Electrical fire
At the risk of going over old ground…….my apologies in advance, but here is my two bits worth….
The three confusing issues or facts (unless the authorities are not revealing the full information, as suspected or insinuated elsewhere) are:-
1) No comms from the crew – no mayday, no request for deviation from altitude or track (it is just possible that they may have still had selected Lumpur VHF control frequency – before getting to IGARI to change over to HCM, and actually did make some initial radio calls but the aircraft position was at the extreme range of Lumpur control).
2) No ACARS messages of any serviceability issues with the aircraft. Or more likely, there were some ACARS messages delivered to MAS maintenance control, but MAS have not been able to make sense of them – and are thus not willing to release them to the public. In other words, the messages, (and it is highly likely that there were more than one), does not fit any logical scenario – a la AF447, the actual scenario of the crew stalling the aircraft and then keeping it stalled, (by sustained crew input on the flight controls, all the way to the surface), would have been rejected out of hand even with all of the STATUS messages that AF had received.
3) No debris found – this has been covered ad-nauseum already.
Simon001 in Post #1648, and others, allude to a bomb – a scenario that fits with the above, unless MAS are sitting on some ACARS messages – particularly if their transmission occurred over a period of time – ie the problem was not instantaneous. Even if MAS are not releasing the ACARS message(s) to the public, I cannot believe that they would keep all of the countries, and relevant SAR authorities therein, in the dark about it. Particularly so the Chinese, with the majority of the pax.
Conversely, if MAS are NOT sitting on any ACARS messages then it beggars belief that they would not publically state as much, leading to the rather blameless conclusion (from the MAS point of view) of a bomb event.
Given all of the above, I do not think it was a bomb event.
So, if not a bomb what is the next most likely scenario (speculation here – running the analytic risk of AF447, without all of the FDR and Voice recorder data)?
Assuming that ACARS messages actually were transmitted by the aircraft, they are not straightforward or logical – in the sense that it cannot immediately be concluded or logically considered – to explain:-
· What was the actual single event that must have triggered the flow of messages?, together with
· What was the likely crew response to such an event?.
Given that there have been no suggestions to date of “pilot error” (the usual and handy suspect) from any source, then I suspect it must be quite difficult to make sense of the ACARS messages transmitted by the aircraft.
I would expect that an electrical fire of sorts in the E&E compartment or on the flight deck would/could make various systems unserviceable (including the left/all VHF radios), leading to the transmission of various ACARS messages. The crew would be faced with an acute emergency, and whilst dealing with it, are forced to revert to manual flight (the turn back alluded to by the Malaysian authorities). Either the radios have been rendered inop or the crew workload is so high in the smoke environment that no radio calls are made by the crew.
With an electrical fire raging under floor or on the flight deck, eventually a vital piece of equipment is burnt through or the crew are overcome. By this stage the aircraft could be heading in any direction, but clearly the Malaysian authorities have concluded that it had headed back over the Malay peninsula and, somehow, ended up in the Malacca straits.
Unlikely scenario perhaps –, but so was the AF447 and the Asiana SFO accident.