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This week, the Australian Transport Bureau released a report on its lengthy investigation into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which went down somewhere in the Indian Ocean in March of 2014.
In it, they found that an electrical failure most likely crippled the plane. From News.com.au:
The report officially acknowledges the doomed Malaysia Airlines flight suffered a sudden electrical failure before its disappearance on March 8 last year, the Daily Beast found. This backs the popular “zombie plane” theory, whereby the missing plane’s avionic systems are ravaged, rendering the flight crew helpless, and the aircraft continued flying on autopilot until it ran out of fuel.
A grim timeline reveals the power blackout occurred in a 56-minute window between the final scheduled contact from the jet’s Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System and a failed attempt from dispatchers to contact the crew.
In the end, a flight that should have taken just over five hours came to a halt over the southern Indian Ocean, seven hours and 38 minutes after takeoff.
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The report explains “fuel exhaustion was probable” and it is believed “the right engine flamed-out (shutdown) first followed by the left engine” about 15 minutes later.It is suggested the “uncontrolled but stable” aircraft then circled downwards and hit the water.
That sounds fucking awful. Imagine just flying, knowing you were going to die when fuel ran out. What the hell do you think the captains said? Who knows. It’s still not even certain what may have caused the outage.
The report provides four possible explanations for the outage, which place blame either on human intervention or a technical fault: crew action in the cockpit using overhead switches, a sudden error requiring an Auxiliary Power Unit to start emergency power, somebody pulling out and resetting circuit breakers in the equipment bay, or intermittent technical failures.
Read The Daily Beast’s entire piece here.