The tragic presumed crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 on Saturday that apparently claimed the lives of 239 people remains a mystery, but it is a mystery that can be solved if searchers find the wreckage, which is still a big “if” at this point. The Boeing 777-200ER that presumably crashed into the ocean was equipped with a capable flight data recording system that captured thousands of flight parameters per second, including the airplane’s airspeed and its altitude, how fast it was climbing or descending, how the pilots were handling the controls, and what the various flight control surfaces, like rudders and elevator, were doing. It also featured a cockpit voice recorder that would have captured the conversations of the pilots, or anyone else in the cockpit, at the time of the emergency, as well as any attempt that the pilots might have made to contact air traffic controllers.
In the case where an airplane disappears suddenly from radar at great altitude, the cause of the crash is often a mystery until the recorders, which are designed to withstand enormous heat, fire, cold and depth below water, are recovered and analyzed. Such was the case with Air France 447, which disappeared over the Atlantic in 2009. We did not know what had happened until we began getting data from the airplane, though in the case of AF 447, some of that data was uplinked via satellite while the Airbus A330 was in flight. Most installations simply store the flight and voice data locally, on the recorders’ solid-state memory, awaiting recovery after the crash for investigators to analyze it. There’s been no indication that the Malaysia Airlines 777-200 had any such data uploading capabilities, but it probably did. Perhaps data from that source will help shed light on what caused the disappearance, or at least point us in the right direction to find the airplane, which today is still missing. We eventually learned that Air France 447 crashed because its air data sensors iced over, rendering the airplane’s flight instruments unreliable. It was still completely flyable, but in the dark and the cloud with a great deal of conflicting information before their eyes, the pilots could not figure out how to control it. They essentially flew the airplane in a controlled deep stall until it impacted the water. It is the only such accident of an airliner we know of, and it took investigators more than a year to find the wreckage and a couple of years to determine the cause.
