On the Erin Burnett Show on CNN they were saying how passenger plane pilots are more about monitoring computer programs than they are stick and rudder pilots and this might have been the issue that was wrong with the Malaysia airlines flight that is missing.
She also said that another Malaysian airlines 777 within the past couple of years had a problem with it's autopilot where the plane was flown straight up by it's autopilot and the crew wasn't trained how to deal with this problem and it was almost fatal for that crew before they solved the problem. There was a software patch for this problem for 777s but it is unknown if the missing plane got this software patch or not because this is Malaysia and not the U.S.
So, it is theoretically possible that the autopilot took them up to 45,000 feet gradually rather than flying them straight up there. At that point the fuselage or window or other part of the aircraft likely failed. At that point (if this is what happened) all people would be dead because of the altitude(depending upon what part of the plane failed and at that altitude if explosive decompression occurred) everyone within a few seconds at this altitude would be dead. It might be possible that what actually happened was a software failure on the autopilot that continued flying the plane then until it ran out of fuel near Perth Australia but all this time from where the plane first turned back to Malaysia the whole crew and all passengers might have been dead. Or another scenario is that the pilots were both dead because of decompression in the cockpit but the crew could not break through the pilot's door to rescue themselves or the passengers from certain death eventually.
So, the following sounds like a plausible scenario. The pilots had the plane on autopilot. The captain was back with the crew and passengers likely having a beverage. While the co-pilot radioed Viet Nam he wasn't looking at the altimeter (altitude reading) while the Autopilot malfunctioned and was steadily taking them up to 45,000 which is the minimum altitude they went to which is the limit of the plane's capacity without having explosive decompression from some source. Some kind of decompression occurred before or after the plane turned back towards Malaysia in trouble. At that point one or both pilots were overcome and were unconscious or dead. No one could get into the cockpit or they didn't know there was a problem because the co-pilot was unconscious there and likely dying or dead at this point. The plane then flew until it ran out of fuel and glided down and bellyflopped on landing near Perth in the ocean.
As someone who used to be a computer programmer in my late teens and early 20s especially, this sounds like the crazy kind of problems people can have regarding glitches in software when software has autonomy and no one is there to monitor it that is left conscious or alive.
You can vaguely approximate this with cruise control on a car. You set your cruise control at 70 mph. But then, there is no traffic and you fall asleep or have a stroke or heart attack. The car isn't going to stop until it either hits something or something stops it other than the driver. Imagine this same thing in a plane with more variable possible within a computer driven autopilot that controls altitude, and direction the plane is traveling. The co-pilot likely before he passed out set it on autopilot thinking someone else might get into the cockpit to save the rest of the passengers from the plane crashing somehow. Unfortunately, he was wrong. No one was able to save the plane for whatever the reason.
This is one plausible scenario from my point of view. However, there could be variables I'm missing because I don't have enough data and apparently neither does anyone else (that we now know of publicly at least).
These are the kinds of problems that we will have regarding planes, Cars and ships and anything else that can be run autonomously. The reason we likely can't make sense of this is because it wasn't a human that did this. Very likely it was a software glitch with no one left conscious to fix it or disconnect it. And maybe they didn't know how to fix it which would make sense more about why the transponder was shut off trying to get the autopilot to disengage. But, at some point likely nothing succeeded in keeping the pilot or pilots alive. Another possibility (though I don't think it is probable) is that there was absolutely no way to disengage the Autopilot and no one had any control at all of the plane because the autopilot was flying and absolutely would not disengage.
However, this doesn't make any sense to me because why would someone design an autopilot that couldn't be disengaged? However, it is possible that when it was tested the problem never came up during the debugging of the software and that it only came up in the context of the humidity of Malaysia while the planes were on the ground in that humidity in relation to the electrical components. So then, it might be theoretically possible that the pilots were prevented from disengaging the autopilot. But then, why didn't they radio for help? Them not radioing for help in this scenario (unless there was a type of explosive or gradual decompression within the cockpit or fuselage doesn't make sense).
Like I said, this is one theory from the information presented today on CNN.
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