MALAYSIA Airlines only twice attempted to make phone contact with its unresponsive airliner over six hours as it flew to its doom, causing vital clues to its final location to be lost and painting a woeful picture of air safety in the region.

The revelations come out of close examination of an Australian Transport Safety Bureau report into MH370’s disappearance, released on Thursday.

WITHOUT A TRACE: Where on earth is Flight MH370?

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The report also shows that no one in the cockpit used aircraft waypoints to set course south over the Indian Ocean, ruling out suspicion that pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah had pre-programmed the Boeing 777 to crash.

But this did not eliminate suspicion that someone used the automatic pilot to send the plane on a southerly heading.

Veteran serving Qantas pilot Richard Woodward, who flies A380s but has test-pilot experience on 777s, said if ground crew or air-traffic control had inundated MH370 with phone contact attempts it would have given a clearer picture of where the plane went down.

FIVE HOURS ‘A LONG TIME NOT TO CALL’

Satellite provider Inmarsat and investigators calculated the early Indian Ocean search areas based on automatic satellite “handshakes”, initiated by an Inmarsat ground station in Perth, but also from phone calls made from the ground to the cockpit satellite phone that went through the same ground station.

“If they’d been calling the plane, the satellite would have tried to log on and the aircraft pinger would have tried to respond,” said Captain Woodward.

“That would have given you a distance from the station and they would have got a more accurate idea where the aircraft went. The very act of the pinging would have narrowed down where to look.”

Instead, after pilots made their final contact at 1.22am, Malaysian time, on March 8, it would be another hour and 17 minutes before ground staff first tried to ring the plane’s satellite phone.

Astoundingly, despite receiving no initial response, no one tried to ring the plane again for another five hours. The next call came at 7.13am Malaysian time, after the flight was supposed to have landed.

“Five hours is a long time (not to call) if you’re trying to search for the airplane,” said Captain Woodward.

“You’d be trying every available means. I’m absolutely surprised there’s only two attempts to call on the satellite phone.

“If you’d lost contact with an airliner you’d be calling them on every frequency. You’d definitely be trying to call them on the satellite phone (as well as VHF and HF and by data link, similar to SMS).”

COCKPIT VOICE RECORDER ‘WON’T PROVE ANYTHING’

It also appears that numerous emergency procedures that should have begun immediately after the plane lost contact were not initiated, including notifying other jets within 300 nautical miles to attempt to make contact with MH370 and warning other aircraft that a jet was potentially off-course.

Captain Woodward also said, based on the ATSB’s view that hypoxia, or lack of oxygen, killed everyone aboard as it flew south, that nothing would likely be revealed on the jet’s cockpit voice recorder if it was ever found.

He said the recorder, or black box, was on a loop that wiped itself clean every two hours.

Any maydays from the cockpit or potential statements of exaltation by hijackers would not exist because everyone was dead.

“All the cockpit recorder will reveal is silence,” said Captain Woodward.

Because the ATSB report refers to waypoints connected with known aircraft routes to places such as Port Hedland, Adelaide and the Cocos Islands, it didn’t mean anyone in the cockpit had set such courses.

The ATSB report, based the plane’s handshakes and the two phone calls, said the jet went “close” to known aircraft waypoints but not directly over them, suggesting there was no programmed course.

“It doesn’t appear to be the case that it was deliberately planned to overfly any waypoint,” said Captain Woodward.

WHO PUT THE PLANE INTO AUTOPILOT?

Captain Woodward does not rule out intervention from pilots or hijackers, because he believes if there was a fire aboard the pilots would have had time to put on oxygen masks and declare a mayday.

He says the pilots could have been overcome by hijackers but, given difficulties of accessing the cockpit’s secure door, it was more likely the result of aberrant behaviour by the flight crew.

“I’m leaning towards to fact a rogue pilot, probably the captain, planned all this,” he says.

MH370 deviated from its course at 1.25am, three minutes after the last voice contact with pilots. It flew south-west over Malaysia and then took a second deliberate turn south over the Indian Ocean.

The first turn would fit the circumstance of pilots trying to turn back to Kuala Lumpur with a problem, such as with a fire, but primary radar data from Malaysia indicates a second deliberate turn was made after this, setting the plane on course for the Indian Ocean.

Captain Woodward believes someone would have needed to have intervene at a human level to make this second “positive” decision to alter the automatic pilot.

He says this was the head of the ATSB, Martin Dolan, was hinting at last week. “He was obtuse,” said Captain Woodward, “but what he meant was for the autopilot to go into that mode it had to be done by a human.”

The search area — based on the plane’s likely performance and the satellite interactions — has now shifted further south.