MARCH 8, 2014. 12.15am. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A line of passengers shuffles down the aisle to their seats, subdued and sleepy. It’s late, and the flight is due to arrive in Beijing at practically the break of dawn. Most of the passengers are Chinese, with a sizable number of Malaysians and Indonesians and a smattering of Indians, Europeans, Australians, New Zealanders, and Americans. Here, for the next six hours, they will be pressed together in the forced comaraderie of late-capitalistic travel drudgery. No one loves taking a redeye.
It appears to be an utterly mundane example of a ritual that plays out tens of thousands times a day in airports on every continent. But if one were aware of the subtlest psychological ripples that can emanate from subconcious gestures, one’s attention would be drawn to three of the passengers in particular.
The first sits in business class, the highest level of service on this flight. A quick-eyed, broad-shouldered man, mid-40s, not tall but physically imposing all the same. He wears a strange half-smile. You can see from his carry-on bag that he is an avid recreational scuba diver, on his way back from a club trip exploring the coral reefs of Southeast Asia. His bag contains a snorkel, flippers, and air-tank hoses. Only if one were preternaturally perceptive would one notice that the bag also contains not one but three full-face diving masks. He settles into a window seat and puts the bag on the empty seat beside him. He unzips a pocket, takes out one of the masks, and stuffs it into the seat pocket in front of him.
Two taller men, about the same age, are coming down the aisle past his seat. Both are well-muscled and carry themselves with the self-confidence of men who prize their physicality. One is shorter and broader; the other has the lanky physique of an elite basketball player. As they pass the first man’s seat, they take no notice of him, but the blond one lifts up the bag with the masks and carries it with him. The quick-eyed man doesn’t seem to notice, and neither does anyone else.
It’s nearly half past midnight when the doors close. The passengers fasten their seat belts, the flight attendants mime along to the safety video, the plane rolls along the taxiway. If there’s a virtue to traveling when most people are already asleep, it’s that there are few delays. Right on schedule, the plane lines up on runway 32R, the engines spool up, and the 777-200ER is airborne, heading north and climbing through the equatorial night.
The lights of Kuala Lumpur glitter below, then fall away. Only a few scattered strings of light mark the small cities and towns of the Malayan peninsula, the darker black of the Malacca Strait to the west. Turning as it climbs, the plane eases to wings level and heads northeast.
Throughout the cabin, passengers sprawl in the abandon of sleep, mouths hanging open, heads pressed against window shades or into balled-up pillows. But the quick-eyed man sits upright and alert. Over Taman Negara, Malaysia’s largest national park, the plane reaches its assigned cruise altitude, 35,000 feet. Up in the cockpit, the pilot turns off the seatbelt sign and tells the flight attendants that they can begin their beverage service.
The flight attendants move through the business class cabin taking orders. The quick-eyed man politely declines. He waits until they have begun to bring out the food and drink, then pulls his regulator from the seat pocket and moves toward the forward lavatory. Seeing that the galley is clear, he kneels and pulls back a patch of carpet to reveal a hatch with a recessed handle. He opens it, scoots down, and lowers the hatch smoothly above his head. A moment later, a flight attendant comes back to fetch a fresh pot of coffee and sees the carpet askew. Huh, that’s weird, she thinks, and puts it back.
Down below, the quick-eyed man flips on a light and finds himself inside a compartment lined with metal boxes, flashing lights, indicators. This is the electronics and equipment bay, or E/E bay. Kneeling, he unshoulders his pack with graceful efficiency. He’s trained this sequence of moves hundreds of times. With a patch cord the intruder plugs into the plane’s Portable Maintenance Access Terminal (PMAT) and begins uploading software. While that’s running, he starts pulling circuit breakers and cuts the ARINC cable coming out of the Inertial Reference System (IRS). A hundred feet away, in the rear of the plane, the Honeywell/Thales MCS6000 Satellite Data Unit (SDU) goes into standby mode.
In the cockpit, all seems normal. Starting to feel a little sleepy, the captain rings the head flight attendant and asks for coffee. At twenty past one, the plane approaches the edge of Malaysia’s air traffic control zone. Lumpur Radar calls MH370 and informs it that it should switch radio frequencies and call up the controller handling the next zone, Ho Chi Minh. The flight crew’s response: “Goodnight, Malaysia 370.”
Now the plane is in a kind of operational no-man’s-land, a limbo between one control area and the next. During the three to five minutes that follow, no one on the ground is responsible for MH370. And even if they were looking for it, the plane happens to be occupying an area over the middle of the South China Sea that’s far enough from land that surveillance coverage often falters. Standard operating procedure is to assume the plane is where it should be. In the past, that’s always been a safe bet. But tonight is going to be different.
The pilot is staring out into the dark of the night sky, mind wandering, when all of a sudden he feels a sensation he doesn’t expect. The plane is tilting to one side. It’s banking, making a turn for the left. Instinctively, he glances to the right, to see if the junior pilot has decided to play some kind of wildly inappropriate prank. But the copilot just looks back at him, eyes wide. The control yokes aren’t moving, but the plane is unquestionably making a turn.
The pilot’s never seen anything like it. He’s accumulated thousands of hours, done countless runs in training simulators, he even has a recreational flight sim rig set up in his basement, and he’s never encountered anything like this. It’s as if the plane has a mind of its own. He grabs the yoke. It’s like a dead thing in his hands, inert. He feels the tendrils of panic spreading as he grabs a checklist and starts running through it. The more he tries, the more bizarre it gets. Nothing works as it should. Switches are dead, readouts blank, indicators flashing gibberish. Is the flight computer having some kind of weird meltdown?
Then: pandemonium. An alarm klaxon sounds. Cabin atmosphere is low and falling. A hull rupture? The sounds of screaming in the cabin filter through the cockpit door. The captain and co-pilot reach for their masks, but no air seems to be flowing. What the hell is going on? Nothing’s working. The copilot dials up the emergency frequency, 121.5. Nothing. He punches in the frequency for Lumpur Radio. Nothing. The sat phone is dead, too. All of it. They’ve been cut off. The air in the cockpit is noticeably thin, the captain feels like he’s sucking air. One idea desperately forms: the E/E bay. Something must be wrong in the E/E bay. He rises, stumbles, throws open the cockpit door. Two burly men wearing breathing apparatus block the way. He falls to his knees and passes out.
Behind him, the copilot realizes too late what is happening. It all feels surreal, impossible, like a nightmare he can’t wake up out of. His vision is swimming. He knows that without oxygen he’s got just seconds before he loses consciousness. Frantically, he reaches into his pocket, fishes out his phone, and sends a text, a single four-digit number: 7500. The transponder code for hijack. He’s unconscious before he hits the ground.
Now the hijackers are in complete control of the plane.
Because its transponder, radios and satcom have been disabled, the plane cannot be seen by air traffic controllers. But is not entirely invisible. As it completes its 180-degree left hand turn and heads back toward the Malay Peninsula, it is within range of both Malaysian and Thai military radar. But it is late at night, and no one has attempted a hostile air incursion in decades. Scratch that: no one has attempted a hostile air incursion in the history of the Malaysian nation. There are no jets ready to scramble. What’s more, the blip that makes its way across the air force radar screens is straddling the border between the two countries. Malaysian military radar operators assume it’s under Thai control; Thai military radar operators assume it’s under Malaysian controls. Neither side does anything.
In the E/E bay, the quick-eyed man still has plenty of work to do. Reaching into his tool kit, he takes out two connectors and attaches them to each end of the severed ARINC cable. Then he removes a small black box from his bag and plugs each of the connectors into it.
He climbs out of the hole and glances back at the eerily silent cabin. The thicket of oxygen masks dangling limp and motionless in the half-light remind him of a sunken forest he once swam through under the midwinter ice of a frozen lake. He hurries forward to join the other two men in the cockpit. Taking the left-hand seat, he punches a set of coordinates into the Flight Management Computer. They’re almost directly over Butterfield Air Force Base, but there’s nothing the Malaysian military can do. The plane is rigged to run fast, faster than its normal cruise speed, and even if air force jets stood waiting on high alert they’d have no chance of catching the plane before it left Malaysian airspace.
Just then the quick-eyed man notices a cell phone lying on the floor of the cockpit. It’s turned on, trying to put through a text message. The quick-eyed man curses and smashes it. Too late: the phone has connected, briefly, with a cell tower far below. Fortunately, the connection wasn’t strong enough for the text to go through. A close call.
The men watch as the symbol of their plane move across the satnav map. They’re heading down the middle of the Strait of Malacca, one of the busiest shipping channels in the world, an ancient nexus between the teeming basin of the Indian Ocean and the great expanse of the Pacific, but at this hour, at this altitude, they are alone. With the wind behind them, they’re moving at nearly 600 mph.
The men know they are under surveillance; invisible beams from multiple radar installations are painting them many times a minute. But part of carrying out an operation like this is understanding not just what your enemies are technically capable of doing, but getting inside their heads, understanding their protocols and their psychology and traditions, in order to understand what they will actually do. And they know the Malaysia well. Their country supplies its front-line fighter jets. They know exactly what Malaysian military radar operators will be doing on a Friday night. The hijackers know that that their progress across the sky is being recorded, but that no human being is actually paying attention. That’s fine. A recorded performance will suit their present needs just fine. When the investigators begin their search in the light of morning, they will start looking just where the hijackers want them to.
At twenty past two, the plane approaches a navigational waypoint, an invisible marker in the sky called MEKAR. They are 270 miles northwest of Penang, and at the limit of military radar coverage. They are home free, now. With the radios turned off, the transponder silent, and the satcom shut down, there is no way for anyone in the world to know where they are. They have vanished.
The time has come for the genius touch. The quick-eyed man climbs back down into the electronics bay and flips a switch on the black box. It ends its electronic silence and begins streaming position and location information through the ARINC cable to the SDU installed above the ceiling of the cabin near the rear exit. To a human observer, the information would seem like gibberish: a physically impossible combination of values that would have the plane speeding in one direction but winding up in another. But the SDU doesn’t care. It slurps up this strange mishmash of numbers and churns out the numerical results that allow it to aim the antenna. It also subtly shifts, by a few parts per billion, the frequency at which it transmits its signals.
Atop the plane, separated from the cold, 600-mph slipstream by the thin skin of its housing, the high-gain antenna whirs into action, skewing toward satellite Inmarsat-3F1, 26,000 miles above. In a burst of radio-frequency energy, it requests a logon to the Inmarsat system, receives confirmation, and then sits ready. Flight MH370 is once again in contact with the outside world. The thread is as tenuous as one can imagine, but it is there, and days from now, when an Inmarsat engineer thinks to look for it in the company’s logs of recorded transmissions, he will be astonished to find that he has the sole clue to the fate of the missing plane.
It will be so subtle, so arcane a hint, that the man and his colleagues will congratulate themselves for their brilliance in finding the clue and discerning its meaning. It will be literally inconceivable to them that another group of men have achieved the even greater stroke of brilliance of planting that clue for them to find.
Five minutes later, 90 miles past MEKAR, the quick-eyed man enters a new waypoint into the flight management computer. The plane banks to the right, settles into a gentle turn, then levels out again. Ahead lie the Andaman Islands, and beyond them the coast of India and the great delta of the Ganges River.
As they pass over the subcontinent, pointillist glow of the cities spreads out below like a galaxy. Ahead, the Himalayas loom like a black hole, the dark emptiness of the Tibetan steppe beyond.
Meanwhile, on the ground, in that great sprawling network of interconnected humanity that is the international air traffic control system, worry is spreading. Failing to find MH370 on his radar scope when expected, a controller near Saigon radios the plane and asks for its status. Hearing nothing, he phones his counterparts at Lumpur Radar. A daisy chain of increasingly concerned telephone calls begins.
At 2:40am, Malaysia Airlines ground operations calls the plane to find out what is going on. A signal is routed through a ground station in Western Australia, up into space, and back down to MH370’s data unit. The frequency of the SDU’s transmissions will tell Inmarsat engineers who examine the logs that the plane turned south and headed out over the open ocean.
On the ground, the urgency and tempo of the phone calls increases. Meanwhile, in the darkness, the plane that was once flight MH370 is slipping further and further north, high and fast. Hour after hour it recedes from its phantom twin, the imaginary electronic duplicate of itself, which appears to be receding into the vague expanse of the southern Indian Ocean. Hour after hour, Inmarsat’s computers check in to very that the plane is still in range and logged on: 3:41am, 4:41am, 5:41am. The plan, elaborate and complicated as it is, has gone exactly as intended. The quick-eyed man is less than a thousand miles from his destination.
To maximize their fuel economy, the hijackers have programmed the plane to progressively climb higher as their flight progresses. As the journey’s end nears they are at 41,000 feet, near the 777’s maximum operational altitude.
At 0:11, above the arid expanse of Kazakhstan’s Qizilqum desert, the plane exchanges its final full handshake with the Inmarsat satellite high above. MH370’s fuel reserves are very, very low at this point. There are not many places in Kazakhstan that are suitable for landing a stolen 777, and even fewer within immediate range of this spot. There is one, however, that stands out.
Directly ahead, nearly within gliding range, lies a 56-mile-wide oval territory: the Baikonur Cosmodrome, where Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to reach orbit. Though it lies inside the borders of Kazakhstan, it is leased by Russia and functions as autonomous territory—a sort of Kremlin-controlled Guantanamo on the steppe, selected by the USSR at the dawn of the space age for its wide-open spaces and remote location.
Near the center of the oval lies a historically significant called airstrip called Yubileyniy, the Russian word for “Jubilee.” Nearly 15,000 feet long, it was built in the 70s as the landing site for the Buran space plane, the Soviet Union’s answer to the Space Shuttle. Constructed of special reinforced concrete twice as strong as that used in normal runways, and ground to exceptional flatness using special milling machines, Yubileyniy remains to my knowledge the only airstrip in the world that was built specifically for the use of self-landing aircraft. On November 15, 1988, after a successful three-hour trip in space, the unmanned Buran made its first and only landing at Yubileyniy, missing its landing mark by less than 50 feet. Soon after, the Soviet Union fell apart, and the project was cancelled. To this day, the area sits largely disused, far from the busy launch areas of Baikonur, surrounded by derelict buildings that haven’t been touched in decades.
Most large runways are located at airports near cities. Yubileyniy isn’t. And the fact that it was designed for a self-landing airplane is particularly apt considering that hijackers were chosen for their ability to steal a plane, not to fly it. Fortunately, the Boeing 777 flight management system is able to fly what’s known as an Instrument Landing System Category III “autoland” approach. Essentially, once the necessary information is plugged into the system, the plane is able to fly itself to any suitably equipped runway, with or without a trained pilot is at the controls.
As it begins its descent, the plane maintains its current heading, then turns left to line up for a straight in approach on Yubileniy’s runway 24. With the wind on its nose, the plane descends steadily over dry gullies and scrubby pasture. Then it is over the smooth concrete and parallel white bars of the runway’s end. The nose rises slightly as the machine eases down for landing. It comes to a stop on the reinforced concrete-and-asphalt runway at approximately 6:50am local time, an hour and a quarter before sunrise on March 8, 2014.