EXCLUSIVE: Did MH370 crew succumb to fire catastrophe?

The former head of security for the United States’ Federal Aviation Administration insists that rather than portraying the crew of the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 as saboteurs, the pilots struggled heroically to save their aircraft until overcome by smoke from a catastrophic cargo fire.

Billie Vincent who served as the FAA’s civil aviation security chief played a key policy and crisis management role in the handling of all hijackings of US aircraft in the 1980s. He was also in charge of the agency’s armed Federal Air Marshals and served as an expert witness in the trial of the Pan Am 103 terrorist bombing.

After leaving the FAA he led an international consulting firm which was contracted in the 1990s to design andat least one of the flight crew managed to don an oxygen mask allowing them to turn the aircraft back to Kuala Lumpur.

Flight 370 is reported to have climbed to 45,000ft which Vincent believes could have been due simply to the inability of the flight crew to clearly see and set the controls for a return to Kuala Lumpur.

Vincent guesses that control could have been regained and the aircraft sent back to a lower altitude of around 23,000 ft – which is a diversion altitude set by manufacturers of large transport aircraft to prevent a fire taking further hold and which both allows better survivability for those on board and vents the avionics bays.

The final report of a UPS B747 crash in Dubai in 2010, details how that