It’s been ten years since Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared with 239 people on board. 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 and the next of kin still don’t know what happened to their loved-ones.

The plane was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it went missing on March 8, 2014.

At the 10^th anniversary remembrance event in Kuala Lumpur on March 3, one of the next of kin, V.P.R. Nathan, whose wife, Anne Daisy, was on board MH370, handed over a new ‘no find, no fee’ search proposal from the American seabed exploration company Ocean Infinity to Malaysia’s Transport Minister, Anthony Loke.

V.P.R. Nathan (left), whose wife, Anne Daisy was a passenger on MH370, presents Ocean Infinity’s new proposal to Anthony Loke..

The proposal is now being studied by experts at the transport ministry. Malaysian transport ministers have long said that there needed to be “new credible evidence” before the government could proceed with another search.

Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, said on March 4, during a visit to Australia, that, if there was “compelling evidence” that the search needed to be reopened, the government would certainly be happy to reopen it.

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

Loke promised on March 3 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.

“We are waiting for Ocean Infinity to provide a suitable date and I will meet them any time that they are ready to come to Malaysia,” he told those gathered at the remembrance event.

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, which began on May 5, 2014, was suspended on January 17, 2017, after an area spanning 120,000 square kilometres was scoured.

No debris was found during an earlier surface and sub-surface search that was conducted in the southern Indian Ocean from March 8 to April 30, 2014, and covered 4.2 million square kilometres of ocean.

Immediately after the disappearance of MH370 the search for the plane was focused on the South China Sea, near to the last point of contact between MH370 and air traffic controllers, just before it crossed Waypoint Igari between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace.

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.

Ocean Infinity now proposes searching an area of about 15,000 square kilometres between latitudes 33°S and 36°S, extending out about 45 nautical miles from what has been labelled the 7^th Arc.

The 7th arc was defined early on in the search for MH370 and is based on calculations by the British company Inmarsat that were based on satellite pings – or handshakes – from MH370. Inmarsat said that MH370 was most likely to be found along this 7th arc.

There are investigators who doubt the validity of the Inmarsat data and believe that MH370 never reached the southern Indian Ocean. Others continue to have faith in the data, but some question the deductions that have been made.

American amateur investigator Blaine Alan Gibson, who has found, retrieved, and/or handed in 22 pieces of debris, said he supported Ocean Infinity’s search 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 in Perth, Gibson says.

“This area suggested by Professor Pattiaratchi includes Broken Ridge, which is a seafloor feature of canyons and trenches at the foot of a subsea slope,” Gibson added.

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 have already been delivered to Malaysia, one is still in Madagascar, ready to be sent to Malaysia, and one is in the process of being handed in.”

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.

The two pieces of debris from Madagascar that arrived in Malaysia in 2019 and another item from South Africa still need to be analysed, he says.

Gibson says debris that has been found disproves the theory that there was a controlled, intact ditching of MH370, a “pilot murder–suicide”.

Numerous small pieces of shattered debris from the main cabin have been recovered, he says, and the wing flap found in Tanzania was in a retracted position, i.e. in flight mode, not deployed as it would be during a landing.

Blaine Gibson with debris found on an island in eastern Madagascar.

The area that stretches from 28.3°S to 33.2°S includes a part of the southern Indian Ocean that independent investigator Richard Godfrey says should be searched.

In an open letter to the CEO of Ocean Infinity, Oliver Plunkett, Godfrey wrote: “The crash location defined in our latest research, which we sent to Andy Sherrell on 15th February 2024, is within a radius of 30 km centred on 29.128°S 99.934°E.

“We note that this area has been excluded from your new proposal, which only covers 33°S to 36°S.

“Can you please explain why you decided to exclude the search area defined by the WSPR [Weak Signal Propagation Reporter] technique?”

Godfrey has analysed data 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.

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 their most recent 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.

“Anomalies in the WSPRnet data in the received signal level SNR [Signal to Noise Ratio], received frequency and frequency drift indicate a possible disturbance by an aircraft,” they wrote.

Maskell and his team at the University of Liverpool have been studying Boeing 777 flights other than MH370 for which the trajectories are known and are analysing the associated WSPR data.

“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.

“My team are using their expertise and know-how in statistical modelling and Bayesian techniques to analyse vast quantities of WPSR data. We hope that our analysis helps in the quest to provide new evidence to support a new search and help locate MH370.”

Debris finds

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 at the remembrance event on March 3.

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 – the 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.

Challenges to the official narrative

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, says that none of the debris that has been found is from MH370.

De Changy says there is no tangible foundation for the official narrative about what happened to MH370: 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.

“Many more clues point to a covert interception attempt that went terribly wrong, with a fatal accident happening around 2.40 a.m. between Vietnam and China,” she writes.

De Changy says that most of her work for the past ten years has been to look at the official narrative. “I think that, by now, I’ve completely dismantled and disproved it,” she said.

She urges people who do know something to speak out. “What we need now is people who know something, people who have a little bit of the truth or the whole truth, to be brave enough to speak out.

“I have identified people who know something, but they don’t have the courage to speak out.”

Ghyslain Wattrelos from France, whose wife Laurence and two of their three children were on board MH370, says that former French president François Holland and the country’s current president, Emmanuel Macron, know what happened to the plane.

He says there is no political willingness in France to advance the investigation into the disappearance of MH370.

In an interview with Télématin, Wattrelos said it would be difficult to get to the truth.

“Everything has been hidden. Those who know [what happened] don’t have the right to speak. When one investigates, little by little one gets closer to the truth. We will get to know more or less what happened, but we will never have the truth.”

Wattrelos, who wrote a book about MH370’s disappearance, Vol MH370 – Une vie détournée (Flight MH370 – A life hijacked), said at the 2023 virtual remembrance event that a French team investigating the disappearance of MH370 had found evidence that completely discredited the official version of events.

He does not believe that MH370 made a turn back across Malaysia or that it flew down to the southern India Ocean. He says that the plane was shot down, probably in the South China Sea, and that the US was involved.

Wattrelos says it can take a long time to make discoveries. He said it took the French investigators three years to organise their last trip to Malaysia, five years to see the British satellite telecommunications company Inmarsat, six years to see Boeing, and seven years to finally meet the FBI.

He told France Bleu that, after ten years, the next of kin didn’t know more about what happened to MH370 than they did on the day that it disappeared.

“We don’t know what happened. We know it isn’t a mystery. We know there are people who know the truth, who know where the plane is, but they don’t want to tell us the truth.”

There is an ongoing judicial investigation in France. Wattrelos’ lawyer, Marie Dosé, said in an interview with Mathieu Viviani, writing for La Tribune, that numerous very precise questions remained unanswered. Dosé said there was incomplete satellite data, certain passengers on MH370 had not been investigated, there were doubts about whether adequate checks had been done on several passengers before boarding, and there were difficulties obtaining data from Boeing and the US.

Dosé also expresses concern about the identification of the flaperon found on Reunion island and says that investigators in France still haven’t been given access to raw data from Inmarsat.

Grace Subathirai Nathan said yesterday (Thursday) on Hong Kong’s RTHK Radio3: “As far as I’m concerned, the only theory so far that is supported by concrete physical evidence, and corroborated by data, is the official narrative that the plane turned around and continued flying till it ended its flight in the southern Indian Ocean.”

Possible technical fault

There are investigators who believe that there was a technical fault on MH370 and that that the chief pilot on MH370, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, tried to land the plane in Penang. They say evidence for a possible attempt to go to Penang is provided by the primary surveillance radar data from Kota Bharu and Butterworth.

One expert has suggested that MH370 crashed after there was a rupture in one of the crews’ two oxygen bottles.

The theory has been put forward by a senior British Boeing 777 airline captain, who prefers not to be named.

The pilot explains that emergency oxygen for the crew is stored in the avionics bay, which is located immediately beneath the flight deck.

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.

He suggests that the transponder could have been disabled when hit by the valve end of a bottle, or the power to it severed as the bottles sit next to the power source. This, the pilot says, would cause the aircraft to disappear from radar. And any number of other pieces of equipment could be affected by such an explosion.

“With the aircraft’s decompression, the pilots would be incapacitated within sixty seconds because of hypoxia and the fact that the emergency crew oxygen supply was destroyed,” the pilot said.

“With the flight crew now disabled and/or unconscious, no immediate descent would be initiated, no radio call would be made, and the passengers and crew would also soon succumb to hypoxia despite the drop-down oxygen in the cabin.”

The pilot says MH370’s erratic flight path could be explained by wiring damage caused by an explosion that could disable the autopilot and autothrottle.

“It is entirely possible that, after a decompression, the ensuing drop in temperature in the avionics bay could interfere with the information received by Inmarsat, thereby corrupting the data that was critical to their 7th arc theory and invalidating the coordinates that were used in the search in the southern Indian Ocean.”

Australian aviation enthusiast Michael Gilbert has speculated that there was a windshield heater fire that was fuelled by an oxygen leak in the plane’s cockpit and the one pilot he believes survived tried to reach Penang.

Aviation safety

At the March 3 remembrance event, the next of kin reiterated that the search for MH370 is not just about bringing answers and closure for them but is also about aviation safety in general.

Grace Subathirai Nathan said: “We, the next of kin of the passengers and crew on MH370, strongly believe that the search for this plane extends far beyond our long suffering, our need for closure, and extends to the greater question of aviation safety.

“Every time each and every one of you or your loved ones take to the skies you should have some guarantee, some confidence, that your plane or the plane your loved ones are on will not vanish into thin air.

“MH370 is not history. It’s the future of aviation safety.”

K.S. Narendran, whose wife, Chandrika, was on board the plane, sent a message via a video link. He said that treating MH370 as an anomalous event and adopting a ‘business as usual’ stance was to normalise a safety threat as an acceptable travel and business risk.

“We don’t yet know why the plane disappeared or where,” he said. “A recurrence of an MH370-like event is a possibility and could endanger passengers’ lives. This is clearly unacceptable.”

Narendran said he believed a fitting tribute to those passengers not in their midst would be for the travelling public to approach their governments, the airlines they patronise, and the regulatory authorities, to commit the full force of their power and resources to find answers.

“To be clear, the search for the plane and the truth is in our collective interest and cannot be an appeasement response to address the entreaties of MH370 families only,” Narendran said.

Narendran said in a programme broadcast on Malaysia’s Astro Awani yesterday that there was more to the search than just finding the plane; it was also about science, about which science had yielded results.

“I believe that the search is a component, an element that goes into finding answers,” Narendran said. “The search is not the answer. We still need to know what happened to the plane, why it disappeared …”

Narendran noted that the Annex 13 report came to no conclusions. “After the report, we were no better off in terms of knowing what happened,” he said.

“I’ve been trying to understand what has the government done since 2018 to stay engaged with the question ‘Where is MH370 and what happened to it?’. To the best of my knowledge, the answer is nil ….

“I think it just thought that, with the passage of time, with the erosion of memory and the dilution of emotions, the whole matter will die away.

“Unfortunately, like bad pennies, the families have kept coming back and they’ve not dropped it one bit.”

Narendran said he welcomed Anthony Loke’s latest announcement as it set out intentions, but he noted that the proposal for a new search came from Ocean Infinity.

“What if there were no proposal from a private firm?” Narendran said after the announcement. “My guess is the government would have stayed comfortably silent.”

Narendran sees it as extraordinary that it is the next of kin who have themselves carried the burden of moving things forward, funding, for example, their own trips to Madagascar and Mauritius to search for debris and to Australia to speak to experts.

“It speaks of government apathy and neglect and an unwillingness to take its lead role as a flag state seriously,” Narendran said. “They showed up as being beyond shame and embarrassment.

“I try and remember what the Malaysian government ever showed enthusiasm and alacrity about in this regard and I can’t come up with anything.”

Grace Subathirai Nathan notes that, when the next of kin went to Madagascar and Mauritius they organised their own press conferences and meetings with the authorities. They went to fishing villages, made brochures, and informed the public, all in their own time and at their own expense.

“I don’t think this has ever been done anywhere else in the world following any sort of tragedy,” she said on Astro Awani.

The next of kin gathered for the 10th anniversary remembrance event in Kuala Lumpur lit 239 candles in memory of those on board MH370.

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