At the break of dawn of the 8th of March 2014, it was highly unlikely that modern jetliner in the class of B777 can disappear just like that.
How can a Malaysian Flight 370 Jetliner drop off the Radar and go missing for 2 weeks with 239 passengers? The many speculative and conspiracy theories are at unprecedented level with over 26 countries involved in the search &rescue effort and not getting anywhere near to a definite answer to this tragedy.
The ease with which a big jetliner melted into the ether after vanishing from Malaysian radar illustrates an uncomfortable paradox about modern aviation: state-of-the-art airplanes rely on ageing ground infrastructure to tell them where to go.
While satellites shape almost every aspect of modern life, the use of radar and radio in the cockpit has, for many pilots, changed little since before the jet engine was first flown. Even though Malaysia suspects someone may have hidden its tracks, the inability of 26 nations to find a 250-tonne Boeing 777 has shocked an increasingly connected world and possibly exposed flaws in our modern technology.
Consider this one of the very many speculative statements about Flight MH370: It flew until it ran out of fuel. On its own that’s a pretty remarkable image. The whole story of this flight begins to look different if you begin at the end, not the beginning. The end is alarmingly simple and final. It is not surrounded by disputes about who did what and when. There is only one source for it, the “pings” indicating that the airplane was still “alive” in the air; approximately for 7 hours. If we reverse-engineer the progress of the Boeing 777 from this single moment of clarity, where does it begin to get complicated?
An airplane doesn’t normally fly until it runs out of fuel if pilots are flying it. It’s not being “flown” at all in that sense; it’s flying itself. In order to do that it has to be in stable equilibrium – “inherent stability” is a quality that airplane designers are required to give the airplane. This composure comes to an abrupt end when the fuel runs out. Two of the 777’s engines would not quit at the same time. Fuel would dribble to a stop in one before it did in the other. At that point, with a loss of symmetry in the power provided by the engines, the airplane banks sharply and dives, into the water.
Given this scenario, we must assume that the crew and passengers were either unconscious or dead. Six or more hours have passed (the time varies according to interpretation of the pinging received by a satellite) during which the airplane has flow at least 3,000 miles. Following the reverse timeline, this “clean” hypothesis – the undisputed physical characteristics of the airplane in flight – only gets “dirty” when it meets the cluster of events following the last call from the pilots at early segment of the flight. In other words, what could have brought the airplane to the point where it headed off to its fate?
The whole picture of the 777’s behavior once it departed from its direct route to Beijing has, from the start, been colored by the quasi-criminalization of the investigation. Suspicion has been directed at two targets, the pilots and the passengers. Sinister motives are given to what few fragments of information we have – the disappearance of signals from the transponder that fixes the jet’s position, the similar ending of signals from its maintenance monitoring system, the presence of a flight simulator in the pilot’s home and the deletion of some files from it – and the latest source of alarm: The fact that the 777’s sudden change of direction was programmed into its flight management system.
The more the information is slanted in this direction, the less easy it becomes to achieve an independent forensic focus. There is certainly a need to interrogate the facts for a criminal or terrorist interpretation – we live in a world of plotters – but there is equally a need to rigorously see if there are not alternative explanations innocent of malignant design.
Experts I have reasoned with believe that investigators should be, and probably are, including in their scenarios at least one that would be accidental and not criminal. This would have its origins not on the flight deck or in the cabin but in the belly of the 777 – in either the cargo hold or the electronics bay or both. Electronically, the brain center of the 777 is in its Airplane Information Management System, AIMS, in the electronics bay. This handles the management of the flight itself – how the airplane is flown in real time – as well as the cockpit information displays, monitoring of all its conditions including the cabin climate, and the receipt and dispatch of data.
In the 777, the AIMS was designed with robust backup ability, what is called “deferred maintenance operation.” If there is a failure in any one of its systems it can continue to operate for as many as 30 days before needing maintenance. The airplane’s two umbilical links to the ground that have featured so critically in this case, the transponder and the ACARS monitoring device, relay their signals through external antennas. The transponder has two antennas under the forward section of the fuselage and the ACARS antenna is at the top of the rear fuselage.
There are at least two locations that could be responsible for the loss of these communications – either by an electrical fault, failure or fire in the electronics bay itself, or as a result of some kind of explosion or fire in the cargo hold that affected the electronics bay. The AIMS units are the gateway for all communications to and from the flight deck. Experts believe, for example, that it is feasible that the loss of both the transponder and the ACARS signals could be explained by this kind of disruption, while backup systems still ensured that the airplane could fly. Another explanation is that a certain kind of combustion in the cargo hold could rapidly introduce toxic fumes and smoke into the cabin and flight deck. The National Transportation Safety Board found that there was an unusually large consignment of lithium-ion batteries on the cargo manifest
