Malaysian Prime Minister
Najib Razak informed the families of the victims that the plane had
crashed into the remote south Indian Ocean, and all 239 people onboard
are presumed dead.
That tragic but not
unexpected conclusion was based on data analysis by satellite company
Inmarsat, which Malaysia now says was able to track Flight 370 until the
signal ended very near where searchers are now hunting for plane
wreckage.
The location tells a lot about what might have happened to the doomed flight while telling us not a single detail about why it crashed.
The presumed location of
the wreckage makes it all but impossible for certain scenarios to have
played out as many observers insisted they must have.
The first thing to
understand is altitude is everything. A turbofan powered jet like the
Boeing 777-200ER relies on altitude to make good on its ultra long-range
capabilities. At its normal cruising altitudes from around 35,000 to
40,000 feet, the 777 can fly very long distances, in excess of 11,000
miles. But it seldom flies long routes.
On its trip from Kuala
Lumpur to Beijing, the plane would have had, according to investigators'
projections, around seven hours of total endurance at a normal cruising
speed of around 600 mph -- just enough to have flown its suspected
flight path north for 40 minutes, west for around that much time again,
and then south for many hours.
Listening for MH370 'pings' underwater
#Search area is a 'giant washing machine'
At lower altitudes,
turbofan engines like the Rolls-Royce engines on the Malaysia Airlines
airplane, burn substantially more fuel than they do at typical cruise
altitudes -- as much as twice depending on the altitudes one uses for
comparison.
The increase in fuel
burn will greatly reduce range, making it impossible for Flight MH-370
to have reached the southern Indian Ocean at a low altitude. It would
need to have flown at a much higher optimum altitude in order to make it
that far.
Pilots can reduce the power to cut back on fuel flow, of course, but that also reduces airspeed, which again reduces range.
There's no winning when it comes to flying a turbofan-powered airplane: If you want to fly far, you need to fly high.
So the fuel required for
MH-370 to have reached the presumed crash location around 1500 miles
west of Perth, Australia, means that the airplane did not do a lot of
climbing or descending after it deviated from its original planned route
to Beijing while it was still an hour or so north of Kuala Lumpur.
So if there was a
struggle for control of the flight -- whether it was mechanical issues
or a hijacker -- it could not have lasted long or involved great
altitude deviations.
This means it's hard,
though not impossible, to explain the disappearance as being the result
of a mechanical or electrical failure. Such a scenario, as I've been
saying since the beginning of the mystery, would require a kind of
mechanical magic bullet, an event that would have taken out the
transponder and ACARS radio, as well as the voice communications radios.
Why else would they not have communicated the emergency?
Then one must accept
that such a failure chain could then allow the crew -- or skilled
intruder-- to be able to drive the airplane around the sky for a
protracted period of time, eventually pointing it south, in the opposite
direction from where the airplane was originally headed.
Let's remember, too,
that the airplane would have to maintain an altitude sufficient to allow
it to reach the southern Indian Ocean. All this must also have left the
777 in good enough shape to fly for another six hours or so before
crashing.
A failure of the
pressurization system might account for the scenario, but only if the
pilots completely mismanaged their response to the emergency. The 777's
backup and emergency oxygen systems are just as intelligently designed
as the rest of the jet's redundant systems.
It's also difficult, if
not impossible, to explain how the jet could have made the turns it did
if the crew were unconscious during that time. Were they desperately
trying to find an airport before time ran out? If so, they would have
done two things they didn't do: They would have communicated the
emergency and they would have descended. Neither of those things
happened.
While it's horrific to
imagine, a botched hijacking or failed pilot commandeering of the
airplane are still the most likely scenarios.
Only when searchers have
located and recovered the wreckage, as we all desperately hope they do,
will we have our first good clues to what have might have unfolded on
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-370.
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