The Missing Plane: A Chilling Novel Based on the Real-Life Loss of Malaysia Airlines MH370

By Captain Verne Pugiev

The Missing Plane is a book of fiction based on all the known facts concerning the loss of Malaysia Airlines MH370, a Boeing 777 aircraft.

The book has been meticulously researched and written by Captain Verne Pugiev, one of the world's most experienced Boeing 777 captains.

The book is written in two timelines. We follow one timeline of a Boeing 777 Captain over the course of five years, as he does his own investigation, finding several clues as to what happened to the aircraft. He continues his quest until he becomes part of the official search. Some of the clues he finds are quite shocking.

Intricately interwoven with the Captain's detective story are the events on the day that MZ70 (the fictional flight), went missing. This second timeline details gripping scenes from the doomed aircraft on the night of the flight, from the hours leading up to its take-off all the way until its inevitable return to earth. All the actions taken by the crew on board are technically possible.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verne Pugiev Press
• Release date: Jan 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215998137

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

It is with great sadness that I have been forced to write this book, but with this sadness comes great purpose.

This is a work of fiction about an aircraft that never existed, performing a flight that never took place: MZ70. It is, however, inspired by a real event, about a real aircraft that did exist and did operate a flight, but was never seen again: the lost flight of Malaysia Airlines MH370.

It is often said that there is no such thing as ‘the perfect crime’, and there is therefore certainly no such thing as ‘the perfect accident’. There are always clues as to what happened strewn around, waiting to be found. So why don’t we have any clues or evidence as to what happened in the case of MZ70?

The reason is that it was not an accident this aircraft vanished: it was a crime. So, there must be clues somewhere, even if they have so far eluded everyone involved in the search. I was sure that the perpetrator, or perpetrators, must have made at least one mistake, so I began to investigate, and I believe that I have unearthed enough clues to piece together a story which is extremely close to what must have actually happened that night. Some of my findings made my blood run cold, and a series of extraordinary events showed me not only what happened to MZ70 but, more importantly, where it now lies.

I have used my imagination to fill in the areas that no one currently knows for sure, and I have used my experience as the captain of this exact model of aircraft to deduce and then explain the various aspects of the crime.

I have incorporated as many facts from the real event as possible and all actions that the pilots and the cabin crew take on this fictional aircraft are technically correct.

And so, to the great purpose. Until the aircraft, its passengers and crew are found, all profits from this book will go towards the funding of a new and successful search for MH370. By buying this book you will have contributed and participated in the quest to find the real aircraft and its occupants, and eventually turn fiction into fact.

Captain Verne Pugiev

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA

7th MARCH 2014

(DAY 0)

In a suburb just west of the Malaysian capital, above a hot street just after midday, a few cumulus clouds are scattered across a bright blue sky. The northeast monsoon season is at an end and there are no storm clouds building on this particular afternoon. Two mynah birds are hopping about in the road, searching for scraps of food.

Molly walks down the edge of a quiet private road in a gated community. There are no pavements, just neatly clipped grass verges. Dressed humbly, carrying two thick plastic bags that look well used, she is on her way to clean for a rich family. As she crosses the road towards her employer’s house, loud shouting causes the two mynah birds to take flight.

When she reaches the tall, black iron gates, she realises the shouting is coming from within her employer’s property. It is not that unusual for there to be shouting inside this house and Molly has become an expert at discretion. She peers through the bars but the net curtains that she has so often washed obscure whatever is happening inside the house. All she can make out is the screen of the large television flickering in the lounge, confirming that there is definitely someone at home.

Her eyes widen at the man’s voice, which sounds similar to her employer’s, although she has never heard him sound this enraged before. Most of the shouting usually comes from his wife or from the male friends he sometimes has in the house on his days off, when they become heated about the issues of the day. They don’t bother Molly; in fact, they barely seem to notice that she is there as they rant and rave about matters in which she has no interest. Her employer is usually the calm one of the group.

‘No, no, no! You arseholes!’ It does sound a lot like his voice.

She waits a moment, straining to hear a reply from any other person involved in this argument. Nothing. No reply. Then it starts again.

‘You bloody bastards! Stupid bloody bastards!’

Usually, Molly activates the gates and lets herself in, but today she hesitates. Obviously, whoever is inside the house named ‘Serene’ are anything but that. She waits, listening to the ongoing tirade, then she presses the bell. Her finger keeps pressing it until the shouting stops. A moment passes. No one is answering. Now what? she wonders. She doesn’t want to walk straight in if her employers are in the middle of one of their domestic arguments, but she doesn’t want to be late for work either, so she waits a little longer before pressing the call button again. A shorter push this time. Like normal. The small speaker on the gatepost squawks scratchily into life.

‘Hello?’ says a man’s voice. He sounds wary.

‘Ah yes, Captain. It’s Molly, the cleaner.’

‘Oh…’ The voice relaxes a little. ‘OK, Molly. I’ll buzz you in.’

The gates immediately click, give a little shudder and start to swing open. She walks through the gap between them and makes her way deliberately slowly to the large wooden door of the house, which stands ajar. She pushes it half open.

‘Helloooo,’ she sings out. ‘Helloooo?’ She puts one foot inside and pushes the door a little further open, tentatively leaning in.

‘Ah, Molly, come in, come in,’ says Captain Mah, appearing at speed from the lounge. As usual, he’s barefoot and dressed casually in his shorts and one of his favourite T-shirts, which declaims the slogan ‘Democracy is Dead’. His complexion looks darker and redder than usual, but his manner is as ebullient as always, a jollity which Molly always finds simultaneously reassuring and overwhelming. ‘Good to see you, Molly. How are you?’

‘Yes, Captain, I’m good. Sorry, I forgot my token for the gate,’ she lies.

‘Oh, that’s no problem, Molly. I hope I didn’t keep you waiting long. I had the television up rather loud,’ he laughs. ‘Did you have to press the buzzer a few times?’

‘Only twice, sir.’

‘Oh, sorry about that, Molly. I’ve finished watching television for now, so you can start on the downstairs. I’ll be upstairs in my study if you need me.’

‘OK, Captain. I usually take about three hours to clean the downstairs rooms, sir, and then I’ll do the bedrooms. Is Mrs Mah going to be OK with that, sir?’

‘Mrs Mah’s not here,’ he says, without making eye contact. ‘She’s gone to stay at her sister’s: I have a night flight tonight, to Beijing.’

‘OK, I see. Yes, sir.’ Molly knows better than to ask any further questions.

‘Standard Operating Procedure today please, Molly.’ As usual, the captain’s level of jollity remains high. ‘I’ll just keep out of your way.’

‘OK, sir. I’ll get started right away.’

After hearing the raised voice, Molly is puzzled by how normally he is behaving. Was Captain Mah shouting at himself? Was he on the phone? Or could it have just been the television blaring, as he had implied? Rich people could be very odd sometimes.

She makes her way into the large lounge where the television is still on, although it has been muted. It isn’t good form for a professional cleaner to have the television on while she is cleaning, so Molly takes the remote from the glass coffee table and puts her finger over the red ‘off’ button, but as she points it at the television she hesitates. She was expecting to see a trashy soap opera with people arguing loudly, but it’s far from that. It’s tuned to the local news channel, which is reporting on a commotion outside one of the courthouses in Kuala Lumpur. A politician she remembers of old is being jostled as he leaves the colonial-style building. The text along the bottom of the screen informs her, ‘…has been found guilty again…is sentenced to another five years jail.’ She frowns for a moment, thinking, then she shrugs, presses the red button and sends the screen black.

ISTANBUL

17th AUGUST 2014

(DAY 163)

A middle-aged couple are peacefully enjoying each other’s company in a stylish old-town flat in Cihangir; a bohemian neighbourhood of Istanbul. Beyond the French balcony the mesmerising view extends across the Bosporus Strait to the Asian side of the city.

Commuter ferries are criss-crossing the water among the tourist cruises and the constant flow of large cargo ships and tankers, coming from or going to the Black Sea.

Captain Stephen Mardy, however, is not looking out of the window at the view or at the woman he is sharing it with. His whole attention is fully focused on a map of the world, which is spread before him. For several days he has been bent double over it, drawing circles, apparently randomly, with a child’s compass. He is a tall man in his early fifties, and whilst he is not a fat man, he is certainly no longer a thin man. Whilst he is broad shouldered, he is not muscular, having spent his entire working life seated in aircraft cockpits for hours on end. Tall and thin as a child, the arrival of middle-aged spread has made him look somewhat more in proportion. His hair is kept very short and neat, by his own hand, with periodic use of an electric hair trimmer. He appears slightly gangly as he hunches forwards from the long, low sofa, to an even lower coffee table, his knees sticking up either side of him, as he concentrates all his mental abilities on the task in hand.

Mardy’s partner, Carmen, is moving in and out of the room, doing ‘productive’ things, and as she often states, she likes to be productive. She is concerned by the intensity of Mardy’s new dedication to trying to find a missing aircraft, call-sign MZ70.

As she passes behind him, she leans down, squeezing his shoulder affectionately as she tries to get an insight into what he is doing. She ensures that her long hair brushes against his cheek; in the past such an occurrence would have led to a passionate kiss, but he just flicks it away, such is his devotion to this chart. She sighs, straightens up and continues with her housekeeping. She is a tall, heavy-boned South African woman of about forty. She is not a conventional beauty exactly, but she does have an interesting face and a thick mane of lustrous hair, which Stephen could never resist stroking when they first started dating. The most striking thing about her is an unmissable air of positivity. She is a supremely kind person, but not a woman to be trifled with. She is in Istanbul as a governess for a well-to-do Turkish family. English, mathematics and morals are top of the parents’ list, but Carmen has another hidden talent which means that they can entrust their two precious children to her without worrying: she is Mary Poppins with a difference. Carmen was a captain in the South African Police Service. She entered the townships of Durban in the dead of night to arrest various villains. She’s been in a lot of sticky situations that she won’t even talk about. The children educated by her will indeed speak excellent English, but if a bad person troubles her two charges in the park, they will be knocked to the ground and immobilised.

A news story appears on the television about the aircraft, which has now been missing without trace for several months, finally making Mardy look up from the map. A Chinese woman is standing with a small boy at her side in an apartment in Beijing, which was the destination city of the missing flight. Her words are being translated into English. She is saying that her husband, the boy’s father, was a passenger on the lost aircraft, and she doesn’t know what to tell her son. Should she tell him that his daddy has been delayed, his business trip has been extended, he is missing, or even that he is dead? The boy stares straight ahead, clinging to her leg, apparently unwilling to hear any of his mother’s words or to accept what they might mean to him.

Mardy gulps and his eyes water up as he stares, blinking, at the screen. As soon as the news article is over, he quickly leaves the room, unable to understand why the fate of these people he has never met should be affecting him so deeply.

In the spacious bathroom, he splashes refreshingly cold water into his eyes. As he buries his face in a soft, dry towel that Carmen has just placed there, he hears himself murmuring out loud, ‘I can find it.’

In the mirror over the basin his face looks shocked as he lowers the towel. He stares at himself for a moment before speaking to his reflection.

‘Why did I say that?’

He shakes his head momentarily, shrugs and goes back along the corridor to the lounge, returning to his usual position in front of the map.

‘I can find it,’ he mutters again.

‘What’s that, babe?’ asks Carmen.

‘I can find it,’ he repeats, ‘the missing plane.’

‘What makes you say that, babe?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not sure.’

‘Have you discovered something?’

‘No, not yet,’ he admits. ‘But I will.’

‘Of course you will, babe.’ She smiles sweetly. ‘Do you want to take a break? Maybe get something to eat downstairs at Susam Cafe?’

‘Can we just have something here instead?’ he says, his stare once more fixed on the map. ‘I don’t really want to lose my train of thought.’

‘Sure,’ she sighs, as she heads back to the kitchen with a wry smile on her handsome features. She’s seen this aspect of Mardy’s persona before and she knows it’s part of who he is, and how he got to be the captain of a Boeing 777.

Many years earlier, Mardy was sitting at his desk in a post-war machine shop converted to offices, on a drab road in a rundown part of north London, the only natural light coming from a few dirty skylights in the ugly corrugated roof. He was a few years out of university and had progressed quickly from being a lowly graduate engineer to a senior design engineer. He was succeeding in life. But all was not well with the young Mardy. He was bored. Bored with designing components for torpedoes. Very bored.

One day the annual pay summaries came round detailing the monies that had been paid to each employee. Very private information was contained on these slips, but after some verbal comparing, not showing, he and the other senior design engineer, twenty years his senior, laid their pay summaries face up on the desk. They were identical. Mardy looked at his colleague and decided I can’t be ‘you’ when I’m forty-five years old. A week later, Mardy handed in his notice.

‘Who’s head-hunted you?’ his colleagues asked him. There were very few other companies involved in the torpedo business. ‘Marconi, Lucas Aerospace, Dowty?’ they asked.

‘No. I’m going to Disney World,’ he replied. ‘To Orlando.’

Mardy had been planning his escape from the nine-to-five drudgery of drawing and redesigning broken torpedo components. He had decided to put himself through flying school to become a commercial pilot. He had actually learnt to fly when he was seventeen, when he won a flying scholarship from the Royal Navy. He already knew he could fly, and so once he had set his mind to achieving commercial pilot status, nothing was going to stop him. He had saved nearly enough money but he still had to sell absolutely everything he owned: his car, his racing bicycle, his precious childhood collection of Marvel and Spider-Man comics.

His parents were very worried. It seemed an unattainable fancy. ‘You’ve given up a good job with good pay and good prospects, to go to America and spend all your money on flying lessons?’

‘Yup! That’s about the size of it,’ Mardy replied, unconcerned.

Two years later, he was back on their doorstep, with a deep tan. Not only had he learnt to fly and caught some rays, but he had taught other people to fly too; he was now a flight instructor. Unfortunately for Mardy, things had changed while he had been away. Before he left, he was going to breeze into any number of flying jobs with his American flying licences, but Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and all those jobs had evaporated. The expensive business of changing his licences to the British versions wasn’t going to be handled by his new employer. He was unemployed, and the further expense of £15,000 had arisen. It was money he didn’t have; he didn’t even have a bike any more.

The naysayers were growing in number and volume, but Mardy was not one to be put off his course. He worked on a garage forecourt as a second-hand car salesman, he bought a tired Ford Granada to use as a minicab, he fixed classic cars in his parents’ garage, and eventually he obtained his UK Commercial Pilots Licence. There were still no jobs available, but finally, four years after he went to seek his fortune in the US, he was employed as a cadet pilot at Singapore Airlines. He is definitely not one to give up in the face of adversity; he just doesn’t.

Carmen has seen this behaviour of his before, maybe even in his pursuit of her. Finding MZ70 looks like it’s the new target that’s been caught in the crosshairs of his mind. It will have as many problems, dead-ends and naysayers as putting himself through flying school had. She automatically clicks the kettle on, looking at the wall, lost in thought. She thinks, I do hope this is not one of those ‘dog with a bone’ events.

It is.

KUALA LUMPUR

7th MARCH 2014

(DAY 0)

Captain Mah stands in his newly fitted, state-of-the-art kitchen, deep in thought, staring at some keys lying on the shiny granite top, as if trying to work out a puzzle. There is his daily use bunch of keys, an empty keyring with a leather fob, and one newly cut key. He finally makes a decision and threads the new key onto the big bunch, taking the old version of that key off and sliding it onto the new keyring. On the leather fob of the new keyring, gold letters on a blue background promote the local BMW dealer.

As he hears Molly rustling her bags in the hallway, he picks up the large bunch of keys, dropping them into the pocket of his shorts. He then moves quickly to a kitchen cupboard, whipping the door open and hanging the keyring with the leather fob on the first hook, before smartly closing it, while being careful not to slam it. Despite their speed, his movements are calm and precise, as anyone would expect of an experienced pilot.

Molly enters the kitchen, scanning the scene for anything she might have left out of place, a final check before her day’s work is done. Captain Mah is leaning casually on the granite top, one hand on his hip.

‘Ah, you all done then, Molly?’ he asks, smiling.

‘Yes, sir. I think I am. Same time next week, sir?’

‘Oh, er, yes. Here, let me give you your wages for all of this month in advance. That’ll mean I won’t need to think about it again for the next three weeks. Do you mind?’

‘Oh no, I don’t mind, but Mrs Mah usually just pays me a week at a time.’

‘Is that the case?’ he says, his tone remaining level. ‘Well, when Mrs Mah starts running the show again, she can pay you weekly, but today I’m going to pay you in advance for the whole month.’

Captain Mah is sensitive to the day-to-day issues of poorer people and he does his best to help Molly out when he can. Money for food, money for clothes, money for shoes are all issues he remembers clearly as he grew up in George Town. His parents were good people, the salt of the earth, but his father ran a small repair shop fixing scooters and motorcycles, and with five children to feed there was a permanent strain on the household budget. Young Mah saw the sadness of his parents’ never-ending struggles and he compared it to the easy, joyful life of the ‘ferringhis’, the foreigners, who visited George Town and lounged around on the golden beaches of their beautiful island. He vowed that he would get out of the kampung somehow, and join the jet set. His father knew that of all his children, he was by far the smartest and he encouraged him to study hard; he found himself at the top of the class in nearly every subject. But young Mah still didn’t know where to direct his energies to lift himself away from the poverty of his environment.

When he wasn’t studying, rather than playing football on the Padang with the other dusty kids, he would help his father in the bike shop. He loved learning how to fix the bikes and, besides that, he was another pair of hands for his dad to utilise. One day his father asked him to deliver one of the motorbikes to the owner, who was arriving at the airport that afternoon. He rode it there and then stood outside the arrivals hall with a cardboard sign with JOSEPH written on it in big black letters. He stood there for a while, raising the sign as people came out in dribs and drabs. He looked inquiringly at every male leaving the terminal. He was thinking that Mr Joseph must have missed his flight, when a pair of eyes alighted on his sign and that person made a clear beeline for young Mah. But Mr Joseph was not Mr Joseph at all; he was Captain Joseph. Tall, handsome, swashbuckling. In full uniform with his gold-braid-laden blue jacket draped casually over his arm, and his peaked hat on his head, also spattered with gold, Captain Joseph was quite a sight to see. Young Mah stood like a statue; shorts, flip-flops, dirty oily hands and a cardboard sign.

‘You got my bike, kid?’ said Joseph with a big white-toothed smile. Young Mah still transfixed, turned and pointed at the bike parked nearby. They made their way over to it, Captain Joseph clearly excited to see his bike again. Joseph removed his tie and his epaulettes and put them in a small backpack. Struggling with his uniform jacket and hat, and running out of resting places, he smiled and placed his captain’s hat on the head of young Mah. It fitted perfectly. ‘You look good in that,’ said Captain Joseph, laughing. Young Mah instinctively turned towards the terminal to check out his reflection in the tall glass panels.

As he looked at himself, he felt a bolt of lightning lance up his spine and explode inside his brain. Still with the hat on, he turned back to Captain Joseph and asked, ‘Can a poor Malaysian boy become a pilot?’

‘Of course. I was a poor Malaysian boy, just like you. Concentrate on your school work, kid. Maths, Physics, English and then, when you’re old enough, you can apply to become a cadet pilot. It’s that easy.’

That was it. From that point on he would focus all his attention on becoming a pilot; a motorbike riding, dashing pilot like Captain Joseph. He would no longer be just a kid called Mah: he would become Captain Mah.

Captain Mah continues to smile at Molly, the cleaner, as he hands over the cash. ‘That means we are all paid up until the twenty-eighth. We’ve always liked your work, Molly. Very efficient, very good.’

‘Well, thank you, sir, that’s very