A former senior captain with a major international airline, who has flown a Boeing 777 aircraft, has debunked all the crash theories proposed by other experts on the Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370 by saying that the flight is so automated that even if the flight crew left the cockpit it would have flown to its destination via the preprogrammed computer Flight Profile.
Contradicting the theory that suggested that the Boeing 777 aircraft could have flown on autopilot for hours and ran out of fuel before crashing, Byron Bailey said that the flight could have flown on autopilot for hours and reached its destination unless a human intervention changed the flight profile, reported The Daily Telegraph.
He explained that the aircraft has 80 computers and except for two engines, nearly every system is triplicated and the failure of even one of these systems would automatically result in a transfer to another. This means that for the Air Traffic Control (ATC) to lose control secondary radar contact with MH370, someone would have to deactivate all the three systems manually.
An analysis of Malaysian military radar had found that the flight tracked across northern Malaysia before drifting to the northwest and turning south into the southern Indian Ocean. However, the former captain said that the Boeing 777 aircraft is fairly big and it is almost impossible for it to go unnoticed on the Indonesian, Thai and then Indian military radar.
He ruled out total electricity failure too, as suggested by some theories, by saying that the flight has five generators and an automatic deployment Ram Air Turbine (RAT) as a final backup which can supply hydraulic and electrical power to vital systems and still have contact with the ATC.
Bailey said that the Boeing 777 is a large aircraft and added that he believed that the MH370 is still intact and submerged under 6000m of water. He said that it will be found only if "we search long enough."
Flight MH370 has been missing since the early hours of March 8, when it left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board.