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Malaysian Airlines MH370 contact lost

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Malaysian Airlines MH370 contact lost

Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:38
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4 Pings, 7 hours?

If the pinging is hourly, how can reports of a) four more pings, but b) data up to ca. 7h after LOC be reconciled?

Transmission capability degraded? Or weaker signals (4th+) only found between reports, after re-examination / with more shade-loving sources ...
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:39
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Well, let's say it's the heist of the century…. where's the plane?

The hypothetical gold might be expensive, but not really when compared with over 200 lives, or the price of a replacement for the aircraft. How much would it cost to arrange the level of complexity in a plot to steal the gold while airborne, have it land somewhere safe for you to offload, and then safely disappear with it.

The lack of people on their delayed way to Beijing would seem to argue against a robbery.
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:39
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Diego Garcia: I think it would be very safe to assume that if a large unidentifiable plane flew anywhere remotely close to Diego Garcia it would have been noticed.
I also think it would be reasonable to assume that if a long haul jet capable of mach 0.8 airspeed went missing with possibly 7 hours of fuel aboard, every military asset within a radius of 6,000 kilomètre would have been put on alert.
I would also note, courtesy of Stratfor from open source info (i.e. public, non classified) that there is an American CSG (Carrier Strike Group) in the Arabian Sea.
It is possible that this plane will never be found because it is not in anyone's interest to have it found. This is pure speculation of course, but I would argue it is one of a number of possible outcomes.

Last edited by SLFplatine; 15th Mar 2014 at 21:47. Reason: grammer
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:41
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What was in the Belly?

Ramjet555 makes a good point. The authorities have to follow up on every possibility regardless. The US Navy does not send ships and aircraft out on whims their confidence in the data must be fairly high.
That said nearly every SAR I have ever been involved in had primary radar tracks involved that turned out to be garbage. I find it hard to believe that more discussion has not revolved around what was actually in the cargo hold. Not what was manifested but what did the ground crew load.
As long as we have people speculating. What about a pallet of lithium batteries? Assume it was damaged and X amount of time later there was a thermal runaway. There are two hull losses associated with lithium batteries. UPS in Dubai and Asiana out of Inchon. No there should not have been a pallet of lithium batteries on a pax carrier. But there should not have been a oxygen generator on Value Jet either. We need to know exactly what was loaded on that aircraft.
Those of you that know the T7 can speculate on how that type of fire would propagate. I will leave that to the experts if this is not dismissed outright. I can envision a scenario that fits with what we know and leaves the crew incapacitated and riding a roman candle into the sea right where the Kiwi said he saw it. Seeing a fire trail in the sky from 150-200 nm away is not impossible or improbable.
Far fetched? Perhaps....
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:42
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Maybe an international heist,fly it to your destination of choice,why limit nowadays sophisticated criminals to a truck robbery,do you know that Swiss or Swedish thieves used a helicopter for a major robbery?

I'm not saying this happened,but I'm saying do not underestimate nowadays criminals,sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction,and a lot of 'fiction' has elements of truth.
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:42
  #4126 (permalink)  
 
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>I would be highly sceptical to find out, that they missed target huge as 777, even if it was coming from not so exposed direction.

Alternatively, they didn't miss it. Maybe even expecting it?
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:45
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The lack of people on their delayed way to Beijing would seem to argue against a robbery.
If the airplane did indeed spend any length of time at or around 40,000ft, then there's a good chance it was done to assure a lack of resistance from the passengers and cabin crew. After that, the person flying most likely had the aircraft to himself.
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:47
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Message for the press - worldwide

Dear members of the press, (I know you are reading this)
Please could you do your own credibility a huge favour and understand the following rough guidelines when referring to flight crew:
A large passenger jet is always flown by at least 2 pilots.
The man in charge is called the captain, or commander. Sits on the left.
The other pilot is called the First Officer. Sits on the right.
Sometimes there is a 3rd pilot who can be called 2nd Officer or cruise- or relief-pilot.
There are other combinations but I want to keep it at this.

It really is that simple. So just to be sure:
The captain is not NOT the chief pilot (BBC news Asia) NOT the first officer (Piers Morgan) and don't ever, ever, EVER refer to 'the pilot of the plane' because there are ALWAYS TWO. At least.

Now consider yourself told and go about your business.
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:47
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Of course we would like to know the cargo and on past experience the manifest may not represent the facts. We would also like to know the fuel load. Both are highly relevant, however we are not going to get that information and the reasons it's being withheld can be perfectly good security reasons, not automatically sinister ones.
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:49
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.........the CVR will be useless as it only records two hours.

Why useless, it should give a clue as to what happened at the start of the drama, which will be something at least ?
I assume the CVR only holds the last two hours or whatever period it's designed to record?
Correct, apologies ! Not thinking straight, but even that would be better than nothing - which is all we have at the moment !
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:51
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@xyze :

Totally agree with your last post ; IF there was indeed a gold shipment on that flight, I have no doubt that it would not be too difficult for any Senior Captain to find out in advance when the shipment was going to "travel".

As you have said, flying your stolen gold to a place of your own choosing will ensure that you have the requisite time to offload and dispose/distribute the gold to some safe haven.

The one thing that has struck me is the amount of planning that has gone into this "disappearance" ( obviously assuming all the facts as we see them presented now to be correct ) Timing of the ACARS and Txpndr switch off, the final call and then into that period of uncertainness when loss of comms first realised. The supposed ziz-zag flight path before heading off N West. From that moment on, the clock started ticking and it is now nearly 8 days since the aircraft disappeared !! So many red herrings in the plot , some unintentional, but others rather more suspicious. The Chinese satellite pictures, then a report of a seismic event? Just when everyone was starting to look West?

I wonder what pensions are for a long serving Captain in Malaysia, or what the career prospects are for a S/F/O ?
I wonder if the home simulator is good for practicing night formation flying in a big jet?

I also wonder why, when so many people are asking, no-one is prepared to state what the cargo was as it ended up limiting pax load due to ZFW limitations.

I think that one has to assume the pax are hapless victims in all this. Perhaps accomplices amongst them, but I really wonder if we'll discover the truth as time is passing quickly with relatively little concrete information.

Very finally , I wonder if the "mods" have someone looking over their shoulders as this thread travels on. For sure, there is an awful lot of stuff in these 205 pages which could prove useful in the wrong hands and I'm surprised that some of it has actually been passed as "fit for consumption by one and all"

Last edited by A310bcal; 15th Mar 2014 at 22:02.
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:51
  #4132 (permalink)  
 
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Crew suicide?

If undetected suicide & mass murder was the aim of one of the pilots, wouldn't it have been easier to do it on a flight which took him out across a deep ocean as part of the route? 30 West and spear it in?
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:52
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Quoting lakedude:

Funny thing about these satellites (assuming the pic a few pages back is correct) is that they are all in a line so even if three or more were in range no "triangulation" would be possible because the satellites are not arranged in a triangle. GPS satellites are not arranged in a straight line for this exact reason.
Triangulation doesn't require the points of measurement to be in a triangle, or even for there to be three of them, as you would have learned had you attended a middle school mathematics class--two will do just fine. The triangle in triangulation is created by the lines of the sightings from two separate points to the target and the line between the two points. Given that, you might wish to try to imagine how two points can ever form anything but a line, although I suppose that is probably beyond your current skill level as well.

It is probably tilting at windmills, but you may also be interested to find out that Inmarsat satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, and therefore only appear in a straight line (over the equator) when drawn on a two-dimensional map--but this is solely an illusion created by the projection of three-dimensional space on a flat surface.

GPS satellites are in low-Earth orbit, with the result that they do not maintain a constant arrangement with respect to one another at all--a consequence of their orbital mechanics.

Also, the Earth is round. Actually, it is a geoid, which is an irregular shape something like an oblate spheroid, but 'round' should get you going in the right direction.
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:53
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>I find the Northern route more credible with Myanmar the hole in the radar fence. They've then got very high ground to cover any intended Westward movement from the Indian radars. The altitude excursions probably indicate non pro pilots as VNAV is the more complicated mode, whist HDG SEL is adequate for LNAV using just a mobile or tablet FMC app. No need for a/c systems nav at all. I've got doubts that they made it unless the authorities in some country en-route were also in on it.


Well that's the elephant in the room, isn't it?

Can any of the pros in here tell me if the northern route ping data is compatible with the T7 flying north through Myanmar and staying over or on the Tinetan side of the himalayas?

Is there any stealth type advantage to flighing close to or above a mountain range?

I'm assuming the cargo in the hold has been dumped for extra range (if you can do that while in flight) and any cargo of interest to hijackers is carried as hand luggage.
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:56
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Inmarsats ability to identify MH370

The information still lacking is Inmarsats ability to identify MH370.
Theoretically it should be able to identify the ac, but we don´t know from evidence that it really did. It is just hearsaying. What we need is transcript from every ping. Maybe the pings comes from similar planes.
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:56
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Trying again--several post attempts since p150 have not appeared and I don't know why. Too many posts are mired in willful ignorance (didn’t read preceding posts) or in details. There are not many either/ors for this flight. The plane took off. There are a few pieces of information after that but not many. Governments are withholding information. There are active efforts to mislead (either east or west). The plane crashed within a short time after the last CONFIRMED position, or landed under control anytime after that before its fuel was exhausted. The pilot acted alone or with help. The pilot may or may not have been a willing or unwilling (coerced) participant. There was a plan or there wasn’t. The plan was a failure or a success. The pilot died or is alive. The flight’s goal may have been happenstance, a hole in the ocean, or a rendezvous.

Suppositions couched in accurate detail are still only suppositions. Suppositions do assist in exploring each possible outcome. Passengers, who have been getting most of the attention, may have been mere pawns and their well being perhaps not important. There are many possibilities where the value of passenger lives may have been irrelevant to some “greater good”.

Everyone wants to believe pilots eternally will act in passengers best interests. Excluding suicide, which appears unlikely unless there was last minute indecision, it took 150 pages on this forum for the idea of intention to get out. Intention beyond suicide may well be behind this. The plan may have been a success. Even if debris were now found floating somewhere, a plan may already have been a success to someone. We don’t want to think this, and have trouble imagining a good greater than 239 lives, but there are astonishing numbers of people who for the correct greater good in their own eyes would see the lives of 238 or 239 passengers to be a small and economical price to pay for something they want.

More attention needs to be paid to what or who might have been on that flight.
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:57
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Would also like to know more about those 'noshows' who were replaced.

- Why were they no shows and has anyone spoken to them?
- who replaced them?
- when was this done?
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 21:58
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KKN

Based on my review of the underlying protocols there are a couple of candidates for "pings". There are requests to establish a comm link between the a/c and ground station via satellite that involve underlying requests to use a particular communication channel with an exchange of packets negotiating that connection (AMSS). Then there are keepalive packets (IDRP) exchanged once a connection is established that occur periodically. I suspect that there were 4 connection requests with more numerous keepalive packets exchanged in between. Of course this is conjecture. I have no way of knowing but someone does!

In the end, I suspect that BOTH are true - 4 pings of one kind and numerous pings of another kind.
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 22:00
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Another thought on SATCOM derived lines of position:

Depending on how long the backlogs of inmarsat are, it should be possible to find data of previous flights of the a/c in the logs. Whatever data is logged there (signal strength, round trip delay, dopplershift, ???), it should be possible to calibrate specifics of MH370 transceiver against data from previous flights. For those flights the exact position, height and speed vector should be known for the points in time when the pings where exchanged.

Probably a bunch of RF engineers is doing extra shifts right now. Im pretty confident, in the end it will boil down to the question, where did MH370 go to after 8:11 MYT.
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Old 15th Mar 2014, 22:00
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The pings that have been tracked, do they stop when an aircraft is powered down at an airport or do they continue under battery?

(not a pilot or journalist but a fascinated observer)
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