The Disappearing Act

According to the first interim investigation report, which came out in May 2014, military experts viewed the radar recordings of the plane’s inexplicable movements at 8.30 am on 8 March, or seven hours after the jetliner went missing. The data was sent to the minister of defence and transport at 10.30 am, who in turn informed the prime minister.

Malaysia never explained how or why, having learnt that very first morning that the plane had radically changed its flight path by heading west, it nonetheless ordered a large-scale search operation to the east, in the South China Sea, calling on the assistance of China, Vietnam and Thailand in particular. These search missions were not officially called off until a week later. An Australian named Ethan Hunt, one of the organisers of the committee of families formed in June 2014 to raise funds for a private investigation, later said to me, ‘If they had wanted to create a diversion to give them time to do whatever they were supposed to do with the plane, they couldn’t have found any better way to do it!’

Meanwhile, a spontaneous army of volunteer detectives offered their services to the Tomnod web platform to help scrutinise millions of satellite images of the search areas. This site, a crowdsourcing project originally launched at the University of California in 2010 and now ‘retired’, called on volunteers to study satellite images and detect forest fires or refugee settlements, map typhoon damage and the effects of other natural or man-made disasters. Prior to the search for Flight MH370, Tomnod had a few thousand contributors. After the search for MH370 began, Tomnod had to shut down on 11 and 12 March due to high traffic of up to 100,000 visits per minute. It reopened again with a more powerful algorithm. More than 8 million people have scrutinised Tomnod images a total of 98 million times and have identified 650,000 objects of interest. Even Courtney Love posted a satellite image from the Tomnod site on her Facebook page, with the following comment: ‘I’m no expert but up close this does look like a plane and an oil slick.’

It looked as if the searches for the aircraft were continuing to target the wrong place, while distraction and diversion tactics took centre stage. The multinational search fleet kept chasing its own tail in the South China Sea, with no clear idea where or how to look for the plane. Meanwhile the families and the media stayed at the crisis centre established at the Sama-Sama Hotel, restless, champing at the bit, and wracking their brains to find meaning in the mass of incoherent and sometimes contradictory information served up at the daily press briefings.

With the release of the passenger manifest, the official accounts began to pussyfoot around in earnest. Malaysia Airlines issued four consecutive statements concerning the number of nationalities represented on board. The first gave a figure of 13, the second said 14, the third was up to 15 and the fourth back to 14. Admittedly, the Taiwanese were counted as Chinese, and the Italian and the Austrian listed on the manifest were in fact two Iranians travelling with stolen passports. Moreover, there were reports of four stolen passports for a while, but one of the press briefings revealed that ‘in fact there were only two’. None of these details were of much interest to someone searching for a Boeing 777 and the 239 people on board, but they filled the airwaves. And it was a great way to sow confusion.

When the passenger manifest was first released at the end of Saturday, 8 March, a spokesman for the airline announced, ‘This is the list of everyone on board. All the families have been informed.’ Shortly thereafter, however, two ‘survivors’ came forward. Luigi Maraldi, an Italian on holiday in Asia at the time, heard his name among the list of missing persons. He immediately called his family to reassure them. Fortunately, his family had not been informed of his disappearance. Luigi’s passport had been stolen six months earlier. As for Christian Kozel of Austria, he was at home when Flight MH370 went missing. He too had had his passport stolen in Thailand two years earlier.

It turned out that the stolen passports were being used by two young men from Iran, Pouria Nour Mohammad, 19, and Seyed Mohammed Rezar Delawar, 29, who had bought them in Thailand. Iran? At long last, the perfect terrorism lead that everyone had eagerly been awaiting seemed to be at hand. The two men had entered Malaysia with their Iranian passports, then changed their identities during their stay in Asia. Malaysia Airlines refused ‘for security reasons’ to explain how passengers holding forged passports had been able to buy their tickets. A flurry of contradictory information ensued. The Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation first claimed it was not sure that the two suspicious passengers had been picked up by the airport security cameras. Next, the Malaysian minister of home affairs declared that ‘they had Asian features’. But then Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, the Director General of Civil Aviation, said that ‘they did not look Asian’. When a journalist asked the director to describe the physical appearance of the two Iranians, he answered, ‘Do you know the Italian football player Balotelli?’

That evening, the conference room full of journalists indulged in the only collective burst of laughter of the entire crisis, and confronted the Director General, who had just mispronounced the name of the famous Italian striker, born of Ghanaian parents. Was he trying to say one can be Italian without looking Italian? Or did he mean the Iranians had African features? In short, were they Asian or African? Football players or terrorists? Whom to believe? What were the facts?

Interpol then announced that the two men had no known terrorist connections. It appeared that they were hoping to join their families in Europe and trying to hide their nationality by travelling via Beijing. As a matter of fact, in the midst of all this confusion, the head of the international police agency Interpol said he did not believe the disappearance of MH370 was a terrorist incident. ‘The more information we get, the more we are inclined to conclude it is not a terrorist incident,’ said Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble on Tuesday, 11 March 2014.

The story took yet another unexpected twist with the publication of the two men’s photos, extracted from the security video of the boarding process. There was nothing ‘African’ about the men’s appearance; they certainly looked Iranian. But the photos showed them as having the same lower bodies. Their torsos and faces were different, but they were both wearing identical jeans and trainers, triggering a new wave of scepticism. Had the photos been doctored? No, it was apparently ‘just a photocopying error’, for which the officials apologised. The Iranian terrorism lead fizzled out. After three days, no one believed it any more. Nonetheless, it had been the focus of the news coverage for at least 48 crucial hours.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg, BBC and many other news outlets quoted Director General Azharuddin as saying during one of the first press briefings, ‘Before the flight took off, the airline removed the baggage of five passengers who didn’t board after checking in […] There are issues about the passengers that did not fly on the aircraft.’ Five no-shows on the same flight is a lot, yet no further elaboration was given. Usually, removing the luggage of the no-show passengers in such situations would create a significant delay. But that did not occur here. Maybe these passengers only had carry-on luggage? That happens a lot with frequent flyers who want to avoid waiting to collect their luggage on arrival. But then, on 11 March, Malaysia Airlines denied the news articles that claimed five checked-in passengers had never actually boarded the aircraft. The airline did confirm, however, that four individuals who were booked onto the flight had never checked in. Their identities were not revealed, and because the individuals never came forward, this unresolved issue was merely added to the list, alongside the question mark hanging over another passenger, Zhao Qiwei, seated in 18D, whose name, according to the Chinese authorities, did not match the passport number provided.

The hours ticked by without a single clue being found by the search operation. Soon enough, however, the press would be able to feast on the latest media tidbit. On its programme A Current Affair, Australia’s Channel 9 aired an interview with a young South African woman named Jonti Roos. Sharing some corroborating photographs, she recounted how two years earlier the co-pilot of Flight MH370, Fariq Abdul Hamid, had invited her into the cockpit on a flight from Phuket to Kuala Lumpur, along with one of her girlfriends. She explained that the captain of that flight (whom she did not name) and his young co-pilot Fariq, 25 at the time, had noticed the two young women queuing to board the aircraft as they walked past them.

Phuket is the tourist capital of Thailand, known as much for its beaches as for its hostess bars. As they entered the plane, the women were invited to join the two pilots in the cockpit, where they ended up staying for the entire hour-long flight, including the take-off and landing phases. In her televised interview, Roos described the two airline pilots as smoking a lot and constantly twisting around in their seats to face the young women, who were sitting on the folding seats at the back of the cockpit. Concerned about damaging the co-pilot’s reputation, since his background was obviously coming under scrutiny with the investigation into the missing Flight MH370, Roos insisted that she never felt she was in danger at any time. She showed a few flirtatious photos in which it is hard to tell who was having the better time during this brief encounter, the pilots or the two young travellers sporting the pilots’ caps on their lovely heads. Ms Roos was still a Facebook friend of the co-pilot, who had since settled down.

Fariq was 27 years old and had logged a total of 2,763 flight hours when he boarded the plane for Beijing for his last supervised flight15 on a Boeing 777 on the night of 7 to 8 March 2014. Malaysia Airlines has a rule that a co-pilot trained on a new type of aircraft must be accompanied by a supervisor for their first five flights. The co-pilot was engaged to marry another pilot, Nadira Ramli, 26, whom he had met at the flying academy in Langkawi. Like Fariq, Nadira was from a good family, and she was employed by AirAsia, the low-cost rival of Malaysia Airlines. People had positive things to say about Fariq when asked to comment by the local press. They portrayed a conscientious and respectable young man who coached young people at five-a-side football in his spare time. He had recently given the kids T-shirts for their team. A neighbour of the family reported that the co-pilot’s father, a senior civil servant in Selangor State, was very proud of his son. His grandmother described the young man as ‘a good son’, ‘obedient’ and ‘religious’. These comments concurred with the view of Fariq as ‘a good Muslim, humble and quiet’ voiced by people at his neighbourhood mosque. On 19 February, only a few weeks before the fated flight, Fariq Abdul Hamid had been a guest on CNN’s Business Travel programme, where he came across very well. Although he had definitely flaunted safety rules on that Phuket–Kuala Lumpur flight under the responsibility of the flight’s captain, all the other aspects of his life painted a rather reassuring portrait of him.

Actually, the unfortunate episode of the Phuket–Kuala Lumpur flight made the co-pilot simply appear as a high-spirited young man who was busy enjoying life. This was quite different from the terrorist, criminal or suicidal mindset that some would have preferred to find. Nonetheless, many in the media seized upon his one mistake to condemn what they termed a ‘reckless attitude’ and ‘perhaps the first clue of guilt on the part of the crew’. There were ‘intriguing personalities in the cockpit’, ‘the co-pilot was known to break aviation rules’ and much more. The whole world was searching for an explanation and somewhere to place the blame.

On Tuesday, 11 March, Malaysia Airlines responded to this volley of criticism, saying that the company was ‘shocked’ by the claims about its employee, although it expressed doubts as to their veracity. If anything, the incident highlights the airline’s lax attitude.

After the finger had been pointed at the co-pilot, all eyes turned to Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, who became the target of an apparent smear campaign. One source said he was divorced. Another claimed that his wife and children had just moved out of the family home the day before the flight. Still others portrayed him as a political fanatic. The press quoted sources close to the investigation as saying that the pilot was allegedly distraught at the new five-year jail sentence for Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of the major opposition party, the Malaysia’s People’s Justice Party or Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR). The sentencing had taken place a few hours before the flight on 7 March 2014. Some sources reported that Zaharie had joined other supporters of Anwar to protest at the Court of Appeal in Putrajaya.16 There were also reports that his diary was blank past the date of 8 March. He was even discovered to have ‘distant relatives in Pakistan’, as though this alone would make him, if not culpable, at least suspicious.

Like his co-pilot, Zaharie’s home was searched, leading to the discovery of a flight simulator. At the press briefing on 19 March, it was revealed that data on this had recently been deleted. The FBI undertook the task of recovering the deleted files. According to the Malaysian news daily Berita Harian, of particular interest to the investigators were five of the landing strips found on the simulator, all of which were at least three kilometres long – the minimum required to land an aircraft the size of a Boeing 777. The runways were located in Malé, the capital of the Maldives and a regular destination of Malaysia Airlines; Diego Garcia, an overseas territory of the UK with a US military base where no civilian aircraft were supposed to land; and three other landing strips in India and Sri Lanka. Two weeks later, however, the American investigators declared that the simulator data contained ‘nothing incriminating’.

A potentially compromising photo of the captain was soon published, first on the front page of the local newspaper Utusan-Cosmo. In the picture, he was sitting on a sofa with a pretty young Malaysian woman and two children. The wording of the photo caption was vague, but suggested that the pilot had a second family. In Malaysia, a Muslim man may have up to four wives, provided he can afford them and follows certain rules. The same picture was picked up by several British tabloids avid for anything that could pin blame onto the captain of the missing flight.

One of the most damning testimonies came from New Zealand. Lincoln Tan, Sino-Singaporean by birth, was serving as special correspondent for The New Zealand Herald. The journalist drew on testimony from a ‘friend’ of the captain to attempt to drive another nail into his coffin. In its 26 March 2014 issue, one of Tan’s articles in The Herald cited but did not name a ‘long-time associate of the pilot’ who claimed that ‘Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s world was falling apart. He had been facing serious family problems, separation from his wife and relationship problems with another woman he was seeing.’ This anonymous informer told Tan that the pilot was ‘terribly upset’ by his wife’s departure. He said he was convinced that Zaharie could well have decided to end it all ‘by taking his plane to a part of the world he had never flown in’. The article went on to claim: ‘The fellow pilot raised questions about the captain’s state of mind. He guessed that Captain Zaharie may have considered the flight a “last joyride” – the chance to do things in a plane he had previously been able to do only on a simulator.’

Three months later, The Sunday Times reported that the Malaysian police had completed their investigation and cleared everyone on board the flight of any suspicions.17 Everyone but the pilot.

I found these suspicions surrounding Zaharie somewhat incompatible with the portrayal coming from other sources, that of a smiling grandfather, a model-building and cookery enthusiast, a handyman, a man who always enjoyed a good joke and was well liked by his flying students. True, he readily talked politics and had a sophisticated flight simulator at home. But even the ‘long-time associate’ quoted by The New Zealand Herald acknowledged that Zaharie lived for the ‘3 Fs: family, food and flying’. A year after the plane went missing, the interim report18 had collected only mundane details about him: married with three children, fracture of the second lumbar vertebra in 2007, and good resilience to stress at home and on the job. ‘No known history of apathy, anxiety or irritability’, it stated. The report also said there were ‘no significant changes in his lifestyle, interpersonal conflict or family stresses’. In fact, according to the interim report, there were ‘no behavioural signs of social isolation, change in habits or interest, self-neglect, drug or alcohol abuse of the Captain, First Officer and the cabin crew’.

Once again, who to believe, what to believe? Everyone was well aware that the pilot was the master on board. Naturally, he bore primary responsibility in the event of failure, thereby making him a prime suspect. But as far as I was concerned, I knew I would need to make up my own mind about this essential member of the cast of characters.

When this all began, the media was being dragged from wrong track to dead end; very soon the various fleets of vessels taking part in the search were starting to question the way the operations were being coordinated and managed. A foreign emissary with access to the crisis management centre set up during the early weeks described to me a scene of ‘unbelievable chaos’, with ‘Chinese and Korean officers standing around with their hands on their hips or scratching their heads, wondering what they were supposed to be doing or not doing’. On Wednesday, 12 March 2014, the exasperated Vietnamese government decided to scale back its involvement in the maritime search off its coast on the South China Sea, criticising ‘the lack of detailed information coming out of Malaysia’. That same day, China’s foreign minister echoed this sentiment: ‘For the moment there is too much confusion. It is very difficult for us to determine whether any given piece of information is accurate or not.’ Coming from a Chinese diplomat, such direct criticism was vanishingly rare and attested to the prevailing din and disorder. Indeed, in the few short days since it began, the crisis, more than any military exercise to date, had trained an unforgiving spotlight on the lack of coordination and procedures for information-sharing in this part of the world.

Besides the criticisms from the Chinese and Vietnamese authorities, Wednesday, 12 March marked another turning point. On that day, the cast of characters was joined by a new player who had been virtually unknown prior to that point: Inmarsat, a British satellite company that had been listed on the London Stock Exchange since 2005.

An executive at rival satellite telecommunications firm AsiaSat told me, ‘Inmarsat has an excellent reputation. They are known for technical excellence across the industry.’ He did point out, though, that their expertise lay in handling data transmission between commercial aircraft and the ground, rather than geolocating or tracking planes.

Despite this caveat, Inmarsat became the source of the final and official version of the jetliner’s flight path after the loss of signal. For although the ACARS stopped transmitting technical data to Malaysia Airlines once it was disabled, we soon learnt that the plane continued to passively receive silent signals, those ‘handshake pings’ we met earlier, the final communication links with MH370 after it vanished from the radar screens. But determining the jetliner’s location from these signals was a monumental task as the pings were not designed for that purpose, nor had they ever been used as such.

At Inmarsat, engineer Alan Schuster-Bruce, an alumnus of Queens’ College, Cambridge, had already worked extensively on the case of Flight AF447. Pursuant to that accident, he made it possible to take some additional measurements of these passive pings, notably their duration and frequency. ‘I was thinking we might need it one day […] might be useful, might not be useful,’ explained Schuster-Bruce in the only documentary that details Inmarsat’s crucial role in this case.19 So it was no surprise that upon hearing the BBC news report of a missing plane at 11 am on Saturday, 8 March 2014, he was the first to realise that Inmarsat quite possibly had data that would be of interest to the investigators. Inmarsat set off in a race against time. Although the handshake pings were but tiny electromagnetic signals, the scientific team felt it was worth trying to analyse them. Initially, knowing how long it took for the pings’ echoes to bounce back would allow them to determine the plane’s distance from the satellite.

I tried to picture these pings as tiny invisible dots that travelled eight times during the night of 7 to 8 March from the ground station in Perth (Western Australia) to geostationary satellite 3F-1 positioned 36,000 kilometres from earth above the equator, whence they were relayed automatically to the Boeing 777 of Flight MH370 before they turned around and travelled back through space to deliver their data to Perth, all at the speed of light. Incredible. And it was these tiny pings – the final ping more than the seven previous ones – that defined the story the world would be told about the fate of Flight MH370.

There is little point here in attempting to describe the complexity of the calculations required, especially given that satellite 3F-1, albeit ‘geostationary’, nevertheless moves constantly north and south over the equator. In other words, for each ping emitted there is a circle in the sky along which the distance between the plane and the satellite is constant. As it flew, the plane must have crossed these different circles, from the first to the seventh, each of which corresponds to the precise instant the ping was emitted. An eighth and final ping emitted at 8.19 am was different from the rest. Not only did it arrive much earlier than predicted – just a few minutes after the penultimate one timed at 8.11 am – but it contained a reboot instruction. Inmarsat’s engineers surmised that once the plane engines had run out of fuel and shut down, the communication system automatically tried to restart. There were no more signals after that one. In conclusion, the plane continued to fly for seven hours after contact was lost. That was the first monumental discovery by Inmarsat.

In London a handful of scientists thus learnt that the plane had remained in the air until 8.19 am. But which way was it going? ‘We suddenly realised that if you knew the initial position of the aircraft together with the likely speed of the plane, there was a good chance that maybe one could get a look at the track of the aircraft,’ recalled Schuster-Bruce. A telephone meeting was then set up between Inmarsat in London and Malaysia Airlines in Kuala Lumpur during which, according to Schuster-Bruce, Inmarsat tried to convince the ‘very reluctant’ airline how crucial it was to hand over this additional data.

The Malaysian authorities had good reason for their reluctance. Answering Inmarsat’s questions would be tantamount to admitting that they had been aware their plane had turned west and had been sighted north of Sumatra (off the western coast of Malaysia), even as an armada of 43 ships backed by 58 aircraft was acting on instructions to look for the plane in the South China Sea (off Malaysia’s eastern coast). The task was complex. ‘One of the concerns we had was that this could just be one big hoax that someone had played on Inmarsat […] that the aircraft went down and someone at the same time pretended to be that aircraft,’ said Schuster-Bruce.

But Inmarsat ultimately came up with a scenario compatible with the pings – its ‘two-arc theory’. The plane must have flown along an arc heading either north (from Thailand to the border between Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan), or south (from Indonesia to the middle of the Indian Ocean). This was Inmarsat’s second major discovery.