One of the many problems that MH370 sleuths have in proposing scenarios that account for the mystery of its disappearance has been to explain a period in which the airplane flew between two points barely 60 nautical miles (or 111 kilometres) apart at an implausibly slow speed.
That part of its flight occurred well west of Penang after the Malaysia Airlines 777 had abruptly departed from its filed flight plan between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing early on the morning of March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board.
Queensland-based MH370 follower Michael Gilbert argues that at that point the plane’s pilots, who had been deprived of communications by a short but damaging cockpit fire, attempted to restore contact with Kuala Lumpur while keeping the lights of Banda Aceh in Indonesia in sight as they flew a loitering path safely away from other air traffic.
Gilbert’s new paper on this follows on his earlier hypothesis as to the causes of that cockpit fire, which has been reported with links to his calculations and conclusions here.
His analysis doesn’t involve criminally insane behaviour by one of the pilots to deliberately fly the Malaysia Airlines’ 777-200ER to the southern Indian Ocean, where it ran out of fuel, or to land it intact on the surface of the ocean, while it was deprived of fully functioning and powered control systems, before sinking it. Both types of claims, widely made by rent-seekers and ratbags, are not only unsupported by what evidence has been collected about MH370, but physically contradicted by forensic examination of key pieces of identified wreckage under the management of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau in Australia.
The one deeply alarming inference from Gilbert’s latest paper is that whatever had gone seriously wrong in the cockpit of MH370 during an attempt to restore communications then took an even more serious turn for the worse while it was loitering 30 minutes’ flying time from Penang.
This has to be so because at the end of that attempt the airliner’s satellite phone rang unanswered in the cockpit of MH370.
The timing of this may well tell us when the crisis on MH370 went from being one where the pilots thought they could save the flight to one where all hope was gone.
*This article was originally published at Crikey blog Plane Talking
Mick has made valiant efforts to reconcile evidence of hypoxic flight but has gotten elements of logic back to front.
It is illogical to suggest Fire was the first emergency to befall MH370, or that in response crew did not make an emergency descent but rather reversed course staying at 35,000ft.
Attempts by Malaysian Airlines (MAS) to raise MH370 with an ACARS message sent at 18:03 UTC that was automatically repeated every two minutes without response until 18:43 UTC, when taken in conjunction with a missed response to a scheduled handshake at 17:37 UTC suggest failure of the Left AC Bus powering the SDU.
It follows therefore that loss of communications was a direct consequence of this power failure, perhaps caused by the ELMS shedding load. It would be logical therefore that if the Left AC Bus came online again at 18:25 UTC that ELMS restored power to the SDU.
Pilots faced with electrical failure but no obvious sign of fire elected to turn back from Vietnam but made no effort to descend from their cruise altitude, 35,000ft.
It is logical that if a fire broke out on MH370 during this communications black out that this is when MH370 suffered a hypoxic tragedy, whether sudden decompression or a gradual process.
Melbourne author and public speaker (and ex-A380 and Dubai Royal Flight captain) James Nixon, will smile ironically to himself if he reads this article. His book on the doomed MH370 flight appears to have been the only one that did not rely upon a loony-tunes theory. Instead, Nixon discussed plausible and rational possibilities for such an event. Only now, it seems, his book has been read by a few commentators-of-profile who have now tired of the conspiracy theories (the media having lost interest) and are prepared to accept a more prosaic explanation. He probably wouldn’t mind his ideas (suitably presented, of course, so as not to be identifiable ‘cut-and-pastes’) being now discussed.