In the ongoing saga that is the mystery of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, there has been no shortage of theories. Recently we even reported on Courtney Love’s amateur sleuthing efforts involving an open source satellite image of the area marked up with MS Paint.
Other theories include that the pilot may be a terrorist who trained for this operation with an in-home flight simulator, meteor activity, and other Bermuda Triangle-type conspiracy theories.
But one man, a pilot with decades of experience, has put forth another theory, startling in it simplicity, that some say bears looking at. His idea of what may have happened takes an Occam’s Razor to the entire proceedings, and will hopefully be reviewed by the bumbling powers-that-be that are on the case. At the very least, Courtney Love could check it out.
Pilot Chris Goodfellow, recently posted the following publicly from his Google+ account:
“When I heard this I immediately brought up Google Earth and I searched for airports in proximity to the track towards southwest [of Flight 370’s last known location].”
Goodfellow’s notion was that there was some sort of emergency on board the flight, perhaps a fire. He theorized that the pilot was looking for a good place to land.
“We old pilots were always drilled to always know the closest airport of safe harbor while in cruise. Airports behind us, airports abeam us and airports ahead of us. Always in our head. Always. Because if something happens you don’t want to be thinking what are you going to do – you already know what you are going to do. Instinctively when I saw that left turn with a direct heading I knew he was heading for an airport. Actually he was taking a direct route to Palau Langkawi a 13,000 foot strip with an approach over water at night with no obstacles. He did not turn back to Kuala Lampur because he knew he had 8,000 foot ridges to cross. He knew the terrain was friendlier towards Langkawi and also a shorter distance.”
But what about the loss of communication?
“For me the loss of transponders and communications makes perfect sense if a fire. There was most likely a fire or electrical fire. In the case of fire the first response if to pull all the main busses and restore circuits one by one until you have isolated the bad one.
If they pulled the busses the plane indeed would go silent. It was probably a serious event and they simply were occupied with controlling the plane and trying to fight the fire. Aviate, Navigate and lastly communicate.”
What might have ended up happening to the plane?
“What I think happened is that they were overcome by smoke and the plane just continued on the heading probably on George (autopilot) until either fuel exhaustion or fire destroyed the control surfaces and it crashed. I said four days ago you will find it along that route – looking elsewhere was pointless.”
While many people still hope against hope that the passengers and crew of Flight 370 will be found alive somewhere, Goodfellow’s suggestion is one of the most sensible to emerge in the entire hunt.
Image via YouTube
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