Nitpicker 330 ref your post ~5554 above, why are you dismissing a wheel well fire with such ease. The T7 was heavy and with high relative humidity at KL that night the take-off run would have been long. A deflated tyre may have been detected and if a fire developed in the wheel well EIDAS would have reported that as you correctly point out, however let’s assume they were working through the QRH when events overtook the crew. Any fire especially an electrical fire would be extremely serious and they may have pulled all the main busses while working through the QRH and were restoring electrical circuits in an attempt to identify the bad circuit. Such an action would of course disable the comms including the transponder; however the priority must be to identify and isolate the fire. Even in the worst case the vital bus however would still be good containing the radio including 121.5
FWIW: The hole that I see in this analysis is the flight deck crew continuing on the first leg of their route / departure to the handover point and checking out with ATC on VHF with no meniton of a malfunction, nor of a fire, and likewise no record of them contacting on the company ops freq of such a problem. *retracted*
EDIT: for G-ARVH
We are talking about a deflated tyre that caught fire on take-off. It’s slow burning and smouldering, this has happened elsewhere in the world before in Nigeria I think leading to the loss of the aircraft. However by the top of the climb everything appears normal with the wheel in its well until they get a EIDAS warning.
I'll retract the critique, but leave it up in case someone else was thinking along the same lines. Thanks for clearing up the scenario.
