Wise - The Plane That Wasnt There: Why We Havent Found Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

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

APPENDIX
Determining the Speed of MH370

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 havent 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 cant 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 were dealing with a real physical event that actually happened. It wasnt 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 publics 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.

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 hell be speaking to next. And so, at 17:19 the following exchange took place:

LUMPUR RADAR: Malaysian Three Seven Zero contact Ho Chi Minh 120 decimal 9 Good Night.

MH370: Good Night Malaysian Three Seven Zero.

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 .

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 spota 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 planes 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 hadnt 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.