MH370: 4 Years Later; Theories

[Bullitt]

@Gatopescado

Left Hand and Lucas are using the same avatar. Confusing! Where is this article??

Post 19:

@Lucas_Jackson

For those interested, there is a fascinating article in The Atlantic online:

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It? - The Atlantic

I would be interested in hearing pilot’s opinions of the claims made in the article.

Conclusion…

the author makes a strong claim for it being a rouge move by the pilot.

It is quite good.

[Musicat]

@Walken_After_Midnight

<snip>
With MH370, it’s conjectured that it was the co-pilot who was locked out of the cockpit, while the captain was at the controls. This MH370 flight was the co-pilot’s final training flight, and he was scheduled to be examined on his next flight. The captain, on the other hand, was a flight instructor and examiner. So I wonder what the dynamic was, and how long it to took the student co-pilot, as well as cabin crew, to get to the frantic stage of perhaps trying to smash the door down.

If he had his phone on him, I guess the co-pilot might have tried to call the airline to ask what to do. The detail about the co-pilot’s cellphone registering with a tower has always intrigued me. According to the article, though, this happened at least half an hour after it is believed that control of the plane was seized, and after the decompression event that is hypothesized to have killed everyone in the cabin.

So I guess one theory might be that the co-pilot left or was asked to leave the cockpit, with the captain taking control of the plane. The co-pilot then returned and found the door locked. After some amount of time had passed, the co-pilot turned on his phone to try and call for assistance.

It’s interesting that it was only the co-pilot’s phone that registered (as far as I’m aware). If there’d been an extended period that the passengers were aware of what was happening, then it might be expected that they would also have turned their phones on. If they didn’t, then that might suggest that the ascent and decompression event took place early on. So perhaps the co-pilot turns his phone on, then there’s the decompression event killing everyone in the cabin, which explains why only the co-pilot’s cellphone is on half an hour later.<snip>

Some thoughts…

It’s possible that many passengers tried to get their phones to work, but there aren’t many good cellphone options at 30-45K feet over the open ocean, so we may never know.

If the co-pilot was locked out of the cockpit, he would have access to more than the passenger’s oxygen masks. I understand that the flight attendants have oxygen cylinders available, good for far more time than the simple drop-down masks. That’s what the attendant grabbed in the Helios incident.

OTOH, it’s entirely possible that the pilot anticipated all of this; deliberately began his actions out of cellphone range, and maybe even hid away or pre-emptied the spare oxygen tanks. If I was super-devious and determined, that’s something I would consider.

[Richard_Pearse]

@enipla

This is what I came into ask. In what type of situation would you want to depressurize the cabin? Would it help to fight fire? Kind of silly if it kills everyone.

If you have smoke/fumes in the aircraft the checklist may lead you to descending to 10,000 feet, depressurising the cabin, and using “ram air” for ventilation.

Just because it can be done at 40000’, doesn’t mean it’s intended to be used that way.

Even if you couldn’t specifically depressurise the aircraft, you could still just turn the air conditioning packs off, which would have the same affect but take longer. You need to be able to turn the packs off because they may be the source of the smoke/fumes.

[Ale]

I just finished listening tothis presentation on the missing airliner, I think they make a compelling case for the airplane having been piloted until it ran out of fuel.
*"RAeS Brussels Branch lecture held at Eurocontrol on the topic of the MH370 Flight and whether ATC was deliberately misled.

Engineers from CAPTIO will illustrate a plausible trajectory of flight MH370 that might have taken advantage of the shortcomings in civil and military air traffic control – and the antiquated air/ground communication systems in particular. People in command of the flight – the pilots? hijackers? – would have been able to fly practically undetected. One thing is known from the Inmarsat communication watchdog data: the flight ended in the Indian Ocean.
"*

Before my guess was that an undetected fire caused both an electric failure and rapid depressurization leaving the plane as a ghost ship across the sky, I didn’t know that the power, according to the information they presented, was restored a couple hours after the plane blinked out of air traffic control. Specially suspicious that it did so at the point where it just came out of radar coverage, it’s also very significant that they show the plane making corrections to account for air traffic and changing heading at the exact crossing of FIR borders.
Additional information is the analysis of the recovered flaperon, substantiating the scenario that the airplane was ditched in the sea.

[Musicat]

@Ale

I just finished listening tothis presentation on the missing airliner, I think they make a compelling case for the airplane having been piloted until it ran out of fuel.
“RAeS Brussels Branch lecture held at Eurocontrol on the topic of the MH370 Flight and whether ATC was deliberately misled…”

I just watched the entire presentation. This is the most detailed report I have seen on the event so far, although the extreme french accents of all presenters made it hard to follow sometimes.

To expand on the title, I think that presentation suggests a failure of the ATC system to detect anomalies or irregularities until too late, perhaps exploited by the perpetrator(s). Reminds me of the ATC confusion on 9/11, a similar situation in some ways – poor provisions to handle the unexpected.