Fog of intrigue shrouds flight

Chris Northover PHOTO/FILE

As I write this column on the Thursday before you get to read it, I doubt that you will have been told that Flight MH370 has been found in one piece floating on the surface of the southern Indian Ocean.

Even if the survival of his passengers and crew were high in the mind of Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and his co-pilot, an ocean landing of a Boeing 777 is not going to be good for your health.

It has happened successfully once before - on the Hudson River in a smaller aircraft, in ideal conditions and with an expert pilot who intended his passengers to live.

So we have three main questions: Where? Why? And why has the Malaysian government apparently bungled the search?

I have musings about the second and third questions but first: Where is it?

With modern GPS systems, the position of an airliner can be pinpointed with accuracy to within 1-5m. MH370 was fitted with Classic Aero, which is a type of Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) which transmits data by satellite link on location, altitude, heading and speed. But this one was switched off in the cockpit soon after the aircraft left Malaysian airspace.

Possibly unknown to whoever switched it off, however, Classic Aero sends out a "ping" every hour to let the satellite system know it is awake. No positional data ... only a ping.

Clever British engineers worked out that they could calculate the rough position of the aircraft by measuring how long the ping had taken to get to the various satellites. The most likely position took it into the southern Indian Ocean, into an area the size of France or Texas.

The Malaysian government announced that new analysis showed that the aircraft's last position was "a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that we must inform you that, according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean".

They will have until about April 7 to find the black box and cockpit voice recorder before the locator batteries go flat.

So, if it was an inside job - as it appears - exactly why did Captain Shah decide to play fast and loose with the lives of 270 passengers and crew? Did he overwhelm his co-pilot or convince him to go along with the murder of the passengers, and with their own suicides? Various Absurdistani organisations in the past have hi-jacked aircraft and held the passengers in exchange for money or the release of prisoners but passengers are of very little value when dead.

Here is where it gets curiouser and curiouser. Captain Shah was a vocal supporter of Anwar Ibrahim, a Malaysian politician who had been jailed for sodomy some years previously in what was a contender for the justice malfunction of the century. That dubious conviction was seemingly perpetrated by the then prime minister of Malaysia and a political rival of Ibrahim.

The day that flight MH370 took off for Beijing, Ibrahim was sentenced by an appeal court to a further five years imprisonment.

Could that have anything to do with the disappearance of the plane, anything to do with the Malaysian government's studied ineptitude, with their carefully delayed release of information, even to their friends?

Could there have been something going on that was just too embarrassing for them to come clean about?