KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 descended to 12,000ft after it diverted from its route to Beijing in a move indicative of an onboard emergency, CNN reported citing an anonymous source.
The source claimed that the Boeing 777-200ER was captured by military radar as it reduced its altitude in intentional fashion, dropping to an elevation that was clear of usual commercial air traffic.
The revelation was promptly labelled by CNN aviation analyst Miles O’Brien as a “game changer.”
“You want to get down to 10,000ft, because that is when you don’t have to worry about pressurisation. You have enough air in the atmosphere naturally to keep everybody alive,” he said.
“So part of the procedure for a rapid decompression ... it’s called a high dive, and you go as quickly as you can down that to that altitude.”
If the revelation proves to be accurate, it would dovetail with scenarios of flight emergencies such as that put forward by pilot Chris Goodfellow of a possible fire that forced pilots to respond by redirecting the plane with 239 on board westward from its Beijing-bound route.
Former inspector general for the US Department of Transportation Mary Schiavo concurred with O’Brien’s conjecture, saying it would explain some of the action of the flight crew in the plane’s mysterious disappearance.
“Now, if we have a scenario where something happened, the plane made a dramatic turn and dropped from 35,000 feet to 12,000 feet, this scenario would fit what a pilot would do in the event of a catastrophic onboard event, such as a rapid decompression, a fire, an explosion,” Schiavo, now CNN’s aviation analyst said.
The former US official was also among the first to speak out against the suspicion that was increasingly directed at the plane’s two pilots, previously saying that “Sometimes an erratic flight path is heroism”.
It is unclear, however, how the CNN source determined that MH370 descended to 12,000ft.
Previous disclosures of Malaysia’s military radar data showed the Boeing 777 climbing to 45,000ft or above its rated operational ceiling before falling erratically to 23,000ft.
Pilot Goodfellow had previously said events on MH370 were indicative of a crew battling with a sudden electrical fire.
He said such a fire would explain why some of the plane’s electronics, such as the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) and transponders, were disabled.
The aviator also said the altered trajectory indicated that the pilots on MH370 were heading for Langkawi International Airport in the Straits of Malacca, possibly to avoid flying over the Titiwangsa Mountains in the event the plane was forced to descend. He also suggested that the plane’s disappearance indicated that the pilots could have been overcome by smoke, and that the plane then flew on to its doom.
But Goodfellow’s fire hypothesis was shot down by a former National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigator as well as another pilot, saying the facts available about MH370 did not match such a scenario.
The disappearance of flight MH370 continues to baffle investigators as well as searchers who are racing against time to locate the aircraft and its critical “black boxes” before the batteries on their emergency locator beacons expire.
MH370 and the 239 people on board disappeared less than an hour after the Beijing-bound flight left Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12.41am on March 8. The plane and its passengers remain missing despite over two weeks of intensive searching by a multinational effort.
The Malay Mail
http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/new-claim-surfaces-that-radar-saw-mh370-dive-after-turnaround
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XnfXwyh-8KY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=n-3YgFRpKUk
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