MH370- The Final Moments

Were the crew and passengers of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 awake or unconscious as the aircraft sped towards the southern Indian Ocean? In a speculative article, the Herald Sun today presented two scenarios that might have taken place on board the ill-fated jetliner during its final hours on March 8.

Despite more than three weeks of intensive searching by a multinational team, the daily reported that the definite fate of MH370 might never be known.

Central to both scenarios is Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, the pilot of the Boeing 777-200, whom experts say was either on a suicide mission or struggling to save MH370.


"What would have happened had the passengers been conscious and aware something was wrong?" asked the Herald Sun.

"Panicked passengers would probably have screamed, cried or prayed. By then, it would have been too late to send a tweet or text or call.

"Did the passengers attempt to break down the bulletproof cockpit door? Or did they turn on the helpless cabin crew?" the daily said.

But one thing was for sure, the Herald Sun said, the final frantic moments of the passengers would have been filled with fear.

"As the Boeing 777-200 stalled, spiralled or slowly descended into the sea, the final moments would have been a nightmare."

An Australian commercial pilot told News Corporation that turning an aircraft towards the southern Indian Ocean would have been simple.

"I could do it in less than 30 seconds. You could just punch in a waypoint for somewhere down there in the top of the leg stage in the flight management computer.

"Then you can execute that as a flight plan and the aeroplane would fly there,” he told News Corporation on condition of anonymity.

“You can turn off the moving map display. You can disable the in-flight entertainment completely. You could just tell the passengers it’s broken.

“Passengers might have (asked questions) but you can lock the flight deck door and no one’s getting in.

"They could bang on the door for the next two hours if they wanted but they’re not going to break down a bulletproof door.”

The Herald Sun reported a less perplexing but equally painful possibility that all on board passed out due to difficulty processing oxygen as the plane ascended rapidly to 45,000 feet.

They would have died minutes later, the paper said. This is the theory pilots support as many in the profession think Zaharie has been prematurely pilloried.

Australian and International Pilots Association president Nathan Safe, however, shunned speculation, saying there was not enough publicly available evidence to suggest sinister motives, the paper reported.

TechSafe Aviation Director Rob Collins, meanwhile, said neither crew nor passengers would have felt the aircraft make that sharp turn-back towards the Malaysian peninsula.

Collins told the Herald Sun that the baffling deviation from the flight path indicated to him that the pilots were seeking somewhere safe to land.

Although investigators have been examining whether Zaharie deliberately sabotaged MH370 after the aircraft was tracked by military radar flying at between 43,000 feet and 45,000 feet, Collins said the erratic ascent and descent were consistent with how a pilot would respond to the effects of a loss of cabin pressure or smoke or toxic fumes in the cabin.

It was reported that military radar tracked the plane flying at 45,000ft — its ceiling for safe flying — for 23 minutes shortly after the last communication with the cockpit.

Oxygen would have run out in 12 minutes in a depressurised cabin, rendering the passengers unconscious, according to one expert.

The Herald Sun reported that there would have been significant obstacles to committing suicide with a full crew and plane load of passengers. For starters, there was a co-pilot.

“The other thing that would make it difficult to pull that off would be that whoever it was, the captain or the first officer, he would have had to overcome the other guy.

"It is very unlikely (they would be complicit), particularly in airline flying where you are almost randomly crewed together,” Collins said. – April 1, 2014.

Source: The Malaysian Insider