As mystery surrounds the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 370, which was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing early Saturday, CNN's aviation expert Richard Quest said the airliner would have been at the safest point in the flight.
"It was two hours into the flight -- this would have been classed as the 'cruise portion of the flight,'" he said. "You break down the flight into taxi, take-off, climb out and then cruise.
"So in that particular point of the flight, this is the safest part, nothing is supposed to go wrong. The aircraft is at altitude on auto-pilot, the pilots are making minor corrections and changes for height as the plane burns off fuel -- the plane will be going higher and higher -- so this is extremely serious that something happened at this point in the flight.
Greg Feith, a former investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in the United States, suggested the pilots should have been able to report in, even if power on the aircraft had failed.
"The airplane by certification has to have battery back-up power -- they still have to be able to utilize certain flight instruments and communication tools to complete the flight safely.
Feith also pointed to the possibility of an issue with the pressurization of the aircraft.
"If you have a high-altitude pressurization problem, catastrophic decompression, the time of useful consciousness (the time a pilot can operate with an insufficient oxygen supply) in the 30,000-40,000-feet range is a matter of seconds."
08/03/14 Paul Armstrong/CNN
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"It was two hours into the flight -- this would have been classed as the 'cruise portion of the flight,'" he said. "You break down the flight into taxi, take-off, climb out and then cruise.
"So in that particular point of the flight, this is the safest part, nothing is supposed to go wrong. The aircraft is at altitude on auto-pilot, the pilots are making minor corrections and changes for height as the plane burns off fuel -- the plane will be going higher and higher -- so this is extremely serious that something happened at this point in the flight.
Greg Feith, a former investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in the United States, suggested the pilots should have been able to report in, even if power on the aircraft had failed.
"The airplane by certification has to have battery back-up power -- they still have to be able to utilize certain flight instruments and communication tools to complete the flight safely.
Feith also pointed to the possibility of an issue with the pressurization of the aircraft.
"If you have a high-altitude pressurization problem, catastrophic decompression, the time of useful consciousness (the time a pilot can operate with an insufficient oxygen supply) in the 30,000-40,000-feet range is a matter of seconds."
08/03/14 Paul Armstrong/CNN
