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MH370: Gone for a year, but never forgotten
When the interim investigation paper on Flight MH370 was released on Sunday, a year after the plane vanished without a trace, the words of a former US defence secretary came to mind
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W
hen the interim investigation paper on Flight MH370 was released on Sunday, a year after the plane vanished without a trace, the words of a former US defence secretary came to mind.
No, Donald Rumsfeld has nothing to do with the missing Boeing 777 but the nexus is his famous 15-year-old blather.
In response to a question about highly doubtful links between vanquished Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, he said:
'As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: The ones we don't know we don't know.'
For this, the well-known warmonger was handed the dubious 'Foot in Mouth Award' from Britain's Plain English Campaign, a group opposed to all forms of gobbledygook.
As for the statement of the multinational investigation team set up by the transport ministry under the International Civil Aviation Organisation's (ICAO) rules, it was clearly informative but the findings were not a big deal.
They mostly reaffirmed what had already been reported or, to draw on Rumsfeld's drivel, mostly a report of 'known knowns'.
Although the team referred to it as a statement for some strange reason, it is essentially a thorough probe report on the Beijing-bound jet which disappeared with 239 passengers and crew in the early hours of March 8, 2014.
It confirmed that the pilot made his last voice contact with air traffic control at 1: 19am, after which the plane changed course.
Based on both primary civilian radar and military radar, it cut across the northern part of the peninsula and veered into the Andaman Sea before presumably heading to the Indian Ocean.
The 587-page document provides factual and technical information about the vanished plane, including its maintenance records, air traffic control contacts and radar tracking.
It also details the psychological and financial profiles of the pilot, co-pilot and 10 crew members, dispelling some widely reported theories and speculations.
It notes: 'The captain's ability to handle stress at work and home was good. There was no known history of apathy, anxiety, or irritability. There were no significant changes in his lifestyle, interpersonal conflict or family stresses.
'There were no behavioural signs of social isolation, changes in habits or interest, self-neglect, drug or alcohol abuse of the captain, first officer and cabin crew.'
But as for clues to what happened to MH370, it neither has any answers, nor raises new alerts.
We have since found out, though, that an air traffic supervisor was caught napping four hours after the flight went off the radar and also that a consignment of lithium batteries from Penang did not undergo additional security screening before being loaded onto the plane at KLIA.
The biggest exposure is perhaps the fact that the battery in one of the underwater beacons had expired more than a year earlier.
But then again, another beacon in the cockpit voice recorder had a properly serviced battery which should have been transmitting for a month after being in water.
As the investigation team has said, further information would only be available if the aircraft is found. Until then, MH370 would remain aviation's biggest mystery.
The passengers and crew of MH370 also make up the largest group to have gone missing in such a manner.
According to the Aviation Safety Network, there have been 105 flights which had disappeared similarly, with a total of 1,615 people aboard, since 1948.
Before MH370, there was only one other case of a plane missing with more than 100 people.
The turbo-propeller aircraft, chartered by the US military, disappeared in 1962 while carrying 107 passengers en route from Guam to the Philippines.
Among the other notable missing plane stories is that of Flight 19, a patrol of five US Navy torpedo bombers which never returned after taking off from Fort Lauderdale in December 1945.
The vanishing of the planes and the 13 airmen added to the myth of the Bermuda Triangle ' the triangular stretch in the Atlantic Ocean covering Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico.
And then there is the even older story of Amelia Earhart. Her bold attempt to fly around the world on June 2, 1937, with her navigator Fred Noonan came to a mysterious end when her Lockheed Electra plane disappeared over the Pacific Ocean.
Although the US government concluded that Earhart and Noonan had crashed, the spot where the plane went down has never been determined.
We can only hope that MH370 does not end up as a mystery forever.
Investigators believe that it is likely submerged in the southern Indian Ocean in an area off Western Australia.
Ships scanning the sea floor with sophisticated sonar for any possible wreckage have so far covered about half of the 60,000 sq km 'high priority area' where the depths are between 4,000m and 6,000m.
In the case of Air France Flight 447 which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, killing all 228 passengers and crew aboard, the first major wreckage and two bodies were recovered within five days.
Two years later, when the black boxes of the Airbus A330 were finally recovered, the remains of only 154 were accounted for and the search ended with 74 bodies still missing.
Against such a backdrop, we can empathise with the pain, anguish and frustration felt by relatives of those who were on board MH370.
The loss of the plane was classified as an accident in January, based on its likely track to the southern Indian Ocean, where survival is improbable.
Under Annex 13 to the Chicago Convention, the disappearance of an aircraft can be deemed an accident when the official search has ended with no wreckage found.
But for MH370, there has not been any evidence of a crash, only conjecture. And it will remain so as long the search is still going on. (***)
