A new interim investigative report from the Malaysian authorities is worth reading, and not just for the news item about an expired battery on the underwater locator beacon for the plane's Digital Flight Data Recorder.
It goes far to address my questions about what was in the aircraft's maintenance logs. The report identifies no major open issues prior to the flight, and it was good to see that prior to the fatal flight, Malaysia Airlines had indeed replaced oxygen-supply hoses of the type that may have contributed to a flight-deck fire in a 777 on the ground in Cairo in 2011.
I particularly appreciated the report clearing up a few uncertainties on my satellite phone question. Though a marketing brochure from Malaysia Airlines had advertised satellite phones in business class seating, on this particular 777, those phones could only make seat-to-seat calls.
The only functional satellite phone mentioned in the report rang to the flight deck when the airline's operations center tried calling, after the fateful turn to the south:
"Two Ground-to-Air Telephony Calls were placed to the cockpit from the MAS Operations Centre at Airline Operational Communications (AOC) Q10 priority level at 18:39 UTC and at 23:13 UTC, 07 March. Neither of the calls was answered."Such incoming calls would trigger chimes and lights on the flight deck; but for reasons that remain a profound mystery, nobody picked up the phone.
For me, I continue to guess that a pressurization failure followed by hypoxia played a big part in this tragedy, along with major problems in the electronics bay that knocked out some communications -- but not quite all the communications, as we now know from the satellite handshakes, and two unanswered calls that rang on the flight deck.
I check the weekly search reports from the Joint Agency Coordinations Center, and lately we were able to see a sample of what the scanning sonar has sent back during the months-long search, the first phase of which is about half complete. The big boxes in the image are probably containers that fell off a ship.
