Sudden Electrical Failure Crippled MH370 and Turned It Into Flying Zombie

Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 suffered a sudden and catastrophic loss of power that left it flying on auto-pilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed in the ocean, a report has suggested.

The Australian Transport Bureau (ATB) findings explain why two crucial communications systems stopped working and why air traffic controllers failed to contact the pilots.

The Boeing 777 is widely believed to have ditched in the Indian Ocean after disappearing on March 8 last year en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, killing all 239 people on board.

Crash investigators revealed the jet's Satellite Data Unit (SDU) had unexpectedly tried to log on to a satellite about an hour and a half after the flight took off.
This request, known as a handshake or ping, was likely to have been caused by a power failure on board.

The SDU rebooted itself after the auxiliary power unit (APU) kicked in to restore electricity, allowing it to send a series of pings that allowed experts to locate its final position in the southern Indian Ocean.

However, according to The Daily Beast, the ATB report said many of the plane's other electrical systems shut down, leaving the pilots powerless to control the aircraft.

This, the website says, supports the theory that a devastating fire on board caused the outage rather than deliberate actions by the pilots to sabotage the flight.

It notes that much of the power to run the plane's systems comes from generators attached to the two engines and, through multiple connections, is distributed throughout the aircraft.

The auto-pilot would have been able to operate, leaving the jet flying as a "zombie plane" until it ran out of fuel.

The report, however, does not explain what caused the power cut, only saying that it could be due to technical failures.

It also does not rule out deliberate action by Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah or his co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, whether a deliberate action to sabotage the aircraft or a desperate, failed attempt to temporarily cut the power to resolve a technical problem.

It says the outage could have been caused by the crew using overhead switches in the cockpit or accessing the MEC below the flight deck.

The findings were buried in an ATB report released last week, which said fresh analysis of data on missing jet MH370 confirmed authorities are searching in the right place, and hopes remain that it will one day be found.

- NZ Herald