Fake
solution of MH370 mystery in The Atlantic Monthly, and Refutation
Newsletter published on July 9, 2019
(1)
Summary of Fake solution to MH370, and Refutation
(2) Fake solution of MH370
mystery in The Atlantic Monthly of June 17, 2019
(3)
MH370 mystery solved
(1)
Summary of the Fake solution to MH370, and Refutation
by Peter Myers,
July 9, 2019
SUMMARY
1. Alleges Pilot
Suicide by Zaharie.
2. says "Technical analysis indicates with near
certainty that the airplane turned south. We know this from Inmarsat’s second logged
value".
3. Interviews
wreckage-hunter Blaine Gibson; the
authors assume that MH370 went down off Western Australia, & that wreckage
floated to Madagascar.
4. Blaine's plan
for wreckage he found: "would hand it to
Malaysia’s honorary consul, who would pack it up and ship it to Kuala Lumpur
for examination and storage. On August 24 of that year, the honorary consul was gunned down in his car
by an assassin"
5. Authors
comment: "But the idea that the debris is worth killing for is hard to take seriously."
6. Authors
comment: The important answers probably
don’t lie in the ocean but on land, in Malaysia. ... If Blaine Gibson wants a real adventure, he
might spend a year poking around Kuala Lumpur.
REFUTATION
1. Pilot suicide
does not make sense if MH370 flew 5 hours or more. If Zaharie wanted to suicide,
he would have done it much sooner.
2. The Atlantic
Monthly itself ran an article in 2014, featuring outside experts saying that
Inmarsat’s analysis is wrong; and that investigators could be looking in the
wrong ocean.
Why the Official
Explanation of MH370’s Demise Doesn’t Hold Up
Outside
satellite experts say investigators could be looking in the wrong
ocean.
ARI N.
SCHULMAN
MAY 8,
2014
Authorities have
treated the conclusion that the plane crashed in the ocean west of Australia as definitive,
owing to a much-vaunted mathematical
analysis of satellite signals sent by the plane. But scientists and engineers outside of
the investigation have been working
to verify that analysis, and many say that it just doesn’t hold up.
... Why
Inmarsat’s Analysis Is Probably Wrong ... Either Inmarsat’s analysis doesn’t
totally make sense, or it’s
flat-out wrong.
...
{read the
article to follow their reasoning}
3. Why was one of Blaine Gibson's associates
assassinated? And why has Blaine Gibson received death threats?
The Australian reported:
US wreck hunter Blaine Gibson claims
stalking, death threats and assassination prevent MH370 mystery being
solved
STALKING, death threats and even
assassination are preventing the mystery from ever being solved, the man who has
found the most debris from the doomed aircraft has claimed.
News Corp Australia Network
May 29, 2018 2:02pm
"For whatever reasons, some people are very
upset that I and other private citizens are finding pieces of the plane," he
told the newspaper."
If
it's just Pilot Suicide, why would anyone care about the wreckage he's found?
But if MH370 was hijacked by an Intelligence Agency,
obviously they WOULD care. Finding the wreck might lead to them being
implicated; especially if MH370 is found to have flown West.
The threats to
Blaine Gibson only make sense if the plane went down near Madagascar / Reunion,
and he was getting close to finding it.
Which would mean
that sightings in the Maldives were genuine, and that the CIA base at Diego
Garcia was behind the disappearance of MH370.
Further, that it
was hijacked by the CIA, probably to stop Freescale technology and engineering
know-how reaching China.
(2) Fake solution of MH370
mystery in The Atlantic Monthly of June 17, 2019
What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing
Airplane
Five years ago, the flight vanished into the
Indian Ocean. Officials on land know more about why than they dare to
say.
William Langewiesche
JULY 2019
Updated at 10:25 a.m. ET on June 17, 2019.
1. The Disappearance
at 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of
March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from
Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising
altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight
number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was
27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be
fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one
of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was
known by his first name, Zaharie. He
was married and had three adult children. He lived in a gated development. He
owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft
flight simulator. He flew it frequently, and often posted to online forums about
his hobby. In the cockpit, Fariq would have been deferential to him, but Zaharie was not known for being
overbearing.
In the cabin were 10 flight attendants, all
of them Malaysian. They had 227 passengers to care for, including five children.
Most of the passengers were Chinese; of the rest, 38 were Malaysian, and in
descending order the others came from Indonesia, Australia, India, France, the
United States, Iran, Ukraine, Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Russia, and
Taiwan. Up in the cockpit that night, while First Officer Fariq flew the
airplane, Captain Zaharie handled
the radios. The arrangement was standard. Zaharie’s transmissions were a bit
unusual. At 1:01 a.m. he radioed that they had leveled off at 35,000 feet—a
superfluous report in radar-surveilled airspace where the norm is to report
leaving an altitude, not arriving at one. At 1:08 the flight crossed the
Malaysian coastline and set out across the South China Sea in the direction of
Vietnam. Zaharie again reported the
plane’s level at 35,000 feet.
Eleven minutes later, as the airplane closed
in on a waypoint near the start of
Vietnamese air-traffic jurisdiction, the controller at Kuala Lumpur Center
radioed, "Malaysian three-seven-zero, contact Ho Chi Minh
one-two-zero-decimal-nine. Good night." Zaharie answered, "Good night.
Malaysian three-seven-zero." He did not read back the frequency, as he should
have, but otherwise the transmission sounded normal. It was the last the world
heard from MH370. The pilots never checked in with Ho Chi Minh or answered any
of the subsequent attempts to raise them.
Primary radar relies on simple, raw pings
off objects in the sky. Air-traffic-control systems use what is known as
secondary radar. It depends on a transponder signal that is transmitted by each
airplane and contains richer information—for instance, the airplane’s identity
and altitude—than primary radar does. Five seconds after MH370 crossed into
Vietnamese airspace, the symbol representing its transponder dropped from the
screens of Malaysian air traffic control, and 37 seconds later the entire
airplane disappeared from secondary radar. The time was 1:21 a.m., 39 minutes
after takeoff. The controller in Kuala Lumpur was dealing with other traffic
elsewhere on his screen and simply didn’t notice. When he finally did, he
assumed that the airplane was in the hands of Ho Chi Minh, somewhere out beyond
his range.
The Vietnamese controllers, meanwhile, saw
MH370 cross into their airspace and then disappear from radar. They apparently
misunderstood a formal agreement by which Ho Chi Minh was supposed to inform
Kuala Lumpur immediately if an airplane that had been handed off was more than
five minutes late checking in. They tried repeatedly to contact the aircraft, to
no avail. By the time they picked up the phone to inform Kuala Lumpur, 18
minutes had passed since MH370’s disappearance from their radar screens. What
ensued was an exercise in confusion and incompetence. Kuala Lumpur’s
Aeronautical Rescue Coordination Centre should have been notified within an hour
of the disappearance. By 2:30 a.m., it still had not been. Four more hours
elapsed before an emergency response was finally begun, at 6:32 a.m.
The mystery surrounding MH370 has been a
focus of continued investigation and a source of sometimes feverish public
speculation. At that moment, the airplane should have been landing in Beijing.
The search for it was initially concentrated in the South China Sea, between
Malaysia and Vietnam. It was an international effort by 34 ships and 28 aircraft
from seven different countries. But MH370 was nowhere near there. Within a
matter of days, primary-radar records salvaged from air-traffic-control
computers, and partially corroborated by secret Malaysian air-force data,
revealed that as soon as MH370 disappeared from secondary radar, it turned
sharply to the southwest, flew back across the Malay Peninsula, and banked
around the island of Penang. From there it flew northwest up the Strait of
Malacca and out across the Andaman Sea, where it faded beyond radar range into
obscurity. That part of the flight took more than an hour to accomplish and
suggested that this was not a standard case of a hijacking. Nor was it like an
accident or pilot-suicide scenario that anyone had encountered before. From the
start, MH370 was leading investigators in unexplored directions.
The mystery surrounding MH370 has been a
focus of continued investigation and a source of sometimes feverish public
speculation. The loss devastated families on four continents. The idea that a
sophisticated machine, with its modern instruments and redundant communications,
could simply vanish seems beyond the realm of possibility. It is hard to
permanently delete an email, and living off the grid is nearly unachievable even
when the attempt is deliberate. A Boeing 777 is meant to be electronically
accessible at all times. The disappearance of the airplane has provoked a host
of theories. Many are preposterous. All are given life by the fact that, in this
age, commercial airplanes don’t just vanish.
This one did, and more than five years later
its precise whereabouts remain unknown. Even so, a great deal about the
disappearance of MH370 has come into clearer view, and reconstructing much of
what happened that night is possible. The cockpit voice recorder and the
flight-data recorder may never be recovered, but what we still need to know is
unlikely to come from the black boxes. Instead, it will have to come from
Malaysia.
2. The Beachcomber
on the evening of the airplane’s
disappearance, a middle-aged American man named Blaine Gibson was sitting in his late mother’s
house in Carmel, California, sorting through her affairs in preparation for
selling the property. He heard the news about MH370 on CNN.
Gibson, whom I met recently in Kuala Lumpur, is a lawyer by training. He has lived in Seattle for more than 35
years but spends little time there. His father, who died decades ago, was a
World War I veteran who endured a mustard-gas attack in the trenches, received a
Silver Star for gallantry, and went on to serve as the chief justice of
California for more than 24 years. His mother was a graduate of Stanford Law
School and an ardent environmentalist.
Gibson was an only child. His mother
liked to travel internationally, and she took him with her. At the age of 7 he
decided that his life’s goal would be to visit every country in the world at
least once. Ultimately this challenged the definitions of visit and country, but
he stuck with the mission, forgoing any chance of a sustained career and
subsisting on a modest inheritance. By his own account, along the way he dabbled
in some famous mysteries—the end of the Mayan civilization in the jungles of
Guatemala and Belize, the Tunguska meteor explosion in eastern Siberia, and the
location of the Ark of the Covenant in the mountains of Ethiopia. He printed up
cards identifying himself: adventurer. explorer. truth seeker. He wore a fedora,
like Indiana Jones. When news arrived of MH370’s disappearance, he was
predisposed to pay attention.
Despite reflexive denials by Malaysian
officials, and outright obfuscation by the Malaysian air force, the truth about
the airplane’s strange flight path quickly began to emerge. It turned out that
MH370 had continued to link up intermittently with a geostationary Indian Ocean
satellite operated by Inmarsat, a
commercial vendor in London, for six hours after the airplane disappeared from
secondary radar. This meant that the airplane had not suddenly suffered some
catastrophic event. During those six hours it is presumed to have remained in
high-speed, high-altitude cruising flight. The Inmarsat linkups, some of them known as
"handshakes," were electronic blips: routine connections that amounted to the
merest whisper of communication, because the intended contents of the
system—passenger entertainment, cockpit texts, automated maintenance reports—had
been isolated or switched off. All told, there were seven linkups: two initiated
automatically by the airplane, and five others initiated automatically by the Inmarsat ground station. There were
also two satellite-phone calls; they went unanswered but provided additional
data. Associated with most of these connections were two values that Inmarsat had only recently begun to
log.
The first and more accurate of the values is
known as the burst-timing offset, or what I will call the "distance value." It
is a measure of the transmission time to and from the airplane, and therefore of
the plane’s distance from the satellite. It does not pinpoint a single location
but rather all equidistant locations—a roughly circular set of possibilities.
Given the range limits of MH370, the near-circles can be reduced to arcs. The
most important arc is the seventh and last one—defined by a final handshake tied
in complex ways to fuel exhaustion and the failure of the main engines. The
seventh arc stretches from Central Asia in the north to the vicinity of
Antarctica in the south. It was crossed by MH370 at 8:19 a.m., Kuala Lumpur
time. Calculations of likely flight paths place the airplane’s intersection with
the seventh arc—and therefore its end point—in Kazakhstan if the airplane turned
north, or in the southern Indian Ocean if it turned south.
Technical analysis indicates with near certainty that the airplane
turned south. We know this from Inmarsat’s second logged value—the
burst-frequency offset. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to this value
as the "Doppler value," because it includes, most crucially, a measure of
radio-frequency Doppler shifts associated with high-speed movement in relation
to satellite position, and is a natural part of satellite communications for
airplanes in flight. Doppler shifts have to be predicted and compensated for by
airborne systems in order for satellite communications to function. But the
compensation is not quite perfect, because satellites—particularly as they
age—do not transmit signals in precisely the way airplanes have been programmed
to expect. Their orbits may tilt slightly. They are also affected by
temperature. These imperfections leave telltale traces. Although Doppler-shift
logs had never been used before to determine the location of an airplane, Inmarsat technicians in London were
able to discern a significant distortion suggesting a turn to the south at 2:40 a.m. The turn
point was a bit north and west of Sumatra, the northernmost island of Indonesia.
It has been assumed, at some analytical risk, that the airplane then flew
straight and level for a very long while in the general direction of Antarctica,
which lay beyond its range.
After six hours, the Doppler data indicated
a steep descent—as much as five times greater than a normal descent rate. Within
a minute or two of crossing the seventh arc, the plane dived into the ocean,
possibly shedding components before impact. Judging from the electronic
evidence, this was not a controlled attempt at a water landing. The airplane
must have fractured instantly into a million pieces. But no one knew where the
impact had occurred, much less why. And no one had the slightest bit of physical
evidence to confirm that the satellite interpretations were correct.
Less than a week after the disappearance,
The Wall Street Journal published the first report about the satellite
transmissions, indicating that the airplane had most likely stayed aloft for
hours after going silent. Malaysian officials eventually admitted that the
account was true. The Malaysian regime was said to be one of the most corrupt in
the region. It was also proving itself to be furtive, fearful, and unreliable in
its investigation of the flight. Accident investigators dispatched from Europe,
Australia, and the United States were shocked by the disarray they encountered.
Because the Malaysians withheld what they knew, the initial sea searches were
concentrated in the wrong place—the South China Sea—and found no floating
debris. Had the Malaysians told the truth right away, such debris might have
been found and used to identify the airplane’s approximate location; the black
boxes might have been recovered. The underwater search for them ultimately
centered on a narrow swath of ocean thousands of miles away. But even a narrow
swath of the ocean is a big place. It took two years to find the black boxes
from Air France 447, which crashed into the Atlantic on a flight from Rio de
Janeiro to Paris in 2009—and the searchers had known exactly where to
look.
The initial search of surface waters ended
in April 2014, after nearly two months of futile efforts, and the focus shifted
to the ocean depths, where it remains today. Blaine Gibson followed the frustration at
first from a distance. He sold his mother’s house and moved to the Golden
Triangle of northern Laos, where he and a business partner set about building a
restaurant on the Mekong River. He joined a Facebook discussion group dedicated
to the loss of MH370. It was filled with speculation, but also with news that
reflected useful thinking about what could have happened to the airplane and
where the main wreckage might be found.
Although the Malaysians were nominally in
charge of the entire investigation, they lacked the means and expertise to mount
a subsea search-and-recovery effort; the Australians, as good international
citizens, took the lead. The areas of the Indian Ocean that the satellite data
pointed to—about 1,200 miles southwest of Perth—were so deep and unexplored that
the first challenge was to map the undersea topography sufficiently to allow
side-scanning sonar vehicles to be safely towed miles beneath the surface. The
ocean floor was lined with ridges in a blackness where light had never
penetrated.
Gibson began to wonder whether, for all
the strenuous underwater searching, debris from the airplane might someday
simply wash up on a beach somewhere. While visiting friends on the coast of
Cambodia, he asked whether they had stumbled on anything. They had not. Debris
couldn’t possibly have drifted to Cambodia from the southern Indian Ocean, but
until the airplane’s wreckage was found—proving that the southern Indian Ocean
was indeed its grave—Gibson was
determined to keep an open mind.
In March 2015, a one-year commemoration of
MH370’s disappearance was held in Kuala Lumpur by the passengers’ next of kin.
Uninvited, and largely unknown to them, Gibson decided to attend. Because he
had no special knowledge to offer, his arrival raised eyebrows. People don’t
know what to make of a dilettante. The commemoration took place in an outdoor
space at a shopping mall, a typical event venue for Kuala Lumpur. The purpose
was to grieve collectively, but also to maintain pressure on the government of
Malaysia to provide explanations. Hundreds of people attended, many from China.
There was a bit of music on a stage. In the background a large poster showed the
silhouette of a Boeing 777, along with the words where, who, why, when, whom,
how, and also impossible, unprecedented, vanished, and clueless. The principal
speaker was a young Malaysian woman named Grace Subathirai Nathan, whose mother
had been on the flight. Nathan is a criminal-defense lawyer specializing in
death-penalty cases, of which Malaysia has many because of draconian laws. She
had emerged as the most effective representative of the next of kin. She took to
the stage wearing an oversize T-shirt printed with a cartoon graphic of MH370
and the exhortation search on, and then proceeded to describe her mother, the
deep love she felt for her, and the difficulty of enduring her disappearance. On
occasion she quietly wept, as did some in the audience, including Gibson. Afterward, he approached Nathan
and asked whether she would accept a hug from a stranger. She did, and they
became friends.
Gibson left the commemoration determined
to help by addressing a gap he had perceived—the lack of coastal searches for
floating debris. This would be his niche. He would become MH370’s private
beachcomber. The official investigators, primarily Australian and Malaysian,
were heavily invested in their underwater search. They would have scoffed at Gibson’s ambition, just as they would
have scoffed at the prospect that on beaches hundreds of miles apart, Gibson would find pieces of the
airplane.
3. The Mother Lode
the indian ocean washes against tens of
thousands of miles of coastline, depending on how many islands you include in
your count. When Blaine Gibson started looking for debris, he
did not have a plan. He flew to Myanmar because he had been intending to go
there anyway, then went to the coast and asked some villagers where flotsam
tended to drift ashore. They directed him to several beaches, and a fisherman
took him there by boat. He found some debris, but nothing that came from an
airplane. He advised the villagers to be on the lookout, left his contact
number, and moved on. Similarly, he visited the Maldives and the islands of
Rodrigues and Mauritius without finding debris of interest. Then came July 29,
2015. About 16 months after the airplane went missing, a municipal beach-cleanup
crew on the French island of Réunion came upon a torn piece of airfoil about six
feet long that seemed to have just washed ashore. The foreman of the crew, a man
named Johnny Bègue, realized that it might have come from an airplane, but he
had no idea which one. He briefly considered making it into a memorial—setting
it on an adjacent lawn and planting some flowers around it—but instead he called
a local radio station with the news. A team of gendarmes showed up and took the
piece away. It was quickly determined to be a part of a Boeing 777, a control
surface called a flaperon that is attached to the trailing edge of the wings.
Subsequent examination of serial numbers showed that it had come from
MH370.
Here was the necessary physical evidence of
what had already been electronically surmised—that the flight had ended
violently in the Indian Ocean, albeit somewhere still unknown and thousands of
miles to the east of Réunion. The families of those aboard the airplane had to
surrender any fantasies that their loved ones might still be alive. It came as a
shock, no matter how rational and realistic they had been. Grace Nathan was
devastated. She told me that she could barely function for weeks after the
flaperon was found.
Gibson flew to Réunion and found Johnny
Bègue on his beach. Bègue was friendly. He showed Gibson where he had found the flaperon.
Gibson poked around for other debris
but without expectation, because the French government had already mounted a
follow-up search to no avail.
Flotsam takes a while to drift across the
Indian Ocean, moving from east to west at the low southern latitudes, and a
flaperon might arrive sooner than other debris because parts of it could rise
above the water and act as a sail.
A newspaper reporter in Réunion interviewed
Gibson for a story about the visit
of this independent American investigator. Gibson wore a search on T-shirt for the
occasion. He then flew to Australia, where he spoke with two
oceanographers—Charitha Pattiaratchi, of the University of Western Australia at
Perth, and David Griffin, who worked
for a government research center in Hobart and had been assigned to advise the Australian Transport Safety
Bureau, the lead agency in the search for MH370. Both men were experts on
Indian Ocean currents and winds. Griffin in particular had spent years
tracking drift buoys, and had launched an effort to model the complex drift
characteristics of the flaperon during its voyage to Réunion—the hope being to
backtrack and narrow the geographic scope of the undersea search. Gibson’s needs were easier to handle:
He wanted to know the most likely locations for floating debris to come ashore.
The answer was the northeast coast of Madagascar and, to a lesser degree, the
coast of Mozambique.
Gibson opted for Mozambique because he
had not been there before and could bag it as his 177th country. He chose a town
called Vilanculos, because it seemed safe and had nice beaches. He got there in
February 2016. As he recalls, he asked for advice from local fishermen, and was
told of a sandbank called Paluma that lay beyond a reef, where fishermen would
go to collect nets and buoys that washed in from the Indian Ocean. Gibson paid a boatman named Suleman to
take him there. They found all sorts of junk, mostly plastic. Suleman called Gibson over. Holding up a gray
triangular scrap about two feet across, he asked, "Is this 370?" The scrap had a
honeycomb structure and the stenciled words no step on one surface. Gibson’s first impression was that it
could not have come from a large airplane. To me he said, "So my mind was
telling me it’s not from the plane, but my heart was telling me it’s from the
plane. Then we had to take the boat back. And here we get into the personal
thing. Two dolphins appeared and helped lead us off that sandbank—my mother’s
spirit animal. When I saw those dolphins, I thought, This is from the
plane."
Make of that what you will, but Gibson turned out to be right. The
scrap—from a horizontal-stabilizer panel—was determined to almost certainly be
from MH370. Gibson flew to the
capital, Maputo, and handed the debris to the Australian consul. Then he flew to
Kuala Lumpur, just in time for the second-anniversary commemoration. This time
he was welcomed as a friend.
In June 2016, Gibson turned his attention to the
remote northeastern shores of Madagascar. This turned out to be the mother lode.
Gibson says he found three pieces on
the first day, and another two a few days later. The following week, on a beach
eight miles away, three more pieces were delivered to him. And so it has gone
ever since. Word has gotten around that he will pay for MH370 debris. He says he
once paid so much for a piece—$40—that an entire village went on a day-long
bender. Apparently the local rum is cheap.
A lot of debris washed up that had nothing
to do with the airplane. But of the
several dozen pieces that have been identified to date as certain or likely
or suspected to have come from
MH370, Gibson has been responsible
for the discovery of roughly a third. Some pieces are still being
investigated. Gibson’s influence has
been so large that David Griffin,
though grateful to him, has worried that the perceived debris pattern may now be
statistically skewed toward Madagascar, perhaps at the expense of points farther
north. He has given this worry a name: "The Gibson Effect."
The fact remains that, after five years, no
one has yet been able to work backwards from where the debris has washed ashore
and trace it to some point of origin in the southern Indian Ocean. In his
insistence on maintaining an open mind, Gibson still holds out the hope of
finding new debris that will explain the disappearance—charred wiring indicating
a fire, for instance, or shrapnel-peppered evidence of a missile strike—although
what is known about the flight’s final hours largely precludes such
possibilities. What Gibson’s
discovery of so many bits of debris has confirmed is that the signals analysis
was correct. The airplane flew for six
hours until the flight came suddenly to an end. There was no effort by someone
at the controls to bring the airplane down gently. It shattered. There is
still a chance, Gibson thinks, of
finding the equivalent of a message in a bottle—a note of desperation scribbled
by someone in his or her last moments on the doomed airplane. On the beaches, Gibson has found a few backpacks and a
large number of purses, all of which have been empty. The closest he has come to
finding such a note, he says, was a message written in Malay on the underside of
a baseball cap. Translated, it read, "To whom it may concern. My dear friend,
meet me at the guesthouse later."
4. The Conspiracies
three official investigations were launched
in the wake of MH370’s disappearance. The first was the largest, most rigorous,
and most expensive: the technically advanced Australian underwater-search
effort, which was focused on locating the main debris in order to retrieve the
airplane’s flight-data and cockpit voice recorders. It involved calculations of
aircraft performance, the parsing of radar and satellite records, studies of
oceanic drift, doses of statistical analysis, and the physical examination of
the East African flotsam—much of which came from Blaine Gibson. It required heavy maritime
operations in some of the world’s roughest seas. Assisting the effort was a
collection of volunteer engineers and scientists who found one another on the
internet, called themselves the Independent Group, and collaborated so
effectively that the Australians took their work into account and ended up
formally thanking them for their insights. In the annals of accident
investigation, this had never happened before. Nonetheless, after more than
three years and about $160 million, the Australian investigation closed without
success. It was picked up in 2018 by an American company called Ocean Infinity,
under contract with the Malaysian government on a "no-find, no-fee" basis. This
search used advanced underwater-surveillance vehicles and covered a new section
of the seventh arc, a section deemed most likely by the Independent Group to
bring results. After a few months, it too ended in failure.
The second official investigation belonged
to the Malaysian police, and amounted to background checks of everyone on the
airplane as well as some of their friends. It is hard to know the true extent of
the police discoveries, because the report that resulted from the investigation
stopped short of full disclosure. The report was stamped secret and withheld
even from other Malaysian investigators, but after it was leaked by someone on
the inside, its inadequacies became clear. In particular, it held back on
divulging all that was known about the captain, Zaharie. No one was surprised. The
prime minister at the time was a nasty man named Najib Razak, who was alleged to
be monumentally corrupt. The press in Malaysia was censored. Troublemakers were
being picked up and made to disappear. Officials had reason for caution. They
had careers to protect, and maybe their lives. It is obvious that decisions were
made to not pursue certain avenues that might have reflected poorly on Malaysia
Airlines or the government.
The third official investigation was the
accident inquiry, intended not to adjudicate liability but to find probable
cause, and to be conducted according to the highest global standards by an
international team. It was led by an ad hoc working group assembled by the
Malaysian government, and was a mess from its inception. The police and military
disdained it. Government ministers saw it as a risk. Foreign specialists who
were sent to assist began retreating almost as soon as they arrived. An American
expert, referring to the international aviation protocol that is supposed to
govern accident inquiries, told me, "Annex 13 is tailored for accident
investigations in confident democracies, but in countries like Malaysia, with
insecure and autocratic bureaucracies, and with airlines that are either
government-owned or seen as a matter of national prestige, it always makes for a
pretty poor fit."
A close observer of the MH370 process said,
"It became clear that the primary
objective of the Malaysians was to make the subject just go away. From the
start there was this instinctive bias against being open and transparent, not
because they were hiding some deep, dark secret, but because they did not know
where the truth really lay, and they were afraid that something might come out
that would be embarrassing. Were they covering up? Yes. They were covering up
for the unknown."
In the end the investigation produced a
495-page report in weak imitation of Annex 13 requirements. It was stuffed with
boilerplate descriptions of 777 systems that had clearly been lifted from Boeing
manuals and were of no technical value. Indeed, nothing in the report was of
technical value, since Australian publications had already fully covered the
relevant satellite information and ocean-drift analysis. The Malaysian report
was seen as hardly more than a whitewash whose only real contribution was a
frank description of the air-traffic-control failures—presumably because half of
them could be blamed on the Vietnamese, and because the Malaysian controllers
constituted the weakest local target, politically. The report was released in
July 2018, more than four years after the event. It stated that the
investigative team was unable to determine the cause of the airplane’s
disappearance.
The idea that a sophisticated machine, with
its modern instruments and redundant communications, could simply vanish seemed
beyond the realm of possibility.
Such a conclusion invites continued
speculation, even if it is unwarranted. The satellite data provide the best
evidence of the airplane’s flight path, and are hard to argue with, but people
have to have trust in numbers to accept the story they tell. All sorts of
theorists have made claims, amplified by social media, that ignore the satellite
data, and in some cases also the radar tracks, the aircraft systems, the
air-traffic-control record, the physics of flight, and the basic contours of
planetary geography. For example, a British woman who blogs under the name of
Saucy Sailoress and does Tarot readings for hire was vagabonding around southern
Asia with her husband and dogs in an oceangoing sailboat. She says that on the
night MH370 disappeared they were in the Andaman Sea, and she spotted what
looked like a cruise missile coming at her. The missile morphed into a
low-flying airplane with a well-lit cockpit, bathed in a strange orange glow and
trailing smoke. As it flew by she concluded that it was on a suicide mission
against a Chinese naval fleet farther out to sea. She did not yet know about the
disappearance of MH370, but when, a few days later, she learned of it she drew
what was to her the obvious connection. Implausible, perhaps, but she gained an
audience.
An Australian has been claiming for several
years to have found MH370 by means of Google Earth, in shallow waters and
intact; he has refused to disclose the location while he works on crowdfunding
an expedition. 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. The news had come from a crudely satirical website
that also reported a sexual assault on an American trekker and two Sherpas by a
yeti-like creature in Nepal.
A New York–based writer named Jeff Wise has
hypothesized that one of the electronic systems on board the airplane may have
been reprogrammed to provide false data—indicating a turn south into the Indian
Ocean when in fact the airplane turned north toward Kazakhstan—in order to lead
investigators astray. He calls this the "spoof" scenario, and has elaborated
extensively on it, most recently in a 2019 ebook. He proposes that the Russians
might have stolen the airplane to create a distraction from the annexation of
Crimea, then under way. An obvious weak spot in the argument is the need to
explain how, if the airplane was flown to Kazakhstan, all that wreckage ended up
in the Indian Ocean. Wise’s answer is that it was planted.
Blaine Gibson was new to social media when he
started his search, and he was in for a surprise. As he recalls, the trolls
emerged as soon as he found his first piece—the one labeled no step—and they
multiplied afterward, particularly as the beaches of Madagascar began to bear
fruit. The internet provokes emotion even in response to unremarkable events. A
catastrophe taps into something toxic. Gibson was accused of exploiting the
families and of being a fraud, a publicity hound, a drug addict, a Russian
agent, an American agent, and at the very least a dupe. He began receiving death
threats—messages on social media and phone calls to friends predicting his
demise. One message said that either he would stop looking for debris or he
would leave Madagascar in a coffin. Another warned that he would die of polonium
poisoning. There were more. He was not prepared for this, and was incapable of
shrugging it off. During the days I spent with him in Kuala Lumpur, he kept
abreast of the latest attacks with the assistance of a friend in London. He
said, "I once made the mistake of going on Twitter. Basically, these people are
cyberterrorists. And it works. It’s effective." He has been
traumatized.
In 2017, Gibson arranged a formal mechanism for
the transfer of debris: He would turn
over any new find to authorities in Madagascar, who would hand it to Malaysia’s
honorary consul, who would pack it up and ship it to Kuala Lumpur for
examination and storage. On August 24 of that year, the honorary consul was gunned down in his car
by an assassin who escaped on a motorcycle and has never been found. A
French-language news account alleged that the consul had a shady past; his
killing may have had no connection to MH370 at all. Gibson, however, has assumed that there
is a connection. A police investigation is ongoing.
By now he largely avoids disclosing his location
or travel plans, and for similar reasons avoids using email and rarely
speaks over the telephone. He likes Skype and WhatsApp for their encryption. He
frequently swaps out his SIM cards. He believes he is sometimes followed and
photographed. There is no arguing that Gibson is the only person who has gone out
looking for pieces of MH370 on his own and found debris. But the idea that
the debris is worth killing for is hard to take
seriously. It would be easier to believe if the
debris held clues to dark secrets and international intrigue. But the
evidence—much of it now out in the open—points in a different
direction.
5. The Possibilities
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. The reasons for that shutdown are not known. But one of
its effects was to temporarily sever the satellite link.
An electrical engineer in Boulder, Colorado,
named Mike Exner, who is a prominent member of the Independent Group, 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. During the
maneuver the passengers would have experienced some g-forces—that feeling of
being suddenly pressed back into the seat. 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.
The cabin occupants would have become
incapacitated within a couple of minutes, lost consciousness, and gently died
without any choking or gasping for air. An intentional depressurization would
have been an obvious way—and probably the only way—to subdue a potentially
unruly cabin in an airplane that was going to remain in flight for hours to
come. In the cabin, the effect would have gone unnoticed but for the sudden
appearance of the drop-down oxygen masks and perhaps the cabin crew’s use of the
few portable units of similar design. None of those cabin masks was intended for
more than about 15 minutes of use during emergency descents to altitudes below
13,000 feet; they would have been of no value at all cruising at 40,000 feet.
The cabin occupants would have become incapacitated within a couple of minutes,
lost consciousness, and gently died without any choking or gasping for air. The
scene would have been dimly lit by the emergency lights, with the dead belted
into their seats, their faces nestled in the worthless oxygen masks dangling on
tubes from the ceiling.
The cockpit, by contrast, was equipped with
four pressurized-oxygen masks linked to hours of supply. Whoever depressurized
the airplane would have simply had to slap one on. The airplane was moving fast.
On primary radar it appeared as an unidentified blip approaching the island of
Penang at nearly 600 miles an hour. The mainland nearby is home to Butterworth
Air Base, where a squadron of Malaysian F-18 interceptors is stationed, along
with an air-defense radar—not that anyone was paying attention. According to a
former official, before the accident report was released last summer, Malaysian
air-force officers demanded to review and edit it. In a section called
"Malaysian Military Radar," the report provides a timeline suggesting that the
air-defense radar had been actively monitored, that the military was well aware
of the identity of the aircraft, and that it purposefully "did not pursue to
intercept the aircraft since it was ‘friendly’ and did not pose any threat to
national airspace security, integrity and sovereignty." The question of course
is why, if the military knew the airplane had turned around and was flying west,
it then allowed the search to continue for days in the wrong body of water, to
the east.
For all its expensive equipment, the air
force had failed at its job and could not bring itself to admit the fact. In an
Australian television interview, the former Malaysian defense minister said, "If
you’re not going to shoot it down, what’s the point in sending [an interceptor]
up?" Well, for one thing, you could positively identify the airplane, which at
this point was just a blip on primary radar. You could also look through the
windows into the cockpit and see who was at the controls.
At 1:37 a.m., MH370’s regularly scheduled
30-minute automatic condition-reporting system failed to transmit. We now know
that the system had been isolated from any satellite transmission—something
easily done from within the cockpit—and therefore could not send out any of its
scheduled reports.
At 1:52 a.m., half an hour into the
diversion, MH370 passed just south of Penang Island, made a wide right turn, and
headed northwest up the Strait of Malacca. As the airplane turned, the first
officer’s cellphone registered with a tower below. It was a single brief
connection, during which no content was transmitted. Eleven minutes later, on
the assumption that MH370 was still over the South China Sea, a Malaysia
Airlines dispatcher sent a text message instructing the pilots to contact Ho Chi
Minh’s air-traffic-control center. The message went unanswered. All through the
Strait of Malacca, the airplane continued to be hand-flown. It is presumed that
everyone in the cabin was dead by this point. At 2:22 a.m., the Malaysian
air-force radar picked up the last blip. The airplane was 230 miles northwest of
Penang, heading northwest into the Andaman Sea and flying fast.
Three minutes later, at 2:25, the airplane’s
satellite box suddenly returned to life. It is likely that this occurred when
the full electrical system was brought back up, and that the airplane was
repressurized at the same time. When the satellite box came back on, it sent a
log-on request to Inmarsat; the
ground station responded, and the first linkup was accomplished. Unbeknownst to
anyone in the cockpit, the relevant distance and Doppler values were recorded at
the ground station, later allowing the first arc to be established. A few
minutes later a dispatcher put in a phone call to the airplane. The satellite
box accepted the link, but the call went unanswered. An associated Doppler value
showed that the airplane had just made a wide turn to the south. To
investigators, the place where this happened became known as the "final major
turn." Its location is crucial to all the efforts that have followed, but it has
never quite been pinned down. Indonesian air-defense radar should have shown it,
but the radar seems to have been turned off for the night.
MH370 was now most likely flying on
autopilot, cruising south into the night. Whoever was occupying the cockpit was
active and alive. Was this a hijacking? A hijacking is the "third party"
solution favored in the official report. It is the least painful explanation for
anyone in authority that night. It has immense problems, however. The main one
is that the cockpit door was fortified, electrically bolted, and surveilled by a
video feed that the pilots could see. Also, less than two minutes passed between
Zaharie’s casual "good night" to the
Kuala Lumpur controller and the start of the diversion, with the attendant loss
of the transponder signal. How would hijackers have known to make their move
precisely during the handoff to Vietnamese air traffic control, and then gained
access so quickly and smoothly that neither of the pilots had a chance to
transmit a distress call? It is possible of course that the hijackers were known
to the pilots—that they were invited into the cockpit—but even that does not
explain the lack of a radio transmission, particularly during the hand-flown
turn away from Beijing. Both of the control yokes had transmitter switches,
within the merest finger reach, and some signal could have been sent in the
moments before an attempted takeover. Furthermore, every one of the passengers
and cabin-crew members has been investigated and cleared of suspicion by teams
of Malaysian and Chinese investigators aided by the FBI. The quality of that
police work is open to question, but it was thorough enough to have uncovered
the identities of two Iranians who were traveling under false names with stolen
passports—seeking, however, nothing more nefarious than political asylum in
Germany. It is possible that stowaways—by definition unrecorded on the
airplane’s manifest—had hidden in the equipment bay. If so, they would have had
access to two circuit breakers that, if pulled, would have unbolted the cockpit
door. But that scenario has problems, too. The bolts click loudly when they
open—an unambiguous sound that would have been familiar to the pilots. The
hijackers would then have had to open a galley-floor hatch from below, climb a
short ladder, evade notice by the cabin crew, evade the surveillance video, and
enter the cockpit before either of the pilots transmitted a distress call. It is
unlikely that this could have happened, just as it is unlikely that a flight
attendant held hostage could have used the door keypad to allow sudden entry
without firing off a warning. Furthermore, what would the purpose be of a
hijacking? Money? Politics? Publicity? An act of war? A terrorist attack? The
intricate seven-hour profile of MH370’s deviation into oblivion fits none of
these scenarios. And no one has claimed responsibility for the act. Anonymity is
not consistent with any of these motives.
6. The Captain
this leaves us with a different sort of
event, a hijacking from within where no forced entry is required—by a pilot who
runs amok. Reasonable people may resist the idea that a pilot would murder
hundreds of innocent passengers as the collateral price of killing himself. The
definitive response is that this has happened before. In 1997, a captain working
for a Singaporean airline called SilkAir is believed to have disabled the black
boxes of a Boeing 737 and to have plunged the airplane at supersonic speeds into
a river.* In 1999, EgyptAir Flight 990 was deliberately crashed into the sea by
its co-pilot off the coast of Long Island, resulting in the loss of everyone on
board. In 2013, just months before MH370 disappeared, the captain of LAM
Mozambique Airlines Flight 470 flew his Embraer E190 twin jet from cruising
altitude into the ground, killing all 27 passengers and all six crew members.
The most recent case is the Germanwings Airbus that was deliberately crashed
into the French Alps on March 24, 2015, also causing the loss of everyone on
board. Its co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, had waited for the pilot to use the
bathroom and then locked him out. Lubitz had a record of depression and—as
investigations later discovered—had made a study of MH370’s disappearance, one
year earlier.
From the November 2001 issue: William
Langewiesche on EgyptAir 990 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. He was not a German signing on to a life in a declining industry of
budget airlines, low salaries, and even lower prestige. He was flying a glorious
Boeing 777 in a country where the national airline and its pilots are still
considered a pretty big deal.
It is the captain, Zaharie, who raises concerns. The first
warning is his portrayal in the official reports as someone beyond reproach—a
good pilot and placid family man who liked to play with a flight simulator. This
is the image promoted by Zaharie’s
family, but it is contradicted by multiple indications of trouble that too
obviously have been brushed over.
The Malaysian police report held back on
divulging what was known about the captain, Zaharie. No one was surprised. 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
official account, referring to Zaharie as the PIC, or pilot in
command, had this to say:
The PIC’s ability to handle stress at work
was reported to be good. There was no known history of apathy, anxiety, or
irritability. There were no significant changes in his lifestyle, interpersonal
conflict, or family stresses … There were no behavioral signs of social
isolation, change of habits or interest … On studying the PIC’s behavioral
pattern on the CCTV [at the airport] on the day of the flight and prior 3
flights, there were no significant behavioral changes observed. On all the CCTV
recordings the appearance was similar, i.e. well-groomed and attired. The gait,
posture, facial expressions and mannerisms were his normal characteristics. This
was either irrelevant or at odds with what was knowable about Zaharie. The truth, as I discovered
after speaking in Kuala Lumpur with people who knew him or knew about him, is
that Zaharie was often lonely and
sad. His 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,
whom he encountered on social media, and for whom he left Facebook comments that
apparently did not elicit responses. Some were shyly sexual. He mentioned in one
comment, for example, that one of the girls, who was wearing a robe in a posted
photo, looked like she had just emerged from a shower. Zaharie seems to have become somewhat
disconnected from his earlier, well-established life. He was in touch with his
children, but they were grown and gone. The detachment and solitude that can
accompany the use of social media—and Zaharie used social media a
lot—probably did not help. There is a strong suspicion among investigators in
the aviation and intelligence communities that he was clinically
depressed.
If Malaysia were a country where, in
official circles, the truth was welcome, then the police portrait of Zaharie as a healthy and happy man
would carry some weight. But Malaysia is not such a country, and the official
omission of evidence to the contrary only adds to all the other evidence that Zaharie was a troubled man.
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.
Iannello believes that Zaharie was
responsible for the diversion. Given that there was nothing technical that Zaharie could have learned by
rehearsing the act on a gamelike Microsoft consumer product, Iannello suspects
that the purpose of the simulator flight may have been to leave a bread-crumb
trail to say goodbye. Referring to the flight profile that MH370 would follow,
Iannello said of Zaharie, "It’s as
if he was simulating a simulation." Without a note of explanation, Zaharie’s reasoning is impossible to
know. But the simulator flight cannot easily be dismissed as a random
coincidence.
In Kuala Lumpur, I met with one of Zaharie’s lifelong friends, a fellow
777 captain whose name I have omitted because of possible repercussions for him.
He too believed that Zaharie was
guilty, a conclusion he had come to reluctantly. He described the mystery as a
pyramid that is broad at the base and one man wide at the top, meaning that the
inquiry might have begun with many possible explanations but ended up with a
single one. He said, "It doesn’t make sense. It’s hard to reconcile with the man
I knew. But it’s the necessary conclusion." I asked about the need Zaharie would have had to somehow deal
with his cockpit companion, First Officer Fariq Hamid. He replied, "That’s easy.
Zaharie was an examiner. All he had
to say was ‘Go check something in the cabin,’ and the guy would have been gone."
I asked about a motive. He had no idea. He said, "Zaharie’s marriage was bad. In the past
he slept with some of the flight attendants. And so what? We all do. You’re
flying all over the world with these beautiful girls in the back. But his wife
knew." He agreed that this was hardly a reason to go berserk, but thought Zaharie’s emotional state might have
been a factor.
Does the absence of all of this from the
official report— Zaharie’s travails;
the peculiar nature of the flight profile on the simulator—not to mention the
technical inadequacies of the report itself, constitute a cover-up? At this
point, we cannot say. We know some of what the investigators knew but chose not
to reveal. There is likely more that they discovered and that we do not yet
know.
Which brings us back to the demise of MH370.
It is easy to imagine Zaharie toward
the end, strapped into an ultra-comfortable seat in the cockpit, inhabiting his
cocoon in the glow of familiar instruments, knowing that there could be no
return from what he had done, and feeling no need to hurry. He would long since
have repressurized the airplane and warmed it to the right degree. There was the
hum of the living machine, the beautiful abstractions on the flatscreen
displays, the carefully considered backlighting of all the switches and circuit
breakers. There was the gentle whoosh of the air rushing by. The cockpit is the
deepest, most protective, most private sort of home. Around 7 a.m., the sun rose
over the eastern horizon, to the airplane’s left. A few minutes later it lit the
ocean far below. Had Zaharie already
died in flight? He could at some point have depressurized the airplane again and
brought his life to an end. This is disputed and far from certain. Indeed, there
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.
Either way, somewhere along the seventh arc, after the engines failed from lack
of fuel, the airplane entered a vicious spiral dive with descent rates that
ultimately may have exceeded 15,000 feet a minute. We know from that descent
rate, as well as from Blaine Gibson’s shattered debris, that the
airplane disintegrated into confetti when it hit the water.
7. The Truth
for now the official investigations have
petered out. The Australians have done what they could. The Chinese want to move
on and are censoring any news that might inflame the passions of the families.
The French are off in France, rehashing the satellite data. The Malaysians just
wish the whole subject would go away. I attended an event in the administrative
city of Putrajaya last fall, where Grace Nathan and Gibson stood in front of the cameras
with the transport minister, Anthony Loke. The minister formally accepted five
new pieces of debris collected over the summer. He was miserable to the point of
being angry. He barely spoke, and took no questions from the press. Nathan was
seething at the minister’s attitude. That night, over dinner, she insisted that
the government should not be allowed to walk away so easily. She said, "They
didn’t follow protocol. They didn’t follow procedure. I think it’s appalling.
More could have been done. As a result of the inaction of the air force—of all
of the parties involved in the first hour who didn’t follow protocol—we are
stuck like this now. Every one of them breached protocol one time, multiple
times. Every single person who had some form of responsibility at the time did
not do what he was supposed to do. To varying degrees of severity. Maybe in
isolation some might not seem so bad, but when you look at it as a whole, every
one of them contributed 100 percent to the fact that the airplane has not been
found."
And every one of them was a government
employee. Nathan had hopes that Ocean Infinity, which had recently found a
missing Argentine submarine, would return to the search, again on a no-find,
no-fee basis. The company had suggested the possibility of doing so earlier that
week. But the government of Malaysia would have to sign the contract. Because of
the political culture, Nathan worried that it might not—as so far has proved
true.
If the wreckage is ever found, it will lay
to rest all the theories that depend on ignoring the satellite data or the fact
that the airplane flew an intricate path after its initial turn away from
Beijing and then remained aloft for six more hours. No, it did not catch on fire
yet stay in the air for all that time. No, it did not become a "ghost flight"
able to navigate and switch its systems off and then back on. No, it was not
shot down after long consideration by nefarious national powers who lingered on
its tail before pulling the trigger. And no, it is not somewhere in the South
China Sea, nor is it sitting intact in some camouflaged hangar in Central Asia.
The one thing all of these explanations have in common is that they contradict
the authentic information investigators do possess.
That aside, finding the wreckage and the two
black boxes may accomplish little. The cockpit voice recorder is a self-erasing
two-hour loop, and is likely to contain only the sounds of the final alarms
going off, unless whoever was at the controls was still alive and in a mood to
provide explanations for posterity. The other black box, the flight-data
recorder, will provide information about the functioning of the airplane
throughout the entire flight, but it will not reveal any relevant system
failure, because no such failure can explain what occurred. At best it will
answer some relatively unimportant questions, such as when exactly the airplane
was depressurized and how long it remained so, or how exactly the satellite box
was powered down and then powered back up. The denizens of the internet would be
obsessed, but that is hardly an event to look forward to.
The important answers probably don’t lie in the
ocean but on land, in Malaysia. That should be the focus moving forward. Unless they are as
incompetent as the air force and air traffic control, the Malaysian police know more than they
have dared to say. The riddle may not be
deep. That is the frustration here. The answers may well lie close at hand,
but they are more difficult to retrieve than any black box. If Blaine Gibson wants a
real adventure, he might spend a year poking around Kuala Lumpur.
This article appears in the July 2019 print
edition with the headline "‘Good Night. Malaysian Three-Seven-Zero.’"
* This article originally stated that
SilkAir is an Indonesian airline.
(3)
MH370 mystery solved
by Peter Gerard Myers
July 9, 2019
At least 20 pieces of wreckage from MH370
have been found around Reunion (near Mauritius) and Madagascar.
They were found by an American lawyer,
Blaine Gibson. One of his associates was assassinated, and Blaine has since
received death threats; someone does not want him to find more. That someone, I
suggest, is whoever hijacked MH370 - most likely the CIA.
The official theory is that MH370 went down
off Western Australia, and that the pieces floated across the ocean over to
Africa.
It's much more likely that MH370 went down
in the area where pieces have been found. This would mean that MH370 headed
west, towards Diego Garcia.
To go beyond Diego Garcia, MH370 would have
needed to refuel. I suggest that it landed and refuelled at Male, Maldives about
3.20am, and departed by 5.45am; this matches the sightings at Kudahuvadhoo at
6.15am.
Passengers & cargo of interest to the
CIA would have been removed, and transferred to Diego Garcia by small plane or
boat.
MH370 would then have passed near Diego
Garcia, but would not have landed there, because it was daylight by that time,
and no hangar on Diego Garcia is big enough to hide a Boeing 777; its tail is
too high. Instead, it would have continued towards Reunion, and been dumped
there, disintegrating when it hit the water at speed.
Forget pilot suicide theories. If the
pilot(s) wanted to suicide, why fly for 5 hours or more?
A conspiracy is involved. Authorities do not
want to find MH370.
Those of us who think thus, also believe
that JFK was murdered by the CIA; and that 911 was a Mossad job. Doubters should
study Operation Northwoods: http://mailstar.net/Northwoods.html
Intelligence agencies operate as a Deep
State in defiance of elected Governments.
If this be the case with MH370, then the
official investigation does NOT want to find the plane; they insist on searching
in the wrong area.
But if we DO want to solve this case, we
need to search the ocean between Diego Garcia and Mauritius /
Madagascar.
That MH370 crashed in the vicinity of
Mauritius or Madagascar has occurred to other investigators too, but it does not
fit the Inmarsat data, so has usually been discarded.
For the same reason, eyewitness reports, by
multiple witnesses, of a plane matching MH370 in the Maldives on the day it
disappeared, were dismissed by the official bodies, and the witnesses ridiculed.
Investigators chose to spend close to $200
million on undersea searches in the wrong area, rather than spend $20,000
interviewing those witnesses in the Maldives.
Here is a map of the Maldives. At Huvadhoo
atoll, south of Male, also called Kuda Huvadhoo, there were multiple reported
sightings of MH370 on March 8, 2014: http://mailstar.net/Maldives.jpg
Blaine Gibson DID interview those
eyewitnesses, and published his account at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B35tmLZHg1FES0l4ZlFnYWd1bE0/view
.
IBM employee Philip Wood allegedly sent an
i-Phone message from Diego Garcia to his fiance Sarah Bajc, a business executive
in Beijing, saying that MH370 had been hijacked.
Blaine Gibson found many pieces of MH370
wreckage around Madagascar, Mauritius, Rodrigues Island, and the east coast of
Africa. But he was loath to accept that it might have been an Inside Job, so for
years he kept trying to fit his data with the official theory.
Researchers with a 'conspiracy' mindset are
not so deceived. Those who are aware of the evidence that JFK was killed by the
Deep State, and that 911 was an inside job, probably by Mossad with CIA
complicity, are quick to assess the disappearance of MH370 as an inside job by
an intelligence agency.
Most likely it was electronically hijacked
by the CIA, and flown by computer as a drone. Those familiar with Operation
Northwoods guess that were two identical planes, one being a decoy to keep the
search focused on the wrong area, while the real MH370 headed for the CIA base
at Diego Garcia, either directly or via the Maldives.
Read the rest of my solution to the MH370
mystery:
MH370: Stop Looking in the Wrong
Place
NB: my writing on this matter is copyright.
It may be used by others but only with attribution to me and with a link to the
above webpage. I will not turn a blind eye to plagiarists.
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