Where is Malaysia 370?

Of course, I don't know either.

But InnovaScapes Institute (ISI) gets some strange requests, and one we got repeatedly this spring was "Where is that Malaysia 370 plane?"     This, coupled with the several conspiracy theories, and my own background (which in most circles, I don't mention) in aviation safety and 'incidents', led me to put a presentation together for 'lay audiences'

I presented this yesterday to an audience of mostly older military types in San Jose, the SIR 21 group.

The reaction was interesting, not unlike the first time I presented to a Palo Alto group a month ago.  Old pilots especially seemed to like it; discussion afterward went for hours.  One phrase, sent to me by a pilot, really resonated:
"Always in accidents the governments and companies lie and cover all this crap up until it leaks out the corners.  Pilots will always pass the true word on to each other even in communist countries it always comes out."

For this post, I'll just hit a couple of highlights

First, even in this day and age, planes get lost.  Something like 83 commercial airline planes have been "LOST" since WW II, lost as in "not found" for some time, if ever.  Amelia Earhart's and Squadron 19 (and the Bermuda Triangle) were the most famous lost planes (though not commercial flights of course), with the largest search teams, until Malaysia 370.  Five planes have been lost since 2001, in Molo Straits, Namibia, Angola, Guyana, and now Malaysia, all remote parts of the globe.

After 75 years, 'we think' we know what happened to Earhart, where the plane landed, and that she survived the wreck only to die marooned when the Navy couldn't decipher her messages.

It took 26 years before Americans learned the true source of the bomb that brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.  It was Iranian retaliation for the U.S. Vincennes shooting down the Iranian passenger liner, not Gaddafi after all.

After 40 years of sleuthing by the lead director of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum with a son of a dead passenger, we still don’t know why Pan Am 7 disappeared on the way to Honolulu in 1957.  Five different theories exist, three of which are engine manfunctions, none of which are mentioned in official FAA doc’s.

Its one thing to know where the plane went down, quite another (black boxes help, but not always) to know WHAT HAPPENED.  It took years, and tens of thousands of pieces of reconstructed blown-up 747,  TWA 800, that was flying out of NYC, to debunk the "Navy missile" conspiracy theory and demonstrate that the empty center fuel tank in fact blew up the plane.

And that’s the message of the presentation.  Pilot error and now terrorism are 80% of the ‘causes’ in most reports.  Our data suggests that more than half are instead plane equipment issues or shoddy instrumentation (on the plane, at the airport, or radar tracking systems).  What else would you expect from an engineer who spent half a lifetime building better instruments?

Pilots tell me that it is 'easy' to blame a dead pilot.  They say that the mistake the pilot often made was to be on that flight!

In general, almost inevitably, the airplane manufacturers and the airlines are quick to look for “pilot error” or terrorists, thus averting the blame and responsibility.  This became the thrust of the presentation, exploring four ‘causes’—weather; “intentional” acts (think Ukraine SAMs, 9-11, Lockerbie); airline folk (pilots, crew, ground support, tower control); or plane issues (ergonomics in the cockpit, mechanical, electrical).  Fires, of course, can be caused by ground crew cargo loading, lightning, or plane equipment malfunction, so these are not always independent variables.

The immediate hue and cry re Malaysia 370 was "pilot suicide" because he was despondent over a friend's court trial, he had a flight simulator on his desk at home (with southern Indian ocean landing practices), and he didn't schedule any lunches with friends the following week.

Then, when the erratic radar trackings (from seven nations, none of which would share info for fear of revealing the effectiveness of their radar  systems) indicated a zigzag path and dramatic altitude shifts, terrorism ideas became rampant.

It took days to reveal that the cargo contents included 400# of lithium batteries, cargo expressly forbidden on any U.S. carrier (although guess which nation consumes the most of these), and another two tons of unspecified goods (thought by the Tom Clancy devotees to be U.S.drone technology captured in Afghanistan by the Taliban and sold to the Chinese).

The misfired cockpit oxygen system on another 777, that burned out the entire cockpit in less than two minutes while sitting on the ground, is also suggestive.  The plane was manufactured two days after the Malaysian plane, and Boeing has now admitted that 200 planes were miswired during that timeframe.  These are more serious recall issues than broken gas feeds for General Motors, although there aren't as many units to go find and fix.

In interests of brevity here, I won’t go on, but might in future posts if anyone is interested.  Call or write—housec1839@gmail.com--or better yet, comment here.  For groups, ISI is open to future presentations.