In an interview with the German newsweekly Der Spiegel, Emirates Airline CEO Sir Tim Clark is unusually candid in his criticism of the ongoing MH370 investigation, promising to “continue to ask questions and make a nuisance of myself, even as others would like to bury it.”
As the search for the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 drags on, criticism of the official investigation by families and friends of the 239 onboard has only become more strident.
Clark notes that “all the ‘facts’ of this particular incident must be challenged and examined with full transparency.” He is also adamant that “we need to know who was on the plane in the detail; that obviously some people do know” and says that “we need to know what was in the hold of the aircraft” which disappeared March 8 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
MH 777 (Credit: Wikipedia)
The Dubai-based Emirates operates nine such Boeing 777-200s in its own fleet, a fact that obviously wouldn’t be lost on Clark. However, mechanical issues with this particular Malaysian 777-200 have never been implicated in the MH370 mystery. In fact, the 777 is regularly touted as one of the world’s safest commercial aircraft.
“My own view is that probably control was taken of that airplane,” Clark continues, noting that “it’s anybody’s guess who did what. … every single second of that flight needs to be examined up until it, theoretically, ended up in the Indian Ocean — for which they still haven’t found a trace, not even a seat cushion. We have not seen a single thing that suggests categorically that this aircraft is where they say it is, apart from this so-called electronic satellite “handshake,” which I question as well.”
However, Clark does tell the German magazine that in his opinion, the flight was probably under human control “until the very end.”
Meanwhile, in an update published by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) earlier this week, reports its latest analyses indicate “that the underwater search should be prioritized further south within the wide search area for the next phase of the search.”
The update notes that this new analysis is the result of both re-examination of satellite to aircraft communications data and an “unanswered ground-to-air telephone call 17 minutes after [MH370’s] last radar information.”
The new data indicates that at the time of last satellite contact, the plane’s fuel was likely near exhaustion and the flight may have already been descending.
The report also notes that ongoing end-of-flight scenarios continue to be played out in 777 simulators. One such simulation involved “fuel exhaustion of the right engine followed by flameout of the left engine” resulting with the flight doing a “descending spiraling low bank angle left turn.”
In such a scenario the 777 would have entered the water in a relatively short, but unspecified, distance after the last engine flameout. If so, the searchers are counting on the doomed flight being located within close proximity of the so-called 7th arc, the seventh probable route that the aircraft could have taken during its journey into the southern Indian Ocean.
In the update, the Australians didn’t comment on how this new information on MH370’s potential spiral into the southern Indian Ocean would affect ongoing search efforts for the 777’s seafloor debris.
Source: http://www.forbes.com/
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