Yes but you have to be looking for an aircraft or catch it inadvertently. There are multiple aircraft in flight caught by serendipitously by Google Earth in their satellite photograph captures. For example:

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/...09_634x482.jpg

and

http://ursispaltenstein.ch/blog/imag..._in_flight.jpg

If the truth is being told by the various agencies, after so long, it must be nigh impossible to:
a. keep all those people and their mobile phones quiet,
b. select somewhere to land so remote that no one sees it
c. take an aeroplane load of passengers hostage and not tell anyone.

I hear about satellites pinging, weak radar trails, mobile phone batteries etc but that doesn't really prove anything.
I think Occam's Razor comes into play and that would suggest the wreckage of the aircraft is at the bottom of the sea within a few hundred miles of where it was lost on radar. It just hasn't been found yet.

Ian, that the ghost plane is flying superb formation on the aircraft in the picture. Hmmm, who was out practicing formation flying that day? :}:cool::hmm:

previous pings
 

@ekpilot

Short answer is yes. I believe this fits the category of information withheld. One can posit a range of reasons for the authorities slowly releasing tidbits they have known for some time. Only a fool thinks that we know what stakeholders know in this incident, not yet known to be an accident.

@Snowfalcon2
You are not thinking of the impact such a regulation has on the industry.

This would require that every aeroplane has a realtime data transmission of every system. Including everything! It's basically more data than the FDR records transmitted real time.

Have you thought about the finical implication and time frame required to implement this regulation?

Pit down, I can say in my airline there a several layers to ensure the correct people are on the flight deck. Having said this, I suppose anything is possible.

So now we have another game changer. If this is some form of terrorist attack, nod the law makers come up with the idea that everyone on the flight deck has to be confirmed who they are, then who confirms the confirmation? And who confirms that the confirmer is confirmed to confirm?

We have a complete melt down in air travel, and the other side has finally won.

While we are on the subject, who is checking those that check for our yogurts? And who checks them?

This thing could result in the complete shut down of all flights, world wide, unless sensible heads prevail.

This has been covered as well, you can easily get a device that jams all mobile phones so keeping phones quiet is a piece of cake.

Yep, i think the idea of the plane crashing around where it was lost on radar has been pretty much eliminated after 8 days of SAR

I think people are forgetting the far eastern face saving culture. They have locked themselves into a spiral which is rapidly disappearing up their own fundaments.

I posted it before, there are only TWO facts:

1. Where the transponder transmitted last
2. Where the ACARS last transmitted.

Anything else cannot be proven yet!!!!!

To quote Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, via Sherlock Holmes,

"When you have eliminated the improbable the impossible must be true"

The aircraft is somewhere not too far from its last KNOWN position.

Yes but until it is clear it was terrorism, there is no terror. At least for me there isn't. I wouldn't be any more worried boarding a flight tomorrow than I was before.

They didn't have to in that case(s). It was clear that it was no accident.

In this particluar case of MH370 it is still completely unclear whether it was a tragic accident, suicide or terrorism. (I leave the totally alien scenarios out).
If the wreckage will never be found it will remain as a mystery and Holywood films will be made about the stranger theories but what else?
Maybe some improvments re Satelite tracking and possibly making it more difficult to switch to 'staelth' mode.
I can't see why on the basis of the known facts huge changes and expenses for security would have to be made. I can rather see some alarm in the HR departments of airlines from what we know so far, how ever sad and uncomforting that is.

So how effective did that work from a Terrorist's perspective?
And which Terrorist for that matter. The Uighurs? Al Qaeda? Czechen? One of the many others e.g. from the Middle East?
You see where I'm getting at?
There seems to be a naive thinking that tere is one World Terror Organisation Ltd. And all are working together to achieve one common goal.
Total Bo**ocks.
That's simply the result of Western Mass Media simplification. Reality is much more complex.

There's been much discussion regarding the wording of the final contact. If one of the pilots was up to no good and wanted to disguise the fact and leave as much confusion as possible, using a signoff that's non-standard but not odd enough to cause immediate concern would be a simple way to do it.

This is not true. If the ACARS went through a normal log-off sequence then it was shut down deliberately. If it just stopped reporting then it could have been some other reason. As it has been said multiple times 'the ACARS was deliberately switched off' that implies that it went through a log-off sequence and tidy shut down, something it would NOT have done if the power to it was cut by the circuit breaker being tripped.

Inmarsat/SITA are far east asian? Which face are they saving? Satellite logs and Primary radar is an invention too? Is Elvis Presley still alive ?

Radars are there to scare mainly
 

Pontius Navigator, GlueBall : If we are looking at a situation that national air defense radars are there to mainly scare and not do the job the taxpayers paid millions for, then it makes it a risky proposition. Now, entire world (including some very bad people) are aware that if a giant B777 can get lost without a trace over south east Asia, then their KingAirs or Gulfstreams carrying drugs, weapons etc. can get away with it as well . Two, it displays a lack of seriousness, as the Indian guy in the article said "nothing much happens at night" which made me sit up. The radars need to be constantly monitored by atleast a pair of eyes and incursions by aircraft flying incognito need to be checked out. If Malaysia had scrambled some rusty F16s at a big plane flying around with no identification, not only millions spent on this massive search could have been saved but who knows, those 239 souls might still be with us.

There is no checklist that I know of that would direct a crew to put a transponder into 'STBY', which incidentally, does not remove power from the unit.

Any electrical smoke/fire checklist has the crew de-power/isolate busses via the elec panel and/or circuit breakers, not individual components (unless it is definitively known as being the offending kit).

It's obvious we have a lot of armchair wannabes on this thread. Sit tight, the relevant (and knowledgeable) authorities are working overtime on this. They know leagues more than any one person on this site.

Yes - With the transponder we would expect another signal ½ second later and we didn't get it.
But we don't know when the next ACARS message was to be expected.

Are we really claiming that the only mechanism for orderly shutdown of the ACARS transmission is deliberate crew action? That the software/system does not provide for other paths (consistent with an accident or some failure scenario) leading to an orderly shutdown?

I would say it would take an in-depth knowledge of the system and its software for anyone to be able to make such a claim.

Other question: would it really come to mind to someone who wants to hide to shut down the ACARS? To shut that down first and then ten minutes later, the transponder? The opposite sequence would make so much more sense. Or both roughly at the same time.

What you've failed to glean from news reports is that the ACARS sent a final message indicating the active waypoint in the FMS had changed to one that gave the initial left-hand turn.

In other words, it had been programmed to turn by someone in the cockpit. This aircraft did not go into a heading mode. It was a deliberate, and premeditated turn, if the investigators' leaks to the media are to be believed.

This is why they know 'conclusively' that the airplane was hijacked/piloted on its rogue course.

If the truth is being told by the various agencies, after so long, it must be nigh impossible to:
a. keep all those people and their mobile phones quiet,
b. select somewhere to land so remote that no one sees it
c. take an aeroplane load of passengers hostage and not tell anyone.

I hear about satellites pinging, weak radar trails, mobile phone batteries etc but that doesn't really prove anything.
I think Occam's Razor comes into play and that would suggest the wreckage of the aircraft is at the bottom of the sea within a few hundred miles of where it was lost on radar. It just hasn't been found yet.




I agree Strake.

The T7 entered service in 1995 (United airlines) and I believe that 1178 are now in service with many more on order. The aircrafts development in the late eighties focused on the use of state of the art materials and composites to reduce the aircrafts weight and improve its economic viability. All believed at the time that these new materials would be tough and stand the test of time. It is evident that this is not the case. Last September authorities issued a global warning regarding the structural integrity of the T7 following reports of cracks and corrosion and the FAA issued a directive requiring airlines to inspect their T7 fleets. For comparison in the late eighties I wrote a prospectus for a company to purchase a BAC 1-11 in an executive jet configuration and I researched the aircraft type’s history of airframe integrity and found in its twenty years of service there was no record of any problem. I last flew on a BAC 1-11 in 2000 and the aircraft was then nearly forty years old.

Until such time as hijacking/ conspiracy theories are proved we might consider the fact that one of the T7’s that developed the cracks and corrosion had only been in service for fourteen years and there may be ongoing problems with structural integrity of the fleet. My gut instinct has never wavered that MH370 lost contact when it suffered a fatal decompression as a result of structural failure and if this is the case then this hasn’t happened since the Comets in the fifties.

The US and Malaysian agenda will be to deflect the public’s attention from the probable cause of the disappearance of the AC for obvious reasons. The radar contacts and satellite comms probably relate to other AC/drones. I hope I am proved wrong.

I was referring to turning something OFF, NOT putting it in standby. Please read for comprehension before you criticize my post. Thanks for your point on this procedure. Criticism of my not quite understanding that point that is accepted.
Insight is appreciated.
Surtchris
Have you considered why that is?
You have added quite a bit of dross to a technical assessment on risks of fatigue failure. If you had stuck to that, your PoV would be worthy of consideration. By adding the rubbish, I am not sure what to make of your assessment. Specific to the drones ... if the drones have not gone down, then the folks who run them can identify the signals from the drones and eliminate them from consideration in the signals analysis.

I'll bet a case of Guinness on your position being not the answer.