Flight Singapore Airlines SQ068 (SIA068)
 

this although it is weather radar will give an idea of the range it was operating over from Surathani to Butterworth.
Met there quote max range as 240 km. I would expect a lot better from military radar but physically at 415 km they claim to have painted at Butterworth and I think that is physically almost impossible unless the plane was flying very high level.
They did say Surathani radar detected it.

TMD Weather Radar

"Sending out" is surely transponder, not primary radar receiving a reflected signal from a skin paint? The "limits" referred to could as easily be display limitations as anything - the radar display only goes to <insert figure here>.

But then reporting in a second language has dogged pronouncements since Day 1.

Dash for Langkawi ?
 

This analysis that gives fire then a dash for Langkawi,with its 13000 ft runway, is good, but.....

https://plus.google.com/app/basic/st...fyiz3vdhbop04#

This reply is better:-

" Okay, the theory make sense, but you forgot some procedures in case of 'Cargo fire', 'Engine fire' or 'Cabin fire': Everytime you stick to your checklists. In this case the aircraft gives you ECAM actions! You have to work through this! Perfectly you can watch those Crew Resource Management on Sim Training Videos on YouTube. A good one is this: 'A380 Engine Fire - Pilotseye.tv' Link:PilotsEYE.tv - A380 EngineFire - SimulatorPattern Toulouse - Bonus DVD|BDAfter you analysed the problem as a pilot you inform ATC. You're right with: Aviate, Navigate, Communicate. Aviate: Autopilot on and work correctly. Check. Navigate: Autopilot still on. Communicate: Inform ATC: Short message, takes only few seconds! Then start ECAM actions. Watch the sim video. And the other ones. The Theory fits not to the outcoming information about disabled ACARS before last radio transmission etc. - They intercept an other airway captured by primary radar: IGARI - VAMPI - GIVAL - IGREX.*


- Inmarsat Satellite still gets requests from aircraft hours after disappearing. - No debris found in street of malacca. If it were on fire, look at other incidents, the crew were not able to fly for hours. they crashed within 1 hour!- They are more alternate and possible airports to land in that area.

As previously posted, dozens of pages back, typical acoustic beacons that conform to the spec operate on a frequency of 37.5kHz +/- 1 kHz

Also, as previously noted, and thanks to my Navy experience in ASW, towed array will run into some ambiet noise problems in that area, due to water depth. Not that they shouldn't try anyway, if that is a high probability search area. If you go back through the last fifty pages of this thread, you'll see why it isn't a high probability search area as of this writing.

nitpicker330
Thta was my takeaway as well. Someone noted that crossing language barriers the occasional nuance or context may be lost.

@RTD1

Or that it was at the limits of reception of its output power of 200watts (wow, didn't know that)

Useful information for anyone with transponder or SSR questions (pre mode s)

Transponder Basics - AVweb Features Article

Edit; End piece from the above 1998 article;

Possibly (as others here have suggested) a standalone version of the above will be mandated as a result of MH370

FBW94, answered comprehensively, scroll back.

"China searches own territory for missing Malaysia Airlines jet


7:26 AM, March 18, 2014 | 0 Comments

China is hunting for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 over its own territory, state media reported Tuesday, as the country also said that it has found no terrorism links to the 154 Chinese nationals that were on the missing jetliner.

Chinese Ambassador to Malaysia Huang Huikang said background checks on Chinese nationals didn't uncover any evidence suggesting they were involved in hijacking or an act of terrorism against the plane, according to the state Xinhua News Agency.

The remarks will dampen speculation that Uighur Muslim separatists in far western Xinjiang province might have been involved with the disappearance of the Boeing 777 and its 239 passengers and crew early on March 8."


Question: now if they and everyone else seems so supremely confident that there is no way that the missing aircraft could have avoided radar through Thailand India or China - why are they now confirming they are indeed searching their own territory?

If I remember correctly, didn't 'suicide videos' of the participants start to appear in the public domain fairly soon after the attack?

DAY 11 and still no new ideas?
 

I am not in any way trying to present an explanation of what has happened to MU370. Instead after watching the news shows talk on and on, one thing comes to mind. One of these reports talked about the altitudes that the aircraft was tracked at. From the low 20,000 foot range to 45,000 feet which as I understand it is above the certified altitude of the 777. So in my mind there are 2 reasons that would explain such deviations in altitude. The first being the aircraft was experiencing mechanical difficulties in which the pilots were having a hard time controlling. Or, the cockpit crew was no longer a part of the equation and some one else was in charge.

Not been around here for about 5 days so 'm sorry if this has already been asked.

Has the projected range charts for this flight been calculated at maximum operating heights/speeds? I noticed the press were saying the aircraft could have decended to as low as 5/6000ft to avoid radar but this would have had a drastic effect on fuel consumption surely.

oldoberon - How much of this tankered fuel would you burn just to carry it, ie more weight less MPG.

however this extra weight may be the reason why max pax was not available as opposed to some very heavy freight in the hold.








You burn slightly less than 3% per hour, of any additional weight carried. Simple rule of thumb is 3% for mental math.

It's a shame someone with technical knowledge cannot immediately ask for clarification.

"Unknown aircraft" = Primary
"sending out" = Secondary

Unknown aircraft + Sending = The primary was tracked constantly(unknown) and the SSR was intermittently transmitting garbage data (it's mode s so even without an assigned code you still know who it is)

Perfect example of poor communication.

I have to admit my ignorance:

In the T7, if the FMC is in HDG mode, does that mean it follows course over ground, true course or magnetic course ? And likewise if you are e.g. in Phuket and set e.g. Ushuahia as next waypoint, would it automatically follow a great circle ?

Knowing the answers to these question and knowing all of the "ping arcs" may give some clues as to how the AP was set on that last journey.

Quite simply, crash or hijack?


Malaysia Airline MH370: 9/11-style terror allegations resurface in case of lost plane - Telegraph

China again.
 

There sure do seem to be a lot of stories popping up tonight about China.

As has been the pattern since day one it is investigative journalism that is providing all the new legitimate leads and leaving the authorities in KL to play catch up.

RT News.

Connecting the dots: Missing Malaysia Airlines plane a terror attack aimed at China?
Get short URL Published time: March 18, 2014 09:28

Students walk past a giant mural featuring missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 displayed on the grounds of their school in Manila's financial district of Makati on March 18, 2014 (AFP Photo / Ted Aljibe)
Tags
Accident, Asia, Intelligence, Planes
While the terror angle behind the missing Malaysia Airline Boeing 777 plane is being probed, there are several questions which, though unanswered yet, can help in piecing together this jigsaw puzzle.

CIA Director John Brennan made a significant remark on March 12 that his agency has “not at all” ruled out terrorism as possibly having played a part in the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. He also said that there have not been any credible claims of responsibility from terrorist groups for the plane’s disappearance.

Obviously Brennan couldn’t have been unaware of claim of responsibility for the plane’s disappearance by the Chinese Martyrs’ Brigade – unheard of before now. This outfit had released a statement through an impossible-to-trace encrypted Hushmail anonymous service on March 9 saying: "You kill one of our clan, we will kill 100 of you as payback." According to the statement it was a response to the Chinese government for its persecution of the Uyghur ethnic minority.

This implies that the CIA chief attaches no importance to the claim, something which Malaysia's acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein has debunked in an on-record statement.

The needle of suspicion over the mysterious disappearance of MH 370 would inevitably point to the Chinese Uighurs if investigators conclude that the Malaysian plane was indeed a victim of terrorism.

The Muslim Uighur community is one of China’s 56 ethnic minorities which is in majority in the restive Xinjiang Autonomous Region. They have had a brief taste of independence as East Turkestan at least twice (in 1933 and 1950) but this independence proved to be short-lived. The Uighurs still harbor ambitions of becoming an independent state, a red rag for Beijing.

However, no such conclusive evidence has emerged yet. The Uighurs have come under the scanner because of ‘circumstantial evidence’. The MH 370 episode has come close on the heels of the March 1 terror incident in which knife-wielding assailants had killed at least 29 innocent people at a train station in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming.

Also, of the 227 passengers on board MH 370 (apart from 12 crew members) at least 153 were Chinese nationals, a fact that must have been known to the perpetrators.

Besides, Uighurs continue to have links with Al-Qaeda-affiliated group, Jemaah Islamiyah, which has a presence in Malaysia, as well as the Philippines and Indonesia.

Nevertheless, there may be several reasons why the shadowy group’s claim is bogus and is just trying to make hay while the sun shines. First, the outfit has not given any details of the plane which is being searched by 12 countries’ navies. Six days after its disappearance, nobody knows what has happened to the ill-fated plane. Second, it may just be an attempt to whip up ethnic tensions between Uighurs and Han Chinese in China.

Third, hardcore terrorists seldom claim responsibility for their acts, as shown by the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database according to which the perpetrators claimed responsibility for their acts in only 14 percent of the more than 45,000 terrorist acts that have occurred since 1998.


Some 20 activists demonstrate in front of the Chinese embassy in Vienna to protest against the repression of China's Uyghur minority in the northwestern region of Xinjiang (AFP Photo / Dieter Nagl)

Was China the prime target of the terrorists, if indeed it was a terror attack? Which terror group could be behind the suspected plane crash? It might be the Chinese Uighurs, but the actual perpetrator might still claim responsibility for this outrage which is too dastardly and too brutal a crime for any terror outfit to take responsibility without alienating the people. Besides, isn’t it possible that the real perpetrators would like to keep the waters muddied and lie low so that more attacks could be launched in the near future.

There is also a possibility that no organized terror outfit per se was involved in the act and instead it may have been a lone wolf (two wolves in the current context as the needle of suspicion is pointing to two men with "Asian features" who boarded the plane on stolen passports). Who will take responsibility for the terror attack if the perpetrators, on suicide mission, themselves perished?

Of course the ground staff of Malaysia Airlines and several Malaysian agencies are guilty of gross dereliction of duty. First they allowed two Asian-looking men who were traveling as European citizens to pass unchallenged. Second, they failed to run a check of the men’s stolen passports against Interpol's vast database of more than 40 million lost and stolen travel documents. Just these two preliminary precautions would have prevented the tragedy.

The dice seem to be heavily loaded in favor of China as prime target of the terror attack theory. There are several circumstantial reasons for this and China has repeatedly figured in the entire narrative thrown up so far.

The two prime suspects with "Asian features", who boarded the plane on stolen passports of two Europeans Christian Kozel (Austria) and Luigi Maraldi (Italy), had purchased their one-way tickets together from Pattaya (Thailand) and were due to fly on to Europe from Beijing. This eliminated the need for the duo to apply for a Chinese visa and undergo further checks.

Thailand has had a festering problem for years with Islamist terror outfits like Al-Qaeda in Southeast Asia, and China has suspected some of its restive Uyghur population to be in touch with terror modules in Southeast Asia.

Malaysia itself has figured prominently in the Uighur saga in recent years and Uighurs do have a reason to hate Malaysia, a country which deported several Uighurs to China in 2011 and 2012 for abortive bids to travel on false passports.

Uighurs are a Turkic ethnic group living primarily in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in China, where they are officially recognized as one of the ethnic minorities. In 2009 violent riots broke out in the region’s capital Ürümqi that mainly targeted Han (ethnic Chinese) people. Over 1,000 Uighurs were arrested and detained during the riots, over 400 individuals faced criminal charges. Nine were executed in November 2009.
However, the most important question is whether there is any linkage between the Malaysia Airlines plane episode and the March 1, 2014, weird attack in the south-western Chinese city of Kunming, in which knife-wielding assailants killed at least 29 innocent people at a train station? The two episodes are too close for comfort for the Chinese. If an inter-connection is established, it would be really very bad news for Beijing.

There may not be any answers to the questions yet but these are leading questions which hopefully should be answered in the next few weeks. Hopefully it would not take very long before the wreckage of the missing plane is spotted and recovered and the Black Box, containing the Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), is recovered now that every major navy in the region is employed and satellites are being used to track the missing flight.

The discovery of the wreckage itself would proffer a clue to whether the plane had a sudden mid-air explosion or whether it nose-dived into the sea because of mechanical failure. A violent bombing would inevitably throw the wreckage to great distances – scores of kilometers at least – while in the latter scenario the wreckage would be confined to a much smaller area.

Evanelpus
 

In your absence, 'projected range charts' have been replaced by 'ping arcs' which allegedly show the last received 'pings' returned to the Inmarsat system.

As these were timed at 08.11 the aircraft would have been at the outer limit of it's range anyway however it was being flown, therefore close to if not already at fuel exhaustion.

surely these devices tell the holder where they are not possible searchers.

WEhat I would like to see ( and I don't care about pilots or bean counters just pax)

A gps receiver and dedicated satcom transponder

Both electrically and physically isolated from all other aircraft systems.

It should be in a rear fuselage location outside the pressure cabin but in it's own enclosed cavity. the power supply should be a separate bus with an inline monitoring device. If system demands too much power of severe fluctuations occur it is disconnected. Disconnection triggers the cavity being filled with nitrogen and loss of signal on the satellite triggers a preset ground plan and notifies crew. All do able in my opinion but one problem I see is polar routes as they must lose sat communication.

They're in the database I use, too.

That's the way the database comes.