[Peetwo]

Captain's Log 26.11.16: HSSS archive entry 161126

Although I indicated at #336 that I am just about over the seemingly endless stream of MH370 theories, I note that today the Oz is carrying several articles on the subject of MH370 theories, expert consensus on those theories and the now inevitable BB attack on the ATSB...

Search leaves no path for truth
12:00amBYRON BAILEY
Adopting the unresponsive pilot theory on MH370 essentially means there is unlikely to be evidence about its fate.


Pilot hijacked MH370: experts
12:00amEAN HIGGINS
A survey of air crash investigators and commercial pilots ­has found MH370 pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijacked the plane.


Enigma of MH370: key theories
12:00amEan Higgins
Sex, politics and the latest crash theories: rogue pilot or hero, we’ll never be quite certain until MH370 is located.

  
So again not wanting to enter too much into the HSSS bollocks but I thought the bottom article, from that man 'Iggins worthy of regurgitation, as it almost perfectly summarises the weaknesses of some of the more credible recent theories and highlights the dangers of theorising without anymore hard facts and/or evidence...

...For most of the airline pilots and professional air crash investigators who form the close-knit international community of MH370 addicts, captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah has been the sole and absolute villain of the piece.

It might have been because he was outraged by the Malaysian government’s persecution of his relative and political idol, opposition figure Anwar Ibrahim. Anwar had his acquittal on sodomy charges overturned by a court the day before the fateful scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014.

Or it might have been what a married woman who was not his wife, revealed by The Australian to be Fatima Pardi, with whom he had a close but she insists not sexual relationship, had told him in a secret message exchange two days before the flight.

Either way, the dominant view has been that Zaharie hijacked his own aircraft when co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid was locked out of the cockpit, turned off the radar transponder and ceased radio ­contact.

Zaharie then flew himself and the other 238 souls on the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 on a zigzag route over the Malaysian-Thai air border to confuse authorities, over Penang and then northwest, finally turning on to a long track south and a watery, deep grave in a lonely part of the southern Indian Ocean.

There are a few sub-variations.

Zaharie might have depressurised the aircraft early and allowed himself and everyone else on board to die from lack of oxygen, or hypoxia, once the limited supply from drop-down masks and portable bottles ran out. He could have pre-programmed the death flight route into the autopilot.

Or he could have put on his oxygen mask with its several hours’ supply, outlasted all others on board and, when they were dead, re-pressurised the aircraft and flown it to the end in comfort, ditching it under power or gliding it after fuel exhaustion to try to make it disappear in as few bits as possible. Either way, Zaharie would be a mass murderer.

But according to a theory developed by former RAAF supply officer, retired logistics manager with Ansett, private pilot and amateur aviation sleuth Mick Gilbert, Zaharie was in fact the hero who tried to save his passengers and crew against overwhelming odds during an on-board fire.

Then, when all was lost, he turned the aircraft towards where it could do no harm to anyone on the surface.

In US aviation journalist Christine Negroni’s scenario, Zaharie was also a hero, struggling to get back to the cockpit after a rapid decompression but succumbing to hypoxia along the way.

This left young first officer Fariq trying to work out what to do, with his brain befuddled by partial hypoxia because of a faulty oxygen supply.

And, in another theory, Zaharie was a bit silly in inviting a pretty girl to the cockpit for a photo op, since she was, in fact, part of a terrorist hijack gang. Later on in the flight, when the chance arose, he and Fariq valiantly tried to retake control of the aircraft from the hijackers but died fighting.

As the ongoing search for MH370 draws to a close in coming weeks without a trace of the aircraft apart from two small pieces of debris from the fuselage, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau and its group of international experts have been conducting a “first principles” review of everything known about the flight and will soon produce a report.

The ATSB has always been eager to say it is running the underwater search for MH370 on behalf of the Malaysian government, which under international law is responsible for the investigation. In fact, the ATSB considered three possible scenarios and selected as its working proposition what has become known as the “ghost flight” or “death dive” theory: that at the end of the flight the crew was “unresponsive”, having possibly been overcome by hypoxia, and the aircraft went down unpiloted and fast after running out of fuel.

The problem the ATSB faces now is that it defined its 120,000sq km search zone based on that theory, and the search hasn’t found the plane, suggesting the ATSB’s theory may be wrong, and it has blown about $200 million of Australian, Malaysia and Chinese taxpayers’ money.

Two vessels, one from the Dutch Fugro survey group hired to lead the search plus the Chinese government vessel Dong Hai Jiu 101, are still out in the southern Indian Ocean scouring the last corners of the target zone.

But they are due to finish that task in January or February, and the three governments funding the search have said it would be resumed only “should credible new information emerge”.

Aviation sources have told Inquirer some in the ATSB would be keen to continue the search in a northerly direction along what is known as the “seventh arc” of automatic electronic handshakes between MH370 and the Inmarsat satellite, which shows the track, but not the precise position, where the aircraft went down.

China is thought to be ambivalent but, as revealed by The Australian, security experts believe Beijing authorities see a fringe benefit in having the Dong Hai Jiu 101 spy on Australian military bases and activities in Western Australia, a claim a Chinese embassy spokesman has described as “wild speculation”.

The sources say, however, that Malaysia, which has been trying to shut down the story domestically, has vetoed any continuation of the search.

Prominent US airline pilot turned air crash investigator John Cox thinks the ATSB may be hoping in commissioning the expert review that “if this group finds reason to, and recommends searching in a different area, it will be much ­easier to persuade the involved countries”.

Cox, who has served on several major air crash investigations with the US National Transportation Safety Board, has changed his thinking somewhat in recent months about what might have happened on MH370.

Cox used to be absolutely in the “rogue pilot” camp. But he thinks the theory Gilbert has developed is so well-researched and thought-through that he now has a more open mind.
“His work and efforts have caused me to back off my thinking that a deliberate act by the captain was the most likely scenario,” Cox told Inquirer this week.

While the on-board fire theory was one of the early ones to do the rounds, it was generally regarded as having been comprehensively shot down.

There was no distress call, it would not explain the route, and a fire would thoroughly destroy the aircraft quickly, or at least its capacity for straight and level flight, meaning it could not have kept flying for another seven hours.

Based on extensive research of the mechanics of the Boeing 777 and aviation crises that have happened in the past, Gilbert has come up with a scenario that purports to plug these gaps.

The starting point in Gilbert’s theory is a fire in the left, pilot-side windshield heater, something known to have happened from time to time, including on Boeing 777s, which burns out some circuits, including that of the radar transponder.

Both pilots don their oxygen masks immediately and turn off the left electrical AC bus to cut power to the short-circuiting heater, but in the process they inadvertently turn off the satellite data unit that makes the electronic handshake “pings” with Inmarsat.

Zaharie fights the fire with an extinguisher, and in the confusion neither pilot immediately makes a radio distress call.

In any event, pilots are trained that radio communication is the third priority in a crisis, after flying the aircraft and setting a heading to the nearest airport: the drill is “aviate, navigate, communicate”, and whoever was flying MH370 did just that by quickly turning back towards Malaysia.

Then, disaster. While reaching for an extinguisher, Zaharie accidentally pulls the tube from the oxygen mask out of its socket.

“That now dumps oxygen at an incredible rate into the cockpit,” Gilbert says, creating a violent fire which is “almost impossible to control”.

He adds: “I think one pilot has made it out of the cockpit alive, but injured.”

Then something else intervenes. The fire weakens the bottom of the windshield and it dislodges, leading to the air rushing out of the cockpit and a sharp fall in temperature, putting out the fire. The decompression of the aircraft, still at high altitude, would cause the oxygen masks to drop, providing about 12 minutes of breathing for the passengers.

There are, however, several portable oxygen bottles and masks available to the crew.

Gilbert’s theory is that the fire partly, but not completely, burned out the cockpit, just like an oxygen fire that melted some control features but not others of an EgyptAir Boeing 777 in an accident on the ground in 2011.

The scenario is then one of gruesome desperation and bravery, with a badly injured Zaharie returning for brief times to the freezing, wind-blasted cockpit to try to regain control, possibly instructing a flight attendant.

The radio knobs have melted, so that “just selecting a radio and tuning it would have been almost impossible”, Gilbert suggests.

But the autopilot, or flight management system, is sufficiently intact to set new headings, although the fire has knocked out the auto-throttle so Zaharie can’t set it to descend.
On a dark night, with a smoky windscreen and some non-functioning instruments, taking over manual control would be problematic and risky.

As Zaharie flies over Penang he decides to turn northwest up the Strait of Malacca, away from built-up areas, to continue the troubleshooting process during which he turns the left electrical AC bus back on, repowering the satellite data unit.

But then, with his own and his assistant’s portable oxygen tanks running out, and all the passengers and the rest of the cabin crew dead, Zaharie accepts the game is up.

He realises, in Gilbert’s words: “It’s two of us versus the danger of killing a whole lot of people in a busy shipping channel.” Zaharie turns the autopilot to a southerly heading to nowhere and soon MH370 becomes a ghost flight.

There are a lot of attractions in Gilbert’s theory, including that it deals with the sub-mystery of why the satellite data unit was turned off for a time, then came back on.

Negroni’s rapid decompression scenario is another that would ostensibly explain the flight route without assuming pilot hijack.

Fariq, on his own in the cockpit while Zaharie is on a “biological break”, tries to deal with the crisis but gets only a partial supply of oxygen from a defective mask, tube or bottle.
In its early phase hypoxia has some of the same symptoms as drunkenness.

Fariq makes a rational decision at first to turn back towards Malaysia but then, light-headed with hypoxia, makes a couple of irrational course changes before his oxygen runs out altogether, leaving the aircraft flying south on ­autopilot.

Geoffrey Dell, a transport accident investigator who is now an associate professor at Central Queensland University, prefers yet another scenario, which he describes as the only one that “doesn’t require a string of implausible simultaneous unrelated failures and errors”.

As Dell observes, Zaharie had published a video of him allowing young women on to the flight deck.

“The would-be hijackers wouldn’t have to threaten a flight attendant … just simply include a young woman in the hijack team and just ask for a photo opportunity with the captain on the flight deck,” Dell says.

A smart hijacking crew could have thus taken the crew by surprise, before they could issue a distress call, and ordered the pilots to turn off the radar transponder.

They then might command the crew to head towards Afghanistan, for example, where the Taliban might hold runways long enough to land such an aircraft and to kidnap its human cargo for terrorist statement or ransom.

“If the crew did then find an opportunity to try to regain control of the flight and a fight ensued, it’s plausible that it could easily have resulted in the death or incapacitation of everyone who can fly the aircraft,” Dell says.

“Then the (flight management system) would have continued to fly the aircraft.”
Most of the commercial airline pilots and air crash investigators approached by Inquirer stick to the rogue pilot theory as the likeliest scenario, and most assume Zaharie flew the aircraft to the end.

With Gilbert’s on-board fire theory, they say, the lack of a distress call would be unprecedented, as would the catastrophic failure of the windshield because of a heater fire.

Negroni’s rapid decompression theory is the least popular. Most of the panel say the idea Fariq would be just conscious enough to fly the aircraft for a couple of hours, but sufficiently hypoxic to do so erratically, is highly improbable: he would have got his reliable oxygen mask on and taken the flight to safety or he would have passed out quickly.

As for the hijack theory, it has been widely reported that while two Iranian passengers carried stolen passports, authorities believe their motive was illegal immigration to Europe. Background checks showed they and the rest of the passengers and crew had nothing hinting at a terrorist past, and there was no claim of responsibility by any terrorist group.

Without the discovery of the aircraft and its black box flight data and cockpit voice recorders, none of the five theories can be conclusively proved or disproved, and that’s why most aviation professionals believe the search should be continued.

“The idea that they are not going to search for the aeroplane to finality is a serious precedent in all aviation,” David Booth, president of the Australian Federation of Air Pilots, tells this newspaper...

Hmmm...no comment but I firmly support this statement...

"..that’s why most aviation professionals believe the search should be continued..."

...and totally agree with AFAP's David Booth that we should not be setting such a precedent as not seeing through to finality the search & investigation of MH370...


MTF...P2