Putrajaya knows where MH370 is but is not telling to protect its interests, says aviation expert

With no concrete clues surfacing in the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, a daily has reported a theory that Malaysian authorities may know where the plane is but are withholding information to protect its satellite capabilities, cover up mistakes or avoid tipping off interested parties.

The theory is one of several contained in a Washington Post article as search for the missing Boeing 777-200ER (9M-MRO) and the 239 people on board enters the 13th day.

"We’re dealing with military organisations, and they don’t want to tell you, and especially they don’t want to tell you if it looks like they really screwed up," Hans Weber, a San Diego-based aviation consultant, was quoted as saying in the article.

"The military doesn’t want to look bad in its own country. I think there is a lot of incentive for the militaries there to not come clean.

However, the article said there is no evidence that anyone knows where the plane is, while pressure is building up from grieving families of the passengers and crew on board for an answer.

The article also said that aviation experts are now discussing a number of scenarios on what could have happened to the Beijing-bound Boeing 777 aircraft which went missing on March 8 less than half an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur.

Mechanical failure

It was theorised that the plane could have caught fire which then caused a crisis and an emergency response. This theory was put forward by a pilot who said MH370's pilot must have turned the plane around for an emergency landing, but had crashed at sea.

Besides that, another scenario is catastrophic decompression. The crew, the daily said, could have lost consciousness and the plane could have kept on flying.

This is also known as the "Payne Stewart scenario", named after the golfer who died in 1999 when his plane underwent decompression and flew more than 1,600km before crashing in South Dakota.

However, Weber said the fact that MH370's diversion was pre-programmed rules out an accident. The pilot, he said, never radioed any distress, adding that the radios rely on batteries which would still be operational even after a fire.

Sean Cassidy, an Alaska Airlines captain who currently is serving as national safety coordinator for the US Air Line Pilots Association, offered a slightly differing view.

“Every single professional pilot is trained that, when you have an emergency, the first focus is on actually flying the plane, next is on navigating it and the third priority is actually communicating. The absence of a distress call does not imply that there was no distress in the airplane," he said.

Hijacking or commandeering

“It had enough fuel to go many places, and unfortunately it had enough fuel to go into places where you don’t have civil radar systems, for example, and into a part of the world where terrorism and to some extent state-supported terrorism exists," George Hamlin, a Fairfax, Virginia-based aviation consultant, was quoted as saying.

He said the plane could have been used to deliver an explosive weapon somewhere.

“It suggests something else horrific is being planned, because no one is claiming credit or saying ‘Ha ha, you have to deal with us.’ There have been no demands for the 200-something hostages on the aircraft,” he added.

However, there was no evidence to back this theory, the article said, adding that investigators have not found anyone on the plane to have any affiliations with terrorist organisations.

The plane landed

There were hundreds of airfields in the range of the plane, leading to speculation that it could have landed at an abandoned airstrip.

“There’s a lot of World War II airfields left over,” said Ron Carr, a former pilot and a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona.

“These guys are not interested in protecting the airplane, so they’re going to use minimal airfields. They’re going to use one that’s fairly secluded. You’re not going to need landing lights; you certainly don’t want a tower.”

But, it added, that there was no evidence that the plane had landed. "It would have had to elude radar coverage, land and then hide. This scenario also requires additional layers of speculation about perpetrator and motive," the daily reported.

9/11-style operation was aborted

There was a possibility that if the plane was hijacked, hijackers intentionally crashed the plane in the remote Indian Ocean to cover up tracks of a failed 9/11-like operation.

Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst in Fairfax, said: "That’s the only thing that holds together with any logical consistency: that this is a failed 9/11."

"I think the most likely scenario is these terrorists managed to commandeer the airplane, and they set a route, and at some point the pilots fought with the people who commandeered the airplane and somehow everybody got incapacitated and there was no one anymore who could fly the airplane," Weber said.

There is also that "awful scenario" that we'll never know what happened to flight MH370.

“There’s still no clarity about what happened to that airplane other than the fact that it changed course and went off to points unknown," Cassidy said. – March 20, 2014.