Missing plane ‘was put on autopilot’
Print Edition
INVESTIGATORS believe missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 flew on autopilot for hours before crashing into a remote part of the Indian Ocean, Australian officials said yesterday as they announced another shift in the search area for the jet.
After analyzing data exchanged between the plane and a satellite, officials believe the plane was on autopilot the entire time it was flying across a vast expanse of the southern Indian Ocean, based on the straight path it took, said Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of Australia’s Transport Safety Bureau.
“Certainly for its path across the Indian Ocean, we are confident that the aircraft was operating on autopilot until it ran out of fuel,” Dolan told reporters in Canberra, the nation’s capital.
Asked whether the autopilot would have to be manually switched on, or whether it could have been activated automatically under a default setting, Dolan replied: “The basic assumption would be that if the autopilot is operational it’s because it’s been switched on.”
But exactly why the autopilot would have been programmed to take a flight path so far off course from the plane’s planned destination of Beijing, and exactly when it was switched on, remains unknown.
“We couldn’t accurately, nor have we attempted to, fix the moment when it was put on autopilot,” Warren Truss, Australia’s deputy prime, said. “It will be a matter for the Malaysian-based investigation to look at precisely when it may have been put on autopilot.”
The latest nugget of information from the investigation came as officials announced yet another change in the search area for the plane that vanished on March 8 after taking off from Kuala Lumpur with 239 passengers and crew on board.
The transport safety bureau said it made the assumption in defining the new search area that the crew was unresponsive, possibly suffering from oxygen deprivation, as the plane flew under autopilot. It said this was indicated by the loss of radio communications and the long period without any maneuvering of the plane. It emphasized, however, that this was only a working theory and did not mean that accident investigators led by Malaysia would reach a similar conclusion.
A loss of cabin air pressure could cause oxygen deprivation, which could make pilots unable to perform even basic tasks.
University of New South Wales aviation expert Peter Marosszeky said if the autopilot was still working when the plane crashed, it suggests the aircraft’s communications systems were switched off rather than disabled by a major malfunction or catastrophe.
“It would appear very unlikely that power was removed from most of the essential systems, because you can’t connect your autopilot if your flight management computers aren’t operating,” he said. “It would appear that it lost all communication and identification with air traffic control because those systems were turned off. You can’t connect the autopilot if you’ve got systems that have been put out of action.”
John Cox, an aviation consultant, former airline pilot and accident investigator based in Washington, DC, said it was unclear at what point the autopilot was programmed to fly out into the open ocean. But he said it was done by someone with expert knowledge.
The new search area is several hundred kilometers southwest of the most recent suspected crash site, about 1,800 kilometers off Australia’s west coast, Dolan said. Powerful sonar equipment will scour the seabed for wreckage in the new search zone, which officials calculated by reanalyzing the existing satellite data.
The shift was expected, with Dolan saying last week the new zone would be south of an area where a remote-controlled underwater drone spent weeks combing the seabed.
Beginning in August, private contractors will use powerful sonar equipment to probe depths up to 7 kilometers.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
