Jun 19, 2019 · The Truth: It is most likely that Malaysia Flight 370 was commandeered by the captain and flown far to the southwest of its original course, into a remote part of the Indian Ocean, where it crash-landed after running out of fuel. The parts recovered on remote islands east of the calculated crash site support this conclusion, as do the probable actions and …
Mar 19, 2014 · Changing the flight path is simple, said Mark Weiss, a former Boeing 777 pilot. He says a pilot can punch a few commands into the airplane’s flight management system, which operates like a car ...
Mar 11, 2014 · The Malaysian military said Wednesday that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went off course but denies that the plane made it to the Straits …
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is still missing, ... So, instead of switching to manual to make a dramatic course change, someone merely changed the …
Mar 25, 2014 · Flight 370 disappeared during exceptionally clear weather conditions and the tracking data indicates that the plane did not simply drop from the sky. Instead, the aircraft changed its flight course for reasons unknown. The change in flight plan was programmed into the plane’s autopilot system, seemingly by an expert.
It appears Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was programmed to steer off course before the pilots signed off with air traffic control, and that the change of direction may have been transmitted to controllers.
Changing the flight path is simple, said Mark Weiss, a former Boeing 777 pilot. He says a pilot can punch a few commands into the airplane’s flight management system , which operates like a car’s GPS.
The Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 crash is perhaps the most enigmatic in history. Airplanes rarely crash mid-flight but instead during landing and take off when the risk of pilot error is at its highest. When planes do suffer extreme emergencies mid flight it is usually due to extreme weather conditions and/or catastrophic mechanical failure.
Needless to say, emotions have been running high since the accident. Families are not only upset that their loved ones likely died in the accident, but also about the lack of communication and perceived compassion from the tight-lipped Malaysian government.
Just after MH370 was supposed to be handed off from Malaysian air traffic controllers to Vietnamese airspace, Captain Shah took a sharp turn to the west. The aircraft’s new flight path took it across the airspace of Malaysia and Thailand, shifting between each country. The experts convened by 60 Minutes argue that this may have been a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the situation by traveling across both countries, rather than remaining in one nation’s airspace. But one puzzle to the situation is why the flight took the sharp left hook it did, before turning right again, then hooking left once more.
Broadly speaking, these fall into two categories. One view is that the plane was deliberately piloted off course by Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, possibly as part of a suicide attempt.
The 60 Minutes investigation discusses how we eventually defined an arc through which MH370 is expected to have traveled, and why the plane is believed to have moved south, into the southern Indian Ocean, as opposed to flying north into Kazakhstan.
Shah is not known to have had any contact with such groups. Pilot-suicides, on the other hand, are not unknown. Germanwings Flight 9525 killed 150 people in 2015 in a suicide by pilot, as did LAM Mozambique Airlines Flight 470 in 2013, EgyptAir Flight 990 in 1999, and SilkAir in 1997 (though this last is disputed).
The aircraft is still yet to be found, but what exactly do we know about this curious incident seven years later? Flight MH370 had 227 passengers and 12 crew onboard.
On March 8th, 2014, a Boeing 777 flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared from radar screens, having deviated from its planned course.
The aircraft that operated MH370 on March 8th, 2014 was a Boeing 777-200ER, which bore the registration 9M-MRO. According to Planespotters.net, this triple-seven had spent its entire working life with the airline, having been delivered in May 2002. This made it just under 12 years old at the time of its disappearance.
Then we must consider what caused the aircraft to disappear. A sudden change of course tends to be the hallmark of a hijacking, so this is a theory commonly associated with MH370’s disappearance. Meanwhile, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has hypothesized that 9M-MRO was brought down by one of its own pilots in a case of murder-suicide.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was a service from its hub at Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KUL) to Beijing Capital International Airport (PEK), China. Its departure occurred at 00:42 local time, with arrival into the Chinese capital expected at 06:30. The aircraft that operated MH370 on March 8th, 2014 was ...
Despite these campaigns, 9M-MRO and its occupants are still yet to be found. Since then, various pieces of debris have been found in locations on the Indian Ocean.
Having continued in a southwesterly direction over Penang Island, the aircraft then made a right turn to follow a northwesterly heading. At this time, First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid’s mobile phone briefly registered with a communications tower below.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, seemingly without a trace. Investigators have struggled to discover what caused the plane to disappear as well as where it ended up. With only sparse evidence available, a probabilistic analysis is needed.
This may indicate an attempt to avoid radar or incapacitate the passengers and crew, increasing the likelihood of a suicide attempt or hijacking.
It appears that someone on MH370 deliberately stopped communications and flight tracking information in order to fly off course. Approximately 39 minutes after take-off, two minutes after signing off with the Malaysia control tower and before signing on with Ho Chi Minh control tower, MH370 ceased contact with no warning and no distress call, and disappeared from civilian radar. Military radars, which do not rely on communications from the aircraft, tracked an aircraft matching MH370’s profile flying west and making multiple adjustments to its flight path, seemingly straddling the border between Malaysia and Thailand.
Flight MH370 left Kuala Lumpur at approximately 0:41 local Malaysian time (16:41 UTC ), heading towards Beijing. It stopped transmitting its location and lost contact with civilian radar around 1:21, northeast of Kuala Lumpur. At about the same time, a Malaysian military radar detected a plane heading west from the location of flight MH370. That plane was last seen over the Andaman sea at 2:22.
On July 19, 1989, United Flight 232 crashed, killing 111 of the 296 occupants, due to an undetected fatigue crack.
On May 11, 1996, ValuJet Flight 592 crashed due to a fire in the cargo section, killing all 110 passengers.
On July 2, 1986, Aeroflot Flight 2306 crashed following a fire in the cargo section, killing 54 people.
Children leave prayers and well-wishes for passengers onboard the missing Malaysia Airlines flight at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang on March 17, 2014.
So what about the United Flight 93 passengers? Most of their calls were made using GTE AirFones, a technology no longer in use that relied on radio waves to communicate with the ground. Malaysia Airlines offers a “air-to-ground phone” service in business class that also allows passengers to send email, but the captain can shut this down, too. Only in the later stages of United Flight 93, when the plane was nearing Washington, D.C. and below 10,000 feet, did a few cell phone calls manage to go through.
If it were to be taken out of airplane mode, a cell phone would begin sending out signals every 20 seconds or so, trying to locate the nearest cell phone tower. (This is why it’s a good idea to put your phone on airplane mode during a flight, even if you’re not worried about disrupting navigational equipment: The constant fruitless pinging will drain your battery.) This won’t result in your phone making a connection to a network, but it’s a source of electromagnetic radiation that eavesdroppers could pick up. “If you have 200 cell phones all pinging repeatedly at 6/10ths of a watt, it would be a chorus,” says Paul Czarnecki, a pilot and cell phone network technician. “The United States has listening stations all over the world to record and digitize every signal in the air. It blows my mind that we don’t know where it is.”
One reason for this lack of pinging might be that the passengers all had their phones in airplane mode, and it never occurred to them that something was amiss. If the plane’s final destination was near Kyrgyzstan, it would have landed within an hour of dawn, giving passengers little time to notice that something was wrong with the landscape outside their window—and by the time they did, they might have been over sparsely populated landscape with little cell phone service, and/or at low altitude, where electronic transmissions of any kind would have been hard to detect.