The Hunt for MH370: The Mystery, The Cover-Up, The Truth – Ean Higgins
Perhaps I’m out of my lane sharing this book on a blog that is mostly, at least tangentially, about the ocean, but I read it very much as someone interested in everything about the ocean, including the subject of a multi-national deep sea search for an aircraft that apparently vanished without a trace in March 2014.
The story of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 is reasonably well known, but unresolved – pieces of wreckage from the plane have been found on Indian Ocean islands such as Reunion, but the crash site and black box of the flight has never been located. Millions of dollars have been spent looking for the plane, but there is no certainty about what happened.
Ean Higgins is an Australian journalist who covered the disappearance of MH370 from day one. In this book he presents several theories as to what occurred on the flight, with varying degrees of plausibility. He does share which theory he finds most likely, and it happens to coincide with the findings of William Langewiesche in a gripping long form article on MH370 that was published in The Atlantic earlier this month. According to Langewiesche,
Because the Malaysians withheld what they knew, the initial sea searches were concentrated in the wrong place—the South China Sea—and found no floating debris. Had the Malaysians told the truth right away, such debris might have been found and used to identify the airplane’s approximate location; the black boxes might have been recovered. The underwater search for them ultimately centered on a narrow swath of ocean thousands of miles away. But even a narrow swath of the ocean is a big place. It took two years to find the black boxes from Air France 447, which crashed into the Atlantic on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009—and the searchers had known exactly where to look.
Higgins writes with compassion about the families and loved ones of the passengers on MH370. He makes it clear that the lack of resolution around the events of that evening in March 2014 has a human impact that those of us who have never had a loved one disappear without an explanation, cannot imagine.
I started reading this book with interest, but also holding a mildly pessimistic expectation that it would re-hash the little I knew about the missing flight, without any conclusions. Contrary to that expectation, I found it surprisingly satisfying, and while the mystery remains mysterious, it is clear from which quarter the truth must emerge. Whether it ever does so, remains to be seen
This is a gripping read that will engender an appreciation for the magnitude of the challenge presented by an underwater search far from shore. Read it, and read the William Langewiesche (author of The Outlaw Sea) article here.
Get a copy of the book here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise here.
