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A Year On, What Flight Simulators Can't Prove About Flight MH370
NBC News, a year after the loss of Malaysian Airlines flight 370, has an interesting piece about various scenarios that would explain the plane's disappearance. From the article: The theory that the pilots turned west because of an emergency is undermined because they did not head back toward Kuala Lumpur, according to retired NTSB senior investigator Greg Feith. ... Feith said that turning off the communications and taking the aircraft to the remote Indian Ocean was a course of action consistent with someone trying to purposefully lose an airliner. "It's 20,000-plus feet deep there," Feith said. "It's going be very difficult to find." He added that "the first thing you're going to do" as a pilot during an emergency is "don the oxygen mask" and "confess to ATC [air traffic control], 'We've got an issue, we need to return.'" Feith, who investigated other so-called "murder-suicide" airline crashes while at the NTSB, said that he has "always postured at least that this was an intentional act by one or both pilots."
That's something I always wondered about with MH370. It used to be that the procedures after smoke in the cabin prioritized trying to locate the source of the smoke and extinguish the fire in-flight. Recently, it's been shifting more towards getting the plane on the ground ASAP (page 33 of PDF).
Except none of the reporters covering this story seem to be capable of actually researching a story. The obvious question to ask when considering the fire hypothesis is, "what were Malaysia Airlines' in-flight fire procedures?" How did they train their aircrew to react in case of a fire? Did the procedures the crew were supposed to follow still prioritize trying to locate and fight the fire? In which case the Wired article seems implausible. Or were they newer procedures which emphasized landing the plane ASAP? In which case the Wired article might be spot on.
Still, the biggest flaw in the fire hypothesis IMHO is that the airliner continued to fly for ~7 hours after the "incident". Fires devastating enough to debilitate the crew typically do not go out by themselves. They burn enough equipment to make the aircraft unflyable, or compromise the structural integrity of the aircraft leading to in-flight break-up with passengers and cargo falling out the bottom.