PLANELOPNIK
The Pilot in Command of Vanished Flight MH370 Was More Troubled Than Malaysia Will Admit: Report

Kristen Lee
Today 11:29am

The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 on March 8, 2014 remains an international mystery, and while we are not really any closer to finding out where the plane went down or how it vanished, a new story in The Atlantic gives us the fullest picture to date.

The story is exhaustively reported by William Langewiesche, known most famously for the definitive account of the World Trade Center site after 9/11. You should definitely go read his latest for yourself, but here are a few of the new details:

1. There was apparently a mix-up in communication between the Malaysian air traffic control and Vietnamese controllers that resulted in a delay in reporting the plane’s disappearance from radar after crossing into Vietnamese airspace. From there, there was further delay in notifying Kuala Lumpur’s Aeronautical Rescue Coordination Centre.

2. Blaine Gibson is the man who has taken it upon himself to manually search the coastlines of the Indian Ocean for debris. After the flaperon was discovered on the French island of Réunion, Gibson traveled to Mozambique and discovered a “scrap—from a horizontal-stabilizer panel—[that] was determined to almost certainly be from MH370.” It means that the plane almost certainly hit the water and smashed into millions of pieces.

3. The Malaysian government is accused of being both incompetent and unwilling to fully cooperate with the investigation:

A close observer of the MH370 process said, “It became clear that the primary objective of the Malaysians was to make the subject just go away. From the start there was this instinctive bias against being open and transparent, not because they were hiding some deep, dark secret, but because they did not know where the truth really lay, and they were afraid that something might come out that would be embarrassing. Were they covering up? Yes. They were covering up for the unknown.”

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