Malaysia Airlines MH370

I mean don't get me wrong, I want these folks to be alive as much as anyone. at this point, I don't even think I can surmise what is known and unknown, given all of the contradictory info.

BTW thanks for that link, dylann

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/world/malaysian-air-scale/

:/

I read the piece and the only thing that they're saying that would lead to contradicting evidence is that the engine transmission cannot be shut down by the pilot. But they could put the plane inside something that acts as a Faraday cage, right?

...but now looking at the map there seems to be a very good reason for them to not find the plane given the size of the area.

also, what if they purposely chose a flight path (and destination) with no cellphone reception?

so they flew to Wyoming?

Why is everyone looking down? "Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space"

Fallows: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/why-malaysia-airlines-370-remains-so-profoundly-mysterious-and-why-a-better-black-box-wouldnt-help/284407/

http://m.smh.com.au/world/malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-may-have-been-deliberately-diverted-to-andaman-islands-20140314-34sp1.html

Smh.com

idk, it would be kinda seriously great if jarawas were behind all this

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00312/109220574_312697c.jpg

landing scenario

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/14/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

And a senior U.S. official on Thursday offered a conflicting account, telling CNN that "there is probably a significant likelihood" the plane is on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

Going out on a limb there, huh, senior U.S. official?

"there is probably a significant likelihood"

This whole thing is (as others have observed) kind of like a twilight zone episode come to life.

I know I know that the LOST references are of bad taste and disrespectful - but damn...

the fact that for a second i considered that this could be a viral marketing stunt gone wrong makes me hate capitalist society and myself

Yeah, that was the bad-taste thought in my head as well. "I hope this isn't some Geico stunt."

http://i.imgur.com/Uv7ZINL.png

wheres david copperfield @

waht

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/21/david-copperfield-s-magical-and-utterly-bizarre-caribbean-island.html

mr veg and I had the most ridiculous argument last night - he said that the plane was going to show up in two pieces on an island in hawaii or in a hollowed out volcano like blofeld's lair, and I said that maybe it went through a wormhole and was going to show up at Pearl Harbor in WWII like Final Countdown, and he was all that's ridiculous a jet would get shot down within minutes of getting there blah blah blah why would that even be a thing that was happened and I was all yeah and your Lost/Bond idea is so plausible

I'm not proud :/

**SPOILER ALERT**
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**SPOILER ALERT**

http://reading.kingrat.biz/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/millennium.jpg

if we've moved on to the joeks phase of the thread surely this disappearance is langoliers related in some way

They've all been captured by a Japanese TV show and their escape attempts are being broadcast there.

http://chud.com/nextraimages/tzone4.jpg

Well now there's this:

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 experienced significant changes in altitude after it lost contact with ground control, and altered its course more than once as if still under the command of a pilot, American officials and others familiar with the investigation said Friday.

Radar signals recorded by the Malaysian military appear to show the missing airliner climbing to 45,000 feet, above the approved altitude limit for a Boeing 777-200, soon after it disappeared from civilian radar and made a sharp turn to the west, according to a preliminary assessment by a person familiar with the data.

The radar track, which the Malaysian government has not released but says it has provided to the United States and China, then shows the plane descending unevenly to 23,000 feet, below normal cruising levels, as it approached the densely populated island of Penang, one of the country’s largest. There, the plane turned from a southwest-bound course, climbed to a higher altitude and flew northwest over the Strait of Malacca toward the Indian Ocean.

Investigators have also examined data transmitted from the plane’s Rolls-Royce engines that shows it descending 40,000 feet in the space of a minute, according to a senior American official briefed on the investigation. But investigators do not believe the readings are accurate because the aircraft would most likely have taken longer to fall such a distance.

“A lot of stock cannot be put in the altitude data” sent from the engines, one official said. “A lot of this doesn’t make sense.”

...

But the Malaysian military radar data, which local authorities have declined to provide to the public, added significant new information about the flight immediately after ground controllers lost contact with it. The combination of altitude changes and at least two significant course corrections could have a variety of explanations, including that a pilot or a hijacker intentionally diverted the plane, or that it flew unevenly without a pilot after the crew became disabled.

The erratic movements of the aircraft after it diverted course and flew over the country also raise questions about why the military did not respond to the flight emergency. Malaysian officials have acknowledged that military radar may have detected the plane, but have said they took no action because it did not appear hostile.

Seven days after the jet’s disappearance, Malaysian authorities have shared few details with American investigators, frustrating senior officials in Washington. “They’re keeping us at a distance,” one of the officials said.

...

Cengiz Turkoglu, a senior lecturer in aeronautical engineering at City University London who specializes in aviation safety, said a deliberate act in the cockpit could cause a radical change in altitude. “It is extremely difficult for an aircraft to physically, however heavy it might be, to free fall,” he said.

An Asia-based pilot of a Boeing 777-200, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to reporters, said an ascent above the plane’s service limit of 43,100 feet, along with a depressurized cabin, could have rendered the passengers and crew unconscious, and could be a deliberate maneuver by a pilot or a hijacker.

Other experts said that altitude changes would be expected if the pilots became disabled after the plane’s autopilot was disengaged. Changes in the weight distribution on the plane as fuel burned off would make the plane descend and climb repeatedly, though changes in course would be harder to explain.

this is such a stressful, weird situation. i can't imagine having a family member on that plane

"Everything so far makes it seem as though someone was controlling the airplane" and attempting to fly it somewhere other than its intended destination, said Robert Francis, another former NTSB member. The longer the search goes on, he said, the less it seems to be "what you would expect from a civil-aviation aircraft in trouble."

Don't you sometimes wish there was some kind of government organisation that secretly spied on everyone? I bet people like them could tell us where it is.

Maybe the pilot flew it into space?

shut the fuck up

Don't you sometimes wish there was some kind of government organisation that secretly spied on everyone? I bet people like them could tell us where it is.

― StanM, Saturday, 15 March 2014 01:24 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the rerouting theories seem to be predicated on someone with advanced avionics knowledge shutting down the systems that those orgs use so all that they have is an unlocated ping to rolls royce or whatever which is impossible to turn off in midair

i'm not really following this story (too horrible and scary to contemplate it; makes me never want to fly, or let my family fly, again). but no-one made cell calls from the plane during its distress? vaguely recall that people made cell calls from the plane on 09.11 when passengers overtook the al qaeda terrorists.

hope none of that sounds glib. not intended to sound that way at all.

there doesn't seem to be any public info about cellphone calls
even assuming they could get signals hundreds of miles from land, localized jamming isn't difficult to achieve

No cell phone reception over the ocean or above a certain height? Sudden decompression or loss of oxygen = no calls either.

And those systems that were turned off at different times could be: first one was someone pushing buttons in a panic + second one was the moment of impact.

The amount of ridiculously uninformed speculation everywhere is baffling but typical of today's 24/7 news cycle.

yeah well everyone going public apart from the malaysian authorities and perhaps the anonymous us govt insider confiding to the associated press is uninformed, and even they seem alternately confused or untrustworthy

there are degrees of expertise in interpreting this freakishly sparse picture though, and the more knowledgable sources seem to be veering to some sort of nontypical human interference (which could include an unorthodox or incompetent pilot response as well as more nefarious things)

And those systems that were turned off at different times could be: first one was someone pushing buttons in a panic + second one was the moment of impact.

About an hour into the flight, the plane's transponders stopped functioning, making it much more difficult for air-traffic control personnel to track or identify it via radar.

The first loss of the jet's transponder, which communicates the jet's position, speed and call sign to air traffic control radar, would require disabling a circuit breaker above and behind an overhead panel.

(wsj)

I still find it so hard to believe that a plane can just vanish like this. Even assuming the tragic worst, you'd think there would be failsafes for the failsafes to ensure a scenario like this one does not occur. Between this and the apparent proliferation of stolen passports, it does not give me faith in international air travel.

how can you not "assume the tragic worst" at this point? i thought the only real issue now was how (and why) it happened.

During the Air France 447 disappearance, a lot of the ATC folks were making the point that when you're out over the open ocean radar coverage is spotty at best. I'm still hoping that between AF447 and MH370 we'll get some sort of real-time satellite telemetry system working.

That would cost a lot of money for what are, though tragic for all involved obv., still increasingly rare events.

Between this and the apparent proliferation of stolen passports, it does not give me faith in international air travel.

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, March 15, 2014 9:59 AM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark

This is just a really stupid thing to say

In Patrick Smith's updates on this, he's made sure to always stress the following:

And as I was saying in my last update, no matter who or what is to blame, we shouldn’t let this latest tragedy overshadow the fact that air travel remains remarkably safe. Worldwide, the trend over the past several years has been one of steady improvement, to the point where last year was the safest in the entire history of commercial aviation. Hopefully their number continues to diminish, but a certain number of accidents will always be inevitable. In some ways, the weirdness of this story speaks to how well we have engineered away what once were the most common causes of crashes. Those that still occur tend to be more mysterious and strange than in decades past (have a look at the year 1985 some time, for an idea of how frequent large-scale air disasters once were).

Yeah I'm gonna quote the swiss-cheese analogy from Fallows:

As I mentioned earlier, airline travel is now so amazingly safe that when something does go wrong, the cause usually turns out be some previously unforeseen triple-whammy combination of bad-luck factors. Air-safety experts refer to this as the "Swiss cheese" factor: the odd cases in which the holes in different slices of Swiss cheese happen to line up exactly, letting the improbable occur.

This is just a really stupid thing to say

Maybe. I just mean that the US is so psycho about this stuff, that I can't imagine a plane just vanishing. As for the passports, well, if that is a thing that often goes down elsewhere ...

US authorities said they were also looking whether lithium batteries in the cargo hold might have overheated and burned into the aircraft's frame

the spreading fire could explian the gradual shutdown of separate electrical systems, although not the 4/5 hours of pings

Flying is the safest way to travel, by far, but also the most spectacular when something goes wrong, hence the disproportionate attention and the success of the endless repeats of shows like Air Crash Investigation, which also seems to make everyone think this happens twice a day.