Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Pilot's explanation

Insty linked this item by Chris Goodfellow on Wired yesterday that I find the most straightforward explanation of all for the missing jetliner full of passengers. 
We old pilots were drilled to know what is the closest airport of safe harbor while in cruise.
He sounds like one too. There is a walk-through-walls sureness to the tone that rings. He is fairly certain, make that certainly certain of his theory with this:
...or the fire destroyed the control surfaces and it crashed. You will find it along that route–looking elsewhere is pointless.
They talk like that. They're not going to let "but the pilot's wife left him that day!" dissuade his assessment. No amount of "but the course was changed by computer!" will affect it. He placed himself in the cockpit and imagined what could possibly have happened. 

His theory appeals to me. His sureness in telling it does. So when commentators say, "The copilot had a simulator, he was checking other airports." I think, well of course he was. That is what simulator programs are for, practicing emergencies. In fact that reminded me of a pilot's basement I was in where I saw a pile of index cards and asked what they were, and he answered pilot-related things he used to memorize for his earlier training. After it reminded me of the simulator Barksdale AFT donated to my nearby High School just when I thought I had escaped such things by being in High School and not being on the Air Force base. 

Chris Goodfellow believes some emergency happened, most likely electrical, he mentions two types of possible fires, one possibility electrical fire, another I hadn't thought of and hadn't even heard of before. 

He brings up the possibility of a wheel flame out on take off, it's happened before where the landing gear is burning, heavy load, hot day, low inflation, the tire blows out and is pulled up burning, not becoming a problem inside until already at altitude.  His piece runs through the scenarios. 

It is the most straightforward theory and explanation I've heard. It starts out criticizing coverage, specifically CNN. It was interesting too clicking through as I do, noticing Chris Whatshisface on CNN, and seeing this same exact photograph featured on Goodfellow's article cycling back to CNN, a bit of eerie recursion as if responding in near real-time publishing-wise to criticism within the article Chris Goodfellow wrote. 

7 comments:

rhhardin said...

I got my private license by knowing where the airports were.

The flight inspector's trick is to wait until you're exactly over an airport and cut the power and ask where you're going.

"Hanover," I said, pointing straight down.

That impressed him enough to cut the test short.

So the FAA likes it.

john said...

Certainly not as appealing as a secret shrouded landing strip in Kazakhstan.

I go with space aliens intercepting the plane for nefarious reasons. Why? It fits all the information we know so far.

Hagar said...

They are at it again, changing the timelines for when things happened.

Some kind of emergency, human caused or not, and the pilot(s) heading for the nearest carrier runway is the simplest solution.

edutcher said...

The simplest is usually right, but...

we know Al Qaeda is capable of doing what people thought couldn't be done.

Amartel said...

Turn west was made before pilot radioed "good night."
So no.

Revenant said...

Turn west was made before pilot radioed "good night." So no.

The Malaysian government denied that rumor today.

We need to remember that the news media is trying to squeeze 24/7 coverage out of a story that has almost no actual facts associated with it. Most headlines boil down to "someone with third-hand information, possibly anonymous, claims _____".

Chip Ahoy said...

How do you know, were you there? The news told you? Who told them? Reliable Asian sources.

The pilot put himself in the cockpit and imagined what happened. Everything devolves from that. Conclusion plane destroyed.

Your analysis starts with pilots as #1 suspect. Conclusion: something else entirely. Unknown. Plane still might be around even a possible weapon.