Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 experienced significant changes in altitude after it lost contact with ground control, and altered its course more than once as if still under the command of a pilot, American officials and others familiar with the investigation said Friday.Radar signals recorded by the Malaysian military appear to show the missing airliner climbing to 45,000 feet, above the approved altitude limit for a Boeing 777-200, soon after it disappeared from civilian radar and made a sharp turn to the west, according to a preliminary assessment by a person familiar with the data.
The radar track, which the Malaysian government has not released but says it has provided to the United States and China, then shows the plane descending unevenly to 23,000 feet, below normal cruising levels, as it approached the densely populated island of Penang, one of the country’s largest. There, the plane turned from a southwest-bound course, climbed to a higher altitude and flew northwest over the Strait of Malacca toward the Indian Ocean.
Investigators have also examined data transmitted from the plane’s Rolls-Royce engines that shows it descending 40,000 feet in the space of a minute, according to a senior American official briefed on the investigation. But investigators do not believe the readings are accurate because the aircraft would most likely have taken longer to fall such a distance.
“A lot of stock cannot be put in the altitude data” sent from the engines, one official said. “A lot of this doesn’t make sense.”
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But the Malaysian military radar data, which local authorities have declined to provide to the public, added significant new information about the flight immediately after ground controllers lost contact with it. The combination of altitude changes and at least two significant course corrections could have a variety of explanations, including that a pilot or a hijacker intentionally diverted the plane, or that it flew unevenly without a pilot after the crew became disabled.
The erratic movements of the aircraft after it diverted course and flew over the country also raise questions about why the military did not respond to the flight emergency. Malaysian officials have acknowledged that military radar may have detected the plane, but have said they took no action because it did not appear hostile.
Seven days after the jet’s disappearance, Malaysian authorities have shared few details with American investigators, frustrating senior officials in Washington. “They’re keeping us at a distance,” one of the officials said.
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Cengiz Turkoglu, a senior lecturer in aeronautical engineering at City University London who specializes in aviation safety, said a deliberate act in the cockpit could cause a radical change in altitude. “It is extremely difficult for an aircraft to physically, however heavy it might be, to free fall,” he said.
An Asia-based pilot of a Boeing 777-200, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to reporters, said an ascent above the plane’s service limit of 43,100 feet, along with a depressurized cabin, could have rendered the passengers and crew unconscious, and could be a deliberate maneuver by a pilot or a hijacker.
Other experts said that altitude changes would be expected if the pilots became disabled after the plane’s autopilot was disengaged. Changes in the weight distribution on the plane as fuel burned off would make the plane descend and climb repeatedly, though changes in course would be harder to explain.
― Ned Raggett, Friday, 14 March 2014 22:36 (twelve years ago)