MALAYSIA AIRLINES MH370 - Looking at aspects of the book, "The Vanishing of Flight MH370,"

BEFORE WE BEGIN, Some important comments to make. I will be quoting pieces from Richard's book, then placing my response which is based upon my own private investigation. This investigation has been achievable through the numerous pieces of evidence available to anyone who wants to go looking for it. Once it's laid out alongside other data/images/reports and personal statements, both official and public, a clear picture starts to develop; one which cannot easily be dismissed or argued against given the scientific and physics world which proves things such as.... 'if we know this happened, then we also know this happened, or maybe couldn't have happened.' I will be placing Mr Quest's portions in ordinary type. My input will be in italics.

IN ABSOLUTELY NO WAY ARE MY COMMENTS A CRITICISM OF MR QUEST.

HE IS WRITING AS HE SEES THINGS BASED UPON HIS RESEARCH, BUT ALSO LARGELY BASED ON WHAT THE PEOPLE HE INTERACTED WITH - MILITARY, GOVERNMENT AND OTHER REPRESENTATIVES INVOLVED IN THIS INVESTIGATION HAVE TOLD HIM, AND WHAT THE MEDIA KNOW ABOUT THIS CASE. IT IS NOT MY INTENTION TO PERSONALLY CHALLENGE MR QUEST OR HIS FINDINGS. INSTEAD, MY INPUT IS MY OWN, THOUGH IT IS BASED UPON WHAT I BELIEVE TO BE INDISPUTABLE FACTS AND TRUTHS.

I HAVE MADE TWO ATTEMPTS TO CONTACT MR QUEST, HOWEVER AT THE DATE OF WRITING I HAVE NOT RECEIVED ANY RESPONSE FROM CNN ADVISING THEY HAVE EVEN RECEIVED MY REQUEST OR INDEED EVEN PASSED IT ON TO HIM.

I COMPILE THIS DOCUMENT WITHOUT PREJUDICE. I WILL PLACE ITEMS UNDER SPECIFIC HEADINGS FOR EASE OF COMPREHENSION.

THAT SAID............... LET'S GET STARTED!

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL [ATC] ~

Page 45... The radar operator did not report what he was seeing. The military didn't send up any fighter jets to investigate. No one called to find out what was happening - even though air traffic controllers in both Malaysia and Vietnam were asking questions about MH370's whereabouts. When the assertion was made that fighters had, in fact, been scrambled, the chief of the Royal Malaysian Air Force, in a statement on April 11, 2014, called it "totally false." What was the air force doing? Having seen an unidentified plane flying across the country, didn't they go and at least take a look? The official explanation for why nothing was done, and a large plane was able to fly across the country unchallenged, was given to me by the prime minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak, when i interviewed him in Kuala Lumpur in April 2014. He said, "I believe there was a man who was monitoring the radar screen." No planes were sent up to investigate, he said, "because it was deemed not to be hostile... it behaved like a commercial airline following a normal flight plan." This is a deeply unsatisfactory reason for not investigating what was going on. First, it is hard to see how this could be viewed as a commercial plane following a flight plan: the plane was flying without a squawk, the radar operator could only see blips, and there was no flight plan. In the US or Europe it is unconceivable that an unidentified aircraft, with no flight plan, would be allowed to fly across the country. In the post-9/11 world, if the radar operator was not immediately reassured what the plane was up to, air force jets would be sent up to investigate, fast.

[ DECLAN: I have nothing extra to add to this. It speaks for itself. In fact, I doubt I will need to make many comments to any of what you are about to read.]

Page 49... air traffic controllers in Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, and Singapore all been haphazardly quizzed to see who had heard what. Seemingly no one recognized a crisis.

... The real problems of Malaysia's air traffic control were buried deep in the Factual Information Report released on the anniversary of the disappearance.

... it seems the air traffic controllers were breaking their own rules about when they should issue official warnings. The first and lowest level of warning is INCERFA, the uncertainty phase, when there is concern about the safety of an aircraft. One notch up is the ALERTFA phase, meaning there is now apprehension about the safety and failure to communicate with the plane. Finally the most serious: DETRESFA, when there is now real possibility of grave and imminent danger.

Page 50... the first call should have been IGARI plus three minutes. However, on that night, it would be IGARI plus thirty-eight minutes before Ho Chi Minh issued an INCERFA.

Page 193... According to sources in Malaysia, the country's primary radar calibration was not working well enough to give a proper reading on altitude; hence the Factual Report doesn't refer to any large altitude changes.

MALAYSIAN AND OTHER OFFICIAL SPIEL ~

Page 46... In the subsequent commotion over the failure to alert anyone, the Malaysian authorities had no real explanation for their lack of action.

Page 47... at 10:30p.m on March 8, twenty-one hours after the plane had gone missing and seventeen hours after the Kuala Lumpur rescue coordination center was activated, the very first formal acknowledgement that they plane may have turned back.

... The confusion of the night can be seen in the log of communications among the controllers released on April 1, 2014, and it the several hundred pages of ATC transcripts released as part of the official report on the first anniversary of the disaster in March 2015.

Page 48... The confusion was made much worse when Malaysia Airlines' operations department said MH370 was flying in Cambodian airspace and they'd been unable to exchange signals with the flight. It would be a further fifteen minutes before someone remembered that MH370's flight plan didn't involve flying through Cambodian airspace. An hour later, Malaysia Airlines admitted the information had been based on projected tracking data, not real-time positioning. In other words, the airline had been looking at screens showing where the aircraft should be, not where it in fact was. It almost beggars belief that this mistake was made and not rectified sooner.

Page 62... In the first of three press conferences on Monday, March 10, the director of civil aviation, Rahman, made the following statement:

"We also conducted search in the areas north of the Straits of Malacca as we do not want to discount the possibilities of the aircraft turn-back to the Straits of Malacca."

Let's be clear: this is sixty hours after the plane had gone missing and it's the first time we ever hear an official use the words "turn back." But Rahman buries the reference, describing the situation as an "unprecedented missing aircraft - a mystery as you can put it." None of the reporters picked up the comment. There was no questioning as to why the Malaysian's were now looking to the west. The Malaysian authorities just slipped the information into the briefing, and none of the journalists, myself included, gave much importance to the fact that the search was now taking place in the opposite direction.

This was followed by a second conference, also on the tenth, when the acting transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, makes no reference to the new search zone, instead becoming defensive, saying, "We have nothing to hide."

[DECLAN: "We have nothing to hide." in my opinion is akin to stating, "to be entirely honest." If you have nothing to hide and you're being honest then why would you need to make those statements! The fact they did tells me that their actions and words weren't matching.]

Page 72... Within a few hours the Journal reframed their story, tweeting, "We've corrected our story to note that satellite not engine data indicated MH370 flew for up to 4 more hours." It was obvious that the story was true: MH370 had continued to send some sort of signal proving the plane continued flying, and probably did so for many hours.

Rereading the transport minister's statement that it was inaccurate to say the plane had kept flying, I am left wondering how on earth he managed to say such a thing. He knew what the question was - did the plane keep flying or not? - when he made this statement; experts in Malaysia, Australia, the UK, and the US were working to interpret the Inmarsat data, and he knew it,

By Friday the fourteenth, Hishammuddin changed tack. He no longer said the story was wrong or inaccurate. Instead, he started being vague: "The investigation team will not publicly release information until it has been properly verified and corroborated." A classic stonewall. This has been rightly held up as an example of the Malaysian government's lack of transparency.

Page 74... The Malaysian prime minister admitted that "according to the new data, the last confirmed communication between the plane and the satellite was at 8:11AM Malaysian time on Saturday 8th March." As he said these words I remember thinking, Hang on, if that's right, it means the plane kept flying for ... I grabbed a nearby timeline sheet and looked. The plane kept flying for nearly seven hours after the "Good night Malaysia 370." This was more than incredible: it bordered on the unbelievable.

Page 103... Then came the words the passengers' families dreaded:

"This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean."

[DECLAN: Why not try Diego Garcia?! (FJDG) Sounds like a great place to start with cozy facilities and a nice long 11,000ft runway with a touchdown of 13ft above mean sea level (AMSL)]

Page 106... This text was sent to all family members who had registered their mobile numbers with the airline so they could be kept informed on developments. Most of those who made the trip to either Kuala Lumpur or Beijing were now being accommodated at the airline's expense in several hotels. As a swift means of getting in touch, Malaysia Airlines was using SMS (short message service) to alert the families when briefings were being held. But no one ever thought for a moment that the company would choose a text message as a way to let them know that the plane had crashed and everyone on board had perished.

Page 108... Unfortunately, in cases like this, it's inevitable that some family members will learn unpleasant facts from the media. In the GermanWings case, the announcement to the victims' families came thirty-six hours after the incident. In MH370, it was sixteen days.

Page 108... Besides the text itself, there is another troubling aspect: the choice of words used. The phrase "beyond any reasonable doubt" is classic legalese, the kind of words used in criminal trials, where juries are repeatedly reminded they must be sure of the accused's guilt "beyond reasonable doubt." Why they would use such a phrase in telling someone about their loved one's death, I can't fathom. I don't understand the inclusion of these words unless they are trying to make their case. When you then add the phrase "we must now accept all evidence," we are left with a text that has all the hallmarks of a statement that was drafted by a committee. It immediately invites the reply "No, we must not now accept," as indeed, at the time, there was no physical evidence of the plane's crashing. In weeks of searching, not a single piece of debris had been recovered. Another sixteen months would pass before the first piece of the plane washed up ashore on Reunion Island.

Page 110... Prime Minister Razak admitted that in drafting the March 24 announcement, his words had been "very carefully chosen." I wanted to know why he had not been more direct. After all, as the Malaysia Airlines text said, all the evidence suggested that the plane went sown in the south Indian Ocean with all loss of life; surely he should have said the same thing. His answer surprised me:

"At the time there was the remote possibility that there could be survivors, a very remote possibility. So I didn't want to exclude that, therefore I chose the words "the flight ended." I didn't say everybody died on board. I didn't say the plane crashed into the sea and everybody died in that process, but I said the flight ended in the southern part of the Indian ocean."

Page 164... For the record, the US has repeatedly denied that the plane flew to Diego Garcia. Former White House press secretary Jay Carney said, "I'll rule that one out," when asked at the regular briefing. Also, in an emailed statement to me, Boeing specifically denied that it has the capability to take control of aircraft.

Page 181... There were numerous eyewitness accounts of a large plane with red markings flying unusually low across the islands [Maldives,] which are only several hundred miles from the US base. The head of the country's civil aviation authority decided to go back and have another look at these stories. In the end, he concluded that what the islanders had seen was not a Boeing 777; it was a fifty-seater Bombardier Dash 8 belonging to Maldivian, a local airline. True, both airlines do have red and blue lettering on the fuselage and their planes could be confused in poor light. There is an obvious difference in size, but perhaps only veteran plane spotters can make this distinction. In any event, it seems the Maldives theory can be put to bed.

[DECLAN: Actually no, it can't. I clearly heard the Transport minister or Prime Minister state in a media conference the following.... "We've had a report from some fishermen in the Maldives of an aircraft matching the description and colors of MH370 time relevant, however these people wouldn't know what they saw, as such aren't credible witnesses and we aren't reading anything into it." Say what?! These people were out fishing around 06:15AM. They described "a large white aircraft which looked like a 747 with a red over blue horizontal strip down the length of the fuselage. They commented about how low they thought the aircraft was - much lower than normal and with its engines screaming. I would expect this from a large jet flying extremely low for it to remain airborne. I would think that being that the Maldives is a tourist mecca, that these people knew EXACTLY what they saw and reported it accordingly. Otherwise why they report it? Large jets would be coming in and out frequently, but you can bet a Boeing 777 wouldn't be likely to.

Below is an image off the Internet showing the Bombardier Dash 8 in Maldivian Airlines livery.

Now, either my optometrist has done a shite job with my glasses, but this aircraft don't match what the description given from the Maldivian fishermen was.

GENERAL ELEMENTS PRESENTED IN THE BOOK ~

Page 51... There were plenty of opportunities to discover something was wrong on that night. A combination of incompetence, poor decision making, and bad operating procedures denied us the chance to gain valuable information. These mistakes set the scene for what was to follow in the months ahead.

Page 71... I contacted several sources who all flatly denied that Rolls-Royce had received any information from the engines. Hishammuddin also denied the accusation, stating, "I would like to refer to news reports suggesting that the aircraft may have continued flying for some time after the last contact. As Malaysia Airlines will confirm shortly, those reports are inaccurate." He concluded, "As far as Rolls Royce and Boeing are concerned those reports are inaccurate." The minister would come to regret these comments - or at least, in hindsight, he should.

Page 83... What Inmarsat engineers discovered in the case of MH370 was that this handshaking had taken place, at the expected hourly intervals, for seven hours after the word " Good night Malaysia Three Seven Zero were uttered from the cockpit. MH370 could not have crashed if it was still sending signals to the satellite at 02:25, 03:41, 04:41, 05:41, 06:41, 08:11, and 08:19. There is one extra wrinkle with the handshakes that requires understanding. Of the seven handshakes, the first (02:25 and the last (08:19) were different from the others. These handshakes were not acknowledging a connection but rather were the plane itself logging into the system, and this would become very important later on ... There were a couple of periods in which it appears that the plane was not logged onto the system at all, and these raised even more questions.

Page 124... The experts had to work out why the first and last handshakes were accompanied by abnormal numbers. There were only a few possible reasons, the most likely of which was a major interruption in the power supply. If the satellite unit lost power, when it was restored the unit would reboot and try automatically to connect again to the satellite. The consensus was that this is what had happened. The plane had lost power, and when it came back, the units were attempting to log on. That only raised another crucial question: Why did the SATCOM lose power?

The first handshake was of particular interest because it occurred immediately after air traffic control handover from Malaysia to Vietnam, just around the time the plane made its turn-back. Truth is, we know almost nothing about this particular power problem - except that it was not because someone switched off the unit in the cockpit... something "just happened."

Page 84... The satellite team in London worked through the British air accident regulator, the AAIB, which would be the point of contact to Kuala Lumpur. Since Inmarsat staff members were now part of the investigation, they were bound by the ICAO treaty rules on privacy and so could not issue any statements themselves. Initially, we heard almost nothing from Inmarsat other than that they were working on the problem.

Page 98... The Inmarsat data is crucial to to the whole search operation. There has been a huge amount of controversy over who knew what and when, and how the data was processed. Numerous allegations have been made that the Malaysians were slow in receiving the data from Inmarsat, accepting it as valid, and then acting upon it.

Page 101... There was a feeling that Malaysia was completely out of its depth and bungling the investigation. The level of international criticism was rising.

Page 110... As we set up for our interview, Razak was preparing for the imminent arrival of President Barak Obama, the first visit by a sitting president in fifty years.

[DECLAN: Maybe Obama, (Soetoro,) needed to ensure they had their story straight and in agreement with each other. Or maybe he was checking up that the instructions had been followed and the deed had been executed - no pun intended.]

Page 132... I said many times on-air that the searchers appeared to be making it up as they went along, and I still think this to be true.

Page 140... One year after the plane went missing, the release of the Factual Report dropped another bombshell in regard to the pingers. It revealed that the battery on the ULB attached to the flight data recorder had actually expired fifteen months before the crash, and there was no record that it had been replaced. Malaysia Airlines' engineering people had failed to enter the current battery into its engineering computer, so the system gave no warning in 2012 when it was time to be replaced. All this despite the CEO of the company saying, "We can confirm there is a maintenance program. Batteries are replaced prior to expiration." In the case of the battery on MH370's recorder, that was not so. We don't, and probably never will, know what effect the age and ineffectiveness of the battery had on the transmission ability of the pinger. Opinion suggests it would have seriously degraded degraded the battery's performance, which would have shortened the thirty-day guaranteed transmission time.

Page 150... Angus Houston's Joint Agency Coordination Center was being relocated from Perth to the Australian capital, though operationally it would remain in western Australia.

[DECLAN: Why split these two operations, unless they wanted to keep the political aspects close to parliament to ensure a control on keeping the administration actions and decisions close to the Government and away from the physical search operational base in Perth!]

Page 175... Except all the incidents of commercial pilot suicide we have discussed display a very different set of actions. In all the cases reported by the ICAO, the act of the culprit is fast, immediate, dramatic. They get the other pilot out of the cockpit and then push the nose down putting the plane into a dive. They don't plot for weeks, devising a highly complicated method of execution requiring detailed knowledge of the plane's complex technology, such as disabling the ACARS systems. If Captain Zaharie Shah or First Officer Fariq Hamid wanted to commit suicide, there were plenty of opportunities to do it over the South China Sea, or even over remote parts of Malaysia. Also they would have known their plan would be ruined if Malaysian radar tracked the plane on its trek across the country and the air force sent up jets. They couldn't have known that incompetence by a military radar operator in Malaysia on that night meant no one reacted, or that neither Thailand nor Indonesia would show any interest in the aircraft, let alone that Singapore, with its obsession over security, would allow an unidentified plane to fly by. Because of incompetence and bad luck, no one responded, an occurrence that, according to all the pilots I have spoken to who regularly fly this airspace, could not have been taken for granted.

[DECLAN: This I have been saying from the very beginning.]

Page 184... First, whatever happened had to take out all the communications tools at once.

Page 184... Second, the plane's movements have been described as "deliberate." Someone was commanding the turn-back toward Malaysia, and the various twists and turns across the Strait of Malacca. There is nothing erratic about these turns. Whether this was done by hands on the wheel or by changing the heading select of the autopilot, the movements were consistent with human inputs.

Page 191... Those I spoke to believe what happened took place in the electrical and electronic bay (E&E), which is beneath the passenger cabin floor, at the front of first class.

Page 196... In a newspaper interview, Sir Tim Clark, CEO of Emirates Airline, gave voice to what others had been reluctant to say. He described himself as "totally dissatisfied" with the current situation.

Tim does believe someone took control of the aircraft, but does not think it was a case of pilot suicide. Fundamentally he thinks something is being hidden. "I do not believe that the information held by some is on the table," he says. The fact that someone of Sir Tim's caliber believes there is much being hidden should give us all pause. As far as I am aware, he is not prone to believing conspiracy theories. His views are worrying, and need to be taken seriously.

Page 238... [Partner of passenger Philip Wood, Sarah Bajc]...

Sarah says, "It's their opinion that there is an act of cover-up within the government and more than one." I ask whether this cover-up is a result of incompetence or a deliberate act. "We don't know that, but it's still unacceptable. I believe they destroyed evidence. So if you're talking about ever finding the truth on this, the likelihood is getting smaller and smaller.

Page 262... Once Annex 13 goes into effect, a wall of silence descends upon an inquiry and every question is met with "Annex 13. Can't say a word."

Page 263... MH370 is the most extreme example of an investigation in which no one is speaking on the record, and everyone is blaming Annex 13 for the fact they can't or won't speak. There surely must be an easier way to make information available than through the statements of a single organization, which may be predisposed to keep silent!

THE SEARCH FOR MH370 ~

Page 61... Puzzled they certainly were, because while they were busy searching off the northeast coast of Malaysia, near Vietnam, indications that things were most definitely not as they seemed began to appear.

... The Malaysians never mentioned publicly that the military had reported seeing the plane, although they appear to have acted upon the news straightaway. They shifted the searches and started deploying planes and ships to the Strait of Malacca in the west almost immediately without ever saying why.

Page 63... Those who claim that the Malaysians delayed starting the search in the west haven't read the record. It is abundantly clear: the military told the authorities on that Saturday night (too late, to be sure, but still...) and they shifted the search almost immediately, but they chose not to draw attention to it.

Page 76... There are two major criticisms to deal with here. One, the Malaysians were slow to respond to the turn-back, wasting days searching in the wrong place. And two, they failed to acknowledge the fact that the plane kept flying for hours, and in doing this, they hindered the investigation.

Page 78... Before we leave this first week of chaos, I ask you to pause and quietly remember: when Malaysia Airlines put out their statement at 07:24 saying the plane had lost contact, MH370 was still in the air, flying south.

It would continue to fly for at least another forty-seven minutes.

Page 90... As the operation gathered speed, those of us covering the story knew where the planes and ships were being sent to search but very little of the behind-the-scenes work of the international experts who determined these areas. The experts never spoke. They never gave interviews. They never revealed what they were doing. The level of official secrecy seemed extreme. Some organizations, such as Britain's Air Accidents Investigation Branch, never said a word. Indeed their website still just stated baldly:

"We are not able to comment further on this investigation, which is being led by the Malaysian authorities." Everyone hid behind the Malaysians, who in turn were hiding behind the broad secrecy curtain known as ICAO Annex 13 (which as I shall argue later, was used to excess.)

Page 92... I had no hesitation in saying I believed that the Australians knew far more than they were letting on, and that they were probably bloody sure this was debris from the plane. In hindsight, it is difficult for me to overstate how important this development seemed at the time, and I said this on television. So, why did I tie my colors to the mast so foolishly?

First, we have the Malaysians saying there are these two corridors; then we have the search planes scouring the most likely place; now we have the Australian prime minister saying something may have been found.

Abbott is a very experienced politician, not someone who was likely to make such significant statements unless he was pretty sure of what he was saying. He was also making them to the Australian parliament. If he was wrong, he'd look like an idiot. What's more, he used the phrase "new and credible information." The use of the word "credible" added huge amounts of, well, credibility to what was being said.

Finally, he talked of a "specialist analysis" of two possible objects. His caveat that "it may turn out to be unrelated to the search for MH370 was almost boilerplate throwaway, added just for the record. Mr Abbott left us with the ringing words " I did want to update the House on this potentially important development."

Anyone who has spent time working in news and politics knows that most senior politicians are very circumspect in situations like these, for the very reason that they don't want to get it wrong. There were many less dramatic ways than speaking in parliament that he could have released this information, for instance just by coming out and making a press statement. Knowing how many advisors and spin doctors are employed by top politicians, I thought it inconceivable that Abbott would have made these comments to parliament without being pretty sure.

Page 119... Malaysia bore the legal responsibility for handling the search for MH370; on March 17, 2014, they delegated the task of running the daily search operation to Australia.

Page 139... There were some who did not believe that this was the pinger. Jeff Wise, one of CNN's aviation analysts went out on a limb and said, "I feel there's a lot of problems with this data." He stated categorically that he didn't think it was the pinger. He believed the distance between Ocean Shield's detections was too far, that the directions, once acquired, should have been held longer, and ultimately the frequency was wrong. Jeff was proved right. It became clear that the sounds that had led to so much hope and confidence did not come from the black boxes. Exactly what those noises were has never been properly determined. The Australian Transport Safety Report just says:

A review of the Ocean Shield acoustic signals was undertaken independently by various specialists. The analyses determined that the signals recorded were not consistent with the nominal performance standards of the Dukane DK100 underwater acoustic beacon. The analyses also noted that whilst unlikely. the acoustic signals could be consistent with a damaged ULB.

To this day we have never learned what those pings or noises were.

Page 149... The search was still essentially based on the turn-back at 1:25, the military radar traces up to 2:22 on the night of the disappearance, and the seven Inmarsat handshakes, along with a couple of unanswered satellite phone calls. This information had been parsed a million ways, using many different models of aircraft performance to determine where the plane finally ended up. There was still much confidence in the seven arcs, but the bedeviling issue with them was where - along or to the side of that seventh arc - the plane had foundered.

[DECLAN: Aah... try going direct to Diego Garcia. I'd like to know why the Malaysian Airbase at Butterworth, near Penang, detected primary radar pings yet made no attempt to establish what they were and furthermore did nothing about immediately reporting them. This strongly suggests that they knew EXACTLY what was in their airspace, who had control of it, why it was passing through and ultimately, where it was headed for and why it was going there. I can't think of any other valid comprehensible reason for dismissing an unidentified radar object, other than what I just mentioned. Why were fighter jets not sent up?]

Page 178... As we saw with MH17, when an airliner is violently brought out of the sky, the crash leaves a massive debris field, and so far nothing of the kind has been reported. If the attack had occurred around the South China Sea, the Bay of Bengal, or the Indian Ocean, with the plane breaking up in midair, we might expect some debris to wash ashore to nearby countries, as in the case of KAL007, when body parts and paper cups washed ashore in Japan.

[DECLAN: The Bay of Bengal. Interesting that this location should be mentioned. Why? Well, early on in the search it was briefly mentioned the search had shot north to the Bay of Bengal because they had detected some pings there. However it was only mentioned briefly and after a "blink and you miss it" period of time [few days to maximum of a week] they returned to the Southern Indian Ocean. This was crucial for me because it tended to indicate that in order to have got pings from anything in the Bay of Bengal, it would be indicting to those on the trail of MH370, such as Abel Danger Investigators, that they were inferring that MH370 had traversed this area. They wouldn't have searched there otherwise if they had no good reason to. It also got me thinking "What would a Boeing 777 need in order to change direction in say a 180deg radius to line up for finals into Diego Garcia. The Bay of Bengal would factor into the equation and fits with the direction of travel as we know it to have been and able to piece together.

Page 181... Pulling all the strands together, the nefarious options are by far the easiest to understand and in many ways the most interesting. There is a simplicity to the notion that the pilot did it, or that someone hijacked the plane.