Malaysian Airlines MH370 contact lost

[Sailvi767]

I witnessed a oxygen fire on a Delta 727 in the late eighties at KSLC. It occurred in the E&E compartment and was impressive in its speed and the amount and toxicity of the smoke produced. One breath knocked the flight engineer to his knees and almost completely incapacitated him. I don't see a aircraft surviving a O2 fed fire to fly for 5 or 6 hours.

[Shadoko]

Today (May 13th) there was an interview of Rémi Jouty, chief of BEA (French equivalent of NTSB) in the very serious French newspaper L'Usine Nouvelle (business related top ranked newspaper): Vol MH370 disparu : pour le patron du BEA "il y a clairement eu une volonté de rendre l'appareil invisible" - Aéronautique - Défense
For him, it is beyond imagination that a simple mechanical incident might have lead to a disconnection of all communication means. He said there had been a clear will to make the aircraft invisible.

[Pontius Navigator]

Portmaneau, what I said was to explain why arearadar essentially kept repeating the question - certain or probable.

I agree with your definition, the various facts, and lack of facts, all add up to create the picture.

For an air traffic controller however they need to be 100%. In the absence of SSR they will ask for a position check or request an ident turn etc,

Even that has on occasion been less than 100% where another aircraft has inadvertently performed a similar manoeuvre and been mis-identified.

[WillowRun 6-3]

Prime Minister Speaks

Government of Malaysia has received some harsh criticisms here. The PM published an op ed in Wall Street Journal - for context, and fairness and balance, it is (or should be) a "must read" relative to that nation's governmental workings to date.
Najib Razak: Malaysia's Lessons From the Vanished Airplane - WSJ.com

[roninmission]

Ocean Shield

OS appears to be nack in the search area and actively searching. ECHO was headed in that direction and is probably there too, altho' no recent position updates from AIS

[Ian W]

Originally Posted by Pontius Navigator

Portmaneau, what I said was to explain why arearadar essentially kept repeating the question - certain or probable.

I agree with your definition, the various facts, and lack of facts, all add up to create the picture.

For an air traffic controller however they need to be 100%. In the absence of SSR they will ask for a position check or request an ident turn etc,

Even that has on occasion been less than 100% where another aircraft has inadvertently performed a similar manoeuvre and been mis-identified.

This is all correct but the case of a controller identifying an aircraft in real time and the forensic technicians gathering data from recorded tapes are significantly different.

The controller has to take on the aircraft with no appreciable delay and be (in their own mind) certain that they have identified the correct aircraft. The technicians and controllers studying the recorded tapes of radar returns have as much time as they need, can access better or amplified / cleaned data, can work out the speeds of aircraft and attempt to account for every return on a screen in order to rule out other aircraft.

I would think that the airspace over Malaysia at 1am is relatively quiet and most aircraft are the expected routine flights that anyone who works in an area for a time expects to see. I doubt very much that it is like the fabled Midland Radar overhead on a busy day. That being the case there would have been few if any primary responses that could be confused with MH370. Then the inquiry would have access to recordings from the various militaries that provided information and this information would be overlaid on the civil radar pictures. We in the peanut gallery will not be shown this.

If the inquiry team then believe that they have followed MH370 in the left turn back across the peninsula then a right up the Malacca straits followed by two left turns to go around Indonesia - then we can't disagree with them we do not have their information.

The important issue here is that if the aircraft did fly that very indirect route, it is unlikely that it was doing so after the flight deck was abandoned as some capable human inputs would be required. Then the following 6 hours of cruise flight also show that the aircraft was airworthy and not badly damaged.

[Val d'Isere]

if the aircraft did fly that very indirect route, it is unlikely that it was doing so after the flight deck was abandoned as some capable human inputs would be required.

The condition 'unlikely' is significant. Not impossible, then.

A "few" pages ago, I abandoned my attempts to investigate the possibilities thoroughly and logically and explain the conclusions in a careful sequence of posts.

[BOAC]

Logic test?

Surely after all these posts we should look a little at old Lady Logic?

Scenario 1) Drastic emergency on board: As said, who as time to re-programme the FMC to follow a bizarre route? Will the a/c systems then allow this to be 'flown'?

Scenario 2) Suicide/political protest: I'm going to crash this aircraft out of desperation/frustration over something. Why drag it out for 7 or more hours and then crash it? What is wrong with a political/emotional R/T message and a high-speed dive into the nearest water?


Anyone got an answer? I don't have - I have absolutely NO idea what happened or where the bits are.

[oopspff7]

If it has taken a dive into water would'nt bodies be a poppin to the surface due to decompostion by now ?

[Pontius Navigator]

oops, in shallow waters like the Dee, maybe. In deep water at just 4 degrees I imagine decomposition would be slower. Then the huge pressures would have a huge difference. Then if they were strapped in as we are encouraged to do.

Many reasons why there is no debris now.

[onetrack]

The only embarrassment here is that a 250 tonne aircraft can disappear off the face of the Earth, despite vast amounts of incredibly-potent surveillance and tracking technology, in the form of radar, satellites, submarines, and ships - by a sizeable number of nations.

We can put men on the moon multiple times, send rovers to Mars - yet we can't find an aircraft that disappears from the control of the most tightly-controlled transport system ever devised. There are a lot of people who must wonder where things are going seriously wrong.

Nations spend hundreds of billions on equipment for defence, and border control, and against aerial intrusions - yet employ so few skilled people in its actual use outside "normal working hours".
Asian nations invest billions in high-tech equipment, yet appear to have very few people capable of utilising it, to its fullest capacity.

Australia spends billions on JORN that is supposed to be able to pick up a Cessna 172 taxiing on the ground in East Timor, yet its áppears to be turned off, more often than it's turned on. It beggars belief.

[rh200]

It beggars belief.

Cost benifet analysis, no perceived threat at the moment, hence not needed. Sounds like good sense me.

[McRotor96]

Cost benifet analysis, no perceived threat at the moment, hence not needed. Sounds like good sense me.

I'm sure that is the reason. Although I'm not convinced that terrorist attacks are flagged up in advance. So perhaps calculated risk rather than anything.

[rh200]

I

'm sure that is the reason. Although I'm not convinced that terrorist attacks are flagged up in advance. So perhaps calculated risk rather than anything.

Your correct about the terrorist attacks of course, but the primary purposes of those assets are generally for threats from states. Hence rely on intelligence to determine the operational status of such.

Terrorist attacks utilising aircraft are supposed to be nipped in the butt at the departure point, or sorted out in flight. Hence those facillities and their operating hours should not be of any use in most cases.

[mmurray]

Press release from JACC:

As advised yesterday, the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, Bluefin-21, was recovered about two hours into its first mission since returning to the search area so a communications problem could be investigated.

During the recovery, Bluefin-21 was damaged but was able to be repaired expeditiously with spare parts on board the ADV Ocean Shield.

Examination of the communications problem has established that a hardware defect exists in the transponder mounted on the Ocean Shield and that a defect may also exist in the transponder mounted on the Bluefin-21. This inhibits the ability of the two devices to communicate with each other.

As a consequence, spare parts for both defects will be dispatched from the United Kingdom. The parts are expected to arrive in Western Australia on Sunday.

Ocean Shield is currently en route to Dampier, Western Australia, to receive the transponder parts. The journey is anticipated to take a number of days. At this stage, Ocean Shield is expected go alongside so engineers can make a full assessment of the transponder repairs.

The Joint Agency Coordination Centre will provide further information regarding the serviceability of Bluefin-21 and the movements of Ocean Shield as it becomes available.

Update on MH370 Search

[Ian W]

Originally Posted by onetrack

The only embarrassment here is that a 250 tonne aircraft can disappear off the face of the Earth, despite vast amounts of incredibly-potent surveillance and tracking technology, in the form of radar, satellites, submarines, and ships - by a sizeable number of nations.

This is likely to happen more often. Systems that are being developed now rely (depend) on the aircraft being able to automatically tell the ground systems whey are it is either by SATCOM link or by VHF link. If those aircraft systems fail or are turned off then the aircraft in the 'brave new space based world' will become invisible. Everyone seems to expect someone else to pick up the tab of surveillance systems to follow what are called 'non-cooperating' targets. But primary surveillance costs money especially the long range primary surveillance and it doesn't work out of line of sight of land - nobody wants to pay for it.

[aerobat77]

"Pardon me if this has been discussed - I gave up reading this thread midway due to so much uninformed speculation - but iirc from the AF447 threads an acoustic wave can be bent as it passes through the interface between media of different density (e.g. layers of different temperature) and thus peak detection would occur when the receiver was not directly overhead the source. "


thats deflection is correct, but nevertheless the range of this device is only few kilometers at all. 10 kilometers radius ( so more than the pinger range ) have been scanned by bluefin and nothing - not even some sunk debries beyond the main wreckage - was found.


that due to my understanding cannot be and one statement ( pings are from an ulb ) excludes the other . ( bluefind scanned the bottom around the ping and nothing was found )


so like said either the origin of the pings was something else or bluefin did not scanned every piece of the bottom in the 10 km radius , maybe due to depth limitation .

[mm43]

Jindalee Over the horizon Radar Network (JORN)

Bear in mind that Australia has never confirmed or denied that JORN was working at 0011z on 8 March 2014.

When you look at all the possible track "fits" that have been developed from the Inmarsat/AAIB Doppler handshake arcs, the skeptics would most likely ask, "How is it that a small 700km long sector of the final partial handshake arc suddenly became an area to focus on?" Furthermore, the northern end of that arc became the area of high probability.

Ignore the fact that a Chinese Coastguard vessel was deployed to the southern end of the arc, and immediately created a stir when it mysteriously heard pings while using some "makeshift" gear. Then consider that the Ocean Shield proceeded directly to the northern end of the arc and detected ULB pings on its first deployment of the Towed Ping Locator equipment.

The question of a target being detected that was traveling tangentially to the JORN arc has been raised. This would not be the case if that target was on the YPCC (Cocos Keeling Is.) to YPPH (Perth) track when you check the location of the JORN Laverton, W.A. site.

Overall, the published tracks based on guesstimates of fuel burn versus altitude and speed helped, but something else was involved for the Ocean Shield to be where it was as the ULB pings announced themselves to the world, then faded into oblivion shortly afterwards.

[YRP]

Originally Posted by boac

Surely after all these posts we should look a little at old Lady Logic?

Scenario 1) Drastic emergency on board: As said, who as time to re-programme the FMC to follow a bizarre route? Will the a/c systems then allow this to be 'flown'?

Scenario 2) Suicide/political protest: I'm going to crash this aircraft out of desperation/frustration over something. Why drag it out for 7 or more hours and then crash it? What is wrong with a political/emotional R/T message and a high-speed dive into the nearest water?

BOAC, I'm not making a judgement about 1 vs 2, but if it were #2 and intentional, I think disappearing the airplane had a much more powerful effect from a terrorism point of view, got much more media attention and aroused more popular curiousity than simply crashing the plane would have done.

Now if only the person had let one what it was they wanted attention for...

Part of me wonders if it wasn't someone who simply wanted to out-clever the rest of the world, to see if they could do it, i.e. disappear the plane without a trace. Problem is that that behaviour seems quite contradictory with someone depressed or otherwise distraught enough to want to end their own life.

[thommo101]

@aerobat77:

that due to my understanding cannot be and one statement ( pings are from an ulb ) excludes the other . ( bluefind scanned the bottom around the ping and nothing was found )

Yes but the area searched was centred around the 4th ping detection location to the south east. It appears that the pings detected on April 8th were intermittent and at an even lower frequency of 27kHz and have been recently disregarded as potentially coming from a ULB.

The area of the first, consistent 2h 20m long detection to the north west on April 5th has NOT been searched via Bluefin-21. Potentially because the depth there approaches 5000m, beyond the depth rating of the submersible.