On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members, went missing on the way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The incident then sparked a massive search operation in the Gulf of Thailand, the South China Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the southern Indian Ocean, but the aircraft was never found.
To this day, there are still countless people who are struggling to find it (see Red Star News's previous report for details: Red Star Interview|People who have been looking for Malaysia Airlines MH370 for 7 and a half years: 8 hours a day to analyze data or start a new search in the second half of next year).
According to the study:
It is not a "free fall" into the sea, or a controlled forced landing
A recent study has brought to the surface a new area that had not been searched before.
Late last month, two experts called on Australian and Malaysian authorities and the U.S. seabed exploration company Ocean Unlimited, to launch a new round of searches, claiming that the mystery of the disappearance of flight MH370 could be solved within "10 days" if a search were conducted in the area.
The study was carried out by two experts, Jean-Luc Marchand, a former aviation programme officer at the European Commission and a researcher at the European Space Agency, and Patrick Brelli, a former French Air Force pilot and Air France captain with 44 years of aviation experience.
Patrick Bryley
Jean-Luc Marchand
The two recently accepted an exclusive interview with Red Star News, and Briley elaborated on their research results and new understanding of the ultimate fate of flight MH370 on behalf of the two. Their study proposed an unsearched crash area, arguing that the aircraft fell into the area under the control of an "experienced pilot", which is different from the previously generally accepted hypothesis of a "free fall" crash into the sea.
Brairy told Red Star News that the two hope to "use our skills and knowledge to help find the plane without expecting anything in return" and that the new research will help restart the search for MH370 and ultimately provide answers to the victims' families and the global aviation safety community.
Brairy believes that the plane eventually entered the sea under the control of "experienced pilots". Many theories blame the plane for the disappearance of the plane, Captain Zahari, and Braley believes this. But his explanation, unlike others, believes that the plane did not crash in "free fall" in the Indian Ocean in the form of a high-speed "death spiral", where it was called the "seventh arc", and during the final descent attempted a "soft landing" (controlled water forced landing) into the ocean. As a result, the landing point will be shifted several hundred kilometers south.
The first arc to the seventh arc (Arc1-Arc7) refer to the seven concentric arcs identified by the distance between the aircraft and the satellite in the case of the disappearance of flight MH370.
After calculations, the technicians gave the approximate position of MH370 on the arc. The seventh arc is the last arc. Malaysian and Australian authorities believe the plane disappeared near the seventh arc, but could not pinpoint the location. All the while, search efforts have focused on some areas of the southern Indian Ocean near the seventh arc.
The first to seventh arcs give the approximate flight position of MH370
Experts speculate:
It may have landed on an undersea plateau south of Broken Ridge
Marchand and Brary's new study uses the sixth and seventh arcs to calculate a flight profile of the final stage of MH370. By assuming the best and worst case scenarios, it is possible to find the farthest and closest flight distance of the aircraft after passing the seventh arc.
According to the team's calculations, the nearest drop point is 93.025° east longitude and 35.518° south latitude, and the farthest drop point is 93.039° east longitude and 35.875° south latitude. The study believes that the previous search area and the wreckage passed by, but in fact, it only takes a few hundred kilometers to the south to salvage the wreckage.
Two possible controlled crash landing lines were calculated
"Based on underwater measurements, we determined that the impact zone was about 4,000 metres deep and was south of Broken Ridge," Bräley explained. It is believed that the wreckage of MH370 is located on some sort of submarine plateau (relatively flat highland) in the area. ”
Newly proposed search area (green)
"The search for these wrecks depends entirely on the technology and dedicated resources at our disposal. He mentioned the advanced technology of the American company Ocean Infinity, which could significantly reduce the time of the new search operation if the company's high-performance unmanned submersibles were used, and were expected to take as little as 10 days and no more than 15 days at the longest.
The official theory suggests that the plane made a sharp turn shortly after its last communication with air traffic control, flew for several hours before crashing into the Indian Ocean. The main theory is that the wreckage may be located at the bottom of the ocean in the area known as the "Seventh Arc" – an area that has been searched twice before.
An assumption:
The pilot manually controls the aircraft at all times
"We identified this new search area based on a key truth: the sharp turning flight path and final maneuver signals achieved by MH370 showed that the aircraft had to be under manned control throughout the flight, until the last moment. "This becomes even more evident when you consider that the person in control of the aircraft is trying to conceal the aircraft after the operation." ”
In the final moments of MH370, when the engine failed due to fuel depletion, the pilot turned on the plane's backup power system (a small gas turbine engine APU in a medium and large passenger aircraft and large helicopter configuration) to regain control of the plane, rather than letting the plane fall out of control, Brairy said, "He prepared the plane for a controlled forced landing." ”
This operation restored the power supply to the aircraft, which allowed the satellite communication system to be restarted. This explains why MH370's satellite communications system suddenly reactivates when the aircraft finally descends, and automatically requests to reconnect with the International Inmarsat satellite system.
Braley believes that the pilot may have tried to land on the surface in this way, in the smoothest way possible, with less damage on impact. Brairy believes that the pilot finally took control of a gliding flight, attempting a conscious, precisely controlled water landing with the aim of producing as little debris as possible and "sinking as little as possible without leaving a trace." ”
"This discovery has greatly expanded our search beyond what was previously assumed to end in freefall. Rather, it opens up a much broader field that requires us to explore and challenge previous hypotheses. "If this assumption is correct, it also means that MH370 crashed into an unsearched area of the southern Indian Ocean.
The Red Star News reporter checked that there is a supporting clue about the assumption that the captain Zahari has manual control of the whole process: Zahari has a strong interest in flight simulation games and has installed flight simulation equipment at home. In 2016, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reinstated six data points that had been deleted a month earlier. One of the simulated routes to the southern Indian Ocean is very close to the MH370 flight trajectory. The uniqueness of this route is that it is manually controlled from start to finish. Zahari's custom routes are all opted to toggle auto-fly.
Event Recap:
Disappearing "MH370"
On March 8, 2014, at 00:42 a.m., a Malaysia Airlines-operated Boeing 777-200ER took off from Kuala Lumpur in a northeasterly direction. In the cockpit sat Zahari, a 53-year-old captain, and Farick, a 27-year-old co-pilot. There are 10 Malaysian flight attendants in the cabin, serving 227 passengers from four continents, most of whom are Chinese. According to the investigation by the Malaysian authorities, none of the passengers had received flight training.
Captain Zahari (left) and co-pilot Farik
At 1:07 a.m., 25 minutes after the flight, the cockpit "Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System" (ACARS) sent out information such as position. The ACARS system sends data every half hour, and the next one should be sent at 1:37. However, 1:07 was the last set of data, during which the ACARS system failed or was artificially shut down.
At 1:19 a.m., 11 minutes after the plane crossed the Malaysian coastline, the Malaysian air traffic control officer radioed: "Malaysia 370, contact Ho Chi Minh 120, good night." Zahari replied: "Good night, Malaysia 370." "This is the last time the world hears about MH370.
"At this time, the pilot was supposed to call the Vietnamese air traffic control, but he did not do what was requested. After that, he no longer contacted anyone. The timing of the "hijacking" was delicate, Braley said—just after leaving Malaysian airspace, but there was a window before establishing contact with Vietnam's air traffic control department.
At 1:20:31 a.m., MH370 entered Vietnamese airspace. A few seconds later, MH370 disappeared from the secondary radar. At 1:21 a.m., another system on the plane that can transmit information such as location, the transponder, was artificially turned off. According to a report released by the Malaysian government in 2018, after the transponder was turned off, the plane suddenly made a sharp turn and turned back under human operation.
The Malaysian Air Force's primary radar showed that after MH370 entered Vietnamese airspace, the aircraft made a sharp left turn and flew back over the Malay Peninsula. It made a sideways turn near Penang (the captain's hometown), flew northwest across the Strait of Malacca and then flew into the Andaman Sea in the Indian Ocean, where it disappeared from radar.
New possibilities:
The satellite communications system was restarted, or in preparation for a forced landing on the water
"The autopilot system can't make this level of 'sharp' turns, and neither can the co-pilot pilot. "This means that the person who was flying the plane at the time was an old pilot, and he leaned his body very little when turning, which is extremely dangerous at night when there is no external visual reference." ”
"The manipulator's first 'sharp' turn is to avoid entering the Vietnam Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), and if he enters without turning on the transponder, the military will intercept the aircraft with fighter jets," Braley said. Only experienced pilots know this. ”
At 2:22 a.m., MH370 "disappeared" over the Andaman Sea. Three minutes later, Inmarsat's communications network received a landing request from the aircraft, but the flight identification number "MH370" in the request was missing. Brairy told Red Star News: "To erase the ID, you can only do it manually in the air. Only experienced pilots have the ability to quickly perform such maneuvers in flight, while ensuring the interruption of all automatic message transmissions on the aircraft. For a new co-pilot, this is an almost impossible task. ”
If it weren't for the activation of the satellite communication terminal at the last moment, which realized the automatic "handshake" with the satellite, the true fate of MH370 after leaving the Strait of Malacca would have been a mystery forever. Previous hypotheses generally believed that the aircraft was "free falling" at the last moment, but it ignored the important suspicion that the satellite communication system was restarted. Some analysts believe that this is just "the hijacker's negligence", so it is considered not worth mentioning. But the new study differs from the traditional hypothesis and proposes a new possibility: the pilot turned on the plane's backup power system in preparation for a forced landing on the water, which led to the rebooting of the satellite communications system. This is the first substantive answer to this question.
There are different opinions about where the plane will finally land. The fate of MH370 remains one of the biggest mysteries of the aviation industry. "Our findings are able to answer all the questions raised by the disappearance. But until the wreckage is found, the flight trajectory we reconstructed is still just a hypothesis. "But if we don't try to explain these anomalous turns, the mystery will never be solved." ”
Reconstructed MH370 flight path
Red Star News reporter Deng Shuyi
Editor: Peng Jiang Editor: Deng Minguang
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