Why are there so few clues on MH370?

The author of ‘Understanding Air France 447’, Bill Palmer who is also an Airbus A330 captain for a major airline in the United States, questioned the mysteries behind the disappearance of MH370 since Saturday in his opinion piece on CNN.com on Monday.

In his article, Palmer commented on the reports of a possible course reversal observed on radar which according to him, may or may not be the intention of the crew on board.

Relating the event with the Air France 447 tragedy, Palmer said the investigation may face many parallels to June 2009 incident, when the Airbus A330 crashed in an area beyond radar coverage in the ocean north of Brazil.

He added, during its three and a half minute descent to the Atlantic Ocean, the aircraft was reported to have changed its course by more than 180 degrees.

“It was an unintentional side effect as the crew of Air France 447 struggled to gain control of the airplane. The flight's last telemetry data, as reported by flightaware.com, showed the airplane cruising at 35,000 feet. Even with a dual engine failure, a Boeing 777 is capable of gliding about 120 miles from that altitude,” said Palmer.

Palmer also raised the question on the lack of distress call made by the flight crew which he described as ‘particularly perplexing’.

“An aviator's priorities are to maintain control of the airplane above all else. An emergency could easily consume 100 percent of a crew's efforts. To an airline pilot, the absence of radio calls to personnel on the ground that could do little to help the immediate situation is no surprise.

The Air France flight's string of events was precipitated by onboard faults that were automatically transmitted to the airline's headquarters during its final minutes. While they lacked any flight parameters, these maintenance fault messages gave key clues, though not a definitive cause of the accident, before any wreckage was found,” Palmer added.

In this case, the recovery of MH370’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders would be important in determining the cause of the disappearance.

He added that flight data recorders contain data from more than 1,000 aircraft parameters, including altitude, vertical speed, airspeed, heading, control positions and parameters of the engines and most of the aircraft's onboard systems, captured several times per second.

“The cockpit voice recorder archives the last hours of not just cockpit voices and sounds but also all radio and onboard inter-airplane communications,” he said, adding that detailed history of the flight crew and the airplane will be closely reviewed by expert investigators as well who was travelling on the two reportedly stolen passports.

Palmer said, the truth will come out once the wreckage is found where the debris and its distribution will tell investigators if the airplane was intact upon impact and the angle at which it hit.

“Metallurgical and chemical analysis of the parts will determine the stresses and angles that caused the parts to fail, and if explosives were present. These findings of fact will drive the creation of theories by investigators about what caused the loss of the airplane and its passengers,” he added.

According to him, the wreckage of the Air France flight was located in April 2011, and its flight recorders recovered and analyzed in May. The cause of the crash was the crew's loss of control of the airplane after the speed sensor probes became clogged while flying through a storm in the tropics. It caused the loss of reliable airspeed indications, the autopilot to disconnect and the flight controls to degrade.

“In the case of the Air France plane, it was five days of intensive searching before the first floating wreckage was found. It took nearly two years to locate the remains of the aircraft on the ocean floor 12,000 feet below, broken into thousands of pieces by the impact with the water.

“In contrast, the Gulf of Thailand has a maximum depth of only 260 feet, with the average being about 150 feet. If the aircraft is in the water, it should make recovery easier.