Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 Still Intact Underwater, Says Pilot

Almost eight months have passed since the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished without a trace. Up to now, various speculations are still circulating as to what happened to the ill-fated aircraft. A former senior captain of a major international airline debunked some theories proposed by other experts about the whereabouts of the plane.

Byron Bailey, who has flown a Boeing 777 aircraft before, said on an op-ed on the Daily Telegraph that it isn't possible for the plane to have flown on autopilot until it ran out of fuel, eventually ending up in the ocean.

According to Bailey, the aircraft has 80 computers with almost every system triplicated to ensure that there will be no fail safe operation. He added that there are three radios, three radar transporters linked to Air Traffic Control, three autopilots, and three flight management computers or FMS, along with others.

"A failure of one will result in transfer, usually automatically, to another. This means for ATC to lose secondary radar contact with MH370 someone had to deactivate all three by manually selecting them to off," he wrote via Daily Telegraph.

The aircraft is highly automated "that even if the flight crew left the cockpit it would have flown to its destination via the preprogrammed computer Flight Profile," an ANI report published on Yahoo added. The Boeing 777 plane could have flown in the air for hours and reached its destination - Beijing - unless someone intervened to change the pre-programmed computer flight profile.

A total electrical failure was also speculated, but Bailey dismissed this theory once again, saying that the aircraft is fully equipped with electrical generators. "The B777 has five generators (two per engine plus APU) and, as a final backup, an automatic deployment Ram Air Turbine (RAT) which can supply hydraulic and electrical power to vital systems and still have contact with ATC," the pilot said on Daily Telegraph.

Bailey also debunked the hijack presumption. "On board were two pilots and 14 cabin crew. None of the passengers came under suspicion and the Flight Deck door is reinforced and kept locked. Airlines have security protocols in place to prevent unauthorized access to the Flight Deck," he further explained on the news outlet.

The explosive decompression theory is also not possible, Bailey noted. He said that the flight crew of the MH370 is trained every six months in the B777 Simulator and that "the emergency and abnormal scenarios are covered at some stage." The Malaysia Airlines crew is capable at handling Boeing Memory Emergency Procedures.

Bailey concluded with this own beliefs about what might have happened to the aircraft.

"The B777 is a very large aircraft and I personally believe that MH370 is intact and in 6000m of water. If we search long enough it will be found," he stated on Daily Telegraph.