When news broke in 2014 that a Malaysia Airlines 777 had gone missing, no one imagined that, nine years later, we still wouldn’t know what became of flight MH370.
It once looked like closure was imminent. Soon after the plane vanished from radar screens, scientists at the UK-based satellite communications company Inmarsat announced they had found recorded signals automatically transmitted from the plane. By using some complicated mathematics, they were able to work out where the plane must have gone into the remote southern Indian Ocean.
They turned over their findings to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which was entrusted with the search because the flight’s presumed end point was within Australia’s marine jurisdiction.
All that remained was for ships to scan the seabed and collect the wreckage. Yet when the seabed was scanned in the area the scientists had calculated, the plane wasn’t there. Still optimistic, officials expanded the search area. But it wasn’t there either. Finally, they threw in the towel.
Then, to everyone’s surprise, a previously unknown private company came along and continued the search on their own dime. Still no plane. In the end, an area the size of Great Britain was scanned but the plane was nowhere to be found.
In the years that followed, the world mostly forgot about MH370. But not everyone. For the family members of the disappeared, the nightmare has never ended. They remain stuck in a shadowland, unable to grieve or to hope, as several of them compellingly describe in the recent Netflix documentary MH370: The Plane That Disappeared, which I was a part of.
Royal New Zealand Airforce P-3K2-Orion aircraft co-pilot and Squadron Leader Brett McKenzie during the initial search.
But it’s not just the family members for whom we need to solve this jumbo-sized mystery. The flying public need to know they can get on a plane and not vanish. We can’t close the books on MH370. We must begin again, from square one, and persevere until we find the answer. If science can find a Higgs boson, it can find a 70m-long airplane.
The question is where to start, and the answer comes down to the issue of why the search has failed so far. Did the official investigation just get unlucky? Or did they make a big mistake?
Many people, including search officials themselves, favour the first explanation. They point to the fact the ocean is a vast place, so it’s not unsurprising the search came up empty. In their view, the plane simply must be there somewhere, either just beyond the defined search area or perhaps in a seabed crevice that the aircraft unluckily fell into.
The families of those onboard MH370 need closure. Credit: Reuters
Those eventualities are certainly possible, but, I’d argue, quite unlikely. Yes, the ocean is big, but the Inmarsat signals that the searchers were working with had well-defined margins of error. Bigger than a GPS error, but equally quantifiable. If you do the math, it turns out to be very hard to find a spot outside the search area where the plane could have gone.
That leaves the possibility that the search officials made a mistake. That when Inmarsat carried out their initial analysis they made a fundamental error that predestined all their subsequent efforts to failure.
Such a thing has happened before. When Air France flight 447 went missing over the Atlantic in 2009, investigators laid out an underwater search area using probability calculations much like those later used for MH370. When their seabed scan came up empty, they revisited their initial assumptions and realised they had made a shaky assumption about the black boxes’ acoustic pingers. They redrew their probability maps and found the wreckage within days.
In the case of MH370, various initial assumptions could have been at fault. The Netflix documentary describes several theories, none of them proven and most of them criticised as “conspiracy theories” by people who would prefer to think that the official analysis was correct. Yet where has that official analysis got us?
The only reasonablly satisfying narrative that was ever on the table – that a suicidal pilot flew the plane straight and fast over the southern Indian Ocean until he ran out of fuel, before nose-diving into the sea – is at this point itself seriously problematic.
As they say in addiction recovery, the first step to getting better is admitting you have a problem. Now it’s clear the official analysis has failed, it’s time to start the search again from scratch. Australia should set up an all-new independent commission that can take a hard, fresh look at every piece of evidence from the case and revisit every assumption one by one.
The hour is late, but it’s not too late. Nine years on, let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work. It’s time to find that plane.
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