‘I feel stupid’, I told Grace, an hour after the briefing for families that I attended in Kuala Lumpur on 30th July. The briefing was on the Full Report by the Safety Investigation team inquiring into the disappearance of MH370. It wasn’t even comprehensive. Much of what was shared was already known. Travelling from Chennai at the last minute just for the briefing suddenly seemed so unnecessary! Besides disappointment and frustration, the Investigation yielded few conclusions, no heroes, no villains and no direction for further investigation, it seems 239 lives were lost for no apparent reason or known cause.

I didn’t expect much from the Investigation team in the first place. And yet, I think I had expected to hear something, anything, that would shed a ray of light on what happened. Hitherto unacknowledged, I perhaps expected that the Investigation knew more than what the public was let on till date. This I hoped would become public in the course of the briefing on 30th July. I had expected that with the benefit of insulation from continuous public scrutiny, these serious men will have been thorough.

Family members from many countries could not make the trip to Malaysia because the country confirmed only in the last minute that it will be willing to arrange for families to travel to Kuala Lumpur. For a while it seemed that for Malaysia, the Malays and the Chinese were the principal audience. As for others they were perhaps seen as inconsequential because their number was small. It felt like a throwback to the early days in March 2014.

Family members of passengers who could make it to the Briefing were handed out a voluminous report, about 1500 pages in all including the appendices – the full report (a euphemism for the Final report) a little before the briefing. The Safety Investigation team’s briefing on the report lends no weight to any hypothesis or conclusions about what caused the plane’s disappearance. If anything, it seemed to prefer language that made possible for Boeing to claim it was in the clear and for family and friends of the cockpit crew to claim the report gave it a clean chit. Neither claims can be argued to be definitive or final.

The Air Traffic Control (ATC) at Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh bungled that fateful night. Malaysia Airlines misled and lulled the KL-ATC into thinking that MH370 was being tracked and its whereabouts were known… now in Cambodian airspace, now in Vietnamese airspace… while actually neither Cambodia nor Vietnam actually saw the plane in their airspace. The airline was reading of a projected flight plan rather than a real-time flight track. MH370’s turn back at the edge of KL-ATC’s boundary with Ho Chi Minh’s was manually done rather than through auto – pilot. These were perhaps the only definitive statements that the Investigation could make. A surprise was that none of the Emergency Locator Transmitters (ELTs) worked. Even more surprising was the nugget shared that historically, ELTs have failed in most cases. Just think about this!

It became apparent that the entire hunt for MH370 hinged on two sets of information – the data from the Military radar and Inmarsat. The Military radar data is still not public and the clamour for it to be released unedited will grow in the coming days. After over four years since the plane disappeared, releasing the data for scrutiny by independent experts is likely to be a risk, not of security but reputation and bruised egos.

When did the military realise that they were indeed seeing MH370’s track? When did the KL-ATC contact the military? When did the Government know of the MH370 turn back with certainty? Why was the search in the South China Sea kept up till mid-March? I doubt the report offers a convincing timeline, and an endorsement of the Government’s response.

At the briefing, I expected that the Malaysian Government through the Ministry of Transport, the Department of Civil Aviation (now rechristened the Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia) to be alongside the Safety Investigation team representing the spectrum of aviation management and accident investigation, in full force to field questions. It made eminent sense for the Ministry of Defence to be present too. Instead, Government representatives didn’t take the stage and the new Transport Minister was absent throughout, preferring to release a statement at the end of the day rather than engage the families and the Press that was present.

One got the feeling that the Investigation team was confined to hand-outs from entities such as the Military and the Police and was content enough to not initiate its own probes, and critically challenge the versions being handed down. Given the unique context of MH370 where a satisfactory conclusion of the investigation is contingent on finding the wreckage, I believe that the Safety Investigation team took a literal and a narrow interpretation of its mandate to preclude any role in the search. It came through as helpless rather than empowered, hamstrung and dependent on the Malaysian Government for resources, tools, access to various agencies / entities. It seemed anything but independent. It saw no role for itself in the search for the plane (wreckage / debris), offered no opinion, and refused to be drawn into any discussion on the search or the tardy efforts to recover potential aircraft debris along the African coast. It played no part in communicating periodically with MH370 families on the progress or lack of it in the investigation, an obligation that the Government too took rather lightly.

In essence, the briefing and the release of the report on 30th July was a non-event, a reminder to the MH370 families that there are no surprises, and no satisfactory answers even after 4 years even though the media, present in large numbers at the briefing, tried breathlessly to inject some energy and momentum with eyeball grabbing headlines.

In the days following the release of the full report, as ‘independent experts’ pore over the report, we are beginning to see doubts being raised, some critical comment, sharp questions, impossible scenarios and contradictions within the report, etc. coming up for discussion or a review. The report ‘as is’, going by the trends in public critique / commentary is at best treated as provisional rather than ‘final’ and I foresee some robust exchanges on the details in the report. We will be making a mistake if we accept the premise that because it is the official investigation, it is reliable and credible. Similarly, because seven accredited international agencies (also members of the team) have signed off without dissent on the full report may not mean full agreement but just effective negotiations, and trade-offs, or even active collusion in closing a case where beyond the known offenders no one is held responsible, and no serious liability sticks too obviously on to any of the powerful manufacturers.

What lies ahead for the search for MH370 appears uncertain. It will be prudent to release the military radar data for independent scrutiny / analysis. It will mean putting the larger public interest above national security concerns. In keeping with the words of the Investigation team’s Lead that the probable cause for the plane’s disappearance cannot be ascertained until the wreckage is found, and in line with the mandate to make recommendations so a recurrence is avoided, it is imperative that the Investigation team seek a continuation of the search for MH370. How can effective recommendations for safety be made beyond fixing obvious gaps if you don’t yet know what happened? It is time for Malaysia to reiterate its commitment to find answers and remain open to credible and competent search proposals like the one from Ocean Infinity last year.

Image from The National.

This article originally appeared on my Facebook page.