Freescale
 

Agreed, chasing the Freescale angle as some sort of target for the hijacking is a waste of time. The employees on board were 12 Malaysian and 8 Chinese with titles like 'Test 1 Process Engineer' and 'Test 1 Manufacturing Manager.' Not exactly janitorial staff or cafeteria workers, sure, but not exactly rare talents in the countries that contain a massive portion of the semiconductor manufacturing facilities on Earth today.

If you had some burning desire to learn Freescale's industrial secrets when it comes to improvement of semiconductor manufacturing processes, surely offering a pay rise and a signing bonus would be simpler than some complicated plot to hijack an airliner, make it disappear, and torture the passengers until they spill the beans.

Could someone share some light on the theoretical possibilities of a T7 reaching 45000 feet, as indicated by the Mal authorities.


This source claims the service ceiling being 43100ft Aerospaceweb.org | Aircraft Museum - Boeing 777

It has been mentioned before, but how do you explain that there have been no reports of any mobile 'phone calls being received?

Passengers would have realised that the flight time was 'overdue'.

Are we saying that there was no possibility of reception throughout the route - wherever that might be?

Were the earlier (dismissed) reports of ringing tones now possible?

The service ceiling is not the performance limit.

At the approximate weight at the time the aircraft would be limited by thrust such that it could maintain about 40000ft with maximum cruise thrust. It could maintain a higher altitude with higher thrust if this is available or it could make a zoom climb to higher altitudes but not maintain.

I am of the opinion that @45000ft is possible but also consider that the height is derived from primary radar and is therefore subject to some error.

And one more addition: was there any crew rostering request with regards to this flight?

Aireps, the maps are very informative, but I don't think SATCOM vs. a ground link is the right inference to base your conclusions. It's not that the Inmarsat pings were initiated by ACARS, but rather by the SATCOM system itself. From what has been released so far, we understand that the ACARS function was turned off, but that action did not fully disable the SATCOM - it only prevented ACARS from initiating any messages.

The "pings" under discussion were empty network keepalive messages sent as a matter of routine functioning of the SATCOM transceiver itself. Imagine this conversation:

"Hello? Anyone there? If, hypothetically, I wished to send some data, could you pass it along for me? Oh, I'm not paid up on this account? So sorry to trouble you. I'll ask again later. Perhaps then I can speak to someone whose bills I've paid."

If that is in fact what the authorities are working off of, then it doesn't matter if any ACARS ground stations were nearby or not, as there was never any ACARS data queued up in the outbox after 01:07 Malaysia time.

Fuel
 

Considering that so many people on here claim to be professionals, I am astounded that nobody has looked into the technical side of how much fuel was actually on-board for this rather short flight.

• MAS370 got airborne at 1643z
• LKP according to Radar/Mode S transponder was 1722z
• Flight time was ZBAA0521 - 5 hours 21 minutes
• When it went missing it had fuel reportedly for a further 7 hours 30 minutes.
• 39 minutes of TRIP fuel was burned to that point and presumably 10-15 minutes APU/TAXI.

So the big question that now remains, why was there an uplift of just over 8 hours for a 5 hours 21 minute flight. Planning within standards would suggests maybe just over 6 and 1/2 hours fuel. If this is the case then how comes the captain signed off and additional 1 hour 30 minutes fuel or more (that is public knowledge)

I've not suggested that the captain has anything to do with this, but all that extra fuel for a flight that isn't going very far has more questions than answers. After all, any additional uplift is his final decision.

In-flight wifi is fairly easy to control. I won't say how but in most cases the pax just think it's a service outage, not that it's been switched off. There is more than one way to control it but like many things, the flight deck usually have some ability to control this.

I would consider this a valid question.

But since as of late it seems to be mostly Holywood time in here (got much worse since Official confirmation pointing also towards Intererence), such detail probably doesn't matter.

Let's simply cross fingers someone finds this Needle in the apparently huge Haystack.

In response to Tristan Gooley's post No. 3463, the Appleman Chart gives the answer although the vertical axis is in pressure rather than feet (I've marked 26,000 feet & -40ºC):

http://i963.photobucket.com/albums/a...ps31c7de4b.png

In rough terms, OAT needs to be -40ºC or colder for formation, and contrails will rarely be found below 26,000' (8km). So depending on the humidity, a contrail could have been formed that Sunday morning – although whether one could have been seen at night is open to question (but it was reportedly cloudless with a moon!), but then "which one"?

NASA's website is informative:
Contrail Education - Science

Re: Fuel
 

Could they be uplifting cheaper Malaysian (state subsidised?) fuel to cover some of the return or onward leg?

Inmarsat tracking
 

@snowfalcon2
@TelcoAUS

About the nearest anyone on here has got to what is actually happening involving the analysis of the Inmarsat received data is snowfalcon2 at post #3850.

With TelcoAUS not far behind.

IMO, the track/positioning deductions will become more accurate during the next hours.

Captains facebook page.
 

Translation (rough) of some of the Captains facebook page. .........

https://www.facebook.com/zaharie.shah.3


right terror anwar ne. !

Politics of fear.. This is what it’s boiled down to… Questioning the qualification of the individuals who dare to standup. (Anuar or Hadi .) These are our only hope to restore democracy. 50 years in power by a single party (coalition) does not say much about democracy in the country. If these leaders willing to stand in the line of fire the least we could do is support them. They might not be perceived to be the best candidate but sacrifice is necessary to achieve the goal of free democracy. When you renovate a house you have to suffer all the consequences. From dust, to the contractor that run off with the money, Aliens workers keeping an eyes on your family. WHY DO YOU RISK THAT? Because at the end after all the loss of extra ringgit for overprice items the contractor billed you and you elude the alien predators from robbing your house and harming your family you know it will be worthwhile.

Asalamualaikum
Today is my last post on FB. The vote is with bijaksana.Kesejahteraan
the future of our children depends on the decision
you do tomorrow.
I count as a watchdog that will Ballot Box P107
opened the next day at the Office of Government Chinatown.
I gather 10 fingers apologize if there terkasar language.
I am a common man can not escape from errors.

In place of the votes in a government office petaling. Kul 5 new start counting. Sorry no pictures allowed.

Mobile Phone Usage and Absence of Calls
 

We seem to be generally agreed that voice calls can be made below 8000 feet and texts sent or received at anything up to 35,000 feet.

Given that MH370 did not have a limitless supply of fuel, at some point it must have descended through 8000 feet at which point crew or passengers would have been able to make calls or send texts. The latest inmarsat information puts the extremes of possible range either over Khazakstan to the north or the Pacific Ocean west of Oz to the South. If it flew north, by the time it started descending, the flight time would be over that expected by most passengers and you would expect a rush of concerned mobile phone calls or texts on the morning of Saturday 8th. At least some of these attempts are likely to have made it to a cell somewhere on the ground.

Even if the cell data was being withheld, at least one friend or relative of those on board would have reported the contact by now. Which makes me think that either the plane flew south and ditched in the sea or if it did fly north, the crew and passengers were either dead or unconscious due to 5+ hours in the death zone.

Just a thought

A map showing primary radar coverage would be interesting, particularly with intersections with the Inmarsat reception arcs.
It is a reasonable assumption that many records are now being scrutinised.

What is also interesting is the availability of such coverage maps to a interested pilot or non-military party.

Agree. This. Plus, as has been explained a million times already, the ringback tone is NOT generated by the phone handset, but by the network, and there are a million reasons why you may hear ringing and yet the handset might never ring (or be turned off/ broken).

I think we need to treat the mobile phone stuff as yet another random conspiracy theory until such time as HARD FACTS show otherwise.....

Facebook posts
 

Even more.... seems he hates Barisan National.... and is backing Anwar.... who just got indicted for Sodomy again.........

Revenge ?

From Capt FB

- Wikipedia reported Dr M is the second richest among retired leaders in the world, after Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. His wealth is estimated to be USD 44 billion (RM 160 billion) .Should we allow him to plunder our country's wealth? If PAKATAN is voted in on May 5 this wealth can be frozen & returned to the rakyat. As long as BN is in power, no one can touch him. Ubah lah !! Forward to at least 10 people

Apparently Putra Jaya issued an order that wef fm Monday, all staff not allowed OT and only authorized staff r allowed into PM department !!!!
They saw the revolt at the Putra jaya's ceramah !!
Clearly pmo are cleaning ****s in the office before handover. Sign of bn preparing defeat.
This is an urgent appeal for support. Pakatan Rakyat needs everybody to bring the messages of truth down to the grassroots level. There are many people who have not received the messages from Pakatan Rakyat. Many have not been able to attend the Pakatan Ceremahs. Please help to send all message that you receive to at least 10 persons. The more people we can reach out to the whole country the better. We need to reach out to the 7th level. We need to reach out to 1 million people very fast. Time is very limited. Please help. Thank you.

While a lone actor might decide to end it all, there's some difficulty in persuading a larger group to go with the plan.

But there is the door and a distinct lack of tools in back to get through it. The Ethiopian pilot was unmolested during his unauthorised diversion.

Methinks there's going to be openings for jumpseaters who can both land the plane if necessary and take care of those with ideas to divert the aircraft.

Cue wails from the beancounters.

I'm going to infer, from the press conference remarks, that the last satellite point was somewhere 40-deg north or south. That they took a map of that part of the world, drew an arc from the last know primary skin paint, out to the range of fuel, then looked to see where 40 north or south would intersect that arc. I suspect that they also took note of potential routes, and who had PSR that might have seen it pass. As the a/c was flying east to west, it would have been moving in the same direction as sunrise, so it could have been in darkness the entire trip.

Would you send a fighter up to investigate a radar blip, in the dark, in mountainous terrain ?

As for the south corridor, there are a few islands out there ... including DG (already mentioned several times). If the a/c had made it to DG, I think most governments would already have been notified. But DG, as a destination, violates the 40-deg north/south, so I doubt that was the target.

Most perplexing.

Fake facebook posts
 

Before people get too carried with stuff from facebook, creating fake facebook accounts is a national sport in some parts of the world.