The Crash Detectives

by Christine Negroni

  The airliner was at cruise altitude, flying a preprogrammed course. There was very little difference at this point between the Boeing 777 and every other jetliner Fariq had flown. So, in the scenario I envision on Malaysia 370, this would have been the perfect time for Zaharie to tell Fariq, “Your airplane,” leaving the triple seven in the first officer’s hands so he could go to the bathroom. And so he did.

  Alone on the flight deck, Fariq must have enjoyed these moments. He was in sole command of one of the world’s largest airliners, responsible for taking his passengers to their destination.

  Seven years earlier, he had graduated from junior science college, a boarding school three hours north of his family home in Kuala Lumpur. He was accepted into Malaysia Airline’s pilot cadet program, at the Langkawi Aerospace Training Centre, on the northwest coast of the Malay Peninsula. He would get more than flying lessons at the training center. He had a guaranteed job flying for his nation’s flag carrier, which served sixty destinations around the globe and operated the Airbus A380, the world’s largest airliner.

  His professional future was full of promise and so was his personal life. During cadet training he met and fell in love with a fellow student, Nadira Ramli, who became a first officer with AirAsia, a Kuala Lumpur–based low-cost carrier. Ramli, one year younger than Fariq, was so charming that she was selected by AirAsia to represent the company on a public relations and marketing campaign that included a drive across China in 2012. In March 2014, Fariq and Ramli were engaged to be married.

  While Zaharie was out of the cockpit, it would be Fariq’s job to tune the radio to the Ho Chi Minh air traffic control frequency. Once he established contact, he would change the transponder’s four-digit squawk code from the one used in Malaysia to one for transiting to Vietnam-controlled airspace. But instead of making that switch, the transponder stopped transmitting entirely. The question is why.

  A transponder is critical for airliners. It links altitude, direction, speed, and, most significantly, identity to what otherwise would be a tiny anonymous green dot on an air traffic control screen. The transponder provides what is called a secondary return: a data-rich reply to a radar interrogation. Controllers need the transponder to keep planes from colliding in increasingly crowded skies. Airlines use it to track the progress of flights. Pilots depend on it for a timely warning if another plane winds up in their flight path.

  Turning the knob on the lower-right-hand side of the device to the left—to the “standby” mode—effectively shuts off the transponder. This stops sending the plane’s identification information and eliminates the plane’s ability to be seen on the collision avoidance systems of other aircraft. Standby is used mostly while airliners are taxiing at the airport, so all the planes don’t trigger the collision avoidance system. For all intents and purposes, standby is “off.”

  In flight, however, pilots have little reason to turn off the transponder, though there have been cases in which it has stopped transmitting for undetermined reasons. In one perplexing flight in 2006, the lack of secondary radar contributed to a catastrophic collision. An Embraer Legacy business jet was being delivered to New York from Manaus in Brazil. While flying over a remote jungle region, it hit a GOL Airlines Boeing 737 flying in the opposite direction at the same altitude. The pilots of the Legacy said they did not intentionally shut off the transponder, but it was in standby mode, so as they flew westward at thirty-seven thousand feet, an altitude normally reserved for eastbound flights,2 the plane was invisible to the GOL Airlines collision avoidance system. These systems require both planes to have a transponder operating to issue an alert.

  The winglet of the small business jet sliced through the left wing of the 737, and the airliner fell from the sky and into the jungle, killing all 154 people on board. The little jet made an emergency landing, and no one aboard was injured. When questioned, neither pilot on the business jet was able to explain what had happened.

  On the captain’s side of the Embraer, the switches for the Honeywell transponder are positioned below a bar that is also used as a pilot footrest. Investigators suspected the captain might have kicked the switch into standby mode. There was also a theory that the lid of the laptop both pilots had been using might have pushed the button into standby. Less than a year earlier, Honeywell discovered a software glitch on more than thirteen hundred devices that could make them go into standby mode if pilots failed to dial the squawk code in less than five seconds. So there were plenty of theories about what might have happened. Ultimately, though, the Brazilians concluded that the software problem was not an issue on the Legacy involved in the collision, and what happened in that case remained a mystery.

  In the United States, however, the Brazilian accident led the safety authorities to one unequivocal conclusion: something needed to change. The FAA issued a rule in 2010 that on new airplanes, the warning of an inoperative transponder should be more obvious to the pilots. Planes produced before the rule, including 9M-MRO, the registration for the plane that was flying as Malaysia 370, would not be affected.

  Zaharie left the cockpit for what is delicately called a “biological break.” Perhaps he would have stopped by the galley for a cup of coffee or a snack. It’s a long flight at cruise altitude, so there would have been no rush to get back to the flight deck. The tasks that First Officer Fariq had to take care of were routine. Easy peasy, as they say.

  Fariq knew he had to get the squawk code from Ho Chi Minh—but first he had to tune the radio to that frequency. This is about the time when, I think, a rapid decompression happened near or in the cockpit. It would have made a deep and startling noise, like a clap or the sound of a champagne bottle uncorking, only much, much louder and sharper. This would have been followed by a rush of air and things swirling everywhere. Zaharie’s nearly empty coffee cup, pens, papers—everything loose—would have been tossed about in the wind, including the shoulder straps of Fariq’s seat restraint, which he would have unfastened for comfort not long after the plane’s wheels left the runway at Kuala Lumpur. A white fog would have filled the space as the drop in temperature turned the moist cabin air into mist. The first officer would have realized immediately, This is an emergency. It would have been a neon light in his brain, but it would also have been competing with other lights and sounds, physiological sensations that had to have been both disconcerting and overwhelming.

  The denser air inside Fariq’s body would have rushed out through every orifice, an effect that can be particularly painful in the ears, as anyone who has flown with a head cold already knows. His fingers, hands, and arms would have started to move spastically. Fariq would have struggled to understand this rapid change from normal to pandemonium while irretrievable seconds of intellectual capacity ticked away.

  Emergency, have to get down, have to let someone know. What first? He would have reached over to the transponder to enter 7700, the four digits that will alert everyone on the ground and in the air that something has gone wrong with the plane. His fingers would still have been trembling as he clutched the small round knob on the bottom left of the device and turned it to Standby. It is not what he would have intended, but he would already have begun to lose his mental edge. In an attempt to transmit a message of distress, he would have inadvertently severed the only means air controllers had of identifying his airplane and the details of his flight. It was half a minute past 1:20 in the morning.

  A Fading Glimmer

  It is not difficult to imagine Fariq responding inappropriately. As the Greeks investigating the Helios disaster discovered, only a small portion of pilots has experienced the dangerous seduction of hypoxia. Military aviators in many countries are trained to recognize the symptoms of oxygen deprivation by spending time at twenty-five thousand feet in high-altitude chambers. Yet even military pilots, astronauts, and soldiers are not subjected to the kind of rapid decompression that could have happened on MH-370. The onset of hypoxia above twenty-five thousand feet is too quick, and the health risks too hi
gh, to duplicate it in a high-altitude chamber.

  When MH-370 lost secondary radar and disappeared from controllers’ screens at thirty-five thousand feet, the plane wasn’t exactly invisible. A two-hundred-foot blob of metal can hardly be missed by the sweep of a radar signal, even if the antenna is as far as two hundred miles away. However, the signal sent back, called an echo, does not transmit the precise information provided by the transponder. The object is picked up on the radar sweep in what is called “primary” mode. Things as different in size and nature as a flock of geese, a cloud, or a ship can all cause the radar signal to ricochet, and show up on the screen as a green blip.

  Primary radar is a “no-frills” target. Viewing these kinds of blips over time allows calculation of an object’s speed, which can help determine if it is an airplane, as few things move as fast as an airliner. Sometimes it is possible to tell what kind of plane it is because different planes move at different speeds. The Boeing 777 cruises at around five hundred seventy-five miles per hour.

  Altitude is a different story. It is much more complicated to judge height, and altitude cannot be determined from primary civilian radar. Only military radar has this capability.

  After MH-370 went missing, stories and theories emerged based on a Reuters wire service report that the airliner went on a wild ride of ascents and descents after turning back toward Kuala Lumpur. While this was based on real information collected and reviewed by international military and civilian radar specialists, some of the data was “essentially useless,” according to one of the men who participated in the evaluation and who wishes to remain anonymous.

  Not all the air defense systems capable of capturing altitude actually got it, and among the altitude data collected were indications that the target thought to be the plane was dropping thousands of feet in a few seconds. This had to be considered erroneous, because the plane could not move that quickly.

  “It was being reported accurately as far as it went. It was showing a forty-thousand-to twenty-five-thousand-foot descent, but to make an airliner do that would require a ten-thousand-foot-per-minute descent,” I was told by my source, more than twice even a rapid ascent rate. “A lot of the numbers were not reasonable.”

  What was never reported is that this questionable altitude information caused a controversy among those reviewing the tapes, because some civilian radar specialists thought it indicated that the plane had been hit by a missile. This dominated the discussion for several days, with the Malaysian Air Force arguing against the theory. What settled it, according to the participant who told me about it, was the lack of wreckage in the South China Sea. “The search was going on in that area, the last place the airplane was seen, but they weren’t finding anything,” this person said. “If it had been shot down you would have found pieces of stuff, but there was no evidence to back up that theory, so we came to a consensus that’s not what happened.”

  That consensus got another boost when the engineers from the satellite company Inmarsat showed up in Kuala Lumpur a few days later to share with the team information that the airplane had not come to a sudden end after disappearing from radar, but flew on a lengthier and far more puzzling journey. They knew this because the airplane was exchanging digital handshakes with a communications satellite. The logs of those exchanges also provided a small slice of data about 9M-MRO’s final hours.

  Before the plane departed Kuala Lumpur it was loaded with just under 111,000 pounds of jet fuel. Based on fuel consumption between 15,000 and 17,000 pounds per hour on a Boeing 777-200, at best the plane had 7.2 hours of flying time. The Inmarsat data showed the plane did fly slightly longer, for 7.5 hours, meaning it could not have engaged in steep ascents or low-altitude flying, both of which burn more fuel.

  The satellite data also indicated that nothing could have happened to the airplane to cause a decrease in its performance, such as a debilitating fire or structural damage. These would have caused more drag or prevented the plane from remaining aloft as long as it did.

  Like the no-frills radar data, the equally unpretentious signals between the airliner and the satellite communication network would become a significant source of information, providing facts even the experts didn’t know they had.

  While the radar intermittently picked up the presence of something moving at the speed of a 777 heading southwest over the peninsula, inside the cockpit of 9M-MRO, Fariq’s brain would have been hovering in a state of befuddlement. He would have been not in the game but not entirely out of it, either. When the interior atmosphere of the 777 suddenly zoomed from eight thousand to more than thirty thousand feet, the young pilot did the wrong things as his rapidly diminishing mental state was telling him he was doing the right things. He would not have become aware of his error: hypoxia victims think they are performing brilliantly.

  When I try to imagine Fariq’s compromised intellectual state, I recall an army aviator in an altitude chamber training session, later posted on YouTube. I could not stop watching the astonishing transformation of the man in the video, identified as Number 14.

  The young soldier is flanked by two others using supplemental oxygen, but Number 14 has his regulator off in order to experience hypoxia. He holds a deck of cards and has been asked to flip through them one by one, announcing the number and suit before moving on to the next card. The altitude in the chamber is twenty-five thousand feet.

  “I feel really good right now,” Number 14 says as he begins announcing, “Six of spades,” and showing a six of spades to the camera. “No symptoms yet.” In twenty-four seconds he reports feeling tingling “in my toes and in my toes.” One minute in, Number 14 gets his first card wrong. He identifies a five of spades as a four of spades. After being asked twice to look again and making the correction, he calls every card the four of spades.

  After two minutes, as his thinking gets increasingly sloppy, Number 14 is asked, “Sir, what would you do if this was an aircraft?” to which he replies, “Four of spades, four of spades.” Ninety seconds later, after ignoring several requests that he put on his regulator, a seatmate does it for him.

  Sessions like this are intended to demonstrate to future pilots the danger of hypoxia. Like the drunk who’s convinced he’s the funniest guy in the room, a pilot suffering from hypoxia can feel a heightened sense of competence and well-being, what one pilot called “a lightheaded euphoria.”

  This is a tricky issue, because hypoxia can lead to brain death. People experiencing it ought to be trying to get some oxygen STAT, but they often don’t. Hypoxia creates a state of idiotic bliss. One commenter on the YouTube video wrote, “Make this legal,” because it sure does look like silly fun.

  I expected to have a similar experience when I joined two dozen pilot cadets from Taiwan’s EVA Air for a daylong hypoxia awareness training session at the Del E. Webb High Altitude Training Chamber at Arizona State University Polytechnic at Mesa, run by hypoxia specialist Dr. Robert Garner.

  Prepared for the goofy, loopy, playful effects of oxygen deprivation, I removed my mask when the hypobaric chamber reached the atmospheric equivalent of twenty-five thousand feet. I began carefully doing the simple math problems on the clipboard given to me and smugly noted that I was getting them right. Some of my classmates were also diligently writing, but others were looking around grinning. My fellow student Shih-Chieh Lu said the sensation was like that of being drunk. After about one minute, my breathing was labored. The head lolling started two minutes in.

  “Hot,” I said, more an exhalation than a statement, because it required a lot of effort just to push the microphone button to speak to the chamber operator. That was it. I passed out, and chamber attendant Dillon Fielitz got an oxygen mask on my uncooperative head. In another minute, the oxygen worked its magic and I was roused from my oblivion. I was unaware that I had lost consciousness and had no recollection that Fielitz had come to my aid.

  “This high-altitude chamber training experience is quite helpful to the pilot,” another cadet, Yuchu
an Chen, told me in an e-mail later. “It will become a hazardous situation if pilots encounter the loss of pressurization without any correction.” Silliness or unconsciousness, the symptoms can vary, but Yuchuan’s impression is the hoped-for takeaway of altitude chamber training, Dr. Garner said.

  Hypoxia was responsible for at least seven fatal aviation accidents since 1999, and many more near disasters. In 2008, both pilots on a Kalitta Flying Service Learjet became hypoxic at thirty-two thousand feet. The flight had just been handed over to Cleveland ATC (air traffic control) when the controller became concerned about the halting transmission of the pilot and the sound of an alarm in the background. In what seems like farcical overenunciation that makes a lot of sense to me now, the captain explained to the controller that he was “Unable . . . to . . . control altitude. Unable . . . to . . . control . . . airspeed. Unable . . . to . . . control heading.” He added, “Other than that, everything . . . A-OK.”

  It must have taken extraordinary effort for the Kalitta pilot to pierce his mental fog enough to make the emergency call. Recognizing the problem, controllers cleared the Learjet to an immediate descent to eleven thousand feet. What made the pilot perceive and react to the instruction remains a mystery and a miracle, as it certainly saved lives. The plane flew lower, the crew revived, and the plane landed safely.

  A similar scenario on Malaysia 370 doesn’t explain everything, but it does explain a lot. Fariq would have known right away that he had a problem, even without the steady high/low electronic sound of the altitude warning horn. And at some point he must have remembered to put on his oxygen mask. It was stored in a chamber the size of a car glove compartment, below his armrest. He may have been slowed by his sluggish movements or confounded by the difficulty of squeezing the red tabs together with his thumb and middle finger so that the huge circle of rubber would expand enough to go over his head before he released the tabs to shrink it back to secure the regulator tightly over his nose and mouth. Thick clear plastic goggles covered his eyes, and a gasket should have created a seal.