The first fragment found by Blaine Gibson, a fragment of a horizontal tail stabilizer, was discovered on a sandbank off the coast of Mozambique in February 2016. Photo by Blaine Gibson
3. Goldmine
The Indian Ocean washes tens of thousands of kilometers of coastline - the final result will depend on how many islands are counted. When Blaine Gibson started looking for the wreckage, he didn't have a plan. He flew to Myanmar, because he was going there anyway, and then went to the coast and asked the villagers on which shore they usually wash things lost at sea. He was advised several beaches, and one fisherman agreed to take him to them on a boat - there was some garbage there, but nothing that would have to do with the plane. Then Gibson asked the locals to be on the lookout, left them his contact number and went on. In the same way, he visited the Maldives, and then the islands of Rodrigues and Mauritius, again not finding anything interesting on the coast. Then came July 29, 2015. About 16 months after the plane went missing, a team of municipal workers cleaning a beach on the French island of Reunion came across more than one and a half meters in size, which seemed to have just washed ashore.
The team leader, a man named Johnny Beg, guessed that it might be a fragment of an aircraft, but he had no idea which one. At first, he considered making a memorial out of the rubble - erecting it on a nearby lawn and planting flowers around it - but instead, he decided to report the find through the local radio station. The gendarme team that arrived at the scene took the found fragment with them, and it was soon identified as part of a Boeing 777. It was a fragment of a movable tail wing called a flaperon, and a subsequent study of the serial numbers showed that .
This was the necessary material proof of the assumptions based on electronics data. The flight ended tragically in the Indian Ocean, although the exact crash site remained unknown and was somewhere thousands of kilometers east of RΓ©union. The families of the missing passengers had to give up the illusory hope that their loved ones might be alive. Regardless of how soberly people assessed the situation, the news of the find was a serious shock for them. Grace Nathan was devastated - according to her, she was barely alive for several weeks after the flaperon was discovered.
Gibson flew to Reunion and found Johnny Beg on the same beach. Beg was open and friendly - he showed Gibson the place where he found the flaperon. Gibson began to look for other wrecks, but without much hope of success, because the French authorities had already carried out searches, and they were inconclusive. The floating wreck takes time to drift across the Indian Ocean, moving east to west in the low southern latitudes, and the flaperon must have arrived before the other wrecks, as parts of it could protrude above the water to act as a sail.
Gibson was interviewed by a local newspaper reporter for a story about a visit to RΓ©union by an independent American researcher. For the occasion, Gibson wore a T-shirt with the words "Search". He then flew to Australia, where he spoke with two oceanographers, Charita Pattiaratchi of the University of Western Australia in Perth, and David Griffin, who worked at a government research center in Hobart and had been invited as a consultant by the Australian Transportation Security Bureau, the lead organization in the search for MH370. Both men were experts on currents and winds in the Indian Ocean. In particular, Griffin spent years tracking drifting buoysβhe also attempted to model the complex drifting characteristics of the flaperon on its way to RΓ©union, hoping to narrow down the geographic scope of underwater searches. Gibson's questions were easier to answer: he wanted to know the most likely locations for floating debris on the shore. The oceanographer pointed to the northeast coast of Madagascar and, to a lesser extent, the coast of Mozambique.
Gibson chose Mozambique because he had not been there before and could count it as his 177th country, and went to a city called Vilanculos because it seemed relatively safe and had good beaches. He arrived there in February 2016. According to his recollections, he again asked for advice from local fishermen, and they told him about a sandbar called Paluma - it lay behind a reef, and they usually went there to pick up nets and buoys brought by the waves of the Indian Ocean. Gibson paid a boatman named Suleman to take him to this sandbank. There they found all kinds of garbage, mostly a lot of plastic. Suleman called Gibson, holding up a gray piece of metal about half a meter across, and asked, "Is this the 370?" The wreckage had a honeycomb structure, and on one side was clearly visible stenciled inscription "NO STEP". At first, Gibson thought that this small fragment had nothing to do with a huge airliner. He says: βOn a rational level, I was sure that this could not be a fragment of an airplane, but I felt in my heart that it was it. By that time it was time for us to sail back, and here we have to touch on personal history. Two dolphins swam up to our boat and helped us refloat, and for my mother, dolphins were literally totem animals. When I saw these dolphins, I thought: Still the wreckage of the planeΒ».
This story can be perceived in different ways, but Gibson was right. It was determined that the fragment found - a fragment of the stabilizer of the horizontal tail - almost certainly belongs to MH370. Gibson flew to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, and delivered the find to the Australian consul. He then flew to Kuala Lumpur, just in time for the second anniversary of the tragedy, and this time was greeted as a close friend.
In June 2016, Gibson turned his attention to the remote northeast shores of Madagascar, which turned out to be a real gold mine. Gibson says he found three fragments on the first day and two more a few days later. A week later, locals brought him three more parts found on a nearby beach, thirteen kilometers from the site of the first finds. Since then, the search has not stopped - there were rumors that a reward was due for the wreckage of MH370. According to Gibson, he once paid $40 for one fragment, which turned out to be so much that the whole village had enough to drink for the whole day. Apparently, the local rum is extremely inexpensive.
A lot of debris that had nothing to do with the aircraft was discarded. However, Gibson is involved in finding about a third of the dozens of fragments that have now been identified as unambiguously - or probably - or presumably related to MH370. Some of the wreckage is still being explored. Gibson's influence is so great that David Griffin, although grateful to him, is quite concerned that the discovery of fragments may now be statistically skewed in favor of Madagascar, perhaps at the expense of more northerly coastal zones. He called his idea the "Gibson effect".
The fact remains that five years later no one has succeeded in tracing the path of the wreckage from where it was brought to land to some point in the southern Indian Ocean. Eager to be open to the new, Gibson is still hoping to discover new fragments that will explain the disappearance - like charred wires that indicate a fire, or shrapnel marks that indicate a missile hit - although what we know about the last hours of the flight is largely excludes such options. The wreckage found by Gibson confirms that the satellite data analysis was correct. The plane flew for six hours until the flight abruptly ended. Whoever sat at the helm did not try to gently land on the water; on the contrary, the collision was monstrous. Gibson admits that there is still a chance to find something like a message in a bottle - a note of desperation, scribbled by someone in the last moments of life. On the beaches, Gibson found several backpacks and many wallets, all of which were empty. According to him, the closest thing he found was an inscription on the inside of a baseball cap, made in Malay. In translation, it read: βTo the one who reads this. Dear friend, I'll meet you at the hotel."
Illustrations by La Tigre
(A) β 1:21 am, March 8, 2014:
Near a waypoint between Malaysia and Vietnam over the South China Sea, MH370 disappears from air traffic control radar and turns to the southwest, again passing over the Malay Peninsula.
(b) - about an hour later:
After flying northwest over the Strait of Malacca, the plane makes a "last sharp turn", as the researchers would later call it, and heads south. The turn itself and the new direction were reconstructed from satellite data.
(c) - April 2014:
The search in surface waters has been stopped, the search at depth begins. Analysis of the satellite data indicates that the last connection to MH370 was made in the area of ββthe arc.
(D) - July 2015:
The first piece of MH370, a flaperon, was discovered on Reunion Island. Other confirmed or probable fragments have been found on beaches scattered in the western Indian Ocean (locations highlighted in red).
4. Conspiracies
Since the disappearance of MH370, three official investigations have been launched. The first was the largest, most thorough, and most expensive: a technically sophisticated underwater search by the Australians, aimed at finding the main wreckage, which would provide data from black boxes and voice recorders. Search efforts included determining the aircraft's technical condition, analyzing radar and satellite data, studying ocean currents, a good deal of statistical research, and physical analysis of wreckage from East Africa, many of which came from Blaine Gibson. All this required complex operations in one of the most turbulent seas in the world. Part of the effort was undertaken by a group of volunteers, engineers and scientists who met on the Internet, called themselves the Independent Group and showed such effective cooperation that the Australians took into account their work and officially thanked for their assistance. This has never happened before in the history of accident investigation. However, after more than three years of work, costing some $160 million, the Australian investigation ended without success. In 2018, it was picked up by the American company Ocean Infinity, which signed a contract with the Malaysian government on the terms βno result - no paymentβ. The continuation of the search assumed the use of the most modern submersibles and covered the previously unexplored section of the seventh arc, in which, in the opinion of the Independent Panel, the discovery was most likely. A few months later, these efforts also ended in failure.
The second official investigation was conducted by the Malaysian police, and it was a thorough check of everyone on the plane, as well as their friends and loved ones. It is difficult to assess the true extent of the police discoveries because the report on the results of the investigation was not published. Moreover, it was classified, becoming inaccessible even to other Malaysian researchers, but after someone organized the leak, its inferiority became obvious. In particular, it omitted all the information known about Captain Zachary - and this did not cause much surprise. The prime minister of Malaysia at the time was a nasty man named Najib Razak, who is believed to be deeply corrupt. The press in Malaysia was censored, the loudest were found and silenced. Officials had their own reasons for being cautious, from careers worth protecting to perhaps their lives. Obviously, it was decided not to delve into topics that could put Malaysia Airlines or the government in a bad light.
The third official investigation was an accident investigation, not to determine responsibility but to determine probable cause, and should have been carried out by an international team to the highest international standards. At the head was a special working group created by the Malaysian government, and from the very beginning there was a mess in it - the police and the military considered themselves superior to this investigation and despised it, and the ministers and members of the government saw it as a risk to themselves. The foreign specialists who came to assist began to flee almost immediately after their arrival. One American expert, referring to the international aviation protocol governing accident investigation, described the situation as follows: βThe Annex 13 created by ICAO is designed to organize investigations in a confident democracy. For countries like Malaysia, with shaky and autocratic bureaucracies, and for airlines owned by the state or perceived as a matter of national pride, it is hardly suitable.
One of the observers of the investigation process says: βIt became clear that the main goal of the Malaysians was to hush up this story. From the very beginning, they had an instinctive prejudice against being open and transparent, not because they had any deep, dark secret, but because they themselves did not know what the truth was and were afraid that it there will be something embarrassing. Were they trying to hide something? Yes, something they don't know about."
The result of the investigation was a 495-page report that lamely mimics the requirements of Schedule 13. It was filled with boilerplate descriptions of Boeing 777 systems, clearly copied from manufacturer's manuals and of no technical value. In fact, nothing in the report was of technical value, as the Australian publications had already fully described satellite information and analysis of ocean currents. The Malaysian report turned out to be less of an investigation than a justification, and its only significant contribution was a candid description of air traffic control errors, probably because half of the errors could be blamed on the Vietnamese, and also because Malaysian controllers turned out to be the easiest and most vulnerable target. . The document was released in July 2018, more than four years after the incident, and claimed that the investigation team was unable to determine the cause of the plane's disappearance.
The idea that a sophisticated machine, equipped with modern technology and redundant communications, can simply disappear seems absurd.
Such a conclusion encourages continued speculation, whether justified or not. Satellite data is the best proof of a flight path and is hard to argue with, but people won't be able to agree with an explanation if they don't trust the numbers. Numerous theories have been published by social media speculators that ignore satellite data and sometimes radar tracks, aircraft design, air traffic control records, flight physics, and school geography knowledge. For example, a British woman who blogs under the name Saucy Sailoress and earns her living by reading tarot reads roamed South Asia on a sailboat with her husband and dogs. According to her, on the night of the disappearance of MH370, they were in the Andaman Sea, where she saw a cruise missile flying towards her. The rocket became a low-flying aircraft with a brightly glowing cockpit bathed in a strange orange glow and smoke. As it flew by, she assumed it was an air raid against the Chinese navy further out to sea. At that time, she did not yet know about the disappearance of MH370, but when she read about it a few days later, she made obvious conclusions for herself. It would seem that it sounds implausible, but she found her audience.
One Australian has been claiming for years that he was able to spot MH370 using Google Earth in shallow water and intact; he refuses to give the location while working to crowdfund the expedition. On the Internet, you will find claims that the plane was found intact in the Cambodian jungle, that it was seen landing in an Indonesian river, that it flew through time, that it was sucked into a black hole. In one scenario, the plane leaves to attack the American military base on Diego Garcia and is then shot down. The recent publication that Captain Zachary was found alive and in a Taiwanese hospital with amnesia has gone viral enough for Malaysia to deny it. The news came from a purely satirical site that also reported on the sexual harassment of an American climber and two Sherpas by a yeti-like creature in Nepal.
A New York writer named Jeff Wise suggested that one of the aircraft's electronic systems could have been reprogrammed to send false data about a south turn into the Indian Ocean to mislead investigators when, in fact, the plane turned north towards Kazakhstan. . He calls it the βprank scenarioβ and talks about it in detail in his latest e-book, released in 2019. His suggestion is that the Russians may have stolen the plane to divert attention from the annexation of Crimea, which was then in full swing. The obvious weak point of this theory is the need to explain how, if the plane flew to Kazakhstan, its wreckage ended up in the Indian Ocean - Wise believes that this too was rigged.
When Blaine Gibson began his search, he was new to social media and was in for a surprise. According to him, the first trolls appeared as soon as he found his first fragment - the one that read "NO STEP" - and soon there were many more, especially when the search on the coasts of Madagascar began to bear fruit. The Internet is seething with emotions even in relation to unremarkable events, while the catastrophe results in something toxic. Gibson was accused of exploiting affected families and fraud, pursuing fame, drug addiction, working for Russia, working for the United States, and at least profanity. He began to receive threats - messages on social networks and phone calls to friends predicting his demise. One report said that he would either stop looking for the wreckage or leave Madagascar in a coffin. Another foreshadowed that he would die from polonium poisoning. There were many more of them, Gibson was not ready for this and could not simply brush it off. During the days we spent with him in Kuala Lumpur, he continued to follow the attacks through a friend in London. He says: βI made a mistake once when I opened Twitter. In fact, these people are cyberterrorists. And what they do works. Works well." All this caused him psychological trauma.
In 2017, Gibson set up an official wreckage transfer mechanism: he gives any new find to the authorities in Madagascar, who turn it over to the Malaysian honorary consul, who packs it and sends it to Kuala Lumpur for research and storage. On August 24 of the same year, the honorary consul was shot dead in his car by an unknown person who left the crime scene on a motorcycle and was not found. A French-language news outlet claims the consul had a shady past; it is possible that his assassination had nothing to do with MH370. Gibson, however, believes there is a connection. The police investigation is not over yet.
Currently, he mostly tries not to reveal his location or travel plans, for the same reasons he avoids email and rarely speaks on the phone. He likes Skype and WhatsApp because they have encryption. He frequently changes SIM cards and believes he is sometimes stalked and photographed. There is no doubt that Gibson is the only person who went on his own to look for the fragments of MH370 and found them, but it's hard to believe that the wreckage is worth killing for. This would be easier to believe if they held clues to dark secrets and international intrigue, but the facts, much of which are now publicly available, point in a different direction.
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To be continued.
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Source: habr.com