[breaking] Malaysian Airlines loses contact with Beijing-bound flight, 239 on board

Another what if conspiracy scenario...what if some bozo really did accidentally shoot down the airplane and now the governments are trying to figure out a way to get out of this without some huge international uproar.

I wouldn't put a penny on it, but my head is swarming with all these crazy scenarios right now...I don't know why I am so vested in this story, I don't even fly that often and I am certainly no aviation expert...just so weird I can't stop looking for more info!!!

I am hoping that some how, some way, the plane lost all communication ability, but spotted a small island and landed on the beach....everyone survived and they are just waiting to be rescued, surviving off peanuts, cheese nips, and whatever the meal of the flight was...

 

Just read that Malaysia Airlines has confirmed the plane was equipped with ACARS, a system that would relay any mechanical failures in real time back to the ground, we have heard reports that the area it disappeared had spotty radio strength, but if it continued on like reports suggest it would have had ample time to relay an emergency...

The flight was under 10 hours, which means I think they only use a 2 man crew. Is it possible both crew members suffered some kind of health issue which stopped them from relaying a distress call?

 

Hopefully, they are also drinking for a local spring and have fashioned spears with which to hunt the wild boars that populate the island and have learned no fear of man. Actually, boar wouldn't be halal, so let's make that deer.

 

Unbelievable.

 

The Malaysian military seems to have more information than they've been willing to release.

If this information is correct, the plan turned around and flew all the way back over the Malay peninsula before being lost again. There is no way the pilots had control of that plane if those are the circumstances.

I'm wondering if the plane was quietly hijacked and the hijackers either were unable to handle the plan or it was shot down.

 

Here's this tidbit from Reuters:

Jetliners do not fly VFR aka +500 altitudes.

 

From CNN:

 

Saw an episode of Air Crash Investigation last night where cabin pressure was lost due to a switch not being set to automatically pressurise the cabin. Oxygen is deployed automatically to passengers but apparently not to pilots when that happens.

The crash the show was about happened in Greece. The pilots were confused by the warnings they were receiving and lost consciousness before they figured it out. A male steward used extra oxygen available and made his way into the pilots seat...he was barely conscious by this stage though. Unfortunately at the controls as he tried to recover the plane to a safe altitude to land it ran out of fuel and crashed. So it is possible to lose cabin pressure and for the pilots to not remedy the situation in time.

Now having said all that....and not directed at you truroxfan but just generally....I think it's pretty sad how this has turned into some great mystery that the media are playing on. I know it's only natural when a plane just vanishes but there will be real causes for why this plane went down. All the speculation without a shred of evidence is ridiculous in my opinion. Until they find the plane no one has any idea what happened.

I'm sure the various air forces in the region will have been able to track where it ended up. I'd be more inclined to believe them over commercial tracking.

It is very sad, so many lives lost. Hopefully they find the wreckage and get to the bottom of what happened.

 

They don't or they can't? I had heard the primary radar that picked the plane up an hour later off the west coast of Thailand said it had descending at least 1,000 ft. from it's previous known altitude of 35,000 ft. It's possible it continued to descend and the last reading was at a +500 altitude.

Nothing about this flight is regular, so I wouldn't assume they were following safety and normal precautions from the point it disappeared off radar to the point of the final event/crash/whatever happened...

Just, the problem with that scenario is that the plane is equipped with Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which sends short messages via radio whenever it detects mechanical issues, even in the case of a complete power failure. There are backup systems and batteries for these things, if it continued to fly then it wouldn't have remained in a radio "dead zone" and would have eventually emitted signals to the ground if there were mechanical issues.

Those who had suggested or questioned why it wasn't standard practice with today's technology to transmit real time the airplane data, apparently it would be incredibly expensive, and because air travel is statistically so incredibly safe, and disappearances like this SO SO SO SO SO SO rare, it isn't financially feasible to do so. Also, the plane is recording megabites of information each SECOND. So they could not possibly transmit all of that data real time. Because this plane was equipped with ACARS it essentially already had a real time reporting mechanism for mechanical failures.

 

Interesting, I read this morning that the first thing pilots do is secure their oxygen masks, then continue steps to rectify the cabin pressure.

As for the media, everyone is speculating. No one appears to be claiming anything has happened. Everyone is as confused as the next person, and just trying to get as much info out as possible. I haven't gotten the feeling that any news media outlets were feeding off this story, making any kinds of assumptions, or leading their audience on. There simply are too few facts at the moment to know anything, but that shouldn't stop us from guessing and questioning what could have gone wrong.

Everyone thinks it is ridiculous it is taking them so long to find the plane, but absent of any concrete data, they don't even know where to look. They have some data that suggests the plane went South, West, or continued North or possibly even veered off to the East. With little to no information on where it went down, it's not easy to find the wreckage. Couple that with the fact that currents in the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand run in different directions (counter clockwise and south respectively), and it makes it even more difficult to find any wreckage...especially if the plane experienced some kind of catastrophic debilitation while at high altitude...it would have exploded into tiny pieces and the wreckage could be dispersed all over the place at this point...

I'm sure they'll eventually find it, but minus any additional clues on where the flight went after it initially disappeared from radar, will hinder the investigation and search.

 

Both. +500 altitudes are for VFR flight only and that's not permitted above FL180 (18,000 feet in aviation terms). For safety reasons, air carriers are almost never permitted to fly VFR.

 

My point was that it doesn't appear they were flying under the proper conditions/requirements. So I'm not sure that regulations necessarily mean anything at this point.

 

Well, a blatant disregard for a standard procedure such as this could be another detail supporting the hijacking or rogue pilot theories.

 

Ah okay, yes that would certainly be the case. I thought you were basically saying that because it is against regulations to drop to that altitude it can't be discussed as a possibility, which, as you would agree, would be ridiculous if there was any kind of issue aboard to flight that would have disrupted normal protocol and regulations.

 

The guy said 'around 9000 meters'. 8840 meters is 'around 9000 meters' which roughly equates to 29,000 feet.

 

9,000 meters = 29,527 ft

I'm going by the Reuters link that I posted.

 

Plane disappearance? Are we not in the year 2014?

 

Why do people keep saying this? As if the entire world is as developed as the United States, or that 2/3ds of the Earth still isn't covered with water...

 

Its the same people wondering why the passengers didn't just use their cell phones on the plane or text what was happening... at 30,000 feet... over an ocean.

Again, satellite and radar technology is not just some simple given thing, that's constantly watching/monitoring every square-inch of the globe. Its not like having GPS on a cell phone either.

Takes a ton of resources, along with extra man-power, to actively track every single plane out there at all times.

 

In the episode he is talking about called "Ghost Plane" the cockpit crew had no idea they lost pressure and never put their O2 and also never dropped the plane to under 10K feet.