Reports/Technical
Technical Reports
General Notes
This section indexes or links to various Reports of a technical nature central to the narrative of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
Prior to the establishment of the The Malaysian ICAO Annex 13 Safety Investigation Team for MH370 a Preliminary Report was produced by The Chief Inspector of Air Accidents, Ministry of Transport (Malaysia).
Short annual Reports in a similar format, called Interim Statements, were subsequently produced by The Malaysian ICAO Annex 13 Safety Investigation Team for MH370 until 2018.
The Malaysian ICAO Annex 13 Safety Investigation Team for MH370 conducted the official investigation into the loss of MH370. ICAO Annex 13 includes a standard format for reports. A version of the Factual Information section was released in 2015. The response by Next-of-Kin and others was disappointment because there were no 'answers'. However, the objective of an Annex 13 investigation is quite clear:-
The search for MH370 did not yield any answers either. Some commentators even doubted that flight MH370 ended in the south Indian Ocean. But debris which has been confirmed to be from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has been recovered in Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, La Réunion Island, South Africa and Tanzania. The most significant item is a Flaperon which was found on La Reunion Island on 29 July 2015.
The fuselage or wreckage of MH370 had not been located; the flight recorders had not been recovered; but the government of Malaysia urged the Annex 13 Team to conclude their investigation and publish a report. This 'not final' report named the Safety Investigation Report MH370/01/2018 was released to the public on Monday, 30 July 2018.
The Safety Investigation Report was published with sets of Appendices which include Debris Reports. But the Ministry of Transport (Malaysia) website which hosts a copy of this report may not include links to the appendices. Also, the Factual Information published in 2015 was removed.
Royal Malaysia Police Reports
Like all police and intelligence services the Royal Malaysia Police (RMP) has not produced any report on MH370 for public reading. Police conduct criminal investigations, collect evidence which could be presented in a Court, and such information is never released prior to a court hearing. The Police Commissioner and deputies attended media conferences and may have provided some details of the progress of their investigation which has been quoted by mainstream media, but that is all.
However, there are two items of interest which are noted here:-
- A set of files which appear to contain copies of folders collated by the Royal Malaysia Police were released on the Internet, despite their security classification and risk to the person who obtained the data. Over time these folders have been withdrawn from various sites, such as scribd, but the files may have been kept by various journalists and others.
- The Australian Transport Safety Bureau was the first organisation to officially confirm rumours that a flight simulator owned by the Pilot-in-Command, Captain Shah, may have been used to 'plan' a flight to the southern Indian Ocean. Based on information provided to the ATSB by the RMP The Operational Search for MH370 (ATSB 2017) includes this statement:-
Six weeks before the accident flight the PIC had used his simulator to fly a route, initially similar to part of the route flown by MH370 up the Strait of Malacca, with a left-hand turn and track into the southern Indian Ocean. There were enough similarities to the flight path of MH370 for the ATSB to carefully consider the possible implications for the underwater search area.
Source: ATSB Pilot in Command’s flight simulatorThe set of RMP Folders (1) contains data on which this statement was likely based. This information is described and analysed in the section Flight Simulator Analysis.
References and Acknowledgements
Extracts from official reports are included in this website to provide easily accessible background information. References are included (or will be added) and copyright is acknowledged. Links to copies of these reports may also use the resources of the Internet Archive or Wayback Machine.