Shock Waves and Incompetence

"We need the remains of our children."
"And they are saying that it can take six months or more."
Ibrahim Mohammed, Kenya

"We came here for nothing."
"They told us the bodies were small pieces, more than 5,000 pieces."
Nejmedin Gazi, Yemen

"We were expecting that we will have our body well-kept but we are amazed to hear that there is nothing, totally nothing."
Pauline Gathu, Kenya

"Break, break, request back to home."
Captain, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302

People walk past a part of the wreckage at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia March 10, 2019. (photo credit: TIKSA NEGERI / REUTERS)

Flight 302 to Nairobi was no sooner airborne than its pilots knew they were in trouble. Their plane lurched by hundreds of feet up, then down. The panicked voice of the captain came in to air traffic controllers, seeking permission to return to the airport it set off from near Addis Ababa in response to the plane accelerating to abnormal speeds, far beyond what was considered standard. And then, while air traffic controllers hurriedly diverted two other flights approaching the airport to make room for Flight 302's return, all contact was lost.

Now investigators in France are faced with decoding the black boxes recovered from that crash. A crash that experts have described as descending at full speed, nose down, directly into the ground, completely disintegrating, buried in the receiving landscape, no one aboard left intact, all 157 people aboard -- passengers and crew -- dead on contact. French authorities won't comment whether they will be able to retrieve much from the flight data and voice recording.

All the countries that have grounded the Boeing 737 Max 8 in their national fleets are aware that Boeing must now face the dire necessity of providing proof their jets are safe to fly while suspicions revolve around faulty software that appears contributed to the Ethiopian Air crash and a previous fall of 2018 crash with similar outlines and deadly force flown by Indonesia's Lion Air Flight 610, whose crash killed 189 people off Indonesia.

Among the victims of the Ethiopian Air crash were representatives of 35 countries, including 21 United Nations staffers. In both instances, each of the planes exhibited erratic altitude changes as they were airborne, leaving the impression with flight investigating experts that the pilots had struggled in an effort to control their aircraft. And in both instances crews attempted to return to the airport from which they had just taken off.

Regulators, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, are in possession of new data from satellite-based tracking indicating the movements of both planes were similar. Boeing reiterates "full confidence" in their planes' safety; that their engineers are changing the software system designed to prevent an aerodynamic stall should sensors detect the jet's nose is pointed too high and its speed too low.

This, however, appears to be the problem; that both captains and crews were unable to override the software that kept pointing their aircraft's nose too low, and accelerating its speed to an uncomfortable degree. Leading investigators to focus on whether the software automatically pushed the plane's nose repeatedly downward; whether the Lion Air pilots had the learned skills to resolve the problem, where Ethiopian Airlines claim its pilots had special training on the software.

Israel's ZAKA emergency response team is on site, granted access to enable them to perform the work the dedicated volunteers know best; forensic examinations to the most minute details to achieve closure. Following which discussions related to repatriating whatever remains of the victims could commence in the wake of identification.

"We never encountered such a difficult situation. I was at the scene together with ZAKA volunteers."
Azriel Schnitzer, commander, ZAKA delegation, Ethiopia

"The great fear is that, God forbid, there will not be a situation where, when they made the scientific identification .... they will not find the bodies of the two Israelis who perished in the plane."
"At the Sakala Hotel, Ethiopian Airlines began arriving dozens of families of bereaved families from around the world who wanted to receive answers and information about the fate of their loved ones, but there was no one to explain to them what was happening or to answer their questions. You can not describe the cries and shouts of the families who [came from] far away, the ambassadors of the countries are walking around the hotel without the ability to help the families because the Ethiopians are not cooperating with them to ... their astonishment."
ZAKA chairman Yehuda Meshi-Zahav

"It's a hard feeling to get to the ring when we see the many findings rolling around without being able to provide a proper and professional response. Within a day, all the parts of the plane disappeared from the arena to an unknown location without [our] being able to check the possibility of findings within the parts of the plane. The feeling is painful and very difficult."
Eliezer Samet,  ZAKA volunteer, Ethiopia

(photo credit: TIKSA NEGERI / REUTERS)

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.

From Tragedy Knowledge in Mapping the Ocean Floor

"It's an incredible trove of data. I've been working in this part of the Indian Ocean for 30-plus years, and over many voyages in the eastern Indian Ocean I've never seen this level of resolution."
"When we look at these data, we're constantly keeping in mind that we wouldn't have this data if it weren't for a terrible tragedy."
Millard F. Coffin, marine geophysicist, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Australia

"There are all kinds of things you can't do if you don't know the shape of the ocean bottom, or don't know it properly."
"I wanted people to realize that it's not just Malaysia Airlines straying into the southwest Indian Ocean where it shouldn't have been."
"Even when your aircraft is exactly where it's supposed to be [on a trans-oceanic flight], it might be [flying] over unknown ocean."
Walter H.F. Smith, geophysicist, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, United States

Oceanographers created this chart one year ago showing the potential drift of MH370, starting from the Indian Ocean search zone. Experts say the chart's predicitions are 'entirely consistent' with the location of newly-found debris on La Reunion, off the coast of Madagascar

In a scientific paper published in the journal EOS, Dr. Smith and his colleagues took pains to elucidate the simple fact of oceangraphic science, that most of the world's oceans remain unmapped. And because that underwater terrain is unmapped, experts are hindered in their capability of predicting tsunamis, in their understanding of oceanic currents, and in making climate forecasts, along with the study of marine life -- let alone the search for missing planes.

But it was the dreadful occasion of a missing plane, a plane that went dramatically off its expected flight trajectory and whose flight pattern was soon lost to the vital tracking of air traffic controllers who had no idea what had happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on March 8, 2014 that led to mapping detail in a significant part of the Indian Ocean. The mystery of where the plane's final resting place and that of its 239 passengers and crew happens to be, remains unknown.

The mystery of why the pilot took the plane so dramatically of course, equally unknown.

The painful agony of the families of those missing cannot be assuaged; their loved ones are gone, vanished into the great unknown. Leaving some of those mourning their dead with the faintest of hopes that the plane landed somewhere and all aboard remain alive, stranded in some unknown place, to be discovered at some time in the future. It is simply much too painful for people whose hearts have been broken to resign themselves to the reality of those they love losing life in a vast, watery grave.

The search that was launched from many points on the regional compass in a desperate effort to find survivors and finally to discover the remnants of the missing plane and with good fortune, clues to what had occurred; available should critical technological devices maintaining data ever be recovered, failed to meet with any degree of success. The mystery has baffled searchers, governments, scientists, aviation experts for years, and seems destined never to be solved.

Something positive, however, did arise out of that tragedy in the sense that a byproduct of the search over an estimated 350,000 square kilometers of seafloor resulted in the mapping at a close range that oceanographers have never been able to accomplish on their own; neither the length and breadth of the search range, nor the infinitesimally minute details taken at close range. Now, Dr. Coffin and a group of scientists from Geoscience Australia have been given access to those invaluable maps.

Data retrieved previously from satellites gave scientists information relating to the Indian Ocean reflecting a resolution of roughly five square kilometers. In contrast, the instruments used in the vast search area by specialized ocean-going vessels and their highly technical equipment enabled the collection of information with a resolution of meters, and in addition in some areas remote operating vehicles and underwater autonomous vehicles enabled the gathering of details on the scale of centimeters.

A 3-D image of the Diamantina Escarpment on the seafloor of the Indian Ocean. The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has helped create maps revealing the ocean floor’s topographical complexity. Credit Kim Picard and Jonah Sullivan

A three-dimensional series of maps of the ocean floor revealing topographical complexity enables researchers to delve into and understand unique features such as the oceanic plateau named Broken Ridge as well as the southern-flank Diamantina Escarpment. Scientists now have in hand information relating to tectonic and volcanic activity on the ocean floor, reflecting further enriched, invaluable data never before available to oceanographers.

A mere eight percent of the world's oceans have been mapped, to date. With only five percent of the southeast Indian Ocean having been previously mapped, according to studies. Dr. Smith and his colleagues made a comparison of data retrieved from both mapped and unmapped portions of the world's ocean segments utilizing a database used by commercial airlines relative to their routes.

They concluded, based on the data available to them, that some 60 percent of all commercial flights crossing oceans, travel over oceanic areas whose depths are unmeasured, with the longest contiguous route over unmapped ocean identified as that from Kennedy International Airport in New York, to Chongqing Jiangbei International Airport in China, an airtrip extending greater than 1,200 nautical miles over unmapped ocean.