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

Was mentioned in article...will look for it give me a few min...

 

If it was a terrorist attack wouldn't they blow it up where people could see it. The point of terrorism is to incite fear and that is the reason they blew up the WTC. If it blew up in the middle of the ocean and no one saw it or heard it the message wouldn't really be that effective. How would they even be able to take credit for it?

How does plane that big with that much fuel just disappear. If it blew up it must have shown up on a satellite. It is amazing that all radio communication just stopped. Even if engines went down how do all the radios go down.

 

At first, I thought the Malaysians were withholding info on the investigation, but it looks like they have no idea what they're doing. Searching a completely different ocean? That's 500 miles west of the initial area. The plane would have had to turn around and fly back over a large land mass to get the other side.


http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2014/03/world/malaysia-flight-map/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

 

The plan may have been to hijack it and hold the passengers hostage.

 

I could have sworn I read that this morning, but I just looked at 12 articles and didn't see it in any of them. Couldn't find it on a google search either.

Apparently my brain wasn't ready for DST...

Mleah, it does seem unlikely that the plane would have drifted so far off course either intentionally or accidentally without radioing the ground. However, military radar says they picked up the aircraft flying West over Thailand at around 2:30 am (an hour after it disappeared). They say it was flying about 1,000 ft. lower than when it disappeared an hour before.

If this was the case, the plane would have flown more than 350 miles West, with transponders and radio equipment turned off...for an hour?!

 

Sure, blame it on the Iranians...were such easy targets.

On a serious note, I just cant believe that this has become such a mystery. Can it really be that difficult to find a plane? This thing bust have blown up into miniscule pieces.

 

Yeah I know, trust me I spent several months doing the backpacker working from a laptop thing in Thailand... it's a big thing over there simply for people to get in and out of other countires for work, partying, or whatever without messing with the complicated visa requirements. Those Iranians looked like young guys going to Germany/Amsterdam to simply have a good time.

 

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Nikki is looking for Juan Pablo to say &quot;I Love You.&quot; She'd have better luck looking for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23TheBachelor&amp;src=hash">#TheBachelor</a></p>&mdash; Jason Biggs (@JasonBiggs) <a href="https://twitter.com/JasonBiggs/statuses/443243155165413376">March 11, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

If by good time you mean getting the hell out of Iran! One of them was seeking asylum in Germany and was going to stay with his mother.

I thought I heard reports that there were other suspect passports, has that been confirmed?

 

It's comforting to know how only a few countries actually screen passports to see if they are stolen. Talking about an opening for terrorists. They are acting like it's normal for people to travel under stolen passports over in those parts. No big whoop. I mean...the database exists. How hard could it be to extend the systems over there to search the database to see if the passport is stolen? It sounds like they don't even care who gets on the plane until something like this happens. Then, it's a glaring hole.

 

Where the plane might've flown across the Malay peninsula it isn't that large. Only about 70 miles wide at its narrowest. Also that area is heavily forested and mountainous so it is possible that the plane could've flown over that area and not been noticed.

This is likely a failure of multiple systems including communication and navigation that led to the pilots becoming disoriented.

 

Searching ocean isn't easy. As noted the Air France crash took days to spot.

 

The Air France flight was in between South American and Africa. I don't know exactly how far, but far enough to where it was in Senegalese air space.

In the case of the Malaysia flight, there are several factors at play. The flight path was supposed to take the plane north east, towards the eastern border of Vietnam. If the plane crashed/exploded/whatever on its original flight path, it should be south of Vietnam or East of Vietnam either in the Gulf of Thailand or the South China Sea. This is problematic because the flight path would have gone right on the edge of the Gulf, which has counter-clockwise circular currents in the winter, whereas in the South China Sea the currents run South.

Radar suggests the plane dropped altitude and flew for an hour West over the gulf, over Thailand, and somewhere into the Strait of Malacca. If this was the case, the plane could have gone even further out into Andaman Sea. The area isn't highly populated and there aren't many radar stations.

So basically they only know where it was at about 1:30. After that, it could have gone East, it could have gone West, it could have turned directly around, or it could have continued on its path. At this point they don't know because they have no data (unusual, as the pilot should have communicated with the ground or another plane on the emergency frequency).

The Air France flight took a few days to find debris, but it took 2 years to find the main wreckage, as it was some 3,700 m below.

It is unusual, considering the MAX depth of the Gulf of Thailand is only 16 meters deeper than the LENGTH of the Boeing 777 (64m length/80m max depth). However, considering they don't know which direction it went, and because of radar issues in the region, they can't accurately guess where to look.

The Air France was transmitting real time information for 3 minutes prior to the crash. So investigators had a much better idea of where to look, even though it was so far out in the open ocean.

Once they find SOMETHING, it will likely lead to the rest.

 

Cockpit doors are heavily reinforced; and even if the hijackers were able to somehow find a way inside the cockpit, the process likely would have allotted plenty of time for a member of the flight crew to squawk 7500 or make a radio transmission indicating a problem.

But generally speaking, an aircraft transponder is a sophisticated piece of a equipment -- and like all sophisticated pieces of equipment, they are prone to failure. It's common in the ATC world if a transponder is acting nuts (i.e. erroneous altitude readings and what not), for ATC to request that the flight crew reset, set to standby or turn off the transponder.

So...it happens. But the important thing to keep in mind here is: radar coverage is limited when not over land, and secondary radar (aka radar involving aircraft transponders) is meant to work with radar. Perhaps some sort of anomaly took place that disengaged the autopilot and the flight crew become disoriented? I don't know. That could potentially explain why the aircraft went off course, but it obviously doesn't explain why there were no radio communications from the flight crew.

I'm as big of an aviation nerd as you will ever find and I'm completely and utterly perplexed by all of this. I will say that I do not buy the hijack theory, though. When it's all said and done this will likely be pilot error of some sort. At least that's the way that I see it.

 

Another possibility...hacked from within...

https://www.federalregister.gov/art...r-series-airplanes-aircraft-electronic-system

Apparently Boeing was aware that their network system left them vulnerable to hackers. There is no indication that this is what happened, just another tid bit of information to add to the realm of possibilities...

 

More now on the allegations one of the pilots on board flight MH370 invited a girl into the cockpit for the duration of a flight in 2011.

Melbourne-resident Jonti Roos has come forward with pics where she was invited by Fariq Ab Hamid into a cockpit of an international flight from Phuket to Kuala Lumpur.

"Throughout the entire flight they were talking to us and they were actually smoking throughout the flight, which I don't think they're allowed to do," Ms Roos told TV programme, A Current Affair.

"I know for the whole time they weren't facing the front of the plane and actually flying."

Ms Roos continued: "I don't think there was one instance where I felt threatened or I felt that they didn't know what they were doing.

"I felt like they were very friendly, but I felt they were very competent in what they were doing."

She admitted that when she saw pictures of Mr Hamid on the television in recent days she was stunned.

"When I realised it was the exact same co-pilot and not only that but I had met him and I have photos in the cockpit with him, that was quite shocking," she added.

 

I agree, it would be very difficult if not down right impossible to open a cockpit door, unless they forced it open when the pilot was using the restroom. But again, the first captain would have had time to relay this over the radio.

I wonder if they have a recording of the emergency frequency channel, since that one flight reported making contact w/ the Malaysian airliner, but could only makeout mumbling over the static.

Certainly equipment can fail, but not usually without any kind of warning. The plane disappeared from radar, but an hour later the military believes they spotted it flying West over Thailand. How did this happen and why wouldn't they try and communicate? If they were disoriented they would have even more reason to communicate. They would have known they were lost as they should have hit land by that point.

 

What would happen if the entire aircraft were to lose pressure suddenly? Would it be a fast enough and thorough enough debilitation to render even the pilots unconscious/dead before they even had a chance to contact anyone for help? Thinking along the lines of some kind of catastrophic systems failure, maybe from a lightning strike or something, causing all electrical systems to fail AND a loss of cabin pressure also rendering communication impossible?

Is that even plausible at all?

 

Oxygen masks deploy, an emergency is declared and the flight crew would descend to about 10,000 feet or so. Unless something literally blew the aircraft up, a simple cabin depressurization is a very manageable situation.

But the concept of redundancy exists for the reasons you just mentioned. Every critical system has a backup critical system.

 

Someone suggested that scenario earlier. I suppose it's possible, but the first step when dealing with cabin pressure issues is to put on your oxygen mask (not those drop down plastic cups). If it happened so fast, it would have had to have completely destroyed the plane with no warning, hard to think of anything that would do that besides a bomb/missile/some kind of weather. We know it wasn't the weather as it was reported clear. I doubt it was a missile, as we have satellite systems that detect such launches. So it had to have been catastrophic and sudden for the pilots to of had a chance to communicate.

The reason I don't think that's plausible are the reports that the plane continued flying for an hour.

As for the lightning strike, I don't think this is all that unusual and it doesn't normally effect the plane's systems. I have been on a flight that was struck by lightning. It is estimated that every plane gets struck by lightning once a year.

The cabin pressure is interesting though, considering they believe the plane dropped altitude. When dealing with cabin pressure issues or any kind of serious issue while at cruising altitude, pilots will immediately drop to about 10,000 ft. to normalize pressure. They only think the plane dropped 1,000 ft, to about 34,000 ft.