S2Ep4 The Terminal Dive

If MH370 plunged into the southern ocean, this is how its descent might have played out

If MH370 did fly into the southern ocean, how long did it fly after transmitting its final pings? The answer has important implications for where its wreckage might lie on the sea floor. Fortunately, the metadata association with those pings includes revealing information about how the plane was flying.

This is what we know. Sometime around 00:02:30, the right engine ran out of fuel and flamed out. At 00:11:00, the satellite data unit (SDU) transmitted its scheduled hourly ping as usual. A few minutes later, at 00:17:30, the left engine ran out of fuel and flamed out. This caused a systemwide electrical supply failure, and the SDU powered down along with everything else.  The ram air turbine (RAT) deployed to provide emergency hydraulic and electrical power—but this would not include the SDU or the flaps. One minute later, the APU kicked in and restored electrical power, and a minute after that, the repowered SDU logged back in with Inmarsat, creating the 7th set of pings.

At this point the plane had been without engine power for two minutes, and had spent approximately 15 minutes before that slowing and descending from cruise speed and altitude under the power of a single engine. Thereupon, it descended without autopilot inputs. So: what happened next?

The BFO data associated with these pings indicated a descent rate of about 5,000 feet per minute, followed a descent rate of 15,000 feet per minute eight seconds later.

Flight simulations carried out by Boeing and others showed that if there were no one at the controls after fuel exhaustion the plane would eventually have entered a bank, begun to dive, then entered a series of porpoising climbs and dives (“phugoids”) before ultimately crashing into the sea at very high speed. According to an article in The Australian, “extensive testing by Boeing indicated that after running out of fuel the aircraft would have dropped from 35,000 feet at a rate of between 12,000 feet a minute and 20,000 feet a minute.”

That’s consistent with the descent rate derived from the BFO data. There’s one major problem, though: Based on Boeing simulations, it would have taken far too long for those phugoids to have developed into the steep rate of descent. The implication is that someone — probably the captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah — deliberately pushed the nose down into a steep descent.

To see how this would have played out, I asked Aaron Murphy of the uFly commercial flight simulator near Toronto, which operates the same model of aircraft as MH370, to push the sim into the kind of dive implied by the BFO data and see what would happen. He found that it took about a minute for the plane to impact the surface.

If this is what had occurred, then the plane’s wreckage would have been found quite early in the seabed search. So we know that probably didn’t happen.

Perhaps, instead, someone held it in a glide so that it flew beyond the boundaries of the current search area and made a gliding landing onto the sea surface. This argument was advanced in an Australian 60 Minutes program in which crash investigator Larry Vance said that the condition of the flaperon discovered on La Réunion meant that it had to have been deployed, and then knocked off by impact with the water.

The problem is that wreckage from the interior has been found. It appears to have been violently torn apart, ruling out a gentil “Miracle on the Hudson”-style ditching.

What we’re left with, then, is a fairly narrow range of possibilities. We know that the plane was under pilot control at 0:19. If the ATSB’s interpretation of the BFO data is correct, it was plummeting at high speed. Since it wasn’t found in the search area, perhaps whoever was at the controls had a change of heart and pulled the plane out of the dive into a glide that carried it beyond the boundaries of the seabed search. But as Aaron’s experiment showed, there was a very short window in which that change of heart could have occurred. For this scenario to work at all requires threading a very fine needle.

Community Radar

In today’s Community Radar segment, social media director Emily Morgul introduces us to new work from viewer Keelie, who while searching for possible landing strips found a very interesting one 125 miles north of the 7th arc. Kambala Airfield lies within the Sary Shagan missile test range, a top-secret Russian base that has been called Russia’s version of Area 51. There’s a fascinating video about it on the Covert Cabal YouTube channel.