MH370: Could the missing plane have been stolen?

Intense speculation and mystery continues to surround the missing Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared without a trace with 239 passengers and crew on board since Saturday.

In the absence of any sign that the plane was in trouble before it vanished, speculation has ranged widely, including pilot error, plane malfunction, hijacking and terrorism, the last because two passengers were travelling on stolen passports.

The terrorism theory weakened after authorities determined both the Iranian nationals were not members of any terrorist group.

Now aircraft investigators are looking at the general circumstances surrounding the missing flight MH370 and mentally draw up a list of the most likely causes. They said this is not meant to leap into conclusions, but rather to prioritise lines of inquiry and organise competing hypotheses.

According to Jeff Wise, a New-York based magazine writer and author of “Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger”, this is important because by eliminating those hypotheses one by one, at the end a full understanding of the circumstances remains.

“The goal is to make sure that the problem will never again bring down an airliner. This philosophy works as year by year, fewer commercial airliners are lost to accidents,” Wise wrote on Slate Magazine’s blog.

“The downside is that, as likely sources of aircraft accidents are eliminated, what are left behind are increasingly arcane and bizarre, once-in-a-million combinations of bad luck, incompetence and malice. And the longer we go without any significant clues regarding Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the more likely that its true cause will fall into that category,” he said.

Wise noted that some airline pilots have begun to speculate that one of the flight crew might have intentionally caused the plane to disappear and flown off with it to an undisclosed location.

“This line of speculation, outlandish as it may sound, was only bolstered when it was reported that investigators were actively pursuing the possibility that the plane had been diverted with the intention of using it later for another purpose,” he said.

He added there's no telling why someone would want to make off with a plane with 239 souls aboard. However if someone were to try it, if it was physically possible, here’s how to do it:

1. Kill or incapacitate your fellow pilot. “We have a deadbolt on the inside of the cockpit door,” says Rich Solan, who flies 777-200s for American Airlines.

2. Wait until you’re over a region with poor radar coverage, then turn off your transponder, ADS-B and ACARS. There’s a small stretch of MH370’s regular route, midway between Malaysia and Vietnam, that fits the bill and this happens to be where the flight vanished.

3. Turn and dive for the deck. Radar coverage gets worse the lower you go, so if you want to stay off the primary radar, you’ll fly as low as possible. There’s a drawback to this strategy. The lower you fly, the slower you go and the more fuel you burn. A 777 can go 485 knots burning 6,000 kilogrammes of fuel per hour at 35,000 feet; down at sea level, more than 9,000 kilogrammes of fuel per hour and only going 310 knots. So if you can go 3,000 kilometres at altitude, you’ll probably only go around 1,300 kilometres down low.

4. Find someplace to land. The 777 is a big plane – once Boeing retires the 747, it will be the biggest in its stable – but in an emergency it can be out down on a relatively short runway. “If I have a fire in flight, I’m prepared to put it down on anything above 5,000 feet,” says Solan. “You could put it on a highway." A runway wouldn't even necessarily have to be paved; hard-packed dirt would likely be good enough. Throw some camouflage netting over the plane once you're on the ground, and you're good.

5. Sell it. There's an active market for used 777s. "They're worth big money," says David Rose, who owns the plane-trading website Barnstormers.com. A 1994 model is currently for sale for US$37.5 million; another from 2001 has a price tag of $54 million. Or you could play chop shop and break it up for parts. "There's a big market for second-hand airliner parts," says Rose. The only problem: All those parts have serial numbers on them, and pretty soon those are going to be the most famous serial numbers in the world. Then again, a cash-strapped operator in a developing country might not care.

Wise stressed a major hiccup to a plan like this one is that part of the 777's Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) that transmits information about the status of the plane's engines can't be turned off by the pilot.

On Saturday Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak announced that based on new satellite information, authorities can say with a high degree of certainty that the ACARS on board flight MH370 was disabled just before it reached the East coast of peninsular Malaysia.

Shortly afterwards near the border between Malaysian and Vietnamese air traffic control, the aircraft’s transponder was switched off.

From that point onwards, the Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) primary radar showed that an aircraft which was believed – not confirmed – to be MH370 did indeed turn back. It then flew in a westerly direction back over peninsular Malaysia before turning northwest. Up until the point at which it left military primary radar coverage, these movements are consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane.