Next of kin await Malaysian government’s decision about new search for MH370

This article has been updated.

The next of kin of the passengers and crew who were on board the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 are still waiting to hear if the Malaysian government will agree to the new ‘no find, no fee’ search proposal from the American seabed exploration company Ocean Infinity.

The Cabinet has discussed the proposal and asked questions, but no decision has yet been announced.

In May this year, Ocean Infinity made a presentation about the new proposal to Malaysia’s Transport Minister, Anthony Loke, senior transport ministry officials, and representatives of other government agencies.

Loke said at that time that the matter would need to be presented to the Cabinet before an agreement was finalised and he anticipated that the process would take about three months to complete.

At the MH370 10th anniversary remembrance event in Kuala Lumpur in March this year Loke promised that he would do everything possible to gain Cabinet approval to sign a new contract with Ocean Infinity for the search for MH370 to resume as soon as possible. He said he was confident that the Cabinet would give its approval.

He said that, as transport minister, and representing the Malaysian government, he was at the MH370 remembrance event not just to express the government’s solidarity with the next of kin but “as a commitment and a promise that the search will go on”.

Loke said the Malaysian government would do everything possible to solve the mystery of MH370 – “the biggest aviation mystery in the world” – once and for all.

Flight MH370 went missing on March 8, 2014, with 239 passengers and crew on board. It was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

V.P.R. Nathan (left), whose wife, Anne Daisy, was a passenger on MH370, presents Ocean Infinity’s new proposal to Anthony Loke during the MH370 10th anniversary remembrance event in Kuala Lumpur.

Leading investigators still favour differing theories about what may have happened to MH370. There are those who think the plane was hijacked and those who consider a mechanical fault to be more likely. For example, one expert (a senior British Boeing 777 airline captain, who prefers not to be named) has suggested that MH370 crashed after there was a rupture in one of the crews’ two oxygen bottles.

He says that, if an oxygen bottle ruptured, it could be propelled into the fuselage structure, would breach the hull, and would cause decompression of the aircraft.

While some debris has been found that the Malaysian authorities say is from the missing plane, neither MH370 nor its voice and data recorders have been located.

Ocean Infinity says in its proposal that there is new credible information.

In 2018, Ocean Infinity spent more than three months searching for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean. The company scoured, and collected data from, more than 112,000 square kilometres of ocean floor, which is far in excess of the initial 25,000-square-kilometre target and almost the same area as was examined in the previous search over a period of two and a half years.

The previous Australian-led underwater search was suspended on January 17, 2017, after an area spanning 120,000 square kilometres was scoured.

In its previous search, Ocean Infinity used a leased Norwegian vessel, Seabed Constructor, and its own Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), capable of operating in depths up to 6,000 metres.

It now has new robotic vessels that can be operated completely remotely, with no crew on board.

Two of the vessels, Armada 78 04 and Armada 78 06, are moored in the port of Singapore. 

Geoffrey Thomas reports in AirlineRatings.com that Armada 78 08 is in a position 6.24286°N 109.68948°E and is stationary in the South China Sea between Vietnam and Borneo at the edge of the NW Borneo Trough.

American amateur investigator Blaine Alan Gibson, who has found, retrieved, and/or handed in 22 pieces of debris, said he supported Ocean Infinity’s proposal, but wants to see more areas of the southern Indian Ocean searched if the plane is not found.

Any search should include the area from 28.3°S to 33.2°S, which is the area suggested by oceanographer Charitha Pattiaratchi from The University of Western Australia (UWA) in Perth, Gibson says.

The indication in March this year was that Ocean Infinity would search between latitudes 33°S to 36°S, which doesn’t include all of the UWA area, but the company hasn’t announced which area it has specified in the proposal it has submitted to the Malaysian government.

A slide presented at the 10th anniversary remembrance event.

The original decision to search for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean was based on calculations by the British company Inmarsat that were based on satellite pings – or handshakes – from MH370. Inmarsat said MH370 was most likely to be found along what became known as the 7th Arc.

Gibson initially mistrusted the Inmarsat data, but he disagrees with those who allege the Inmarsat data was faked.

“The Inmarsat data was not spoofed,” Gibson told Changing Times. “There’s really no way to spoof it and there’s really no reason that anyone would think to spoof it because it wasn’t even known or contemplated that it could have been used to track the aircraft in this way …

“I think that the Inmarsat data is honest. The Inmarsat data is reliable; however, it has its limitations. It’s dependent on different assumptions as to speed, course and altitude.”

There’s a margin of error built into the Inmarsat data, Gibson says. This, he says, is mainly related to the altitude of the plane.

“If any calculation is slightly wrong and the 7th Arc is not in the right place, that could throw off a search,” Gibson said. “So that’s why we need to rely on the debris, drift analysis and oceanography, which specifies the latitude, and use the Inmarsat data to give us an indicator narrowing down the longitude to prioritise the search.

“We shouldn’t, however, rely too much on the sanctity of the Inmarsat data as it is quite simply open to interpretation. We don’t need the Inmarsat data to know that the plane crashed in a high-speed crash in the southern Indian Ocean somewhere in between about 28 degrees south and about 36 degrees south.”

Gibson and Pattiaratchi argue that any new search should not be focused too narrowly along the 7th Arc. “We hope that Ocean Infinity will take notice of the UWA drift analysis and search wider this time,” Gibson said.

The combined analyses by researchers from the UWA and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) put the possible crash site between 28.3 and 36.5 degrees south.

Blaine Gibson with debris found in June 2016 on Île Sainte-Marie, Madagascar.

Gibson says the fact that debris was found in Africa and not in Australia means the plane didn’t go down in the area of the Roaring Forties. He thinks the plane is at or near Broken Ridge – a series of mountains and canyons at the foot of a sloping plateau in the southeastern Indian Ocean.

“If the plane had crashed too far north of Broken Ridge, debris would have arrived much earlier than it did,” he said. “If it had crashed south of there it would have arrived later than it did. If the plane had crashed in the area of the Roaring Forties in the far south of the Indian Ocean, debris would have gone east, not west. If it had crashed in the northern Indian Ocean, debris would have been found there, and not crossed the equator.”

Gibson says Pattiaratchi’s drift analysis guided him in his search and led directly to the recovery of 22 debris items. Gibson found seven pieces himself and the other 15 were found by local people.

“Of those 22 pieces, 18 are in the official Annex 13 Safety Investigation Team report,” Gibson said. “Two more were delivered to Malaysia five years ago, one is still in Madagascar awaiting delivery, and the MH370 families handed in one this March.”

The two pieces of debris from Madagascar that arrived in Malaysia in 2019, another item from South Africa, and the one most recently handed in still need to be analysed, Gibson says.

Grace Subathirai Nathan, whose mother was a passenger on MH370, handing a piece of debris over to Anthony Loke in November 2018.

Gibson notes that the debris item that is still in Madagascar has been in the authorities’ possession for more than a year and the Malaysian government simply needs to pay for a courier for it to be sent to Malaysia. “Madagascar has notified Malaysia they’re ready to deliver the piece for investigation as soon as Malaysia expresses an interest and a willingness to pay for the delivery,” he said.

The piece is very significant, Gibson says. “It is clearly from MH370,” he said. “It has in it four parallel cuts that were possibly caused by the engine blades when the plane impacted the water.

“If they could identify exactly where that part is from, it might be able to indicate not only how the plane impacted the water, but if someone was flying it when it did. And that is anathema to the people who do not want MH370 found.

“It’s also anathema to the people who want to protect their pet theory about whether it was a ghost flight or whether it was piloted at the end because, to them, it’s all about proving their theory is correct. It’s not about finding the truth.”

The full safety investigation report released by the Malaysian International Civil Aviation Organisation Annex 13 Safety Investigation Team for MH370 on July 30, 2018, stated that 27 significant pieces of debris had been recovered and examined at the time it was produced.

Five more pieces of debris are mentioned in a separate Annex 13 document. It’s stated that there was no conclusive evidence that these five pieces could be from MH370, although they appeared to be parts from an aircraft.

However, it is also stated in the document that one of the pieces was likely to be from MH370 based on the material it was made of and the visible part of the placard, which confirmed that the debris was a floor panel of a Boeing aircraft.

The report states that three items of debris – a flaperon that was found on Reunion island, and is still in the possession of the French authorities, a part of the right outboard flap, and a section of the left outboard flap – have been confirmed to be from MH370.

Seven pieces of debris, including some cabin interior items, were determined to be “almost certainly” from the plane.

The report adds that eight pieces of debris are “highly likely” to be from MH370.

Gibson initially thought MH370 had crashed somewhere south of the Maldives. This was before he had found any debris.

“I actually looked for debris in the South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea, on the coast of Myanmar and in the Maldives,” he said. “I didn’t find any.”

Once debris started to be found on Reunion island, Madagascar, and the east coast of Africa, Gibson became convinced that MH370 had not crashed south of the Maldives.

Battling misinformation

Gibson says he cannot grasp why other people remain fixated on theories that he says simply don’t stand up to scrutiny.

“Why can’t Mike Exner, Don Thompson, and Victor Iannello simply realise that the plane is not exactly where they say it is. Aside from a few small gaps worth scanning, that area was searched, some of it twice, and the plane wasn’t there.”

“Why can’t Jeff Wise just realise that that MH370 didn’t land in Kazakhstan and stay there to be cut up.

“Why can’t Florence de Changy realise that MH370 was not shot down in the South China Sea. All the evidence, the radar, the co-pilot’s cellphone ping, the Inmarsat data, and the debris disprove that.

“Why can’t Byron Bailey and Larry Vance and Simon Hardy realise that it’s not a controlled, intact ditching. The debris I and others found proved that it was high-speed crash, which could have been a ghost plane in a death spiral.”

Bailey, who is a pilot and aviation consultant, and Hardy, who is also a pilot and worked with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau during the search in 2015 for MH370, are among those who have promoted the theory that the pilot of MH370, Captain Zaharie Shah, committed a premeditated mass murder/suicide. The Australian current affairs programme ‘60 Minutes’ has also pushed this theory.

There is no evidence to prove that Zaharie purposely brought down MH370 and the full report released in July 2018 does not apportion blame.

Lead investigator Kok Soo Chon said when releasing the report that the team was not of the opinion that Captain Zaharie caused the plane’s disappearance.

The investigation team reported that there was no evidence to suggest that MH370 was flown by anyone other than the designated Malaysia Airlines pilots, but Kok Soo Chon said the team could not rule out the possibility that there was “unlawful interference” by a third party.

“But at the same time we cannot deny the fact that there was an air turn back. We cannot deny the fact that, as we have analysed, the systems were manually turned off, with intent or otherwise,” he added.

There are people who don’t want MH370 to be found, Gibson says, and they are behind the ongoing disinformation campaign.

Gibson blames this disinformation campaign for causing delays in beginning a new search.

“There is very little chance of an Ocean Infinity search happening this year, but hopefully next year,” he said. 

Gibson says some people don’t want MH370 found at all, some don’t want it found unless it went down exactly where and how they say it did, some want to exploit the mystery by pushing their political agendas, and some just want to profit from the mysterious tragedy.

“People who make and spread ridiculous claims that MH370 ‘could be anywhere’, even in another ocean or hemisphere, or on land, are hurting efforts to convince Malaysia to sign a contract to renew the search,” he told Changing Times.

“The debris is all that is left of the plane. The people and interests that don’t want the plane found don’t want the debris found and attack the people who are finding and delivering debris. It’s that simple.

“There is definitely a very strong conspiracy to cover up what happened to MH370, to prevent the plane from being found, and to prevent the truth from being known.”

Gibson has for a long time had to deal with extremely troubling threats against himself and his friends. “Some people are threatening me because the debris that I have found and collected from local people disproves their pet theories and pet crash locations; some of them because they don’t want the plane found at all,” he said.

“I think what the people who do not want the plane found are most afraid of is not that I’m going to find some piece of debris that helps solve the mystery, because it really can’t. What they are afraid of is that I would find some personal effect that could solve this mystery: that message in a bottle, that cellphone.”

Netflix documentary

The Netflix three-part series ‘MH370: The Plane That Disappeared’, which was released in March last year and is narrated by Jeff Wise, is awash with disinformation. It features Wise’s theory that MH370 was hijacked by Russians who flew the plane from its Main Equipment Centre (MEC).

In a completely made-up enactment, Wise says the Russian agent in the electronics bay turned MH370 towards the northwest and deliberately altered the Inmarsat data.

“Now, if anyone looks at the trail of digital breadcrumbs that the plane’s about to leave, they’ll misinterpret the signal as meaning that the plane has gone south, when in fact, the plane is actually going north,” he says.

After the dramatic, fictional enactment, Wise is shown in an interview on CNN saying that the theory that MH370 went to Kazakhstan was not something he believed; it was just a hypothesis that he pieced together.

Former crisis director for Malaysia Airlines Fuad Sharuji says during the Netflix documentary: “Anyone who gets into the hatch can disable the transponder and disable the communication systems, but it is impossible to fly the aircraft from the avionics compartment.”

Writing on AirlineRatings.com, Geoffrey Thomas quotes investigator Richard Godfrey as saying that it is not possible to fly the aircraft from the Main Equipment Centre.

“You cannot plug into the Airplane Information Management System (AIMS) computer in the MEC and fly the aircraft remotely. AIMS uses four ARINC 629 buses to transfer information. There are 2 cabinets on each plane (left and right). The ARINC 629 bus operates as a multiple-source, multiple-sink system; each terminal can transmit data to, and receive data from, every other terminal on the data bus. This makes it impossible to connect to any part of the system and take over the entire operation of the aircraft remotely,” Thomas quotes Godfrey as saying.

Thomas also quotes Godfrey as saying that Wise’s theory that items of debris were flown intact to Kazakhstan, then subsequently damaged to simulate a crash, then exposed to marine life for months and finally planted in 27 locations in seven countries for 14 different people to find, is “preposterous nonsense”.

In a blog post entitled ‘Netflix on MH370: The Truth That Disappeared’, K.S. Narendran, whose wife, Chandrika, was on board the plane when it disappeared, says it soon became apparent that the Netflix series was about drama and entertainment, disguised as a documentary.

Narendran writes: “Netflix’s latest documentary on MH370, MH370: The Plane That Disappeared, was a difficult watch – it wasn’t just pointless, it was plain irresponsible. If honest, they should have admitted at the outset that it is a fictional drama inspired by real life events, featuring real people playing themselves. Viewers should be advised to not treat it as a serious documentary seeking to inform or educate the viewer. It is a slick production – and we know Netflix doesn’t stinge – about which we can say no more than that it is a lavish exercise in gaslighting.”

He adds: “Wise put forward his bizarre scenario of the plane being spirited away to Kazakhstan some years ago only to be ridiculed and discredited. Yet, he has a free run for nearly a whole episode to outline his plot, only to be demolished by the representative from Inmarsat, the satellite communications company.”

Gibson said: “In one Netflix scenario, dead passengers are baselessly and cruelly falsely accused of hijacking the plane and killing everyone else on board. A fantasy reenactment is then presented as fact.

“Netflix presents viewers with a false choice of one possible, yet unproven theory (pilot mass murder/suicide), and two fantasies (a Kazakhstan landing and a South China Sea shootdown) that are disproven by all the science and evidence there is.

“The Netflix series is not a documentary. At best, it’s a sensationalist show and, at worst, it’s a propaganda hit piece on science and the truth.”

Wise’s theories are promoted by the administrators of certain Facebook groups in which commentators who raise doubts about his credibility and trustworthiness are not welcome.

While some of the Facebook groups about MH370 are useful sources of credible information, others are sources of disinformation that give airspace to inaccurate, misleading news reports.

The flaperon

As of October 12, Wise had raised US$ 2,700 pledged of his US$ 50,000 goal for ‘The Finding MH370 Project’ in which he wants to do an experiment he thinks will show that the flaperon recovered on Reunion island in July 2015 could not be from MH370.

He plans to release a Boeing 777 flaperon, cut down to match the damaged flaperon recovered on Reunion island, and aims to do this on the 11th anniversary of MH370’s disappearance near to where MH370 is thought to have crashed.

He says the barnacles on the flaperon recovered on Reunion island were too small (too young) for it to be from MH370. Also, he says, the flaperon was completely covered in barnacles. “Barnacles only grow underwater, so at first they thought that the piece must have floated completely submerged, but when we put it in a tank, it floated quite high, with about 1/3 sticking out,” Wise said in his video about the project.

He says in his Kickstarter crowdfunding appeal that the flaperon he releases will be fitted with sensors and telemetry. “Cameras will monitor the growth of barnacles on the surface, and a radio transmitter will relay its location and the temperature of the water. After 15 months, the flaperon will be recovered and the barnacle population examined,” he says.

Gibson says the planned experiment will not provide answers about the fate of MH370. “Unfortunately the barnacles say almost nothing about where MH370 crashed,” he said. “People pushing their pet locations and theories incorrectly claim that the barnacles say whatever they want them to say.”

The flaperon found on Reunion island in July 2015.

French investigative journalist Florence de Changy, whose book, ‘The Disappearing Act: The Impossible Case of MH370’, was published in hardback in February 2021 and (updated) in paperback in 2022,  is also convinced that the flaperon that is in the possession of the French authorities did not come from MH370. It would never have floated all the way to Reunion island, she says.

“If the plane crashed where they say it crashed, on the 7th Arc, there is no way a piece of debris would have floated for 5,000 or 4,000 kilometres and ended up on a beach 15 months later. That’s simply impossible,” she said.

De Changy further notes that there is no identification plate on the flaperon. “Identification plates are either riveted or glued on with a special mastic so that they don’t come off easily. The only instance in which an identification plate is taken off a piece of an aircraft is when a plane is decommissioned.

“This major matter of the missing plate has never been addressed or explained. It should have been a major red flag leading to questions about the real provenance of the flaperon.”

De Changy was enraged when she saw debris on display at the MH370 10th anniversary remembrance event. Her extremely angry outbursts at the sight of the debris shocked attendees who witnessed it.

Several items of debris that have been declared to be confirmed pieces from MH370, or “highly likely” or “almost certain” to be from the plane, were on display.

De Changy, who also featured in the Netflix documentary about MH370, says there is no tangible foundation for the official narrative about what happened to the plane: that it made a turn back across Malaysia and then flew on for more than seven hours until it finally crashed in the southern Indian Ocean. There is simply no proof to back up this version of events, De Changy says.

Gibson says that the flaperon and other recovered debris arrived where and when the UWA oceanographic drift analysis predicted it would from a simulation location at Broken Ridge.

He says the flaperon was confirmed to be from MH370 by a matching serial number on an internal component. He says the main identification plate was not riveted on. It was only glued on and likely came off in the crash or during the year-and-a-half journey in salt water, he says.

MH370’s route: questions still abound

According to Gibson, there is no doubt that MH370 made a turn-back at Waypoint IGARI and headed back towards Malaysia on a bearing towards Penang.

It’s been said that, after Penang, MH370 flew up the Malacca Strait on a general north-north westerly heading. However, according to two pilots who prefer not to be named, the Malaysian safety investigation team’s full report clearly indicates that MH370 took a random path; that it was turning at random. Furthermore, the pilots say, the altitude was fluctuating as well, between 24,500 feet and 44,700/44,800 feet.

“The fluctuation in heading and altitude clearly indicates that no one was in control of the aircraft,” one of the pilots told Changing Times. “If it was being flown in a controlled manner, there would have been more consistency in altitude and heading.”

The full report states that the plane’s heading varied from northwest to northeast in a random manner. This has led some pilots who have studied the report to believe that the aircraft was flying with its autopilot off when it made the turn back from IGARI over the Malaysian peninsula towards Penang, that the pilots were incapacitated, that the autopilot remained off and that the plane was flying randomly, as suggested by the heading and altitude specified in the full report.

Early on in the investigation into MH370’s disappearance it was revealed that the mobile phone of the co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, had connected from the plane to a signal tower on land near Penang. This was about 30 minutes after the time when the Malaysian authorities believe the plane made a sharp turn westward. (There is no evidence that the co-pilot had actually tried to make a call.)

The bearing towards Penang is also a bearing towards the island of Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that is owned by the British and is home to a major US military base.

It appears, Gibson says, that, after a turn at Penang northwest up the Strait of Malacca, MH370 may then have made a short turn towards Diego Garcia.

“I’m sure that it then made another turn south,” he said. “I believe that, at that point, somebody was flying the aircraft. I don’t think it was a ghost plane at that stage.”

Was someone trying to take MH370 to Diego Garcia, but somehow got diverted and the plane ended up in the southern Indian Ocean? Had there been a struggle for control of the plane?

Former director of the French airline Proteus Marc Dugain suggested back in 2014 that US military personnel may have shot down MH370 over the Indian Ocean to prevent it being used to attack the Diego Garcia base.

Dugain also speculated that the plane may have been forced to divert from its flight path because of remote hacking or an on-board fire.

If MH370 had crashed around Diego Garcia, Gibson says, there would have been lots of debris in the Chagos Archipelago and whatever reached the Mascarene islands and southern Africa would have reached there much earlier than it did.

The cargo

Many of the questions raised about MH370 relate to the cargo it was carrying. There are numerous hypotheses about this, including the theory that the plane was carrying gold bullion stolen from Ukraine.

De Changy, who is based in Hong Kong and covers the Asia-Pacific region for Le Monde, notes in her book (referring to the Malaysian safety investigation team’s full report) that MH370 was carrying 2.5 tonnes of electronic cargo that was not X-rayed before being taken on board and was taken to the airport under escort.

She hypothesises that this suspicious cargo may have triggered a “cargo confiscation operation” that the chief pilot on MH370, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, may have refused to execute.

There is a reference in the full report by the Malaysian safety investigation team about the theory that batteries and mangosteen fruits on board MH370 could have mixed during the flight, creating a reaction that could cause an explosion or fire in the plane, causing it to lose oxygen or crash.

“There were concerns that the mangosteen extracts could have got into contact with the batteries and produced hazardous fumes or in a worst-case scenario caused a short circuit and/or fire,” the report states.

The report said that, given the comparatively short flight duration and the controlled conditions, the notion that the two products got into contact was “highly improbable”.

It said the items were in a cargo compartment next to each other, but the batteries and fruit were wrapped up and in separate containers.

“Even though they were placed next to each other in the aircraft … the mangosteens were packed in plastic crates and placed in Unit Load Device (ULD) containers,” the report stated. “The consignment was also wrapped in a plastic sheet to make it waterproof to a certain extent.”

After carrying out tests, Malaysia’s Science and Technology Research Institute for Defence was “convinced that the two items tested could not be the cause in the disappearance of MH370”, the report added.

Monitoring radio signals

One of the recent developments in the investigation into the disappearance of MH370 is the analysis of data by Richard Godfrey using the Global Detection and Tracking of Any Aircraft Anywhere (GDTAAA) software based on WSPR data, which is publicly available on WSPRnet.

Some investigators find Godfrey’s analysis compelling, but others are more sceptical. Several professional pilots have asserted that WSPR data cannot provide information that is useful for aircraft tracking.

Godfrey monitored radio signals sent out by radio amateurs around the world. Hundreds of these signals are sent out every two minutes.

He explains that, when the radio signals cross the path of an aircraft, it is possible to detect changes in the signal level and in the frequency.

Godfrey originally placed the location of MH370 at about 33.2 degrees south, 95.3 degrees east in the middle of the southern Indian Ocean, about 2,000 kilometres west of Perth, Australia, but, on September 8, 2022, he published a new paper in which he presented new calculations that he says indicate that MH370 took a different route to the one he suggested earlier.

He now says the crash location is further north than previously thought and is urging Ocean Infinity to search the possible crash location defined in his most recent research: within a radius of 30 km centred on 29.128°S 99.934°E.

One of the co-authors of several papers written about WSPR is Simon Maskell, who is a professor of autonomous systems with the University of Liverpool’s School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science.

In a paper published on February 4 this year, Godfrey, Maskell, and Hannes Coetzee state in their conclusion that WSPRnet radio signals can reliably detect and track aircraft over long distances to the other side of the globe.

“I strongly believe that a synergistic mix of statistics, data science and High Performance Computing (HPC) can be used to help find MH370,” Maskell said.

Godfrey is one of numerous people who have made the unsupported allegation that Captain Zaharie Shah purposely brought down MH370 and was responsible for the deaths of those on board.

However, in September 2022, he co-authored a report in which he said Captain Zaharie may have been disoriented, possibly because of hypoxia.

Godfrey said: “We have presented evidence [in the new report] that there was an active pilot until the end of the MH370 flight. We have also presented evidence that the pilot may have been disoriented, which can be caused by hypoxia.

He added: “I am on the record publicly as stating that my private opinion is that the pilot was Captain Zaharie Shah. I have always made it clear that this is based only on circumstantial evidence and is not proven

“This is not my public opinion, where I have always talked about the pilot without naming anyone.

“I am also on the record publicly as stating that the circumstantial evidence against Captain Zaharie Shah would not hold up in a court of law.

“To be clear the home flight simulator of Captain Zaharie Shah shows an accelerated simulation to fuel exhaustion in the southern Indian Ocean based on the fuel available for a flight to Jeddah and not to Beijing. The simulation is not a flight route, but only a fuel check.

“This cannot be used as evidence in court of a planned flight to fuel exhaustion in the southern Indian Ocean. This is not evidence of a premeditated hijacking and murder suicide. This is like someone being handed a smoking gun and then being accused of being the murderer.

“To solve the mystery of the disappearance of MH370 we need to find the aircraft and recover the flight data recorder and other evidence from the wreckage.”

Acoustic experiments

Another development in the investigation into MH370’s disappearance is the study of acoustic signals to see if they might have come from the MH370.

Usama Kadri, who is an interdisciplinary theoretician, applied mathematician, and aerospace engineer, affiliated with Cardiff University, has been analysing signals captured on underwater microphones (hydrophones) and detected at the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization’s (CTBTO) hydroacoustic monitoring stations off Cape Leeuwin in Australia and on Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean.

He says field experiments in the southern Indian Ocean could help bring investigators closer to the truth of what happened to the plane.

Kadri recommends conducting experiments involving controlled explosions or airguns along the 7th Arc while monitoring the signals received at surrounding hydroacoustic stations.

Significant media attention has focused on Kadri’s discovery of a signal detected at the Cape Leeuwin station. The signal in question was generated on the day of MH370’s disappearance within a few minutes of the last satellite ping the British company Inmarsat says was received from the plane along what is known as the 7th Arc. The signal was not detected at Diego Garcia.

Kadri doesn’t share the excitement exhibited in mainstream media outlets about what he calls ‘Signal 306’. He is eager to emphasise that the signal in question has not been identified as coming from MH370. He says the signal, which was relatively weak, came from the direction of the 7th Arc and coincides, time-wise, with a signal coming from the Antarctic.

Alec Duncan from Curtin University in Perth, Australia, cautions that further analysis should be carried out before taking any action based on ‘Signal 306’. He says it’s possible that, in the analysis of this detection, Kadri’s software may have misinterpreted some of the residual energy from strong signals coming from the south at the same time (most likely Antarctic ice-cracking events) and arriving at the Cape Leeuwin station at the same time as ‘Signal 306’.

In his analyses, Duncan has not identified any signals coming from the direction of the 7th Arc. All the signals he has identified in the time window in question have originated in the south and were almost certainly ice-cracking events.

He told Changing Times: “There are relatively few places in the Indian Ocean where an aircraft could have crashed that would have resulted in a detectable sound being received at the Cape Leeuwin hydroacoustic station. 

“This is because most of the sound from a surface impact initially travels steeply downwards, which prevents it from getting trapped in the deep sound channel and travelling long distances. 

“For the sound to get into the deep sound channel the impact would have to occur in water that wasn't too deep (very roughly, not more than 3,000 metres) and where the seafloor was sloping downward towards the receiver.”

Duncan agrees with Kadri that it would be a good idea to conduct calibration explosions along the 7th Arc.

The differing viewpoints about acoustic signals is something that Jeff Wise has leapt upon, with the apparent intention of fostering dissent and promoting his own theories.

Wise seems eager to discredit Kadri’s work. He interviewed David Dall’Osto, who is a research scientist and engineer at the University of Washington’s applied physics laboratory, and entitled the podcast ‘Fighting Over Noise’.

He posed questions that were clearly aimed at pushing Dall’Osto to agree with him that Kadri is wrong – leading questions such as “… so what he’s doing is he’s spun a whole paper out of a miscalculation of an event that’s completely irrelevant. Do you think that’s accurate?” and “… you feel that this paper’s so problematic that it should be maybe retracted”.

There isn’t a “fight over noise”, in fact. Duncan and Kadri have had what Duncan describes as “very fruitful discussions” about their findings and viewpoints and Dall’Osto and Duncan have co-authored two papers that they presented at an Acoustical Society of America conference in Sydney.

Dall’Osto said during the podcast, which was broadcast in July this year, that, if MH370 was acoustically detected, it was a high-speed impact.

Gibson says it would be worthwhile to conduct the experiments that Kadri suggests, but he considers that the discussion about acoustics is a red herring, along with the debate about barnacles, and the discussion about flight coordinates found on Captain Zaharie’s home simulator.

“The simulator ‘route’ wasn’t really a route,” Gibson said. “It was just a collection of ten coordinates that may or may not have been from one session. They probably were, but it wasn’t a route that was actually flown.

“The barnacles, the acoustics, and the simulator are the three red herrings that a lot of people hope will show where MH370 crashed, but they really don’t.

“All we really have is the debris and the drift analysis. We have the Inmarsat data, but it is open to interpretation, and we have the WSPR data, but it is debated by experts whether it can track MH370 at all. But we should give it a chance and see if it works. That small area that Godfrey suggests should be searched.”

Consul’s murder

One element of the MH370 story that adds another troubling layer to the mystery is the murder of the honorary Malaysian consul in Madagascar, Houssenaly Zahid Raza, on the evening of August 24, 2017.

When he was killed, he had just been finalising arrangements for the delivery to Malaysia of two pieces of debris.

Zahid Raza was shot by a hitman on a motorbike. At about noon the next day an article appeared in the press in Madagascar claiming that the killing was retribution for a kidnapping that the consul had allegedly been involved in nine years earlier.

Gibson points out how strange it is that such an article would appear so quickly.

“That story was apparently investigated, written and approved by the censors and was already in the press within 18 hours, which would be absolutely impossible in Madagascar,” he said. “Usually a story would take three days to get past the censors.

“There is no evidence that the consul was involved in a kidnapping or in any criminal activities that could put his life in danger.”

Blaine Gibson and Zahid Raza, photographed in December 2016.

This article is also available on my Changing Times website.