Where Did It End Up?
 

Davidsoffice

IF the rogue radar track was our aircraft..... Where would it reach, in that general direction, outside of friendly radar coverage before needing fuel?


This is THE most important question today obviously and if the aircraft turned west as most believe now, the only party that can help answer this question is India. Just now the news came out that India has deployed 3 ships and 3 aircraft to search effort east of Andaman islands. However, their unexplained silence on tracking an unknown large aircraft near Andaman islands is curious to say the least, unless, like Malaysia they also have been caught in a situation where they cannot confess to holes in their radar coverage.

Reports coming in of relatives of flight 370 passengers reducing malaysian airline staff in their hotel to tears during press conference and shouting at them "you are not leaving" after a 4 hour Q & A

Sounds like this situation is getting more and more toxic. Is there any precedent to something like this? (except air france 447).

There are arrays of suitable satellites. I'm sure that if it turns out a mystery remains, then their owners can be quietly asked if they can help, and in an informal way they would. Countries with ocean surveillance radar constellations and missile warning imaging satellite, along with even some weather coverage from moderate and geostationary locations might be able to shed some light.

In the meantime, a fisherman with a bit of plastic is likely to be the first to shed light on the location of the wreckage.

Some of the truest words I've read in six days.

can we pls out this one to bed
 

Turin #2796
What is the distance between the bottle's forward end and the bulkhead?

Accepting all your reservations I comment as follows.

If it hasn't built up max momentum it will not pierce the bulkhead, being round at the "front end" it will deflect and bounce around ( may even get stuck) but if it ever got to face aft this would propel it into the MEC, which by now is a fairly oxygen rich environment.

As an aside to those speculating the aircraft could have been "secretly" fully fueled you obviously don't know much about refueling procedure.

It is not like pulling up at the pumps needing 1/2 tank and deciding you might decide to go the scenic route and filling up instead.

At your hub ops will have informed refueling of the required load and that is all they will put in.

We once landed at an airport which was a regular stop and the refuelers knew pretty well how much we need to depart full and would send out a bowser and trailer. On this occasion we needed more, the driver would not let me have more, he asked to check the flight deck gauges, read the fuel content subtracted the input and stated we had landed below minimum reserve. I confirmed this and stated pilot was filing a report right then. I still had to fill in loads of paperwork for the fuel company.

YOU CANNOT JUST TOP UP

What that event was will be discovered if the boxes are found. And If the CVR does still include the initial event, and did not overwrite it during 4 hours flight with anyone on board being unconscious, containing 30 minutes of silence in the cockpit...

AFAIK the aircraft identity is not coded into the transponder. ATC enters the aircraft ident into their system when they assign the transponder code. I would expect that if you select the same code it would cause problems with ATC.

Now if you were to coordinate with another known flight in the area and have them turn off their transponder as you turn yours on with the same code, that would be seamless with ATC.

Would the supposed conversation the Narita-bound 777 pilot had with MH370 about 10 minutes after the transponder loss, where he reported hearing "mumbling", be preserved on the CVR of his plane, or would it have been over-written by the time he reached Japan?

I hope someone is doing a carefully controlled sonar survey of the area where contact was originally lost. Swissair 111 was found almost exactly where it was lost several days after the search had moved on, due to poor control of the original sonar survey, later inspection of the records showed that the debris was seen on the very first track. Needless to say it didn't look much like an aircraft.

Er, are you sure?

What would be the point? AFAIK satcom is used when out of range of VHF. EG over mid atlantic. The a/c communicates directly with satelites.


https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ai....0%3B581%3B526

Re the fuel load, it was stated very early in this event that the aircraft had 7 and a half hours of fuel loaded. So there was plenty of gas to go even further than the 4 hours post loss of contact.

Proposed Search Location
 

I worked on flight profiles for avionics system tests at Naval Air Test Center (Pax River) for a couple years back in the late 1980s. Based on the reports I've heard, my analysis is as follows:

' ' Point S1 - Last ATC contact
txtStartLatitude = "6.9208"
txtStartLongitude = "103.5786"

' Point S2 – Contact, ADSB system (web track FR24)
txtStartLatitude = "6.9208"
txtStartLongitude = "103.5786"

' Point S3 - Last ATC contact, ADSB system (web track FR24)
txtStartLatitude = "6.9208"
txtStartLongitude = "103.5786"

' Sanga Mercur Oil Rig - known position
txtStartLatitude = "8.3667"
txtStartLongitude = "108.7026"

' Oil rig (Sanga Mercur Oil Rig) sighting report was:
' 265 - 275 bearing, high, minimal lateral velocity, on fire
' Plane had to be below 15,000 ft to not be on SGN ATC
‘
' Maintaining 65 deg course from S4, gliding @ 7:1 on fire?
' max range = 17.3 nm
' could have just reached the rig if turned toward it immediately, but
' rig was only 15 deg off to right so might have maintained course since
' that's where SAR would look (assuming SAR doesn't know about rig)
' Oil rig report: 265 - 275 bearing, high, minimal lateral velocity,
' on fire. Plane had to be below 15,000 feet to not be on SGN
' (Ho Chi Minh City) ATC as reported. Not sure how oil rig bearing was
' determined. If phone more accurate, but if just memory from rig true
' north, then maybe +/- 25 deg instead of +/- 5 deg.
'
' Point S4 - Location at oil rig sighting (assuming due west as reported):
txtStartLatitude = "8.3667"
txtStartLongitude = "108.4186"

' Maintaining 65 deg course, with 7:1 glide ratio.
' Not sure on glide ratio, 7:1 is for 747 (my memory).Also that's max
' with optimal AOA. Some time would have been used before attempting
' max glide and on fire (damage) would have probably reduced it.
'
' Point S5 - Final point (end of glide – crash/ditch) is at:
txtStartLatitude = "8.4885"
txtStartLongitude = "108.6825"

Obviously, there is some uncertainty in this position. I'm not sure about the FR24 system (I believe it extrapolates minute to mintute) Points (S2 & S3). I'm also not sure about the oil rig sighting bearing and distance (S4). Best guess on my S5 estimate uncertainty is +/- 15 nm. We probably have subs scanning gulf bottom by now (as well as ships) and they will probably find it soon.

@ TURIN

Totally agree - once out of LOS radio range, ACARS would switch to direct Sat link.

...or it would switch to HFDL....

..a fisherman with a bit of plastic is likely to be the first to shed light on the l
 

Good. Common sense is not totally dead.

One caveat: anyone notice,what was a semi-strange answer for a basic question on a civilian jet's NAVCOM equipment on Day 2 or 3.

"Asked to detail the communications devices aboard the missing jet, Boeing spokesman Doug Alder said, "It’s not appropriate for us to discuss that right now."

MountainSnake There are a lot of naval and air assets out there. Some have an anti-submarine warfare capability and with it, an underwater acoustic capability. The areas west and east of the Malaysian peninsula so far searched have consisted of shallow water. Any continuance beyond the Straits of Malacca starts to run off the continental shelf to deeper water in the Indian Ocean.

Shallow water makes for a notoriously difficult acoustic environment. Those waters are chock full of fishing vessels. Man made noise and natural noise in the water adds to the ambient noise, which will be much increased over that of an open ocean environment. Reverberations will be rife. There will be surface reflections and bottom bounce (depending what the bottom is made of).

In deep water, sounds spread spherically, greatly dissipating the intensity. Shallow water, constrained by the surface and sea bed, causes the sound to spread cylindrically, meaning in a given volume the noise is greater. It's logarithmic and I can't be 4rsed digging out my old notes! 10Log versus 20Log.

That said, the shipping noise is low frequency whereas sonic locators on Flight Data Recorders is not. Regardless of the frequency, ambient noise is still a factor and higher frequencies are subject to greater attenuation than low frequencies.

In the Air France 447 case, the location was open ocean; much quieter acoustically and a submarine could manoeuvre in the deep water there. Submariners are notorious liars about where they are and where they've been but if they tell you they are loath to go anywhere a prang might ensue, I'd (guardedly) believe them. They certainly don't like shallow water.

They could use a surface vessel with a decent SONAR suite to listen for the location device. To cover any area AND listen is almost mutually exclusive. They may need to sprint and drift, otherwise their Own Ships Noise (OSN) may mask what they're listening for. Otherwise, drop sonobuoys from fixed or rotary-winged aircraft. That might do it.

Look, an acoustic search really requires a half decent datum to start with. An acoustic search of the South China Sea or the Indian Ocean, or even a corridor of the Indian Ocean, is really not a practical primary search tool. Searching for this aircraft now, entering the sixth day with so many false starts, will have left any traces on the surface in a much diminished state.

I flew SAR on Air India 182 back in 1985. I was an acoustic specialist on my Nimrod Maritime Reconnaissance crew. We dropped buoys but heard nothing. The water there was over the 1000fathom line and was "quiet". Plus we dropped buoys at each of the 2 datums of wreckage on the surface, so we were as near to the source as one could be, under the circumstances. We heard nothing. To be fair, sonic location devices then were in their infancy and I've no idea if the Air India 182 aircraft had been fitted out with such a device.

Isca: are you serious that you had such a discussion with a pump jockey?

In my part of the world, which overlaps yours, I tell the guy how much fuel, and he pumps it. Period. He does not get a vote on how much fuel goes in, and I cannot fathom a scenario where you would have to explain yourself to a fuel dealer. Man up!

And if I decide last minute to add 20 tonnes of fuel, it goes on or I don't. Its really that simple.

Fuel load
 

Quote from ISCA Well it appears unfortunately you do not either.
Different Airlines bestow different levels of responsibility and authority in allowing their crews to upload whatever fuel they feel is justifiable.
Therefore, unless you know exactly what MH crew refuelling policy and procedures are, the view you are espousing carries no weight.

Their fuel load was I believe still an area of discussion.

To be fair Dai, your sonobuoys in the central Atlantic were designed to hear a submarine a couple of hundred meters below, within a km or so, and not a pinger from 4km down.

Emeraude also has a much larger sound collecting area than those buoys.

You're absolutely right that listening for data recorder sounds in 100-foot deep water full of shrimps, raindrops and shipping, large and small, is not going to be easy.

In water as shallow as the South China Sea, towed arrays are also going to come into problems, as they are going to be in water whose depth is comparable to their length.

I would bet that a trawler has to be the most likely to find the wreckage.

MAS confirmed in the Beijing press-con at 6pm just now that the signal of the ringing phone of a missing passenger is now traced to the US.