THE HUNT FOR MH370

How can a modern-day airliner simply vanish, never to be seen again? Five years ago, this is exactly what happened … and the mystery remains unsolved.

How can an airliner simply vanish? After countless interviews, writer Ean Higgins shares insights into the MH370 mystery.

It would be a rare person who would step onto a commercial airliner nowadays and think, “If I catch this plane, am I just going to disappear into thin air?” After all, it’s well documented that air travel is now the safest form of travel we have – about 2000 times safer than travelling by car.

However, this is exactly what happened to the 239 passengers and crew on board Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8 March, 2014. The plane left Kuala Lumpur shortly after midnight and after 40 minutes’ flying time, there was nothing heard from the plane again. The pilots did not speak to the ground, no passengers or crew sent text messages or made phone calls, and the plane disappeared from radar. However, it is known that somebody took the controls and turned the plane around, off its northward course, flying it back across Malaysia, up the Malacca Straits and out to sea – where, after eight hours’ flying time, it disappeared.

As a boy, writer Ean Higgins grew up in Québec, Canada, fascinated by planes and flying. He had ambitions to be either a fighter pilot or a journalist, and learned to fly a Cessna 150 while still a teenager. “It snows for about 4-5 months of the year in Québec, and our ‘airfield’ was just a field with a lot of snow on top. So in the winter time, they would take the wheels off the plane and replace them with skis. That way, if you made a rough landing, you wouldn’t feel it so much,” he recalls.

The basic knowledge and understanding of planes and aeronautics he’d gained as a young

man stood him in good stead some 40 years later, when – by now not a fighter pilot but a senior reporter on The Australian newspaper – he was asked to start reporting on the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines MH370. After 18 months, investigators had found no trace of the plane and the lack of evidence was clearly frustrating those involved.

“The mystery got me immediately, along with the extraordinary technology and detective work that had gone into the hunt,” he says. “Perhaps a further interest for me was that I had spent time in Malaysia as an adolescent, including going to a local school.”

Over the next three years, Higgins followed developments closely and wrote numerous stories about the plane’s disappearance. The more he learned and wrote about the case, the more intrigued he became. When, four years after the plane’s disappearance, its whereabouts and the fate of its occupants were still unknown, Higgins decided the mystery warranted a book. “I made a pitch to publishers, and Pan Macmillan came back and said, ‘Let’s do it’. I wanted to get it out for the fifth anniversary of the plane’s disappearance, so I had to work pretty hard to get it done.”

The Hunt for MH370 is published this month. In the book, Higgins posits six possible theories as to what happened to flight MH370, based on the opinions of international experts, pilots with decades of experience, and those involved in the investigation. They range from a terrorist hijacking gone wrong, to a fire on board, to a deliberate murder/suicide mission by the plane’s pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

“We don’t know for sure what happened, and we won’t know until the aircraft is found, the black box recovered and the bodies examined,” says Higgins. “It remains a mystery.”

But having spent countless hours interviewing some of the family of the six Australians and two New Zealanders on the plane, Higgins believes the hunt should continue.

“The families of those lost talked about the torture they’re still going through,” he states. “There are two levels of their angst. Firstly, they lost their loved ones, and secondly, they still don’t know where they are and what happened to them. That torments them to this day.”

As Danica Weeks, whose husband, Paul, was onboard, says, “I won’t be released until they find him.”

• The Hunt for MH370 by Ean Higgins (Pan Macmillan Australia).