#MalaysiaAirlines, #MH370, #PrayForMH370
Quest: Malaysia Airlines jet was 'at safest point' in flight
(CNN) -- As mystery surrounds the disappearance of
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 370, which was en route from Kuala Lumpur to
Beijing early Saturday, CNN's aviation expert Richard Quest said the
airliner would have been at the safest point in the flight.
"It was two hours into
the flight -- this would have been classed as the 'cruise portion of the
flight,'" he said. "You break down the flight into taxi, take-off,
climb out and then cruise.
"So in that particular
point of the flight, this is the safest part, nothing is supposed to go
wrong. The aircraft is at altitude on auto-pilot, the pilots are making
minor corrections and changes for height as the plane burns off fuel --
the plane will be going higher and higher -- so this is extremely
serious that something happened at this point in the flight."
Back-up power
Greg Feith, a former
investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in the
United States, suggested the pilots should have been able to report in,
even if power on the aircraft had failed.
"The airplane by
certification has to have battery back-up power -- they still have to be
able to utilize certain flight instruments and communication tools to
complete the flight safely.
"So you could lose all
the generators, you could have both engines out, but the battery back-up
-- which will only work for a certain time -- is intended for emergency
situations."
Feith also pointed to the possibility of an issue with the pressurization of the aircraft. "If you have a
high-altitude pressurization problem, catastrophic decompression, the
time of useful consciousness (the time a pilot can operate with an
insufficient oxygen supply) in the 30,000-40,000-feet range is a matter
of seconds."
Asked whether it was likely the airliner could have made an emergency landing, Quest said it was possible but unlikely.
"You're not talking
about a Cessna here. You're talking about a long-haul, wide-bodied
aircraft and that puts it into a completely different league."
Search for aircraft
But with speculation
mounting over whether Flight MH 370, which was carrying 227 passengers
and 12 crew, went down on land -- perhaps in Vietnam -- or in the South
China Sea, one aviation expert says it's essential to find the plane as
soon as possible in case there are survivors.
"Given the modern
communications and the truly modern equipped (Boeing) 777, it's highly
unlikely this plane would have landed somewhere not contactable," Mary
Schiavo, the former Inspector General of the U.S. Department of
Transportation, told CNN. "Depending on how the plane has gone down,
there could be many survivors in need of aid.
"That plane has many
different ways to locate it: Automatic beacons that tell you where it
is; there are several ways to conta
ct it both with radios and GPS, as
well as computer communications within the cockpit.
"But the lack of
communication suggests that something most unfortunate has happened --
though that does not suggest there are not any persons that need to be
rescued and secured."
Schiavo warned that if
for some reason the transmitters on the airliner are not operating, then
the search will obviously become far more complex and time-consuming.
"If they are not working
then sadly there are similarities with the Air France plane, which was
traveling from Brazil to Paris, France and was lost in the ocean. That
was very difficult to locate because of the depth of the ocean," she
said.
Air France Flight 447 --
an Airbus A330-203 -- plunged into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009,
killing all 228 people on board. It took four searches over the course
of nearly two years to locate the bulk of the wreckage and the majority
of the bodies in a mountain range deep under the ocean.
The incident report
detailed how the pilots failed to respond effectively to problems with
the plane's speed sensors or to correct its trajectory when things first
started to go wrong.
Aviation expert Jim
Tilmon said the Boeing 777-200 was as sophisticated an aircraft as they
come with an excellent safety record.
"The only fatality has been from the Asiana crash
in San Francisco (last year)," he told CNN's Anderson Cooper. "There's
been one other 777 that had some problems but no-one was hurt. This is
really a shock in lots of ways."
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