Malaysian Airlines MH370 contact lost

[oldoberon]

Could it be, that at the final moments of flight, at 0019utc, so well within the window of 0011 to 0115 utc, agreed to be the time of fuel exhaust, someone had circulated power (switch them all off for a while and then later switch SATCOMM back on) to try to alert the time of crash,

or was it effect of low power on fuel exhaust?

This could be a good indicator, that 0019 was the exact time of the final power failure.

could it be engine wound down no gennies, rat came on then satcom tried to fire up

ie does rat power satcom for an expected acars report (even though they don't subscribe), but that wouldn't explain just a partial ping unless it hit the water at that point.

[Ptkay]

could it be engine wound down no gennies, rat came on then satcom tried to fire up

This was my exact suggestion few posts before:

or was it effect of low power on fuel exhaustion?

This could be a good indicator, that 0019utc (08:10) was the exact time of the final power failure.


Is the Inmarsat comms device on RAT at all?

[UnreliableSource]

Quote:
MAS no satellite contract...


The inmarsat information with logon/logoff probes pretty well confirms that MAS was an active customer. No network provider would be probing non-customers in this way.

I had picked up the no sat contract from a very early post, but this clearly was wrong.

[flt001]

Some more information on the Inmarsat calculations:

http://i.imgur.com/vtNqkyN.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/1qn0Zep.jpg

Source (https://twitter.com/AliBunkallSKY/status/448433016495288320/photo/1)

[volcanicash]

@A69 thanks for posting the AAIB report and charts. Assuming the blue dots on the “Measured Data” chart are actual points of measurement for the burst frequency offset analysis (as implied), the satellite and aircraft would appear to have communicated more often than had previously been thought – i.e. at (roughly) the following times:

0042L
0055L
0107L

0225L
0227L
0228L

0340L
0440L
0540L
0640L
0811L
0819L (partial)

It would be interesting to know what prompted the comms between 0225L and 0230L.

[Hogger60]

MAS no satellite contract therefore by your own statement the switching vhf to data would disconnect ACARS - agreed?

No I don't agree. From various news sources (Google MAS satellite contract) MAS didn't have the contract to continuously transmit its position and other continuous data (ala AF447) via ACARS satellite data (in order to save about 10usd/flt), but they retained the the ability to transmit data via satellite on a request basis. For example to request weather or contact ops in an emergency, or when using CPDLC. Without the satellite connection the aircraft wouldn't be able to use CPDLC when outside of VHF range, and I know they were able to do that.

To turn off the ACARS data transmission you have to go into the com's page on center console, and perform the four step process to actually turn it off. Simply moving the VHF 3 radio head out of the data mode won't do it.

[oldoberon]

The inmarsat information with logon/logoff probes pretty well confirms that MAS was an active customer. No network provider would be probing non-customers in this way.

I had picked up the no sat contract from a very early post, but this clearly was wrong.

no sat contract FOR Acars. not no sat contract, even if transmitted by aircraft not accepted by satellite

[JamesGV]

"BBC are reporting a final partial Inmarsat handshake ping received at 08:19 following the routine handshake received at 08:11 with no explanation".

Flame out.
RAT deployed.
SATCOM Packs ( are ON/RUN) provides the last (new) "handshake".

IF the report is actually correct.

[philip2412]

We`ve heard,that the Pilot was separated from his wife,but still living under the same roof.
Do we know, who was the force behind this separation ?
Maybe it was his wife and the pilot still hoped to reconcile.Wè`ve heard she left him just the day before that flight.If, and it is of course a big "if"this affected him really strongly it could have triggered a suicide situation.

[JamesGV]

Yep. Simultaneously powers Electrics and Hydraulics.

[Pontius Navigator]

Uplinker, IMHO the best visual search platform is already there - the Chinese IL76.

It has a fast transit speed, good slow speed performance, and what it lacks in electronic equipment is more than compensated by an incomparable lookout capability.

[JamesGV]

Forgot.

Unsatisfactory RPM, then the load is shed with priority to Hydraulics.

[PA28Viking]

Now that the crash site has (almost) been located inside Melbourne FIR, will the formal responsibility for the investigation be transferred to Australia?

[nupogodi]

"BBC are reporting a final partial Inmarsat handshake ping received at 08:19 following the routine handshake received at 08:11 with no explanation".

Flame out.
RAT deployed.
SATCOM Packs ( are ON/RUN) provides the last (new) "handshake".

IF the report is actually correct.

Does the RAT power SATCOM? For classic Aero it is quite a powerful transmitter, it is not used as a critical flight system, it seems like a waste of RAT power.

My theory is that a momentary loss of power to the SATCOM modem caused it to attempt to re-establish a connection with INMARSAT, which it was not powered for long enough to complete.

[dingy737]

Since this unfortunate incident, it occurred to me that if required to ditch in the open ocean I should easily be able to contact nearby ships, since then I decided to test the standard HF maritime emergency frequencies and have made continuous attempts to contact ocean going vessels as I fly directly over them in the Atlantic. I have tried several HF frequencies regarded as maritime emergency frequencies over the last 2 weeks without success. It would appear there is no set frequency that is "religiously" monitored as 121.5 on aircraft. Maybe this is something that needs some extra thought as a commercial airliner in distress should quickly and easily be able to communicate with ocean going vessels. it would be a shame to ditch alongside a vessel at night and watch it continue to steam off into the distance. 2182 kHz, 4125 kHz, 8291khz, 16590khz, 12290khz. Any advice?

[Speed of Sound]

Wè`ve heard she left him just the day before that flight.

No, she moved out of the family home the day before the flight. As you say, they were already separated.

[Red Plum]

Most merchant ships ceased to carry radio officers and now have automated communications including email etc. HF is seldom used nowadays.

You would be much more likely to contact ships using the VHF frequency of 156.800 which is commonly known as Channel 16. This maritime radio equipment is not carried in any commercial aircraft I have flown but is fitted to some Naval helicopters and maritime patrol aircraft.

[KTVaughan]

Many posts ago, there was an unsubstantiated report that a US naval base in Thailand (Utapuo?) received a distress call with language like "cabin disintegrating".
What ever happened to this story?
Was it shown to be a hoax?

[syseng68k]

Lapp, #8026:

Wrong attribution - it might help if you could actually verify who said what before posting :-).

My original post was in reply to James890 as follows, #7968:

James890:

Data remanence on CVR?

If they were still using magnetic tape, then there may be a chance to recover earlier recordings, much as overwritten hard drive data can sometimes be recovered if you have a right tools.

However, I would expect that modern cvr systems would record to flash or battery backed up memory. ie: digital rather than analog recording. Earlier contents would be overwritten in a continuous loop from the start of memory once end of memory is reached. There would be no way to recover data that has been overwritten...

To which CommanderCYYZ said in #7987 :

@syseng68k
It's actually much easier to recover data from over-written digital media. FBI software can recover data from digital media that has been over-written multiple times, or reformatted repeatedly.

Clearer now ?…

[deadheader]

Now that the crash site has (almost) been located inside Melbourne FIR, will the formal responsibility for the investigation be transferred to Australia?

Australian PM told parliament today: "SAR has now moved to a recovery and investigation operation and that responsibility for the investigation would now be handed back to Malaysia, as it is legally responsible under the Chicago Convention"
Read more: Grieving families of ill-fated MH370 clamour for exodus to Australia (http://www.smh.com.au/national/grieving-families-of-illfated-mh370-clamour-for-exodus-to-australia-20140325-35gio.html#ixzz2wz3eAPhL)

[Dai_Farr]

Quote:
Originally Posted by dingy737 View Post
Since this unfortunate incident, it occurred to me that if required to ditch in the open ocean I should easily be able to contact nearby ships, since then I decided to test the standard HF maritime emergency frequencies and have made continuous attempts to contact ocean going vessels as I fly directly over them in the Atlantic. I have tried several HF frequencies regarded as maritime emergency frequencies over the last 2 weeks without success. It would appear there is no set frequency that is "religiously" monitored as 121.5 on aircraft. Maybe this is something that needs some extra thought as a commercial airliner in distress should quickly and easily be able to communicate with ocean going vessels. it would be a shame to ditch alongside a vessel at night and watch it continue to steam off into the distance. 2182 kHz, 4125 kHz, 8291khz, 16590khz, 12290khz. Any advice?

Red PlumMost merchant ships ceased to carry radio officers and now have automated communications including email etc. HF is seldom used nowadays.

You would be much more likely to contact ships using the VHF frequency of 156.800 which is commonly known as Channel 16. This is not carried in any commercial aircraft I have flown but is fitted to some Naval helicopters and maritime patrol aircraft.

Nice thinking but Red Plum is correct. As a former Nimrod crew member, I'd say you would also need the name of the vessel to address it. Anyone listening to Marine Channel 16 would be unlikely to respond to a call of a general nature without being addressed. Hopefully a Mayday would elicit a response, although again, without Channel 16 availability, you'll never know.

We used Channel 16 regularly on SAROPS, and always (in my experience) to good effect. With three low level passes of a vessel allowed us by international law, we had a fighting chance of seeing the vessel's name. We could then make the final pass across the bows to grab the attention of whoever was on the bridge as we called the vessel!

In Civvy Street, "Tool this is hawk" is only likely to yield a WTF, a shrug and possibly a chortle.

[ionagh]

It would appear there is no set frequency that is "religiously" monitored as 121.5 on aircraft.

There are but they are normally contacted by Selcall called DSC. This sets off an alarm and then someone might listen to the voice comms channel.

2182kHz would be right but normally preceded by a DSC call on 2187.5kHz.

[Methersgate]

dingy737 - the maritime distress frequency is 2182 on SSB and/or as Red Plum says VHF "channel 16" which is 156.800. A transmission on 2182 or Channel 16 will generate an alert response from automatic equipment. Our EPIRBS transmit on 121.5 but more importantly on 406 for Cospas-Sarsat. Basically we now use Inmarsat for almost all coms except line of sight. Radio officers disappeared about the same time that flight engineers did!

edited to add - cross posted with Ionagh who is precisely correct!

[OleOle]

What determines the handshake ping timing and what could have delayed this final (complete) ping?

Inmarsat will know?

There are three "delayed" bursts:

1:07->2:25 = 1:12
2:28->3:40 = 1:12
6:40->8:11 = 1:31

The burst activity around 2:25 appears to count as one ping, otherwise the number of 6 pings received after 1:07 doesn't make sense. This activity may be attributed to the big change in relative speed between 1:07 and 2:25

[lincman]

When all the dust has settled on this tragic mystery and the recriminations and allocation of blame begins, one of the principal criticisms of Malaysian Airlines and the Malaysian Government aircraft safety authorities will be their failure to follow even the basic steps of ICAO Annex 12 – Search and Rescue*. (I assume Malaysia is a Contracting State to the ICAO).

Annex 12 has been around since 1951 and basically lays out three basic steps or actions to be taken when an aircraft goes missing. The ‘Uncertainty Phase’ begins 30 mins. after an aircraft goes off radar or fails to respond to radio calls. This initial phase should act as a wake up call to the closest S & R services and also get everyone prepared in case there is a need to move to the next phase – the Alert Phase. This second phase is less clearly defined, but is certainly not meant to be the point where the aircraft must have run out of fuel. Finally, the third phase, ‘Distress’, is when the aircraft is obviously no longer airborne – i.e. crashed/run out of fuel.

It is debatable which phase is the most critical of the three. In the case of MH370, and with lots of 20/20 hindsight, the lack of real action in the ‘Uncertainty Phase’ will undoubtedly be the focus of Malaysian authority criticism. Again, and with 20/20 hindsight, a coordinator should have been appointed in the first hour of contact being lost with the first step of the coordinator being to contact neighboring countries to backtrack over their radar recordings to search for the B777. It appears the authorities did nothing until the situation was well into the third, ‘Distress’ phase. Coordination with the ACARS/INMARSAT folk during this first phase would most likely have revealed a SW heading of the B777 well before it ran out of fuel, possibly resulting in a search being initiated off Perth on Day 1 instead of Day 12.

Finally, I find it odd that aircraft routinely flying over the Poles and vast uninhabited areas such as Siberia for years have been under a mandatory requirement to be equipped with ELTs or tracking device while aircraft flying the vast trans oceanic routes are not. Lets hope this tragedy, if nothing else, will change that situation and also encourage Government and Airline safety organizations to read and adhere to ICAO Annex 12.

*
http://www.unlb.org/showbinarydata.asp?q=U%01%AC~b%08%83%D6%2B)%B7%85%10%C2zr%22 %DA%FF-O%AF%1D%95aL%27L%14%A0%90%B3%25%0B%1E%95l%04%B5a%7Flg%04%A3% 13%FC%3C%FE%E9L%23%92%CA%14%12%92r%E2W%DE

[StrongEagle]

Not so absolute...

While solid state media cannot retain overwritten information, hard disk drives CAN retain forensically retrievable information. That is why the US Dept of Defense has had long-standing protocols for multiple repeated overwrites of HDDs to completely erase classified information.

To be clear, the reason why it is possible to recover data from a hard disk is because the heads do not precisely track the same position each time that they pass over the disk. This leaves tiny "edges" where the heads wrote data last time but missed this time. This is what the forensics specialists recover.

Multiple overwrites usually solves this problem. So, digital information cannot be retrieved when over-written, but it's not always over-written completely on a hard disk.

[Lonewolf_50]

Does it really matter a rats bottom?
Maybe and maybe not. Too many unknowns and too much guessing, certainly.

I think a reason that the Captain's marital status gets discussed again relates to the amount of training, education, and awareness pilots have had about the potential influence of major personal life changes on cockpit performance. Each pilot has his or her own capacity and talent for compartmentalization. Some are incredibly good at it and some not so much. What is unknown is how well he had already adjusted to his change in status at home. May have been mostly sorted out, may have still been a significant annoyance. The nature of a given breakup varies as well.

Take that line of thinking. Apply to the malfunction scenario. If this gent was good at compartmentalization, then as you say it's a non issue.

If not the best at compartmentalization, then perhaps response to a given emergency was not up to his usual standard of performance. It's unknown, and with my guess on CVR data being not available, unknowable.

Remains a human factors issue to consider when the investigation team eventually get their hands on more information.

[MartinM]

"BBC are reporting a final partial Inmarsat handshake ping received at 08:19 following the routine handshake received at 08:11 with no explanation".

Flame out.
RAT deployed.
SATCOM Packs ( are ON/RUN) provides the last (new) "handshake".

IF the report is actually correct.

Sounds plausible to me, however, ACARS on T7 is hooked up to SAFEBus, which is battery powered too. Flame out would not turn off BAT, right?

[syseng68k]

Strongeagle:

To be clear, the reason why it is possible to recover data from a hard disk is because the heads do not precisely track the same position each time that they pass over the disk. This leaves tiny "edges" where the heads wrote data last time but missed this time. This is what the forensics specialists recover. In the early days, hard drives used stepper motors to position the heads and this was followed by voice coil actuators as density increased. In both cases, one could expect that data might be recovered, but modern high density drives have much narrower track spacing. They use very sophisticated techniques like piezo micropositioners on the heads to improve accuracy of the voice coil to lock on to the servo pattern. I would think it would be very dificult to recover prior data on such drives, even using custom test rigs. The latest enterprise drives have robust onboard encryption as well, which makes the problem even more difficult.

Take the lid off one of these drives and it's amazing how much tecnology goes into your $100 2Tb drive :-)...

[WillowRun 6-3]

@lincman
Yes, Malaysia is a signatory nation-state (and holds status as a Council Member): http://www.icao.int/MemberStates/Member%20States.Multilingual.pdf

Other posters have commented in this thread to the effect that ICAO as an organization does not move, does not adapt to change or emerging challenges quickly. @lincman - do you contend that a case exists for pressing ICAO to change its modus operandi in this particular instance - with respect to an effort to audit and then request remediation of member states' compliance w/ Annex 12?

[sky9]

I do wonder whether the aircraft flew from close to MEKAR to SPOLE (South Pole) or to YWKS (Wilkins Runway) using LNAV thereby independent of further input.

If the aircraft had been depressurised by turning off the Bleed Air, the range would also have been increased beyond the initial endurance estimate. Jeppesen should be able to provide a more accurate calculation of GS for the period rather than the 450kts GS estimate for the whole route south.

[lincman]

Quote:
Other posters have commented in this thread to the effect that ICAO as an organization does not move, does not adapt to change or emerging challenges quickly. @lincman - do you contend that a case exists for pressing ICAO to change its modus operandi in this particular instance - with respect to an effort to audit and then request remediation of member states' compliance w/ Annex 12?

Yes, I guess I do. As a min., the ICAO could at least publicize the inadequate and delayed initial S&R action on the part of the Malaysian authorities.

Note that Annex 12 is reasonably up to date - Rev. 8 being July, 2004.

[GarageYears]

Isn't it likely that one of such events is engine flameout or some other major failure, so that the 08.19 ping was triggered by some non-normal event on the airplane?

Given there were no other ACARS messages in the preceding 6 hours, it seems a given that the ACARS reporting system was disabled. It seems far more likely that the 08.19 partial handshake was the result of a power interruption (gen offline or similar) resulting in a "I'm here" attempt as the power came back. However, since the message was only "partial" (INMARSAT words) my guess is the power failed again before the transmission was completed.

[sardak]

Willow Run, lincman
This paper, presented this past January, shows the Asia/Pacific region member states' compliance with Annex 12 in graphical and tabular format. http://www.icao.int/APAC/Meetings/2014%20APSAR%20TF2/WP04%20Asia%20Pacific%20SAR%20Status.pdf

It reflects compliance at a high level and doesn't reflect actual incident performance.

[Above The Clouds]

OleOle
Regarding the yellow and the red track on the aaib image/globe.

- Yellow represents the solution which covers the greatest distance, red the solution for smallest distance?
- Yellow is great circle, red is constant magnetic heading?

Together with the search areas that points to great circle solution, i.e. FMC and not to A/P => deliberate action?

Edit: Thinking about it, there could be a solution with 450 knots and constant magnetic heading which is much closer to the yellow track => deliberate action not confirmed


Could it not be that the FGP was set to fly TRK and not HDG

[toffeez]

"Cabin disintegrating" call.

I remember that, but I don't remember it being proved a hoax.

The forward cabin of Aloha Airlines Flight 243 disintegrated but the plane was still flyable.

[DriverAirframeOneOf]

Hi All,
This might have been discussed before...
In the regional jet world, it often amazes me how similar FMS reserve fuel over destination is for a VMC flight of about 2 hrs, for Planned Cruise at altitude vs 250K cruise below 10000'. (Junior RR engines.)
Other than for reasons of ATC, GA traffic and topography, you have to wonder why it is even required to climb to flight level then.
This might be offset somewhat for longer distances by wind, temperature, etc., but can any T7 driver here enlighten us as to Long Range Cruise distance at altitude vs. say 250K below 10000' in still air conditions..?

If the range is more or less similar, then MH370 would get to the crash site without having to climb.
And with breathable cabin air all the way....

If the range at 250K ~10000' is much less or more, this plane could be far away from the proposed crash site.

[VinRouge]

Does the 777-200 do wing to wing automatic fuel balance/transfer?

[lapp]

"Cabin disintegrating" call.

I remember that, but I don't remember it being proved a hoax

Not confirmed, or proved == false information.

[Capt Kremin]

Above the clouds,

Could it not be that the FGP was set to fly TRK and not HDG

TRK is still magnetic in this context so still subject to the large change in magnetic variation over the course of the flight.

The only way TRK could provide a straight track over this long distance would be if the HDG REF button, a guarded switch, was pushed. The MCP HDG lateral modes would then become referenced to True North.

If that was the case then the same problems of implied technical knowledge and intent rear their heads.

[DJ77]

Does the 777-200 do wing to wing automatic fuel balance/transfer?


No, it's done manually. There is a fuel imbalance alarm however.

[vapilot2004]

BBC are reporting a final partial Inmarsat handshake ping received at 08:19 following the routine handshake received at 08:11 with no explanation. I'm not familiar with 777 systems, but could this have resulted from a transient power interruption during bus transfer following the loss of a genny?

Could be a loss and recovery of the Left Main AC bus. The radio pack would wake-up and send an "I'm here" message skyward.

could it be engine wound down no gennies, rat came on then satcom tried to fire up


When the RAT is deployed after a loss of APU/Engine generator power, the only AC power on the aircraft comes from a small capacity static inverter. This supplies the AC standby bus which powers a few critical items, SATCOM not being one of them.

[WillowRun 6-3]

@sardak - very large thanks for the paper regarding status of compliance in region.

Some observations: by 'compliance' I meant to refer not only to status of agreements, but operationally. As legal counsel I advise (generally) clients to talk the talk (agreements on paper) as well as to walk the walk (activities pursuant to agreement, in point of actual fact). Some of the exhibits to the paper appear to show the subject matter coverage or scope of the respective nations' agreements. But not results of actual incident response, as sardak noted.

Second, isn't this incident (MH370) one that breaks open new problems, new questions? Certainly every major incident presents one or more unique parameters, but the current one presents a largely unique set of problems. And if one had drawn up a scenario based on what set of facts as do seem fairly solid at present and asked whether the Annex 12 agreements now in place are sufficient to mount the appropriate S&R response - would the answer have been "don't worry, the Annex 12 scheme will provide all the response needed?" I'm skeptical such answer would have been correct. Of course I'm looking ex post, and also, I'm indicating deference to those more knowledgeable.

Third, once the manifold mysteries of this highly atypical disappearance have been solved, my contention would be that still greater adaptation of the Annex 12 bilateral and multilateral agreements architecture will be needed.

From a legal perspective, we are as far from knowing what the questions are, growing out of this incident, as we are from knowing what happened to the aircraft, why, how, and by whom. Maybe farther, given the non habeus corpus of the airplane itself, at this point in time.

[Emma Voberry]

Opinion: How mechanical problem could have downed Flight 370 - CNN.com (http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/24/opinion/abend-explaining-flight-370/index.html?hpt=hp_t1)

[wiggy97]

Tourist

Willow is a lawyer and is expressing his opinion about legal issues - likely to be of limited interest to non lawyers.

However as a fellow lawyer I haven't got a clue what he is saying so point well made!

[Above The Clouds]

Capt Kremin

True track selection on the FGP/MCP was my next response, it would make sense and of course as you say would infer knowledge and intent.

[costalpilot]

Since the FBI has had the Capt's computers almost a week, I wonder if the lack of information relative to them is meaningful. Seems to me that if they had found anything of consequence we would have heard of it by now. Further it seems to me that they would have found anything incriminating by now if it were there.

Does that make sense? I'm not a computer guy.

[toffeez]

VERY approximately, you get 50% more miles for a lb of fuel at FL350 than at FL100. Sensible speeds in both cases.

[rampstriker]

Curvedsky: MAS did not subscribe to the RR Engine Health Management service (satcom) on this aircraft.

[sunnySA]

Post 8089
When all the dust has settled on this tragic mystery and the recriminations and allocation of blame begins, one of the principal criticisms of Malaysian Airlines and the Malaysian Government aircraft safety authorities will be their failure to follow even the basic steps of ICAO Annex 12 – Search and Rescue*. (I assume Malaysia is a Contracting State to the ICAO).

Wouldn't the initial SAR actions rest with Vietnamese ATC?

[Tourist]

Willow

Is there a gap between what countries want to be able to achieve re SAR and realistic capabilities?

Yes

Is it likely that any sane country is going to attempt to maintain a SAR capability that can rescue mid Atlantic/Indian Ocean etc?

No, because the cost is silly. If you have that kind of money to throw around then spend it on something worthwhile.

In over a hundred years of civil aviation this has happened once. Worldwide SAR cover is unaffordable, in fact beyond 200nm offshore is unaffordable.

There is a price on life, only idiots say otherwise, and sometimes bad :mad: happens.

[DaveReidUK]

How could Rolls Royce monitor the engines in a plane which, apparently, had no communications systems operating?Well they probably could, retrospectively, in the case of a normal flight - my understanding is that the EHM system stores half-hourly data snapshots for transmission once an ACARS link becomes available again.

But in this case, the third-hand quote attibuted to the anonymous 777 captain

The WSJ reported that RR indicated the engines on the Malaysia 777 were running normally for 4 to 5 hours after the reported disappearanceis clearly inaccurate, albeit perhaps inadvertently.

Perhaps that's why the mods deleted it?

[papershuffler]

However as a fellow lawyer I haven't got a clue what he is saying so point well made!

Ummm, it's not that difficult.:hmm:

Agreements have been made as to what should be done, but the actual responses haven't been defined sufficiently under the current Annex 12.

i.e. Annex 12 states what should be done, but the mechanics of how to do it have not been spelled out as every incident is different.

More or less, anyway.

Plus the plane is still missing.

[Golf-Mike-Mike]

CNN have a 777 captain's take on what may have happened. Interesting (and entirely innocent) explanation of the repeated mention by the FO to Malaysian ATC of FL350, that it may have been a gentle nudge that they'd requested a higher FL in their flight plan and they wanted a further climb. I've heard this type of nudge many times as US-bound aircraft climb out from Heathrow towards the Welsh coast and get levelled off below their desired initial cruising altitude. Overall the article is another one inclined to a fire/malfunction scenario.

Opinion: How mechanical problem could have downed Flight 370 - CNN.com (http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/24/opinion/abend-explaining-flight-370/index.html?hpt=hp_t1)

[ I see the url has just been posted above ]

[Lon More]

it may have been a gentle nudge that they'd requested a higher FL in their flight plan and they wanted a further climb. I've heard this type of nudge many times as US-bound aircraft climb out from Heathrow towards the Welsh coast
FWIW it's a common call anywhere. I'd take no notice if another level was not available unless the pilot stated he would be unable to legally make his destination

[BWV 988]

Though Inmarsat analysis undoubtedly have been key to home in on a crash site, the Doppler method might not tell the full story. A jitter assessment would have to be performed on ping return clock rather than on return data. Maybe the sat guys here know how much raw data, or data about the raw data, is logged?

[sleeper]

Quote:
Does the 777-200 do wing to wing automatic fuel balance/transfer?
No, it's done manually. There is a fuel imbalance alarm however.


There is no wing to wing balance system, either automatic or manual.
Balancing the fuel is done via using one tank to feed both engines until fuel in wingtanks is equal. Then it is wingtank to engine again. You cannot transfer fuel from one wingtank to the other.

[Ornis]

Flight MH370: Pilot in wrong state of mind to fly - friend - World - NZ Herald News (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11226334)

Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah's world was crumbling, said the long-time associate. He had been facing serious family problems, including separation from his wife and relationship problems with another woman he was seeing.

The man, who spoke to the Herald on condition of anonymity, said Captain Zaharie was "terribly upset" when his wife told him she was leaving

I hope the Herald checked this man's credentials.

[galaxy flyer]

Driver Airframe,

It's very different over longer ranges.

[Vinnie Boombatz]

Thanks to A69 (*8052) and flt001 (*8068) for posting the link to the AAIB data.

A lot of posters have stated that the autopilot in TRK mode would follow a constant magnetic heading.

The geomagnetic South pole is now at about 80 S, 107.5 E.

Magnetic Poles (http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/education/poles.html)

If the heading had been set to due South (magnetic), that would seem to give a track somewhere between the 400 KTAS and 450 KTAS curves on the last AAIB figure:

https://www.facebook.com/178566888854999/photos/pcb.740971779281171/740971732614509/?type=1

MAGVAR is about zero over Kuala Lumpur, and increases to around 20 E at the last positions shown on the AAIB routes. For MH 180, that would favor the 450 KTAS line.

Historical Magnetic Declination | ngdc.noaa.gov (http://maps.ngdc.noaa.gov/viewers/historical_declination/)

[mickjoebill]

Live interview with former chairman of NTSB James Hall on Al Jazeera.
James Hall is chairman of Hall Associates.
Context was accident investigation

Summary
Strange that no confirmation of wreckage.
"If wreckage had been found, that information has to be made available to the families and then made available in a responsible manner via media to worldwide audience watching this disaster playout"

"Unfortunate that Malaysian govt is not competent to handle an investigation of this magnitude"

6 underwater investigations he dealt with took 6 weeks to get underwater vehicles to the known crash location, hard to put a time frame on this investigation as aircraft location is not yet known.

"In a normal investigation (by transportation bureaus such as in Australia and China) investigators not politicians handle investigation, then as information is identified it becomes public so it is a transparent investigation so the world knows that the facts being put forward are the correct facts."

"In this investigation facts come forward only to be corrected, its no wonder the families have lost confidence."
Ends

ABC Australia report families held a protest at Malaysian embassy in Beijing, demanding more information, they clashed with police.
Id be doing the same, there needs to be an explanation of how the authorities have determined that there are no survivors?

[500N]

"Unfortunate that Malaysian govt is not competent to handle an investigation of this magnitude"

"In this investigation facts come forward only to be corrected, its no wonder the families have lost confidence."


Glad someone calls a spade a spade !

[UnreliableSource]

Though Inmarsat analysis undoubtedly have been key to home in on a crash site, the Doppler method might not tell the full story. A jitter assessment would have to be performed on ping return clock rather than on return data. Maybe the sat guys here know how much raw data, or data about the raw data, is logged?

Normal telecoms (digital side of the sat modem at the earth station) would not yield anything useful. It is possible the raw analogue RF was being digitised and captured for diagnostic purposes. I guess that their business model sees them handle very short messages. If a message isn't received, they won't get a real-time complaint, but a complaint many hours or days later. It would be a useful function to be able to go back and tell the customer that their signal wasn't relayed because it was off-freq/garbled/too-weak/overmodulated/oh-it-really-was-our-fault/whatever.

Sat earth stations have very precise frequency and time standards. Incoming RF would be downcoverted to an Intermediate Frequency (IF) that would be supplied to the sat modem for demodulation. If this IF was digitised by a SDR receiver tied to the station frequency standards, then reconstruction of the original analogue waveform arriving at the earth station would be possible.

The analysis of this waveform has been the rocket science here. I would struggle to separate doppler shift from other sources of frequency drift, especially with so little data to work with. There would have had to have been some serious maths at work, coupled with data from other aircraft and detailed historical information about the exact beam coverage patterns of their sat.

Another possibility is that deeper analysis found some too-weak-to-demodulate-so-not-initially-noticed signal on the "IF-tapes" for their POR bird. The IOR plus POR recordings would then give triangulation.

[BWV 988]

It is possible the raw analogue RF was being digitised and captured for diagnostic purposes.Thanks for the thorough explanation US. Do you mean 24/7 sampling at 3+ GHz could be taking place in the sat? I understand the reasoning but doubt the practicalities.

[ghw78]

Driver Airframe in post 8101 queries the effect of altitude and speed on amount of fuel required to fly a set distance.

From Boeing Data for B777-200ER.
Long Range Cruise. Engines RR Trent 892
All up Weight at start of distance, 200.0 Tonnes
Time in hours and minutes, fuel burn in 1,000s kg

Distance Flight levels
(nm) 100 200 300 400
Fuel Time Fuel Time Fuel Time Fuel Time
600 11.5 1.50 9.1 1.37 7.5 1.28 6.6 1.22
1200 23.3 3.18 18.8 3.12 15.6 2.52 13.9 2.38
2000 38.5 6.08 31.2 3.21 26.4 4.45 23.5 4.19

[mickjoebill]

What happened to the ship that was just a few hours away from the wreckage sighted by RAAF ..turned back due weather?


ABC reporter Wed morning;
80km surface wind yesterday.
Seas eased and less rain today.
NZ Orion heading off first.
HMAS Success would be probably first ship to scene if something sighted by air.
Ocean Shield heading from Sydney today with "black box finder"

[grounded27]

China and Malaysia clearly want to just close this book, why are other nations investing so much $ in finding the Malay mess?

[Sir Richard]

ghw78


From Boeing Data for B777-200ER.
Long Range Cruise. Engines RR Trent 892
All up Weight at start of distance, 200.0 Tonnes
Time in hours and minutes, fuel burn in 1,000s kg

Distance -------------- Flight levels
(nm)_______100__________200___________300____________400
_________Fuel Time______Fuel Time_______Fuel Time________Fuel Time
_600_____11.5 1.50_______9.1 1.37________7.5 1.28_________6.6 1.22
1200_____23.3 3.18______18.8 3.12_______15.6 2.52________13.9 2.38
2000_____38.5 6.08______31.2 5.21_______26.4 4.45________23.5 4.19

Easier to read?

[auraflyer]

China and Malaysia clearly want to just close this book, why are other nations investing so much $ in finding the Malay mess?

1. Because there is a moral obligation to the victims and their families.

2. Because there is a practical (and economic) incentive: modern airliners should not just disappear. Knowing how one has will allow attempts to be made to avoid future repetitions.

[boguing]

Dillboy asked in 7743 "I'm wondering how long it will be before it is announced that the South China sea is to be revisited."



Not before somebody realises that the sat pings are a distraction.

What are the odds of the longest ever suicide/terrorist/unmanned autopilot flight also being solved by the first and novel use of technology that was never designed for the purpose?

[4Greens]

True and best comment on situation re search. Australian Commander 'We are not searching for a needle in a haystack. We are searching for the haystack'.

[sandos]

Thanks for the thorough explanation US. Do you mean 24/7 sampling at 3+ GHz could be taking place in the sat? I understand the reasoning but doubt the practicalities.

I think he means on the ground-station. This would work if the satellite just very stupidly relays the signal in its raw form somehow and doesn't interpret/regenerate it before. I'm a bit hazy in this area, but I know its possible to do with wavelenghts in fibre so RF should be amenable to something similar. And yes, I would not be (very) surprised if the ground-station actually does some full sampling of the IF frequency, and maybe even saves it for later. Extremely valuable for finding faults etc.

If you didnt know there are SDR USB-dongles that can do ~3Mhz bandwidth full sampling costing ~10$. That a satellit ground-station is capable of something similar is not weird.

[Richard W]

When UnreliableSource said
It is possible the raw analogue RF was being digitised and captured for diagnostic purposeshe was clearly thinking of a recording at IF. The signal could well be reduced to a few key parameters, and even transmitting it raw would have take bandwidth numerically less than the IF.

[Lonewolf_50]

What are the odds of the longest ever suicide/terrorist/unmanned autopilot flight also being solved by the first and novel use of technology that was never designed for the purpose? "Necessity is the mother of invention."

Not sure if you bothered to read the piece on how INMARSAT applied their knowledge of their own systems to the science of radio waves and satellites to come up with estimates of the aircraft's position at various points in time.

Had other means been successful, they'd not have had to figure this out on the fly. As someone pointed out in that article, they " ... did about a year's worth of research less than two weeks."

That may be a slight overstatement, but it indicates how many man hours they applied to the problem to try and find a solution. During the first two days of the search, a lot of observers in the PPRuNe threads opined that they weren't finding any wreckage due to looking in the wrong place. That "wrong place" was the South China Sea.


Australian Commander 'We are not searching for a needle in a haystack. We are searching for the haystack'. Indeed. The haystack (or the first bits of straw from the whole haystack) are apparently being blown about by wind and wave.

[Sober Lark]

Regarding the marker buoys dropped from fixed wing aircraft over debris in the SAR zone, can anyone advise how many days these devices are trackable for?

[daikilo]

If we assume Inmarsat could have digested more data from MH370, would it not be prudent for ICAO to recommend to its members to find means to ensure such data will be transmitted in any failure or deliberate disconnect scenario?

[RichManJoe]

I am not knowledgeable about the rf front end for the INMARSAT, but I am knowledgeable about AEHF and a few other communication satellites, and I would hypothesize they are similar. The comms between the satellite and the ground terminals (in this case, the aircraft terminal node controller (TNC)) use a form of PSK. All of the baseband and "IF" processing is done synchronously using digital processors, so there are digital to analog (D/A) converters prior to the upconverters and A/D's immediately following the downconverters. I don't know what the state of technology is today, but the converters may be sampling on the order of 400 MSPS to 1GSPS. For the receiver, the first digital process which is performed following the A/D is a fast fourier transform to channelize the data. This is then followed by a phase lock loop (PLL), which removes the doppler. By simply logging this phase correction used in the PLL (simply a number indicating radians per sample period) and sending it in the downlink to the INMARSAT earth station in Australia, INMARSAT would be able to reconstruct the doppler. This may be normal payload telemetry.

[Stefan Wolf]

Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly called this accident correctly one week prior to the Malaysian Prime Minister's official announcement yesterday. O'Reilly said the plane was at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. You might not like his political views, but he nailed it-- unlike countless armchair experts in our profession.

[costalpilot]

Good to know they found it stefan

[lynw]

As an forensics professional, you are aware that magnetic force microscopy has never been used to recover data off once-overwritten magnetic media. I assume you are also aware of the 2006 NIST Special Publication which stated that using magnetic force microscopy to recover data from magnetic media of any considerable density is impossible. Since you would know all this, I wonder why you would make such a statement.

It is also irrelevant since the CVR/FDR would not be recording to magnetic tape on the accident aircraft.There is a world of difference between being technically possible and realistically achivable hence my rather tongue in cheek comment about not coming to a PC World near you anytime soon. :)

Without wishing to don a tin foil hat (the world must be running short of tinfoil by now if this thread is anything to go by :)), consider this. The DSS sanitisation processes for hard disks requires the devices to be either degaussed (complete magnetic wipe to the point the drive becomes effectively unusable) or destroyed. One wipe cleans the drive but does not sanitise the drive which is interesting if NIST insist this recovery is impossible and one wipe sufficient... suggests to me that not everyone is buying into that being an absolute fact :oh: ;)

Although, even if you did get a mapping of the magnetic patterns, you are a long long way from reconstructing that to meaningful data. While it may be possible, the reality is that its very unlikely anyone actually will do this. In my experience the biggest things to worry about in computer forensic examinations are encryption and dealing with what you do find and making sure you do interpret that properly.

@Coastalpilot:
Since the FBI has had the Capt's computers almost a week, I wonder if the lack of information relative to them is meaningful. Seems to me that if they had found anything of consequence we would have heard of it by now. Further it seems to me that they would have found anything incriminating by now if it were there. Does that make sense? I'm not a computer guyI did read this on CNN about their examination of the data:
Indications files deleted closer to final Malaysian Airline flight - CNN.com (http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/21/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-hard-drive-deletions/)

The article suggests that on the 22nd the FBI examiners were just days into the examination of what they call a large volume of data. Depending on how much data they have, it can take a while to investigate all of it. It is not uncommon for forensic investigations to take weeks if there is a considerable amount of data so no response so far is not really conclusive of anything and examiners will generally want to examine in full before drawing any conclusions.

What I would be prioritising is retrieving deleted files and seeing if I could run those files in the simulator. This does also assume nothings encrypted and password protected... if there are passwords/encryption, then this data could take many months to restore and examine.

Interestingly there is a suggestion that the Malaysians may have messed up this part of the investigation. Firstly, they waited 6 days before searching the pilots home which would have allowed someone time to amend data on that. While they have strict laws on probable cause, the time delay would be of concern about tampering.

Also there seems to be some question about how they searched and seized - the whole CSI/Hollywood scenario of walk in, switch computer on, start typing on the keyboard looking for things springs to mind. If someone has hinted to CNN that they have concerns that the evidence wasnt secured immediately there will be concerns about the integrity of the evidence and that not securing it could have altered, deleted or added data which taints the whole process and casts doubt on any results they find.

What becomes more confusing is that 3 days ago when CNN were stating FBI experts were just days into the examination, this was stating with certainty there was no evidence on the computers:
Malaysia Airlines flight: investigators find nothing suspicious in pilot's flight simulator (http://www.smh.com.au/world/malaysia-airlines-flight-investigators-find-nothing-suspicious-in-pilots-flight-simulator-20140322-35a7d.html)

The question then becomes the sources of these - is one based on an examination by Malaysian forensic examiners or from the FBI? Even this becomes a mess to determine reliable sources. It would seem rather odd for the Malaysian examiners to state that there was nothing suspicious if they hadnt examined all the data and then send the drive off to the FBI for retrieval of the deleted data. But I doubt the FBI would issue such a conclusive statement this early on in the examination if they havent examined all the data yet. :confused:

[chillpill]

Has the full cargo manifest been disclosed as yet?

[Evey_Hammond]

Good news from the Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/malaysia/10718181/Malaysia-Airlines-MH370-live.html) that the search is resuming today after yesterday's bad weather put it on hold.

"The search for wreckage of crashed Flight MH370 has resumed after the weather improved, with Chinese ships and Korean planes joining the hunt over a vast stretch of the Indian Ocean.
Gale force winds, rain and big waves prevented any sorties being flown on Tuesday but 12 aircraft will be in the air on Wednesday while Australia's HMAS Success plans to conduct a surface sweep of an area where two objects were spotted this week.
China's polar supply ship Xue Long was also due in the area, with other Chinese vessels on their way, as the search intensifies for the Malaysian Airlines jet that crashed into the sea after vanishing on March 8 with 239 passengers on board.
"Today's search is split into three areas within the same proximity covering a cumulative 80,000 square kilometres," said the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is coordinating the search.
"AMSA has tasked a total of 12 aircraft today to search for possible objects in the search area.""

[DriverAirframeOneOf]

@RichmanJoe

:) TNC, PSK, IF, DA/AD....

I am sure good old RF principles will pinpoint this aircraft yet.
If one of the victims had Android APRS via cell/sat phone (Thuraya) on board, he would be a hero...
I hope the APRS guys at least had a good look at Google Maps APRS (http://www.APRS.fi) of 08 March for just such an eventuality.
I call on all Radio Amateurs to have this very easy free APRS capability in their pockets when they travel internationally....
While we are waiting on the airline industry to play GPS tracking catchup...

KC9SGV

[JohnPerth]

"Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly called this accident correctly one week prior..."

People who make definite statements without sufficient data are either not very clear thinkers or they are demagogues who want to be able to point back later and say, "See, I was right" (or have their followers do so for them).

[Mahatma Kote]

It is not uncommon for forensic investigations to take weeksWhile factually true, it's not relevant to what will have been discovered by now.

In my day-job I'm a cyber-forensic analyst. The very first thing I'd do on that drive is a run a timeliner - a program that extracts file events from the life of the drive. That is accesses, deletions, creations, moves etc. Timelining is by file-system nature incomplete but usually accurate. Luckily deletion events tend to hang around and also luckily, ensembles of events can give a pretty good picture of what happened even if many individual events are missing.

Timeliners can be run in minutes.

The investigators will already know with a high degree of certainty the macro events that happened on the drives over the past weeks and months. For instance installation or deletion of packages and system updates and when programs were last used. They will also have been able to recover most of the recently deleted files and fragments of files deleted some time ago (months to years).

They will have a full record of internet activity including web sites visited, search terms used. They will even have 'image' snapshots of many of the pages visited.

One thing that makes it more difficult is use of a secure deletion program. The actual content of files will be gone, but many of the file events will remain. Secure deletion would be a serious red-flag for investigators.

In conclusion. They already know everything they need to know / can know about the data.

[Wantion]

Anyone know how many Vessels are now at the search areas ? seems thus far to have been a lack of vessels...with objects being sighted but so far unable to have been picked up.....any heli's available ?

[lincman]

SunnySA
Quote:
Wouldn't the initial SAR actions rest with Vietnamese ATC?


Yes, sort of, but the point I was trying to make was that the Malaysian authorities did not initiate timely action (i.e. within 30 mins. of loosing transponder/radar/radio contact) to coordinate an S&R effort until it was basically too late; then, yes, the Vietnamese ATC would be the first to be contacted for assistance, followed by Thailand or whoever it was whose radar tracked MH340 turning around.

[Lord Mounts]

Still very early days in this investigation and at this stage we have no idea if the cause will ever finally be established beyond doubt.

One current line of thought is the pilot suicide one. I sincerely hope this does not prove to be the case. We already see some aviation authorities twitching at this likelihood - the DGCA in India is reported as looking at introducing psychometric testing for pilots as a result of MH370 even before the cause is declared (or even known):-

[URL="http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/dgca-looking-at-mandatory-psychometric-tests-for-pilots-in-india-114032500763_1.html"]

I believe the DMT (Defence Mechanism Test) has been used by the Swedish military; it is felt that this eliminates individuals who are not up to the task before money gets spent on training them. Other slightly authoritarian countries possibly also test in this way. Yet overall I think that most informed opinion would query the value of any similar tests for commercial pilots simply on the basis of their validity. Many false positives would almost certainly result; indeed it would perhaps be that results needed to err on that side. This would simply debar many otherwise suitable individuals from the profession for very questionable reasons, at any stage of their career. We all can see that making flight crew pass through airport security and have, say, a jar of aftershave or a leatherman removed from their bag would go nowhere near preventing a pilot bent on destroying his/her aircraft; psychological evaluations would be equally futile. How often would they be undertaken - after all, a person's mental state of health can be very changeable over time. I would argue that peer concern/CRM/good open company management culture is a far more effective defence against this sort of act. That said, no doubt certain commercial organisations would see a good business opportunity in providing such services, aviation being perceived as a cash cow, and may well start pushing for this as well as some more nervous regulators wishing to demonstrate their grasp of the situation.

A professional pilot, military or commercial, goes through much rigorous selection and evaluation to get their licence and they then have continuous assessment of their ability and competency for the rest of their careers. No other profession comes close to being regularly and repeatedly assessed in such a fashion. That as final arbiters of safety of their aircraft they are made to endure humiliating "security" checks is bad enough; there is no need for this further knee-jerk reaction to what may or may not have happened in this instance.

[hamster3null]

Latest charts are extremely interesting, but they don't quite add up to me.

I actually sat down and tried to derive Doppler offsets by hand.

* The range of values in the chart is not right for 1.6 GHz - they should be much larger.
* It looks like we're looking at absolute values, not raw frequency shifts. The peak at 18:25 UTC corresponds to the time when the aircraft was flying directly westwards, towards the satellite. At 00:11, it was flying away from the satellite. These two points should have opposite signs of Doppler shift.
* The difference between "predicted north track" and "predicted south track" is WAY too large to explain by nonzero satellite orbit inclination or eccentricity. Satellite has inclination of 1.7 degrees, apogee of 35816 km and perigee of 35769 km. That's maximum speed of ~175 knots perpendicular to Earth-satellite axis in the north-south direction, and something negligible like 4 knots along the axis. Perpendicular component enters with a factor of at most ~0.11. Its absolute contribution is largest at the end of the track, when the satellite is contributing 20 knots and the aircraft is flying away from the satellite at the speed of 230 knots (total speed 450 kts, projecting on the aircraft-satellite axis leaves 230.) During the period up to ~21:00, when the aircraft is still near the equator, the effect of satellite inclination should be very small. Anyone is welcome to repeat these calculations.

Ultimately, I don't think that the chart is comparing the south track towards south Indian Ocean against its mirror image. In fact, a good fit for the "north track" would be the route that goes to Straits of Malacca and then turns and heads for Beijing. That's the only way to arrive at a high Doppler shift early on, at 20:00 to 21:00 (because the aircraft is to the east of the satellite and moving northeast, while the satellite is moving south). They could also be comparing against a track that heads northeast initially and then hugs the 40 degree arc through Burma and Tibet.

[lhp]

...a red flag alright. running a defrag however would essentially perform the same function. you could tell a drive has been defragged, but that's about it, and wouldn't be unusual.

[flt001]

Looks like the search conditions today will be very difficult, how they can spot a 20m piece of wreckage in this, professional indeed.

Somewhat frightening video from search boat here. (Telegraph UK) (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/10723108/MH370-Search-boat-battles-huge-waves-in-Indian-Ocean.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter)

http://i.imgur.com/J7k9v4hl.jpg

[Lantern10]

Relatives of those lost are starting to get agitated.

The group shoved past police officers as they left their hotel, arriving on foot at the embassy about 40 minutes later. The street was crowded with journalists, police officers and people trying to get past police roadblocks to reach some of the other embassies on the block, including the American, Israeli and French embassies. A line of paramilitary police officers then blocked the road and prevented journalists from following the marchers.

Missing Malaysia Airline jet: Malaysia releases details of last contact with MH370 (http://www.smh.com.au/world/missing-malaysia-airline-jet-malaysia-releases-details-of-last-contact-with-mh370-20140326-zqmzm.html)

[SupplierSam]

Gentlemen-
Let me share a few thoughts from a man who designed bits and pieces of the missing airplane, and probably bits and pieces of half the jets you folks fly on.

You should be highly suspicious of these stories about fires. Have any of you folks ever seen a cargo compartment smoke test? Modern jetliners will detect a burnt napkin in a space the size of a living room in under 3 minutes.

You should be highly suspicious of stories of large volumes of smoke propagating out of the cargo compartment. That’s because after we supplier types detect a teensy puff of smoke in all that big space, the airframer types goes back and flood it with smoke so dense you can hardly see and makes sure not one bit of smoke comes up into the passenger compartment.

Those folks at Hamilton aren’t sitting still, neither. Once we find smoke, they turn off the air conditioning fans and turn up the packs to keep smoke downstairs.

Now you’re going to say to me, what about Swissair? To which I’ll say, no modern jetliner is lined with insulation blankets made of tinder and oily rags, and no competent designer wires up a disreputable pile of entertainment boxes so the breakers won’t trip when it arcs.

Did the fire burn a hole in the fuselage and decompress it? Well, I have to say I followed the 787 lithium battery incident in great detail and was privileged to see pictures of the damage. That fire didn’t burn through a plastic fuselage. I would say it beggars the imagination to come up with a fire that burns through an aluminum skin without setting off a smoke detection a considerable time previous.

What about carbon monoxide? Well, you’re going to have to tell me what could generate CO in the airplane without making detectable smoke. Have you ever been on a jetliner when an engine leaked some of that wonderful fireproof oil they use? It’s a smell you’re not going to forget, let me tell you!

Now you’re going to say, what about a fire in the avionics? Most new jetliners automatically goes into smoke override, and the 777 is no exception. I have not personally witnessed it, but I’m told the override clears smoke so dense you can’t see the instruments in under 90 seconds.

And now let’s talk wiring – did you know that we have to supply extra long wire bundles for critical equipment? That’s because the airframers have to meet FAA separation requirements. So now your undetected fire has to burn through two different redundant wire bundles kept over 12 feet apart. That’s a darned big undetected fire! This is a modern jetliner – everything is multiply redundant to the point of absurdity.

If that isn’t enough, read this excellent post by Albert Driver, who covers all the points I didn’t:
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/535538-malaysian-airlines-mh370-contact-lost-380.html#post8396452
And auraflyer: http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/535538-malaysian-airlines-mh370-contact-lost-408.html#post8401172

Now I can’t say there isn’t some magic bullet that takes out the transponder and disables ACARS and depressurizes the airplane but somehow leaves the plane able to fly to fuel exhaustion after making several apparently commanded turn. Maybe some near impossible common mode failure in the load management system shut down a dozen isolated, multiply redundant systems without bringing up the backups. But I’ll tell you, it’s darned hard to believe.

[onetrack]

@wantion - Three Chinese warships, two Chinese patrol/SAR vessels, the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long, and HMAS Success.
The warships are the amphibious landing ship Kunlunshan, the missile destroyer Haikou and the supply ship Qiandaohu.

Rescue vessels Haixun 01 and Nanhaijiu 101 have also been tasked to the search area. These are high-speed Coastguard-style patrol vessels around 1500 tons. They're nearly new and cutting edge patrol vessels.
They have helipads and high-speed, crane-launched inflatables, and it appears that at least the Haikou has one helicopter aboard.

The Kunlunshan is reported as carrying 4 x Frelon Z-8 helicopters. The Haikou is reported as carrying 1 x Kamov KA-27 or 1 x Harbin Z-9C. The Qiandaohu is reported as having 1 x Frelon Z-8.

No helicopter on the HMAS Success, debris recovery by the Success is by launch of small craft.
The Success tried unsuccessfuly to recover the debris spotted Monday afternoon by aircraft, on Monday night, but failed to find the reported debris and had to leave the area due to deteriorating weather and sea conditions.

Type 071 Amphibious dock ship - Kunlunshan - Type 071 amphibious transport dock - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_071_amphibious_transport_dock)

Type 052C destroyer - Haikou - Type 052C destroyer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_052C_destroyer)

Type 903 supply ship - Qiandaohu - Type 903 replenishment ship - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_903_replenishment_ship)

China´s largest rescue vessel Haixun 01 heads toward Singapore CCTV News - CNTV English (http://english.cntv.cn/20140318/104910.shtml)

Chinese rescue vessel Nanhaijiu 101 heads toward Singapore - Xinhua | English.news.cn (http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/photo/2014-03/18/c_133196065.htm)

[InDaBack]

This event reminds me of the Apollo 13 incident. Not the actual incident or cause, but the response to it.

An event that occurred which had not been thought of, or tested, or trained for.

The response by multiple organisations and individuals working the problem, doing the improbable, thinking outside the square, performing tasks that would normally take extensive resources and time, and developing multi-level solutions.

Consider the multiple employment disciplines involved in this event, science, aviation, satellite techology, computer and mobile phone technology, weather and marine science, data analysists, to name but a few.

If there is a positive outcome to this situation, I think these actions will add to our extensive knowledge and provide solutions for future events and improvement to not only aviation but all facets of life.

[Ong88]

Thank you all who have put in their input, relevant/pertinent, farcical/fanciful or any which way.

The lack of facts made even the conspiracy theories useful : after all up to the time mh370's black box is found, we are only scenario painting.

For the the few professionals who were worried that some info compromised operational security, fear not : the bad guys are smarter these days.

Some crew took exception to contributions by non professionals, please get off that high chair (you won't be an air jock if you were so smart) : those contributors are your "out of the box" hive of ideas improving the forum's collective neuronal bandwidth.


Thank you PPRUNE et al.

[onetrack]

SupplierSam - An excellent post that effectively debunks the much-vaunted fire scenario, thank you.
All that remains is destruction of electrical and mechanical components by flying shards of external debris. I have heard no mention of an uncontained engine explosion, and whether both engines were still functioning after the deviation from the original flight path? And I'm personally still suspicious of space debris, which often contains some mighty durable metals.

[Wantion]

Many thanks onetrack Excellent info ! :ok:

Seems like they have got resources now in place to get the job done...if the weather will just abate! My hope and best wishes to the crews out there in tough conditions....for all the Math and predictions its up to them now and just hard yakka to finally prove that plane went down as expected

..Is Australia short on vessels? ...just wondering..no heli on Success either..yet it has a pad?

@wantion - Three Chinese warships, two Chinese patrol/SAR vessels, the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long, and HMAS Success.
The warships are the amphibious landing ship Kunlunshan, the missile destroyer Haikou and the supply ship Qiandaohu.

Rescue vessels Haixun 01 and Nanhaijiu 101 have also been tasked to the search area. These are high-speed Coastguard-style patrol vessels around 1500 tons. They're nearly new and cutting edge patrol vessels.
They have helipads and high-speed, crane-launched inflatables, and it appears that at least the Haikou has one helicopter aboard.

The Kunlunshan is reported as carrying 4 x Frelon Z-8 helicopters. The Haikou is reported as carrying 1 x Kamov KA-27 or 1 x Harbin Z-9C. The Qiandaohu is reported as having 1 x Frelon Z-8.

No helicopter on the HMAS Success, debris recovery by the Success is by launch of small craft.
The Success tried unsuccessfuly to recover the debris spotted Monday afternoon by aircraft, on Monday night, but failed to find the reported debris and had to leave the area due to deteriorating weather and sea conditions.

Type 071 Amphibious dock ship - Kunlunshan - Type 071 amphibious transport dock - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Type 052C destroyer - Haikou - Type 052C destroyer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Type 903 supply ship - Qiandaohu - Type 903 replenishment ship - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

China´s largest rescue vessel Haixun 01 heads toward Singapore CCTV News - CNTV English

Chinese rescue vessel Nanhaijiu 101 heads toward Singapore - Xinhua | English.news.cn

[flexthrust]

VinRouge, NO the 777 does not auto balance fuel. B787 has a auto fuel balance system, however you still have to push a switch to turn the system on.

[500N]

"...if the weather will just abate!"


Looking at the low (ex cyclone) and the direction it was heading late yesterday, hope it stops going south soon or that will complicate things.

[Buster Hyman]

..Is Australia short on vessels? ...just wondering..no heli on Success either..yet it has a pad?
Others, with better knowledge will correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that it doesn't always put to Sea with a Sea King on board and, if it didn't have one when tasked with the search, I doubt they would have waited.

[500N]

That is my understanding as well. It doesn't always have one on board.

They can always pick one up in Perth ;)

[Avtrician]

They can always pick one up in Perth ;)

Nope, no Seakings (do we have any any more?? not sure) or Seahawks kept over in the West. Only here as needed. No Black Hawks of fighters either

:bored:

[500N]

I know. But we have C-17's that can fly them over ! :O

[imaynotbeperfect]

Wantion ... ..Is Australia short on vessels? ...

Maybe not quite the armada fielded by some of the world's super powers but probably consistent with a population of 25 million

[onetrack]

500N - The cyclone has dissipated into a weak low pressure system, and the cloud and moisture associated with it, is dispersing into the Southern Ocean and the Bight. However, the weak low pressure system is now producing another buildup of heavy cloud, West of Shark Bay.

The search area is again being traversed by a cold front with increased cloud, and the likelihood of moderate weather and good sea conditions with vastly improved visibility isn't looking good for today, either.

It's been noted by oceanographics experts, in line with my prediction hundreds of posts back, that debris from MH370 will appear on the West Australian coastline in the not-too-distant future.
I trust any fishing vessels in the Indian Ocean have been notified by AMSA to keep a sharp lookout for MH370 wreckage.

Australian weather satellite and lightning tracker (http://www.farmonlineweather.com.au/satellite/)

[Hogger60]

Supplier Sam, Kudos to you sir.

Finally someone who has expertise with the 777 fire warning and suppression systems to debunk many of these so called experts. This post should be read aloud during all of the Media's nightly Circus Clown roundup, and made mandatory reading prior to anyone posting anything at all having to do with their half-assed theories of what happened to MH370, because they have their CPL and they "know" how it all works at 35,000ft.

Bravo

[lomapaseo]

Supplier Sam

Now you’re going to say to me, what about Swissair? To which I’ll say, no modern jetliner is lined with insulation blankets made of tinder and oily rags, and no competent designer wires up a disreputable pile of entertainment boxes so the breakers won’t trip when it arcs.


This kind of belief doesn't carry weight among those charged with investigating air accidents.

We have been faced with too many lessons unlearned by those who think they have done it right this time.

All avenues are open until facts are in evidence.

[Sheep Guts]

From Boeing Data for B777-200ER.
Long Range Cruise. Engines RR Trent 892
All up Weight at start of distance, 200.0 Tonnes
Time in hours and minutes, fuel burn in 1,000s kg

Distance -------------- Flight levels
(nm)_______100__________200___________300____________400
_________Fuel Time______Fuel Time_______Fuel Time________Fuel Time
_600_____11.5 1.50_______9.1 1.37________7.5 1.28_________6.6 1.22
1200_____23.3 3.18______18.8 3.12_______15.6 2.52________13.9 2.38
2000_____38.5 6.08______31.2 5.21_______26.4 4.45________23.5 4.19


Nice table it's a little weird when you look at your kgs/hr check. Take for example the FL100 column.

600nm. 11.5 Tonnes in 1:50 equals 6.38 Tonnes/hour

1200nm. 23.3 Tonnes in 3:18 equals 7.06 Tonnes/hour

2000nm. 38.5 Tonnes in. 6:08 equals 6.31 Tonnes/ hour

Surely it would burn more in the first 600nm?

Is there any tail trim tank fuel with 38.5 Tonnes left?

[Lost in Saigon]

Still don't see the range comparison at throttled back low speed below 10000' vs Planned Cruise speed at altitude.

I guess...tell me the range at assumed fuel load from when turning southbound at max hold speed at ~10000'...
This very slow speed might cross the southern Inmarsat LOP very far north at more or less 90 degrees relative.
Maybe just south of Jacarta, Indonesia, where it was shot down on visual approach to Jakarta Airport after being watched on military radar all night long - at just after 8 am local at the time of the last partial Inmarsat handshake...Maybe...
Or maybe it just ran out of fuel flying slowly eastbound crossing the Inmarsat LOP south of Jakarta...

Here are some numbers for GE powered B777-200LR Long Range Cruise......

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/msowsun/photo%20stuff/Photo14/_777LRC.jpg~original

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/msowsun/photo%20stuff/Photo14/_777LRC1.jpg~original

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/msowsun/photo%20stuff/Photo14/_777LRC2.jpg~original

[nitpicker330]

777's don't have a trim ( tail ) tank

[Uncle Fred]

Regarding the search, what height of wave brings about whitecaps, foam, and heavy spray? What height of wave then brings about the breakers that one sees in the video that was posted from the Telegraph? Does merely a confused sea cause a lot of foam or does there need to be a good blow over the water as well.

What I am trying to understand is how calm the sea and wind needs to be for even decent SAR spotting? I know they deploy in pretty foul weather, but I can imagine that a lot of white on the water makes the challenge a difficult one at best.

[UnreliableSource]

Thanks for the thorough explanation US. Do you mean 24/7 sampling at 3+ GHz could be taking place in the sat? I understand the reasoning but doubt the practicalities.

No. At an earth station the incoming RF effectively filtered and downconverted to extract a section of the RF they care about. This downconvered segment is called an IF, and will be a much much smaller chunk of bandwidth.

So the sampling is done on earth, and it is done over a subset of the spectrum.

[Sheep Guts]

Thanks Nitpicker and Lost in Saigon,
I stand corrected. Gosh I hope they find this thing.

[onetrack]

Another unsettling factor here, is that a leading marine geologist, Robin Beaman, from James Cook University. has pointed out that the seafloor in the aircraft search area is largely unmapped - and there's a chain of undersea volcanoes in the region, the Southeast Indian Ridge.

He's pointing out that the "complex terrain" of the Ridge will make underwater recovery difficult at best - and the lack of 3D sea floor mapping will only exacerbate the problem.

Australia's only sea-floor mapping vessel, the RV Southern Surveyor, was retired in December, and its replacement is still undergoing sea trials.
To say the timing of the aircraft loss was unfortunate as regards our sea-floor mapping ability is an understatement, to say the least.

[StrongEagle]

Looks like the search conditions today will be very difficult, how they can spot a 20m piece of wreckage in this, professional indeed.

Somewhat frightening video from search boat here. (Telegraph UK)


Ref post: http://www.pprune.org/8401233-post8158.html

Complete fake...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aow2ErSP3dQ

This video was taken Jan, 2013 and probably in the North Atlantic where this LPG carrier normally makes short runs.

It's a small boat, relatively speaking, and hard to fathom exactly where it would be delivering LPG deep in the south Indian Ocean.

[G0ULI]

Uncle Fred
Beaufort wind force 6 will cause white caps to form and make it virtually impossible to spot smaller objects in the water.

Try google for images of the various sea states on the Beaufort scale.

[AirTrafficOne]

Like millions of others I'm watching this saga with intense interest. I just flew as pax 6 sectors with AirAsia through Malaysian airspace. I'm a former Captain rank ATC (in an Air Defence environment too) and civilian ATC and pilot. I'm going to throw this in there.
Not much talk of military interference causing the loss of this aircraft. Just say there was a SNAFU (or deliberate) downing. Just say. The country involved steams its ships to the crash site and collects all the debris and bodies.
The Malaysian Air Defence RADAR is spoofed by Mil ECM. Unless you have a very experienced operator, complex spoofing is very hard to detect. How 'hardened' against this type of attack is the Malaysian system? We don't know.

Equally, we have no idea how 'hardened' the Inmarsat system is against a similar spoofing attack.

All have to agree that this is whole event is just bizarre.

There are NO SATELLITE IMAGES ANYWHERE that show a B777 IN FLIGHT along a pathway to the southern Indian ocean? Are you kidding me? None?

Please don't go into attack mode - just throwing it in there... Nothing I've seen so far makes much sense...

Cheers

[nitpicker330]

I was referring to your FL450 comment.
I earlier posted data regarding the difference between real Altitude and Indicated pressure Altitude being up to 2,500' different.

[Hogger60]

AirTrafficOne (http://www.pprune.org/members/367277-airtrafficone)
There are NO SATELLITE IMAGES ANYWHERE that show a B777 IN FLIGHT along a pathway to the southern Indian ocean? Are you kidding me? None?


I think there are most probably satellite photos of it, just not photos that any military organization (maybe US NRO?) who has them is going to release to the public.

[roulette]

@Uncle Fred

For what it's worth, here is info on swell/wave size, wind speed, white caps etc
windwater.html (http://www.geology.wmich.edu/kominz/windwater.html)

However, some white caps are not real problem in the southern Indian and southern seas generally. This article - Malaysia Airlines MH370: Rescue expert Aaron Halstead describes challenges of southern Indian Ocean search for possible debris - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-23/aaron-halstead-describes-mh370-search-area/5339468) - gives a good account of the problem in relation to swell height, visibility and depth perception from the SAR point of view (aerial and from ship height).

[Dai_Farr]

Regarding the search, what height of wave brings about whitecaps, foam, and heavy spray? What height of wave then brings about the breakers that one sees in the video that was posted from the Telegraph? Does merely a confused sea cause a lot of foam or does there need to be a good blow over the water as well.

What I am trying to understand is how calm the sea and wind needs to be for even decent SAR spotting? I know they deploy in pretty foul weather, but I can imagine that a lot of white on the water makes the challenge a difficult one at best.

Uncle Fred, others have posted the various tables of Beaufort wind scales, sea state, etc. All I can add is an experienced searcher's perspective. Firstly, I think the video posted very recently gives a dramatic example of how difficult any sort of search can be under these conditions. In my opinion, the useful search range from the bridge of that vessel is going to be a couple of hundred yards, MAXIMUM!

Strong winds whip up the sea. Gradually, waves develop. Over a period of time a wind covering hundreds of miles causes the ocean to develop a swell. Wave-like, these swells can have enormous wavelengths and in open oceans 150m to 700m may not be uncommon. Local winds can produce waves on top of an established swell. If the wind is from a different direction to the swell, the surface will be even more disturbed. These local waves, depending on their wavelength compared with the wavelength of the swell they ride upon, may break and produce local white water. Anything that produces waves and/or swell will periodically mask anything afloat. Anything that produces white water will also detract from an observer's ability to see a solid object afloat or riding in neutral buoyancy at some depth under the surface.

Continued strong winds will, at a given rate, "rip" the tops of the waves and blow the spume downwind. In sea state 8 or more, all you can sea are lines of spume set in the direction of the wind. And a very difficult spotting environment this is.

To overcome the masking of something afloat by the presence of the waves and the swell, you need elevation. Too much elevation risks missing anything small!!

To the high swells from the Southern Ocean (lets face it, the area under consideration is on the borderline Indian/Southern Ocean) and the waves from recent strong winds in the search area, you must add the spume and local breakers to the factors that diminish an observer's ability to recognise a person or an object in the water.

A RADAR search of the surface may not be put off by the muddled visual spectrum of white and blue water. But swell and wave height will mask RADAR returns and even return unwanted ones called "clutter". And given that what may or may not be on the surface is almost certainly not going to be generously RADAR-reflective, that's not an enormous help either.

I have only experienced Nimrods as a search platform. At 200 feet, if you mentally extended the 4A tanks forward, you were looking at about 3 nautical miles from the aircraft. A similar exercise with the wingtips or Loral pods, 5nm. Looking for something the size of a person even out to 3nm is not easy, and even if they are wearing a dayglo vest. 5nm? Forget it!

This is an enormously difficult task in an enormously difficult and unfriendly part of the world.

[tartare]

Dai - ineteresting post.
I thought military radar would be able to see through the waves to a certain degree - obviously wrong there!
Wouldn't something semi metaliic stand out very strongly on radar, even in a horrible State 8 sea?

[Uncle Fred]

Good information. Thank you. Lends a bit of perspective as to what one sees below from FL 350...

[hamster3null]

Don't forget, the ground station compensates for Doppler from satellite motion, and the aircraft attempts to compensate for Doppler from aircraft motion. The former is probably very precise, since it can sync to the pilot signal from the satellite, the latter is probably not, since I suspect it just treats the satellite as located at a fixed position.

At least, I believe that's what the slides posted earlier today meant, when they said only aircraft->satellite Doppler wasn't corrected.

So you'd be looking at Doppler from satellite motion relative to the aircraft, plus any residual Doppler that the aircraft hadn't corrected for in its own motion.

If the aircraft did any compensating, it could compensate more or less to zero, since it has GPS. From the charts, it does not look like there's any compensating happening on the side of the aircraft. That's why Doppler shift jumps when it turns.

Anyhow, this is the best I could do to "reconstruct" their "reconstruction" of the south track. Scales are different, I have no idea why. Even the zero in the original chart is not a zero. (The "knee" around 20:00 UTC corresponds to the Doppler shift going through zero and changing sign as the aircraft passes the closest approach to the satellite, somewhere near the equator.) But at least qualitatively there's an agreement: http://i61.tinypic.com/abo2n7.png This corresponds to the aircraft going off at heading 185 at 450 kts from 18:30 UTC and beyond.

I can't quite tell how they came up with whatever north route they used. There seems to be no way to draw a route that agrees with their "predicted north track" and ends up at 40 degree arc. Here's one way to look at it: their "predicted north track" has no apparent sign changes after 18:30 (we can assume that their "100 Hz" is near real zero, and the red line on the official plot does not get near 100 Hz.). Therefore, the aircraft flying along their "north track" has large consistent Doppler shifts all the way. But they began at the ~32 deg. arc at 18:30 and got only to 40 deg. by 0:11.

I can draw an approximate mirror image of the south route and get good agreement with "measured data" if I send it over Bangladesh and Nepal into south Kazakhstan.

About the only real conclusion that can be drawn here is that there was nothing remarkable happening to the aircraft after 18:30. It was not zigzagging or making any sharp turns. If it went south, I get an OK agreement simply assuming a constant 185 deg. heading (even without corrections for magnetic declination a la Cpt Kremlin above). This is not the track of an aircraft that tries to avoid detection.

[StrongEagle]

Firstly, I think the video posted very recently gives a dramatic example of how difficult any sort of search can be under these conditions. In my opinion, the useful search range from the bridge of that vessel is going to be a couple of hundred yards, MAXIMUM!

It's a fake video. Taken in Jan, 2013, most likely in the North Atlantic.

Always makes sense to confirm sources before commenting upon them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aow2ErSP3dQ

[auraflyer]

Anyhow, this is the best I could do to "reconstruct" their "reconstruction" of the south track. Scales are different, I have no idea why. Even the zero in the original chart is not a zero. (The "knee" around 20:00 UTC corresponds to the Doppler shift going through zero and changing sign as the aircraft passes the closest approach to the satellite, somewhere near the equator.) But at least qualitatively there's an agreement: http://i61.tinypic.com/abo2n7.png This corresponds to the aircraft going off at heading 185 at 450 kts from 18:30 UTC and beyond.

Interesting, hamster3null. One question - how does it look at lower or higher speeds? Do you get the same profile but just at a different heading? Or does the plot actually differ?

(As I understand it, and I may be wrong or missing something, they don't know the actual speed of the aircraft, or even that that speed was constant over the 7 hrs. Rather, they only know the difference in relative velocities at points in time. As a result, while the velocity and position for the satellite are known, one has to posit assumed heading/assumed speed pairs for the aircraft, each of which give the same difference in relative velocity, but correspond to a different track in real life.)

[Dai_Farr]

I thought military radar would be able to see through the waves to a certain degree - obviously wrong there!
Wouldn't something semi metaliic stand out very strongly on radar, even in a horrible State 8 sea?

Unfortunately, radio waves are too attenuated by the medium of water to allow useful penetration from a RADAR detection point of view.

Semi metallic? I'm afraid it's the 64,000 dollar question. There are too many variables to come up with an answer anyone would feel comfortable with.

When we were out hunting Red October and its ilk, we had all manner of detection ranges given to us from a variety of sources. But the best way to catch the b****r was to literally test the water. We would drop in a bathythermal buoy. As the thermistor head descended it gave us a trace of the thermal profile of the water, locally. From this, once we had consumed our dairy cream sponges, we could establish a sound velocity profile.

If you want an accurate idea of the sort of track spacing to employ in "this" body of water, you would ideally lob something of comparable RADAR reflectivity and/or visual reflectivity into the water and do a RADAR and visual search for it. Of course, most maritime patrol aircraft don't carry conveniently-sized (for the launchers) objects in a variety of materials to experiment with in this way. Flotation devices on sonobuoys are not in dayglo colours.

One of our crew members had experimented with modifying a sonobuoy with a RADAR reflector. His idea had been that if he could convince the manufacturers to incorporate such a thing, then Nimrod Dry sensor operators (the above-water team) could draw some benefit from them (i.e. practicing RADAR homings) as well as we Wet sensor operators (the acoustics team) could derive from the data they were primarily designed to yield. Unfortunately, he was collared by the harbourmaster and almost sparked a live Search and Rescue incident when, in response to, "What the b****y hell are you doing?" he declared there was a buoy in the water! (NOTE: The phonetic impact of this ONLY works with the British pronunciation of "buoy".)

Track spacing in any search is one of those "what do you think" decisions. Might a droppable device, based on a sonobuoy, with a dayglo flotation device (as opposed to military green) help lookouts establish a realistic detection range? If the RADAR could pick it up, then you have a measured visual range, as opposed to a "guestimate". Calm seas are one thing. But in this case, the searchers are on a hiding to nothing. A measured visual range established like this also gives the rest of the world (including Prime Ministers, Presidents) an honest idea of what they are truly up against. Cost of such a device (plus delivery of course). Still peanuts by comparison with the overall operational cost!!

[413X3]

nitpicker330 (http://www.pprune.org/members/304320-nitpicker330)

Anything above FL400 doesn't seem possible with their payload weight. If the airplane had an initial cruising altitude of 370-390 then it could get above 410

[StrongEagle]

That's not a fake video, it is very real and is representative of the kind of conditions that frequently are found in the southern ocean.

Good footage of heavy sea conditions are hard to capture, that's some outstanding footage. Who cares where it was filmed?

That said, the seas in the search area haven't quite reached that state yet.

While the video itself is real, it is clearly a misrepresentation of the circumstances surrounding the search, and when people make comments like "the view from the bridge of a search vessel", you know we have reached information BS at high levels.

This video is representative of conditions in the North Atlantic in Jan, 2013. Please spare us your attempts to show this is representative of the crash zone. It adds no information to an already confused situation.

PS: Google "heavy seas". Then click on "videos". Lots of 'footage' of high seas in many different circumstances. You want to post 50 or 100 of them as being "representative" as well?

[onetrack]

Here's a good graphic of the search region, around 43 deg S and 90 deg E, IIRC? The jagged yellow line is the South East Indian Ridge, the join line of the Indo-Australian and Antarctic tectonic plates.

If the aircraft ended up in the flatter regions of the S.E. Indian Ridge, it could be up to 4500M deep - if it just happened to lodge on top of one of the underwater volcanoes, it will more likely be a modest 2000M down. :uhoh:

File:Seir.png - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Seir.png)

[500N]

Modern radar from Fast Patrol boats of 20 years ago couldn't pick up low, non metallic boats in rough seas (typical seas you got South of Aus) unless we put up something metal on a pole. How that relates to wreckage - no reading ? but happy to be corrected.

[Sheep Guts]

What model of SATCOM system was installed in this Aircraft. I haven't heard anything from Boeing or The SATCOM installer since this all began. I understand INMARSATs calculations but does the SATCOM system, have any more to it than we know.
If say for example the ADIRU Position speed heading data info sent to the SATCOM for the BSU Beam steering Unit. If the info was cut or missing, what would happen to the gear?
Would it work based on its last SPEED and HEADING input ie. stored in some type of buffer. Or would the system read an error and park the Antenna ( if it was a mechanical type) or just freeze the position say in a modern phased array type antenna?
We need to hear Avionics SATCOM techos out there people who work on the gear. Anyone know brand of gear it was, Rockwell Collins, Honeywell ?

[Matt48]

It would seem that air in the fuel tanks brought down MH377

[*Lancer*]

With the approximate final location now known, has it been confirmed which agency will lead the investigation once AMSA has completed the search?

[CaptainEmad]

That footage was taken in a hurricane. Going by the BOM.gov.au sea/swell forecast charts, conditions appear relatively OK for todays search.


Last light in the general search area is at around 1230Z tonight, unfortunately coinciding with what looks like the last window of reasonable weather for some time.

Regarding the radar search...

The track spacing in poorer sea conditions has to be tighter, resulting in less area covered in the visual search. As the sea state increases, search radar like they have on the P3 must be brought down closer to the surface, resulting in decreased range and less efficient coverage.

So here's hoping they can pick up something of interest again this afternoon, pass it to a surface vessel and actually get some hard evidence.

[uksatcomuk]

Like many people I have been rather skeptical of the data produced by
Inmarsat in which they claimed that the a/c flew along or near to the
"southern" arc produced by signal levels of the hourly pings.
I could see how they might deduce the arc , but not how they could tell if
the signals were north or south of the equator.
Of course all this assumed that , as was mentioned in the media Inmarsat at
63 degs was used [ 5 Flight 1 ]....but the system aboard MH370 was older and
didnt use GPS.
Then I suddenly realised that not only was the system old , but so was the
satellite.
These non GPS signals are sent via Inmarsat 3F1 at 64.18 east....not 62.7
east.
Not only that , but 3F1 launchedd in 1996 , is inclined by 1.6697
degs....so wobbles above and below the geo arc in an extended figure of 8
pattern every 24 hours.
INMARSAT 3-F1
1 23839U 96020A 14082.92914473 -.00000008 00000-0 10000-3 0 2891
2 23839 1.6697 73.1023 0005489 286.4812 220.7448 1.00274299 65821

At the time the flight took off the sat was 1 deg 11 mins N of the equator
.Three hours later it was at the top of its wobble one deg 40 minutes....and
by 2240 GMT it was back around one deg 11 minutes....having travelled around
the top of the figure of eight.
This gave Inmarsat the third refrence to allow a very approximate idea of where
the signal was coming from....and put it in the southern corridor , not the
northern.

Ref 1 the signals from MH370
Ref 2 the doppler from the wobbling satellite and the moving aircraft
Ref 3 the calculated behaviour of a signal from a "known" a/c within the
footprint of Inmarsat

Hardly cutting edge science...more basic orbital mechanics , but probably
the first time they have used the technique

All geostationery satellites move around a bit but are kept in position by
the operators station keeping.
As they get older they start to wobble more as the fuel runs out and to
extend their life , the operators carry out fewer regular burns.
Even the most stable geo sats. those we get our tv from , move
You can see this movement in the 80 minute time lapse video I took about
ten years ago of a group of TV satellites
http://www.satcom.freeserve.co.uk/hbs1a.GIF
The dots are the satellites 36,000 km out in space the streaks are stars
which appear to move due to the rotation of Earth


So there we are....thats probably how they did it.
No doubt someone from Inmarsat will correct me on some of the finer points....but these are the basics.

Of course , Inmarsat tracked the device emitting the ping....not
necessarilly MH370......but odds are the two were together.

[rampstriker]

What model of SATCOM system was installed in this Aircraft?

It appears that MH370 had a Swift64 terminal onboard (or possibly an older Aero-H or H+ terminal), not one of the latest SwiftBroadband terminals according to this blog (http://tmfassociates.com/blog/2014/03/15/understanding-satellite-pings/). Classic Aero Services.

[mickjoebill]

Regardless of the cause, this incident has sparked considerable debate about commercial flights.


Should the passenger emergency air be able to maintain life in a decompression at the maximum altitude achievable by the aircraft?

Should cabin crew have enough endurance in their portable air to stabilise passengers, then react and enter cockpit if during a decompression the flight crew are non responsive?

Should the cabin crew have independent means of communicating with the ground, a comms system that can't be turned off in the cockpit?

Should low cost PLBs be available for deployment by cabin crew and passengers?
If there were a dozen PLBs onboard and none were deployed after an accident this would speak to probable survivability.

Is a live camera view of the cockpit that can be viewed by cabin crew or passengers out of the question?


After watching a well produced documentary a few days ago about the Qantas A380 that suffered a runaway engine, I am of the view that both passengers and crew are distancing ourselves from the perils of flying at 500 knots at 35000ft over hostile terrain in a machine controlled by a computer.

Pilots can't see even their engines or control surfaces, in the case of the A380 an action list that took 45 minutes to scroll through, cabin crew somewhat isolated from pilots and 600 lives at stake. The pilot commented that he was very fortunate to have a spare pilot on the flight deck who could go back and report on what the hell had happened, in the meantime copilot worked his way through the onscreen warnings, but with no way of knowing how many pages of warnings there were and how long it would take to get through them.

[Ollie Onion]

MickJoeBill,

I don't think this incident raises ANY of those questions..... YET. How about we just see what comes out of the investigation.

[DaveReidUK]

Should the passenger emergency air be able to maintain life in a decompression at the maximum altitude achievable by the aircraft?That would make the safety demonstration very interesting - by the time you have shown 300+ pax how to don pressurised masks and then how to breathe through them, you'd be at your destination.

And just how long would you plan on being able to sustain life for at FL400 with no cabin pressure? Where would you store all the extra oxygen that would require?

[Above The Clouds]

MickJoeBill
Is a live camera view of the cockpit that can be viewed by cabin crew or passengers out of the question?

Or recordings via a secure link that cannot be turned off in flight manually, with its own independent power supply, collected data to be stored at a central base then deleted at an appropriate time subject to any events being recorded that may require future investigation.

[Wannabe Flyer]

@F14

Highly unlikely that 238 pax then sat about for 7 hours without attempting and succeeding in breaking down the door to the Flight Deck and/or communicating with ground via alternate means.... Confident there were at least 238 operational cell phones/tablets and other such devices on board.

More importantly and this is an answer a MH crew member would give as to what is the protocol followed by that carrier when one of the crew leaves the deck for a leak....

As in all accidents post the human tragedy it is important the cause is determined to avoid re occurrence.

[Sheep Guts]

Mountain snake,

What about the humble fisherman at Kota Bahru? Anyone actually discounted his police report yet. Was the Kota Bahru Airport still open at 1:30 am. It says on wiki it closes at 12:00 midnight and may stay open for delayed departures.

I fact there were multiple sightings on the North Malaysian. Coast Gulf of Thailand.

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/beritamalaysia/conversations/messages/129362

It seems to me that we've relied to much on technology, to get to the current search zone and there seems to be a total discount of what these people saw.

The majority of air accidents are seen or heard first technology comes second.

Don't discount the Mark 1 eyeball!!

[tichy]

@Uncle Fred
this is pretty close to the current conditions, 4-5m swell in the southern ocean. Vessel is 95m long. Think the current winds are a little stronger then this day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9G-QxYXE4I

[Mahatma Kote]

4-5m swell in the southern oceanIt's not so much the swell that's a problem for searching but the sea and rain.

Swell in that area is usually generated by sub-polar lows or tropical cyclones to the North. It travels thousands of kilometres from origin. The weather at any mid-latitude is mostly unrelated to the swell.

In a previous career I monitored and reported on sea and swell in the Western Australian littoral - particularly off Perth and in the North-West.

[Pontius Navigator]

More importantly and this is an answer a MH crew member would give as to what is the protocol followed by that carrier when one of the crew leaves the deck for a leak....

This a question I have been asking from the outset and no one, as far as I know, has come up with an answer.

We know the FO had invited passengers on to the flight deck.

Based on that I would expect either:

a. Someone to admit that the FO had done this frequently.

b. Admit that several pilots did this from time to time.

c. Admit the company knew the FO had done this and issued him a formal warning.

d. Deny they knew the FO had done this.

e. Admit the door was left open routinely when one left the flight deck.

f. Deny the door was left open routinely when one left the flight deck.

Now I don't hold with the conspiracy theorists but this is a strange thing that as far as I know MAS has made no such statement.

g. We might also ask he the Captain and FO flown together previously? We know the FO was a recent convert to the 777 so we may deduce that any previous flight together was either in the distant past (737) or recently (777).

Now that is a conspiracy of silence or just plain lack of thought.

[nitpicker330]

F14 highly unlikely the FO or Captain couldn't get back in. Without going into details you can gain access UNLESS the person inside doesn't want you to.

The people that need to know the code, know the code.

[SQGRANGE]

Good points regarding protocol. I would expect the company to deny all points and even if management had addressed the issues, that would be between the flight crew and management and not to be aired in public as dirty laundry and under normal circumstances I would agree. However MAS probably need to be seen as being proactive and show internal audits are in place to re-assure customers.
Put quite simply, it is cost prohibitive to have an extra crew member for each flight so if it MH370 turns out to be anything other than a catastrophic failure, then other measures probably need to looked at. As you say, we learn from mistakes.

[Mahatma Kote]

Although they are just on the edge of the search zone these model predictions give some idea of probable weather changes affecting the search area.

Click on each image for better resolution.

Prediction quality is inversely proportional to time in future

10-day BoM ACCESS model weather forecast of isobars and rain (http://www.weatherzone.com.au/models/)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/muunbzc6gd2egi2/search.png

[Orion Man]

nitpicker330 F14 highly unlikely the FO or Captain couldn't get back in. Without going into details you can gain access UNLESS the person inside doesn't want you to.

The people that need to know the code, know the code.


Exactly so. Too many suspicious pieces of evidence add upto hijack but more probably pilot suicide here -

(1) No checking in with Vietnamese after clearing Malaysian airspace
(2) Transponder and ACARS turned off at this point
(3) Turning off track
(4) No Mayday call
(5) Possible height excursion

Whether one of the pilots has fire-axed the other or locked him out and depressurised the aircraft remains to be seen. I would be astonished if this is not a criminal act.

[F14]

I can assure you the people, who should know the code, don't necessarily know the code. Many airlines, routinely leave the cockpit single crew, when another pilot take a break or a comfort stop.

The second point I made, was the code may have been changed as part of a company specific security protocol and not propagated to the crew via communication or in the tech log. Due to familiarity/aircraft change or rushing, the code not confirmed or checked pre departure. All these elements have human factors related threats.

Sensible airlines never leave the cockpit single crew. This is not an industry wide procedure though.

There is also a huge difference between suicide and mass murder and torture. Sorry but these pilot profiles, don't point towards this.

[multycpl]

I may be wrong, so please let me know.....


But, l don't believe that the 'Nobody on the flight deck" rule is the same the world over. I know the UK and USA will not allow visits.

[Wannabe Flyer]

MH370: New satellite images show 122 potential objects, some bright and up to 23m long, in ocean, Malaysia minister says.

[Data Guy]

FACTUAL DATA.


Notes; 'Blankets' refers to the PET acoustic/thermal insulation. AD 2008-23-09 calls for removal of PET (aka Mylar-AN-26) by Dec 2016.)



4/8/2010. Cathay 747, Reg # B-HOV > “Burnt” Blankets in avionics compartment. Cause; electrical short. Source; BEA (Bureau d' Enquetes et d' Analyses) Report on B-HOV. BEA Report Link > http://www.bea.aero/docspa/2010/hs-l100318.en/pdf/hs-l100318.en.pdf
--------------------
3/18/2010. Thai 747, Reg # HS-TGL. Burnt Blankets in avionics compartment. Cause; electrical short. Source: BEA (Bureau d' Enquetes et d' Analyses) Report on HS-TGL. - BEA Report Link > http://www.bea.aero/docspa/2010/hs-l100318.en/pdf/hs-l100318.en.pdf
-----------------------
2/26/2007. United 777. Blankets “ignited” at P 200 panel in E & E bay. Blanket type; PET-Mylar- AN-26. Source; AAIB Report # 2/2009. BEA Report Link > http://www.bea.aero/docspa/2010/hs-l100318.en/pdf/hs-l100318.en.pdf AD Link > http://www.airweb.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgAD.nsf/0/a25376cdf9be5b42862574fd0055eda4/$FILE/2008-23-09.pdf
--------------------------
11/15/2004. British Airways 777. Fire in E&E bay. Cause; arcing at external power terminals. Source; NTSB Safety Recommendation Letter A-07-113-116. Letter Link > http://www.ntsb.gov/doclib/recletters/2007/a07_113_116.pdf
---------------------
7/6/2004. United 777. “Thermal Damage” Blankets in E&E bay. No Cause. Source NTSB Safety Recommendation Letter A-07-113-116, ref 2. Letter Link > http://www.ntsb.gov/doclib/recletters/2007/a07_113_116.pdf
----------------------
3/28/2004. Continental 757. Fire damage to structure in E&E bay. Cause; wire arcing. Source; SDR # & Link CALA0400292. Source; SDR Query Link > FAA :: SDR Reporting [Service Difficulty Report Query Page] (http://av-info.faa.gov/sdrx/Query.aspx) enter SDR # and run query.
----------------------
11/1/1999. Carrier not given, 737-500. Wiring fire in E & E bay. . No cause. Source; U.K. (MOR) Mandatory Occurrence Reporting report 199907499. Reference to page 35 of AAIB Aircraft Accident Report 5/2000. “Significant Electrical Arcing Events”. AAIB Rpt - Link > http://www.aaib.gov.uk/cms_resources.cfm?file=/5-2000%20N653UA.pdf
---------------------
11/28/1998. Foreign 747. “Film (blanket) Consumed in the fire” in E & E bay. Cause; wire arcing. Source; AAIB Bulletin No: 6/99 EW/C98/11/7. Link > AAIB Link > Air Accidents Investigation: Boeing 501413 (http://www.aaib.gov.uk/publications/bulletins/june_1999/boeing_501413.cfm)
------------------------------
1/9/1998. United 767. Wiring Fire in E & E bay. Cause, arcing. Wire insulation ETFE and Kapton. Source; AAIB report 5/2000. AAIB Link > http://www.aaib.gov.uk/cms_resources.cfm?file=/5-2000%20N653UA.pdf
-------------------------
10/10/94. ‘Beijing’ 737. Blankets on fire in E & E bay. Cause; wire short. No NTSB report Source; FAA Tech Center Report DOT/FAA/AR-97/58. Report Link > Tech Report Link > http://www.tc.faa.gov/its/worldpac/techrpt/ar97-58.pdf Example 2.
------------------------
End

[ZAZ]

The rep ports above are a worry. I saw the Halifax doco how Mylar burned. Why do people have an issue with the idea that something like this might have occurred.

[Golf-Mike-Mike]

Sturdy riposte to a question at the Press conference about Malaysia's future after such a "bruising" by the press, the Acting Transport Minister reminded the audience that, in an unprecedented incident such as this, not many countries, particularly in SE Asia, could have brought together 26 countries, to help and co-operate as they are doing. He believes that in the end history will judge them well.

Fact is we live in a Hollywood-influenced world where you can save the whole planet from asteroids inside 90 minutes so long as Bruce Willis or Morgan Freeman is involved. Perhaps it's time for critics to moderate their expectations.

[Pontius Navigator]

I may be wrong, so please let me know.....


But, l don't believe that the 'Nobody on the flight deck" rule is the same the world over. I know the UK and USA will not allow visits.

Multy, you may well be right and for MAS it is a 'non-question' but I would have expect some acknowledgement that the initial 'shocking' revelation in the western media was, as far as they were concerned, a non-event.

They didn't; as far as I know they simply ignored it. Of course the answer there might be they didn't want a blame-game witch hunt early in the search phase.

[paultr]

Did the acting aviation minister say when the satellite data showing the 122 objects was acquired (by the satellite not the Malaysians) ?

[Orion Man]

I can assure you the people, who should know the code, don't necessarily know the code. Many airlines, routinely leave the cockpit single crew, when another pilot take a break or a comfort stop.

I can't go with that. I would be amazed if the cabin crew and pilots of a national carrier do not know the access code to the flight deck. My carrier changed the code once post 9/11.

Whether you subscribe to one of the pilots committing this act or not, the fact remains that the transponder and ACARS were switched off. Whether it's hijack or pilot suicide, those items were disabled for a reason as was the absence of a radio call to Vietnam on airspace transition.

[Howard Hughes]

Did the acting aviation minister say when the satellite data showing the 122 objects was acquired (by the satellite not the Malaysians) ?
French satellite, 23rd March.

[Wannabe Flyer]

Did the acting aviation minister say when the satellite data showing the 122 objects was acquired (by the satellite not the Malaysians) ?

March 23rd More recent than others and within a 400 sq km area

Hope this is not another Wild goose chase considering how many objects are being sighted

[clayne]

Whether one of the pilots has fire-axed the other or locked him out and depressurised the aircraft remains to be seen. I would be astonished if this is not a criminal act.

I'd bet the same thing was said over and over back during AF447.

[nitpicker330]

We don't leave the Crew alone in the cockpit in our mob and I can assure you that those in my crew that need to know the codes, know the codes required.:ok:

[nitpicker330]

Serious question here-----

They say they've spotted 100+ objects of interest in the Indian Ocean where they are searching from the Satellites pictures....

How old are these pictures exactly that the search Aircraft cannot seem to find the debris?????? How long is the time between taking the picture and getting the location coordinates to the search Aircraft???? Surely it could be very quick????

[Above The Clouds]

nitpicker330
They say they've spotted 100+ objects of interest in the Indian Ocean where they are searching from Satellites....

How old are these pictures exactly that the search Aircraft cannot seem to find the debris?????? How long is the time between taking the picture and getting the picture to the search Aircraft???? Surely it could be very quick????


Imagery can be sent to the P-3

[korrol]

No. The satellites involved are not geo-stationary.

[A69]

Here's the press briefing for today (26th March 2014)
MH370 PRESS BRIEFING BY HISHAMMUDDIN HUSSEIN,

MINISTER OF DEFENCE AND ACTING MINISTER OF TRANSPORT

26 MARCH 2014, 5:30PM

Introductory statement

The search for MH370 continues. Our efforts are now focused in the southern Indian Ocean, where a multi-national team, led by Australia, is combing the waters trying to find debris from the flight.

Our determination to find MH370 remains steadfast. As we have said all along, we will never give up trying to find the plane – in order to bring closure for the families, and to establish exactly what happened to MH370.
New satellite images

Australia, China and France have already released satellite images, showing objects that may be related to MH370.
Yesterday, on 25 March, the Malaysian Remote Sensing Agency (MRSA) received new satellite images from Airbus Defence and Space, which is based in France. The images were taken on 23 March.

MRSA analysed the images and - in one area of the ocean measuring some 400 square kilometres - were able to identify 122 potential objects.

Some objects were a metre in length; others were as much as 23 metres in length. Some of the objects appeared to be bright, possibly indicating solid materials.

The objects were located approximately 2,557 kilometres from Perth.

We will issue handouts relating to this new information, after this press conference.

MRSA’s findings were immediately forwarded to the Australian Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Perth yesterday.
It must be emphasized that we cannot tell whether the potential objects are from MH370. Nevertheless, this is another new lead that will help direct the search operation.
We have now had four separate satellite leads, from Australia, China and France, showing possible debris. It is now imperative that we link the debris to MH370. This will enable us to further reduce the search area, and locate more debris from the plane.

2. Operational update

Australia is leading the search effort in the southern Indian Ocean, based out of Perth. Malaysia continues to play a co-ordinating role. All countries involved are displaying unprecedented levels of co-operation; that has not changed.
Australia has divided the search area into two sectors, East and West.

Today the weather has improved, and twelve planes will travel to the search area – six in the East sector and six in the West.

In the East sector, searches will be conducted by:

· one Australian P3 Orion, and three Australian civilian aircraft.

· one Chinese Ilyushin IL-76.

· one New Zealand P3 Orion.

In the West sector, searches will be conducted by:
· one US P8 Poseidon.

· one Korean P3 Orion.

· one Japanese P3 Orion.

· two Australian P3 Orions, and one civilian aircraft.

Two ships will also join the search operations.

Yesterday ‘HMAS Success’ was redeployed to the south of the search area due to bad weather. Today the ship has returned and will support the search operation in the West sector.

Meanwhile, the Chinese ship ‘Xue Long’ has today been deployed to the East sector.

A Japanese Coast Guard gulfstream aircraft left Subang this morning for Perth, to join the search operation.

As I mentioned yesterday, the search operations in the northern corridor, and in the northern part of the southern corridor, have been called off. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has sent diplomatic notes to all relevant countries to formally inform them of this change.

Before I continue, I would like to convey our appreciation to the Australian authorities, and in particular to Prime Minister Tony Abbot, for making such an extraordinary contribution to the search operation.

Chinese Special Envoy

Today, the Prime Minister met with His Excellency Zhang Yesui, the Chinese Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs and Special Envoy of the Government of China. I also met with His Excellency this afternoon.

During our conversation His Excellency conveyed China’s commitment to continue and intensify the search operation in any way possible, and to deploy any assets that may be required.

Malaysia has provided his His Excellency and his delegation with a full update on the latest information from Inmarsat.
His Excellency and his delegation also received a comprehensive briefing from the international technical team.

4. International Working Group

As I mentioned yesterday, based on the new information provided by Inmarsat, we have established an international working group. The agencies involved in this working group include: Inmarsat, AAIB, the Chinese CAAC and AAID, NTSB, FAA, Boeing and Rolls Royce, as well as the relevant Malaysian authorities.

The role of the working group is to help try and refine the Inmarsat data and, if possible, more accurately determine the final position of MH370.

5. Further information

I should like to note that the CEO of Malindo Airlines, Chandran Rama Murthy, has joined me on stage today, and will be able to answer any questions that you might have.
As I announced yesterday, MAS is now taking a lead in communicating with the families and is conducting their own press conferences. MAS will hold another press conference tomorrow.

Concluding remarks

New satellite images continue to provide clues in the search for MH370. And with improved weather conditions, aircraft are now able to investigate objects of interest.
I would like to thank once again our international partners for their continued support and assistance. The search for MH370, and the investigation into what happened on board the flight, is now a truly international effort.

ENDS
http://s28.postimg.org/3zyz508eh/1011630_741488512562831_1581308885_n.jpg (http://postimg.org/image/3zyz508eh/) http://s28.postimg.org/ecl9r31xl/1465375_741488489229500_1480901014_n.jpg (http://postimg.org/image/ecl9r31xl/) http://s28.postimg.org/hux9nh2tl/10154508_741488479229501_2057720477_n.png (http://postimg.org/image/hux9nh2tl/)

Source: Ministry of Transport Malaysia (https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=741488612562821&id=178566888854999)

[TWT]

The delay in finding objects of interest from satellite imagery will no doubt be due in part to the need for many eyes to painstakingly assess each image,of which there must be thousands.

[Wannabe Flyer]

should like to note that the CEO of Malindo Airlines, Chandran Rama Murthy, has joined me on stage today, and will be able to answer any questions that you might have.

Any particular reason or significance of this?

[A69]

should like to note that the CEO of Malindo Airlines, Chandran Rama Murthy, has joined me on stage today, and will be able to answer any questions that you might have.
Any particular reason or significance of this?

Malindo Airlines had an incident at Subang. He was at the press conference for addressing that.
Malindo Air confirms plane caught fire but landed safely in Subang (http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2014/03/26/Malindo-Air-fire-statement/)

[Golf-Mike-Mike]

The delay in finding objects of interest from satellite imagery will no doubt be due in part to the need for many eyes to painstakingly assess each image,of which there must be thousands.

Yes the Minister explained that the whole area is shrouded in cloud and the French had done a great job in homing in on the few gaps that cropped up from time to time and then spotted the 122 objects. The images are dated 23rd March, was that 23rd March at Airbus in France (and possibly 24th in the Indian Ocean) or 23rd March in the search area? Either way, as you imply, this all takes time.

[SOPS]

That thing looks very much like a fire suppression bottle to me. Is anyone official on the way to have a look?

[Howard Hughes]

Sure looks like a fire bottle, but doesn't look big enough to be from a 777, look at the size in relation to the foliage.

[Capt Kremin]

It doesn't matter if you know the code. Let's leave it at that.

[Speed of Sound]

One thing which nobody seems to have mentioned so far is the possible use of onboard images and audio recorded on passenger and crew mobile phones in any investigation.

Many on here are agreed that the most useful portion of the CVR recordings will have been overwritten and this may or may not be recoverable. There is also concern that both DFDRs may have been disabled during whatever events occurred on MH370. It is not outside the realms of possibility that when the wreckage is finally located, there may be very little data available to investigators.

If, and it's a big if, passengers and crew were still conscious during some or all of the flight south, it is very likely that audio and video recordings exist on the 200+ mobile phones on board at the time.

In the old days Nokia phones were famous for their ability to survive immersion in water and work perfectly again after removing the battery and leaving them in a warm place for a few hours. I have seen a few telecoms engineers posting here in the last two weeks. Does anyone know the likely survivability of a modern 'smartphone' (or more relevantly, the data contained) inside a crashed aircraft in deep salt water? :confused:

[bubbers44]

HH, the bottle could be for the APU.

[Mahatma Kote]

In the press briefing diagram giving Lat/Long coordinates, why do they publish them with Long first then Lat ?

Google Earth and Google Maps do the same thing. Its a geospatial convention.

[jimster99]

Ventus - your water spill theory sounds possible, with reservations.

A water spill like the QF2 747 water spill would have initially caused numerous problems. You can easily imagine the pilots rerouting to Langkawi. But why wouldn't they transmit a mayday? Maybe they were too busy flying and fault diagnosing? Seems unlikely (but not impossible - after all, the 747 water spill crew didn't declare a mayday either).

Anyway, after 30 minutes the plane battery runs out and they lose all communication and navigation and many other critical systems. At this point they cannot tell anyone what is happening and they would be flying blind in a crippled plane at night with only basic flight controls. At this point they are in real trouble.

It does seem possible that in this scenario (especially if its cloudy) they get disoriented or accidentally induce a turn, and head south, with occasional changes in altitude and direction, hoping to find a runway somewhere. Their situation would get worse and worse, and eventually they run out of fuel and get forced to ditch. But would they really end up getting THAT lost?

[BobT]

@Mahatma Kote

Re. Use of a PC secure deletion tool being a "red flag": That would be an old policeman's attitude - "what do you have to hide". I'd suggest that in these days of online privacy concerns, more people than you might think use such tools.

Should they all be suspected of illicit activity? No.

The flight simulator is an odd sidelight in this sad episode. As usual, evidence from the aircraft will tell the tale.

[Pontius Navigator]

I wonder if God forbid one of the SAR crafts ditches due to some failure how the heck will they be rescued ?

Whilst this would indeed be a dreadful event, it would actually be a most propitious time to ditch.

There are lots of other SAR aircraft on the route. In the search area thee are specialist ships.

[matkat]

As far as I am aware (B747 Tech in a past life) the APU and engine fire bottles are the same size.

[Pontius Navigator]

One thing which nobody seems to have mentioned so far is the possible use of onboard images and audio recorded on passenger and crew mobile phones in any investigation.

it is very likely that audio and video recordings exist on the 200+ mobile phones on board at the time.

There was a case about 3 years ago, a Spanish fisherman recovered a camera that had been lost in the Atlantic some months before. The camera was ruined but the images on the SD Card enabled the owner to be traced. SD Cards are solid so water pressure us unlikely to be a factor and that one had survived immersion in salt water.

Good call.

[Andy_S]

A water spill like the QF2 747 water spill would have initially caused numerous problems. You can easily imagine the pilots rerouting to Langkawi. But why wouldn't they transmit a mayday? Maybe they were too busy flying and fault diagnosing? Seems unlikely (but not impossible - after all, the 747 water spill crew didn't declare a mayday either).

Who says they were trying to divert to Langkawi? Some contributors to this thread have tried to suggest this, but all of their theories were purely speculative and were pretty much debunked.

If, as you suggest, they were still able to fly the aircraft, then it’s far more likely that if they had a problem then they would have attempted to return to KLIA (which, unlike Langkawi, operates around the clock). And I simply can’t believe that they wouldn’t have communicated their intentions. Even the ill fated Swissair 111 was in contact with ATC before it’s demise.

[Lost in Saigon]

Ventus - your water spill theory sounds possible, with reservations.

A water spill like the QF2 747 water spill would have initially caused numerous problems. You can easily imagine the pilots rerouting to Langkawi. But why wouldn't they transmit a mayday? Maybe they were too busy flying and fault diagnosing? Seems unlikely (but not impossible - after all, the 747 water spill crew didn't declare a mayday either).

Anyway, after 30 minutes the plane battery runs out and they lose all communication and navigation and many other critical systems. At this point they cannot tell anyone what is happening and they would be flying blind in a crippled plane at night with only basic flight controls. At this point they are in real trouble.

It does seem possible that in this scenario (especially if its cloudy) they get disoriented or accidentally induce a turn, and head south, with occasional changes in altitude and direction, hoping to find a runway somewhere. Their situation would get worse and worse, and eventually they run out of fuel and get forced to ditch. But would they really end up getting THAT lost?

Even after 30 mins, the aircraft can continue flying and they still have a good old reliable standby magnetic "Spirit" compass.

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/msowsun/photo%20stuff/Photo14/standby_compass.jpg~original

[sandos]

Even after 30 mins, the aircraft can continue flying and they still have a good old reliable standby magnetic "Spirit" compass.



What about a horizon? Would be messy without one at night?

[Mahatma Kote]

Use of a PC secure deletion tool being a "red flag": That would be an old policeman's attitude I work for the bad guys' defence teams. Drug dealers, paedophiles etc. If I see a deletion tool in use I know they are up to no good.

I'm definitely no cop nor have I ever been. I just know what's normal and not normal.

Getting on topic. If a deletion tool has been used then there are very grave suspicions about the user. Let's wait and see what is revealed in subsequent investigations.

[philip2412]

Every time a terror act happened somewhere the US noticed an increase in telephon "traffic" in certain areas.We`ve heard anything yet,of course thy don`t have to tell us,buit i think it`s possible something would have been leaked already.
Don`t saying it was no technical faillure,but i thonk one should really take a closer look at the state of mind of the ctp after his wife left him.For some people it could have an devasting effect.

About the possible try to go back to KUL,i´ve have thougt,they would have waited til dawn,fuel was enough,maybe not a good idea to arrive therein the middle of the night with no means for comms.

[Capn Bloggs]

In the press briefing diagram giving Lat/Long coordinates, why do they publish them with Long first then Lat ?

Google Earth and Google Maps do the same thing. Its a geospatial convention.
GE takes either. In the example for the GE search box, Lat comes first. I've never heard of Longitude being given before Latitude, certainly not in aviation applications.

[Lost in Saigon]

What about a horizon? Would be messy without one at night?

The aircraft flew for over 7 hours so it was either on autopilot, or it wasn't too "messy".

[LFRT]

[Notice the way it's strapped]
http://aae-ltd.com/wp-content/uploads/Extinguisher-Bottle-Assembly.jpg

And compare to the marks on these two other photos of the object that washed ashore :
http://vnews-assets.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/posts/medium_29222.jpg

http://vnews-assets.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/posts/medium_29224.jpg


The article these photos come from :

vnews - An object suspected to be an explosive washes into Baarah (http://vnews.mv/17971)

"Maldives Police Services (MPS) reported that reports of such an object were filed with the department yesterday evening around 5.30 pm and that Maldives National Defense Force (MNDF) had taken in the object.

MNDF Spokesperson Major Hussain Ali said that the object is an explosive and the MNDF Northern Area team is active in the area."



My only question is : what amount of BS are we willing to eat in the name of "security" ?

As Benjamin Franklin said : "Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."
And i'm pretty sure that the right to be told the truth is included in freedom.

Big words put aside, i see 239 other good reasons to demand that officials stop treating us as idiotic children. Shame on the mass media for not even have begun to try that.

[starliner]

Maybe they transmitted but no-one heard ?

[Speed of Sound]

Mahatma

If a deletion tool has been used then there are very grave suspicions about the user.

I'm sure there are plenty of people using deletion tools for completely innocent purposes.

A friend of mine who works in the AV world uses one all the time. He has SD cards to record SD and HD video. After each show he archives the material from 6 or 7 cameras to his hard drives. If he uses a brand new 32Gb flash memory card he can record about 31.5Gb of HD video onto it but when he archives it, deletes the files and puts the card back in the camera, he can only record 29.3Gb of HD video onto the card.*

I'm sure we have all at some point tried to write a 7.2 Gb file onto a 8GB USB drive only to be greeted by an 'insufficient space' message. Despite checking that everything has been erased then trying to rewrite the file, it won't have it even though you wrote a 7.9Gb file to the same pen drive two days ago when it was new.

*Data figure are purely for illustrative purposes only. ;)

[flown-it]

bono
No Debris Sightings Today-Where Is The Debris?
Final aircraft has left the #MH370 search area. Nothing further identified after initial sighting of three objects.

https://twitter.com/AMSA_News/status/448788733593018368


So where is the debris? It will make sense at this stage to make an educated guess regarding the aircraft's crash position using Inmarsat data and send in a few ROVs to the ocean floor. This preoccupation with locating debris as marker for crash location in the roaring 40s is looking less and less fruitful.


Bono good call:D


Search and Rescue
I've done it for 10+ hours in the North Sea North of Scotland looking for a missing yacht. Nothing seen
I've done it looking for downed flight crew in different parts of the world flying from a carrier. Nothing seen.
I've been in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea in post cyclonic seas and even on an aircraft carrier it was less than pleasant

SAR is a monotonous, puke making and potentially thankless task. Add the weather in the southern Indian Ocean, the shortening days as winter approaches and you have a monumentally difficult task.
Don't expect instant results

[Speed of Sound]

It will make sense at this stage to make an educated guess regarding the aircraft's crash position using Inmarsat data and send in a few ROVs to the ocean floor. This preoccupation with locating debris as marker for crash location in the roaring 40s is looking less and less fruitful.

Tedious as it may be, locating the wreckage through floating debris then backtracking to the crash site is still going to be the quickest way. Anything else is just a guess.

All Inmarsat data can do is take us down 90% of the track south. That final 10% which can't be predicted by hard data represents a hell of a lot of ocean. :(

[londonman]

@ pace

"The most likely for me is still a massive depressurisation caused by a fire with the fire extinguishing with the depressurisation and messed up communication and navigation!"

i thought that the possibility of fire had been debunked on more than one occasion in this thread by those with a pretty authoritative knowledge?

[Above The Clouds]

Given the specialised equipment fitted to drones;

Would ship launched or land based controlled long range drones not have a useful part to play in searching for debris, once in the area they could stay on station far longer time than any MPA.

[Wantion]

@LFRT

Looks to be evidence of of burning...is this some kind of fake ? Maldives ? I thought we were long past the idea of an area anywhere near the Maldives!?

There has to be a serial number on that thing somehwere....hope it can be rule in/out asap.

[skridlov]

I fear the Mahatma's profession may have induced a suspicious default state of mind. For many years, both personally and professionally, I've used a readily available simple utility to periodically securely delete cached data.

I have a couple of reasons, neither of which implies mischief. One, cached data is a great way to introduce malware which can evade AV applications at boot-time - or at least before the OS and utilities are fully up and running - and secondly to free up space, particularly where it's limited by the currently quite small SSDs in general use.

I've also installed this on many other people's PCs where I know their understanding of security issues are very limited and taught them to run it before shutting down. No point in leaving, for example, cached email addresses, passwords etc lurking about. PCs get stolen too. Obviously this procedure isn't bullet-proof however the use of these utilities is, in my experience, far from being automatic evidence of illegal behaviour.

[Trim Stab]

The most likely for me is still a massive depressurisation caused by a fire with the fire extinguishing with the depressurisation and messed up communication and navigation!

I agree - read the report on the Egypt Air MS667 772 cockpit fire, which happened on the ground in 2011. The fire was so sudden and spread so fast that the co-pilot had to immediately vacate his seat, and captain could not extinguish the fire with the cockpit fire-extinguisher(s). The cockpit was immediately filled with smoke, and the fuselage was badly holed.

http://wfol.tv/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Egyptair.jpg

If all that happened in flight, the captain might just have had time to disconnect the AP and turn the aircraft to a haven before being overcome by fire & smoke. If the aircraft then flew on completely unguided it might have developed large phugoid oscillations which would account for the large changes in altitude reported from some sources.

After MS667 Boeing mandated modifications to the co-pilot oxygen system which had probably caused this fire. Does anybody know if the MH370 aircraft had received this modification?

[Machinbird]

LFRT
"Maldives Police Services (MPS) reported that reports of such an object were filed with the department yesterday evening around 5.30 pm and that Maldives National Defense Force (MNDF) had taken in the object.

MNDF Spokesperson Major Hussain Ali said that the object is an explosive and the MNDF Northern Area team is active in the area."The appearance of the fire suppression bottle is superficially similar, but their are differences. The Maldive item is a mine, not a fire suppression bottle.
I'll bet that the dimensions are different as well. The mine has a circumferential weld that is not visible on the fire bottle. The angle of the "ports" (fuses) is wrong for a fire bottle. There appears to be the remains of an anchor cable attached to the mine.

[Andy_S]

After MS667 Boeing mandated modifications to the co-pilot oxygen system which had probably caused this fire. Does anybody know if the MH370 aircraft had received this modification?

I'd suggest that if the modification was "mandated", the answer might be yes......

I don't really buy this theory. A fire which on one hand is so severe and fast spreading that it incapacitates the pilots and compromises the structural integrity of the aircraft, yet on the other allows the aircraft to be a) maneuvered and b) continue flying, straight and level, for several hours seems quite implausible.

[Lost in Saigon]

[Notice the way it's strapped]


http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/msowsun/photo%20stuff/Photo14/_scuba1a.jpg~originalhttp://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/msowsun/photo%20stuff/Photo14/_scuba1.jpg~original


LFRT
The appearance of the fire suppression bottle is superficially similar, but their are differences. The Maldive item is a mine, not a fire suppression bottle.
I'll bet that the dimensions are different as well. The mine has a circumferential weld that is not visible on the fire bottle. The angle of the "ports" (fuses) is wrong for a fire bottle. There appears to be the remains of an anchor cable attached to the mine.

How large is it? It looks a lot like part of a Biomarine Re-breather.


http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/msowsun/photo%20stuff/Photo14/_scuba.jpg~original

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/msowsun/photo%20stuff/Photo14/_scuba2.jpg~original

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/msowsun/photo%20stuff/Photo14/_scuba3.jpg~original

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/msowsun/photo%20stuff/Photo14/_scuba4.jpg~original

[minimaman]

Garage man -How do you know the plane is not largely intact?The ocean is full of debris and none has yet been identified as mh370.Even on fuel starvation the fly by wire system on the 777 would not allow a stall and the plane could have impacted at low vertical speed and 200kts airspeed or lower assuming cmd engagement and no pilot input.Waves may have broken off bits but the fuselage could be largely intact?

[atr-drivr]

Lost,
Good find! That second photo really looks like what they found. Hard to tell the size of it. Yours looks like about the size of a soccer ball...?

[Msunduzi]

@LFRT (http://www.pprune.org/members/428565-lfrt)

Those "spheres" are very different in construction.

The mark around the one that washed up is a welded join.

I think the one that washed up is more likely a mine than anything off an aircraft

[VinRouge]

The appearance of the fire suppression bottle is superficially similar, but their are differences. The Maldive item is a mine, not a fire suppression bottle.Its not a mine. I reckon its a fire bottle; it certainly looks like the ones I have flown. From a 777 not sure. Fire bottles are an absolute nightmare to transport, due to their IATA classification. I believe they are classed as both toxic/non flam gasses as well as UN Class 1.2.

Having flown a couple, I can testify to the large amount of DG paperwork required to fly them. the UN class 1.2 is due to the explosive squib which pierces the burst disk to initiate the release of agent.

http://quick.aero/sterling/blog/how-to-ship-apu-fire-bottles-as-non-explosives/

http://aircraftengineering.wordpress.com/tag/wheel-well/

Sizing wise, could be the poo fire bottle? No reason to suspect its from the 777 though, as its such a long way from the primary search site! If the serials match MH370, there are going to be big headaches as to where the jet went in.

http://www.b737.org.uk/images/firebottles.jpg

[Leightman 957]

>Indeed, despite the revelations from the DFDR and CVR when they were recovered that turbulence was not involved, there were still posts claiming that the crash was due to severe turbulence.

But no one suggested that given the storm line turbulence was not present, or that flying attitude without instruments, or intermittent or conflicting instruments, at night without a horizon, would not be more difficult than smooth air. Turbulence probably contributed to confusion in an already confused situation. And my bet is that turbulence would be about the last thing pilots would mention. "Gee its turbulent."

[bono]

GarageYears
Uhhg... what fantasy land do you live in? Please give me one example of a large widebody jet *landing* on the ocean and remaining even close to intact? And if you mention Sully and the A320 on the Hudson... immediate disqualification - a relatively smooth and calm river is NOTHING like the Indian Ocean on ANY day of the year.
Let me use your intuitive assumption in this case, if it is not possible for a big aircraft to stay intact after ditching in waves, coupled with the fact that Inmarsat is pointing in the right direction, we should have found atleast some debris by now. You have to keep in mind that search effort is also going on using satellite imagery by multiple nations and TomNod,not counting ships that arrived into aearch area from different directions.
1. Big plane loaded with passengers, luggage and cargo
2. Thousands or more floatable plastic parts

If the aircraft did not stay intact (a highly logical assumption), atleast some debris should have been spotted by now. However, lack of any debris discovery anywhere (Aircraft,Satellites, Ships) argues that in this case the plane possibly did not break apart.

[Walnut]

Re broken aerial feeds it appears the AD re structural problems did not impact this a/c. Maybe it should have? I also have had a reply that the power source/ feeds for a lot of the comms. VHF HF TSPDR ACARS but not the SATCOM shared a common path. That's hard to believe but it would lead to extra workload for the crew just at the point when they were sorting out a major problem. Any initial calls would be dead & a crew trying to sort out a major emergency would not waste time on this extra minor problem. They would probably believe they had just left VHF range. It also appears the A/P uses a different source which could explain why the a/c made a turn etc.

[MichaelKPIT]

Bono

Yes, but two caveats: 1) Even narrowed down, the search area is the size of Texas and Oklahoma combined. 2) There still remains the possibility that they are NOT in fact searching in the right place. In fact the only piece of "stuff" even remotely resembling debris is the fire bottle/mine/breathing gear in the Maldives. I know - very tenuous link indeed, but it's the only thing to come out of the water so far.

[Lonewolf_50]

Re broken aerial feeds it appears the AD re structural problems did not impact this a/c. Maybe it should have?
That was mostly cleared up about 200 pages ago. To sum up: absent a certain airframe mod, the bulletin would not apply to this hull. That's the info available to the public so far.

[HeavyMetallist]

@minimaman: The Indian Ocean isn't some smooth, unruffled surface where an airliner could skim the surface before coming to rest - even if it were being flown by a great pilot, rather than just relying on its natural stability as you're suggesting. An aircraft hitting water at 200kts is not going to remain intact, it will be smashed to pieces. Imagine what a truck would look like after hitting a motorway bridge at 60mph, then scale that up by a factor of 10 for the higher energy of the aircraft speed you're suggesting. The only large pieces remaining intact will be those torn off at the root by the impact, such as wings and tail surfaces.

[bono]

MichaelKPIT
Bono
Yes, but two caveats: 1) Even narrowed down, the search area is the size of Texas and Oklahoma combined. 2) There still remains the possibility that they are NOT in fact searching in the right place. In fact the only piece of "stuff" even remotely resembling debris is the fire bottle/mine/breathing gear in the Maldives. I know - very tenuous link indeed, but it's the only thing to come out of the water so far.
1. Big passenger plane hits water, breaks apart and spews debris of all kinds
2. Roaring forties will spread debris far and wide within days
3. Satellites looking across hundreds of miles will spot atleast some debris within a few days using Inmarsat data
4. Aircraft and ships will be notified and regular search and investigation will follow.


It sounds all logical but nothing, absolutely nothing has been spotted, so cross off #3. If they do not find anything in a week's time, start looking underwater.

[Ian W]

>Indeed, despite the revelations from the DFDR and CVR when they were recovered that turbulence was not involved, there were still posts claiming that the crash was due to severe turbulence.

But no one suggested that given the storm line turbulence was not present, or that flying attitude without instruments, or intermittent or conflicting instruments, at night without a horizon, would not be more difficult than smooth air. Turbulence probably contributed to confusion in an already confused situation. And my bet is that turbulence would be about the last thing pilots would mention. "Gee its turbulent."

Actually they did mention the turbulence and told the rear crew that the pax should be strapped in. However, it is always like that flying through the ITCZ. The CVR and DFDR showed the LOC was almost certainly due to lack of experience/practice in limited panel manual flight at altitude with unreliable speed indications when in Alternate Law.

[VinRouge]

I'd believe it was a piece of discarded rocket debris before I'd believe it came from a 777. Not least because it's 5,000km away from Oz.
Good point. lots of stuff ends up in the indian ocean from launches in the US and South american launch sites.

[PriFly]

AFAIK MAS do not allow non crew to be in the FD but just like anything else there are rules written on paper and then there is real life. I'll leave it at that.

[James7]

GarageYears. Uhhg... what fantasy land do you live in? Please give me one example of a large widebody jet *landing* on the ocean and remaining even close to intact? And if you mention Sully and the A320 on the Hudson... immediate disqualification - a relatively smooth and calm river is NOTHING like the Indian Ocean on ANY day of the year.

Did not the Tristar land in the Florida Everglades.
T7 crash in San Fran bounced around a fair bit, just check out the videos on YouTube there should be plenty to choose from. Remainder of Aircraft stayed in tact. Bits of flaps missing.

Anything is possible and actually having some waves to cushion the impact so less chance of a breakup.

Chances are some of the flaps and other control surfaces came off and these are what is likely the debris, if it is actually from MH370.

Please give one example of a wide body attempting to land and breaking up!

[MG23]

An 'aviation expert' has stated that, within the console of the B777, there is a satellite 'phone.

I've wondered about that. If the crew were conscious and wanted to communicate, even if the radios and ACARS were out, they should still be able to use the phone. Unless that had somehow become disconnected from the SATCOM terminal by whatever affected the radios.

[Golf-Mike-Mike]

what fantasy land do you live in?

I know what you're saying but it does beg the question why the safety briefing for trans-ocean flights doesn't include a caveat something like, "there's no way we can land this thing safely in the ocean but for your comfort and convenience, .....". But let's not go there ;)

[James7]

AFAIK MAS do not allow non crew to be in the FD but just like anything else there are rules written on paper and then there is real life. I'll leave it at that.

Maybe if they allowed it and someone was in the FD, possibly 200+ persons would still be alive.

[bono]

Ian W
First some debris has been spotted by aircraft but ship recovery has not yet happened. There is nothing that can be tied to MH370 that has been spotted visually by any ship. South Indian ocean has plenty of debris otherwise (Google Indian Ocean Garbage Patch).


The two arguments go against each other:
1. Big fully loaded aircraft "crashes" and breaks apart
2. Practically no debris located


One of them CANNOT be right if Inmarsat data is correct.

[GlueBall]

Best Flight 370 lead yet? Satellite spots possible debris field - CNN.com (http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/26/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/index.html?hpt=hp_t1)

[AT1]

I am considering setting up an "E@Humble-Pie" store, with discount for registered site posters.

I suspect there will be quite a demand when we do find out what happened, hopefully sooner rather than later.

[Ian W]

There is nothing that can be tied to MH370 that has been spotted visually by any ship. South Indian ocean has plenty of debris otherwise (Google Indian Ocean Garbage Patch).


The two arguments go against each other:
1. Big fully loaded aircraft "crashes" and breaks apart
2. Practically no debris located


One of them CANNOT be right if Inmarsat data is correct.


You really have no sense of scale - in a post way back at the beginning of the thread the problem was described as looking for a green grain of sugar in Central Park.

Now some debris has been sighted and marker buoys dropped - and even then ships cannot get to that area easily to check out what has been found.

If someone had wanted to find somewhere to 'lose' a widebody aircraft so it could not be found they would have chosen the South Indian Ocean in the 'roaring forties'.

Had it not been for the maintenance of low level SATCOM connectivity, and, the capability of communications scientists to calculate from simple handshakes where an aircraft could be - the location of the aircraft would be completely unknown and the assumption would have been a crash close to Malaysia.

[flown-it]

For BONO and the others who keep on about debris, bear in mind what the Australian military have said. " We have to find the haystack"

As I said in a post several days ago, I've been there, in the haystack, and still couldn't find what we were looking for. Even with modern radars, sea clutter is a major problem, particularly when looking into the swell. If the object in the water is moving relative to the swell you may be able to electronically isolate it. If on the other hand it is drifting with the swell I don't see how you can reduce the sea return without killing the return from the object.

So back to Mk 1 eyeball!

Info from current SAR types would be helpful.

Post# 8267

[bono]

U.S. hardware designed to help with that task arrived Wednesday in Perth, the western Australian city that is the base for the search efforts.
The United States sent a Bluefin-21 autonomous underwater vehicle, which can search for submerged objects at depths as low as 14,700 feet (about 4,500 meters), and a TPL-25, a giant listening device that can help pinpoint the location of pings from the flight data recorder. Towed behind a ship, the TPL-25 can detect pings at a maximum depth of 20,000 feet (about 6,100 meters).

-From Above CNN Article

Great!, looks like NTSB is as baffled as I am regarding no worthwhile debris from crash of a fully loaded giant aircraft.

Ian W
You really have no sense of scale - in a post way back at the beginning of the thread the problem was described as looking for a green grain of sugar in Central Park. The search area has not ballooned it has simply moved around based on drifting models as mentioned by AMSA briefings. The area if anything has become narrower, a fact you can verify by looking at daily search maps published by AMSA on its media site. From the initial area given to them by NTSB, AMSA has essentially factored in only drifting models and satellite sightings. None of these searches have been fruitful. In any case it defies logic that while search area is become narrower, yet there have been zero debris sightings.

[Boudreaux Bob]

CNN certainly is NOT the source to reference for anything to do with this Aircraft Disappearance. They being of the every conspiracy and lunatic theory there is.:ugh::rolleyes::=

[galaxy flyer]

Please give one example of a wide body attempting to land and breaking up!

Please give an example of a wide body landing in 15' swells and NOT breaking up.

EA 401 landed in the Glades at a gentle descent rate in smooth surface and most were killed. The 'Miracle on the Hudson' was 99% about still surface conditions and landing at a controlled rate. IF MH 370 flamed at fuel exhaustion, as seems most likely, it hit either barely controlled (pilots still alive, which then begs why were they there) or uncontrolled after the A/P tripped off following loss of AC power.

[Golf-Mike-Mike]

The search area has not ballooned it has simply moved around based on drifting models as mentioned by AMSA briefings

While the Australian effort has been focused on an area of 36,000 sq km, the area seen by French satellites that showed 122 objects is 400,000 sq km - that's pretty big, about the size of California.

[ex_matelot]

I don't hold much hope for radar being used to search for debris in that environment. Surface borne India-band would be the only real option and that would need to be within say ten miles at the most to detect small pieces of debris. Sea clutter can be managed to a certain degree by adjusting gain / pin attenuation but that comes with the expense of loss of range.

Radar IMO would only be of any use once the debris range location has been already identified.

[Leightman 957]

IanW: Actually they did mention the turbulence and told the rear crew that the pax should be strapped in. However, it is always like that flying through the ITCZ. The CVR and DFDR showed the LOC was almost certainly due to lack of experience/practice in limited panel manual flight at altitude with unreliable speed indications when in Alternate Law.

Yes yes but a passenger advisory is routine and not a notable comment of concern between pilots. Subsequent focusing on inadequate pilot experience/practice is too often an expediency by event reconstructors with competing agendas, and as an explanation misleads from or ignores possible airline system (et al) inadequacy and the other workload increases you mention which are all cumulative inside a time crunch. You are suggesting that 100 or 1000 other airliners, crews, instrumentation, and identical conditions (which we don't really know) would result in 99 or 999 flight completions with only AF447 failing because of the pilot inadequacy. My point regards the other 99, or 9999. Most accidents wouldn't occur if the aircraft remained completely intact and there was adequate time, altitude, and information to figure things out. AF447, and perhaps MH370 may not have had either. So were those two outcomes singular or more systemic in nature? If the latter, we should all be interested in understanding the situation as much as is possible and promoting necessary changes to prevent repetition. If in the future major loss of flight instrumentation with the most up to date systems were to occur again in the same weather situations, would it again be the pilots fault?

[Squawk_ident]

This picture is visible on this site here:
Boeing disparu : 122 débris flottants repérés par satellite - France Info (http://www.franceinfo.fr/monde/boeing-disparu-122-debris-flottants-reperes-par-satellite-1363733-2014-03-26)

http://i61.tinypic.com/rkpl08.jpg

The pictures were taken by a Satellite owned by Airbus Defence and Space.
As we know these debris are not positively identified as MAS370 ones yet.
The pictures were published today Wednesday.

[martynemh]

How do you 'confirm' a primary radar return (possibly 200nm WNW of Penang VOR) being that of flight MH370?

Together with all the cavorting about (FL45, FL295, 45,000 feet, FL120, etc etc), was that confirmed as being MH370?

If you take the left turn at the FIR boundary as its Last Known Position; if you believe that a crew in trouble is most likely to turn off the airway and head for 'home' if only 40 mins out from KUL; and if you use the data from all Inmarsat 'ping' arcs (do we have them yet?); and using all Capt Kremin's good works with isogonals etc, do we not then get as likely an impact point as they are hoping to obtain by backtracking 18-day old debris?

Especially if the 'final' arc is used as the impact arc - the partial ping at 0019hrs UTC (was it?)

It would be a good place to start trailing your TPL-25 towed array, whilst waiting for a better spot...

[Pontius Navigator]

How do you 'confirm' a primary radar return (possibly 200nm WNW of Penang VOR) being that of flight MH370?

Covered in detail days ago. It may have been deleted but the short answer is that an air defence system maintains a recognised air picture. A tracker places a Track Number against a contact, in this case MH370, and the system will then associate the track label with the aircraft.

Where the aircraft goes dark the tracker may have to re-associate the track. Admittedly it is possible to re-associate to the wrong track but, assuming other aircraft and track labels remain associated and only MH370 lost tracking then re-association should not be questioned.

[Tallman]

The Dutch navy aircraft had the following damage though during the ditching (in rough sea):
Lost one wing, other wing snapped off near engine, tail section and part of the rear fuselage detached. All 12 crew got out though but 3 didn't make it to the life rafts and drowned.

Source: Flight International

Re comms precautions: maybe time to consider a battery backup satellite phone in the cabin for cases where the flight deck is for some reason closed off to the crew etc. You'd need to have safeguards against sabotage of course.

[bono]

Detailed scientific explanation of the complex mathematical puzzle solved by Inmarsat engineers surviving on pizza for 6 days/nights while working on the problem.


Physics Buzz: How Inmarsat Hacked Their Data to Find Flight MH370 (http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2014/03/how-did-inmarsat-really-find-flight.html)

[Soundman101]

A question for any ex-Nimrod guys on this thread, and forgive me if this has already come up but I'm not going to go through 8300 replies to find out!
Watching the TV reports of the P-3's and others flying the search, some of the pictures seemed to show the aircraft flying pretty low, maybe 500' ish. This struck me a little odd in that unless you flew almost directly over an object you were cutting down everybody's field of vision and that a search from a higher altitude would let you see more area. This, I presume, would also limit a radar search. If the initial objects they were looking for were about 75' in length and possibly semi-submerged I would have thought a search from a higher level looking vertically down rather than horizontally would have made life easier and given more time for the searchers.
What were the recommended procedures when the UK had aircraft that could actually do this kind of thing.

[Pontius Navigator]

A question for any ex-Nimrod guys on this thread, and forgive me if this has already come up but I'm not going to go through 8300 replies to find out!

It has, recently.

Watching the TV reports of the P-3's and others flying the search, some of the pictures seemed to show the aircraft flying pretty low, maybe 500' ish. This struck me a little odd in that unless you flew almost directly over an object you were cutting down everybody's field of vision and that a search from a higher altitude would let you see more area. This, I presume, would also limit a radar search. If the initial objects they were looking for were about 75' in length and possibly semi-submerged I would have thought a search from a higher level looking vertically down rather than horizontally would have made life easier and given more time for the searchers.
What were the recommended procedures when the UK had aircraft that could actually do this kind of thing.

First consideration is to stay below cloud.

A low radar look angle might be better at a longer range.

The media show the aircraft flying low - this makes good video. The aircraft may already have made faster passes at greater heights looking for the larger object - doesn't make good video.

For the small objects Dai Farr explained how they establish best range for a visual and radar detection and the height to fly.

[Above The Clouds]

Pontius Navigator
Long endurance not long range

True, however a Predator Sea Avenger of a ship with approx 20 hours endurance could be useful with the right sensor equipment fitted.

[ManaAdaSystem]

Passed out pilots don't switch off systems.

[Tourist]

Soundman

I'm not an ex Nimrod, but ex 771 819 Seaking SAR.

The reason is that it is really really difficult to spot things from the air at any distance.

We used to carry out Royal Navy Sea Drills in Falmouth Harbour for training aircrew in sea survival once a week. The "casualties" would be in single seat life rafts. These are coffin sized and dayglo orange sitting up about 60cm above sea level.
Even in smooth inshore waters it is astonishing how close you have to be to see them. We would fly out from RNAS Culdrose looking for them but often had to just fly towards the tender that looked after them just to get close enough to ID. This was on smooth inshore water.

Yes, if you flew higher in the P3 your horizon would be greater, but the cleared swath of sea checked would be no wider, and slightly less well checked.

To give an idea, in a Seaking I would expect to be flying a 60kts or less and 200ft or less if looking for small objects

[Above The Clouds]

LoneWolf_50

Predator Sea Avenger, but as Pontius pointed out what assets are available in that area to launch it, only a thought for more on station search time.

[Ozlander1]

A
Watching the TV reports of the P-3's and others flying the search, some of the pictures seemed to show the aircraft flying pretty low, maybe 500' ish.


Do you really think there's a TV crew out there 4 hours off shore taking pictures of the aircraft while they are searching?

[MATELO]

The two arguments go against each other:
1. Big fully loaded aircraft "crashes" and breaks apart
2. Practically no debris located

I reckon they are both pretty much spot on to be honest.

No counter argument for either against the other.

[UnreliableSource]

To improve the precision of the inmarsat data two things could be done:

1. Hand the data over to some radio astronomers. Their toolset for dealing with signals is outstanding.

2. Fly a calibration flight. Charter a long range bizjet with the same class of sat terminal fitted. Communicate over the bird throughout the flight down the calculated MH370 path. Capture this data and process it. Refine the MH370 calcs based on this.

[NigelOnDraft]

Tourist`s post "For those that think a 777 could not land in one piece on the water ".

The Hudson glider experience proves it can be done, but and that`s a big BUT, subject to:Strictly the A321 did not end up in 1 piece, the lower aft fuselage was pretty much torn off.

However, I am not sure the question is whether it can be in "1 piece" or not. It is whether it will remain intact enough to sink without much trace, or whether it will disintegrate to such an extent that light debris, even bodies, will remain floating to be found.

I have little doubt that a 777 could be ditched without the cabin (where the light stuff is) disintegrating, and thus sinking without trace. Whether that happened here ???

[GlobalNav]

From TMF Associates MSS blog (http://blog.tmfassociates.com/) which is one of the links previously posted.

"Last week Inmarsat performed an analysis of pings received from other aircraft flying in the Indian Ocean region to confirm that this effect is consistent across all of these planes and therefore concluded that MH370 must have been to the south of the satellite at the time of the last ping, not to its north."

So, I think this in essence "calibrated" the data and the mathematical analysis.

[RGN01]

I'm not connected with the aviation industry other than as a frequent passenger and a fascination with anything aeronautic so please excuse what may be a basic question.

How big are the escape slides on the 777 and similar aircraft when fully inflated?

Just wondering if perhaps these may be what is being seen from the satellites and they are getting blown about making them hard to locate from the surface.

[buttrick]

If the plane had broken up, there would be 'lots of lifejackets floating around, as they inflate when they hit water'.

HIGHLY unlikely to have been in one piece. Apart from that most of the bits that float will not float as in sit on the surface, they will float at or near the surface, but submerged!!

The lifejackets do not inflate automatically!!!