Any Airline’s Worst Nightmare

Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 MH-MRP, a sister of the missing plane (whose tail number was MH-MRO). Photo from Airliners.net.

Losing an aircraft full of passengers is the worst possible crisis any airline can face, but the loss of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is particularly distressing. Although a commercial aircraft simply “vanishing” is not without precedent, it is a rare occurrence, and the consensus is that it is something that is virtually impossible in this day and age – and particularly so in this case because of the type of aircraft involved, the airline which was operating it, and the area in which it was flying when it disappeared.

Flight 370, a Boeing 777 (a 777-2HE6, specifically), departed Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12:41 am Saturday, March 8 for a six-hour flight to Beijing, where it was scheduled to arrive at 6:30 am. The plane carried 227 passengers – most of them Chinese nationals – and 12 crew members, and had been loaded with eight hours’ worth of fuel. At about 1:30 am, shortly after the plane had reached its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, contact with the flight was lost; its last known position was 6.5515° North, 103.3443° East, over the Gulf of Thailand approximately 65 nautical miles ENE of the Malaysian city of Kota Bharu.

And that, nearly four full days after Flight 370 disappeared, is the sum total of what anyone actually knows. The maddeningly few clues as to what might have befallen the flight or even where its final resting place might be have so far led nowhere. An oil slick in the vicinity of the plane’s last known location turned out to be marine bunker fuel, not jet fuel, and the few bits of floating debris that initially appeared to be possible aircraft parts turned out to be ordinary trash. Even the “mystery passengers” – two who purchased tickets and boarded the flight together using stolen passports, which immediately raised alarms about a possible terrorist act – were cleared by what was the likeliest explanation all along: They were identified as two young Iranian men attempting to travel to Europe (one of the young men’s mothers was waiting for him at her home in Frankfurt) by taking advantage of Southeast Asia’s notoriously-porous defenses against illegal immigrants.

Without forgetting that at the very heart of this tragedy is the loss of 239 lives, there are two angles to the story that are most compelling. The most obvious one, of course, is the mystery of how one of the world’s safest commercial aircraft, a plane weighing 350 tons with an overall length of 209 feet and a wingspan of 200 feet, equipped with numerous systems that automatically communicate the plane’s location and status, and flying in good weather in an area continuously monitored by radar could simply disappear without a trace.

Whatever happened to the plane, there should have been some indication. We know that the flight crew did not report anything out of the ordinary; the only direct human communications with the plane were the completely routine exchanges between the crew and flight controllers. Without direct radio communication between the pilots and controllers on the ground (or crews of other nearby aircraft), there are three automatic systems that provide information about the flight:

• The transponder: The transponder works by transmitting a signal, a code for which is provided by ground controllers, that identifies the plane on radar. For instance, the controller will instruct a plane entering his airspace to “squawk 2457” (that was, coincidentally, the transponder code for Flight 370 when it was lost, but the specific number is not important). The flight crew enters the code into its transponder control, and the transponder begins transmitting basic information such as altitude and speed; when the signal reaches the air traffic controller, he can then designate the blip on his radar screen representing the plane with the correct identification – in this case, “MH370”. Depending on the system, other helpful information, such as the type of aircraft, might also be included.

As we all learned during the terrorist onslaught on 9/11, the transponder can easily be turned off by the flight crew, which leaves ground controllers unable to identify the aircraft. The aircraft will still, however, appear on radar so long as it is within range and above the minimum altitude the radar system can still distinguish the plane from “ground clutter” – which over water is very nearly all the way to the surface.

• The ACARS: ACARS stands for Aircraft Communications and Reporting System, and is an automated system that transmits data about the aircraft’s performance back to the airline’s operations headquarters. Over land the system relies on VHF radio relays also used for other types of aircraft communications; over water, the system communicates via satellite. Most commercial airliners are equipped with ACARS, but the management of the system is largely left to the airlines themselves, so what particular information is transmitted and at what interval it is transmitted varies. ACARS data was not particularly helpful in investigating the crash of Air France Flight 447 in June 2009, and does not seem to be particularly helpful in shedding light on what happened to Flight 370, perhaps because the time interval between ACARS transmissions may have been too long. In addition, the ACARS can also be switched off from the flight deck, although under normal operating conditions there is generally not much reason to do that.

• The ELT: Every commercial aircraft is equipped with some kind of Emergency Location Transmitter; Boeing has declined to specify which one was installed onboard Flight 370 – and in any case, the original could have been replaced by the airline – but a common type used in Boeing aircraft is the Artex B406-4, which is mounted in the upper rear part of the fuselage and is connected to a VHF antenna on top of the aircraft as well as the master caution indicator panel in the cockpit. Since the ELT is a “last resort” system, it generally cannot be switched off manually although it can be manually activated; it is automatically activated when it detects an acceleration of 2.3 G (about 4.5 ft/sec) – considerably less force than a plane impacting the ground or water at speed, or suffering a large in-flight explosion.

The ELT transmits on three emergency frequencies – 121.5, 243.0, and 406.0 MHz – and is designed to be detected by the Cospas/Sarsat satellite system. It is not infallible, however; an ELT will not work when submerged, and the unit might not work at all if it is badly damaged.

Even if these three automated systems were simultaneously non-functional, which however unlikely is still plausible, at the moment Flight 370 came to grief, it still should have been detected after that point. An aircraft, intact or not, free-falling from 35,000 feet takes three to four minutes to reach the surface; if the aircraft was in one piece, or in large enough pieces, it would have been detected on radar during those last few minutes. If the aircraft had for whatever reason disintegrated more-or-less instantly in midair what was left of it might not be picked up on radar, but it would leave a widely-scattered field of small debris – the more catastrophic the break-up, the more likely finding something actually becomes, because much of it would be light enough to float. Even if the breakup was somewhere between those two extremes and the plane wreckage sank almost immediately, any aircraft cabin is filled with all manner of light materials; anything not firmly attached to something heavy would soon float to the surface. If the plane had changed course and flown away to crash or land in some other area, it would have been detected on radar for at least most of that time – it would have been an unidentified radar target if the transponder was not functioning, but it still would have been detectable down to a very low altitude, which it would have taken some time for the plane to reach in controlled flight – at a minimum, 10 to 12 minutes.

The number of “experts” who are trying to reassure the public, in a way, that it is actually possible for a modern jetliner – one whose only other fatal incident was an obvious case of pilot error committed in broad daylight – to simply vanish without a trace outnumber those who say it simply isn’t possible, but it is the latter who are correct. A Boeing 777 simply does not and cannot disappear into thin air. Granted, everyone is about to learn something new about how commercial airliners can meet with disaster, but the story – when the plane is finally found – will in all likelihood not stand all our knowledge on its head.

The outcome might, however, stand the future of Malaysia Airlines on its head, and that is the other intriguing aspect of the crisis. The Malaysian flag carrier is a study in contrasts; although MAS aircraft have been involved in the odd incident now and then – the aircraft now missing suffered minor wing damage in a taxiing accident back in 2012, which was repaired by Boeing – the airline, its subsidiaries, and its predecessors have had a reasonably solid safety record. According to the Aviation Safety Network database, since its original founding in 1947 there have only been three fatal accidents prior to Flight 370: A crash of a Boeing 737 as a result of a hijacking in December 1977, in which the hijacker shot both pilots and then himself – the plane crashed in swamp, killing all 100 on board. In September 1995, a Fokker 50 crashed after a failed approach in the western Malaysian town of Tawau, killing 34 of the 53 on board. Then in October of last year, a DeHavilland Twin Otter operated by Malaysia Airlines subsidiary MASwings crashed into a house while landing at Kudat Airport in a stiff crosswind; the copilot and one of the 14 passengers aboard were killed, while four others were injured.

In terms of handling the current crisis, the airline has been generally lauded by risk and crisis management experts, given that the strangeness of the incident imposes unexpected challenges and is especially frustrating for families of missing passengers. The airline’s “dark site” – a purpose-built webpage that every airline hopes it never has to activate, but has ready just in case – was online with initial information and contact numbers roughly an hour after Flight 370 should have arrived in Beijing, which is normal; in the hours between last contact with the plane and the first public statement, the airline would have been concentrating, first of all, on trying to find the damn thing, contacting the relevant authorities, and starting the process of assembling its crisis team to contact the families of the passengers and crew. And of course, all this would have been done as discreetly as possible, just in case against all hope the plane landed where it was supposed to when it was supposed to.

As organized and professionally-sympathetic as Malaysia Airlines appears to be in the crisis, one could easily overlook that behind the corporate façade the airline is basically a financial and managerial disaster. MAS, which is heavily subsidized by the Malaysian government, has been hemorrhaging money for years; so much so, that it has become a bit of a joke that Malaysia Airlines’ most popular management activity is “restructuring”. Not even the buy-in of Malaysian business wunderkind Tony Fernandes seems to have helped; Fernandes, whose AirAsia has hammered MAS’ domestic business in recent years, took a 20.5% stake in Malaysia Airlines in 2012, hoping to return the airline to profitability in 2013. Unfortunately, exactly the opposite happened; after posting a 432.6 MYR net loss in 2012 ($131 million), the airline somehow managed to triple that in 2013, posting a full-year loss of 1.17 billion MYR ($356.5 million) in 2013.

With the loss, in so spectacular a fashion, of one of its long-haul jets on one of its busiest routes, MAS is inevitably going to face questions about whether its financial difficulties have led to cost-cutting to the detriment of safety. Even if it is determined that an extraordinary event obviously outside the airline’s control – something like a hijacking, or being slapped out of the sky by the hand of the Almighty – was the cause of the disaster, the perception that “Malaysia Airlines is unsafe” is going to be extremely difficult to overcome, and particularly so for an airline that does not have an abundance of resources to apply to the problem.

Whether or not the tragedy of Flight 370 will be enough to clip Malaysia Airlines’ wings for good is still an open question, but stock market investors are apparently not waiting around to find out; MAS share prices, which had already dropped by more than 20% over the past month but seemed to have bottomed out and started a slow recovery just prior to the accident, promptly tanked on Monday and are now at their all-time low. If it turns out, though, that the loss of Flight 370 was in any way the airline’s fault, even that price will likely seem way too high; disappearing aircraft may be rare, but in this age of intense competition from low-cost carriers, disappearing airlines are not.