Subsequently, more pieces turned up elsewhere in the western Indian Ocean. The only question is: Was it exploited? If it was, then the plane did not fly south over the ocean, but north toward land. For search officials, this possibility was erased when a piece of aircraft debris washed ashore on Réunion Island in July of 2015. This strikes me as a major oversight, since the very same peculiar set of coincidences that made it possible to tease a signal from the Inmarsat data also make it possible that a sophisticated hijacker could have entered the plane’s electronics bay (which lies beneath an unsecured hatch at the front of the business class cabin) and altered the data fed to the Satellite Data Unit.
Neither viewed it as their job to question the soundness of their evidence. Both teams told me that they worked with the data they were given. I’ve asked both Inmarsat scientists and the Australian mathematicians who defined the search area how they knew that the satellite communications system hadn’t been tampered with. They failed to ascertain whether the data could have been tampered with. And the data? It seems to me that the scientists who defined the search area overlooked a step that even the greenest rookie of a criminal investigator would not have missed. I am convinced that the analysis is good. If the data is good, and the analysis is good, the plane should have been found. Search vessels have now scanned all of them. Based on the signal data, aircraft performance parameters, and the available autopilot modes, there is a finite range of places where the plane could plausibly have fetched up. The plane is not where the models said it would most likely be. Now, obviously, we know that that effort was doomed. Never before had a plane been declared lost, and its location subsequently deduced, on the basis of mathematics alone. Using this information, officials were able to generate a probabilistic “heat map” of where the plane most likely ended up. The subsequent seabed search began under unprecedented circumstances.
Soon after the SDU reboot, the plane turned south, flew fast and straight until in ran out of fuel, then dived into the sea. With much hard work, search officials were able to wring from the data quite a detailed picture of what must have happened. Later, Inmarsat scientists poring over the data made a remarkable discovery: due to an unusual combination of peculiarities, a signal could be teased from this data that indicated where the plane went. Over the course of the next six hours, the SDU sent seven automated signals before going silent for good.
An SDU reboot is not something that can happen accidentally, or that airline captains generally know how to do, or that indeed there would be any logical reason for anyone to carry out. But lo and behold, three minutes later a piece of equipment called the Satellite Data Unit, or SDU, rebooted and initiated a log-on with an Inmarsat communications satellite orbiting high overhead. Its hijackers could have flown it anywhere in the world without fear of discovery. In the brief gap between air-control zones, when no one was officially keeping an eye on it, the plane pulled a U-turn, crossed back through Malaysian airspace, and then vanished from military radar screens.Īt that point the plane was completely invisible. Six seconds after that it went electronically dark. Forty minutes passed the last navigational waypoint in Malaysian airspace. To sort it all out, we need to go back to why officials thought they knew where the plane went.Įarly on the morning of March 8, 2014, MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing. So why did the search come up empty? Did investigators get unlucky, and the plane happened to wind up in the unsearched 3 percent? Or did something more nefarious occur? In August, 2015, Australia’s deputy prime minister Warren Truss declared, “The experts are telling us that there is a 97% possibility that it is in area.”
The effort’s dismal conclusion stands in marked contrast to the optimism that officials displayed throughout earlier phases of the search. Having searched an area the size of Pennsylvania and three miles deep, they’ve found no trace of the plane. Yesterday, officials responsible for locating missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 announced that their two-year, $150 million search has come to an end.