Cockpit doors were made more secure after 9/11. Do any of the flight attendants, or anyone else outside of the cockpit during flight, have a key or other means to open the cockpit door from the outside?
Some leading theories include:
— mass hypoxia event
— fire
— rogue pilot
If it was a hypoxia event, and limited to the cockpit and if the flight crew were incapacitated early on while all other people on board were alert, it would be unnerving to say the least for the flight attendants to not have any comm with the cockpit, possibly for hours, and be awake and alert and realize there’s nothing they can do.
I’m not an expert, but I always thought it sounded like a gradual decompression incident, much like Helios 522. The most puzzling part of the incident is that the flight crew seems to have taken a number of irrational actions, and, well – how well do you troubleshoot when you’re hypoxic? Their attempts to fix the air conditioning despite ATC asking important questions like ‘did you remember to set the pressurization system to AUTO?’ are exactly the sort of thing you expect from people who recognize something’s gone wrong, but don’t have the ability to figure out what it is. You get similar behavior from mountaineers who climb too high without supplemental oxygen.
A slow enough leak would have been pretty much undetectable, mechanically/electronically speaking. You’d only know it was happening by observing the signs of oxygen deprivation among the passengers and crew, and by then it’d already be too late.
As a side note, I’ve always found it comforting that in fifty years we have only ever completely lost – as in, have absolutely no idea where on Earth it might have even gone down, if it did crash, not even a decent general idea – one jumbo jet. ONE. We’ve lost more submarines than that.
It’s even more readily observed in people who sit through a session in a high-altitude simulation chamber. Good SmarterEveryDay video here; by the end, he’s being told repeatedly to put his mask on, but he can’t quite grasp that he’s supposed to, you know, put his mask on.
My pet theory was that there was “nerve gas” released in the cabin. At the time, there were alerts out about some vague threat of a terrorist actions about something that could be stored in a toothpaste tube or similar. After the incident, all warnings about that threat stopped.
It would make sense that if such a thing happened, ATC would not mention it directly, specifically if they had no direct evidence. The pilot could have taken it upon himself to censor his transmissions to avoid the obvious result.
It would explain the aircraft rise to 45,000 feet and back. The pilot was trying to “air out” the cabin. All passengers would have been dead by that time and several pressurize/depressurize cycles at 45,000 feet is probably much more efficient than a dozen or more at 30,000.
After returning to cruising altitude, it would also make sense for the pilot (assuming the only living beings were in the cockpit) to set a “run out of fuel” destination on the autopilot before allowing the cockpit door to be opened.
Can you imagine what would happen with commercial aviation?
The most incriminating part of it, IMHO, is that the airplane’s diversion off-course took place precisely in that gap of communication between Malaysian air traffic control and when it was supposed to check in with Vietnamese air traffic control. That timing is far too suspicious and convenient; screams ‘rogue pilot’.
Yes, the way I think about it is knowing that a plane is lost “somewhere in the United States” and you can only look for it on cloudy moonless nights from a hot air balloon with a flashlight.
Shortly after the incident there was an article in which a pilot made an awfully persuasive case that what happened what consistent with there being a fire aboard the aircraft. It made sense; a depressurization incident makes sense, too. I’d say it’s 99% likely it’s one of the other.
Just curious, let’s say that by some miracle they find the wreckage and the recorders. Would they still be readable? What’s the greatest time so far between a crash and recovery of a useful recorder?
Both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder will probably have survived. However, the cockpit voice recorder used on Flight MH370 records on a loop and deletes all but the final two hours. This is typically a long enough time to determine the cause of any potential aircraft crash, but since MH370 flew for several hours after going missing, audio of what happened around the time of its disappearance will have been erased over.
At first, the search wasn’t even in the right ocean.
The crash has given a bit of momentum to the idea of streaming CVR and FDR data continuously to ground stations, via satellite, although the industry’s reluctance to spend money they’re not required to is an obstacle. So often things seem obvious in hindsight, after people die.
Because the law requires only two hours. It’s extremely rare that a voice recording longer than two hours would be of any use to crash investigators - so rare that it’s not worth the effort to change the requirement.