I was just explaining why this was not similar to the 370 incident because they had time to contact the ground crew and there was plenty of communication and was intending to make the point that there was time for communication. I do realize not all incidents are the same. The perception that 'this happens all the time' with an incident like mh370 seems unjustified.
"Aviate, Navigate, Communicate", in that order. I guess fighting fires comes even before that. So no one claims flight 370 "did not have time". Its far more plausible they chose not to communicate, and instead chose to do the obvious thing and not waste time talking and instead tried to fix the problem asap, pulling fuses thereby disabling communication and transponder. Its not because the Greek crew couldnt find their fuse box that this crew needed help with that.
Engines just need fuel is not a good argument, planes need more than just an engine to fly and make turns into the indian ocean.
Yeah, they need wings and a tail too. And thats about it. As for turning, apparently its beyond doubt the pilot initiated the turn. How does that invalidate a fire theory? Apart from trying to fight the fire, turning back to an airport is the second most urgent thing to do. Many will say its the first thing to do.
In the Quantas incident, pilots were able to regain control of their damaged plane, there is no evidence of anything like this happening on mh370.
My theory is that flight 370 never lost control at all. The crew was incapacitated, but the plane itself may have been fine after they stopped the electrical fire.
IF it was NOT raging out of control:
I would anticipate, in this theory, the crew potentially getting the fire under control by killing electronics, programmed a new heading for the airport that people claim it was heading towards, and ultimately must have died at some point thereafter due to smoke. When they died, why would the plane have continued to fly?
Because that is precisely what planes do.
Would autopilot have been shut off at this point with all of the other electronics? If autopilot was still active, why the erratic flight path?
Why would the plane have suddenly turned into the indian ocean and not just followed a straight path, as other ghost flights do?
I dont know what path it followed exactly after the transponder was shut down. Does anyone? I think not. But if it did indeed fly a slightly erratic path, it would only serve as another argument in favor of incapacitated crew. A plane doesnt just fall from the sky when you release the controls, it will for the most part simply continue flying even without autpilot. Almost all pilot induced crashes are because the crew actively did something wrong, like slowing it down too much, steering in to the ground, or in to a mountain, or because they pulled too hard and stalled the plane, .. not because they didnt do anything at all. If only the pilots of Air France Flight 447 had done nothing, or simply released the controls at any point during their stall, instead of pulling the sticks non stop, it would have been fine.
A plane cruising at altitude will just fly on without any input. If it starts to pitch down it will gain speed, gain lift and therefore automatically pitch up again. ANd due to the wing incidence if it starts rolling in one direction it will automagically slowly level itself again. Planes that lost all hydraulic power, leaving the pilot with no input (besides throttle), have flown on for hours many times, and the opposite, the plane crashing shorty after losing hydraulics in a cruise flight, has to my knowledge, never happened. In fact, at least one plane landed safely without any hydraulics, with the pilots only using differential throttle. A DHL flight over Iraq. That shows you dont need stick input to keep flying, aerodynamics take care of that. You only need stick input/autopilot to steer.
Alternatively if the plane flew straight and level all the way to the crash site, that doesnt invalidate the theory either, as its just as plausible the autopilot was not disabled by the fire or fuse pulling. The fire could have been found being caused by other circuitry like communications, or the fire may have disabled those but pilots restored power to the other circuitry. We have no way of knowing.
With this particular theory, I'm not looking for an identical event. I am looking for evidence that a plane can either:
a) Suffer from a vicious fire that kills off the crew but manages to keep the aerodynamics of the plane intact and continue flying for 6+ hours with no pilots, while changing directions.
You will never find that, because if the fire truly rages out of control, it will eventually burn aluminium and composites and disintegrate. This is not a theory anyone is putting forward. Although I will add one thing; even a raging fire
might be extinguished by depressurizing the plane at high altitude, since it will dramatically lower oxygen levels. Some radar plots suggest the plane climbed well above cruising altitude, and this might have been deliberate to starve a fire. Alternatively, it might have been caused by no one controlling the plane, pitching up and down is what you might expect in such scenario. That said, that radar altitude data is not at all reliable, so no one knows for sure if it did indeed climb that high.
b) Suffer from a small fire, contain it by pulling fuses, die by smoke and somehow the plane continues on 6+ hours, while changing directions.
And this is absolutely an identical event. Flight 522 is the closest you are going to find, and AFAICS, its absolutely identical with one exception: they did not disable communications. But since pulling fuses in reaction to inflight fire or cockpit smoke is
standard procedure, was even attempted in the case of flight 522, I reallly dont get why you think this is such a leap of faith.
I'm just not buying that this was a typical incident that has happened plenty of times in the past.
Of course not. How many accidents have happened exactly the same way plenty times in the past? I would hope none, thats why we have all this safety regulation, crash investigation, mandatory pilot training and what not. The sole purpose of that is to avoid making the same mistakes over and over. Thats why commercial planes crash on average only once every 4 million hours. Almost all accidents that are not blatant pilot error these days are freak coincidences of things that rarely if ever happened before. When looking for the cause of a crash, you are almost by definition looking for an unprobable (chain of) event(s).
