Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 hijacked, official says
- Thread starter Fred Zed
- Start date
To ensure the insurance payout is provided to his family and to protect them from the stigma being associated with such a heinous act. It would not surprise me is if that plane is in the **************s trench now
Presumably the emphasis on "two corridors" means that the "Military Radar" is Diego Garcia (although out of position) and that they have gone back over stored data and failed to see a return that might be the 777 heading out over the open Indian Ocean.
As do I, with, however, the caveat that Indian Air Defence is largely postured towards the west and north.
Exactly.
I also wonder, as both pilots are muslim, would they still get 72 virgins in paradise ?
7 to 8 hours after it departed Malaysia, or after it disappeared leaving the Malaysian coast? All reports I heard said 5 or 6 hours of fuel from the time it disappeared. Which is reasonable. The heavier you are, the more gas you need, which means taking extra gas is a waste of money. In the case of a 777 on a 6 hour flight, having 2 hours of reserve (which would be 8 hours from take-off) is even a little much (about an hour at cruising speed is a good rule of thumb, though the actual rule is quite specific and varies from region to region), but it's not unreasonable. That's only thousands of wasted dollars, one hour would be more realistic. If you mean 7 to 8 after it disappeared, that's a ridiculous amount of gas. The cost in hauling that extra fuel would eliminate virtually any profit from the flight and chew it into a losing proposition. Which is why when the Captain (or First Officer) would've asked for that load, Malaysian Airlines would've questioned it. And they would have known. The flight calculations are done by the pilots, true, but they are also done by the flight computers, by flight management systems and by the airline's dispatch department, who would've received data from the airplane detailing its own calculations. It would not have gone unnoticed that the airplane was carrying enough fuel to chew threw 10's of thousands of dollars of lost revenue.
And if it's flying under radar, cut its range in half or more. A jet engine is extremely fuel-efficient at high altitude and high speed. It's extremely fuel-inefficient down low in the grass. Also, being down below radar coverage over land means staying REALLY low. Low enough that people in India would've been calling in reports of a plane crashing non-stop. Toronto gets lots of "A plane is crashing!" reports from planes over the GTA enroute to YTZ, YKZ and YYZ, imagine how many reports would come in of a huge airliner screaming past overhead a mere few thousand feet above the ground over areas not close to airports used to traffic, like over Barrie or Grand Bend for example.
The other factor is that, despite what "experts" say on CNN, it's not easy to disable communications. And for good reason. A hijacker charges into the cockpit and, knowing the basics of aviation, advises the pilot he knows about emergency squawk codes and code words, and advises you to disable the transponder and turn the radio off. It's a very possible situation. So one of the built-in redundancies is to remove some communications from the pilot's control. Things like ACARS are automatic redundant systems. To turn off ALL communications, you'd need to get out a big honking manual, isolate where the circuits are tied in, and start pulling circuit breakers. Which, to do safely, would involve following multiple long, complex checklists to make sure you aren't turning off something important. We don't remove ALL communication from the pilots control because very few people understand what ACARS is, let alone how it works. A terrorist who goes off and gets a pilot's license will know about emergency squawk codes and the like, but probably won't realize there's a magical stream of information flowing from various systems to the airline and the aircraft manufacturer, so he'll feel confident after he's had the radio and transponder turned off. And making them comfortable is good. It keeps them from hurting people or panicking.
I heard one "expert" say that all systems need to have the ability to be disabled for safety, such as to prevent the spread of fire. But that shows a lack of understanding on how these systems work. In fact, if you look at the QRH (Quick Reference Handbook) for basically ANY Boeing airliner (which is what I fly), you can see the "smoke, fire and fumes" procedure is very short. If you're a private pilot, you likely remember that step one in a cabin fire is the electronics master. It's simple because the aircraft is designed for stick-and-rudder flight. Aside from fancy equipment like a GPS and a radio, which aren't really necessary to avoid plummeting, electronics have no effect on your aircraft. In an airliner, step one is to put on your oxygen mask and smoke goggles, step 2 involves venting to clear the smoke, and step 3 is to start the diversion process if the smoke doesn't start going away. There is nothing in the emergency checklist that says start turning off electronics because it's a bad idea to do so blindly. You won't find those details in the QRH. The most the QRH will say is if you can easily determine the cause and locate the circuit breaker, trip the circuit to disable the equipment and continue or divert at the crew's discretion. Turning off ALL electronics just isn't done in an airliner. So having multiple connection points to multiple buses for critical components, which include the majority of things like black boxes and ACARS since they can help locate or isolate the cause in the case of a crash, is just common sense. If a component being off means the plane can't fly or disables critical safety systems, there's no reason to give a pilot easy access to disable them.
The idea that a pilot can make a plane stop transmitting everything is pretty out there. It's not impossible, but it would take a lot more knowledge than even your most experienced pilots. We're talking months and months and months of premeditation. It's not impossible, but it's EXTREMELY unlikely. And it certainly could NOT have flown across a populated country. It would've been caught on radar or visually reported at some point if it had tried to do that. What remains the best explanation is an electrical fault that caused a catastrophic failure of the electrical systems. A fire can spread quickly, so quickly that all communications and electronics could've been disabled, or a failure of some critical part of the electronics system that caused all electronics to stop transmitting. While the question remains "Where is the evidence of a crashed airline then?" you have to bear in mind that none of the other proposed scenarios (except maybe "aliens beamed it away") explains why there's no evidence of wreckage or diversion either. But at the end of the day, the most likely reason for an airplane to completely disappear from every single communications system is a catastrophic failure of all electronics. I'm not saying all other ideas are impossible, but they are less likely by a mile based simply on how these aircraft are designed.
I agree with the U.S. military that said the plane probably is in the deep of the Indian Ocean.
I was wondering days ago, how can this plane be stolen without being detected by foreign military air defenses? I doubt hijackers would know how to elude radar 100% of the time, even if they flew low as terrain or topography changes over such a vast area or long distance.
Maybe it was also shot down for failing to respond to fighter aircraft radio transmissions or hand signals, etc. by foreign air force pilots? Would the responsible nation keep that secret?
Thanks for posting this BlueLaser, great to have a Heavy Pilot's perspective.
As to the above I'd heard 45 minutes flight time of reserve fuel, I don't know, however, whether that was actual knowledge or informed speculation.
The comments of those former NTSB are excellent.
Mayday just telecast the SilkAir crash during a flight from Singapore to Jakarta in 1997 and the prime NTSB investigator back then was the same guy shown on CNN.
As to evidence of a crash, the Indian Ocean is vast. If life jackets or seats float to the surface, won't it still take a long time to detect or discover?
Considering the military radar in the map is the Brit's base at Diego Garcia, I think where the Indian radar is pointed is not too significant unless the plane overflew India/Bangladesh.
Canadian law states that for IFR flight (which all commercial operators are), the required fuel for jet aircraft needs to account for taxiing, run-up if needed, take-off, flight to destination, conduct an approach, conduct a missed-approach (a go-around, where you abort landing at the minimum altitude and climb back up to altitude on the track proscribed by the approach), fly to an alternate, conduct an approach at your alternate, land at your alternate, taxi to parking, any foreseeable delays including air traffic control, routing changes or weather delays, plus 30 minutes of flying at cruise speed. For propeller aircraft, the rules are the same except they have to carry 45 minutes of flying at cruise speed. If an alternate aerodrome isn't specified in the flight plan, you don't need to take fuel to get to an alternate. As of right now, an exemption exists allowing any COMMERCIAL operator, whether foreign or domestic, to file without an alternate. Some due to save on fuel, many don't because the alternate is usually pretty close. My company, as a policy, files alternates if only to make sure that flight planners have double-checked the weather and located a suitable alternate. There are times when the closest alternate is hours away, and that's kind of important to catch on those rare cases it happens given that we wouldn't carry hours of fuel otherwise.
The other thing I just learned is that the corridors are based on the satellite "pings" from the aircraft - - in other words they can't tell if the aircraft was north or south of the satellite, but they can tell how far away it was - hence the two arcs.
That was exactly it: danmand suggested it had done exactly that. And the odds of a 160ton, 240foot long, 200foot wide, all-metal beast like a 777 staying undetected in doing so is about as close to nil as you can get.
No, that's wrong. Radar will tell you the direction. Always. Even if there's only one station. With multiple stations you can triangulate based on distance alone, but radar sweeps and returns azimuth (direction) information as well. Civilian radar is just broad beam that goes straight out, so when the return radar signal that bounced off the aircraft is absorbed by the dish, the radar records the direction and uses math to calculate how long it's been since it sent out the signal to figure out how far. Military radar uses a narrower beam and uses sweep patterns that allow it to isolate exactly which part of the beam is being returned to calculate what angle the aircraft is at, which can be combined with fancy math to determine altitude and distance in a given direction.
EDIT: My bad, you said satellite pings. Satellite indeed works via triangulation, so only one satellite means no idea which one it is.
