The Mystery Of The Missing Planes

The Lost Planes

Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777

The mystery of flight 447 that crashed in 2009 was solved after a few months while the mystery surrounding flight MH 370­­­­­ continues to deepen every moment.....

The disappearance of Malaysian airlines flight MH 370 over the South China Sea, a few kilometres off the coast of Kota Bharu, is undoubtedly a throwback to the mysterious crash of Air France flight 447 over the Atlantic Ocean. Flight 447 was a long haul flight bound to Paris from Rio De Janeiro. Once the plane got out of the range of the Brazilian Air Traffic Controller (ATC), it was flying above the ocean with the nearest radar of the European ATC still some hundred miles away. It was flying with no navigational help from any ATC which is quite normal for any transatlantic flight. A few hours passed by and when the plane didn’t appear on the radar of the European ATC as per its schedule, a multinational search for the lost plane was under way much like the ongoing search operations for MH 370. After months of searching and scouring vast stretches of the treacherous Atlantic, the search team finally came to know about the exact location of the plane’s fuselage and also managed to recover the most vital component- the flight data recorder, also called as the blackbox by the media-which would help the air crash investigation team to report the causes of the crash. Besides, their report would shed some light on the loopholes in safety measures, thereby making civil aviation safer for future passengers and crew.

The investigation team studied the data and recordings from the blackbox and thoroughly analysed the conversations among pilots and all other activities in the cockpit that happened during that fateful night. It eventually became clear that the pitot sensors outside the Airbus had iced over, narrating a misleading information about the speed and altitude above sea level to the pilots. Since the 58 year old captain who was the most experienced on board was asleep at the back of the cockpit, the onus was now on the novice second officer who was flying the plane. As he saw dangerous figures of the plane’s speed and altitude, he immediately brought the plane out of the autopilot mode which was not a wise thing to do as he was without the ATC help and was flying above the ocean at night. Then he pulled up the plane’s nose in order to gain some altitude but that slowed down the plane. After some time, there was an alarm that alerted the pilots about the threat of stalling in mid air. By the time the captain was woken up to stabilize the plane, the plane had stalled and was losing altitude rapidly. Finally, another alarm warned the pilots to pull up the plane as it neared the ocean level that made the situation in the cockpit one of frenzied chaos and confusion. The captain tried his best by increasing the thrust but the 240 tons aircraft, made heavier by tons of jet fuel, was falling out from the night sky towards the ocean with phenomenal speed. It crashed somewhere in the Atlantic ocean 340 miles off the eastern coast of Brazil.

In the case of flight MH 370, with theories of pilot suicide and a 9/11 like hijack doing the rounds, the more credible incident of a head on crash into the South China Sea-similar to that of flight 447- cannot be ruled out. The ocean currents could be more powerful than we think. The debris may have floated across the Americas towards the western Pacific Ocean even as our search and rescue operations are still restricted to the Indian Ocean. This event not only makes us wonder about the enormous scale of our planet but it also reminds us of the weakness, helplessness and incapability of humans even in the twenty first century.