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A Puzzle With No Pieces: What Happened to Malaysia Plane?
The disappearance of Malaysia
Airlines Flight 370 is so baffling that veteran aviation investigators
say they are struggling to come up with a plausible theory in the
absence of any wreckage.
There
are only a handful of scenarios that could explain how a usually
reliable wide-body jet could seemingly vanish from a clear sky with no
distress call and no obvious debris field.
And for every circumstance that would seem to support one theory, another undercuts it.
"It's
a thousand-piece puzzle, and we have two pieces and we're trying to
make a picture with that," said John Goglia, a former member of the
National Transportation Safety Board.
"I'm totally confused, to be honest with you. Nothing makes sense."
Added former NTSB investigator Greg Feith, "You can't rule anything out at this point."
Here
are the possibilities investigators are likely looking at as they try
to figure out what happened to the Boeing 777 flying 239 people from
Malaysia to Beijing across the South China Sea.
Midair mechanical malfunction
A
catastrophic event that made the jet come apart at its cruising
altitude of 35,000 feet would explain its sudden disappearance. But
Feith said that would result in a large debris field in the water, and no one has found one yet.
On
the other hand, a mechanical malfunction that brought the plane down
intact presumably would have given the pilots time to make a distress
call. Even if there were a total electrical power failure, backup
systems would have kept the radio running.
Bomb or other explosion
Again,
if there were a cataclysm over water — where authorities say the plane
lost contact and where the search is concentrated — debris would likely
have been spotted already.
"Lots of things inside an airplane float. People float, to some extent," Goglia said.
What
if the blast were smaller? Feith can conceive of a situation in which a
bomb blew open a hole big enough to cause explosive decompression but
didn't damage the structural integrity of the plane. The fuselage would
fill with fog, and passengers and crew would pass out within five to 15
seconds.
On autopilot, as the
plane would be at that point of the flight, it could fly for hours
before crashing on land, perhaps in a thick, remote jungle, Feith said.
Weighing
against a bomb is the fact that no one has claimed responsibility, and a
plane carrying mostly Malaysian and Chinese passengers would seem to be
a less likely terrorist target than an American or European jet.
Pentagon surveillance data also uncovered no sign of a midair explosion.
"It's a thousand-piece puzzle, and we have two pieces."
Hijacking
Increased
security has made skyjackings largely a crime of the past. Flight 370
would have had a cockpit door, and procedure would have called for it to
have been locked at that point in the trip.
Nevertheless,
it's impossible to tell what security measures were actually in place
on the flight. We already know that Malaysia didn't bother to check
whether the stolen passports used by two passengers were listed in an Interpol database.
If an armed person did
manage to get into the cockpit, he or she might prevent the crew from
making a distress call. There are discreet codes for a hijacking that
pilots can put into the transponder, but because radar coverage in that
area was unreliable, it might have gone unnoticed, Feith said.
Typically,
hijackers take over a plane to land it somewhere other than its
intended destination or to make a demand of some sort — neither of which
appears to fit with this case. However, as 9/11 showed, a suicidal
hijacker could wrest away control of an aircraft for the purpose of
terrorism and intentionally or accidentally crash it into anything.
Pilot error or sabotage
The
Boeing 777 should have been on autopilot, but let's say the pilots took
it off and then got disoriented or made some other mistake. They still
should have had time to make an emergency call once they got into
trouble.
In the 1999 crash of
EgyptAir Flight 990, authorities believe co-pilot Gamil El Batouty
directed the plane into the Atlantic Ocean off Nantucket, Mass., while
the pilot desperately tried to regain control.
Experts
say that theoretically could have happened with the Malaysia Airlines
flight — although there is no evidence to suggest it did.
Bringing
an intact plane straight down into the water would explain the lack of a
sprawling wreckage field. If there were a struggle in the cockpit, that
might be a reason no distress call was made.
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