Thread: Contact lost with Malaysia Plane.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

All covered UP previously in the thread.

Originally Posted by Dragonfly

Chinese chips ?

There were "rumours" that some of the people onboard owned a new electronic system/design. As they perished, "without trace", the ownership passed to an old established bank.

Along with a few tons of gold of course, it's always useful to have the operation fully funded and profitable.

Yes...perhaps just rapid decompression......


Good night, Malaysian

What happened to MH370 after this final message from the cockpit? An air safety specialist offers a theory.

The Weekend Australian Magazine, October 1-2, 2016
Story: Christine Negroni




The moonless night was warm and dark with mostly cloudy skies when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 lifted off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12.41am on March 8, 2014. On board the overnight flight to Beijing were 12 crew members and 227 passengers. There were business travellers, vacationers and students. There were families, couples and singles from Indonesia, Malaysia, China, the US, Australia and nine other countries; a global community common on international flights.
Because Kuala Lumpur and Beijing are in the same time zone and the flight was to arrive at dawn, many travellers were probably sleeping when things started to go wrong.

At takeoff, First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid was making the radio calls, so we can assume Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was flying the Boeing 777. A 33-year employee of the company, Zaharie, 53, had 18,000 flight hours and had spent more untallied time flying his home-built flight simulator. He took so much pleasure in this activity that he made videos and posted them on his Facebook page, offering tips and instructions to other simulator enthusiasts. He also owned and flew radio-controlled airplanes. There just wasn’t enough flying, as far as Zaharie was concerned.

Professionally speaking, Fariq, 27, was everything Zaharie was not. He had been flying for Malaysia for four years. From 2010 to 2012, he was a co-pilot on Boeing 737s. He was moved to the Airbus A330, where he flew as a first officer for 15 months until he began his transition to the bigger Boeing 777. The flight to Beijing would bring his total hours on the aircraft to 39.
Twenty minutes after takeoff, at 1.01am, the plane reached its assigned altitude, 35,000 feet, and Fariq notified controllers: “Malaysia Three Seven Zero maintaining flight level three five zero.” Shortly afterwards, the 12-year-old plane transmitted a routine status report via ACARS, the Aircraft Communications Addressing & Reporting System; such reports can be done manually if the pilots want to request or send information to the airline, and are also triggered by a novel condition on the plane requiring immediate notice. In the absence of either of these, an automatic status report is transmitted on a schedule set by the airline. At Malaysia, it was every 30 minutes. Neither Zaharie nor Fariq had anything to add to the 1.07am scheduled ACARS report, and it showed nothing amiss.

Around the time the ACARS report was being sent, it appears control of the flight was transferred to the first officer because Zaharie was now making the radio calls. He confirmed to air traffic control that the plane was flying at cruise altitude: “Ehh ... Seven Three Seven Zero [an error, as the flight was Three Seven Zero] maintaining level three five zero.” Eleven minutes later, as the plane neared the end of Malaysian airspace, the controller issued a last instruction to the pilots, giving them the radio frequency to use upon crossing into Vietnam’s airspace. “Malaysian Three Seven Zero contact Ho Chi Minh one two zero decimal niner, good night.”
“Good night, Malaysian,” Zaharie said. It was 1.19am. His voice was calm, according to a stress analyst who listened to the recording as part of the investigation. There was no indication of trouble.


Zaharie Zaharie had been in his seat since around 11pm, supervising Fariq, ordering fuel, entering information in the onboard computers, arming systems, checking the weather and discussing the flight with the cabin attendants. The airliner was now at cruise altitude, flying a pre-programmed course. There was very little difference at this point between the Boeing 777 and every other jetliner Fariq had flown. So, in the scenario I envision on Malaysia 370, this would have been the perfect time for Zaharie to tell Fariq, “Your airplane,” leaving the 777 in the first officer’s hands so he could go to the bathroom.
Alone on the flight deck, Fariq must have enjoyed these moments. He was in sole command of one of the world’s largest airliners. Seven years earlier, he had graduated from college and been accepted into Malaysia Airline’s pilot cadet program at the Langkawi Aerospace Training Centre. His professional future was full of promise and so was his personal life. During training he’d fallen in love with a fellow student, Nadira Ramli, who became a first officer with AirAsia, a low-cost carrier. In March 2014, Fariq and Ramli were engaged.

While Zaharie was out of the cockpit, it would be Fariq’s job to tune the radio to the Ho Chi Minh air traffic control frequency. Once he established contact, he would change the transponder’s fourdigit “squawk code” from the one used in Malaysia to one for transiting to Vietnam’s airspace.

A transponder is critical for airliners. It links altitude, direction, speed, and, most significantly, identity to what otherwise would be an anonymous dot on an air traffic control screen. Controllers need the transponder to keep planes from colliding. Airlines use it to track the progress of flights. Pilots depend on it for a timely warning if another plane winds up in their flight path. Turning the knob on the device to the left - to “standby” mode - effectively shuts off the transponder. Standby is used mostly while airliners are taxiing at the airport, so all the planes don’t trigger the collision avoidance system. For all intents and purposes, Standby is “off”.
Zaharie had left the cockpit for what’s known as a “biological break”. Perhaps he would have stopped by the galley for a cup of coffee or a snack. It’s a long flight at cruise altitude, so there would have been no rush to get back to the flight deck.

This is about the time when, I think, a rapid decompression happened near or in the cockpit. It would have made a startling noise, like a clap or the sound of a champagne bottle uncorking, only much, much louder and sharper. This would have been followed by a rush of air and things swirling everywhere. Pens, papers - everything loose - would have been tossed around, including the shoulder straps of Fariq’s seat restraint, which he would have unfastened for comfort not long after takeoff. A white fog would have filled the space as the drop in temperature turned the cabin air into mist. The first officer would have realised immediately, This is an emergency. It would have been a neon light in his brain, but it would also have been competing with other lights and alarm sounds that must have been disconcerting and overwhelming.


Fariq. The denser air inside Fariq’s body would have rushed out through every orifice, an effect that can be particularly painful in the ears. His fingers, hands and arms would have started to move spastically. Emergency, have to get down, have to let someone know. What first? He would have reached over to the transponder to enter 7700, the four digits that will alert everyone on the ground and in the air that something has gone wrong with the plane. His fingers would still have been trembling as he clutched the small round knob on the device and turned it to Standby. It is not what he would have intended, but he would already have begun to lose his mental edge. In an attempt to transmit a message of distress, he would have inadvertently severed the only means air controllers had of identifying his airplane and the details of his flight. It was half a minute past 1.20 in the morning.

Only a small portion of pilots has experienced the dangerous seduction of hypoxia. Military aviators in many countries are trained to recognise the symptoms of oxygen deprivation by spending time at a simulated 25,000 feet in high-altitude chambers. Yet even they are not subjected to the kind of rapid decompression that could have happened on MH370. The onset of hypoxia above 25,000 feet is too quick, and the health risks too high, to duplicate it in a high-altitude chamber. Fariq’s brain would have been befuddled. When the pressure in the plane suddenly dropped, the young pilot perhaps did the wrong things as his rapidly diminishing mental state was telling him he was doing the right things. He wouldn’t have been aware of his errors: hypoxia victims think they are performing brilliantly.

I recall watching a YouTube video of an army aviator in an altitude chamber training session. He’s flanked by two others using supplemental oxygen, but he has his own regulator off in order to experience hypoxia. He holds a deck of cards and has been asked to flip through them one by one, announcing the number and suit before moving on to the next card. The simulated altitude is 25,000 feet. “I feel really good right now,” he says as he begins announcing, “Six of spades,” showing a six of spades to the camera. “No symptoms yet.” In 24 seconds he reports feeling tingling “in my toes and in my toes”. A minute in, he identifies a five of spades as a four of spades. After being asked twice to look again and making the correction, he calls every card the four of spades. After two minutes, with his thinking increasingly sloppy, he is asked, “Sir, what would you do if this was an aircraft?” He replies, “Four of spades, four of spades.” Ninety seconds later, after he ignores requests to put on his regulator, it’s done for him.
Like the drunk who’s convinced he’s the funniest guy in the room, a pilot suffering from hypoxia can feel a heightened sense of competence and wellbeing. Sufferers ought to be trying to get supplementary oxygen, but they often don’t. Hypoxia creates a state of idiotic bliss.


Fariq’s oxygen mask was stored in a chamber the size of a glove compartment, below his armrest. His movements may have been sluggish, confounded by the difficulty of fitting the mask correctly. When all is working well, the mask should rejuvenate a pilot. But any number of problems may have prevented Fariq from getting enough oxygen. Something wrong with the mask, the oxygen supply, or the connection between the two could explain why he might still be unable to think clearly. Still, he must have wondered: Why hasn’t Zaharie returned?

Everything was in chaos, the altitude warning alarm clanging. I find it logical to assume that Zaharie visited the business-class bathroom near the flight deck that is also used by the flight crew. In this and all the airline’s 777 bathrooms, a dropdown mask is there to provide oxygen in the case of depressurisation. Imagine what it would have been like for Zaharie to see the yellow plastic cup bob down. He would have been momentarily rattled, but he would have realised immediately what had happened and what needed to be done. Still, he had to make a choice: try to get back to the cockpit without oxygen, or remain in the bathroom and wait for Fariq to get the plane to a lower altitude and then rejoin him on the flight deck. I’m guessing Zaharie wasn’t confident in Fariq’s ability to handle the emergency and chose the former course of action. But the effect of oxygen deprivation would have been crippling for Zaharie, too. Air would have been exploding from his respiratory and digestive systems. His extremities would have been shaking. He would have struggled to get out of the bathroom.
The distance between the bathroom and the cockpit is just a few steps, but like Fariq, Zaharie was a smoker and probably more susceptible to the effects of oxygen deprivation. If he got out of the bathroom, down the narrow corridor and to the door of the cockpit without losing consciousness or cognitive function, another challenge would have awaited him.

The cockpit door unlocks automatically when cabin pressure is lost. Would Zaharie have remembered that? Or did he, by force of habit, stop outside the door and try to enter the code? Did he lose precious seconds struggling to remember a passcode he did not need? Or did he just grab the handle and open the door, but succumb to the lack of oxygen before getting into his seat? Pilots at Malaysia Airlines tell me that in a rapid decompression it would have been very difficult for Zaharie to get back onto the flight deck. Previous cases of rapid depressurisation on airliners have shown how physical exertion eats away at the too-few seconds of useful consciousness.
The captain, I believe, was unable to regain command of the airplane. If he had, things might have turned out very differently.


The route taken by MH370.
The control panel for the flight management system (FMS) is located between the two pilot seats, above the throttles, where it is easily accessible to whichever pilot is programming it. The FMS has many functions, including allowing the crew to send text messages to the airline’s operations desk. We know no messages were sent. Yet in an emergency, the FMS supplies navigational information for the closest airports, so that in seconds the pilots can select a destination and head there.
From where the 777 was flying, between the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, if Fariq turned the plane around, the divert airports would include Penang and Langkawi, according to pilots who fly in the region. These choices would have appeared on the screen in a list, waiting for the pilot to select one. Who knows how much actual thinking Fariq was able to accomplish, but for some reason he selected Penang, Malaysia’s third-busiest airport, with a 10,000-foot runway. The next choice appeared on the screen: Divert now? Fariq selected Execute. The plane began a slow, orchestrated turn, and by 1.30am it was headed south-southwest to Malaysia once again.

The period when a person can remain conscious and thinking at high altitudes is called the time of useful consciousness. While that time varies depending on many factors, including health, age and a genetic predisposition, the ballpark figure for how long Fariq had before he lost his ability to think clearly would be 15 to 30 seconds. We know whoever was in the cockpit maintained sufficient intellectual capacity to turn the plane around and select a course toward Penang. Yet that these manoeuvres were made without a radio call and after the transponder became inoperative leads me to conclude that the pilot handling the airplane was compromised to such an extent that while he could make simple decisions about the direction of the airplane, not much more sensible action could have been expected of him. Judging from what happened next, he did not return to his senses. The primary indicator of that is that the plane did not start to descend.

By 1.52am, Fariq had taken the plane back across Malaysia and to Penang. Here he made yet another decision explicable only by a hypoxia-induced state.
He changed course again. Perhaps he had the intention of landing at Langkawi International Airport, north of Penang, where he’d learnt to fly. Surely the airfield was as familiar to him as his own driveway, and the runway was nearly 2000 feet longer than that at Penang. He would be coming in heavy, with much of the fuel still in the tanks. If Fariq did any mental processing at all, he may have concluded the more runway, the better, and Langkawi had a lot of it. Yet I think he was no longer doing much reasoning - his ability to do that was long gone.
MH370 continued to fly. There was no effort to descend or to begin an approach to the airport. Fariq had been flying for 32 minutes since the depressurisation. Still at cruise altitude, the plane passed over VAMPI - one of the many navigational waypoints in the sky, all of which have five letter names. Then the plane flew north of the next one, MEKAR, disappearing for good somewhere at the northernmost part of Sumatra.


The aircraft that went missing with 239 passengers on board.

Fariq’s mental incapacitation explains a series of perplexing events that began with a sudden, catastrophic occurrence that caused the rapid depressurisation. Some have theorised it was related to the load of lithium-ion batteries the plane was carrying. That’s an iffy theory to me; a lithium-ion battery fire is a frightening thing and in such a circumstance the pilots would have understood the need to get the airplane on the ground quickly. Moreover, had there been a fire, it is unlikely it would have disabled the crew without causing significant damage to the plane, and we know it continued to fly for hours after the initial problem.
Whatever happened to Flight 370 probably caused both the depressurisation and an encompassing failure in the airplane’s electrical system. It is not knowable if Fariq accidentally turned off the transponder or if it failed on its own. The same is true for the loss of the ACARS system, which sends status reports from the plane to the airline via satellite: did it fail or was it intentionally switched off for some reason? Yet an even more intriguing clue is the loss of regular transmissions from the plane to the satellite sometime between 1.07am and 1.37am, with the return of the signal at 2.25am. Even those paying attention to the MH370 story have heard little about this peculiar lapse.

During the ongoing news coverage, people learnt that airliners regularly transmit a status message: a “ping” or “handshake” in the same way a mobile phone that is powered on sends out signals to nearby cell towers. A phone would stop doing this only if it were turned off or in aircraft mode. This is the analogy used by the engineers at British satellite company Inmarsat to explain what happened on MH370 at the same time so many other inexplicable events were occurring. The airplane’s signal to the satellite stopped, and returned only when the airplane logged back on at 2.25am, as if powering on at the beginning of a flight.
There are only a few ways this can be explained: there was a power failure on the airplane, the software failed, or something interfered with the connection between the antenna and the satellite, such as the plane flying upside down so that the fuselage was between the antenna and the satellite. All three possibilities are extremely remote. Some clues, however, have not been pursued.


A 777's cockpit.

On January 7, 2008, a Qantas Boeing 747 was on approach to Bangkok from London with 365 people on board. It was a clear and sunny afternoon - which was fortunate, because as Qantas Flight 2 passed through 10,000 feet it lost electrical power. The auto-throttle, autopilot, weather radar and many other systems simply stopped. Only the captain’s flight display worked, albeit in “degraded mode”. The plane landed safely, but once on the ground its doors couldn’t be opened because the valves failed to release the cabin pressure.

On the Boeing 747 and other Boeing jetliners including the 777 and the 767, there is a galley above the electronics and equipment room called the E&E bay. On Qantas Flight 2, a flood from the galley above caused water to flow into this area. This was not a one-time event. During its investigation, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau discovered that electronics equipment in the bay had been “repeatedly subjected” to liquid beyond what it was designed to handle. When the ATSB set out to find similar events it turned up five on large jetliners, four on Boeings and one on an Airbus A300 - and those were just the ones serious enough to have caused a safety event in flight.

I’ve learnt that on airplanes with galleys located above electrical equipment, mechanics often see leaking. “The 777 has an avionics bay below the first-class galley. When a crew reports water, it is required by the manual to inspect the avionics bay for leaks from water penetration,” I was told by a mechanic for a major US airline; a few days after he told me this, he sent a video in which I could clearly see water dripping onto the floor of a cramped and noisy equipment room. “Where did you get this?” I asked, thinking he’d found the footage on a YouTube-like service for aircraft mechanics. But no, he’d shot it himself, on a Boeing 767 that came under the care of his wrench shortly after our initial conversation about Qantas Flight 2.
I started to think that maybe some water-induced intermittent electrical problem could have produced the various failures on MH370, including the puzzling power down and subsequent restoration of communication at 2.25am that no one has yet been able to explain.

So I asked the ATSB: when Qantas Flight 2 lost most of its power on January 7, 2008, did it cause a termination in the link to the satellite? Could this issue with water damaging the electronics affect satellite communication? The ATSB did not know. “I am unable to provide you with a definitive answer as we would need to establish a detailed understanding of the loadsharing arrangements on the aircraft, interaction with AC BUS 4, not to mention the electrical system that supports the SATCOM,” Julian Walsh, the acting chief commissioner, replied in an email. “This was not an aspect of the original investigation.” I do not know if it is part of the Malaysian investigation into what happened to MH370, because the team doing that investigation does not answer questions.
Once MH370’s last ping faded - the one showing it at the northern tip of Sumatra - Fariq made a final turn. No data suggests when, but the plane turned south and flew on for five hours more until it ran out of fuel. This final turn is the point where I believe Fariq’s deprived brain reached its limit. Like Number 14 fixed on the four of spades, Fariq was locked onto some thought.

I asked a friend, airline captain Pete Frey, to try to explain Fariq’s last action. “Who knows what he’s doing? He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Frey said after considering my question. “He’s lost sense of time, so now he thinks he’s back there. Maybe he’s thinking, ‘I’ve got to head north, and where am I? I’ll go this way.’ By the time he realises he’s lost, he says, ‘Now I’ll turn around and go back, but I don’t know where I’m going back to, so I’ll just head south. I’m too far north.’”

When you consider how muddled Fariq’s mind must have been, you can see many ways to explain the bizarre flight path. “All you really have to say is that at this point he’s struggling with intermittent abilities,” Frey told me, “and it’s not enough.”

Edited extract from The Crash Detectives by Christine Negroni (Atlantic Books), out Monday.

Nocookies | The Australian

Your brain hasn't been functioning properly for years, but I doubt it has anything to do with brain hypoxia.

When the brain is starved of oxygen, even for a very short time, even just a few seconds,...coming to is a disconcerting experience, not simply a matter of waking up fresh as a daisy.

The victim of short term brain hypoxia, such as occurs during strangleholds, for example, where the jugular vein and carotid artery are compressed, or where one is in an oxygen depleted room where say a gas fire has eaten up the available O2, results in extremely groggy behaviour in the victim, and confusion reigns, while physical movement slows to a crawl.

It takes several minutes to revive victims of oxygen starvation, they are almost invariably semi-conscious and sleepy, disorientated, hardly moving, knocked out.

If the pilot on MH370 did indeed get starved of oxygen and came to several times as you claim, it would have taken several minutes for him to adjust each time, and each subsequent hypoxia event would make his recovery time longer, his responses would be slower, similar to having been knocked out repeatedly.

Suffering from hypothermia, which has a similar effect on a victim, similarly slows the supply of blood, thus oxygen to the brain, and takes several minutes, indeed hours to recover from.

It's not a dramatic 'up-and-at-'em' scenario on coming to.

It's a WTF happened scene, where you're just too disorientated to even figure out where you are.