Correct, apologies ! Not thinking straight, but even that would be better than nothing - which is all we have at the moment !

@xyze :

Totally agree with your last post ; IF there was indeed a gold shipment on that flight, I have no doubt that it would not be too difficult for any Senior Captain to find out in advance when the shipment was going to "travel".

As you have said, flying your stolen gold to a place of your own choosing will ensure that you have the requisite time to offload and dispose/distribute the gold to some safe haven.

The one thing that has struck me is the amount of planning that has gone into this "disappearance" ( obviously assuming all the facts as we see them presented now to be correct ) Timing of the ACARS and Txpndr switch off, the final call and then into that period of uncertainness when loss of comms first realised. The supposed ziz-zag flight path before heading off N West. From that moment on, the clock started ticking and it is now nearly 8 days since the aircraft disappeared !! So many red herrings in the plot , some unintentional, but others rather more suspicious. The Chinese satellite pictures, then a report of a seismic event? Just when everyone was starting to look West?

I wonder what pensions are for a long serving Captain in Malaysia, or what the career prospects are for a S/F/O ?
I wonder if the home simulator is good for practicing night formation flying in a big jet?

I also wonder why, when so many people are asking, no-one is prepared to state what the cargo was as it ended up limiting pax load due to ZFW limitations.

I think that one has to assume the pax are hapless victims in all this. Perhaps accomplices amongst them, but I really wonder if we'll discover the truth as time is passing quickly with relatively little concrete information.

Very finally , I wonder if the "mods" have someone looking over their shoulders as this thread travels on. For sure, there is an awful lot of stuff in these 205 pages which could prove useful in the wrong hands and I'm surprised that some of it has actually been passed as "fit for consumption by one and all"

Crew suicide?
 

If undetected suicide & mass murder was the aim of one of the pilots, wouldn't it have been easier to do it on a flight which took him out across a deep ocean as part of the route? 30 West and spear it in?

Quoting lakedude:

Triangulation doesn't require the points of measurement to be in a triangle, or even for there to be three of them, as you would have learned had you attended a middle school mathematics class--two will do just fine. The triangle in triangulation is created by the lines of the sightings from two separate points to the target and the line between the two points. Given that, you might wish to try to imagine how two points can ever form anything but a line, although I suppose that is probably beyond your current skill level as well.

It is probably tilting at windmills, but you may also be interested to find out that Inmarsat satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, and therefore only appear in a straight line (over the equator) when drawn on a two-dimensional map--but this is solely an illusion created by the projection of three-dimensional space on a flat surface.

GPS satellites are in low-Earth orbit, with the result that they do not maintain a constant arrangement with respect to one another at all--a consequence of their orbital mechanics.

Also, the Earth is round. Actually, it is a geoid, which is an irregular shape something like an oblate spheroid, but 'round' should get you going in the right direction.

>I find the Northern route more credible with Myanmar the hole in the radar fence. They've then got very high ground to cover any intended Westward movement from the Indian radars. The altitude excursions probably indicate non pro pilots as VNAV is the more complicated mode, whist HDG SEL is adequate for LNAV using just a mobile or tablet FMC app. No need for a/c systems nav at all. I've got doubts that they made it unless the authorities in some country en-route were also in on it.


Well that's the elephant in the room, isn't it?

Can any of the pros in here tell me if the northern route ping data is compatible with the T7 flying north through Myanmar and staying over or on the Tinetan side of the himalayas?

Is there any stealth type advantage to flighing close to or above a mountain range?

I'm assuming the cargo in the hold has been dumped for extra range (if you can do that while in flight) and any cargo of interest to hijackers is carried as hand luggage.

Inmarsats ability to identify MH370
 

The information still lacking is Inmarsats ability to identify MH370.
Theoretically it should be able to identify the ac, but we don´t know from evidence that it really did. It is just hearsaying. What we need is transcript from every ping. Maybe the pings comes from similar planes.

Trying again--several post attempts since p150 have not appeared and I don't know why. Too many posts are mired in willful ignorance (didn’t read preceding posts) or in details. There are not many either/ors for this flight. The plane took off. There are a few pieces of information after that but not many. Governments are withholding information. There are active efforts to mislead (either east or west). The plane crashed within a short time after the last CONFIRMED position, or landed under control anytime after that before its fuel was exhausted. The pilot acted alone or with help. The pilot may or may not have been a willing or unwilling (coerced) participant. There was a plan or there wasn’t. The plan was a failure or a success. The pilot died or is alive. The flight’s goal may have been happenstance, a hole in the ocean, or a rendezvous.

Suppositions couched in accurate detail are still only suppositions. Suppositions do assist in exploring each possible outcome. Passengers, who have been getting most of the attention, may have been mere pawns and their well being perhaps not important. There are many possibilities where the value of passenger lives may have been irrelevant to some “greater good”.

Everyone wants to believe pilots eternally will act in passengers best interests. Excluding suicide, which appears unlikely unless there was last minute indecision, it took 150 pages on this forum for the idea of intention to get out. Intention beyond suicide may well be behind this. The plan may have been a success. Even if debris were now found floating somewhere, a plan may already have been a success to someone. We don’t want to think this, and have trouble imagining a good greater than 239 lives, but there are astonishing numbers of people who for the correct greater good in their own eyes would see the lives of 238 or 239 passengers to be a small and economical price to pay for something they want.

More attention needs to be paid to what or who might have been on that flight.

Would also like to know more about those 'noshows' who were replaced.

- Why were they no shows and has anyone spoken to them?
- who replaced them?
- when was this done?

KKN
 

Based on my review of the underlying protocols there are a couple of candidates for "pings". There are requests to establish a comm link between the a/c and ground station via satellite that involve underlying requests to use a particular communication channel with an exchange of packets negotiating that connection (AMSS). Then there are keepalive packets (IDRP) exchanged once a connection is established that occur periodically. I suspect that there were 4 connection requests with more numerous keepalive packets exchanged in between. Of course this is conjecture. I have no way of knowing but someone does!

In the end, I suspect that BOTH are true - 4 pings of one kind and numerous pings of another kind.

Another thought on SATCOM derived lines of position:

Depending on how long the backlogs of inmarsat are, it should be possible to find data of previous flights of the a/c in the logs. Whatever data is logged there (signal strength, round trip delay, dopplershift, ???), it should be possible to calibrate specifics of MH370 transceiver against data from previous flights. For those flights the exact position, height and speed vector should be known for the points in time when the pings where exchanged.

Probably a bunch of RF engineers is doing extra shifts right now. Im pretty confident, in the end it will boil down to the question, where did MH370 go to after 8:11 MYT.

The pings that have been tracked, do they stop when an aircraft is powered down at an airport or do they continue under battery?

(not a pilot or journalist but a fascinated observer)

I think the CVR can only be erased with the aircraft on the ground (WOW) and the engines shutdown?

Four and a half tonnes of gold? I'd move it in a 7.5 tonne truck!

And does anyone seriously believe that £120 million worth of gold would be carried on a scheduled passenger flight?

Really? The plane and 200 or so people have been missing now for 9 days. Releasing cargo and fuel information is hardly going to make it less secure!

The US Navy 5th fleet always has a carrier group covering the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, Arabian Sea, and parts of the Indian Ocean.

This more westerly route is incompatible with this map (or Australian defence simply missed the object regardless what they say). Or they took the northerly route.

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/...ticleLarge.jpg

hijacking hijackers
 

speaking as a software design and AI guy, it seems entirely sensible and do-able that, in specific cases, total control of a plane could be taken away from the cockpit and handed to a combination of autopilot systems and external commands (via satellite), in other words, turn the plane into a drone.

so far, the scenario is compatible with unknown problem detected one hour into flight, external diversion of plane to miliitarily secure airport via low-detection routing and releasing, for the time being, misinformation to a) mislead "enemy" and b) try and keep this capabilty secret.

does anybody know if external-takeover technology is possible/implemented/out of the question?

Yes I think you might be correct. You must have copied my post when it was still a draft before I edited it.

I thought that they had multiple pings but your suggestion that they only mapped the final ping actually fits better. What are the odds that multiple pings would have exactly the same strength as shown in the arc (unless the aircraft was stationary by that point)?

EDIT (3-16-2014): The arcs are possible locations of the last ping from one satellite. This fact is being reported very well by some broadcasters (so well you would wonder why there was ever a question) but still being called a "flight path" by other broadcasters. The "flight path" broadcasters are doing it wrong. Obviously I got my original information from the "flight path" sources, hence my confusion.

Aircraft on the ground with parking brake set.

The sad thing is we would of knew 99.9% of this information 2/3 days ago if the Malaysians were being transparent and honest.

Could a plane really land without being noticed? There clearly has been some sort of pre-planned situation, by the person who had control of the aircraft, to at least go somewhere (this is surely proved by the evidence that the plane flew for over 7 hours after).

Would it have to be the pilots that done this or would it have to be an "inside job"? Everybody seems to forget that there were 2 people on board travelling on stolen passports? This cargo story is surely clutching at straws.

No doubt some more contradictory, delayed information will be released by the Malaysian government in the coming days. They know tonnes more than they're letting on.