In the past day or so Ive conceived a theory about what happened to Malaysia flight 370. Im quite obsessed with my thoughts; I havent heard it suggested by anyone else, and it nicely explains the observations much better than any other Ive heard. I suspect that, over the South China Sea, the airplane slowly lost cabin pressure. The pilots gradually became hypoxic and made a number of errors. They inadvertently turned off the transponder, thus explaining why radar contact was lost at that point. At about the same time, they entered a wrong heading into the autopilot. If they specified 250 instead of 025, that would explain the otherwise unexplainable turn toward the west-southwest, putting the plane on a course that headed back over the isthmus of the Malay Peninsula near the Thailand/Malaysia border and over the Malacca Strait. Their hypoxic state would also explain why there were no further communications after that point. Then, halfway across the Malacca Strait, contact with Malaysian military radar was lost not because the plane was destroyed, but because it got out of range of Malaysian radar, which can see only so far off shore, if the radar is based on the Malaysian coast (a supposition which I do not know for a fact but its a reasonable hypothesis). The plane then continued untracked over the northern tip of the island of Sumatra and far out into the Indian Ocean until it ran out of fuel, descended (or stalled), and crashed. Given the 777s range, it would have crashed somewhere in the western Indian Ocean, probably somewhere between Maldives and Seychelles (probably closer to the latter). The whole scenario has the same shades as the LearJet crash that killed golfer Payne Stewart in 1999, when the pilot forgot to pressurize the cabin upon climb-out, became hypoxic, and could no longer fly the plane, so it flew itself on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed in South Dakota: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_crash At some point, the oxygen masks in the passenger cabin probably deployed, and this would no doubt have gotten the attention of the passengers and flight attendants. After a while they might have questioned the flight crew; however, the supply of passenger oxygen only lasts 10-15 minutes. If the passenger masks deploy; the pilots are supposed to descend immediately to ~10,000 feet where the air is breathable. In their own hypoxic state, however, they would not have done this. The occupants of the passenger cabin would have all become hypoxic themselves before the lack of flight crew action or instructions led them to suspect that something was wrong. I would certainly guess that the 777 cockpit would be designed so that the flight crew would be able to don their masks before becoming hypoxic, regardless of the rate of depressurization - something strange would have had to happen if that process failed. However, given pilot hypoxia any pilot error becomes a reasonable hypothesis, which could explain a whole host of observations that are difficult to explain any other way. Overall, I feel that the hypoxia theory fits the observations better than any other that Ive heard or can think of.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 15:19:09 +0000
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