The Loss of MH Flight 370 - Research Paper Example

The Loss of MH Flight 370 The MH Flight 370 is a Malaysian airlines flight that disappeared on 8th of March, on the Friday night to Saturday morning. The plane was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with a carrying capacity of 227 passengers who originated from fifteen countries with twelve Malaysia crew members. The flight was at a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet before it throttled to a 12,000 feet. According to the Air traffic controllers in Vietnam, the air was relatively clear. The Air traffic controllers have reported that they lost contact with the crew in the ill-fated plane about 120 nautical miles east of the Malaysian town of Kota Bharu. Reports from the radar signal imply that, before the crew lost contact with the Air traffic controllers, the flight might have turned around. The international investigators who were searching for the missing plane released a report in which they indicated the prevalence of rough conditions which did not allow for effective search of the plane such as deep water in the Indian Ocean and remote location. The search was commenced in the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand since it was the area in which the plane was missed on the secondary surveillance radar. After analysis of the path the flight might have taken, the search team shifted their efforts to the southern part of the Indian Ocean by narrowing their areas to 60,000 km2 of West of Australia. The search on this area was utterly unfruitful. There was no indication of any flight debris or a crash site. As such, the there was no official theory which was formulated by the authorities that could have aided in the search for the missing flight. As a result, there were informal many theories and speculations of what happened to the plain. There are no reports on where the plane might be or whether the passengers and the crew members are still alive despite month of searching. The search effort for this plane is of a multinational dimension which has turned out to be the most expensive and largest search efforts in history. There has been diverse theories and misconception about the causes of disappearance of the Boeing 777. Some of the theories indicate that the plane was shot down due to military conflicts between Thailand and the United States in the South China Sea. This theory is developed in Nigel Cawthorne’s Flight MH370: The Mystery. In his theory, the shoot down might have been accidental. Another theory is the “9/11 theory” that has been widely spread in the internet. The theory originated from Christopher Green of “Alternative Media Television (AMTV)" and indicates that the missing plane was hijacked by terrorists in the wake of the approaching 13th anniversary of the New York 9/11 attack. Major Theories of the Cause of the Loss of MH Flight 370 Ethnic Theory Ethnic Theory was proposed by Malcolm Gladwell. The theory is about the influence of culture and cockpit communication on flight accidents. According to Ethnic theory, cultural issues have a potential to cause plane crashes. He urges that cultural which have strong cultural legacies are prone to have many plane accidents. Such cultures are hierarchical and the crew is obliged to be differential when it comes to their superiors and elders. As such, it is unimaginable for a hitch to be taken seriously by a junior ion the ladder when the seniors are responsible for it. For example, flights from the Asia region are flown by a captain and a first officer. The captain is superior to the first officer and therefore, he has to observe the distance between them. This obligation of the junior of the captain to keep his hierarchical distance can be responsible for a plane accidents as proposed by this theory. To support this theory, Gladwell provides the statistics of the Korean Air which is reportedly the airline with most of the plane accidents that any other airline in the world. This is despite that fact that it has quality planes and highly trained pilots. In cultures like the United States where hierarchical culture is unrecognizable, planes are flown by two pilots who are of equal caliber. This promoted properly coordinated flights and has worked wonderfully to prevent accidents or any other flight incidences. Such equals are able to fly complex airlines such as Airbus design modern and Boeing (BA, Fortune 500). This has been an influential factor for the few cases of plane crashes in area that have low power distance cultures. Ethnic theory also proposes that plane accidents are caused by miscommunication between the pilots and the air traffic controller and also among pilots. Such accidents can happen when landing or when taking off and are caused by mistakes made by the pilots or technical errors which could otherwise be noticed and fixed weren’t not for the communication barrier. Poor communication in this case is culturally driven. The cultural distance is assessed through a power distance index fuelled by the attitude of the subordinates towards the authority and due to the high respect level between the two. Another communication barriers due to technicalities of co-piloting where a pilot is ranked below another and the junior one has to mitigate his speech when addressing the superior pilot. As such, it is difficult for the junior co-pilot to confront the senior one about issues suspected to be potentially risky for the safety of the plane (Orasanu, 1993). This theory can be applied to explain the cause of disappearance of MH Flight 370. Malaysia is part of the Asia region ad is therefore characterized by high power distance cultures where the first officer is restricted from making mitigation measures to prevent accidents due to respect and power barriers between him and the co-pilot. As such, issues like bad weather, the plane running out of fuel, errors made by the captain and other mishaps which happen of the plane and the first officer fails to correct the captain could have been the case for the missing Malaysian flight. Accident Theory The pioneer of this theory was Heinrich in 1936. Heinrich proposed the "domino" theory of accidents. The theory suggested that an accidents do not happen in isolation as they are result from a sequence of events that follow in a predetermined manner. They events leading up to the accidents therefore fall like dominos. As such, the causes of aviation accidents are investigated on relation to the events which preceded the accident as opposed to the conditions of the accident. It is imperative to note that the underlying principle of this theory is based on the fact that the accidents is an unintentional harm which is caused by a transformational process of uninterrupted events with interacting elements. The last event in the transformational process is the injurious events and is therefore the primary events. However, this event needs all the other secondary events in order to cause harm to the plane. The causes of the plane crashes are analyzed through an accident "reconstruction" approach that requires an understanding of a liner chain of events which will help the investigators make informed judgment as to the precise cause of the accident (Orasanu, 1993). In application, this theory takes the form of a flow chart where the different preceding events are analyzed with the aim of reaching into a conclusive decision. The approximate order of the steps followed in application of this theory include; Description of the events in a sequence which lead to the accident in form of a sketch. Delineation of the actors involved in the accident from the sketch already produced. Both animate and inanimate actors are included such as the passengers, wind current, the controller, an aircraft component or the pilot. Determination of the actual point in the plane from where the alarm was triggered from and where the transformation of events stringed from. List of all the actors and their actions chronologically according to the time they acted. Assessment of every action of the actors recorded alongside its spatial and temporal logic and then compare them to the assumed events which caused the accidents this will help in the validation of temporal-spacial relationships or events. In case the evidence in inconclusive, a logic tree is constructed to show the flow of events leading up to the accident. The evidence is more likely to be found at the top of the tree as it is the source trigger of all the other events. This theory could be used to investigate the cause of disappearance of MH Flight 370. Since there was no reported evidence of the cause of the accident as the plane has not been found yet, the investigators can use this theory by construction of a sketch which will show all the reported actions of the actors in time and space and the resulting events which were recorded before the Air traffic controllers and the pilots lost contact. This is because this theory believes that the main cause of the accident was triggered before the point in which the plane went missing. Using the sketch and the described process, the investigators will be able to draw a conclusive relationship between the point which initiated the accident and the disappearance. Human Factor Theory This theory is based on the notion that plane crashes are caused by human errors. According to Shappell & Wiegmann (1996), 70% to 80% of all the plane accidents are caused by human factors. This theory proposes a comprehensive framework for identification and investigation of human errors which may be responsible for the crash or an accident suffered by a plane. One of the approaches developed to identify the genesis of human errors is the “Swiss Cheese” Model of Human Error developed by James Reason (1990). According to the “Swiss Cheese” Model, there are four levels of human failures which influence each other in a preceding way thereby leading to the emergence of the accident. This method investigates the cause of the accident starting backwards from the time the accident took place. The last level is the unsafe acts. This is the immediate event that ultimately led to the accident. Most investigations focus all their attention at this point is order to uncover all the casual factors. The effectiveness of this model in uncovering the cause of the plane failure is based on its ability to investigate accident failure by analyzing causal sequence do events. The second level involves the conditions of the crew and the role such conditions played in affecting the performance of the plane. This level is known as the Preconditions for Unsafe Acts. Such conditions include coordination practices, poor communication, and mental fatigue among others. When the crew is under pressure of any other the above conditions, they are likely to make poor decisions which then cause errors resulting to plane accidents. Preconditions for unsafe acts are based on the practices referred to as “Crew Resource Management (CRM) (Reinhart, 1996). Poor CRM can be traced backwards to the third level which is unsafe supervision. The cause of a plane crash can result when unqualified pilots are paired with each other and sent to a place with adverse weather. With poor supervision and lack of quality training, there is a high potential for poor communication to take place. In this case, the coordination and performance of the crew will be compromised and therefore set up for failure. The highest level is the organizational influencers. The organization should also be analyzed as it might have a role to play in the cause of plane accidents. This is because they are responsible for funding and authorization of different operations. For instance, if they do not disband funds required to train the crew, the supervisors will have no alternative than to assign complex tasks to “not-proficient” crew. As a sequence, poor communication and low-quality training will manifest as preconditions for unsafe acts which will influence the performance of the crew thereby leading to an accident (Senders and Moray, 1991). This theory can be applied to identify the cause of disappearance of MH Flight 370. The main aim of this theory is to identify the root cause of the disappearance of the Malaysian plane by identifying the unsafe acts identified before the plane lost contact with the air traffic controller. The unsafe acts will be linked to the preconditions for the unsafe acts in order to identify the role of the supervisors and the Malaysian airline in general. This will help the airline prevent future failures. The most suitable theory to explain the cause of disappearance of MH Flight 370 is the “Accident Theory”. Before the plane went missing, there are a series of events which took place in a progressive manner and can be explored by an expert to form a pattern that will provide conclusive evidence as to what caused the disappearance of the plane. According to the theory, the plane was flying at an altitude of 35,000 feet at the time they said their good night. Immediately after, there was a catastrophic decompression but there are no reports as to what had caused it. This led to changes in the course of the plane for an emergency airport. At this point, the pilots throttled the altitude to a 12,000 feet. This implies that the crew was already overtaken by whatever had led to decompression and the plane was reprogrammed and left to fly on its own. It is possible that the crew and the passengers had already lost consciousness at this point and so the plane continues on its own over the Indian Ocean until it ran out of fuel and got lost in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Therefore, investigation can center on finding out if there as furl deprivation or if the plane’s engine was working properly. References Nigel Cawthorne. Flight MH370: The Mystery. John Blake. August 1, 2014. Print. Orasanu, J.M. Decision-making in the cockpit. In E.L. Wiener, B.G. Kanki, and R.L. Helmreich (Eds.), Cockpit resource management (pp. 137-72). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.1993. Print. Shappell, S.A., and Wiegmann, D.A. U.S. naval aviation mishaps 1977-92: Differences between single- and dual-piloted aircraft. Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine, 67, 65-9.1996. Print Senders, J.W., and Moray, N.P. Human error: Cause, prediction and reduction. Hillsdale, NJ: Earlbaum. 1991. Print. Reinhart, R.O. Basic flight physiology (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. 1996. Print. Read More