Christine Negroni - The Crash Detectives: Investigating the World’s Most Mysterious Air Disasters

T his I can say about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: there is little to suggest the pilots were involved in hijacking or crashing the plane they were flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. One need only look at the shocking, intentional crash of a GermanWings flight one year later to see how quickly, and how many, clues emerge when a pilot plots to bring down an airliner. My theory about what happened to MH-370 began to form within a week of arriving in Malaysia to help ABC News cover the story.

When I first heard about the missing flight, I was at sea in Vietnams Gulf of Tonkin. The fact that the news reached me in such a remote place was a new high in communications technology. That years later we do not know what happened to the airliner and its passengers demonstrates the shallows.

I hurried to Kuala Lumpur and spent five weeks there. Each night, I went to bed pretty sure Id wake up to hear that the airliner had been found. When it was not, I was swept along with everyone else in believing that this was unprecedented, as Malaysias transportation and defense minister was fond of saying.

In fact, over the past century of commercial aviation, more than a dozen airliners have disappeared without a trace. And even when a missing plane is found, it is sometimes impossible to determine what went wrong.

When I returned to the United States and started the research for this book, I came across the trailer for a documentary produced by Guy Noffsinger, a media specialist at NASA. What happened to the most high-tech commercial airliner in the world and those people aboard it? the narrator asked ominously. Was it structural failure, pilot error, or something more sinister?

In a similar vein, author Edgar Haine in Disaster in the Air, writes, Of particular concern to everyone was the sudden termination of normal radio contact and the absence of subsequent communications.

Yet Noffsinger and Haine werent referring to MH-370; they were talking about the Pan American Airways flying boat the Hawaii Clipper. It disappeared seventy-six years before MH-370 and was one of the first mysteries in commercial aviation. It remains a subject of fascination to this day.

After two decades writing about air safety and working as an accident investigator, I have learned that most accidents are variations on a limited number of themes, and in this book I explore some of them: communication failures, overreliance on or misunderstanding of technology, errors in the design of airplanes and engines, and lapses in the performance of flight crews, operators, and mechanics. The tie that binds the accidents (and incidents) in this book is that they confounded the crash detectives looking for answers.

Why conduct investigations anyway? It is not to provide closure for families of victims, though thats a compassionate side benefit. It is not to assign blame so people can be prosecuted and lawyers can sue. Investigations help illuminate how machines and humans fail, which in turn shows us how to prevent similar events. Because the aviation community has been so conscientious about this over the years, hurtling through the air at five hundred miles an hour and seven miles high is far less likely to kill you than almost any other type of transportation.

From pilot training and airplane and engine design to dropping crash test dummies on their rubberized and sensor-equipped bottoms to the floor of a test lab, every decision in commercial aviation is based on lessons learned from disaster. Thats why it is so important to discover what happened to Malaysia 370, even if the plane is never found.

An unsuccessful search is still not the end of the story; thinking through scenarios of what might have happened can identify hazards that need to be fixed. So while it is possible that one or both of the pilotsin an uncharacteristic act of hostility and without any of their friends or family noticing anything amisspurposefully took the plane on a flight into oblivion, other theories better fit the available facts.

My theory is that an electrical malfunction knocked out systems on the Boeing 777 and that the plane lost pressurization, incapacitating the pilots. Whatever happened, it could not have caused damage serious enough to affect the airworthiness of the plane, since it flew on until running out of fuel many hours later. Likely, the men in the cockpit were overcome by the altitude sickness known as hypoxia, which robbed them of the ability to think clearly and land the plane safely. Many of the links in the bizarre chain of events that night can be explained by hypoxia because past cases have shown how rapidly those who fall victim to it turn imbecilic.