Lost Malaysia Airlines jet flew for hours on autopilot

Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 flew for hours on autopilot before running out of fuel over the vast Indian Ocean and crashing, a team of international investigators searching for the plane now believe.

Australian officials now leading the international probe said Thursday said further analysis of data revealed that the lost jetliner flew in a straight line after veering off its planned flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, suggesting it was under automatic control.

"Certainly for its path across the Indian Ocean, we are confident that the aircraft was operating on autopilot until it ran out of fuel," Australian Transport Safety Bureau Chief Martin Dolan said at a news conference in Canberra, the nation's capital.

Dolan said someone aboard the doomed jetliner must have switched on the Boeing 777's autopilot before the automatic controls would have taken over the plane's operation.

"The basic assumption would be that if the autopilot is operational it's because it's been switched on," he said, according to the Associated Press.

But officials had no explanation to offer as to why automatic controls would have taken the plane with 239 passengers and crew so far off course, nor could they say when durng the flight the autopilot was activated.

Flight 370 disappeared from radar screens about an hour after taking off March 8 from Kuala Lumpur.

No distress signal was received from the airplane or its crew, and no sign of them has been spotted despite a multi-nation search on the surface and floor of the Indian Ocean.

"We couldn't accurately, nor have we attempted to, fix the moment when it was put on autopilot," Australia's transport minister, Warren Truss, told reporters.

"It will be a matter for the Malaysian-based investigation to look at precisely when it may have been put on autopilot," he said.

Dolan also said investigators now presume the crew of Flight 370 were incapacitated, possibly from oxygen deprivation, as the plane turned south and flew under autopilot.

This would explain why the plane would have lost radio contact with the ground and flew so long without changing course after the initial radical change from its flight plan.

Dolan also offered further explanation of why authorities plan to search a different area of the ocean when search efforts resume in August.

High-powered sonar equipment will be used to scour the new 23,000-square-mile search area, several hundred miles southwest of the previous area that was painstakingly checked over weeks by a high-tech underwater drone.

But the new search area is so large that it could take as long as 12 months to thoroughly check, the AP said.

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Hunt for MH370 could take ‘decades’, admits airline chief

The hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 could take “decades”, the company’s British commercial chief has admitted.

Hugh Dunleavy, a former Ministry of Defence employee who became the airline's director of commercial operations in 2012, said he believed something “untoward” had happened to the Boeing 777, which disappeared on March 8 as it flew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

“Something untoward happened to that plane. I think it made a turn to come back, then a sequence of events overtook it, and it was unable to return to base,” Mr Dunleavy told the Evening Standard.

“I believe it’s somewhere in the south Indian Ocean. But when [a plane] hits the ocean it’s like hitting concrete. The wreckage could be spread over a big area. And there are mountains and canyons in that ocean. I think it could take a really long time to find. We’re talking decades,” he added.

In the days immediately after the plane went missing, a senior Malaysian minister told The Telegraph he feared the search mission would take weeks or months.

“We are in for the long haul,” Hishammuddin Hussein, the acting transport minister, said.

However, even that prognosis proved wildly optimistic. More than three months have now passed since the plane disappeared and no physical trace of it has been found despite a massive multi-national search effort.

On Sunday it emerged that Zaharie Shah, the plane’s captain, had used a flight simulator at his home to plot a flight path to a remote island deep into the southern Indian Ocean, where much of the recent search operation has been focused.

That discovery has rekindled suspicious that the pilot may have hijacked the plane and deliberately steered it off course.

Hishammuddin Hussein, the minister, rejected suggestions that the pilot was now “prime suspect” on Monday. “We should not entertain conspiracy theories,” he told Malaysia’s The Star newspaper.

Mr Dunleavy, who is originally from Ealing, defended his company’s initial response to MH370’s disappearance.

“People say, ‘Why didn’t you work quicker?’ But you’re calling pilots, explaining the situation, waiting for them to send out pings, doing the same to the next plane, then the next, and it’s four in the morning, you don’t have 50 people in the office, only a couple. An hour goes by frighteningly quickly — you realise that the missing plane is now another 600 miles somewhere else.”

However, the airline’s commercial boss criticised the Malaysian government for taking so long to reveal that the missing plane had turned back over the Malay peninsula towards the Strait of Malacca.

“I only heard about this through the news,” Mr Dunleavy said. “I’m thinking, really? You couldn’t have told us that directly? Malaysia’s air traffic control and military radar are in the same freakin’ building. The military saw an aircraft turn and did nothing.”

“They didn’t know it was MH370, their radar just identifies flying objects, yet a plane had gone down and the information about something in the sky turning around didn’t get released by the authorities until after a week. Why? I don’t know. I really wish I did.”

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How long will the search for MH 370 continue?

Malaysia Airlines’ (Kuala Lumpur) missing flight MH 370 has now been missing for 100 days. So far, no debris from the missing fine has been found. Nothing has been found, despite promising leads and observations. Everything turned out to be floating ocean flotsam.

The previously reported “pings” are now thought to be erroneous. In short, missing flight MH 370 is a true aviation mystery of epic proportions.

Missing Air France flight AF 447 took almost two years to be located so there is some hope MH 370 will be found. However authorities had a better idea where AF 447 was located. For the MH 370 without better data, no one knows for sure where the flight is located. For the families of the missing passengers and crew members, this uncertainty is so hurtful and very hard to accept. They cannot have any closure. The families rely on any hope which they cling to. Today, after 100 days, they have very little to cling to.

CNN has raised the difficult question of how long the search will continue. The search is very costly and without better data it has a low chance of being discovered. If anyone wanted to have this flight “disappear” they have succeeded.

So far Australia has shouldered most of the cost in the search. Australia is leading the search due to assumption the flight crashed into the southern Indian Ocean closest to Australia. Many other countries including the United States, Malaysia and China have contributed costly assets and crews in the search with zero results. The assumption that the flight crashed near Australia is now in question. In short, no one knows where MH 370 has gone.

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