In an analysis published by the South China Morning Post (SCMP), Florence de Changy questioned if the report issued by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which led the search mission, was merely an exercise in media management.
Referring to the report stating that the last point of contact with the plane was somewhere north of Sumatra, Changy said this so-called contact point was only “confirmed” by a single blurry slide shown to some of the families of the people on the plane, in Beijing on March 21, 2014.
She also took to task the mention of the plane’s pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah having “flown” a simulated route on his home flight simulator that was “initially similar” to the one supposedly taken by MH370, six weeks before the actual flight.
“The document that the report based this on had been dismissed as a clumsy fabrication based on several simulator routes flown by Zaharie,” Changy said.
De Changy, a Hong Kong correspondent for Le Monde and French National Radio who had published her investigation into MH370 in French and Chinese, said the report’s description of debris was also “troubling”.
“It publishes a drawing provided by Malaysia that shows about 20 pieces of debris found in the western Indian Ocean even though most of these pieces have not been confirmed as belonging to MH370 and several were found in questionable circumstances,” she said.
She added that it was particularly strange for the ATSB to determine that “no analysis by Boeing was necessary” for the debris.
“Numerous claims that other debris were ‘almost certainly’ from MH370 that had appeared on the southeastern coast of Africa were made despite the region having had several plane crashes over the last few decades, involving Boeing planes in some instances.
“Another oddity is the inclusion of French satellite images from March 24, 2014. If these held any clues, three and a half years is a long time to notice them,” she said.
De Changy panned the report for suggesting that better methods of satellite tracking be implemented, saying that most pilots had maintained that long-haul planes were already amply “triple covered”.
“In fact, if just one of the recommendations from the report into the crash of Air France flight 447 in June 2009 had been taken up – that black boxes should detach on contact with water and float – MH370’s location might now be known,” she said.
“The natural conclusion of this sad story, if we are to follow the official line, is that a plane as big as a Boeing 777, loaded with electronics and equipped with several redundant communications systems – not to mention the hundreds of mobile phones of its passengers – can become perfectly stealth in a few seconds, in one of the most closely monitored regions of the planet,” she said.
MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, en route to Beijing from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, with 239 passengers and crew members on board.
It was believed to have crashed into the waters of the southern Indian Ocean, about 2,000km off the coast of Western Australia.
Australia, China and Malaysia, which jointly coordinated and funded the search operation led by ATSB, announced in January the suspension of the search for MH370.
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