Hypoxia "Best Fit" in MH 370 Disaster ATSB Says

The Australians have been asked by the Malaysians to head up the search for the Boeing 777 that went nordo on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8th. 

The suggestion that hypoxia events have a lot in common with the known facts of MH 370 came in a 58 page report released to reporters by the ATSB as part of its explanation of the new underwater search zone. MH 370 seemed to share these factors with other accidents attributed to loss of pressurization and pilot incapacitation 

 

The Aussies have not been asked to work on the "why" of the missing flight, just find out where the plane is now, though I suspect they're itching to get their hands on all the evidence collected so far concerning the greatest aviation mystery since Amelia Earhart. 

Making the link between MH 370 and other hypoxia-related accidents came as part of a larger compilation of aviation accidents intended to help create a reference base of what happens when a plane drops from the sky; how does its speed change and what is the effect of its impact with the ground or water? These answers became part of complicated calculations giving investigators a revised geographical range for search efforts.

That's what the report is about. Having spent five weeks in Malaysia this spring, listening to nonsensical and contradictory statements by the country's then-double duty minister of transport and defense, the show-us-your-cards report by the Australians practically had me weeping with joy. And that was even before I read pages 34 and 35, where the Aussies suggested that hypoxia - my pet theory - was a "best fit." 

Since day one, I've felt uncomfortable with the rush to pin the mysterious disappearance of MH 370 on the pilots or some unnamed/unknown bad guy on the plane, because there's just no evidence to support it. 

Read about hypoxia however, how strips pilots of their judgment while infusing them with a sense of well-being and all the illogical events in the missing airliner story begin to make sense.

Several years ago I wrote a long article about two high profile plane crashes in which the pilots died from a lack of oxygen but their planes continued to fly; the Learjet carrying American golfer Payne Stewart in 1999 and the crash of Helios Flight 522 in 2005. I spoke to passengers and the pilot of yet another flight that underwent a depressurization and nearly suffered the same fate.

We fly through the sky, seven miles above the ground, watching movies or munching peanuts, forgetting entirely that the environment just beyond is inhospitable to life. Only the constant infusion of oxygen rich air keeps us going. That we can appreciate. It is harder to appreciate how quickly a depressurization can strip the best of pilots of their judgment and skill. Without sufficient oxygen, anything they do defies logic. If that doesn't describe some of the inexplicable details of MH 370, I don't know what does.