New Delhi: The admission made by Malaysian safety investigators of their inability to explain the mystery of the missing flight MH370 has been greeted with relief and anger, even as a top aviation official stepped down from his post.
On March 7, 2014, 42 minutes after midnight in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian Airlines MH370 departed for Beijing with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board. The last recorded radio transmission was at 1.19 am MYT: “Good night Malaysian Three Seven Zero”. Three minutes later, MH370 fell off the radar, and has never been found since.
While there are no definite answers, the Malaysian investigators did conclude that the plane was being manually controlled when it changed its flight path.
MH370 – Curated tweets by thewire_in
The voluminous report finds that the recorded changes in the flight path, turning north-west towards Penang and then another turn towards the southern Indian ocean “was difficult to attribute to any specific aircraft system failures”.
“There is also no evidence to suggest that the aircraft was flown by anyone other than the designated MAS pilots. However, the Team does not exclude the possibility of intervention by a third party,” said the report.
The report was released at a press conference in Kuala Lumpur on Monday addressed by the lead investigator Kok So Chon.
While the Malaysian government has termed this as the final investigative report, Kok denied it. “This is not the final report It would be presumptuous of us to say it is. This is because there are no victims or wreckage found. There must be closure,” he said.
But relatives have been publicly unhappy that the report does not provide any “new” information and that there is still no clarity on the fate of the airplane even four years later.
Credit: Reuters
“In conclusion, the team is unable to determine the real cause for the disappearance of MH370,” said the report issued by the Malaysian International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Annex 13 Safety Investigation Team.
The Star quoted the husband of a victim as saying that there was no answers in the report.
“The plane departed from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8, 2014. It turned back and then disappeared. Where did it go and why did it disappear? We do not know… After the release of today’s report, I do not think we are any wiser,” said K.S. Narendran, the author of Life After MH370: Journeying Through a Void. Narendran’s wife of over 25 years, Chandrika Sharma, was one of the passengers on the plane.
While the report could not come to any firm conclusion about the cause and final fate of MH370, the report did raise questions about the operations of Air Traffic Control and laid to rest some theories.
On Tuesday, Azharuddin Abd Rahman, the chairman of Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia, resigned.
“While the report does not suggest that the accident is caused by the department of civil aviation then, nevertheless, there were some very apparent findings with regards to the operations of the Kuala Lumpur Air Traffic Control Centre, where it was stated that the Air Traffic Controller did not comply with certain standard operating procedures,” he said.
The lapses include the early transfer from the jurisdiction of MH370 Kuala Lumpur controllers to Vietnam’s area control centre (ACC).
When Ho Chi Minh’s ACC could not establish two-way communication with MH370, it did not inform Kuala Lumpur within five minutes as is required under international guidelines. Instead, it took about 20 minutes for Kuala Lumpur air traffic controllers to realise that MH370 could not be contacted.
In fact, the report said that one of the reasons for the delay, as deduced from the “direct line of communication transcripts”, was due to the lack of proficiency in English of the Vietnamese air traffic controllers.
“The Direct Line Coordination Communication transcripts between KL ACC and Ho Chi Minh ACC suggested that there were uncertainties on the position of the aircraft. This could come about from the level of understanding of the English language. The HCM Duty Controller also could not communicate effectively during the interviews and an interpreter was there to assist him,” said the report.
More so, the report found, Kuala Lumpur air traffic controllers were dependant on position information of the aircraft provided by MAS Flight Operations Despatch Centre instead of checking up with other ATC authorities.
According to the report, when the Kuala Lumpur controllers had asked the MAS flight operations despatch centre for the position of MH370, they were told that the plane was in Cambodian airspace. However, during the investigation, the MAS official said that his lack of training led to him presume that the position was “actually projected movement and not actual”.
It was also found that air traffic controllers in both Malaysia and Vietnam “did not initiate the various emergency phases as required then, thereby delaying the activation of the alerting search and rescue operations”.
Putting theories to bed
Media reports had claimed that one of two pilots had diverted the plane in a suicidal path.
However, the report discounted all such theories about abnormal behaviour from either captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah or his co-pilot first officer Fariq Abdul Hamid, after checking their medical, psychological, personal and financial history.
A Malaysia Airlines plane arrives at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang, Malaysia, March 2, 2016. Credit: Reuters/Olivia Harris/File Photo
A flight simulator seized from the resident of the chief pilot did not “find any data that aircraft was performing climb, attitude or heading manoeuvres, nor did they find any data that showed a similar route flown by MH370”.
The investigators had studied CCTV footage of the pilots at Kuala Lumpur airport on March 7, as well as in previous flights, but could not find any change in their behavioural pattern.
The MH370 captain had suffered a spinal injury in 2007, but was certified to have recovered from it. “There is no evidence to suggest a pattern of regular over-the-counter medication purchase by the PIC. However, the possibility that such medication may have been purchased by cash cannot be excluded,” said the report.
The family of Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah expressed relief that the report had cleared him of much the speculation.
Newspaper tabloids had also reported in 2014 that the co-pilot may have been trying to make a phone call near Penang, but there is no clarity if he had been trying to dial a number.
The Malaysian report says that a signal ‘hit’ was recorded from a phone number belonging to the co-pilot on March 8 at around 1.52 am However, the signal ‘hit’ did not record any communication except that it was in the ‘on’ mode.
Tests were carried out with different cell phones on the same area at different altitudes, but the telecom service provider cautioned that it “would be difficult to conclude and use as scientific/theoretical assumptions for the case of MH370, cautioned the Team that the tests would be difficult to conclude and use as scientific/theoretical assumptions for the case of MH370”.
Another pet theory that was ruled out was that a fire may have broken out in the cargo are due to the contamination by lithium ion batteries and mangosteen fruit.
“Extensive tests conducted on the mangosteens packed with water-soaked foam and juice extracts of mangosteens in contact with Lithium ion batteries revealed that this could only be hazardous if exposed to a certain extreme condition and over a long period of time. This was highly improbable on board MH370 which had a comparatively shorter duration of flight time and was under controlled conditions,” the report said.