Quick Comment: Commodore Peter Leavy on the search mission for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Summary: Lowy Institute Military Fellow James Brown speaks to Commodore Peter Leavy who was in charge of the joint-task force organised to search for the missing Malaysian Airline Flight 370. Commodore Leavy discusses the difficulties that were faced by his team during the search including communication problems with other nations, weather issues, and operational limitations. Transcript Interview between Commodore Peter Leavy RAN, Commander Joint Task Force 658 and James Brown, Military Fellow, Lowy Institute for International Policy JAMES BROWN: I’m talking to Commodore Peter Leavy, who was the commander of the Joint Task Force involved in the search for Malaysian airlines flight 370. Commodore Leavy, how did this mission come together, how did the task force stand up? CDRE PETER LEAVY: The ADF put together a task force a couple of weeks after the aircraft itself went missing. It first went missing, as you know, on the 8th of March. Initially, as with any search and rescue activity, it was headed up by AMSA, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, from the Australian perspective working with the Malaysian authorities. There was a little delay, I guess, before the ADF got involved, as you’d understand. The initial search area was between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, so it took some time, and some really good work from the technical analysts to work out that the aircraft was perhaps down in the Indian Ocean, and that’s when we got heavily involved. Personally, I had about 48 hours notice to move across to Perth with a small team, and we established ourselves at HMAS Stirling over there. But we were fitting in our command structure to a wider search and rescue effort that was already in place, and it’s probably worth noting too that the Australian Defence Force was a supporting agency to AMSA in the initial part of the search. We weren’t leading it ourselves, we were providing the assets, but a lot of the legwork on focusing the search areas was actually done by AMSA. That’s where their expertise is, and that’s their remit. (1.20) JAMES BROWN: So you’re the commander, you’re plugging into a wider civilian maritime search agency effort, what was the scale of the mission from your perspective? CDRE PETER LEAVY: It was quite large, we had up to about 18 aircraft from 7 different nations, and at various times up to about 15 to 16 ships – a mixture of civilian ships and naval ships from 5 different nations, plus a submarine of course. So the scale there was quite significant. Diverse nations, from China, obviously a very heavy interest with the number of passengers they had on board MH370; Malaysia, heavily involved as well; and obviously Australia, being in our search and rescue zone, we were quite heavily involved. But the coordination challenges there were, I guess, were tempered by it not being a combat operation, so that made it relatively, or took out one degree of complexity. But just the different language barriers were a bit of a challenge, but we worked through that fairly quickly. One good thing about navies in particular is, we had as a navy, and I had personally, exercised with every nation that was participating there. So we do tend to understand how each other work, how we operate, and the various strengths that each of those teams bought to the search area. So, the coordination in a sense was a bit of work behind the scenes, but relatively straightforward, and made all the much easier by everyone having that single focus on the mission, which for us was actually finding debris floating on the surface, initially. We had, as you know, Ocean Shield doing the, part way through, start of the underwater search, but that was really only one asset. The focus for us, particularly early on, but the focus throughout, for the majority of our assets, was really on that surface search for debris that was floating which would help the drift modelling back-cast to try and pin point the crash site. (3.07) JAMES BRO