Twists and turns on a trail to nowhere

MARK FOX welcomes a new book taking a fresh approach to the ongoing mystery of Flight MH370

The disappearance of flight MH370 on 8 March 2014 ( FT345:12, 352:8) constitutes one of the quintessential mysteries of our age. Fundamental questions remain as to the reasons for the disappearance of the doomed flight and the location of its final resting place. Seven years on, despite millions of words of analysis and explanation, the enigma of MH370 remains unrivalled in the annals of commercial aviation.

Odd, then, that until recently no attempt had been made to pull all of the information together into one overarching study, despite the publication of over 100 books exploring the fate of the doomed flight. The publication of Florence De Changy’s The Disappearing Act: The Impossible Case of MH370 might change that. De Changy joins a growing number of MH370 researchers – ‘MHists’ as she calls them – in suggesting an alternative rendering of accepted events: that the plane did not turn back over Malaysia before heading south into the Southern Indian Ocean but, instead, carried on along its intended flight path before meeting with a tragic end somewhere over the South China Sea.

It’s hard to exaggerate what a deviation this is from the official narrative. Up until now, the accepted view has been that somebody – the pilot, perhaps – made a hard-left turn at waypoint IGARI, at the exact hand-over point from Malaysian toVietnamese Air Traffic Control (ATC), before flying back across the Malaysian peninsula, around the tip of Indonesia, and south into the vast nothingness of the Southern Indian Ocean. De

Changy’s scenario accepts none of this. For her, and thanks in part to what we know from ATC exchanges subsequent to IGARI, MH370 simply flew on over the South China Sea, reaching the next waypoint before being shot down: far from deviating from its original heading, MH370 simply kept flying north-east until its flight was abruptly and tragically terminated.

She pulls together a lot of data in support of this view, examining everything from radar records and ATC transcripts to the discovery of alleged ‘wreckage’ at Reunion Island. Strangely, though, she almost entirely neglects to examine the ‘smoking gun’ that might, ironically, clinch her case: the reboot of the satellite communication system (SATCOM) at 18:24:27 UTC which gave rise to the alleged satellite data ‘pings’ crucial to the official narrative of MH370’s final resting place being in the Southern Indian Ocean. Given the centrality of this curious reboot to the narrative she rejects, it is hard to understand why De Changy pays it such scant attention. Certainly, the calculations to which it gave rise turned out to be complex – but not that complex; and any interested layperson can understand the implications, which have been in the public domain for a while. On Monday 30 July 2018, the final report into the disappearance of flight MH370 was published, running to 1,500 pages. However, it failed to explain why the SATCOM rebooted in-flight just before 18.25 after an interruption that could have lasted for anything from

22 to 78 minutes. This cannot be stressed enough: the SATCOM question remains key (see my letter, FT371:74-75). Even the July 2018 report described it as ‘abnormal.’ In fact, rebooting in-flight is highly unusual; much rests on it, given that without this restoration of power there would have been no ensuing sequence of ‘handshakes’ with an orbiting satellite owned by British company INMARSAT, allowing investigators to determine that the aircraft had reached a terminus somewhere in the Southern Indian Ocean.

What, then, of this curious reboot? In addition to its sheer inexplicability, other oddities surround it. Aviation journalist Jeff Wise, long interested in the case, has drawn attention to its timing. After turning back at waypoint IGARI, the plane was allegedly tracked by Malaysian radar until it disappeared from view, heading to the northwest, at 18:22:12 UTC. The reboot occurred at 18:24:27 when power was mysteriously and inexplicably restored to the SATCOM. Coincidence or something else? After all, there is no way that anybody piloting the plane could have been aware in real time of when it had passed out of radar coverage. De Changy argues in The Disappearing Act that the radar data supplied by the Malaysians is itself spurious and that subsequent ATC exchanges completely refute the notion of a turn-back at IGARI. Given all this, it’s not difficult to see how a ‘false trail’ could have been planted: first by a false radar plot back across Malaysian airspace, then by a false ‘breadcrumb trail’ of INMARSAT data ‘pings’ leading the search for the plane on a futile goose chase into the middle of nowhere.

Lest this sounds like conspiracy theory, four other key factors are worth considering. Firstly, the fact that the extensive underwater searches have so far failed to turn up a single trace of wreckage, to the extent that search efforts have effectively been abandoned. Secondly, the fact that no other information exists with which to corroborate the INMARSAT data ‘trail’. Thirdly, the curious fact that the initial log-on signal after the reboot generated a signal radically different from the subsequent ones (which nobody has been able to explain). And fourthly, the fact that INMARSAT engineers and executives themselves had at least considered the possibility of a ‘spoof’ when first analysing their ‘ping data’.

This latter point is worth noting. In a BBC interview in the aftermath of the disappearance, INMARSAT engineer Alan Schuster-Bruce admitted that one of the first concerns they’d had was that the data trail “could just be a big hoax that someone… played on INMARSAT.” INMARSAT’s VP for aviation, David Coiley, asserted that the company was “confident that this data is correct assuming that there is no way this data has been spoofed.” Despite later company comments rowing back from the ‘spoof’ possibility, it is worth noting that researchers unattached to INMARSAT but with considerable knowledge of the investigation have urged caution. In this regard, Jeff Wise cites oceanographer David Gallo, who led the effort to locate the wreckage of Air France 447 in 2008: “I never accepted the [MH370] satellite data from day one… I never thought I’d say this… I think there is a good chance that MH370 never came south at all. Let’s put it this way, I don’t accept the evidence that the plane came south.”

Neither does Florence De Changy, whose book looks set to reignite the debate, among MHists at least. Meanwhile, the wider discussions rumble on, with many – such as Independent Group memberVictor Iannello – continuing to assert the veracity of the data and producing refinements of analysis which it is claimed will finally pinpoint the location of the plane’s actual terminus. For others, De Changy included, the mystery remains open, the accepted narrative questionable at every turn.

SOURCES

Florence De Changy, The Disappearing Act: The Impossible Case of MH370, Mudlark Press, 2021.

Jeff Wise, The Taking of MH370, The Yellow Cabin Press, 2019.

2 MARK FOX is an independent researcher, speaker and writer. His books explore various fortean topics For more, go to www.markfox.co.uk.