Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Fat Cat · Post by **Fat Cat** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 8:47 pm

I know we have both military and civilian pilots on here, and I am genuinely intrigued by the mystery of this plane's disappearance. The facts as I understand them:

-Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was hundreds of miles off course, traveling in the opposite direction from its original destination.

-It had stopped sending identifying transponder codes before it disappeared.

-The plane's transponder apparently stopped working at about the time flight controllers lost contact with it. I take this to mean that radio contact and transponder contact were lost at the same time, an unlikely accidental coincidence.

-Two passengers entered Malaysia using valid Iranian passports, but they used stolen Austrian and Italian passports to board the missing Malaysian plane.

Does anyone have any thoughts about what might have happened? It's an intriguing mystery to me.

Cave Canem · Post by **Cave Canem** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 10:26 pm

A new season of "Lost" ?

Batboy2/75 · Post by **Batboy2/75** » Wed Mar 12, 2014 12:26 am

T200 · Post by **T200** » Wed Mar 12, 2014 12:29 am

How long does it take to turn that many individuals into Manchurian candidates? I'm sure everybody is totally fine.

nafod · Post by **nafod** » Wed Mar 12, 2014 12:50 am

It'd be easier to make it disappear flying into a forest or a swamp (think the United flight into Shanksville) than into the water. Too many things that float.

I am sure that whatever I think happened is wrong. This one is bizarre.

Fat Cat · Post by **Fat Cat** » Wed Mar 12, 2014 2:06 am

nafod wrote:It'd be easier to make it disappear flying into a forest or a swamp (think the United flight into Shanksville) than into the water. Too many things that float.

I am sure that whatever I think happened is wrong. This one is bizarre.

Yeah there is no "easy answer" because there seems to be an element of volition: somebody chose to change course and stop transmitting at the same time.

milosz · Post by **milosz** » Wed Mar 12, 2014 2:12 am

The plane could have lost pressure and they turned around - wouldn't be the first crash caused by lack of oxygen to the pilots.

Protobuilder · Post by **Protobuilder** » Wed Mar 12, 2014 2:13 am

RFID Microchip employees were onboard. It is known to all that they were working on a microchip to be implanted in people as part of Obamacare and, as a result, were silenced along with everybody else on the plane.

Protobuilder · Post by **Protobuilder** » Wed Mar 12, 2014 2:16 am

Fat Cat wrote:I know we have both military and civilian pilots on here, and I am genuinely intrigued by the mystery of this plane's disappearance. The facts as I understand them:

-Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was hundreds of miles off course, traveling in the opposite direction from its original destination.

-It had stopped sending identifying transponder codes before it disappeared.

-The plane's transponder apparently stopped working at about the time flight controllers lost contact with it. I take this to mean that radio contact and transponder contact were lost at the same time, an unlikely accidental coincidence.

-Two passengers entered Malaysia using valid Iranian passports, but they used stolen Austrian and Italian passports to board the missing Malaysian plane.

Does anyone have any thoughts about what might have happened? It's an intriguing mystery to me.

I hadn't heard that the plane was off course but see that it's being reported now.

Were both of the people using stolen passports Iranian? They reported that one of the people was and that he was trying to immigrate to Italy...though flying through Beijing would be an odd way to do it. The passport angle doesn't really seem that odd as I would venture that a lot of people use them for flights between SEA and China.

Fat Cat · Post by **Fat Cat** » Wed Mar 12, 2014 2:25 am

They were both Durkadurkites. Pouri Nourmohammadi, 18, and Delavar Seyed Mohammad Reza, 29 both entered Malaysia with valid Iranian passports.

lasalle · Post by **lasalle** » Wed Mar 12, 2014 3:04 am

nafod wrote:It'd be easier to make it disappear flying into a forest or a swamp (think the United flight into Shanksville) than into the water. Too many things that float.

Not quite. From a pretty interesting article in Wired: "How it's possible to lose an airplane in 2014"

Aviation experts said it is far too soon, and too little is known, to speculate on what might have happened. But many agree that whatever happened was sudden and almost certainly occurred at high altitude, scattering the debris over a vast area.
“If something catastrophic happened, that’s seven miles up,” Joseph said. “Winds at that altitude are sometimes over 100 knots. Based on that wind, small pieces are going to be moved a lot of different places.”

Any aerodynamic pieces–wing sections, say, or pieces of the tail–will be blown around like a bag in the wind. Heavier pieces like an engine or landing gear will fall straight down. Fuel and other fluids will be scattered, leaving little evidence below. This is what happened when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry on February 1, 2003. The difference there was the disaster occurred over land. Spotting debris on open ocean is much, much harder.

“It’s very very difficult to spot things in the water unless you’re on top of it,” Joseph said.

A related factoid:

It took investigators two years to recover the black box data recorder from Air France Flight 447, which went down over the Atlantic on June 1, 2009.

Fatty, if you're really interested in this stuff, I recommend the whole article: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2014/03/malaysia-air/

Grandpa's Spells · Post by **Grandpa's Spells** » Wed Mar 12, 2014 3:55 am

The Air France example is the one I thought of, and it turned out to be pilot error, IIRC.

Protobuilder · Post by **Protobuilder** » Wed Mar 12, 2014 4:30 am

Fat Cat wrote:They were both Durkadurkites. Pouri Nourmohammadi, 18, and Delavar Seyed Mohammad Reza, 29 both entered Malaysia with valid Iranian passports.

The fact that they are both male is surprising to me. When I heard they had people flying in between KL and Beijing on stolen passports, I figured they were sex trade workers/human trafficking, etc. Middle Eastern men flying out of Malaysia wouldn't raise that many eyebrows assuming they were legal.

I talked to a flight attendant yesterday who said that everyone around her believes that some kind of fire started in the cabin and the pilots were able to turn the plane around but not do much else. Of course, if it actually broke up, it would have to be more than a fire, I would think.

Holeyfraggaroley · Post by **Holeyfraggaroley** » Wed Mar 12, 2014 5:03 am

I can vouch for spotting plane parts in the ocean as being hard. Spent a day looking for EA6B parts from a crash in the ocean. Probably found 6-7 pieces. Largest was 3ft long. Found the pilots helmet and that was all we found of him and we knew where the plane augured in.

Fat Cat · Post by **Fat Cat** » Wed Mar 12, 2014 6:22 pm

Still nothing. Let me ask a follow up question; do you think it is likely that the flight recorder will be recovered? And if so, is it likely to hold the answers?

Anon · Post by **Anon** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 1:10 am

Fuck Globalization!

Batboy2/75 · Post by **Batboy2/75** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 1:53 am

Fat Cat wrote:Still nothing. Let me ask a follow up question; do you think it is likely that the flight recorder will be recovered? And if so, is it likely to hold the answers?

Didn't hey fish the Airfrance recorder out of the middle the Atlantic? They seem to always find the the recorder.

Fat Cat · Post by **Fat Cat** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 1:58 am

That's my impression too.

baffled · Post by **baffled** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 2:03 am

Batboy2/75 wrote:
Fat Cat wrote:Still nothing. Let me ask a follow up question; do you think it is likely that the flight recorder will be recovered? And if so, is it likely to hold the answers?

Didn't hey fish the Airfrance recorder out of the middle the Atlantic? They seem to always find the the recorder.

I think it took them like 3 years to find it, but yeah.

CharlieBob · Post by **CharlieBob** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 2:22 am

Grandpa's Spells wrote:The Air France example is the one I thought of, and it turned out to be pilot error, IIRC.

Yeah, failure of one of the airspeed monitors which shut off auto pilot and a rookie pilot that stalled the plane into the water without the other pilot knowing because the flight sticks did not have dual feedback. Also the senior pilot was in back having sex with a stewardess.

Freki · Post by **Freki** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 11:53 am

U.S. Investigators Suspect Missing Airplane Flew On for Hours

http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424 ... 2?mobile=y

Malaysia: No engine data after plane went missing

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/malaysia ... was-headed

DrDonkeyLove · Post by **DrDonkeyLove** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 2:20 pm

This is starting to sound like a Tom Clancy novel.

Freki · Post by **Freki** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 2:39 pm

DrDonkeyLove wrote:This is starting to sound like a Tom Clancy novel.

Yep! What I've heard implied but not explicitly said is this: can they track it from the updates from the engines, assuming they actually were sending updates?

Maybe not like a GPS but more like a "this update came via this satellite, the next update came from this other satellite". Get a direction. There's supposedly some Malaysian military radar data that might show it as well. Shutting off the transponder just made it invisible to air traffic radar, military radar could still pick it up. They, supposedly, didn't make the connection until late Sunday or Monday.

buckethead · Post by **buckethead** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 3:16 pm

Remember, radar "sees" anything with a big enough cross section for the distance and atmospheric conditions.

A pilot can't turn something off and make it invisible to radar.

A transponder is just a identification associated with a radar blip, so the ATC can say "that blip is that flight"

Now, I've never played with an ATC console, and they may filter out non-transponding returns, but it doesn't mean there wasn't a raw return captured.

What CAN make you disappear from radar is a) blowing up/crashing into little cross-sections too small for radar or b) getting below that radar's horizon by flying low to the ground or c) having some super-secret stealth technology to fool radar.

The only "mystery" here is whether it was a) or b) or some combination of the two.

Bedlam 0-0-0 · Post by **Bedlam 0-0-0** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 3:47 pm

A Vietnamese oil rig worker claims to have seen the plane go down while on fire. This could be a hoax as indicated in the article.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... go-down-r/

IGX

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