Malaysian Airlines MH370 contact lost

[Samehada]

Are aircraft required to establish HF communications / SELCAL check with WSSS or VVTS before leaving WMKK FIR?

[mabuhay_2000]

Australopithecus

I agree with your scepticism.

Of course, what we don't know is how the guy on the rig guestimated the 50-70km distance he gave, or what the guestimated altitude was.

Estimating distance and altitude at night is very difficult, so I would take those numbers with a bit of a pinch of salt.

Of course, it would still be nigh on impossible to spot even a burning aircraft at anything like 380-odd kilometres. Even assuming perfect conditions, it would be nothing more than a faint pin-prick of light in the sky, so quite how one would deduce it to be a burning aircraft is another question!

[OzBob]

If you look at the currents in the Gulf,
Ships at sea: positions and weather observations

there is one drifting buoy quite close.
Buoy 53520




Its movement in the last 5 days has been from
2014-Mar-09 06:01N 06°33' E 104°06' to
2014-Mar-13 02:01N 06°31' E 103°49'

[mabuhay_2000]

gchriste

I'm sure it would be possible to calculate, from prevailing currents, how far the supposed wreckage could have drifted between the time the guy spotted what he thinks was a burning aircraft and the Chinese took their sat snaps.

If we supposed a current of 4 knots, or about 7.5km/h, seeing as the guy worked in Kilometres, it would have drifted about 180km in 24hrs. So it would still have been about 200km away from him when he spotted it. That's still a very long way and it would still have been a small object in the sky and mean that his guestimated distance was way out.

[Australopithecus]

I am actually an aviator, been staring at planes out the window for a while*. Even when I know exactly where in the sky to look, courtesy of the TCAS, I cannot spot a 777 beyond about 90km in the very best visibility and high contrast light. And thats with better than standard vision, from any of the many modern airliners I have flown.

I once saw (at altitude) the space shuttle launch from about 230 miles away, at night. It was barely discernible. Now that's a fire!

The US already volunteered that their flame detecting satellites saw nothing in the area, so we have inconsistent data.

*still learning though.

[jcjeant]

Hi,

Seems bad news ... for China ... and researches
Geisterflug MH370: Angeblich Fotos von Trümmern der Boeing gefunden - News Ausland - Bild.de
The Chinese satellite image should show wreckage - marked with the cross. Hours later disillusionment

[INTEL101]

Looks like another red herring.....

This time from Reuters:

A search by two Vietnamese aircraft responding to information provided by a Chinese satellite has failed to locate objects suspected of being wreckage from a missing Malaysian airliner, a Reuters journalist on board a search plane said on Thursday.

[KrispyKreme]

Beat me too it INTEL ......so MAS release your ACARS data! It's sent thru the same coms system!

[hans66]

Now we need to know whether the engine data feed ends with a shutdown, a flameout or something worse.

[David75]

Perhaps the best thing that can come out of this is a journalist code of practice for reporting of SAR events.(probably needed for the people running the media briefings as well.) The reporting of this incident has been worse than the SAR operations.

1) report all times as UTC with a conversion to local time for your readers
2) separate fact from interpretation - last secondary surveillance contact at lat/long at time(UTC) - interpreted to mean that a power failure occurred
3) report data as given rather than try to interpret for your readers - ie the radar contact in the straights - state a contact was observed - not that it was the missing aircraft.
4) state sources - if you pick up a Reuters feed attribute to the source publication - so translations etc can be cross checked.
5) don't try to read subtle meanings into the language of non native English speakers
6) publish corrections to articles when shown to be misleading - ie the mobile phone ringing reports.
7) speak to technical experts ie telecoms engineers for the mobile phone reports / aircraft engineers for ACARS etc.

[etrang]

A flight time of five hours is interesting because the flight time from KL to Beijing is 5:55 hours, including fuel for diversion, etc, the 777 should have been fulled for at least 7:00 hours flight time. Suggesting that it flew on for several hours but didn't necessarily crash from fuel exhaustion, although if it was at a low altitude all that time fuel burn would have increased.

[thehawk]

In short, someone somewhere should have detected that plane. Either that someone is incompetent or is hiding some facts.

Never underestimate the power of incompetence, or probably more accurately the power of people ambivalent about their jobs and not particularly being alert to anything out of the normal. If they aren't looking they won't see it.

[jugofpropwash]

P.S. If true, the "unidentified object" tracked by MAF comes back in play. The plane was in the air for the total of 5 hours. That makes 3.5 after it was lost by the military radar off Phuket. Continuing on the same heading at a reasonable cruising speed, it would've ended up in Maldives or Lakshadweep.

If someone shut the transponder off and headed out, they had to know that crossing Malaysia they'd be picked up on radar and probably visually spotted as well. The logical thing to do would be to make another turn once off primary radio and out of sight of land - so don't assume the same heading.

[nigf]

Malaysian Air Said to Opt Out of Boeing Jet-Data Service - Businessweek

"
Malaysian Airline System Bhd. (MAS) opted out of a Boeing Co. (BA:US) service to collect real-time performance data from jets like Flight 370 for use in planning maintenance, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The carrier harvests the same information itself, said the person, who asked not to be identified because Flight 370 is under investigation. "

[StormyKnight]

With ACARS, i thought it transmits when there is a change in flight profile as in finish of take-off, finish of climb etc & then perhaps every 30 minutes in cruise....

Is it likely that you can descend to landing without any ACARS messages being sent even if you manage it under the 30 minutes time frame?

[techgeek]

Rolls Royce engine monitoring system

Here is a link to the RR web page about their engine monitoring system. It does piggyback on ACARS for the comm link.

http://www.rolls-royce.com/about/tec...monitoring_sys
tems.jsp

[GroundScot]

I do wonder if the Malaysian Prime Minister's trip late this morning to an undisclosed location indicated in link 2575 earlier is related to this new information....

[dr dre]

If Rolls Royce can monitor engine data, i'd assume this means N1, reverser status?
They should be able to know whether the recording ended with the A/C at full power, low EGT (fuel exhaustion), a lower powered approach setting or maybe with reversers (having landed)?

[Mahatma Kote]

5 hour Flight - Wall Street Journal

Here's a link to behind the WSJ pay-wall

U.S. Investigators Suspect Missing Airplane Flew On for Hours - WSJ.com

Summary: The engine systems kept on telemetring engine parameters for up to four hours after last contact. Giving a total flight time of around five hours.

[MG23]

Originally Posted by DWS

Why would malaysia or RR hold back on release of such info- while search was still going on ???

No-one's going to say 'sorry guys, the plane was still flying for hours' when that conflicts with other sources, until they've exhaustively checked their data to verify that it's real. In the meantime, you keep checking the obvious places to make sure it's not there.

However, I wonder whether this really is RR ACARS data, or someone just said 'ACARS' and they assumed it was that data.