@Speed of Sound

Where does the fact come from it was flying at 8.11?

evanplus - 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.


Most, if not all, of the experts have done a poor job of explaining this. If you're operating the aircraft efficiently your fuel flow actually decreases at low altitude(3%, 250kt vs. .84) so your endurance goes up slightly.


The big hit is on your range. Range is cut drastically at lower altitude.


Flying at optimum cruise altitude increases your fuel flow by approx. 3% but your speed increases resulting in a range increase of over 70%.


So endurance is fairly constant while range changes significantly.

A third conceivable reason could be that negative and positive g was introduced deliberately, to detain someone who would wanted to enter the FD.

The mirror image on the northern arc
 

From crikey.com blog

The head of the Australian Search:

"He wouldn’t be drawn on the possibility that MH370 has come down along the mirror image northern hemisphere arc from which the last known electronic trace from the jet could have come, other than to give the media a lucid explanation as to why both arcs were, signal wise, of equal validity."

Could someone with mapping software plot the mirror image on the Northern Arc of the current declared search area on the southern arc.

My hunch is that this will be smack bang over western Xinjiang, the homeland of the Uygurs.

If that turns out to be the case me thinks we might just have found the plane. Or where it has been hidden.

@dicks-airbus
 

It need not necessarily have been flying, it just needed to be capable of answering the enquiry from the satellite ie. SATCOM system switched on and being provided with sufficient power.

A fourth is that their height-finding with primary is not all it should be.

@ildarin: I read the post that on the flightsim PC specific practices were stored re. these destinations/fields. Who knows, maybe these were especially demanding or had nice scenery. May well mean nothing.

@ speed of sound

I have seen reports that claim the last two pings were at the same location which some suggested could mean it was on the ground.

Given that 59 minutes could have elapsed after landing before that second last pin the plane could actually have been on the ground for 2hrs 59 minutes.

"That oil rig worker"
 

As many posters (including me) have stated, an aircraft on MH370's track to SGN at FL350 would have been well below the horizon at the drilling rig's location.

An industry contact, who is in the offshore drilling business, told me that the purported author of the email exists and was working on the rig on the 8th.

Neither the owners of the rig nor the oil company that the rig is working for, was happy with this individual's actions. Not so much due to the unwanted publicity, but due to the deluge of communications from journalists.

Of course, the correct action for an individual in these circumstances would have been to contact the captain ( a drilling rig is a vessel, even though it is mostly anchored) and let him contact the appropriate SAR authority.

My contact speculated that this individual is probably no longer on the rig or even in Vietnam and is unlikely to be employed in the oil industry again.

A mirror image of the northern arc would be the southern arc. Was that what he meant?

If the image were reversed then it would have been recorded on the other satellite.

Just culture in action...

My understanding was that he emailed management in the company for which he works? If he'd told the 'captain' and had his story dismissed, this seems a reasonable course of action to me.

Correct practice maybe.India four two.but if it turned out that he had reported it and the report dismissed as it will cause us too much trouble and he still considered it correct what else was he to do.
How would suppressing it help the search. I think about the same as Indonesia refusing acccess to the search planes. (I am sure the US would have done the same though)

@mrbigbird

So if the above is true re. pings and if they landed, then they landed between the 3rd and 2nd last ping. Take the arc and go backwards along the line of pings with an average speed based on time contact lost minus time of last ping?

I'm a little puzzled by the Chinese statement that they've 'cleared' all the Chinese pax.

From NY Times:
Wasn't there one passenger travelling on a Chinese passport, where the passport owner was alive and well and had never lost or mislaid his passport? So do the Chinese government know who that passenger really was, in order to absolve him from suspicion?

fire in tbe wheel well
 

Not plausible to me that it would burn through the pressure hull to get to the innards without somebody noticing. But I'm not an expert. ;-)

.

From my understanding "mirror" means just that. The geometrical problem is symmetrical to the axis satellite<->LKP (from primary radar). Whatever information from previous pings there is, it remains symmetrical.

The southern ocean option probably takes the "flying dutchman" scenario into account, i.e the only conceivable reason why it would be there, is because it flew on a/p until fuel exhaustion.

The designated search area is where max range and ping arc intersect, i.e on the extreme end of the arc. Mirrored to the northern arc that would be in the Caspian Sea or maybe a little earlier due to jetstream? On the northern arc the "flying dutchman" isn't the only option, so it may not have gone in a straight line / great circle.

Thinking about it: If the FMC was in HDG mode the trajectory on the northern branch would have a different shape than on the southern branch. On the norther branch the trajectory would bend away from the center on the southern branch it would bend to the center. Stand to be corrected.

Obidiah post #5709 ...can be associated with practical logic, because normal, average reasonable people can one day be overcome with life's challenges, snap, and come off the rails. ...Just as Eqypt Air 990, LAM 470, Silk Air 185, and Ethiopean 702 just last month when the copilot had locked out the captain over Egypt and hijacked himself to Geneva. :{

Nobody is using hypothetical scenarios to define why to search any area. They are using last known position. Simple as that.

The last known position is anywhere along the north and south corridors.

You can join up without TCAS.