Red Eye
 

Re Question - would it be common for a high-hours pilot with significant seniority to be flying a red-eye flight (which I gather most pilots are not particularly fond of)
Yes - some airlines, the PIC does not get a choice of routes/times regardless of hours/seniority or even routes for that matter.
Some airlines however a senior Captain would not dream nor have to do such a flight.

Pilot home searched
 

Police arrived at the home of 53-year-old Zaharie Ahmad Shah shortly after the PM finished speaking, the Reuters report adds.by Alan McGuinness 1:19 AM

Breaking: Senior Malaysia police official says house of pilot of missing flight MH370 is being searched, according to Reuters.

Question for somebody that knows!

The location deductions by the sattelites is assumend to be from differential power levels. This would seem to have a extremely large error factor. Could the logs just be time tagged when the ping was recieved.

Sort of like a reverse gps. Another words sattelite 1 gets it at time x, and sattelite 2 gets it at x.000002 seconds later. This to would give a north south area of interest. I presume each sattelite has known time on board.

I think it is safe to say the IAF has sufficient coverage to pick up a T7

IAF scrambles Su-30MKI after spotting UFO near Amritsar border - Worldnews.com

There seems to be some weight age to the flight swinging south and headed towards Australia. Given the timing , location and the gaps in radar it has penetrated this was done by someone with explicit knowledge and precision timing. Would find it hard to believe crew rest room door opening at opportune moment of handover and all other aspects given general awareness post 9/11.

If it is a man made event it definitely has an inside hand.

Surely the most likely explanation is a massive decompression and not terrorist activities.

We would have surely heard from the terrorist organisation who spearheaded this by now as a terrorist attack would be pointless without a result to the organisation and that organisation to claim their victory.

so massive decompression has to be the most likely cause to explain a number of course changes, lack of communication and coming down way off track.

Assuming the info provided at the press sonferance is correct, it would be interesting to know what track the aircraft is believed to have followed. For instance, if it believed to have turned north-west after crossing the penisular and there is no sign of it having subsequently turned again, I would tend to assume it has taken the northern of the two possibilities. In addition, if it flew for up to 7 hours it would suggest that it would then have either had a controlled landing or a crash-landing by fuel starvation.

I may be wrong, but if it did not have a significant cargo load, at maximum continuous thrust I believe it just might have been able to reach 45000 feet toward the end of the flight, although whether it would have had enough fuel to fly that far at that thrust I have no idea (anyone with a flight-planning handbook?).

So what if from a point in the flight, it just flew off into the night with no-one at the controls? Indeed, could it have been following way-points in the database from a previous flight?

ACARS Data Switched Off, Satcom still ON
 

The ACARS data feed from the engine systems (for Rolls Royce) and other aircraft systems (sent to Boeing) stopped or was switched off.

The Satcom system (used by ACARS as an alternative to VHF links to ground stations) continued to operate, but only exchanged routine information (pings) with Inmarsat to confirm that the link was still alive. (These "pings" contain information identifying the querying aircraft.)

This is like your Outlook email browser checking with an email server every few minutes. The message check proceeds even if no messages are waiting to be sent or received. Of course, the client needs to identify itself to enable the server to check for messages for that aircraft. Normally, the senders and recipients of messages never hear about these purely procedural link maintenance communications.

When the Malaysian government says that ACARS was "switched off", they mean only that no messages were sent or received after a certain time. Neither the Malaysian government nor the hijackers realized that the Satcom link would remain active even without ACARS messages to transmit or receive.

As mentioned earlier the satellite communications are received by the INMARSAT service which uses geostationary satellites covering much of the earth. Here is their latest map of coverage for the service (Classic Aero) which covers ACARS.

Our coverage - Inmarsat

You will see that there is only one satellite covering the India Ocean (the blue one) so that will have picked up the signals for most of the morning of March the 8th (until just after 8am).

So there will be no triangulation involved, and not even two satellites to work off.

Obviously the plane did not turn up under the coverage of the western green satellite because then the authorities would be more definite about the final signals.

anybody wondering what took them so long to let us know the possible new tracks the aircraft may have taken, Inmarsat data, etc?

More smoke and mirrors. In a global surveillance society, there's not a hope the thing could be missing this length of time and nobody be aware as to its location.

It went east, no it went west, no it went south, oh hang on, it went north west. Seriously. And nobody picked it up. Anywhere. They're still hiding something.

Unidentified aircraft
 

Searches now seem to be concentrated to the west and north west of Malaysia and hijacking, by the pilot or other person they don't say, seems to be the favourite theory coming from press conferences. This seems to be based on the Malaysian Air Force radar seeing it turn but as an unidentified aircraft.

Has anyone asked what the Air Force was doing whilst this unidentified aircraft was flying towards them? Same question to countries further along the supposed track. All sitting on their hands? Why were fighters not sent up to investigate? I am sure they would have been in Europe.

Could this have been a hijacking to test the air defence systems in the area?

ADS-B Hard to Jam
 

Like cell phones, ADS can be disrupted by jamming in interactive mode.

On the other hand, in one-way broadcast mode, ADS-B only transmits without waiting to receive any signals.

To jam the transmitted ADS-B signal, a jammer would need to generate and radiate a conflicting signal at the same or greater effective power as seen from a land-based receiver. This is difficult to do without a specialized antenna mounted outside the metal fuselage.

It is not entirely clear at present whether ADS-B transmissions from MH370 were actually disabled, or whether they were merely not received due to range issues. FR24 appeared to say that they lost the signal as the aircraft disappeared below the horizon.

@rh200,You are absolutely right. That timing will produce a position line (in this case a curved one) and the originating signal will be somewhere along that line.

IMHO that is the clear reason why the authorities are talking about either to the NW or the SW. If the reason to go SW was a "terminal" one, then a very deep spot in the Indian Ocean would be a likely outcome. The reason to go NW, would probably be politically based. Take your pick.

It would be interesting to find out if there was an abnormally large discretionary uplift above the flight plan fuel. That might point to a deliberate attempt to extend the range.

A detailed post of mine about how to use INMARSAT satellite coverage to narrow down the location of signals has not appeared yet after I posted it.

However, a brief extra point is that, even with just one ACARS satellite communicating with you (which is the case over most of the Indian Ocean and subcontinent), you can determine distance (from signal to satellite) quite accurately from ping times (as there are usually several time-stamped messages going each way).

Amazing fact !!

The police have only just started searching the aircrew's houses some 8 days - read that again - 8 days after the event.

We discussed this course of action on about page 2 - why are they just starting to check the "obvious"??

They need now to do a live test with B777 fly it on the same track with all radar and facilitates watching and recording and see if the can replicate what the THINK they have already!! I'm sure if they do this they will eliminate or confirm their assumptions to date. Otherwise the search windows are too large and there are not enough assets worldwide to cover such a large search zone.

I'm probably biased by being in the telecom engineering industry, but calculating the signal strength boundaries to create a 2-dimensional range would take a good bit of effort. Not to mention, if I'm at Inmarsat, my model is going to change based on every piece of new information that comes in regarding the possible actions undertaken during the flight.

Imagine you're holding your cellphone, and some guy looking at two towers worth of signal strength data is asked to find you. In a 2-d world it wouldn't be that difficult. I could pretty easily nail you down to two points. But now, get in an elevator, and I'm going to have a hell of a time mapping your movement.

In this scenario, going only off received signal strength data between two satellites, I have to figure out a boundary for a high and low signal that I want to say you crashed in. Now I look at all of the other data but some critical pieces are missing. I don't know how fast you were moving between two points when the satcom pinged, I don't know your changes in altitude, and on top of that, I don't know what interference or noise could've been introduced into the system at any given time by your environment or your actions on the plane.

I'll guarantee you one thing though - every hour spent by an RF engineer to limit that range saves somewhere on the order of half a day's worth of ocean to cover.

This is an incredibly complex system with limited knowledge of all of the variables.

To describe the difficulty, it would be like me asking you to find out which cows your hamburger came from after visiting a random McDonalds. You could probably limit it down to a few slaughter houses, but you'd never be able to pinpoint the cows.

Communicator

Don't know how to paste your post here.

If that's the case (Satellite com/data system still "pinging" satellite after ACARS/CPDLC/ADS-C turned off) then the authorities would know how long the 777 system was active for. Is this the case?

Everything I've seen suggests that F450 would at best have been nearly impossible - and the rapid descent WOULD have been impossible. That said, if there was a climb to anything approaching that altitude, I suspect it was done to eliminate opposition from the cabin. From what has been posted, the drop down oxygen masks are useless at that altitude.

The Two Possible Flight Corridors...
 

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BiwHC3sCMAApe2v.jpg

Source: NewsBreaker ‏@NewsBreaker 1h
MAP: Shows 2 possible corridors that Malayasian Prime Minister mentioned for flight #MH370 pic.twitter.com/rv3q3FFA4e - @KHOLMESlive