Malaysian Airlines MH370 contact lost

[island_airphoto]

The "altitude excursions" that keep getting mentioned don't seem likely. I think between inaccurate primary radar and F-15 performance from a 777 I would have to go with the former.

[RifRaf3]

Flying into Gan or other islands ignores the fact that they have radars and eyes and know you are not a flight planned flight. It would be reported unless they were a perpetrator country and satellites would identify the a/c on the ground. It has to reach a rogue country like Somalia for cover if routing South of India and that's stretching it.

[captplaystation]

I am imagining that 777 has no fire detection/suppression in the E&E bay.

Somewhat wild guess (among many even wilder guesses) would suggest a slow undetected melting of various electrical components which sequentially disabled ACARS/Tpndr/ Comms / CrewO2/Control of pressurisation . . . is it possible that the depressurisation could have deprived the fire/smouldering of oxygen sufficiently to extinguish/halt the electrical carnage leaving the AP/FBW to continue serenely in Marie Celeste fashion till fuel exhaustion ?

[RifRaf3]

The altitude excursions may not be accurate because of primary radar, but nevertheless probably occurred to some extent. The readings may have merely exaggerated the trends.

[island_airphoto]

Do we have some packet that says <ACARS SYSTEM BEING TURNED OFF NOW> or is just that it missed the usual interval?

[atakacs]

Folks: why would an apparently competent crew turns off ACARS and transponder but seemingly "forget" about SATCOM (assuming this is indeed the satellite feed the authorities are referring to - I have not seen any formal reference to IMARSAT) ? And in the case it was not a deliberate act is there any scenario that would take off ACARS and transponder yet allow the aircraft to fly for another 4-5 hours ?! I can't think of any...
Really really weird one !

[Pom Pax]

R/T

Does your vhf announce your presence even if you are only listening?
Once upon a time it did not appear to.

[Desert185]

Oceanic

As a Professional Pilots forum, these fanciful posts are embarassing. Heists, gold bullion, conspiracies. If you haven't anything sensible to post may I request you desist or join a different forum for fictional creative writing. 200 pages of posts, mostly drivel. Thanks to those few who have the expertise to elaborate on the facts.

Some intelligent conjecture, but primarily uninformed, soap opera style conjecture. Think I'll abstain and wait for the book or movie version.

Condolences and sympathies to the family and friends of all involved. Not knowing, while trying to have some semblance of hope has got to be trying. Much of this doesn't help at all.

[Aireps]

Reports say that MH370's last ACARS pings were received by Inmarsat.

If it's a fact that the pings were received by Inmarsat only, and not by ACARS ground stations, couldn't you deduce that MH370 was not in range of an ACARS ground station when it sent its last pings?

SITA ACARS ground station coverage:


ARINC ACARS ground station coverage:


SITA ACARS ground station coverage (PDF)

ARINC ACARS ground station coverage (PDF)

[Foray Access]

Freescale

Go look up Freescale, they do a LOT more than aircraft related stuff.... they are a broad semiconductor company supplying and designing components from aircraft to computers to telephones to everything and anything in between.

Given China's status as a major manufacturing centre for many companies, its perhaps no surprise that bunches of engineers from a major semiconductor company fly there on a regular basis. Freescale have something like 18,000 employees.... sending 20 employees somewhere is no big deal !

Don't believe all the nonsense journalists publish, and certainly don't read too much into it !

Agreed, chasing the Freescale angle as some sort of target for the hijacking is a waste of time. The employees on board were 12 Malaysian and 8 Chinese with titles like 'Test 1 Process Engineer' and 'Test 1 Manufacturing Manager.' Not exactly janitorial staff or cafeteria workers, sure, but not exactly rare talents in the countries that contain a massive portion of the semiconductor manufacturing facilities on Earth today.

If you had some burning desire to learn Freescale's industrial secrets when it comes to improvement of semiconductor manufacturing processes, surely offering a pay rise and a signing bonus would be simpler than some complicated plot to hijack an airliner, make it disappear, and torture the passengers until they spill the beans.

[Caygill]

Could someone share some light on the theoretical possibilities of a T7 reaching 45000 feet, as indicated by the Mal authorities.


This source claims the service ceiling being 43100ft Aerospaceweb.org | Aircraft Museum - Boeing 777

[G-CPTN]

It has been mentioned before, but how do you explain that there have been no reports of any mobile 'phone calls being received?

Passengers would have realised that the flight time was 'overdue'.

Are we saying that there was no possibility of reception throughout the route - wherever that might be?

Were the earlier (dismissed) reports of ringing tones now possible?

[FE Hoppy]

Caygill Could someone share some light on the theoretical possibilities of a T7 reaching 45000 feet, as indicated by the Mal authorities.
This source claims the service ceiling being 43100ft Aerospaceweb.org | Aircraft Museum - Boeing 777

The service ceiling is not the performance limit.

At the approximate weight at the time the aircraft would be limited by thrust such that it could maintain about 40000ft with maximum cruise thrust. It could maintain a higher altitude with higher thrust if this is available or it could make a zoom climb to higher altitudes but not maintain.

I am of the opinion that @45000ft is possible but also consider that the height is derived from primary radar and is therefore subject to some error.

[Tu.114]

Quote:
Yes agreed. I said before we need to know 2 things more:--

1/ Fuel on board at departure, this will be known by MH
2/ Cargo manifest, what were they carrying?
I will add one more thing to your list:

3/ Crews roster for last month, what was crew doing?

And one more addition: was there any crew rostering request with regards to this flight?

[Foray Access]

Aireps, the maps are very informative, but I don't think SATCOM vs. a ground link is the right inference to base your conclusions. It's not that the Inmarsat pings were initiated by ACARS, but rather by the SATCOM system itself. From what has been released so far, we understand that the ACARS function was turned off, but that action did not fully disable the SATCOM - it only prevented ACARS from initiating any messages.

The "pings" under discussion were empty network keepalive messages sent as a matter of routine functioning of the SATCOM transceiver itself. Imagine this conversation:

"Hello? Anyone there? If, hypothetically, I wished to send some data, could you pass it along for me? Oh, I'm not paid up on this account? So sorry to trouble you. I'll ask again later. Perhaps then I can speak to someone whose bills I've paid."

If that is in fact what the authorities are working off of, then it doesn't matter if any ACARS ground stations were nearby or not, as there was never any ACARS data queued up in the outbox after 01:07 Malaysia time.

[HeathrowAirport]

Fuel

Considering that so many people on here claim to be professionals, I am astounded that nobody has looked into the technical side of how much fuel was actually on-board for this rather short flight.

• MAS370 got airborne at 1643z
• LKP according to Radar/Mode S transponder was 1722z
• Flight time was ZBAA0521 - 5 hours 21 minutes
• When it went missing it had fuel reportedly for a further 7 hours 30 minutes.
• 39 minutes of TRIP fuel was burned to that point and presumably 10-15 minutes APU/TAXI.

So the big question that now remains, why was there an uplift of just over 8 hours for a 5 hours 21 minute flight. Planning within standards would suggests maybe just over 6 and 1/2 hours fuel. If this is the case then how comes the captain signed off and additional 1 hour 30 minutes fuel or more (that is public knowledge)

I've not suggested that the captain has anything to do with this, but all that extra fuel for a flight that isn't going very far has more questions than answers. After all, any additional uplift is his final decision.

[givemewings]

In-flight wifi is fairly easy to control. I won't say how but in most cases the pax just think it's a service outage, not that it's been switched off. There is more than one way to control it but like many things, the flight deck usually have some ability to control this.

[henra]

Originally Posted by vee1-rotate

So how has ACARS been disabled and the crew are carrying on as normal until TOC ? Unless someone was in the equipment bay.

I would consider this a valid question.

But since as of late it seems to be mostly Holywood time in here (got much worse since Official confirmation pointing also towards Intererence), such detail probably doesn't matter.

Let's simply cross fingers someone finds this Needle in the apparently huge Haystack.

[Lorimer]

but is there any merit in looking for contrails in satellite imagery or even (massive undertaking) ground based pictures?

In response to Tristan Gooley's post No. 3463, the Appleman Chart gives the answer although the vertical axis is in pressure rather than feet (I've marked 26,000 feet & -40ºC):



In rough terms, OAT needs to be -40ºC or colder for formation, and contrails will rarely be found below 26,000' (8km). So depending on the humidity, a contrail could have been formed that Sunday morning – although whether one could have been seen at night is open to question (but it was reportedly cloudless with a moon!), but then "which one"?

NASA's website is informative:
Contrail Education - Science

[PlaneMass]

Re: Fuel

So the big question that now remains, why was there an uplift of just over 8 hours for a 5 hours 21 minute flight.

Could they be uplifting cheaper Malaysian (state subsidised?) fuel to cover some of the return or onward leg?