Malaysia Airlines MH370

Another good detailed article breaking the news that Zaharie's flight simulator had underwater practice runways near the Indian Ocean:

http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/cops-find-five-indian-ocean-practice-runways-in-mh370-pilots-simulator-bh-r

― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli), Tuesday, March 18, 2014 1:00 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wtf.

The word "underwater" appears nowhere in that article. It refers to runways in the Indian Ocean region, not in the Indian Ocean.

lol

albert broccoli between this and the beer thread you have to get your facts straight

lol underwater runways

It all comes back to SPECTRE

The word "underwater" appears nowhere in that article. It refers to runways in the Indian Ocean region, not in the Indian Ocean.

― bi-polar uncle (its OK-he's dead) (Phil D.), Tuesday, March 18, 2014 2:16 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'd already read the article and then was like wait did i miss

underwater runways was an awesome psychambient disc imo

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/0f/Airport_77_movie_poster.jpg/220px-Airport_77_movie_poster.jpg

Secret Boeing Duckboat Project

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9d/The_Soft_Boys-Underwater_Moonlight_%28album_cover%29.jpg

I swear to dog it said underwater when I linked to it (I did note the article was 8 minutes old when I c/p'd it)!

...but then again it was like 2am after a long day.

I'm in your message board distorting your facts!

Hello Down There

Maledives residents see low flying plane with blue and red stripes: http://www.haveeru.com.mv/news/54062

https://goo.gl/maps/egXlU

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BjCC-ILCAAAX3TC.jpg

good idea, check lake superior

these graphics are supposed to convey the enormity of the area it could be but i don't find them convincing. it's 2014. it's very hard for me to believe that you can just lose an airplane for this long in 2014 no matter how large the search area for the flight (unless maybe it doesn't want to be found?)

how is that hard for you to believe? that's a huge area.

It's a pretty small circle, not even 500px by 500 px

http://news.yahoo.com/thailand-gives-radar-data-10-days-plane-lost-124915659.html

a circle that size only holds about forty 777s so I'm with mordy here

lol are you talking about the text, '777'?

well you clearly are so congrats

maybe they ran away

in 2014 I find it hard to believe that the plane hasn't checked in on foursquare AT ALL in this time I mean cmon

how long would it take to find a downed airplane in that area in the united states? 2 hours max? ok, so obv the issue isn't the size of the area at all but the kind of technology we have available in that area to track these things. a large body of water in the indian ocean poses different problems than the continental united states + bc of coverage issues different problems than maybe the atlantic ocean. so the question isn't whether the area is too big to search - it's about our capacity to search it. politics for sure plays a role, but it's hard to imagine knowing the little i do about the state of first world military technology that it couldn't be found in this long period of time unless a) it didn't want to be found or b) <tinfoil> it has been found and for whatever reason it's being kept out of the news? </tinfoil>

Mordy did you not see the infographic about the tens of aircraft disappeared over the last few decades?

i did not miss this lede:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-17/australia-to-lead-hunt-for-jet-in-southern-indian-ocean.html

Malaysian Air Flight 370’s disappearance became the longest in modern commercial aviation as investigators lacking new information to back other theories explored the possibility of pilot suicide.

mysteries are exciting, it's true

i mean that if your point is that this is precedented, that lede should indicate that it is actually unprecedented.

nah, the lede says it's the longest disappearance in modern commercial aviation, that's a statistical truth perhaps but doesn't give any sense that this is uniquely inexplicable

i didn't say the disappearance was inexplicable! what would that mean? magic? divine intervention?

idk it feels like all kinds of hubris to say that technology CAN find this plane, but the govmint or military or whoever WON'T find this plane or won't reveal it to we sheeple

the whole 'we live in 2014' thing kinda bugs me. like ok we have cool phone and google glasses and there's drones delivering amazon packages but that doesn't rule out shit going pearshaped. technology fucks up ALL the time, the sheer fact of 'having' technology isn't a guarantee of anything

I mean, there's a lot of assumptions you have to get past to even cross over into the conspiracy tinfoil theme park...

if you're cool making that leap then have fun on the rollercoaster but yr hittin the pipe a little hard imo

/end rant

this: it's hard to imagine knowing the little i do about the state of first world military technology that it couldn't be found in this long period of time etc, i'm saying i don't think it's "hard to imagine" at all because i think the difficulties are probably greater than you realise

i say this as somebody who's absolutely not any kind of expert but feels like lots of journalists and other people who are not any kind of expert are making a bunch of over-confident assertions

^^^

well, i did acknowledge that there is a political component. i'm sure jurisdiction + information sharing is a huge clusterfuck. maybe the countries who could find it don't care enough to do so.

that said, we can bug Merkel's private cell phone, we have drone coverage over remote tribal areas of Pakistan and Yemen, we have all kinds of tracking + radar equipment. i don't think the problem is lack of technological sophistication available worldwide. i guess there's a remote chance it fell into some deep abyss where the passengers are now chilling w/ a civilization of sea aliens and we just can't get down there (nb maybe no sea aliens)

you're not comparing like for like - Merkel's phone, selected military targets, those things' locations are already known

As far as I know searches are still done via the human eye (no transmitters except the black box ping, which isn't strong enough to carry much distance), and in that vast of an area, where the big pieces are surely out of sight by now, it is next to impossible. Other wreckage gets found because the searchers know the direction and last know position, speed, etc and can therefore extrapolate to a relatively small area.

jesus christ mordy this is the dumbest i've ever seen you

lol

these graphics are supposed to convey the enormity of the area it could be but i don't find them convincing

That is not what "enormity" means jftr.

Seems like searching for a needle in a haystack to me. I hope they do find it, for the sake of the families of those aboard.

Figure all we need to do is to tap the underwater sea aliens' seashell phone and we can find the plane... should be pretty easy for the US military to do in 2014!!

"But enormity is also frequently used interchangeably with enormousness, which means the quality of being great in size, number, or degree. This is not wrong, nor is it a new development; the OED lists examples of enormity used this way from as far back as the late 18th century, and plenty more examples are easily found in historical searches."

i axed the website grammarist- they said don't worry, its' cool.

xp

enmordyty

Biggitude

Gave up the enormity fight long ago

Ginormity

Interestingly énormité in French means both enormousness and something smaller than enormity, more like bad fuck-up or glaring mistake.

If it flew over the Maledives, isn't that towards Somalia, where pirates like to hijack oil tankers for money? Maybe they're diversifying into planes now?