President and CEO of Dubai-based Emirates airlines said last week to Der Spiegel that he believes the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 did not crash into the Indian Ocean.
Current theories maintain that the Boeing 777 airplane remained on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed into the southern Indian Ocean, but Sir Tim Clark of Emirates stated, in his opinion, "control was taken of that airplane."
"Our experience tells us that in water incidents, where the aircraft has gone down, there is always something [debris]," he said. "We have not seen a single thing that suggests categorically that this aircraft is where they say it is, apart from this so-called electronic satellite 'handshake,' which I question as well."
Clark added that aside from Amelia Earhart in 1939, there has not been one overwater airplane crash in history that has not been at least 5 or 10 percent trackable. "But MH370 has simply disappeared. For me, that raises a degree of suspicion."
"It's anybody's guess who did what. We need to know who was on the plane in the detail that obviously some people do know. We need to know what was in the hold of the aircraft. And we need to continue to press all those who were involved in the analysis of what happened for more information," Clark said. "I do not subscribe to the view that the Boeing 777, which is one of the most advanced in the world and has the most advanced communication platforms, needs to be improved with the introduction of some kind of additional tracking system. MH370 should never have been allowed to enter a non-trackable situation."
Clark stressed that he is concerned that the disappearance will be dismissed as one of "aviation's great mysteries," adding that "we must not allow this to happen. We must know what caused that airplane to disappear."
Being the president of one of the world's largest airline operators, and being that Emirates operates 127 of the Boeing 777 model planes, Clark had a few things to say regarding the disabling of the tracking device on MH370.
"The transponders are under the control of the flight deck. These are tracking devices, aircraft identifiers that work in the secondary radar regime. If you turn off that transponder in a secondary radar regime, that particular airplane disappears from the radar screen. That should never be allowed to happen. Irrespective of when the pilot decides to disable the transponder, the aircraft should be able to be tracked."
"Disabling it is no simple thing and our pilots are not trained to do so. But on flight MH370, this thing was somehow disabled, to the degree that the ground tracking capability was eliminated," said Clark.
The plane disappeared seven months ago with all 239 people on board, and according to the most recent analysis by the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau, once the plane's fuel ran out, the flight went down in a slow left turn, eventually spiraling into the Indian Ocean.
