Five days after a Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 between Kuala lumpur and Beijing disappeared, which had 239 people on board, things are getting even stranger. The aircraft vanished off radar screens 150 kilometres off the coast of Vietnam while flying over the Gulf of Thailand and into the South China Sea. Quite unlike the disappearance of Air France flight AF447 over the Atlantic in 2009, this was not the middle of a very deep ocean, in fact the Gulf of Thailand is very shallow body of water.
However, over the past five days several other clues have emerged. Two of the passengers onboard were Iranians travelling on stolen European documents, which raised the threat that this was a terrorist attack. However, it now appears that both these passengers were likely to be illegal immigrants. While this has raised questions on why immigration authorities in Kuala lumpur did not scan the passports on the global police network Interpol’s lost and Stolen Passport database, it might not have caused the crash.
On an aside, the issue of stolen passports came to the fore during the crash of Air India Express flight IX812 in Mangalore when it came to be discovered that 10 passengers on that flight had stolen documents. As a result Dubai, from where that flight had originated, has become one of the largest users of Interpol’s database after the United States and the United Kingdom.
Back to flight MH370, when the plane vanished off the radar screen, people wondered if it just fell from the skies, which happens during a catastrophic incident like a bomb, similar to the terrorist incident that felled Air India’s Boeing 747 Kanishka from the skies near Ireland in June, 1985. But now, Malaysian authorities claim that the plane had apparently turned around. So much so, that the search area for debris and wreckage also includes the Straits of Malacca and the Andaman Sea on the western side of the Malayan peninsula.
This raises another question. How on earth could a plane fly across a landmass undetectedIJ The Boeing 777-200ER that was operating flight MH370 is one of the largest commercial aircraft in the world and in the configuration used would have weighed close to 250 tons. In fact after several mid-air collisions such as the tragic accident over Chakri Dadri, Haryana in 1996 when an Uzbek Ilyushin 76 slammed into a Saudia 747 killing over 300 people, most radar systems at airports have shifted to “secondary radar” systems.
Radar, which is the short form of ‘Radio Detection and Ranging’ was developed by the British during World War II and primary radar which all early radar systems used even by civilian air controllers was based on depended on the system broadcasting a radio wave and the controllers determining the location of the plane after seeing their reflections. Unfortunately, primary radar did not identify the aircraft or give its precise location. After the Chakri Dadri incident and another mid-air collision over Uberlingen in Germany, almost every civilian radar system in the world moved to ‘Secondary Radar’ systems.
Secondary Radar systems depend on aircraft transmitting their precise location using satellites and Very High Frequency (VHF) radio through something called an Automatic Dependant Surveillance-Broadcast or ADS-B system. If you visit websites such as www.flightradar24.com you can track thousands of aircraft across the world as ADS-B information is in the public domain. However, ADS-B information is dependant on the transponder transmitting the data to be switched on, if it is switched off, as might have happened in the case of MH370, the plane becomes invisible to civilian controllers.
But that raises more questions, even if the ADS-B transponder was switched off, the aircraft would still be visible, particularly at high altitude on primary radar systems. While civilian air traffic controllers might depend heavily on secondary radar, military controllers still use primary radar. It is puzzling how an aircraft could have crossed the entire length of the Malayan peninsula without activating all sorts of warnings for an Air Force.
It is likely given that Malaysia is not like India where following the Purulia air-drop and the fact that India is bordered by nations with which we have been at war in the recent past, military controllers in India are on a hair trigger with some of the most sensitive radar installations in the world. In fact, news has emerged that on February 20 an ‘unidentified flying object’ (UFO) near the border at Amritsar led the Indian Air Force to scramble a Sukhoi-30MKI which then had two near misses with civilian aircraft at their assigned altitudes. The UFO turned out to be a weather balloon.
Still, how a big plane managed to fly across several hundred kilometres of land without being detected, or raising alarms raises even more questions. Analysts have independently determined that the flight did not have a huge amount of fuel onboard, and given available information, if it turned west, the longest distance it could have travelled would have been to the western coast of India.
In addition, it is still not clear whether this aircraft had an automated fault reporting system called Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) which sends information back to the airline frequently through the flight and instantly when something deviates from normal flight, including if an autopilot is disabled, which happens if the aircraft changes its planned route.
It has been reported that the flight did send two status updates to Rolls-Royce, the manufacturer of the engines the plane was using, but what those messages were has not been disclosed. In the case of Air France 447, the authorities had revealed that the airline got a slew of fault messages over ACARS early on in the investigation, in this case there have been no revelations but since most aircraft have ACARS nowadays, the authorities must have kept the information secret.
The fact that the wreckage has not been found has obviously led to speculation, with theories like ‘Asia’s Bermuda Triangle’ and even Alien Abduction being discussed on social media and online forums. It took searchers five days to locate the wreckage of Air France 447 in the Atlantic. Until the wreckage is found or the authorities in Malaysia make an announcement of what could have happened, the speculation will just continue to grow. It is remarkable to think that in this age of global communication, a plane can just disappear into thin air. It makes the argument for aircraft to constantly be transmitting their vital parameters over satellite or radio very strong as data from black boxes are contingent on the aircraft being located, sometimes a tough and very expensive ask if the plane has crashed into the sea.
In the meantime, we ought to pray for those who still await information of what exactly happened to their friends and family.