Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Why was the flight on autopilot? New clues.
A new report on the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau supports the theory that the crew was incapacitated while the flight continued on autopilot until it crashed.
In this map, details are presented in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean. Australian officials say the hunt for the missing plane will shift farther south of the most recent suspected crash site in a remote stretch of Indian Ocean.
Joint Agency Coordination Centre/AP
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, missing since March 8, may finally be yielding some clues as to its disappearance.
In a report issued by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, officials said they were confident that the plane was flying on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed, according to the Associated Press.
This is a significant detail in an investigation that has so far yielded few reasons for the disappearance of the Boeing 777 beyond mere speculation. The new information comes from a detailed analysis of communication between the plane and the Inmarsat satellite network, according to ABC News.
Martin Dolan, the chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, said that someone on the plane had activated the autopilot.
“If the autopilot is operational, it’s because it has been switched on,” Dolan is quoted as saying in the New York Times. The autopilot ran on Malaysia Flight 370 until the plane ran out of fuel.
When a jet runs out of fuel, the engines rarely die at the same time, according to the report. The plane would then have gone into an uncontrolled, spiral descent.
If engaged, the autopilot could have remained engaged following the first engine flame out but would have disengaged after the second engine flamed out. By the time of the SATCOM log on message, the autopilot would have been disengaged for approximately 3 minutes and 40 seconds. If there were no control inputs then it would be expected that eventually a spiral descent would develop. In the event of control inputs, it is possible that, depending on altitude, the aircraft could glide for 100+ NM.
This spiral might have made the plane hit the ocean farther south than initially calculated, and investigators are shifting their search accordingly.
If the plane is found in the area predicted by the report, it may finally yield some conclusive evidence as to the cause of the crash. However, the new search area is 23,000 square miles, which is approximately 70 times larger than the area that has already been searched, according to ABC News, so it will likely take quite some time before any conclusions can be reached regarding the fate of the plane. In the meantime, the autopilot/fuel loss hypothesis does lend itself to certain theories that, until now, had been pure speculation.
For instance, if it is the case that the plane was on autopilot until it ran out of fuel, it would indicate that there was likely no deliberate attempt to crash or redirect the plane, and the fact that the pilots were no longer communicating despite being on autopilot could indicate that the crew was somehow incapacitated. The report from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau speculates that a loss in cabin pressure might have been the culprit.
If the air pressure on a Boeing-777 is lost, the crew is trained to put on oxygen masks, which should provide oxygen for about an hour. The passenger’s masks only last about 20 minutes. Without descending to a lower altitude where they could get adequate oxygen, the crew would have suffered from hypoxia, resulting in confusion and the inability to perform even simple tasks.
As The Christian Science Monitor reported earlier this year, there has been speculation that an electrical fire or loss of oxygen on the flight, resulting in a crash of after several hours on autopilot, and that would not be unprecedented. In 1999, a Learjet owned by US golfer Payne Stewart crashed nearly four hours after the pilot and passengers passed out from the affects of hypoxia.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s report said: “The final stages of the unresponsive crew/hypoxia event type appeared to best fit the available evidence for the final period of MH370’s flight when it was heading in a generally southerly direction.” The report added that this judgment was an assumption to assist the search effort, not meant to infringe the Malaysian government’s authority to ultimately determine the cause of the crash.
If the ATSB report is accurate, a few of the theories that have been thrown around since the plane’s disappearance in March can be given less weight. The New York Times for example notes that some investigators had been exploring the theory that one of the pilots may have attempted suicide, taking the passengers on board with him. Allowing the plane to fly until running out of fuel after nearly seven hours of flight for a suicide attempt seems unlikely.
However, the ATSB report may support a theory postulated by Stanford University undergrad Andrew Aude that went viral earlier this year. On Aude’s Tumblr page, the student hypothesized that some sort of a “decompression event” might have disabled communications, or that the decompression might have been so slow that there the pilots did not realize there was danger until it was too late. Though portions of his theory are now considered unlikely, the slow, unnoticed decompression may help to explain why there was no communication from the airplane to authorities on the ground about the loss of air pressure.