KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 10 — A sudden loss of electrical power had struck Flight MH370 that presumably left it flying on autopilot before crashing in the southern Indian Ocean, a report has said.
The Daily Beast cited an Australian Transport Bureau December 3 report that contained the first official acknowledgement of a sudden electrical failure capable of disabling vital systems, which the US news portal said seriously undermined the conspiracy theory that the pilots of the Malaysia Airlines plane had deliberately sabotaged the flight.
“As well as portraying a sudden crisis of control in the cockpit, the report greatly undercuts theories that the pilots themselves went rogue — far from harming the airplane it is much more likely that they were struggling to save it in a situation that most pilots would find hard to master,” said The Daily Beast.
According to the portal, the report by Australian authorities gave four possible causes of the power failure: a sudden failure that caused the airplane’s Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) to kick in to restore emergency power; an action in the cockpit using overhead switches; someone accessing the Main Equipment Centre below the flight deck, pulling out and resetting circuit breakers; and intermittent technical failures.
The Daily Beast quoted an expert on Boeing 777 jets who said it was extremely unlikely for a pilot to go down to the lower deck and to pull the circuit breakers.
“And even if they tried, few would be familiar with the locations of avionics components, or be able to find the relevant circuit breakers to pull. That kind of information is not even contained in the typical pilot training or operating manuals,” the unnamed expert was quoted saying.
The Daily Beast said the Australian report gave clarity to the “zombie flight” version of events in which the still missing Boeing 777 jet flew on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed into the southern Indian Ocean.
MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
Searchers have yet to discover the main body of the plane after it disappeared last year, with the only physical remnant being a flaperon, or a wing part, that recently washed up on the La Reunion island near Madagascar.
