Kiwiconhead:
Um this is a territory of Australia. Populated with Australians.

Add to that the understanding that JORN is not manned 24/7. Whether or not the traces are available 'outside operating hours' is the classified bit

I believe it has been. From CBC: 'Police on Saturday went to the Kuala Lumpur homes of both the pilot and co-pilot of the missing plane, according to a guard and several local reporters. Authorities have said they will investigate the pilots as part of their probe, but have released no information about how they are progressing.'

Just the thing for Australian P3's performing a SAR in the southern arc :rolleyes:

@D.S.


From what I remember reading, Vietnam ATC informed Malaysian ATC about the missing a/c at 02.40L (Malaysian time). This is pretty much exactly the time when the mystery a/c disappeared from the military radar to the west of Malaysia. I imagine the news sent the Malaysians scurrying to replay their recordings of what radar operators had failed to see? So there were two instances of '02.40', which may have confused a few people.

Limitations of JORN
 

A further limitation of JORN, according to ADF publications, it doesn't scan like a conventional radar, but rather it is tasked to scan a particular 'tile' and either airborne or surface targets. I don't know how quickly it can be retasked, but it seems very unlikely that it would have accidentally painted MH370. If it deliberately painted that part of the sky then that's a whole other story.

MAS Fined in New Zealand
 

This was probably mentioned here earlier, but MAS was actually fined by usually mild New Zealand.

According to the report below, MAS deliberately violated an order not to allow a named passenger to leave the country. The passenger's passport details were falsified to circumvent automatic checks.

Malaysia Airlines has previous conviction for 'falsifying passport details to allow passenger on board' | South China Morning Post

I'm thinking about the final non standard radio transmission. As this happened after the ACARS was turned off I presume that someone has done an analysis of the transmission to see if it is either of the pilots voices. The opinion of some of the comments on this site is that it is an Americanism, is it a normal term of speech for Malay pilots?

Snowfalcon,

But every crew is only ever 90 seconds from voluntarily spearing into the ground/sea, as Egyptair showed.

Circuit breaker design isn't going to stop a deranged crew, or fraction thereof, of going postal.

Legacy aircraft can't have their power systems and the location of their avionics bays redesigned as a result of a one-off freak event. If you want a permanent locator, then fit an independent transponder.

I wonder if any knee-jerking legislators might consider having arbitrary numbers of security persons with much less education, training and judgement than the crew themselves installed in the jump seats to watch the crew and each other?

My thoughts exactly. What airfields has he practised landing at?

Question:

How long is passenger oxygen supposed to last? Obviously with fewer passengers it would last longer. With high anxiety it would last less.

How long will cockpit oxygen last supposing it is a different supply?

PS:

Remember the film Thunderball. Has the pilot got that at home too?

Todays Press Conference will be in about 30 minutes at 17:30 MYT (+8GMT)

It should be able to be seen on this video stream like previous press conferences.

Live TV | Astro Awani

Indeed, or for that case any other country's assets that may be able to help. I wouldn't think anybody would object, the hard bit would be keeping up with the consumables.

awblain,

No, of course, but they may think twice if they know they can be traced.

My post was actually partly inspired by a BEA study post-AF447 investigation, referred to somewhere in the early part of this thread. It had a slightly different theme - the scope was to detect when the airplane is doing unusual maneuvers (as AF447 did) and then communicate relevant alert messages over ACARS satcom.

So the main intention was the same - to ASAP inform the outside world that something unusual was happening to the plane, with some details (such as position)

I don't know what has been the result of the BEA study, which recommended implementation in aircraft getting certified in 2018 and in legacy aircraft by 2020 IIRC. I thought it notable in this context anyway.

Linking to the legacy equipment hardware is of course slightly more difficult than linking to the flight instruments (which presumably are already connected to ACARS in most a/c types) as in the BEA study. But there may be some easy wins, especially for future airplane designs.

If it was a hijacking, they end up on the northern arc.

If it was suicide, they end up on the southern arc.

At this stage of the investigation there is precious little real news and probably will not be until physical evidence is found, then it is a question of whether it is a criminal act (including suicide) or an accident.

Either way, I think one result of this might be that the "Loneliness of Command" might get a bit deeper: extra toilet and E&E both accessible only from Flight Deck, plus refreshments for flight crew passed in through double hatches.

Erwin Schroedinger said

The answer to that, sadly, might be this

Now I will say, reports are his home was also searched. (as seems to have been addressed by others)

But that quote might possibly give some indication as to why more official attention seems to be paid to Zaharie Ahmad Shah rather than Fariq Ab Hamid. It might also be why the prior against-policy actions of Fariq seemed to have flown so far under the radar as to not only apparently result in a lack of discipline, but even seemingly proved no resistance in his resent promotion to the cockpit of a 777.

(this works off my belief that the incident with the ladies/smoking can not be a one-time thing, and that the airline had to have been aware at some point. I could be wrong, of course, but...)

That said, if I had to pick one of the two as being involved, I would go with Zaharie. Mainly because of that initial sharp Ascent/Descent and the skill it likely would have taken to pull it off seemingly rather smoothly (even if was not as extreme as reported, it was still drastic.) Was Fairq experienced enough to do that? Then add in all the radar avoidance tricks and all... And on second thought, stuff such as that could be playing a huge role in their seemingly leaning towards Zaharie as well.

@ overthewing

Interesting. Do you happen to know where you might have read that?

Whittle

I prefer Sherlock Holmes's version: "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"

Why bother going to FL450 and then back to FL295 and making a lot of unexplainable turns?

Too many whys

Nothing new from the press conference, other than confirmation they've formally contacted and briefed representatives from governments in the expanded search zone. They're currently taking questions from Malaysian journalists. Other journos to follow.