Malaysian Airlines MH370 contact lost

[deadheader]

north

Unnamed "top officials" close to investigation team:


''While the ongoing search is divided into two massive areas, the data that the investigating team is collating is leading us more towards the north"


(Published by SMH)

[SLFgeek]

Originally Posted by cairnshouse

This plane flies west over the populated land of a relatively sophisticated country. Yet no-one with any recollection of UA 93 makes a call from a concealed phone.

Keep in mind that on 9/11 much of the US still had AMPS cellular service, and there were many dual mode AMPS phones about. AMPS is now completely deactivated in the US. Some countries never had AMPS, and began service with GSM. AMPS had longer range and better coverage than GSM.

If people were able to actually place cell phone calls from UA 93, it may have been over AMPS (although one mention way back in this thread suggested they used a special aircraft phone service).

[GarageYears]

View inside the EE compartment

HawkEye Media Boeing 777 Avionics Compartment VR Panoramic Photography

The EE bay is not accessible from the cockpit. It is accessed via a door in the floor in the vicinity of the forward entry door.

Boeing-777 - Warbird Photo Album

[Ian W]

Originally Posted by Jumpjim

Once again, ACARS DOES NOT DO POSITION REPORTS WITHOUT BEING LOGGED ONTO ADS!!!! The ground systems cannot setup a contract without the aircraft logging on.

If the pilots haven't logged the ADS onto the FIR ADS address the ACARS will not send position reports. ATC cannot log on to the aircraft without the pilots requesting it first as far as I know.

There seems to be a common misconception throughout this thread that ACARS is sending back position reports constantly. It doesn't.

Do try not to get too excited.

The ACARS reported the Waypoint Change so it was contracted to do so, which shows that the ACARS was logged in on a contract with Sebang. There were also routine health monitoring reports every 30 minutes as the expected one after 1:37am local was not received.

[ex_matelot]

to try to shadow a 777 would be not possible ( read some pages back ). Also military operators do not look at the blips but track symbols. Depending on the radar you would get two very overlapping symbols (one identified, the second not), drawing attention to the situation.

The best chance to fool the military is to fly like everybody else on a published airway. Chances are best you will not be discovered, even if not automatically identified. Unless there is a very good relationship between military radar and ATC, nobody will raise an alarm in the middle of the night.

I'd advise people to disregard the above quoted. It is wholly wrong on several points. I speak from years of experience operating several different types of medium / long range air defence radars,associated command systems and datalinks. The bread & butter is in the "blips" - the track idents come afterwards in many cases. I could go on but that would be a bit naughty.

[surfcat]

View inside the EE compartment
HawkEye Media Boeing 777 Avionics Compartment VR Panoramic Photography

The EE bay is not accessible from the cockpit. It is accessed via a door in the floor in the vicinity of the forward entry door.

Boeing-777 - Warbird Photo Album

That's an amazing room. But don't tell O'Leary as he'll want a few more seats down there.

[OleOle]

It would be very interesting to see a plot of the distance to satellite rings for the all the SATCOM pings which should have occurred about every hour after 01:07.

I mentioned earlier that the geometric problem still would be symetrical (to the axis satellite position projected to the ground <-> LKP). For determining if it's the northern or southern arc it wouldn't help.

[glenbrook]

Originally Posted by VinRouge

Doppler from multiple geostationary sats would give you derived heading, speed and possibly location. It's how the Americans tracked Sputnik.

Doppler is no use in this case.
For a start Sputnik was moving about 7km/sec relative the ground and because it was in low-earth orbit the motion relative to a ground observer was very high.

A Geostationary satellite has no motion relative to a fixed point on earth, and the only motion relative to the aircraft is the component of its velocity moving toward or away from the satellite. If the a/c is moving at say 290m/s parallel to the satellite which is 35,786,000 meters away and the earth curves at about 12 cm per km, then the motion relative to the satellite directly overhead is about 3.5cm/sec. Of course at the far end of the satellite's range the relative motion will higher, but only a couple of m/s at the maximum edge of the satellite footprint. To measure a speed that small using doppler is very difficult and I doubt very much that Inmarsat is set up for that.

[cairnshouse]

Keep in mind that on 9/11 much of the US still had AMPS cellular service, and there were many dual mode AMPS phones about. AMPS is now completely deactivated in the US. Some countries never had AMPS, and began service with GSM. AMPS had longer range and better coverage than GSM.

If people were able to actually place cell phone calls from UA 93, it may have been over AMPS (although one mention way back in this thread suggested they used a special aircraft phone service).

I accept this, but one is not looking for a connection long enough to make a meaningful phone call, just a connection long enough register on the network (not even with the recipient) that a call had been made. Certainly, and obviously this is in a horizontal rather than a vertical plane,there are problems in the Dover, England area where callers connect to French mobile networks in error where the French signal is at least 22 miles away. Yet there is no suggestion any calls were made.

[Ngineer]

The EE bay is not accessible from the cockpit. It is accessed via a door in the floor in the vicinity of the forward entry door.

Who cares. Disabling VHF and Satcom part of ACARS takes all of 30 seconds from the Comms MGR page. Anyone requiring EE bay access inflight can do so easy enough ATM (however this will change in future)

[Jumpjim]

Re: (IANW) "The ACARS reported the Waypoint Change so it was contracted to do so..."

The reporting (incl CNN) has the ACARS timeline issues sorted out finally, more or less mimicking what's has been "established" here. OTOH the recorded/reported waypoint change ("pre-programmed left turn"?) is not being addressed. I assume that is what you are posting in above quote.

We had the 25-degree to 40-degree Vn ATC issue in focus as something that cast doubt on this as on ACARS-at-1:07 event. Even ABC NEWS and FOXnews that reported this "turn on ACARS" had vague "sources say" and that has been it. CNN has not really addressed it as fact or otherwise.

IF it is FACT, it would seemingly confirm deliberate human action rather than other mishap. For how could that left turn be in the FMC at 1:07 otherwise?

IANW, CNN, any journalists reading this: Can we pin this down as FACT or otherwise discard it as a supported detail please?

So the suggestion is that the pilots manually logged on to ATC, let the aircraft broadcast a turn, including their next re-programmed waypoint which apparently they had reprogrammed into the FMC prior to the aircraft broadcasting a pos report, and then successfully made the aircraft disappear?

Do you not think they may have skipped the ADS log-on procedure, if in fact local ATC even HAS ADS, prior to trying to go dark??? For the aircraft to be "Contracted" as you say above, the crew would have had to manually request a log-on. This makes absolutely no sense given what subsequently transpired. What possible reason would they have had to do this? If the reports said they had logged on, broadcast a position report including the next flight-planned waypoint, THEN disabled the ADS and ACARS PRIOR to turning onto a new track then I could sort of understand it....

The arguments on here get less and less logical by the minute...

[jeanlyon]

Yes I had noticed that the last "over" had changed from "All right, roger that" to "all right, goodnight". Could someone have misheard that when it was first reported. Maybe.

[GarageYears]

Quote:
The EE bay is not accessible from the cockpit. It is accessed via a door in the floor in the vicinity of the forward entry door.
Who cares. Disabling VHF and Satcom part of ACARS takes all of 30 seconds from the Comms MGR page. Anyone requiring EE bay access inflight can do so easy enough ATM (however this will change in future) 17th Mar 2014 16:59

The context for this was disabling the CVR and FDR....

[Heli-phile]

Cabin oxygen

Oxygen generators or piped...it does not matter really. At that altitude you require a pressurised mask. Those are only available in the cockpit. All irrelevant anyhow as the aircraft would not be able to reach that altitude, not with that load and fuel!

[Jumpjim]

Rigbyrigz: The FMC does not downlink every legs change. I think it is HIGHLY unlikely, as I've posted above, that the aircraft was logged onto Kuala Lumpur ADS (WMFC) at the time the FMC was reprogrammed by whoever was altering the flight route. This is extremely easy to verify.

If it was logged on then it could have conceivably have downlinked the change in next waypoint ONLY, but after flying 777's for 10K hours so far I'm still unsure whether it does this immediately the change is executed in the FMC or at the next waypoint/18 minute reporting interval.

Either way, as stated previously, unless the crew had manually initiated an ADS log-on ATC would be clueless what they had in their FMC.

[vapilot2004]

Originally Posted by Mahatma Kote

O.K. Serious question for 777 Avionics Techs.

Is it possible to alter the ICAO unique airframe code in the transponder using pilot available menus; or engineering menus using pilot accessible equipment?

While there is an MAT (maintenance access terminal) in the cockpit, in order to change the airframe code, there are 2 prerequisites - one, the Air/Ground logic must indicate Ground and two, new ID data is uploaded only via disk file which is created by a GBST software package - something a pilot is not going to have access to - usually the operators are dispatch and maintenance.

[RifRaf3]

The left turn towards P. Lankawi makes sense.
It would imply a fire in the climb taking out the acars with a positive fire warning such as smoke intrusion after the last transmission, followed by turning off all cockpit electronics, hence loss of comms.
There are still problems with it as there are with all other scenarios.

[oldoberon]

VApilot2004

thanks for that info, it is what I would have expected and like the air/ground bit, so even if you had a MAT in the air bit of a problem, data possibly from a undercarriage weight on limit switch

[FE Hoppy]

costalpilot

Join Date: Jul 2013
Location: world
Posts: 8
My problem with fe hoppy's analysis is: if a person is smart enuff to heist and enroute hide a t7 they arent going to be dumb enuff to die of lack of 02 or heat.

imo.
costalpilot is offline Report Post

I don't think FE Hoppy has made any such claim. You may be miss attributing the analysis.

[jeanlyon]

If that suggestion of a fire and no comms is correct, then surely it would have come down in the sea and there would be debris? How long after AF774 went down was there debris. I can't remember. In that case they had a Mayday call though.