Martin Dolan is a faceless aviation bureaucrat, until something big happens.

The 57-year-old is helping solve what remains the greatest aviation mystery of all time: the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

As head of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, he is leading the search for the jet, concentrated deep in the southern Indian Ocean off the coast of Perth.

Even out of the global media's glare, Dolan has to endure people asking him at dinner parties if he has found the plane.

"Sometimes I'm tempted to say 'oh yes, we've found it we're just not telling you'," he says.

He quickly clarifies that he's joking. Since the disappearance, conspiracy theorists have been busy trying to solve the mystery themselves. Many have contacted Dolan.

"It's because you've got this big mystery and everyone wants to know the answer and everyone wants to help. It's unhelpful, for the sake of the families more than anything else, in the sense that it has the potential to undermine confidence in what we are doing," he says.

The Boeing 777 vanished with 239 people on board en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March. There has been no sign of it since.

We meet for lunch at Mezzalira, a swanky Italian restaurant just a few blocks from Dolan's office in central Canberra.

As we sit at a corner table by the window, Dolan knows he could receive a phone call at any moment telling him that the plane has been found. He also knows the weight of his waiting is nothing compared to what the families of those on board MH370 are experiencing.

Ships are scouring a search zone of up to 60,000 square kilometres where the plane is thought to have run out of fuel and plummeted into the ocean after travelling for several hours on auto-pilot.

"It's always in the back of my head, the idea that the phone could ring at any time," Dolan, whose face and hands come alive with expression when he makes a point, says. "So while we are at the sharp end of a big exercise and there are huge expectations, we've got a whole lot of capability behind us."

Before we open our menus, Dolan informs me that he will be paying the bill because public servants must make official declarations for gifts over a certain amount. He opts for the spaghetti alla carbonara and I choose the tortellini di zucca.

Commitment to the public service has been a consistent feature of his life – and has led him to what could now prove to be the greatest challenge of his career.

The son of a mediaeval historian and an archaeologist who were both university lecturers, Dolan was born in Scotland but grew up in Armidale in north-western NSW.

The second of five children, he spent most evenings after school playing in paddocks and creeks at the edge of the town.

At the nearby University of New England, where both his parents worked, he studied arts and teaching.

"I had a moment of revelation in front of a high school English class in Coffs Harbour as I did practice teaching. I looked at them, they looked at me and we realised this was never going to work," Dolan says.

Engaged to be married and in need of a steady job, Dolan landed a coveted graduate position managing aid projects for the Australian Development Assistance Bureau, which was later renamed AusAid.

He admits he wasn't passionate about it. To the chagrin of the 14 other graduates who were desperate for the position, he had to ask what the bureau did when he was invited to join it.

Four years into the role, Dolan was posted to Dhaka in Bangladesh, where he had his first insight into the world of aviation. He took his wife Cynthia, now a primary school deputy principal, and two children Fiona and Peter, along with him.

Once there, he helped train aircraft maintenance engineers, facilitating learning trips for them to Sydney.

The position marked the start of 35 years in the Commonwealth public service, in which he has added various corporate management roles, including chief executive of Comcare and Chief Finance Officer in the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.

Dolan says Comcare, where he analysed how to boost workplace safety, further prepared him for his current job, where he must make recommendations following transport accidents.

"I used to mentor graduates in my term, and they would say 'tell me, oh wise one how do I manage a career in the public service?' and I would say I really don't know. Stuff comes up, you take your opportunities if you can and it's surprising how often it's a really interesting job."

Dolan has also learnt the secret power of being a generalist, rather than a specialist.

He says the most useful ability he has developed is how to process and absorb information quickly, a skill he thinks starts with an arts degree.

It was when two planes crashed into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, that Dolan had his real "baptism of fire". He was put in charge of Australia's aviation and airports, with his first task to ramp up security. He had to a build a system that was terrorism-proof, negotiating with the major players like airlines, airports and flight companies to implement tighter security measures.

"It was a high-pressure job because obviously the expectation was that nothing should go wrong and we had to make sure as best as we could that was the case, but there was always the possibility," Dolan says.

He says the intensity of the job – not knowing what's around the corner but at the same time having to prepare for it – makes it the one most comparable to his current position.

He took on the role of first ever chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, an independent government body charged with investigating transport safety, in 2009.

"Sometimes narratives aren't clear until you look back on things," Dolan says.

"And I can see that a lot of what I had been doing over all that time has sort of all come together. This is the job that has brought it all together."

When Dolan woke eight months ago to the news that a Malaysia Airlines jet had gone missing, he had no idea of the key role he would soon play.

It was only after the search shifted to Australia's coast and hopes of finding passengers alive faded, that the unprecedented search and recovery mission landed wholly in his lap.

Now Dolan is co-ordinating a team of investigators, whom he is quick to praise, in a search for the aircraft  kilometres beneath the ocean's surface.

The key to the mystery is the flight data recorder, which stores a log of electronic systems on the plane. It will take the ships one year to scour the long and narrow arc where the plane last communicated with a ground station through satellite.

Yet even if, as he chews his last bite of spaghetti, Dolan were to receive the call that wreckage had been found , his job would be far from complete. The Malaysian government has agreed that the best place to download the data would be in Canberra.

Dolan was at the helm of the bureau when it investigated the mid-air explosion on Qantas flight 32, which suffered catastrophic engine failure shortly after it took off from Singapore's Changi Airport in 2010.

He also oversaw the investigation into the ditching of a Pel-Air ambulance plane off Norfolk Island in 2009. Amazingly, all six people on board survived the crash.

A senate committee slammed the bureau's handling of the inquiry, criticising its report for focusing on the pilot's actions and lacking analysis or details of factors that assist the wider industry.

Dolan says the government accepted the bureau's advice that no safety purpose would be served by reopening the investigation as was urged by the committee.

At the bureau's request, he adds, Canadian transport safety regulators are currently conducting a peer-review of the the body's policies and how they were  implemented in several investigations, including Pel-Air.

"We learnt that there are different views of our work and how we do it and that aviation safety is an area where people have different views and they don't always agree with you," Dolan says.

Yet, hemaintains that MH370 is the organisation's "greatest challenge yet" and the most intriguing one.

At the same time he is still overseeing more than 100 other aviation, marine and rail investigations. A few of his staff are also working with Dutch authorities on another recent air catastrophe  MH17, shot down over the Ukraine in July.

Dolan speaks slowly and chooses his words thoughtfully, confiding he has never felt at home in the spotlight.

"First and foremost in our minds is the families. If we can find answers we will give them certainty and closure. Bearing in mind this is a huge tragedy, it's also a mystery and we really do want to find the answer."

Dolan's term as a chief commissioner is due to finish in June 2016.

With his usual cautiousness he says the "most likely outcome" is that the plane would have been found by then.

"There may theoretically be a point when we say we've done all we can and we haven't succeeded, but we're not really contemplating that yet and we certainly haven't reached that point."

When the term is complete, he has another challenge to address.

"At this stage, I have an incomplete novel sitting in my top drawer that I would like to spend more attention on," he says.

Dolan has a lifelong love of the written word. His collection of poetry Clouds and edges was printed by an independent publishing house in 1999 and another volume is ready to go. He's also a member of a poetry group that meets in Canberra monthly.

"I write lyric poetry. Short, focused on a moment, trying to encapsulate an emotion in visual imagery," he says.

When he is not writing, Dolan is also a big reader. Detective novels are one of his favourite genres, with Ian Rankin novels regularly on his bedside table.

Could we perhaps see a novel where a detective must solve an unprecedented mystery as the entire world watches on?

No, Dolan says. His story is set in Sydney in the 1920s and explores the suffering of World War I veterans in a society that doesn't yet comprehend post-traumatic stress disorder.

Besides, adds the ever-diligent public servant, there are very clear rules that stop government workers using information for the purpose other than for what it was received.

Life and times

1957  Born in Edinburgh, Scotland.

1961 Migrated to Australia with his family and lived in Armidale.

1979 Completed a Bachelor of Arts with honours in French at the University of New England.

1980 Started with the Australian Development Assistance Bureau and married Cynthia.

1984  Posted to Dhaka, Bangladesh.

1990 Moved to Department of Primary Industries and Energy and worked in various corporate management roles.

2001 Appointed executive director of Aviation and Airports.

2007 Became chief executive of Comcare.

2009 Appointed first chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.