To Explain Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight, ‘Rogue Pilot’ Seems Likeliest Theory

 

 

 

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — The retired chief pilot of Malaysia Airlines is torn between logic and loyalty to an old friend. Nik Huzlan, 56, was one of the first captains to fly the 12-year-old Boeing 777 that disappeared over the Indian Ocean a year ago this Sunday. He has known the pilot who flew the plane that day, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, for decades.

 

Mr. Huzlan is convinced that deliberate human intervention, most likely by someone in the cockpit, caused the aircraft, on a red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, to suddenly turn around, cease communication with air traffic control and some six hours later run out of fuel and fall into the ocean. But he also said that he had never seen anything in more than 30 years of friendship that would suggest that Mr. Zaharie was capable of such a deed.

 

“Based on logic, when you throw emotion away, it seems to point a certain direction which you can’t ignore,” Mr. Huzlan said. “Your best friend can harbor the darkest secrets.”

No trace of the plane has been found, though four ships continue to scour a section of the ocean floor roughly the size of West Virginia and as deep as three miles below the surface. Without the plane’s flight recorders, the disappearance remains a mystery.

Reconstructing the Plane’s Path

The main communications systems of the Malaysia Airlines plane ceased working about 40 minutes into the flight, forcing investigators to try to piece together the plane’s location from other systems.

Transponder

Secondary Radar and Text Updates

Air traffic controllers typically know a plane’s location based on what is called secondary radar, which requests information from the plane’s transponder. A plane also uses radio or satellite signals to send regular updates through Acars, the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System. Both of those systems were turned off.

Primary Radar

Two Malaysian military radar stations tracked a plane using primary radar, which sends out radio signals and listens for echoes that bounce off objects in the sky. Primary radar does not require a plane to have a working transponder.

SATELLITE

Satellite Communications

If Acars updates are turned off, the plane still sends a “keep-alive” signal, that can be received by satellites. The signal does not indicate location, but it can help to narrow down the plane’s position. A satellite picked up six complete signals and a seventh partial, about one per hour, after it left the range of military radar.

           

But the “rogue pilot theory,” as investigators call it, has emerged as the most plausible explanation among several. Many, but not all, of the investigators and experts who have reviewed the limited evidence say Mr. Zaharie, or perhaps the co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, is the likeliest culprit, though they caution that the evidence is limited and circumstantial, and that the theory is full of holes, like lack of a motive.

 

“I would say that’s my favorite, because it would fit best with what has happened,” said Peter Marosszeky, a longtime Australian airline executive who is now a senior research fellow at the University of New South Wales. But he added that without finding and retrieving at least part of the plane, it would be very hard to say anything conclusively.

 

 

Others still suspect a different explanation for the disappearance of a jumbo jet with 239 people aboard: mechanical failure, a fire, hijacking, sabotage or some other event as yet unknown.

Psychological profiles of the pilot prepared after the disappearance of Flight 370 do not suggest Mr. Zaharie could have taken the plane down or would have had a compelling reason for doing so, several people with detailed knowledge of the investigation said. His family has emphatically denied that he would have deliberately turned the plane around and flown it to its destruction.

 

A rival theory in the early days after the plane’s disappearance, a midair equipment failure, falls apart for lack of a breakdown that could swiftly disable separate communications systems but still allow the plane to stay in the air and perform a long series of maneuvers.

 

There were no reports of bad weather in the area.

Yet at 1:21 a.m. that March 8, 40 minutes into the flight, all communication with the aircraft was lost, and its radar label vanished from the screens of ground controllers. According to military radar, which continued to track the plane, it suddenly altered its northeasterly course, veering west and south, over the Malaysian Peninsula, across the island of Penang, where Mr. Zaharie grew up, and then headed out to sea across the Strait of Malacca before turning south into the Indian Ocean.