Well, I'm nowhere as knowledgeable as this man in aviation, but I do have some mixed feelings regarding his views.
At this point, with what we know, I agree with him that it is likely that someone took control of the plane, but I do allow for the possibility of other mechanical issue scenarios and mechanical issues with human intervention scenarios.
I didn't even know this board had a section for stuff like this
I understand that this post is from over half a year ago and maybe your opinion has changed, but what makes you think this?
Not that anyone asked, but here's my take on MH370:
The chain of events is as follows: The airplane takes off from Kuala Lumpur and climbs towards its cruising altitude. At the airspace border between Malaysia and Vietnam, the pilots sign off from Malaysia Air Traffic Control but never sign on to Vietnam ATC. The aircraft then makes a sharp turn to the left which is consistent with an emergency landing attempt. But the aircraft never leaves its cruising altitude and crashes into the indian ocean supposedly because it runs out of fuel. This is consistent with what an airplane is designed to do. Airplanes are inherently stable, which means that even without control inputs, an airplane must have the tendency to return to level flight after an upset in any direction, be it a roll or a nose up/down upset, so it's not unreasonable to assume that the aircraft flew all this time without anyone at the controls.
The question is what caused the deviation from cruise flight? My theory is a cockpit fire.
There is a precedent for a cockpit fire in a Boeing 777, in fact, it's
the exact same type that disappeared:
avherald.com/h?article=44078aa7&opt=0If you look at the photos, you can see that the damage is excessive, even though fire fighters were there within minutes to put the fire out.
The priorities in an emergency for any pilot are "aviate, navigate, communicate". So the pilots would call mayday only after having changed the course to the deviation airport and having tried to put out the fire. When that failed, they probably didn't have an operational radio to call anyone from anymore.
The engines are completely independent from the cockpit, they produce the airplane's electricity that they tap into and the engine control unit FADEC has complete control in case of a loss of communication with the cockpit and would simply keep producing the last requested amount of thrust. There is an example of this happening in an accident with an Airbus A340-600 in Toulouse during ground tests:
avherald.com/h?article=3fd5ab56&opt=0 "Fire Brigade reported, that one engine continued to run for several hours until fuel was exhausted, as the electrics got severed in the accident."
An alternative theory to this is of course a highjacking, but all passengers and crew got checked by all sorts of branches of law enforecement and nothing was found. And even if it was a highjacking, what was the purpose? How could a highjacking possibly go so horribly wrong that the aircraft just flies onwards until it runs out of fuel? In my opinion, the simplest explanation is the most probable. A cockpit fire and subsequent emergency landing attempt would explain the change of course and the lack of radio communication. There is one detail that is somewhat inconsistent with this: The airplane is said to have made a second left hand turn off the coast of Indonesia, as indicated on this map:
avherald.com/img/malaysia_b772_9m-mro_gulf_of_thailand_140308_13.jpg I think this can probably be explained with turbulence or some kind of inflight upset, but I'm not entirely sure. Some people take from this that there must have been someone at the controls, hence the cockpit was intact, hence it was a deliberate act, but I for one am not convinced. I think right now a cockpit fire is the best theory to go by.
It's all speculation at this point, though.
I like this theory for a few reasons:
-It's simple (one cause)
-There's precedent
-It explains the deviation from cruise flight
-It explains the extended flight until the fuel ran out
-However, it does not explain the change of course in the Malacca Strait
My 2 cent.