Category Archives: Aircraft

9M-MRO, the aircraft that would become Flight 379

Many of you will recall that I said it was just far too early to determine what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. (See: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 — What We Know and What We Don’t and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 — It’s STILL All About What We Don’t Know)  Guess what: It’s still too early And it will be until the aircraft is located and the black boxes recovered.  We may all be scratching our heads over this a decade from now, and probably will be.

Any “expert” on CNN telling you otherwise is only displaying their total ignorance. Indeed CNN’s reputation took at least as big a hit as Malaysia Airlines did during this entire fiasco, but in the case of CNN all that remains of their journalistic credibility is a smoking crater with a bunch of people standing around it, scratching their heads, wondering when they went from being respected journalists to being merely silly, uninformed, and unworthy of the profession.  At least they now know that they’re of Fox News caliber if they ever lose their jobs at CNN.

News Flash: Boeing 777 won’t fly without fuel. REALLY?!

 So, what do we know?  We know the Boeing 777 did not land on some remote airfield.  We know that the Malaysia Air Force defense radar was not sufficiently accurate enough to justify the earlier report of the aircraft climbing to 45,000 feet — several thousand feet higher than the Boeing 777’s certified ceiling.  We know that the Australians were searching in the wrong location based on an erroneous “ping” detection that turned out to not be from MAS370.  (no, I’m not faulting the Aussies; they did what they had to do because of the reported detection)  We know that Inmarsat told the Australians that the most likely final resting place is several hundred miles south southwest of where they were looking.  We know that this new search area is 23,000 square miles (the previous search area, which took a month to cover, was only 330 square miles — do the math on that one).  And we know that we have long missed our chance of picking up those black box pingers in this new location, so the search is going to be painfully slow, exceedingly tedious, and ridiculously expensive.

What we have surmised.  The Boeing 777 was probably on autopilot from the time it turned south to the time it impacted in the waters of the Southern Indian Ocean after fuel exhaustion (see CNN headline above for what most likely happens when the fuel runs out).  It appears that no one attempted to open the cabin doors after impact and escape, suggesting that no one survived the impact.

What we do not know (despite the “experts” on the telly, and especially over at CNN).  We do not know if the aircraft was hijacked.  We do not know if one or both of the pilots commandeered the aircraft.  We do even know if the crew were conscious after the initial “event” that led us to this point, which would make for a lot of red faces if this is indeed the case.  If they were unconscious, we’re suddenly looking at a whole host of very different possibilities including unintentional gradual depressurization from a hull leak or rapid decompression from an explosion or major catastrophic structural failure.

So, once again, disregard all those “experts” telling y0u what happened or may have happened.  Listen instead to the true experts who are telling you to sit tight and wait . . . and that wait could be for a very, very long time.