Malaysia Airlines flight MH370-Updates and Discussion

lomb

They either record radar traces or they don't. I don't see the problem, even if the transponder was off and it went off secondary it would have shown as a blip on the primary radar presumably with some kind of altitude information possibly no? I this is the case its a simple matter of tracking it to the point the radar contact was lost ie the crash site.
Its all very unusual. I presume they have looked directly under where the secondary radar was lost and there is no crash site hence the confusion. They need some US radar experts in there analysing the radar info.

aliveandkicking

sopretty wrote: »

They will occasionally let off a bit of steam about speculation etc., but largely add nothing to the information on the thread.

I think that's a very poor comment on your part. I've learnt plenty from reading this thread. Did you know what ACARS was before you arrived on this thread? Did you know anything about primary or secondar radar? Did you know that the transponder can be switched off manually by the pilots? Did you know about the sonar pings the black boxes give off and their range? There are many many bits of interesting information on this thread and on the aviation forum and I am glad that the people with this knowledge have shared it here.

kippy

Jack1985 wrote: »

Lot's of us know a lot about aviation, and I think nearly unanimously it can be said, nobody knows anything - There's nothing that is actually fact past its disappearance at this stage, thus everything is speculation unfortunately, it is quite unprecedented at this stage.

The big issue here really is the 24/7 demand for print online and TV news and then the major use of sites such as twitter and facebook for the dissemination of information or indeed dis information.
Planes have gone missing for longer than this in the past but this time out there are more red herrings than any other time in the past due to the issues I have mentioned. It doesnt of course help that the bodies responsible for co ordinating the search arent making the most "media friendly" job of it but it is a difficult situation for all involved and until something is found the actual root cause of the issues here will not be known.
The media demand to know what is happening and once they realise nothing has changed more speculation or BS needs to be printed or indeed rehashed from a few days ago.

Whatever has happened here I cannot imagine what the families are going through and I hope a speedy recovery takes place from this point.

tayto lover

Can't understand why this plane has not been found.
Mobile phones should be traceable through GPS.
The Yanks could put a bomb down your chimney but can't find a plane with 238 people on it??
There is something odd about the whole thing.

D3PO

god almighty can people stop with this GPS mobile phone bullsh1t im fed up of reading this tripe from people who havent a clue what they are on about.

spurious

tayto lover wrote: »

Can't understand why this plane has not been found.
Mobile phones should be traceable through GPS.
The Yanks could put a bomb down your chimney but can't find a plane with 238 people on it??
There is something odd about the whole thing.

My first thought was that we can and do track a single great white shark across the Atlantic and yet we lose a whole planeful of people? Quite frightening.
I always thought on flights you were handed over from one ATC to another.

tayto lover

D3PO wrote: »

god almighty can people stop with this GPS mobile phone bullsh1t im fed up of reading this tripe from people who havent a clue what they are on about.

OK then Mr Expert, you explain it to us ignorant folk.

Peregrine

tayto lover wrote: »

Mobile phones should be traceable through GPS.

We've been over this a few times now..

Have a read through the last few pages, maybe from this morning and afternoon.


I think I too will follow the countless others and just unfollow this thread, it was good in the beginning but now it's just the same baseless speculations and "Why don't we locate it using Google Maps?" regurgitated page after page.

sopretty

aliveandkicking wrote: »

I think that's a very poor comment on your part. I've learnt plenty from reading this thread. Did you know what ACARS was before you arrived on this thread? Did you know anything about primary or secondar radar? Did you know that the transponder can be switched off manually by the pilots? Did you know about the sonar pings the black boxes give off and their range? There are many many bits of interesting information on this thread and on the aviation forum and I am glad that the people with this knowledge have shared it here.

.

No, nor do I care to retain such information into the future. Certainly, I like when posters explain technical stuff, but most of it goes over my head. I am not technically minded, I shut off when I start seeing unexplained abbreviations and random figures in a post. The arrogance displayed by some posters also makes my eyes glaze over. It's not like I come into this thread to ask where I might get my cat neutered in Phibsboro. I'm interested in the topic, and I don't like being consistently condescended to.

D3PO

spurious wrote: »

I always thought on flights you were handed over from one ATC to another.

The plane was handed over from Malasian ATC howver the pilot never made touch with Vietnam ATC.

The handover process including an example transcript of how the handover works was posted earlier in the thread

Darius.Tr

Hi, I only recently found out about this missing aircraft as I have been away. Reading all of the 153 pages seems a bit too much, could someone sum it up in a short reply? Is the aircraft still missing?

ectoraige

Darius.Tr wrote: »

Hi, I only recently found out about this missing aircraft as I have been away. Reading all of the 153 pages seems a bit too much, could someone sum it up in a short reply? Is the aircraft still missing?

Yes.

Grandpa Hassan

sopretty wrote: »

Basically, the plane went off the radar. This is a wee bit of a problem for the aviation industry. No-one who knows anything, is going to tell us anything.

In the meantime, anyone who knows anything about anything aviation related, will keep miles away from this thread, as they know no more than you or I.

They will occasionally let off a bit of steam about speculation etc., but largely add nothing to the information on the thread.

Those in the industry have been at it as well. You obviously haven't read the professional pilots rumour network boards...pprune.org. All sorts of stuff on there such as the fact that the plane had enough fuel to make it to east Africa, and could have been below radar the while way. And is now sitting on a dirt runway somewhere, to be used at a future date in an attack or for the hostages to be ransomed. Some of the theories on there make boards.ie look like it's full of sensible ideas!

Darius.Tr

Thanks ectoraige, the answer could not have been any shorter, but still answered all of my questions

sopretty

Darius.Tr wrote: »

Hi, I only recently found out about this missing aircraft as I have been away. Reading all of the 153 pages seems to much, could someone sum it up in a short reply? Is the aircraft still missing?

Plane had a last known (we've discussed that terminology) reported connection at a certain point to the east of Malaysia.
Nobody is willing to say anything further.

Happyman42

Darius.Tr wrote: »

Hi, I only recently found out about this missing aircraft as I have been away. Reading all of the 153 pages seems a bit too much, could someone sum it up in a short reply? Is the aircraft still missing?

Plane missing...people talking about it. Some confused, some cross.

ABC101

Well I don't have any technical knowledge to add to the thread.

But I am frustrated at how little info there actually is about MH370. If the ABC news report is correct then it is going to take a long time to find the plane and put the pieces of this puzzle together. Hopefully,.... if it was sabotage by somebody on board... who switched off certain equipment such as transponders... hopefully they did not manage to switch off the black box... otherwise we may never know what happened on board in the final hours.

However I would add this... it could have been worse... a lot worse... in Brazil 2006... a GOL 737 airplane was involved in a mid air collision with a Embarer over the amazon jungle.

The Embarer did not have it's transponder switched on... and the GOL airplane and ATC did not know a collision was going to take place.
There were several other issues which contributed to the disaster as well.

So whilst I feel very sympathetic to the family, friends and relatives of the passengers and crew of MH370, at least it did not involve two aircraft.. just one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gol_Transportes_A%C3%A9reos_Flight_1907

adam88

Surely some vessel would have came across wreckage by now. Be it a ship looking for it or a ship coming across it by accident. Either that or it has crashed on land in some remote area

knotknowbody

From the latest information the Americans have disclosed it seems as if the disappearance was deliberate, and they seem to believe the blip picked up by the Malaysians on primary radar was in fact the flight, the timing at the transfer between Malaysian ATC and Vietnamese ATC seems very convenient for the deliberate action scenario in that it might cause some confusion as to what happened.

If that is the case it is most likely in the Indian Ocean, I don't believe terrorists or a terrorist organization would hijack a plane and just crash it into the sea and then not claim responsibility it just does not seem logical to me.

In that case we come back to it being an act of one of the crew, in order for it to be one of the crew they would have to either overpower the rest of the crew, or it was a group act by a number of members of the crew.

It would seem unlikely to me that one crew member managed to overpower the rest of the crew in a life and death situation such as this, and equally unlikely to be a group action by crew members. What are security checks like for crew, are they put through the same checks as passengers, could a crew member smuggle a weapon onto the plane with less difficulty than a passenger.

If it was a hijack, is there a possibility they made land somewhere remote in the Indian ocean, or that their aim was to make such land, and then look for a ransom, how long a landing strip would you need to get it down, obviously you couldn't land it on a beech or sandy island but could you land it on grass, if you had a reasonably long strip.

Animord

I keep seeing this on twitter in the last few minutes. Clearly I have no idea it is true and will be verified.

BREAKING UPDATE: The data reporting system was shut down 1:07 a.m. The transponder was shut down at 1:21 a.m

sopretty

adam88 wrote: »

Surely some vessel would have came across wreckage by now. Be it a ship looking for it or a ship coming across it by accident. Either that or it has crashed on land in some remote area

It just doesn't make any sense to me. They are looking to the east of a piece of land, and to the northwest of a piece of land, but never on the land, and now they're back to focusing on the east of the piece of land. You don't need to be a genius to figure out you're not being told something!!!!

geneva geneva4444

2 stroke wrote: »

To those in the aviation industry. How common is it that a plane disappears off radar and loses radio contact? The reason I'm asking, is that I'm wondering why the automatic coverup, marking the flight as delayed until after the expected landing time.
Surely the sensible thing to do, when a plane disapears off radar and radio, is to issue an alert to police forces, the military, emergengy services and maritime trafic, to look up and note what they see in the sky. Of course, if these things are happening regularly and if these type of alerts are being issued too often, the public might lose confidence in our airlines.

Okay so to answer the first part of your post;
Aircraft very rarely disappear off radar. Depending on the location of the aircraft, sometimes aircraft can briefly drop off for a few seconds and come back when they are at the outer edges of radar coverage. Pilots are typically informed asap by controllers when radar contact has been lost. If it is not due to coverage and is therefore a transponder issue, pilots can work on solving the problem and even that is also rare.

Radio contact being lost is much more common and happens for a variety of reasons, mishearing a frequency and dialling in the wrong one, being otherwise engaged and not monitoring the frequency, drifting out of radio coverage etc. But there are many ways around these problems such as relaying messages from one aircraft to another on behalf of the controller, pilots switching back to the last frequency that they were on, communicating on the guard/distress frequency, CPDLC (Data Link) messaging pilots etc etc. But aircraft can drift along out of radio contact for several minutes before they can be tracked down. It happens.

As an air traffic controller myself, you don't typically jump into panic mode when an aircraft is not responding to calls. You'll get them eventually. Losing radar contact is a more complex issue but particularly if it's accompanied by no answer from the pilots. In that event, there would be no delay in alerting SAR units and any other relevant authorities. You can be sure that this was the case with MH370, but let's not forget it was the middle of the night and over water. Hope this info helps.

ongarite

Animord wrote: »

I keep seeing this on twitter in the last few minutes. Clearly I have no idea it is true and will be verified.

BREAKING UPDATE: The data reporting system was shut down 1:07 a.m. The transponder was shut down at 1:21 a.m

ABC news in the US reporting it:
http://abcnews.go.com/International/us-officials-malaysia-airline-crashed-indian-ocean/story?id=22894802

wil

Nimrod 7 wrote: »

....and "Why don't we locate it using Google Maps?" regurgitated page after page.

Amazingly, you may have been the first to ask that here.

It might be sensible to ignore silly qxs and respond to new / breaking information only otherwise those asking silly qxs will have even more repetitive posts to read through to catch up.

Just saw that a Philadelphia flight had a tyre blowout on takeoff but returned to land w/o further incident

2 stroke

ABC101 wrote: »

Well I don't have any technical knowledge to add to the thread.

But I am frustrated at how little info there actually is about MH370. If the ABC news report is correct then it is going to take a long time to find the plane and put the pieces of this puzzle together. Hopefully,.... if it was sabotage by somebody on board... who switched off certain equipment such as transponders... hopefully they did not manage to switch off the black box... otherwise we may never know what happened on board in the final hours.

However I would add this... it could have been worse... a lot worse... in Brazil 2006... a GOL 737 airplane was involved in a mid air collision with a Embarer over the amazon jungle.

The Embarer did not have it's transponder switched on... and the GOL airplane and ATC did not know a collision was going to take place.
There were several other issues which contributed to the disaster as well.

So whilst I feel very sympathetic to the family, friends and relatives of the passengers and crew of MH370, at least it did not involve two aircraft.. just one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gol_Transportes_A%C3%A9reos_Flight_1907

I wouldn't be so quick to rule out a second aircraft, I've already sugested a colision with another plane running without transponder, this second plane continuing towards the Indian ocean. Just an idea, without any evidence.

sopretty

2 stroke wrote: »

I wouldn't be so quick to rule out a second aircraft, I've already sugested a colision with another plane running without transponder, this second plane continuing towards the Indian ocean. Just an idea, without any evidence.

But sure there is no other reported missing plane?

billie1b

wil wrote: »

Just saw that a Philadelphia flight had a tyre blowout on takeoff but returned to land w/o further incident

Nose gear collapsed and she ran off the RWY

geneva geneva4444

2 stroke wrote: »

I wouldn't be so quick to rule out a second aircraft, I've already sugested a colision with another plane running without transponder, this second plane continuing towards the Indian ocean. Just an idea, without any evidence.

I reckon it's extremely unlikely though. Any impact with another aircraft that would simultaneously knock out the transponder and communications would have sent the aircraft to an abrupt collision with the ocean close to where radar contact was lost. Given that the SAR mission was heavily focused on that area initially, debris would surely have been found by now.

Not to mention that the theory that it was another aircraft that the Malaysian military primary radar picked up is equally hard to imagine. We are talking about a massive impact that would not allow the second aircraft to continue flying. And if somehow it was still flyable, a Mayday would have been forthcoming. The only way it would be still flyable is a wingtip style collision which would not cause the MH370 aircraft to lose it's transponder capabilities.
It just doesn't add up in my opinion.

microsim

Investigation upgraded to include extra dimensions

http://www.theonion.com/articles/malaysian-airlines-expands-investigation-to-includ,35524/

knotknowbody

sopretty wrote: »

But sure there is no other reported missing plane?

That may be because the other plane survived, flew on, landed at its destination and now the collision is being covered up.

Perhaps the other plane was a military or government plane and they don't want it known it was the cause of an accident.

But the pings going on for hours after the disappearance from radar would seem to rule this out, if it went down it wouldn't have been sending those.