When MH370 disappeared, the plane’s identifying transponders appeared to be intentionally shut off, its pilots stopped making radio transmissions and the airliner made a mysterious turn before possibly traveling for hours until all traces vanished.
Concerns over hijackings and terror permeated that case, but so far they haven’t come up in the AirAsia case.
“In this case you had normal communications with the pilot, a line of weather that appeared to be pretty difficult, severe, and he was asking to climb as high as he could to get out of it,” said Peter Goelz, an aviation expert and former National Transportation Safety Board official.
What role did weather play?
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With a more precise fix on where the plane was when it lost contact, a smaller search area and shallower seas, the airliner almost certainly will be much easier to find, said Steven Wallace, former director of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Accident Investigations.
It’s “very unlikely that we’re going to see anything remotely close to what we saw with Malaysia 370,” he said.
“It will not surprise me if this airplane is found in the next 12 hours of daylight, because they know to a fairly high degree of certainty where it was, the water is 150 feet deep as opposed to 10- or 20,000 feet deep in the Indian Ocean.”
