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发帖数: 1563 | 1 (CNN) -- As mystery surrounds the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight
MH 370, which was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing early Saturday, CNN'
s aviation expert Richard Quest said the airliner would have been at the
safest point in the flight.
"It was two hours into the flight -- this would have been classed as the '
cruise portion of the flight,'" he said. "You break down the flight into
taxi, take-off, climb out and then cruise.
"So in that particular point of the flight, this is the safest part, nothing
is supposed to go wrong. The aircraft is at altitude on auto-pilot, the
pilots are making minor corrections and changes for height as the plane
burns off fuel -- the plane will be going higher and higher -- so this is
extremely serious that something happened at this point in the flight."
READ MORE: No distress signal, no contact
Quest, who coincidentally had been working on a story with the carrier
recently, said the aircraft -- a Boeing 777-200 -- would have been around 11
years old, powered by two British-made Rolls-Royce Trent engines.
Map: Malaysia airliner lost contactMap: Malaysia airliner lost contact
At least 3 Americans aboard missing plane Plane loses contact with airline
"So it's not a particularly old aircraft. Malaysia has 15 777-200s in its
fleet, it's an extremely experienced operator of this type of aircraft. It's
a very reputable airline with a very good safety record."
Back-up power
Greg Feith, a former investigator with the National Transportation Safety
Board (NTSB) in the United States, suggested the pilots should have been
able to report in, even if power on the aircraft had failed.
"The airplane by certification has to have battery back-up power -- they
still have to be able to utilize certain flight instruments and
communication tools to complete the flight safely.
"So you could lose all the generators, you could have both engines out, but
the battery back-up -- which will only work for a certain time -- is
intended for emergency situations."
Feith also pointed to the possibility of an issue with the pressurization of
the aircraft.
"If you have a high-altitude pressurization problem, catastrophic
decompression, the time of useful consciousness (the time a pilot can
operate with an insufficient oxygen supply) in the 30,000-40,000-feet range
is a matter of seconds."
Asked whether it was likely the airliner could have made an emergency
landing, Quest said it was possible but unlikely.
"You're not talking about a Cessna here. You're talking about a long-haul,
wide-bodied aircraft and that puts it into a completely different league."
Search for aircraft
The lack of communication suggests that something most unfortunate has
happened -- though that does not suggest there are not any persons that need
to be rescued and secured.
Mary Schiavo, former Inspector General, US DOT
But with speculation mounting over whether Flight MH 370, which was carrying
227 passengers and 12 crew, went down on land -- perhaps in Vietnam -- or
in the South China Sea, one aviation expert says it's essential to find the
plane as soon as possible in case there are survivors.
"Given the modern communications and the truly modern equipped (Boeing) 777,
it's highly unlikely this plane would have landed somewhere not contactable
," Mary Schiavo, the former Inspector General of the U.S. Department of
Transportation, told CNN. "Depending on how the plane has gone down, there
could be many survivors in need of aid.
"That plane has many different ways to locate it: Automatic beacons that
tell you where it is; there are several ways to contact it both with radios
and GPS, as well as computer communications within the cockpit.
"But the lack of communication suggests that something most unfortunate has
happened -- though that does not suggest there are not any persons that need
to be rescued and secured."
Schiavo warned that if for some reason the transmitters on the airliner are
not operating, then the search will obviously become far more complex and
time-consuming.
"If they are not working then sadly there are similarities with the Air
France plane, which was traveling from Brazil to Paris, France and was lost
in the ocean. That was very difficult to locate because of the depth of the
ocean," she said.
Air France Flight 447 -- an Airbus A330-203 -- plunged into the Atlantic
Ocean on June 1, 2009, killing all 228 people on board. It took four
searches over the course of nearly two years to locate the bulk of the
wreckage and the majority of the bodies in a mountain range deep under the
ocean.
The incident report detailed how the pilots failed to respond effectively to
problems with the plane's speed sensors or to correct its trajectory when
things first started to go wrong.
Aviation expert Jim Tilmon said the Boeing 777-200 was as sophisticated an
aircraft as they come with an excellent safety record.
"The only fatality has been from the Asiana crash in San Francisco (last
year)," he told CNN's Anderson Cooper. "There's been one other 777 that had
some problems but no-one was hurt. This is really a shock in lots of ways." |
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