March 21, 2014

  • De Plane! De Plane!

    I'm so sick of all the news media speculation about what may have happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Guess work has run the gambit from the ridiculous to the sublime. "A Black hole?" Seriously. If they are going to speculate, why can't they come up with something that sounds more reasonable?

    How about this -- a catastrophic failure of the windscreen at 35,000 feet? This would result in the almost immediate death of the bridge crew as 400 mile-n-hour winds tore up the cockpit, ripping up the control panel and any other instrumentation. Flying debris could have torned the switch turning off the transponder and the ACARS system right from their housing and mounts, and the sudden decompression could have lifted the plane momentarily about 10,000 feet (as one observer reported). As the plane then decended, it would eventually reach an altitude where the engines could have stabilized the flight until the fuel was finally exhausted. By then, the autopilot would not be in control, and the plane's direction would be at the mercy of the prevailing winds. Thus accounting for the apparent erratic flight path.

    What would cause the windscreen to fail like that? The answer is, "Any number of things." A small micro-fracture created by a small bit of gravel hitting the screen on takeoff could have created such a micro-fracture. Fatigue due to age is also a possibility. Less likely (but possible) is a strike by a small bit of space debris re-entering the atmosphere. Such debris rains down upon the earth everyday.

    The scenario I have just laid out is within the realm of possibility (which a black hole and other supernatural causes are not). Indeed, a similar event has already happened. When the Learjet rented by Payne Stewart in 1999 suffered a windscreen failure, everyone aboard was killed by hypoxia and the plane continue to fly halfway across the United States until running out of fuel over Either North or South Dakota. It also doesn't call into question the character of the pilots without good and just reason.

    The only thing not taken into account by my scenario is the apparent course change prior to the copilot's signoff, and supposed manual entry of new waypoints into the ACARS system. But such entries could have been entered for any number of reasons that don't include criminal intent and may not even have been activated.