SHERLOCK HOLMES COULD NOT SOLVE THE MYSTERY OF MH370

On Tuesday (4/08), we learned that "crews searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have failed to relocate the sounds previously heard deep in the Indian Ocean, raising fears that the batteries in the plane’s black box may have died."

The tragic disappearance of all 239 people on board flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean has one really peculiar feature to it: none of the possible explanations is remotely plausible, yet one of them must be true.

The usual rule on these occasions – choose the simplest explanation or, as William of Ockham taught, make the fewest assumptions – simply does not work. There is no simple explanation. Whether the cause was an accidental decompression, a terrorist act or a suicide, all three require us to assume that an outlandish and bizarre sequence of events happened.

I don’t know about you, but I have had conversations about MH370 with many people recently, some of whom were fairly confident that they knew what had happened. Yet every story they told was baroque in its contrivance to the point of implausibility, requiring a chain of events that stretched my credulity. Yet, as I say, one such story will turn out to be right.

Consider the sequence of events. Very shortly after entering an air-traffic control dead-spot, somebody switches off both communication devices and changes course. He then changes course twice more, possibly rising very high and then dropping low (this does not seem to be established for certain), and heads for a region of sea with no hope of landing, apparently choosing to run out of fuel slowly rather than land or crash sooner.

An onboard accident of any kind seems highly unlikely, because somebody was in control for at least some of the time. Yet whoever this was remained silent. That surely makes it unlikely that a terrorist took control. A secretive disappearance with no message to the world and no claim of responsibility seems an unlikely way for a terrorist group to act.

There was no emergency radio message, so a struggle between pilots and terrorists for control of the plane seems equally unlikely. A conspiracy between the two pilots seems still more unlikely and nothing in their backgrounds suggests such a thing. That’s five unlikely things already.

We are back to suicide, of the pilot or co-pilot, with only the thinnest of motives (the pilot is said to have been upset following the break-up of his marriage and the conviction of the opposition leader for sodomy), the narrowest of opportunities (his colleague left for the toilet just as the plane left Malaysian air-traffic control?), an implausibly callous indifference to the happiness of passengers and their families, and the oddest of methods – who wants to kill themselves very slowly over seven hours and why would he care to leave no trace?

All this, too, sounds utterly ridiculous. Yet it may prove to be the least ridiculous theory and thus satisfy Ockham’s razor.

I’ve never had a great deal of time for Sherlock Holmes’s bon mots, which are just that little bit too smug. One of the smuggest is the put-down of the long-suffering Dr Watson in The Sign of Four, which seems appropriate to this case: "You will not apply my precept," Holmes says to Watson, shaking his head.

"How often have I said to you that, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? We know that he did not come through the door, the window, or the chimney. We also know that he could not have been concealed in the room, as there is no concealment possible. Whence, then, did he come?"

This seems to sum up the problem of MH370 rather well, but Arthur Conan Doyle proves to be no help either, for the answer to Holmes’s question turns out to be that the villain came through a trap-door in the roof. This hardly qualifies as more improbable than an impossibility, as Sherlock had suggested. It’s rather a simple (and irritatingly deus-ex-machina) explanation, after all.

Indeed, I am struggling to find any unsolved case of mass disappearance that is remotely as baffling as this one, even from before the age of satellites. Take Flight 19, the five torpedo bombers that vanished off the coast of Florida on a routine training exercise in 1945, and whose planes have never been found.

The case was much beloved of the UFO crowd (the pilots return to Earth – still youthful – in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind), but it takes only a brief internet search to find out that there is nothing mysterious here at all. The flight leader was on the radio admitting he was lost and saying he thought he was over the Florida Keys, rather than the Bahamas. This led him to fly further out to sea, rather than back towards the coast.

The disappearance of Sir John Franklin’s expedition to find the North-west passage after 1845 seemed mightily mysterious to the Victorian public because two whole ships and 129 men vanished altogether, and nine years of searching by lots of expeditions turned up nothing.

As with MH370, they were looking in the wrong place at first. But eventually buttons, medals, spoons and clothing in the possession of Inuit natives led searchers to the west shore of King William Island, where they found a trail of artifacts, bodies, two messages and a boat.

These eventually told a coherent, if confused, story of two winters stuck in the same stretch of pack ice, deaths from scurvy (abetted by lead poisoning, as 20th-century analysis showed) and the abandonment of the ship by the 105 survivors in an attempt to reach mainland Canada, dragging the boats overland intending to row them up a river.

Mysteries remain, including why the boat that was found on a sled was apparently being dragged back towards the ships and contained not just bodies but also soap, silk handkerchiefs, silver, 40lb of chocolate and several books including a copy of the Vicar of Wakefield.

But these are minor mysteries – not like the Malaysian airliner. The black box will soon stop transmitting, so we may struggle ever to find it and know what actually happened.

If the cause remains mysterious for years, as now seems possible, that need not prevent us from learning lessons. Planes will surely now be fitted with satellite tracking devices. And given that some kind of human intervention seems to be at the root of the disappearance, pilotless planes may come to be seen as less dangerous than piloted ones.

Matt Ridley is the author of The Rational Optimist, and as 5^th Viscount Ridley is a Member of the British House of Lords.

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