#MalaysiaAirlines, #MH370,
#PrayForMH370
Searching for the plane truth -- amid speculation
It's been more than 12 days since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went
missing from radar screens, and hard facts about its fate remain in
short supply.
To fill the vacuum,
experts and amateurs have been conjuring and sharing theories on what
may have caused the commercial airliner carrying 227 passengers and 12
crew members to seemingly disappear.
Here are some of the leading theories:
SPECULATION: PILOT HERO
The evidence for it:
Pilot Chris Goodfellow, in a posting published by Wired Magazine,
suggests a simple scenario in which a wheel of the heavily loaded plane
overheated as it lumbered toward takeoff from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
"Yes, this happens with
underinflated tires," he wrote, adding that the tire may have smoldered
initially and not caught fire until some time into the flight.
Once he became aware of the fire, pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah would have turned left toward the closest, safest airport -- Langkawi International Airport, a 13,000-foot airstrip that has an approach over water, he said.
"The captain did not turn
back to Kuala Lumpur because he knew he had 8,000-foot ridges to
cross," Goodfellow wrote. "He knew the terrain was friendlier toward
Langkawi, which was also closer."
The loss of the jet's
transponders and communications could be expected in a fire, and a
pilot's first response would be to pull the main buses -- conductors
carrying a computer system's data and control signals -- "and restore
circuits one by one until you have isolated the bad one," he said.
If the buses were
pulled, "the plane would go silent. It probably was a serious event and
the flight crew was occupied with controlling the plane and trying to
fight the fire. Aviate, navigate, and lastly, communicate is the mantra
in such situations."
He said radar reports
that the plane ascended to 45,000 feet were unreliable. And, even if
true, they are not necessarily damning. The pilot might have been
seeking to quell the fire by going to an altitude with less oxygen, he
said.
A reported rapid descent
could have resulted from a stall at such a height, above the plane's
limit, followed by a recovery at 25,000 feet. "The pilot may even have
been diving to extinguish flames," he said. "But going to 45,000 feet in
a hijack scenario doesn't make any good sense to me."
Goodfellow speculated
that smoke may have incapacitated the pilots and crew, leaving the plane
to continue on autopilot until it ran out of fuel or the fire caused it
to crash. "You will find it along that route -- looking elsewhere is
pointless," he concluded.
There is precedent for
that. In 1999, a private jet carrying golfer Payne Stewart and five
others crashed after apparently losing cabin pressure "for undetermined
reasons" after takeoff from Florida, the National Transportation Safety
Board found.
Fighter pilots were sent
up to intercept Stewart's plane after controllers lost contact with it,
and they reported its cockpit and cabin windows were frosted over.
The plane flew more than halfway across the United States, apparently on autopilot, until it crashed in a South Dakota field.
The evidence against it:
Jeff Wise, an aviation journalist for slate.com
and author of "Extreme Fear," was unpersuaded on the tire fire/Langkawi
landing theory for Flight 370. The pilot, who had been slated to fly to
Beijing, did not enter the airline code for Langkawi as a destination
in the jet's navigation system, he said.
And the change in course
to a different destination was put into the computer that controlled
the plane's navigation at least 12 minutes before the co-pilot said good
night -- "in very calm tones" -- to air traffic controllers, he told
CNN.
"So the change in course
was not due to something that happened spontaneously, it wasn't a
spontaneous reaction to some emergency in the cockpit," he said. "It had
been planned out."
And the jet continued to
navigate after it passed Langkawi, making at least two more turns, he
said, citing Malaysian military radar. "So there was this careful,
planned navigation that was taking place. This was not something that a
plane would do on its own; this was something that a human being had to
be telling it to do."
In addition, he said, Langkawi lies in neither of the arcs along which investigators believe the plane traveled.
Still, American Airlines
pilot John Testrake said events could have played out as Goodfellow
described. "It's a possible scenario, but there are a lot of possible
scenarios, and that's just one of them," he told CNN.
The plane might also
have landed on an island runway that was then covered with trees, he
added. "It's anybody's guess. We're speculating; we're just
speculating."
SPECULATION: PILOT SUICIDE
The evidence for it:
The notion of a crew member bent on annihilation may seem far-fetched, but it's possible.
For example, EgyptAir
Flight 990 was flying 217 people from Los Angeles to New York to Cairo
in 1999 when it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. U.S. officials blamed a
co-pilot, who was recorded repeating a prayer, for deliberately causing
the crash, but Egyptian officials blamed mechanical problems.
The Malaysian Airlines flight, a Boeing 777, could have experienced destruction by pilot or crew, some say.
"It's my belief that
there was probably some type of struggle in the cockpit where it was one
of the pilots that maybe had a meltdown or did something nefarious to
the airplane," said Mark Weiss, a retired American Airlines pilot
captain who has flown the Boeing 777 and now works at the Washington
consulting firm Spectrum Group.
Or there could have been
another crew member or an uninvited or invited guest in the cockpit who
"was bent on perhaps committing suicide or doing some destruction on
the aircraft," Weiss added.
Though allowing guests
to enter the cockpit would be improper and "should be disconcerting to
anybody," Weiss said, there is no one on a plane who can order them not
to do so. Weiss cited a woman's report that co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid,
27, invited her and her friend into the cockpit, where they sat from takeoff to landing during a 2011 flight from Phuket, Thailand, to Kuala Lumpur.
"That's an enormous breach of security," Weiss said of cockpit guests.
But none of us will know
what really happened in the cockpit "until we have the cockpit voice
recorder and the flight data recorder," he added.
And Malaysian opposition
leader Anwar Ibrahim told CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday that
he has met Zaharie "on a number of occasions" and said that the pilot is
no extremist.
"He supports our
multiracial coalition. He supports democratic reform. He is against any
form of extremism," Anwar said. "And we take a very strong position in
clamoring for change through constitutional and democratic means."
Some have tried to tie Zaharie to Anwar as a family relation.
Anwar's press secretary
told CNN that Zaharie is the opposition leader's -- wait for it -- son's
wife's mother's father's brother's son.
"What my daughter-in-law
told me is that he is a family member, not too close, but she calls him
'uncle,' which is quite common here," Anwar said. "But I know him ...
basically as a party activist."
The evidence against it:
No information has
emerged suggesting either of the men flying the jet had a history of
mental illness or radicalism. The flight was piloted by Capt. Zaharie, a
53-year-old Malaysian family man with more than 18,000 flying hours
compiled during 33 years experience at the airline. He was a veteran
flier.
Peter Chong, a friend of
Zaharie's, said early this week that he was bothered by speculation
about the captain's possible role in the disappearance and questions
about possible ties to terrorism.
"I think it is a little
bit insensitive and unfair to the family," he said, adding he knew of no
evidence to suggest any ulterior motives on Zaharie's part.
The first officer also
has a stable work history: He has been at the airline since 2007 and has
compiled 2,763 hours of flying time. He had recently switched to
working on the Boeing 777 and had a brief moment of fame when he was
featured in a story on "CNN Business Traveler."
SPECULATION: COMMANDEERING
The evidence for it:
Commandeering isn't to
be confused with hijacking, a political act in which demands are issued
by the hijacker, said CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen.
A commandeering is more idiosyncratic, where motives aren't immediately clear, Bergen said.
Some counterterrorism
officials say that could be the case with the Malaysian flight, he said.
"The plane could have been commandeered," according to Bergen.
Commandeered flights predate the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Bergen said.
For example, in 1994,
the cargo plane FedEx Flight 705 was commandeered by an employee with a
hammer and spear gun who burst into the cockpit and wanted to crash the
plane into FedEx's Memphis, Tennessee, headquarters. The crew thwarted
that takeover attempt.
In 2000, a passenger
with a suspected history of mental illness commandeered British Airways
Flight 2069 between London and Nairobi, Kenya, and put the plane
carrying 300 passengers into a nosedive until the crew subdued him.
"So commandeering would
fit with the few facts that we do know and certainly a theory that we
haven't heard a lot of that isn't a conspiracy," Bergen said.
The evidence against it:
Since September 11,
2001, airlines around the world have put in place procedures to keep
unauthorized people out of the cockpit; speculation that those
procedures may have been flouted during the flight is just that.
SPECULATION: HIJACKING
The evidence for it:
That the plane terminated transponder data before its disappearance has led some experts to suspect a hijacking.
The political motivation for a hijacking, however, would be as mysterious as the plane's whereabouts.
"If you are dealing with
hijackers on board the aircraft, whether it was an organized gang, or
whether it was some psychologically disturbed individual that ...
managed to gain access to the flight, they can neutralize the crew,"
said Philip Baum, editor of Aviation Security International.
"But then again, there
wouldn't necessarily be any communication at all -- as we witnessed on
September 11th," Baum added, referring to the 2001 terrorist attacks.
"If there was an explosive decompression, if a bomb detonated on board
the aircraft, then again there would be no communication."
The evidence against it:
One possible motive
could be terrorism. Authorities haven't ruled out that possibility,
though experts are divided on this theory, partly because no one has
claimed responsibility.
Still, the absence of a
claim of responsibility doesn't mean it wasn't terrorism. "There might
be another reason for them not coming forward at this point," said Shawn
Henry, former executive assistant director of the FBI. "If it was a
terrorist incident ... if this was part of a much larger or broader
potential act, and for whatever reason, they wouldn't come forward at
this point, but at a later time."
SPECULATION: MECHANICAL FAILURE
The evidence for it:
In a less sinister but
equally lethal hypothesis, some experts theorize the plane crashed
because of a mechanical malfunction -- or perhaps a total electrical
failure.
Aviation consultant Kit
Darby has said that it's possible there was a power failure, and that
the pilot was attempting to get to a runway when the plane lost
communications. There's also the possibility that the tail or a wing
tore from the fuselage. This particular Boeing had suffered a clipped
wingtip in the past, but Boeing repaired it.
Another possibility is
that a window or door failed, which would cause the temperature inside
the plane to drop to 60 degrees below zero, creating a freezing fog and
giving crew members only seconds to don oxygen masks before becoming
disoriented and then incapacitated.
The evidence against it:
The possibility of
electrical failure is improbable, but not impossible, according to Jim
Tilmon, an aviation expert and retired American Airlines pilot. It "is
very, very hard to imagine" because the Boeing jet has so many
generators aboard, he said.
"If all the engine
generators fail, they still have what's called the RAT (ram air
turbine). That's the generator that literally falls out of the bottom of
the airplane, has a propeller on it, and ram-air turns that and gives
them generating power enough to go ahead and fly the airplane safely.
"Electrical failure -- it'd have to be total ... absolutely incredible, like we've not heard of before," Tilmon said.
The absence of a debris
field could suggest that the pilot made an emergency landing on water
and the plane then sank intact, but there is still the mystery of the
distress signal. There wasn't one.
The possibility of failure of a window or door would be remote, given the Boeing jets' reliability.
SPECULATION: THE BIZARRE
Unconstrained by the
professional accountability under which the experts labor, some Internet
users have offered their own blue-sky theories:
A meteor struck the plane.
The evidence for it:
A meteor was reported in the area around the time Flight 370 took off.
The evidence against it:
This seems to be atop a
list of strange theories popping up in the absence of empirical data
explaining the plane's disappearance. Given what little is known about
the flight path, and the astronomical odds against such an event, a
meteor strike seems like an ultralong-shot explanation.
Some country's military shot it down:
The evidence for it:
None.
The evidence against it:
Any such effort would
have required the involvement of dozens, if not hundreds, of people,
many of whom would have relatives, boyfriends, girlfriends, Facebook
accounts. A story as combustible as this one would not remain secret for
long.
The plane landed on an airstrip without anyone noticing:
The evidence for it:
None, though that has not stopped people from conjecturing, or encouraging others to do so.
"What I have failed to
read so far is the possibility that the pilot in command intentionally
turned off the engines and performed a dead-stick landing at their
intended destination," said CNN.com reader Dave Matthews, in an e-mail.
"Planes are essentially gliders with power and a 777 is no different, it
is simply a big glider which makes zero noise with no power."
He cited the story of the Gimli Glider, an Air Canada Boeing 767 whose captain glided it to safety when it ran out of fuel and lost power during a flight in 1983.
"Whoever is brazen enough to steal a jetliner is brazen enough to perform that maneuver intentionally," said Matthews.
James Kallstrom, a
former FBI assistant director, said this week that it's possible the
plane could have landed somewhere, though he added that more information
is needed to reach a definitive conclusion. He referred to the vast
search area.
"You draw that arc, and
you look at countries like Pakistan, you know, and you get into your
Superman novels, and you see the plane landing somewhere and (people)
repurposing it for some dastardly deed down the road," he told CNN's
Jake Tapper. "I mean, that's not beyond the realm of realism. I mean,
that could happen."
The evidence against it:
An action like the one
performed by the Air Canada pilot would best be highly dangerous and
would need to be performed under ideal conditions.
And Kallstrom acknowledged the difficulty of basing any conclusion on scraps of information that sometimes conflict.
"We're getting so much
conflicting data," he said. "You veer one way, then you veer the other
way. The investigators need some definitive, correct data."
Aliens abducted the plane.
The evidence for it:
None.
The evidence against it:
None, and -- if you believe that aliens abducted the plane -- we've got a bridge to sell you.
Speculation abounds.
"Everybody wants to get
a handle on something right now," former Federal Aviation
Administration investigator David Soucie said of the myriad theories.
"No one has an answer, so they're going to try to put one on it. So that
creates all kinds of assumptions."
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