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KUALA LUMPUR, (Bernama) -- The mysterious disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Flight MH370 since Saturday continues to baffle experts around the world.
At this point, an aviation expert has suggested historical evidence leading to six major reasons for the disappearance of the 11-year-old Boeing 777-200ER aircraft used for the flight.
The reasons he cited were a combination of technical and pilot errors leading to a snowballing effect, structural disintegration, human factors, bad weather, total electrical failure and hijacking.
Frost and Sullivan Asia Pacific Aerospace and Defence Consultant Ravi Madavaram said there was no single factor that generall led to an airplane crash but a combination of technical glitches and pilot decisions. In a statement here today, he said each of these glitches and decisions taken independently were harmless and often happened.
"This is what happened to Air France 447. There was no distress signal from Air France 447 as the pilots did not realise that they were going to crash until 10 seconds before crashing," he explained.
On structural disintegration, Madavaram said structural failure of an aircraft could cause pilots to lose control.
"This happened to China Airlines Flight 611, during its cruise at 35,000 feet in 2002 when the Boeing 747 (Flight 611) crashed due to faulty repair. The Boeing 747 is an aircraft with older technology (20 years earlier) compared to a Boeing 777 (The Boeing 747 entered service in 1975 while the Boeing 777 entered service in 1995)," he said.
However, Madavaram noted that new aircraft coming into the market use better materials, technology and maintenance schedules compared to earlier ones.
Touching on human factors, he stressed that deliberate actions by passengers or pilots to crash an aircraft had been highlighted in the 9/11 World Trade Centre incidents, which brought human factors to the fore. The expert pointed out that bad weather conditions such as snow, fog, rain, and ice could affect the performance of an aircraft and result in a crash.
However, he noted these weather conditions affect the critical stages of aircraft like landing and takeoff, and as for MH370, the flight had clear weather through the flight and was during the calmest period of flight cruise. He said total electrical failure could occur in general aviation aircraft, and there were three types of electrical power sources ― two generators (each engine has one), APU (Auxiliary Power Unit) and RAT (Ram Air Turbine).
"For the aircraft to have total electrical failure, all three systems should have failed at the same time. This is quite rare and has not happened. This happened to a Qantas flight in 2008 in Bangkok. The Qantas flight landed safely with backup power from the APU. Electrical failure from generators is an incident that needs to be reported back to the ATC and request for re-routing," he said.
Madavaram ruled out the possibility that MH370 was hijacked, because it was impossible for the aircraft to have escaped all radar detection in the area where it was travelling.
"When there are many country borders around the vicinity of the aircraft, the last point of contact, more so the aircraft being a big one (radar cross-section of Boeing 777 would be bigger)," he said, adding that so far, no group had claimed to have hijacked the plane.
Elaborating further, he said every commercial civil aircraft would have Emergency Locator Transmitters (ELT), and it would be activated during a crash based on the gravity force they experience or by pilots input. He said another beacon was attached to the flight recorder or the black box, called Underwater Locator Beacon (ULB), and this black box beacon would be activated when it came in contact with water.
"Assuming the aircraft crashed on water, the ELT's would have sent signals, but they are not waterproof. The ULB starts emitting signals the moment it touches water," he said.
Although the aircraft might be emitting an automatic distress signal, he noted that there might not be anyone listening to them every minute. And these signals have a range within which there might not be anybody listening to them.
"The crash sometimes happens within a time frame of 15 minutes and pilots may realise that a crash is imminent only five to 10 seconds before a crash. Only after 30 minutes to an hour, does the ATC (Air Traffic Centre) realise that something is wrong and starts looking for the aircraft, by which time, the beacons are well underwater," he explained.
Accoding to him, the Under Water Beacon (ULB) can emit a signal for hundreds of miles but if the black box is covered with debris or falls into a trench at the bottom of the sea, then the strength and range of the signal would be lower. The ELT and beacons use their own batteries and electrical failure does not affect them.
"The batteries of the beacons of the black box beacon are designed to last 28 days. If the black box beacon battery dies and the plane is not located within that time, then the only hope is to find the debris and try to work backwards from there on," he said.
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