Theory Five: Rapid Decompression

Zaharie Ahmad Shah had enjoyed several non-alcoholic drinks with his latest mistress at his favourite Kuala Lumpur nightspot earlier in the evening.

So, 40 minutes into the flight, with co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid well settled and in control as part of his training, and after signing off to Kuala Lumpur controllers with ‘Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero’, Zaharie decided to leave the flight deck for a ‘biological break’. Just a minute later, faulty cabin door seals broke and the aircraft suffered rapid decompression. Fariq, well trained to deal with such an emergency, immediately put his oxygen mask on, but the young co-pilot was unsettled at the rush of air out of the cockpit, the cold creeping in, the fogging up of the cockpit, and the fact his veteran and trusty captain was not there.

His first reactions were professional; he knew the drill – aviate, navigate, communicate, in that order. With his oxygen mask on, and having established the flight controls worked normally, Fariq turned the aircraft around on a heading to Kota Bharu, with a view to making an emergency landing there. But the first officer’s oxygen mask had an undetected fault which prevented him from getting the full supply. His brain got some oxygen but not enough to work properly, leading him to still fly the aircraft but make irrational decisions such as not making a distress call. With the flight deck thrown into confusion, Fariq tried to send a distress signal on the radar transponder, but instead accidentally switched it to ‘standby’, which effectively turned it off.

Zaharie meanwhile, occupied with the matter at hand in the toilet at the precise moment the crisis erupted, initially took a few breaths from the drop-down mask, but decided it was his duty to try to get back to the flight deck. He made a dash for it, but Fariq was already too hypoxic to unlock the cockpit door quickly enough. Zaharie started to lose useful consciousness, and tried but missed the chance to get to the portable oxygen bottles and masks, and soon passed out.

Fariq was in control, but groggy from partial hypoxia and not thinking straight. He did not put the aircraft into a rapid descent as he should have, and at 35,000 feet, the chemically produced 12 minutes of oxygen supplied through the drop-down masks for the passengers ran out before the aircraft got back over land and into mobile coverage. Fariq, thinking in the fuzzy-headed way of partial hypoxia that he was dealing the emergency magnificently, flew MH370 first towards Penang, then in the general direction of Langkawi where he had done flight training and met his girlfriend, then tried to vaguely turn around, but ended up setting the aircraft on a course almost due south before he passed out altogether. And with that, MH370 became a ghost flight.

This scenario is based on a theory developed by Christine Negroni, an American aviation journalist, who in 2016 published The Crash Detectives. As mentioned, there have been several precedents of hypoxia on commercial flights – Helios Flight 522 being the all-time classic. In that case, there was a period, though only a short one, where the pilots were still conscious, but not making rational decisions or communicating sensibly with the engineer on the ground. In some cases, air traffic controllers have recognised by the slow and not quite right tone of pilots that they are partly hypoxic, and successfully persuaded them to take corrective action.

Negroni has also written that in private aviation there have been several hypoxia cases including the ghost flight of a Socata TBM 700 that killed Laurence and Jane Glazer in 2015. The Glazers, prominent American real estate developers and philanthropists, had taken off from Greater Rochester International Airport heading for Naples, Florida, where they had a holiday home. Laurence Glazer was an experienced pilot, and flying the plane at 28,000 feet, he radioed air traffic controllers to report ‘an indication that is not correct in the plane’ and asked to descend to 18,000 feet. Controllers initially cleared him down to 25,000 feet, but when they instructed him to descend to 20,000 feet a few moments later, his speech had become slurred and he didn’t respond.

Faulty oxygen delivery systems are a notorious problem facing military pilots including when they get some supply, but not enough.

There are also some pretty spectacular cases of rapid decompression: one which beats them all for drama is British Airways Flight 5390 which left Birmingham Airport in England for Málaga in Spain on 10 June 1990. All of a sudden, a windscreen panel for which an aircraft mechanic had used the wrong bolts to install blew out, along with the captain, who was sucked half way out of the cockpit and was flapping around on the roof. A quick-acting flight attendant who happened to be in the cockpit grabbed the captain’s belt and held on, while the co-pilot put the aircraft into rapid descent.

In the intense cold the cabin crew took turns holding onto the captain. They all thought he must be dead – his head could be heard banging around against the fuselage in the slipstream, but the co-pilot wanted to keep him frozen on the roof rather than let go because his body could have taken out the left engine if it were sucked in and got gobbled up. The co-pilot performed an emergency landing at Southampton Airport and all 87 on board survived – including, extraordinarily, the captain, who after several months’ recovery flew again.

Again, several moving parts have to operate in unison here to make Negroni’s theory work, but there have been a number of cases of rapid decompression of one sort or other, and it is the case that there is a period, though not usually long, where pilots can be partly hypoxic and have a degree of consciousness to fly the plane but not rationally. So it’s another theory with elements of solid precedent.