Deciphering A Mystery

"We [in professional vocabulary] call it an accident because that's our terminology [as air accident investigators]. But this is a criminal act. It's not an accident."
"If someone does this intentionally, you can call that suicide. The pilot took his own life and he took the lives of everyone who was on board that aircraft."
"People accuse me of being insensitive to families. I don't mind taking the question, but if someone challenges me, I say, 'I don't need any lessons from you. How many grieving families have you talked to after an airplane accident? I've done it by the hundreds. Don't tell me that I don't have any sympathy. I've had people faint in my arms."
"What they're [searchers for the wreckage of MH370] proving every day they search is that their assumptions were wrong."
"[The Malaysian Airline pilot’s] intention was to make the plane disappear forever, and make it so that no one would ever find it."
Larry Vance, retired Ottawa air accident investigator

"When you start looking at them [identifiable parts of MH370], there's a story in every one of them. And the story is consistent."
"When the airplane is coming in [vertically] at 300 to 600 feet per second, everything is shattering into a million pieces. In a third of a second to half a second, it's gone."
"There's no way you could end up with a piece like this with the leading edge absolutely intact."
"Wreckage analysis is a dying art. They're depending on the recorders [recovered black box]. They tell you what happened -- maybe. But they don't tell you the sequence or why things are happening. You need to be able to do wreckage analysis."
Terry Heaslip, retired Transportation Safety Board investigator

A flaperon from MH370 recovered from the Indian Ocean, showing the intact rounded leading edge that air crash expert Terry Heaslip says proves the plane was ditched at sea and didn’t crash at high speed. AFP/Getty Images

Three investigators with the Transportation Safety Board, a federal Canadian investigative authority, retired to launch their own consulting company into accident disasters, calling it HVS Aviation. Larry Vance, Terry Heaslip and Elaine Summers, all retired, thought their own independent investigation into the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 might represent a good joint exercise, whose conclusion might have a twofold purpose; their effort leading to success would give comfort to the grieving families in solving the mystery, and the results would give closure to a puzzle.

Vast sums of funding went into international searches, at first desperate in nature, in hopes of being able to rescue survivors lost at sea awaiting help, or marooned on a remote island somewhere. When the critical  time frame for rescue had passed, it became an international search without anyone knowing precisely where to search in a confused and confusing scenario that placed hope on various areas of vast oceanic searches. Airplane parts were found and  discovered not to be those being looked for, though eventually some pieces did surface and were identified as having come from Flight 370.

That the Boeing 777 had simply vanished with all 239 passengers and crew aboard on March 8, 2014 was a shocking catastrophe. Explanation eluded, and searches were futile. In all of aviation accident history this single flight disaster likely epitomizes the most puzzling. In a later flight of a German airliner in the remote French Alps a brief mystery also puzzled investigators when in March of 2015 Flight 9525 crashed into mountains with the loss of 144 passengers and six crew. Its young co-pilot had carefully planned his own suicide and sacrificed the lives of all aboard to his plan. That conspiracy, however, was solved with the aid of recordings and a successful investigation.


The mystery surrounding the Malaysia Airlines flight is more enduring, however, and it isn't that long ago that the last of a succession of searches was called off with a sense of hopelessness. There were 20 confirmed and identified MHY370 pieces retrieved since the plane and its human cargo vanished. It was some of those pieces that have helped this investigative team who took on this investigation of their own initiative, to solve the seemingly unsolvable. They examined all available data and came to their conclusion.

Mr. Heaslip, an expert on wreckage analysis, who with the Transportation Safety Board was its director of engineering and his partners were convinced the crash resulted from a deliberate action on the part of one of the pilots. Whom they theorize in all probability killed his passengers through depressurizing the plane. And then he deliberately flew toward a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean and ditched the plane to end his life, taking so many others with him, becoming a mass murderer in one fell stroke.

Their theory bears no resemblance to the official story which holds that the plane flew in a straight line until running out of fuel when it plunged vertically into the sea. Quite dissatisfied with the official theory, the Ottawa-based investigators examined wreckage photographs, the flight path maps and schematic drawings of the aircraft. Their investigation transcended a cold analysis of engineering calculations and cockpit procedure, however; their concern also lay with the need of the families to know the truth of what had occurred.

"This is an attempt by us to give some amount of closure by telling them [families of the victims] what happened. Because if people in the end -- I don't care who they are -- if they know the truth it's better in the long run than if they never know what happened."
Larry Vance

And so they zeroed in on pieces that had washed ashore and identified as having belonged to flight MH370; the aircraft's right flap, a part of the wing extended when the plane slows before landing, and the adjacent "flaperon", used to control the plane in low and slow flight. Along with the eight-by twelve foot piece also examined which they knew could not possibly have survived a high-speed vertical impact. Both it and the rounded leading edge of the flap and flaperon were undamaged.

Relying on tried-and-true wreckage analysis; studying stresses and fractures visible on the recovered pieces Heaslip and Vance deduced the forces that tore apart the plane; an exercise that no electronic data of a black box recorder could reveal. Earlier parts of the flight, including the pilot turning off the plane's transponder to make it invisible to radar before reversing direction and flying along the boundary point of two different air traffic control regions to ensure the plane would be missed by controllers, all contributed to their analysis and final conclusion.

The team documented their careful study of all available evidence and their professional analytical methodology, to reach their final, informed conclusion, and it all appears in a book titled MHY370 Mystery Solved which can be ordered online at hvsaviation.com.