. Yet not a single scrap of
physical evidence was found. The case, baffling from the start, has come under
the glare of careful analysis to seem even weirder and more uncanny. And so
with increasing urgency we confront the same question we started out asking
ourselves in the first few days after the event: Why haven’t we found MH370
yet?
At one level, the answer is simple: this is fundamentally a strange case. No
matter how you look at the data, you can’t make it line up in such a way that all
the evidence fits neatly into a jigsaw puzzle. Some of the things that look like
clues must actually be coincidences. Some of the bedrock facts must not be facts
at all. What we can never forget, though, is that we’re dealing with a real
physical event that actually happened. It wasn’t an illusion or an act of magic.
Everything that happened had a cause that can be understood in strictly physical
terms. However strange the mystery, there has to be a comprehensible
explanation.
For all the ink that has been spilled over MH370, the story has yet to be fully
and accurately told. In the frenzy of the initial days a great deal of information
was reported in the press that was later determined to be inaccurate, and a
number of theories were publicized that ultimately did not mesh with the facts.
Only several months later, after the public’s attention had drifted away, did a
clear view of the event emerge. The first part of this book, comprising chapters
one through six, aims to provide a concise account of what we know, how we
came to know it, and where experts believe the plane most likely went. I have
been privileged in my ability to provide this account by my inclusion in an
extraordinary cadre of individuals, the Independent Group (or IG), a
confederation of unaffiliated researchers who have spent the better part of the
past year delving into the mystery of MH370 with intelligence, vigor, and
expertise. I am also grateful for the opportunity to have covered the story for
Slate.com and CNN.
In chapters seven and eight I examine some of the problems that underlie the
default scenario described in the first section. The rest of the book is devoted to
an alternate scenario that fits the data on hand in a novel way, and offers an
explanation for why the plane has not been found in the location the authorities
believed it would be. I would like to emphasize that this scenario is as yet
hypothetical and does not represent the opinion of the IG as a whole.
Figure 1: Forty minutes into its flight, MH370 disappeared from air traffic
control screens; an hour later, from military radar.
ONE
LOST COMMS
AT 12:41AM LOCAL Malaysia time, or 16:41 universal time (UTC), the 777-200ER
aircraft registered as 9M-MRO took off from runway 32R at Kuala Lumpur
International Airport bound for Beijing. The red-eye flight was expected to
arrive in Beijing six hours later, at 22.30 UTC. As it climbed out, the plane
followed a standard departure pattern, an invisible path in the sky which brought
it along a curving path to the north. One minute into the flight, the crew received
a message from air traffic control instructing them to cancel the standard flight
pattern and instead take a shortcut by flying directly to the next waypoint on
their route, an imaginary navigational fix called IGARI, located just at the
boundary of Malaysian-controllled airspace. This was a common and
unremarkable occurrence.
Indeed, the first 40 minutes of the flight appear to have been absolutely
normal. At 17:07, flying level at its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet over the
middle of the Malay peninsula, the airplane automatically transmitted a radio
signal, a kind of text message, using what's called the Aircraft Communications
Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS. Minutes later, the plane crossed
the coast and headed out to sea on a northeast bearing. Flying into a light
headwind, it clocked a groundspeed of approximately 470 knots, which it
relayed to the ground via another automatic system called Automatic Dependent
Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B. Soon after, MH370 approached IGARI and
the edge of Malaysian-monitored airspace. Beyond lay the Ho Chi Minh Flight
Information Region, or FIR, which is monitored by controllers in Vietnam.
When a plane is transitioning from one zone of control to another, it is standard
procedure for the controller to call up the plane on the radio and give the pilot
the name and radio frequency of the authority he’ll be speaking to next. And so,
at 17:19 the following exchange took place:
These are the final words heard from MH370.
Two minutes after the final transmission, at precisely 17:21:04, the plane
passed waypoint IGARI and turned slightly to the right, heading towards its next
navigational fix. Nine seconds later, at 17:21:13, the ADS-B signal winked out
and the plane disappeared from air traffic control radar at the end of the yellow
segment marked in figure 1.
Now, you might think that all this would set off red flags for the air traffic
controllers, but in fact this kind of winking-out is perfectly normal. IGARI is
located far enough out over the ocean that, depending on weather conditions, it
is sometimes out of range of ADS-B and radar. It is, therefore, a kind of blind
spot—a place where the automatic tracking system often temporarily loses track
of planes for a few minutes before they are picked up again by radar and radio
receivers on the far side. Air traffic controllers continued to see the plane’s
symbol on their screens, as the system assumed that the plane remained on
course.
Not until 15 minutes had passed did air traffic controllers in Hanoi begin to
wonder why MH370 hadn’t radioed in to establish contact.
Over the next few hours, with increasing urgency, air traffic controllers
around the region phoned back and forth to one another, and to the airline, trying
to establish where the plane might have gone. When dawn broke with still no
sign of the plane, MH370 was declared missing. Fearing the worst, authorities
launched search planes.
Instantly, the search for MH370 became worldwide news. Modern jet travel
is so safe that for an airliner with 239 souls aboard to crash is a rare and
compelling event. It’s just not supposed to happen. The 777 in particular is an
advanced and extremely robust airplane; none had ever suffered an inflight
fatality before. What could have gone wrong?
In the broadest possible terms, there are only three kinds of accidents that
befall airplanes. MH370 could have suffered a mechanical failure like ValueJet
Flight 592, which crashed into the Everglades in 1996 after a fire broke out in its
cargo hold. Or it could have fallen victim to pilot error like American Airlines
Flight 587, which crashed in Long Island in 2001 after the pilot swung the
rudder back and forth until it broke off. Or it could have it suffered a
combination of both, like Air France 447, which went down in the middle of the
Atlantic in 2009 after one of the co-pilots overreacted to a frozen airspeed probe.
In each of these cases, the plane impacted the surface within five minutes, and
less than 20 miles from its location when the problem began. This is typical:
when planes go down, they usually go down quickly. And so in the days after
MH370 disappeared, searchers scoured the South China sea, near the plane’s last
known location, looking for wreckage. They saw nothing.
That was unexpected, but what happened next was jaw-dropping. It turned
out, according to sources within the Malaysian air force, that the plane had not in
fact disappeared entirely. While all MH370’s active electronic communication