The Crash Detectives

by Christine Negroni

  So what happened? Why did it fail to revive him? Why didn’t Captain Zaharie return to the cockpit? Everything was in chaos, the altitude warning alarm still clanging.

  I find it logical to assume that Zaharie visited the business-class bathroom near the flight deck that is also used by the flight crew. In this and all the airline’s 777s’ bathrooms, a drop-down mask is there to provide oxygen in the case of depressurization. Imagine what it would have been like for Zaharie to see the yellow plastic cup bob down after the depressurization. He would have been momentary rattled, but with his experience, he would have realized immediately what had happened and what needed to be done.

  Still, he had to make a choice: try to get back to the cockpit without supplemental oxygen, or remain in the bathroom and wait for Fariq to get the airplane to a lower altitude and then rejoin him on the flight deck. I’m guessing Zaharie wasn’t confident in Fariq’s ability to handle the emergency and chose the former course of action. But the effect of oxygen deprivation would have been crippling for Zaharie, too. Air would have been exploding from his respiratory and digestive systems. His extremities would have been shaking. He would have struggled to get out of the bathroom. Perhaps he looked for a flight attendant or a portable oxygen tank. Perhaps he stopped to assess the situation in the cabin. Perhaps he retained focus and moved quickly to the cockpit door.

  The distance between the bathroom and the cockpit is just a few steps, but like Fariq, Zaharie was a smoker and probably more susceptible to the effects of oxygen deprivation. If he got out of the bathroom, if he got down the narrow corridor, if he got to the door of the cockpit without losing consciousness or cognitive function, another challenge would have awaited him.

  The cockpit door unlocks automatically when cabin altitude is lost. Would Zaharie have remembered that? Or did he, by force of habit, stop outside the door and try to enter the code? Did he lose precious seconds struggling to remember a passcode he did not need? Or did he just grab the handle and open the door, but succumb to the lack of oxygen before getting into his seat? Pilots at Malaysia Airlines tell me that in a rapid decompression, it would have been very difficult for Captain Zaharie to get back onto the flight deck. All the previous cases of rapid depressurization on airliners, those that successfully landed and the few that crashed, bring home with chilling clarity that physical exertion eats away at the too-few seconds of useful consciousness.

  The captain was unable to regain command of the airplane. If he had, things might have turned out very differently.

  Incomprehensible

  On the flight deck, Fariq was wearing his oxygen mask. He was getting enough oxygen to sustain some level of intelligent thought. Why hasn’t Captain Zaharie returned? he must have thought. And he must have realized that he needed to get the plane back on the ground.

  The control panel for the flight management system is located between the two pilot seats, above the throttles, where it is easily accessible to whichever pilot is programming it. The FMS has many functions, including allowing the crew to send text messages to the airline’s operations desk. We know no messages were sent. Yet in an emergency, the FMS stores navigational information for the closest airports, so that in seconds the pilots can select a destination and head there.

  From where the 777 was flying, between the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, if Fariq turned the plane around, the divert airports would include Penang and Langkawi, according to pilots who fly in the region. These choices would have appeared on the screen in a list, waiting for the pilot to select one of them.

  Who knows how much actual thinking Fariq was able to accomplish, but for some reason he selected Penang, Malaysia’s third-busiest airport, with a ten-thousand-foot runway. The next choice appeared on the screen. DIVERT NOW? Fariq selected, EXECUTE.

  The plane immediately began a slow, orchestrated turn, and by 1:30 it was headed south-southwest to Malaysia, once again.

  The amount of time a person can remain conscious and thinking at high altitudes is called the time of useful consciousness. While that time varies depending on many factors, including health, age, and a genetic predisposition, the ballpark figure for how long Fariq had before he lost his ability to think clearly would be fifteen to thirty seconds. We know that Fariq, or whichever pilot was in the cockpit, maintained sufficient intellectual capacity to turn the airplane around and select a course toward Penang. Yet that these maneuvers were made without a radio call and after the transponder became inoperative leads me to conclude that the pilot handling the airplane was compromised to such an extent that while he could make simple decisions about the direction of the airplane, not much more sensible action could have been expected of him.

  Fariq was breathing through a mask. The default position should have given him 100 percent oxygen, and at thirty-five thousand feet, positive pressure actually pushes the oxygen into the wearer’s nose. I experienced this during my time at the ASU high-altitude training chamber. It felt like an air-conditioning vent was being pressed to my face.

  When all is working well, the mask should rejuvenate. Fariq’s vision would have been clear again and his thoughts solidified, except, judging from what happened next, he did not return to his senses. The primary indicator of that is that the plane did not start to descend.

  Because of the seriousness of loss of pressurization in flight, the modern airliner has a belt-and-suspenders approach to the hazard. The oxygen mask is the belt, and emergency descent is the suspenders. They are equally important, two routes to the same destination: clearheadedness.

  In his book Of Flight and Life, Charles Lindbergh tells of testing an unpressurized fighter plane at thirty-six thousand feet in 1943 when his oxygen supply abruptly stopped. “I know from altitude-chamber experience that I have about 15 seconds of consciousness left at this altitude—neither time nor clearness of mind to check hoses and connections. Life demands oxygen and the only sure supply lies four miles beneath me,” he writes.

  As he recounts in the book, Lindbergh sent the airplane into a dive, rocketing toward earth as he passed out. Not until he was at fifteen thousand feet did he come to and witness the clarity of “the cockpit, the plane, the earth and sky.”

  That was not Fariq’s experience. The razor’s edge was dull. His mask was providing him with enough oxygen to maintain some awareness, but he was not thinking clearly.

  Any number of problems may have prevented Fariq from getting enough oxygen even while wearing his mask. Something wrong with the mask, the oxygen supply, or the connection between the two could explain why he might not have experienced what Lindbergh called “the flood of perception through nerve and tissue.”

  In the hours before MH-370 departed for Beijing, mechanics had serviced the two oxygen containers for the cockpit, topping them off and restoring the pressure to eighteen hundred pounds per square inch. After reinstalling the bottles, mechanics must reopen the valve fully, or the proper supply of air will not flow to the mask. “One or two times a year out of the hundreds of times oxygen bottles are changed at a major U.S. airline, a mechanic may fail to do this,” according to a mechanic who agreed to discuss the issue if I did not identify him.

  “It’s a lapse in memory, and it’s embarrassing,” he told me. I was asking my contact about this because of a story I heard from a pilot who flies for a different U.S. carrier. The pilot was conducting his preflight check when he discovered there was little oxygen flowing to his mask. “I had the mechanic come to the cockpit,” he told me—again, as long as I did not use his name—and it was then that they discovered the supply valve was barely open. “He was shocked; he was ashen,” the captain said, describing the mechanic, who then got a little spooky. “You all would have died,” the mechanic told him.

  On many airliners, this important final action after servicing the oxygen is not left to a mechanic’s memory. A message appears on a flight deck monitor notifying the pilots if the oxygen pressure drops between the tank and the mask. If the supply line
between the tank and the mask is full, the indicator will show that the oxygen system is working properly, but it does not indicate if the valve is only partially open, which would reduce the oxygen available to the pilot in a depressurization event.

  “To the pilot doing the preflight, it looks, because of the trapped air in the supply line, that the system it is fully pressurized, and if he looks at the monitor it will show the tank is fully charged,” this pilot told me. If the crew needs oxygen during the flight, that restricted flow could cause a problem for the pilots. “Once that stored volume of oxygen in the supply line flows out, the pressure will drop within this line to some value that is insufficient. It won’t supply full oxygen, so no matter how hard he breathes, he is not going to get enough oxygen.”

  There are other potential pitfalls. Leaks in the supply tubes or in the seal holding the mask on the face can diminish the supply to the pilot. While working for the NTSB, Dr. Mitch Garber said he would sometimes fly in the cockpit observer seat. On three occasions he discovered a problem with his oxygen mask. Once, the air-filled tubes that contract to hold the mask to the head were leaking. Another time, the inflation of the tubes was followed by a loud pop and no air flow. The one he remembers best is the time the mask worked fine in the box, but when he pulled it out of the holder, it fell apart. “That was the one that got me kicked off the plane, because there were no other masks,” he said, adding, “These things sit in these boxes for a long time.”

  Another factor that could have kept Fariq from regaining full cognitive function was if the aneroid barometer in the regulator of his mask failed so that it did not correctly sense cabin altitude. Above thirty-five thousand feet, this small bellows-like device triggers the mask to provide not just a mix of pressurized air but 100 percent oxygen under pressure.

  In a decompression at higher altitudes there is a delay between a pilot’s first breath of supplemental oxygen and its arrival in the brain. James Stabile, an airline pilot and a longtime member of the industry committee overseeing standards for aircraft oxygen systems, asked me to imagine little boxcars loaded with oxygen, chugging first from the lungs, where oxygen will enter the bloodstream, then to the heart and then to the brain.

  When the oxygen pressure drops suddenly, as in a rapid decompression, gas races out of the body, including out of the lungs. The time it takes for this oxygen shortage to reach the brain is about ten to twelve seconds. That’s the time of useful consciousness at high altitudes. Pushing 100 percent oxygen into the lungs will enable the next several boxcars to resupply the brain, switching it back on, and “quite often the individual will not even be aware of this cognitive lapse,” Stabile said.

  The difference between what happened on Helios Flight 522 and the private jet carrying Payne Stewart and what I believe occurred on 9M-MRO (the plane that was Malaysia Flight 370) is that when it departed Kuala Lumpur, the cabin was pressurized. Had it not been, the pilots’ exchange with air traffic control at 1:19 a.m. would have indicated that something was amiss. The problem would also have been transmitted via the 1:07 a.m. normal ACARS status report. What happened on Flight 370 happened suddenly.

  Because pilots succumb to hypoxia so quickly at cruise altitude, some government aviation regulators require that if one pilot leaves the cockpit, the crew member remaining wear the emergency oxygen mask. And while the intent is good, the execution is inconsistent. Crews frequently ignore the rule. One pilot told me he had not put on his oxygen mask in five years; nor had he been asked to by a fellow pilot vacating the cockpit. “It is incredibly cumbersome,” he told me.

  John Gadzinski, a pilot with a U.S. airline and a private safety consultant, told me why so few pilots comply. “You have to take off your headset and put it back on and maybe even take your glasses off. You then have to speak through the microphone in the mask and reset the communications when you stow the mask again,” he told me. “Pilots are human, and ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time, nothing bad ever happens on a flight.”

  So I think that when Zaharie left the cockpit, leaving Fariq at the controls, the young first officer did not put on his mask. Neither pilot anticipated the number of things that could have gone wrong, from the banal to the bizarre. Here are a few:

  In 2011 a rupture in the roof of a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 at thirty-four thousand feet caused a rapid loss of pressure on a flight in Arizona. Passenger masks dropped, but one flight attendant who was trying to use the public address system before putting on his mask lost consciousness, as did the passenger who tried to help him. The pilots made an emergency descent and landed without further problems.

  Faulty door seals and breaks in the structure of an airplane have been known to cause decompressions. In one case, a passenger oxygen bottle exploded on a Qantas Boeing 747 in 2008. The bottle shot through the side of the airplane like a small missile, leaving a hole large enough to cause a rapid decompression. No one was injured.

  Sometimes, however, decompressions do turn deadly. In one horrific case in 1988, an eighteen-foot section of an Aloha Airlines 737 tore off on a flight to Honolulu, sucking a flight attendant out of the airplane.

  British Airways Flight 5390 is another macabre story. This was an early morning trip from Birmingham, England, to Málaga, Spain, on a sunny day in June 1990. As the BAC-111 jet with eighty-one people on board passed through seventeen thousand feet, the cockpit windshield blew out. Capt. Tim Lancaster was partially sucked out of the hole, but his legs got tangled in the flight controls.

  Flight steward Nigel Ogden had just turned to leave the flight deck, after checking to see if the pilots wanted tea, when he heard the blast. He thought a bomb had gone off. When he turned around, he saw the captain’s legs.

  “I jumped over the control column and grabbed him round his waist to avoid him going out completely,” Ogden wrote in a first-person account for a local newspaper.

  In his unexpected exit through the cockpit window, Lancaster had kicked off the autopilot. While another flight attendant raced in to help keep the captain from disappearing, First Officer Alistair Atcheson regained control of the airplane, and then prepared for an emergency landing, which he accomplished just eighteen minutes later. Captain Lancaster survived, and returned to flying. An examination of the airplane showed that while replacing the windshield days earlier, a mechanic had used screws slightly shorter than those required, so the new window was not effectively secured.

  So you can see that in the case of Malaysia 370, a loss of pressurization mishandled by the pilot is neither farfetched nor unprecedented. It fits the facts we know.

  By 1:52 a.m., Fariq had taken the plane back across Malaysia and to Penang. Here he made yet another decision explicable only by a hypoxia-induced, half-witted state. He turned the plane north. Perhaps he had the intention of landing at Langkawi International Airport, where he’d learned to fly. Surely the airfield was as familiar to him as his own driveway, and the runway was nearly two thousand feet longer than that at Penang. He would be coming in heavy, with much of the fuel loaded on the plane in Kuala Lumpur still in the tanks. If Fariq did any mental processing at all, he may have concluded the more runway, the better, and Langkawi had a lot of it. Yet I think he was no longer doing much reasoning, because his ability to do that was long gone. Turning to the northwest, 9M-MRO continued to fly. There was no effort to descend or to begin an approach to the airport. Fariq had been flying for thirty-two minutes since the occurrence of whatever had caused the flight to go amiss. Still at cruise altitude, the plane passed over VAMPI—one of the many navigational waypoints in the sky, all of which have five letter names. Then the plane flew north of the next one, MEKAR, disappearing for good somewhere at the northernmost part of Sumatra.

  Intermittent Power

  Fariq’s mental incapacitation explains a series of perplexing events that began with a sudden and unknown catastrophic occurrence. Some have theorized it was related to the load of lithium-ion batteries the plane was carrying. That’s an iffy the
ory to me, for two reasons. First, a lithium-ion battery fire is a frightening thing, which you will read about later in this book. I have little doubt that in such an alarming circumstance, the pilots would have understood the need to get the airplane on the ground quickly. Moreover, had there been a fire, it is unlikely it would have disabled the crew without causing significant damage to the structure of the airplane, and we know the plane continued to fly with notable efficiency for many more hours after the initial problem.

  Whatever happened to Flight 370 probably caused both the depressurization and an encompassing failure in the airplane’s electrical system. It is not knowable if Fariq accidentally turned off the transponder or if it failed on its own. The same is true for the loss of the ACARS reporting system: did it fail or was it intentionally switched off for some reason? Yet an even more intriguing clue is the loss of regular transmissions from the plane to the satellite sometime between 1:07 a.m. and 1:37 a.m., with the return of the signal at 2:25 a.m. Even those paying attention to the Flight 370 story have heard little about this peculiar lapse.

  During the ongoing news coverage, people learned that airliners regularly transmit a status message: a “ping” or “handshake” in the same way a mobile phone that is powered on sends out signals to nearby cell towers even when it is not being used to make a call. A phone would stop doing this only if it were turned off or in aircraft mode.

  This is the analogy used by the engineers at Inmarsat to explain what happened on MH-370 at the same time that so many other inexplicable events were occurring. The airplane’s signal to the satellite stopped, and returned only when the airplane logged back on at 2:25, as if powering on at the beginning of a flight.