Nigel Cawthorne - Flight MH370: The Mystery

To the families of the missing.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

O n 22 September 2004, the first episode of the TV series Lost aired in the US. In it, a commercial airliner crashed, leaving the surviving passengers stranded on what seemed to be a deserted tropical island. The hit series ran for six seasons and was enormously popular around the world. On 23 May 2010 the last episode aired in America, but its following worldwide continued.

Then, when Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared over the South China Sea on 8 March 2014, it was only too easy to believe that this was a case of life imitating art. For over a month, the search for the vanished plane topped the news, even eclipsing the Russian invasion of the Crimea. The world wanted the plane to have landed safely at some mysterious destination and the passengers and crew to be found in one piece on the ground.

As time passed, the mystery deepened. The airwaves were filled with experts outlining their latest theories. Meanwhile, the Internet buzzed with ever more outlandish tales. Some even tried to link the disappearance of Flight MH370 to the Bermuda Triangle, a mysterious area of the North Atlantic where aircraft and ships are thought to vanish into thin air. However, Bermuda was a little too far from where the missing plane had last been seen to be credible.

Charles Berlitz, author of The Bermuda Triangle , also identified the Dragons Sea, also known as the Dragons Triangle or Formosa Triangle, where similar things happened. Off the coast of Japan, it was a little closer. However, researcher Ivan Sanderson identified 12 of these Devils graveyards around the world. They became known as Vile Vortices. One of them is off the coast of Western Australia, where those searching for Flight MH370 ended up looking.

The mystery of Flight MH370 has other resonances too. In 1937, Amelia Earhart, the first woman to make a solo flight across the Atlantic, disappeared somewhere in the middle of the Pacific while attempting a round-the-world flight. In May 2013, TIGHAR The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery claimed to have found traces of wreckage using sonar equipment off the northwest reef of Nikumaroro Island. TIGHARs executive director Ric Gillespie believes that Earhart crash-landed on the uninhabited atoll and survived for some time as a castaway.

Then there was the Marie Celeste the fictional name given by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the Mary Celeste , a ship found under full sail in the mid-Atlantic in 1872 with no one on board. None of those who had been on board were ever seen or heard of again. Numerous theories sprang up around this ghost ship. So was Flight MH370 a ghost plane with no one or, at least, no one conscious on board as it flew out over the Indian Ocean?

These days we live in a rational world, where things like this simply do not happen. Everywhere we go, we are watched by CCTV. Flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders black boxes were introduced in the 1960s after a series of crashes, so investigators can discover what happened in the cockpit in the run-up to an accident. Most people carry a mobile/cellphone. If it is switched on, it is possible to track exactly where you are. Many cellphones are equipped with GPS, so too are cars, but somehow it was possible for a 200ft (60m) long, wide-bodied jet plane, nearly six storeys high and carrying 239 people to vanish without a trace.

Callously, it has been pointed out that the loss of 239 people is barely more than the carnage on the roads of China every day. But somehow the tragedy of a plane crash touches us in a different way, although it shouldnt. Each day more than 80,000 flights take off and land around the world without incident. And, it is said, each day close to a million passengers step aboard Boeing 777s at airports worldwide. However, when we fly, we all have that fleeting moment of fear. We put ourselves in the hands of the pilots, air traffic controllers, ground crew and aircraft manufacturers and designers. They are human; they are fallible. And when things go wrong, as they sometimes do, they go wrong catastrophically.

Any one of us could be on board a plane where the pilot is seized by a suicidal urge to crash it into the sea. Or where cabin pressure is lost at 35,000ft (10,668m). Or where there is a fire in the cargo hold or washroom, or the plane suffers a total mechanical breakdown. Or one that is taken over by hijackers who want to smash it into the side of a building, killing everyone, or to ransom the passengers and crew for some political cause.

But perhaps worse than being on board is waiting at the airport for a loved one who does not arrive. The plane is lost who knows where? Then there is the endless waiting, hoping against hope that they have somehow survived; knowing in your heart of hearts that they havent.

Almost certainly, the relatives of those on Flight MH370 will never be sure what happened to their loved ones. Did they die painlessly, unaware of their fate? Or did they die in terror in a flaming wreck, crashing from the sky in the hands of a madman? Perhaps in some secret corner of their hearts, they will go on believing that their parent, child or lover survived as a castaway on some tropical paradise.

Some time has passed since Flight MH370 vanished. It is time to look back through the evidence and assess the competing theories. Perhaps we will never find out what happened to Flight MH370. But, while the mystery may endure, surely we ought to try?

Nigel Cawthorne
Bloomsbury, April 2014

CHAPTER ONE

VANISHED

E verything started ordinarily enough as Malaysia Airlines MH370 taxied toward the runway at Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA). The 227 passengers had gone through the usual stringent checks as they entered the departure lounge. They had been made to empty their pockets and remove their belts before walking through the metal detectors. Their shoes had been removed and inspected. Bottles of water and other fluids had been confiscated, and laptops opened and switched on to check that they were what they purported to be. After that the passengers were let loose in the airport shopping mall to buy some duty-free luxury, a last-minute gift or perhaps even a book or a newspaper, or have a bite to eat or something to drink while awaiting the final call. According to industry polls the facilities in Kuala Lumpur International make it the travellers third favourite airport in the world.

The two pilots were going through the pre-flight checks as the 10 cabin staff helped passengers board; the plane was a Boeing 777-200ER. Malaysia Airlines had 15 of the wide-bodied planes in a fleet of 88 aircraft. The list price is US$261.5 million (156 million) and over 1,000 of them were in service around the world. In 20 years of flying, 777s had only ever been involved in nine accidents leading to the deaths of just three passengers. It was an enviable safety record. Malaysia Airlines had only had two crashes that resulted in fatalities in over 40 years of flying one of which had been a hijacking. In 2013, it was voted Asias leading airline at the World Travel Awards, beating 11 other big name full service carriers.

MH370 was bound from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, a distance of some 2,700 miles (4,345km or 2,346 nautical miles). This was well within its maximum range of 8,885 miles (14,300km or 7,720 nautical miles). Its route would take it almost due north, over the Malay Peninsula, out over the South China Sea, then across Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos, until it crossed into Chinese airspace.

Among the passengers was a young man who made a last-minute call, telling his sister he was on board; he said he would see her at the airport in Beijing. Also on board was a Malaysian couple taking a longed-for holiday after the anguish of a miscarriage. A Chinese father had changed his flight at the last minute and was coming home a day early to take his child to the dentist. Then there were 24 artists and their families, returning from an exchange calligraphy exhibition in Kuala Lumpur, and a group of Buddhists who had flown to Kuala Lumpur to participate in a religious ceremony earlier that week.