email forwarded by jks weerasekara
There has been a lot of speculation about Malaysia
Airlines Flight 370. Terrorism, hijacking, meteors. I cannot believe the
analysis on CNN; it’s almost disturbing. I tend to look for a simpler
explanation, and I find it with the 13,000-foot runway at Pulau Langkawi.
We know the story of MH370: A loaded Boeing 777
departs at midnight from Kuala Lampur, headed to Beijing. A hot night. A heavy
aircraft. About an hour out, across the gulf toward Vietnam, the plane goes
dark, meaning the transponder and secondary radar tracking go off. Two days
later we hear reports that Malaysian military radar (which is a primary radar,
meaning the plane is tracked by reflection rather than by transponder
interrogation response) has tracked the plane on a southwesterly course back
across the Malay Peninsula into the Strait of Malacca.
Read more:
The left turn is the key here. Zaharie Ahmad Shah1 was a very
experienced senior captain with 18,000 hours of flight time. We old pilots were
drilled to know what is the closest airport of safe harbor while in cruise.
Airports behind us, airports abeam us, and airports ahead of us. They’re always
in our head. Always. If something happens, you don’t want to be thinking about
what are you going to do–you already know what you are going to do. When I saw
that left turn with a direct heading, I instinctively knew he was heading for
an airport. He was taking a direct route to Palau Langkawi, a 13,000-foot
airstrip with an approach over water and no obstacles. The captain did not turn
back to Kuala Lampur because he knew he had 8,000-foot ridges to cross. He knew
the terrain was friendlier toward Langkawi, which also was closer.
The loss of transponders and communications makes
perfect sense in a fire.
When I heard this I immediately brought up Google
Earth and searched for airports in proximity to the track toward the southwest.
For me, the loss of transponders and communications
makes perfect sense in a fire. And there most likely was an electrical fire. In
the case of a fire, the first response is to pull the main busses and restore
circuits one by one until you have isolated the bad one. If they pulled the
busses, the plane would go silent. It probably was a serious event and the
flight crew was occupied with controlling the plane and trying to fight the
fire. Aviate, navigate, and lastly, communicate is the mantra in such
situations.
There are two types of fires. An electrical fire might
not be as fast and furious, and there may or may not be incapacitating smoke.
However there is the possibility, given the timeline, that there was an
overheat on one of the front landing gear tires, it blew on takeoff and started
slowly burning. Yes, this happens with underinflated tires. Remember: Heavy
plane, hot night, sea level, long-run takeoff. There was a well known accident in Nigeria
of a DC8 that had a landing gear fire on takeoff. Once going, a tire fire would
produce horrific, incapacitating smoke. Yes, pilots have access to oxygen
masks, but this is a no-no with fire. Most have access to a smoke hood with a
filter, but this will last only a few minutes depending on the smoke level. (I
used to carry one in my flight bag, and I still carry one in my briefcase when
I fly.)
What I think happened is the flight crew was overcome
by smoke and the plane continued on the heading, probably on George
(autopilot), until it ran out of fuel or the fire destroyed the control
surfaces and it crashed. You will find it along that route–looking elsewhere is
pointless.
Ongoing speculation of a hijacking and/or
murder-suicide and that there was a flight engineer on board does not sway me
in favor of foul play until I am presented with evidence of foul play.
We know there was a last voice transmission that, from
a pilot’s point of view, was entirely normal. “Good night” is customary on a
hand-off to a new air traffic control. The “good night” also strongly indicates
to me that all was OK on the flight deck. Remember, there are many ways a pilot
can communicate distress. A hijack code or even transponder code off by one
digit would alert ATC that something was wrong. Every good pilot knows keying
an SOS over the mike always is an option. Even three short clicks would raise
an alert. So I conclude that at the point of voice transmission all was
perceived as well on the flight deck by the pilots.
But things could have been in the process of going
wrong, unknown to the pilots.
Evidently the ACARS went
inoperative some time before. Disabling the ACARS is not easy, as pointed out.
This leads me to believe more in an electrical problem or an electrical fire
than a manual shutdown. I suggest the pilots probably were not aware ACARS was
not transmitting.
As for the reports of altitude fluctuations, given
that this was not transponder-generated data but primary radar at maybe 200
miles, the azimuth readings can be affected by a lot of atmospherics and I
would not have high confidence in this being totally reliable. But let’s accept
for a minute that the pilot may have ascended to 45,000 feet in a last-ditch
effort to quell a fire by seeking the lowest level of oxygen. That is an
acceptable scenario. At 45,000 feet, it would be tough to keep this aircraft
stable, as the flight envelope is very narrow and loss of control in a stall is
entirely possible. The aircraft is at the top of its operational ceiling. The
reported rapid rates of descent could have been generated by a stall, followed
by a recovery at 25,000 feet. The pilot may even have been diving to extinguish
flames.
But going to 45,000 feet in a hijack scenario doesn’t
make any good sense to me.
Regarding the additional flying time: On departing
Kuala Lampur, Flight 370 would have had fuel for Beijing and an alternate
destination, probably Shanghai, plus 45 minutes–say, 8 hours. Maybe more. He
burned 20-25 percent in the first hour with takeoff and the climb to cruise. So
when the turn was made toward Langkawi, he would have had six hours or more
hours worth of fuel. This correlates nicely with the Inmarsat
data pings being received until fuel exhaustion.
Fire in an aircraft demands one thing: Get the machine
on the ground as soon as possible.
The now known continued flight until time to fuel
exhaustion only confirms to me that the crew was incapacitated and the flight
continued on deep into the south Indian ocean.
There is no point speculating further until more
evidence surfaces, but in the meantime it serves no purpose to malign pilots
who well may have been in a struggle to save this aircraft from a fire or other
serious mechanical issue. Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah was a hero struggling
with an impossible situation trying to get that plane to Langkawi. There is no
doubt in my mind. That’s the reason for the turn and direct route. A hijacking
would not have made that deliberate left turn with a direct heading for
Langkawi. It probably would have weaved around a bit until the hijackers
decided where they were taking it.
Surprisingly, none of the reporters, officials, or
other pilots interviewed have looked at this from the pilot’s viewpoint: If
something went wrong, where would he go? Thanks to Google Earth I spotted
Langkawi in about 30 seconds, zoomed in and saw how long the runway was and I
just instinctively knew this pilot knew this airport. He had probably flown
there many times.
Fire in an aircraft demands one thing: Get the machine
on the ground as soon as possible. There are two well-remembered experiences in
my memory. The AirCanada DC9 which landed, I believe, in Columbus, Ohio in the
1980s. That pilot delayed descent and bypassed several airports. He didn’t
instinctively know the closest airports. He got it on the ground eventually,
but lost 30-odd souls. The 1998 crash of Swissair DC-10 off Nova Scotia was
another example of heroic pilots. They were 15 minutes out of Halifax but the
fire overcame them and they had to ditch in the ocean. They simply ran out of
time. That fire incidentally started when the aircraft was about an hour out of
Kennedy. Guess what? The transponders and communications were shut off as they
pulled the busses.
Get on Google Earth and type in Pulau Langkawi and
then look at it in relation to the radar track heading. Two plus two equals
four. For me, that is the simple explanation why it turned and headed in that
direction. Smart pilot. He just didn’t have the time.
Chris
Goodfellow has 20 years experience as a Canadian Class-1 instrumented-rated
pilot for multi-engine planes. His theory on what happened to MH370 first appeared on Google+.
We’ve copyedited it with his permission.
1CORRECTION 9:40
a.m. Eastern 03/18/14: An editing error introduced a typo in Capt. Zaharie
Ahmad Shah’s name.
