[Professor Fox]

(03-18-2014 05:32 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  

In some weird way I would feel relieved if it was a deliberate act. I don't want to think that a plane with such an impeccable safety record would go down in the middle of the ocean due to mechanical failure. That to me is somehow more scary than a deliberate act. Though the outcome is the same regardless.

This. I'd like to believe that the only flaw of the plane was unanticipated icing in the fuel filtration of RR-powered aircraft (BA38). The possibility that a safe established plane can have some sort of well hidden fatal flaw is much worse imo.

[dtf]

Can anyone post a link to the passenger list that includes names, passport country & country of birth?

[dtf]

"LOSE YOURSELF ON A JOURNEY OF EPIC PROPORTIONS"

"WHEREVER YOU GO NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW"

What kind of airline would use these phrases in their advertising?

[Teutatis]

(03-18-2014 05:32 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  

In some weird way I would feel relieved if it was a deliberate act. I don't want to think that a plane with such an impeccable safety record would go down in the middle of the ocean due to mechanical failure. That to me is somehow more scary than a deliberate act. Though the outcome is the same regardless.

I know what you mean and I agree. It's very unlikely that too many pilots will go crazy and do something like this, so this might be a very rare occurrence, but if the plane itself has something wrong with it then that could potentially mean more problems in the future. Not that either one would make those poor people come back to life anyway.

[CrackerJack]

(03-18-2014 04:41 PM)AntiTrace Wrote:  

(03-18-2014 04:39 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  

^^^ One of the pilots could've been intentionally incapacitated by the other. For example, some chemical substance or "roofie" in a cup a coffee.

possible.

i do believe it was a deliberate act.

Deliberate act of what?

Suicide? Why all this pussyfooting with disabling comms and turns at altitude. I would just push the controls forward right after takeoff and get it over with. No time for the other guy to react or even transmit and you're pretty much guaranteed to go out with a bang.

Piracy/Hijack? It's 10 days since, and nothing out. Where do you think you can take and hide this thing for so long? The furthest place north without being seen might be Burma and Bangladesh. Their incompetency exceeds that of Malaysia and Thailand.

The only place to disappear like that is over water to the south west.

The "deliberate" thing about this is a huge media spin off and mass retardation.

I'm with the Wired article on this. Makes total sense to me.

[GunznButta]

Pilot & CFI here, even so, this is still (hopefully more than half-assed) conjecture

i like chris goodfellow's wired article because it covers the most bases in a rational, linear way.

doubt there's foul play. top clue: when terrorists bring down jets, they'd LOVE to BRAG about it. no one has stepped forward...yet.

things he didn't emphasize enough/neglected:

assuming the fire flared after the last radio call, the first thing to do will be to put out the fire hence the fuses get pulled (along with transponder, radios, etc..)

the first turn to langkawi is sensible as it's towards the nearest long runway. after that, suppose the smoke and fire extinguisher chemicals get into everything around the cockpit and other systems. things go out in some seemingly random pattern. eventually every major system (like navigation) has fried/failed.

maybe the captain was the one mortally wounded in the fire. he tells the copilot what to do and dies.

so now you have a copilot fucking glad he's flying a boeing (because those fucking fly-by-wire airbuses woulda long since died and dived) but privately shitting that he's dead reckoning flying at 30,000+ft, on a half-moon night, over open water & featureless terrain from a point he forgot X minutes ago (so he can't calculate the X minutes ahead to get to langkawi)

so copilot follows orders and guesses on time to field and when time's up he looks down and sees only open water. no land. time now is 2-4am. no light. starts freaking and drops altitude to look for shoreline. (or he stays at altitude -- who knows? -- the point now is he's a way too raw pilot is flying the jet.) this dude is SCARED.

problem with that is that by going lower he increases fuel consumption (reducing speed and range), reduces the distance he can see and kills his fuel out glide range. starts making guessed turns hoping for land. still no dice in the middle of the night.

maybe by 5am enough light peeks out so he decides to fly east. (by climbing or descending) he burns more fuel and kills his range. fuel out. splash.

i dunno if they'll ever find the plane but i think last known track of the plane was eastward toward the sun. but given that flying reg's are, as we say in the biz, written with blood, i'd bet that there'll be a new requirement that all overwater planes carry a handheld, battery-powered GPS device (in case everything fries) like fire extinguishers.

one of the things that older pilots harp endlessly on about modern cockpits is that it turns pilots into button-punching idiots with no handflying or basic pilotage sense. if you disable the systems on a modern jet, most overseas pilots -- especially those fast expanding airline cadets, i believe, will freeze up -- just like i think this copilot did.

i currently know of ZERO airlines that require backup, independent gps units being carried aboard. this is something that should happen.

[zarzuelazen]

(03-19-2014 01:25 AM)GunznButta Wrote:  

Pilot & CFI here, even so, this is still (hopefully more than half-assed) conjecture

i like chris goodfellow's wired article because it covers the most bases in a rational, linear way.

Good try at a theory, but there's some serious problems with it - see my comment in the other thread.

All the famous cases I read on Wikipedia about fires breaking out on planes have the plane on the ground within 15-30 minutes of the fire starting to degrade aircraft systems - fires seem to crash planes very fast!

In the case of MH 370, it's apparently still flying for up to 7 hours , and the complex course changes seem hard to explain.

I do agree that some sort of mechanical problem is the simplest explanation. I don't think it was a fire though.

[AntiTrace]

(03-19-2014 01:25 AM)GunznButta Wrote:  

Pilot & CFI here, even so, this is still (hopefully more than half-assed) conjecture

The reason I don't buy these fire theories are because the lack of radio communications.

As a CFI you know that you don't pussyfoot around when switching freqs from one controlling agency to another. How do you explain the fact they never switched over and contacted Vietnam Control?

Its possible the fire happened the in the few seconds it takes switch freqs. And we know they would attempt to isolate the fire by pulling breakers and turning off equipment. It possible as the last transmission was reported at 1:19am and the transponder was turned off at 1:20am.

I also know the whole "aviate, navigate, communicate" mantra. But it's too easy to get a radio call off stating the emergency and your intentions before going radio silent. I mean, wouldn't you want crash,fire,rescue to be on scene when you landed or at the very least have the airspace cleared for your approach?

He could have also asked for a heading and distance to an emergency airfield.

They only possible way the fire could work is it was a sudden MASSIVE and COMPLETELY debilitating fire that destroyed all communications equipment almost instantly. The likelihood of that happen at 1:19am during the switch between controlling agencies is too unlikely for me to believe.

Yeah it possible, but so is it being deliberate act of some sort.


you did bring up that it was a cloudy night. do you know the weather of that night? I haven't heard it mentioned yet but without clear skies I could see a pilot getting lost trying to dead reckon unless he got underneath the cloud layer.

regardless, I have no clue what happened. Not even enough an idea to really guess as to what happened. It's like a puzzle, and so far all the theories I have heard have large pieces missing from them. Only time will tell if we get more information and can end up filling in the missing pieces to figure out what finally happened.

But yeah, regulations are written in blood and I'm sure something will come of this.




edit - the more I think about it, the more the fire theory starts to grow on me. still a bunch of holes in that theory, but I'm not completely against it now.

[MidniteSpecial]

What if a group of people secretly got together and booked plane tickets together at the same time? And just disappeared. Like a secret society disappearing club and just started their own society on a secret island somewhere.

[CrackerJack]

(03-18-2014 04:41 PM)AntiTrace Wrote:  

(03-18-2014 04:39 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  

^^^ One of the pilots could've been intentionally incapacitated by the other. For example, some chemical substance or "roofie" in a cup a coffee.

possible.

i do believe it was a deliberate act.

Deliberate act of what?

Suicide? Why all this pussyfooting with disabling comms and turns at altitude. I would just push the controls forward right after takeoff and get it over with. No time for the other guy to react or even transmit and you're pretty much guaranteed to go out with a bang.

Piracy/Hijack? It's 10 days since, and nothing out. Where do you think you can take and hide this thing for so long? The furthest place north without being seen might be Burma and Bangladesh. Their incompetency exceeds that of Malaysia and Thailand.

The only place to disappear like that is over water to the south west.

The "deliberate" thing about this is a huge media spin off and mass retardation.

I'm with the Wired article on this. Makes total sense to me.

[AntiTrace]

(03-19-2014 03:39 PM)CrackerJack Wrote:  

(03-18-2014 04:41 PM)AntiTrace Wrote:  

(03-18-2014 04:39 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  

^^^ One of the pilots could've been intentionally incapacitated by the other. For example, some chemical substance or "roofie" in a cup a coffee.

possible.

i do believe it was a deliberate act.

Deliberate act of what?

Suicide? Why all this pussyfooting with disabling comms and turns at altitude. I would just push the controls forward right after takeoff and get it over with. No time for the other guy to react or even transmit and you're pretty much guaranteed to go out with a bang.

Piracy/Hijack? It's 10 days since, and nothing out. Where do you think you can take and hide this thing for so long? The furthest place north without being seen might be Burma and Bangladesh. Their incompetency exceeds that of Malaysia and Thailand.

The only place to disappear like that is over water to the south west.

The "deliberate" thing about this is a huge media spin off and mass retardation.

I'm with the Wired article on this. Makes total sense to me.

who knows.

if it was a fire or any other type of emergency procedure it was extremely sudden and completely incapacitating. Given the stellar record of the 777 that is unlikely.

and curious as to what experience you have that can label the claims of many as mass retardation?

[Hotwheels]

Apparently several of these have been posted;



http://www.dailydot.com/lol/malaysia-plane-craigslist/

lolzzzz

[Professor Fox]

[RexImperator]

Australian PM says something may have been spotted on satellite...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/ma...ralia-says

[zarzuelazen]

Fire theory conclusively rebutted:

Key points:

(1) No communication of any kind (no MAYDAY) , makes no sense , someone would have had time to get off messages in a fire
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/did-mi...ire-2014-3

(2) The plane did not continue in straight line flight , it made several programmed course changes following waypoints that could not have been made had everyone been unconscious
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-26640114


New Developments:

Search area now dramatically reduced, analysis of sat data shows the plane definitely went South, and is likely in a area around 2300km west of Perth, Australia:. Australian PM just reported objects in the water found in the area , Australian air force is on its way now:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...ngine.html

[Vacancier Permanent]

BREAKING NEWS:

The Aussie Prime Minister just announced they've found and identified objects from the missing plane in the South Indian Ocean!!!

Could this be it?

If true, my heart goes to those on board and their families and friends.

[Slim Shady]

deleted

[speakeasy]

Or then again it may just be garbage flowing into the ocean from the Ganges.

[Vacancier Permanent]

Speakeasy,
That's what we all deep down hope and pray to be the case! Everyone hopes the plane is sitting on land somewhere anywhere really with the passengers alive and taken hostages.

But unfortunately, it's not looking like it tough.

Slim ashady, didn't get what you were trying to say. This is no joking matter man!

[GunznButta]

@zarz: i clearly said i was speculating -- just in a (hopefully) more than half-ass way. lots of unknowns and mysteries here. i dislike the irresponsible slander and fearmongering that's being slung around on cnn these days. like goodfellow's original article, hopefully the simplest explanation ends up being what happened and he's NOT some batsh-t crazy muslim pilot hellbent on creating a mystery for everyone.

the key takeaway you should get from me is that, or all the crackpot theories out there, his is the one that i've seen that holds most water -- as leaky as it may still be -- fire or no fire. i just added some other practical considerations like the difficulties of dead reckoning....

@Anti: cloudy? i don't recall mention anything about clouds. i have no idea if it was cloudy or not.

yes the freq switch to vietnam shoulda been a snap (it obviously should've been the freq that's punched in on standby on the comm switch.) the timing of events in first 10-30 min after the lost comm is the biggest mystery of all -- why they didn't is one that may never be solved given that people say the cvr (cockpit voice recorder) is a 2 hour loop tape. unfortunately no one will ever know.

the 1st turn was clearly a diversion to the nearest airfield. FMS systems like one you'd find in a B777 should include some divert button where punching a very short sequence of buttons will automatically turn the plane as needed. the turns after that are where plane likely got lost.

that said, i'm betting on the captain being incapacitated in whatever way (probably after that first turn/divert) and the copilot panicking and getting lost in the night. flying by dead reckoning is one of the lost arts of modern flying -- to have to do it in a high-altitude, high-speed heavy on a dark night with no nav....that would have me sweating bullets too....

edit: just heard they may have found something...we'll see....

[Professor Fox]

ERJ135 From Australia Wrote:

I am unable to give sources or any other information, however I am looking at a hard copy of the satellite imagery which clearly shows the two pieces of debris.
The larger one at 24 metres is definitely a part of an aircraft wing, if it is the 777 we are looking for it would be from the engine pylon to the tip. The other part is harder to tell what it is.
The credible information is that it was found at the extreme fuel range of the aircraft off the West coast of Australia near Perth. The theory of a Helios type tragedy is now most likely but is still speculation.

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

Given the remoteness of this location from any land which limits even air search, this looks like a great opportunity for an U.S. aircraft carrier to head over and help recover all the stuff. They will become global heroes more than if they had bombed 10 Syrias in a row.

[bojangles]

Oceans freak me out, the vast expanse etc, they may never find the black box if the plane has indeed crashed

[iknowexactly]

(03-18-2014 08:07 PM)dtf Wrote:  

(03-18-2014 05:28 PM)Sombro Wrote:  

"LOSE YOURSELF ON A JOURNEY OF EPIC PROPORTIONS"

"WHEREVER YOU GO NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW"

What kind of airline would use these phrases in their advertising?

One without the inclination to involve and/or listen to experienced English speaking marketing people.

Maybe correlating with disinclination to proactively keep in touch with the highest standard (i.e. English speaking countries) of safety experts.

I only fly on aircraft from wealthy countrys' airlines from now on.
USA, Japan, Germany. etc.

I think if Japan airlines safety regs say "keep the cockpit door locked" they keep the fucking cockpit door locked.

[DetlefMourning]

I am by no means an expert on aviation so the pilots feel free to chime in and correct my ignorance, but I have a hypothesis:

According to investigators, the flight path change was fed into the plane's computer 12 minutes before the final communication to Air Traffic Control. Yet the pilots communicated no distress or problems whatsoever to ATC. So this would lead one to believe that either the pilots were in on it, or perhaps doing the bidding of hijackers under duress.

As far as hijacking goes, pilots have been trained post 9/11 to protect the integrity of the cockpit and not let their planes be converted into missiles, even if the lives of the crew and passengers are being threatened. Even if the pilots decided to violate that policy and open the cockpit door to hijackers, they still would have been able to send a coded distress signal to ATC before doing so.

Some have suggested that the pilots encountered a mechanical/electrical failure or fire, and that whatever happened was quick enough that they did not have time to send out a distress signal. In that case you would expect to find wreckage in the South China Sea where it disappeared, but the plane was in the air for an additional 7 hours, and it's immediate diversion off the original flight path has it hitting three navigational waypoints in a row. The plane was being flown in a purposeful manner, which means if there had been a problem with the plane, the pilots would have been able to get out a distress call.

And if this were going to be some sort of suicide/kamikaze mission, you could just push the controls forward right after takeoff like the other guy upthread said. There's no need to fool with flight path changes and disabling comms. And in the case of the Egypt Air pilot who intentionally took his plane down, it was discovered he had serious legal troubles at home and his life was falling apart. Nothing in the background of these pilots seems to suggest anything sinister. For the plane to have continued on for 7 hours and to be flown in the manner that it was, by somebody who knew how to program flight path changes, disable comms and navigate commercial air corridors and navigational waypoints, that would suggest either one or both of the pilots or another pilot on board that commandeered the cockpit. And what are the odds that you would have TWO mentally unbalanced pilots in the cockpit together, or TWO pilots on the take carrying out some sort of mission? For it to continue on for 7 hours and to be flown in an expert manner, that would tell me that either one of the pilots managed to neutralize/incapacitate the other, or...

Could the plane's flight controls have been hacked? When the pilots last communicated, they may have been unaware of any problems or that their plane had been compromised, thus explaining no mayday call or distress signal. And then the pilots were unable to regain control over the plane, unable to communicate with any ATC, and whoever hacked the plane programmed its path over the ocean and its eventual fall from the sky when it ran out of fuel? The plane would have hit the water largely in one piece and thus sunk to the ocean floor. And the intentional turn off of transponders and ACARS would mean by the time the authorities realized there was no wreckage in the South China Sea, the plane would be on the bottom of the Indian Ocean, where the emergency locator beacon's signal can't get out.

We are a technologically advanced enough civilization that Stuxnet can be used to neutralize centrifuge processing at an Iranian Nuclear Power Plant. Could we not also use technology to bring down a plane?