The most foolish thing to do is make wild guesses about why any aircraft crashes. You don’t know enough and unless the “Go” teams and investigators have made some sort of rational assessment every scenario is merely guesswork.
That said, one can point at certain factual signposts that will mark the path of the probe.
For example, it is extremely rare for a modern aircraft to have a catastrophic situation at 38,000 feet when it is cruising. If you eliminate bombs and hijacked aircraft the number of accidents that have begun at this altitude are very few.
The odds of both engines flaming out at the same time are astronomical. Unless the pilots were incapacitated they would have had 10 minutes to communicate to ground control which is an eternity in a crisis. Even if they were unable to establish communication, the CVR (cockpit voice recorder), when it is retrieved, will reveal enough for this descent not to be a mystery like the unsolved saga of MAS Flight 70.
Aircraft have multiple back-up systems and do not go into even a partial CFIT mode(controlled flight into terrain) without there being something very unusual occurring at that height. No one can even dare to hazard a guess and all that the experts can do is create plausible scenarios and eliminate them.
The way they go about it is to put every possibility on the table. This does not mean that it happened that way, it means nothing can be struck off without evidence that allows for its removal.
Consequently, whether it is an icing issue (unlikely) or an intrusion by third parties, instrument failure, contaminated fuel or electrical failure, all these aspects will be thoroughly checked.
It is customary and often convenient to use the label of “pilot error” or what is more kindly known as the human factor and close the book, especially so in less developed nations that fly fourth generation aircraft. But that is not a measure here and there is very little a pilot can do at cruising altitude when the aircraft is winging its way on auto pilot.
This is the first major commercial crash of the year. According to statistics there was one fatal accident per 2.38 million flights in 2014, compared with every 1.91 million flights the year before.
These figures did not include the loss of the Malaysian airliner over Ukraine, where 298 people died, which was counted as a war loss, rather than an accident.
As flying gets safer, it is a cause of concern when the unexpected occurs, because with the huge leaps in technology no aircraft should vanish without a trace and no aircraft should descend at a controlled rate and then hit into a mountain.
