Re: Interesting blog comment/post about Flight MH370

From: Hilary Kitching

Date: 2014-04-07 09:17:22

Also try www.airliners.net for tech and history of aircraft on a global scale. It’s a great resource for images of many types of aircraft photographed by serious enthusiasts including pilots themselves.  I haven’t searched for this particular aircraft on the site yet but you might find something of interest there if you do. Sent from my iPhone On 6 Apr 2014, at 19:59, “Andrew Johnson” wrote:   I was trying to find out something about the manufacture date of the aircraft and found this page:   aviation-safety.net/…   It shows the model/type of Rolls Royce engines fitted to the aircraft. I then wanted to try and find out if the engine monitoring system was fitted to these engines (designed in the 1990s). Searching around for information about this, led to me to a comment on the blog below, which has a reasoned analysis of what might have happened. I am not saying I think this is correct, but the person who posted the blog seems to know what they are talking about!   It has some notes about previous aircraft incidents/crashes.   earthlinggb.wordpres…   Nalliah Thayabharan said, on March 22, 2014 at 1:25 am Whatever happened to the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, it occurred quickly. The problem had to be big enough. There could have possibly been a cockpit fire that cut off radar and all other communications. The Boeing 777, registration 9M-MRO, was delivered new to Malaysia Airlines on May 31, 2002. The tip of the wing of this aircraft broke off Aug. 9, 2012, as it was taxiing at Pudong International Airport outside Shanghai. The wingtip collided with the tail of a China Eastern Airlines A340 plane. The aircraft was powered by two Rolls-Royce Trent 892 engines.had accumulated over 20,000 hours and 3,000 cycles in service. The stolen passports are not necessarily related to the disappearance of the plane since passengers use false identities for illegal immigration. The disaster is most similar to the mysterious disappearance of Air France Flight 447, which killed all 228 people on board. Investigations were unable to conclusively come up with a reason for the crash of the Airbus A330 until the plane’s black boxes – its flight and voice data recorders – were recovered from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean 2 yrs later.Air France Flight 447 provided a cautionary tale against premature speculation. The accident was initially blamed by the airline on a thunderstorm. Later, investigators pinpointed ice that caused faulty speed sensor readings on the plane. But data recovered after a 2-year search led authorities to conclude that pilot error had also played a part – the crew’s handling of the plane after the auto-pilot was disengaged put it into a stall from which it could not recover. Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370′s disappearance marks the fourth hull loss of a Boeing 777 – the previous being Asiana Airlines Flight 214 with three fatalities. In 2005, during a flight from Perth to Kuala Lumpur the crew received a “stall warning” forcing the pilot to turn back. On Jul 29, 2011 an Egyptair flight MS-667 – Boeing 777-200, registration SU-GBP was preparing for departure from Cairo (Egypt) to Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) at gate F7 with 291 passengers already boarded waiting for a delayed last passenger until doors could be closed .when a fire erupted in the cockpit causing smoke to also enter the cabin. Emergency exits were not opened, all passengers vacated the aircraft through the smoke and the main doors.What a lucky set of crew and passengers. Imagine the horror had they been airborne.The aircraft was subsequently written off as beyond economical repair.The more worrying part of the report on the Egypt Air fire was that the investigation discovered the suspect wiring and it’s brackets did not comply with the Boeing blueprints and a very large batch of 777s had been delivered with the same fault. If such a fire occurred at FL 350 (35,000 ft), on an aircraft flying 850 km/h (475 knots), it is plausible to assume it would be catastrophic. If such a quick and devastating cockpit fire occurred aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, it could be consistent with some of the known facts: * communications being cut abruptly (pilots struggling to extinguish it, speed of fire, electronics destroyed)* no mayday signals sent (no time before cockpit uninhabitable due to smoke and fire, and/or instruments destroyed),* the transponder going down,* no calls from passengers (too high for cell-phone contact, no time, panic)* perhaps the “mumbling” when another pilot from Flight MH 83 to Narita radioed (e.g. if static or 850 km/h wind sounded like mumbling) and * perhaps a change of course and/or altitude (if the plane continued to fly for some time, even with the cockpit electronics destroyed due to a growing fire), Evidently the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System – ACARS went inoperative few minutes before the last communications with the pilot. Disabling the ACARS is not easy,. Most probably an electrical problem or an electrical fire cause the shutdown of the ACARS than a manual shutdown and the pilots probably were not even aware ACARS was not transmitting. Things could have been in the process of going wrong, unknown to the pilots. The loss of transponders and communications were most probably caused by an electrical fire. In the case of an electrical fire, the first response is to pull the main busses and restore circuits one by one until the bad one is isolated. If pilots pulled the busses, the plane would go silent. It was probably a very serious fire and the pilots were occupied with controlling the plane and trying to fight the cockpit fire. Aviate, navigate, and lastly, communicate is the only way in such situations. Probably the pilot was turning towards the closest airport – Langkawi with an approach over water and no obstacles. The pilot did not turn towards Kuala Lampur most probably due to the fact that he had 8,000-ft ridges to cross. The pilot obviously knew the terrain was friendlier towards Langkawi, which also was closest airport. An electrical fire might not be as fast and furious, and there may or may not be incapacitating smoke. However there is the possibility, given the timeline, that there was an overheat on one of the front landing gear tires, it blew on takeoff and started slowly burning due to under inflated tires, especially with heavy plane and long-run takeoff. A front landing gear tire fire would produce horrific, incapacitating smoke. On departing Kuala Lumpur, Flight 370 would have had fuel for 8 hrs of flying. The flight burned almost 25% in the first hour with takeoff and the climb to cruise. So when the turn was made the flight would have had more than 6 hrs worth of fuel. The pilots were overcome by smoke and the plane continued on the heading, probably on George (autopilot), until it ran out of fuel and it crashed. This correlates with the Inmarsat Satellite data pings being received until fuel exhaustion. The flight continued until time to fuel exhaustion confirms that the pilots were incapacitated and the flight continued on. The aircraft was expected to contact air traffic control in Ho Chi Minh City as it passed into Vietnamese airspace just north of the point where contact was lost. The captain of another flight MH 83 – Boeing 777 – flying 30 minutes ahead of the MH370 had attempted to reach the pilots of MH370 “just after 1:30 a.m.” to relay Vietnamese Air Traffic Control’s request for MH370 to contact it; the captain said he was able to establish contact, but just heard the voice at the other end, believed to be that of co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, was just a mumble and there was a lot of static interference. The ‘mumble’ could be the vital clue – for hypoxia starves the brain of its cognitive faculties and the victim becomes like someone heavily intoxicated, unable to think or speak properly, before passing out. Three crashes in the past 15 years have been attributed to the pilots passing out from hypoxia – lack of oxygen – resulting in their aircraft flying on for hours until they ran out of fuel and crashed. The timing of the mumbled contact from MH370 fits in with the final coherent words spoken by co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid– ‘All right – Good night’ – at 1.19am on March 3 as MH370 passed over Malaysia’s north east coast and headed out over the Gulf of Thailand. May be one of the pilots had desperately tried to turn the aircraft back to the nearest airport Langkawi resulting in the sharp turn but had passed out after making that manoeuvre and the plane had continued on westwards either on autopilot or with that system switched off. Stupified fumbling with the controls might have resulted in systems being shut down. In Oct 1999 top-ranked golfer Payne Stewart, 3 other passengers and the pilots of a chartered Learjet 35, were killed when all on board were incapacitated due to lack of oxygen as it flew across the United States. The jet flew on over the southern and mid-west USA for almost 4 hrs and 2,500 km before it ran out of fuel and crashed in a field in South Dakota. In Sep 2000 a chartered Beechcraft 200 Super King Air plane set out from Perth, Western Australia, for a mining town in the same State, but later air traffic control was unable to make any sense of the pilot’s words and he seemed unable to respond to instructions. 3 other aircraft failed to make radio contact with the pilot and the Beechcraft flew on for 5 hrs before running out of fuel and crashing in the desert, resulting in Australian media referring to it as the Ghost Flight. In 2005 a Greek airliner – a Helios Airways Boeing 737 – crashed into a mountain near Athens, killing all 121 on board after investigators concluded that the jet had lost cabin pressure and it became too late for the pilots to reach for their oxygen masks before they became unconscious. In that case, it was found that one of the cabin attendants had come around enough to try to save the aircraft and had struggled with the controls – in vain. Could such a scenario have occurred on flight MH370? It is a question which might take years to answer, if at all. Much of the wreckage may be at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The size of the debris field will be one of the first indicators of what happened. A smaller field would indicate the plane probably fell intact, breaking up upon impact with the water. Discovering the debris can take days. . If it is due to a deadly mechanical breakdown then Malaysia Airlines should take the blame.   < Reply via web post Reply to sender Reply to group Start a New Topic Messages in this topic (1)