It was 7 weeks yesterday since MH370 vanished with all its crew passengers and cargo.
Barack Obama is visiting Malaysia – the first visit by a sitting US President for over 50 years. He has expressed “solidarity” with Malaysia regarding MH370 – whatever that entails.
Since I left Malaysia on 8th April – one month after the vanishing act – nothing further has emerged. There is still no trace of anything. No debris at all. No bits and pieces gradually making their way to the surface. No passenger effects or luggage washed up anywhere. As if everything and everybody had been vaporised.
The behaviour of the Malaysian Air Force in ignoring the aircraft while flying back over Malaysian airspace and which was picked up by military radar is still to be explained.
Searches are continuing under water, in an area of the Indian Ocean which has been calculated to be its final position. The handshake radio pings from the ACARS system on board when communicating to a wobbly Inmarsat satellite contained no location or direction of flight information. Those are being inferred from an analysis of the Doppler variations caused by the satellite’s wobble. A method being used for the first time and unproven. The probability that this calculation method is in error and may even be invalid is not insignificant.
Malaysiakini: Family members of MH370’s passengers have expressed doubt on the analysis of Inmarsat data that Prime Minister Najib Razak relied on to declare, some say with questionable haste, that the plane had “ended in the southern Indian Ocean”.
But what is known is that the aircraft spent 23 minutes at 45,000 feet and then descended rapidly to 23,000 feet. The passengers (and crew?) being incapacitated by hypoxia is highly probable. At most the oxygen masks could have provided 12 minutes of oxygen – perhaps less. A lack of oxygen for this long a time (11+ minutes) would have led not only to unconsciousness (after 4 or 5 minutes) but a permanent and irreversible coma. It is not unreasonable to suppose that all passengers and most of the crew were already dead or in an irreversible coma just over an hour into the flight, by the time the plane descended to 23,000 feet. It remains faintly possible that the pilot(s) were conscious at this time but if the plane was under remote control at this time then they too would likely have been fatally incapacitated.
But I note that there is nothing emerging about the cargo. Or about the software engineers on board.
Malaysiakini: MH370’s cargo manifest remains a secret, and its contents are unknown besides disclosure of an uncharacteristically large shipment of mangosteens, which are not in season in March, and potentially hazardous lithium-ion batteries …
A terrorist hijack with no subsequent publicity or claims makes no sense. The return to 23,000 feet and the continued “stealth” flight for several hours to “nowhere” makes “pilot suicide” highly unlikely. And that leaves a deliberate act – by persons or agencies unknown – to first eliminate all the passengers and crew and then a flight to get rid of some very sensitive cargo, the entire plane and all evidence in a remote and inaccessible place.
Tags: MH370
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