Pings?
 

Do we actually know that information is available from pings prior to the published 'last ping' at 08.11?

Somewhere earlier in this thread, a poster who seemed familiar with Inmarsat protocols suggested that the log of SATCOM responses is overwritten with each new response which means that only the final ping data exists. As earlier, hourly pings will only reveal a series of concentric arcs that show no more than that the aircraft was 'in the area', there seems no reason to withhold them.

This could be credible
 

The news item is very intriguing. The only issue I have
Is why did it take so long for this purported sighting in the
Maldives To hit the media ? Puzzling....

Hogger60.

When you switch on the TCAS & Transponder you DO NOT then get a primary return. You get a sqawk & a height readout (Modes A & C) from the transponder (unless Mode c is switched off - & if it is, you won't get TCAS advisory).
A Primary return is a blip of reflected electro magnetic energy, which contains NO coded information &, therefore, NO a/c identifying info. It is therefore, useless for TCAS purposes.

The most likely scenario seems to be the suggestion made of a technical problem, whoever was flying turned sharp left, possibly to get back to nearest runway, then without further input aircraft continued until fuel used.

The spanner in the works is the last verbal transmission attributed to the second officer - a seemingly 'normal' response after what seems to have been a traumatic event.

How 'normal' an R/T response this would be from a professional pilot I would question. It would surely be relevant to hear his level of R/T on his other flights, much this was in or out of character could say a lot.

@mrbigbird
@dicks-airbus

How do you account for the possibility of being stationary for 2 hours 59 mins....and it being possibly landed for this period?

The investigators monitoring the 'pings' - by time- or attenuation-shift, or whichever way they have managed to do it - have confirmed a strong probability of the last two 'pings' indicating transmission from the same location. Obviously they would have seen shift between the 2nd-from-last 'ping' and the penultimate, indicating the a/c was still moving at least up to the penultimate 'ping'. Minimum one hour in the same place, maximum ??? (once the 'pings' stopped).

Ditch into ocean, empty tanks, no major hull breach....one hour of buoyancy?

Perhaps MAS is doing all it can, but an article in Malaysia Today suggests that the plane could have (and should have) been intercepted by Malaysian Air Force jets, had they not been asleep at the wheel.

Air Force caught napping. MH370 could have been saved | Malaysia Today

I don't think the following is very likely - but then, we ran out of likely scenarios a week ago.

Someone suggested the possibility of the crew/passengers being exposed to toxic fumes. At some point we were told that a large shipment of mangosteens was on board. Is it possible that the fruit was over ripe/rotting and fermented? Could fumes from fermenting fruit have gotten into the cabin air supply and slowly intoxicated the crew, causing stranger and stranger actions?

Only on a flat earth within 88 miles of the radar head.

Ground Master 400 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ground Master GM 400 403 406 Thales Raytheon 3D air defense radar technical data sheet pictures - Army Recognition - Army Recognition

Sadly no mention of height finder accuracy, which might have separated wheat from chaff in the various 'pronouncements' from KUL.

Now this is getting interesting:

They released this info after 10 days..

Does it change existing assumptios?

The release of the Thai radar observation after 10 days is jaw dropping. Surely this was discussed with the Malaysians/US etc and has been discounted days ago and has been misleadingly entitled "just released"? ?

I haven't looked into the docs yet (thanks techgeek). How stuff (pings) is logged in the space equipment and then downlinked is probably not covered by the spec. At some point I was afraid logs could have been overwritten (I no longer am).

Earlier I reasoned/estimated on technical grounds why i would expect the precision derived of the pings to be better than 5km. I hope I do find something on the precision in the spec.

It was officially stated that primary radar track was correlated to sat ping arcs. That statement IMHO only makes sense
- if sat pings are sufficiently precise
- AND pings form the first two hours of flight (during primary radar coverage) are still in the log.

So all pings should be in the log, probably even pings from earlier flights or when the a/c was parked at the gate. Those earlier pings in the log from a definitely known (parking) position can even be used to calibrate the measurement of in flight pings to a better precision.

*IF* the precision is actually that good (5km), then taking into account known wind drift and making assumption on a/p settings (FMC versus HDG - Thanks aerobat77 ) and TAS I would expect you can come up with some pretty precise estimations of the flight path.

P.S.: This is only educated conjecture !! (But i think supported by the fact of SAR equipment being rushed to the south)

Cargo Freighter Hang Sheng I in Southern Ocean
 

Depending on "which" freighter this one is, it is either apparently 58 meters long, or 81 meters long. Either way, for a displacement hull operating a full throttle it would not make more than 12 knots. There is an upper limit correlated to the square root of the waterline length on a displacement hull after which point you can add infinite power and the hull will not move any faster (you get a huge wake wave, though! :)).

The more interesting question is: what is a tiny freighter doing way down there? Such smaller boats are typically coastal freighter. Could be a fish-processing or whale-processing vessel. Dunno. Just guessing. Don't count on that crew in those waters to spot any aircraft flotsam. Or spend effort hauling it in.

Even more confusion. When the first report about the Maldives broke, i though okay, it must be Somalia then, especially if you extend the satellitte arc around the globe, Somalia looks good. Then i read witnesses saying it was heading north to south east. That will either be it piling into the base at Diego Garcia, mistaken directional awareness of the witnesses or it was a USAF aircraft returning to DG.

Another Red Herring probably.

Maldives
 

Maldives position (the island Kudahuvadhoo) does not fall on the satellites arc of assumed last position/ping. So, either the satellite information is wrong or the "eye witnesses" are off/a hoax. I'd lean more towards the latter but at this time with all the information disaster in front of us...

The German news outlet "Die Welt" reports in their online article (http://www.welt.de/vermischtes/artic...-Flugzeug.html)
"Die Berichte von Größe und Farbe des mysteriösen Flugzeugs stimmten mit der Maschine der Malaysia Airline überein." = Reports of the size and color scheme of the mysterious plane are in concordance with a plane of Malaysia Airlines."

When the Maldives sighting report first appeared on the Daily Telegraph website, the time was quoted (as far as I recall) as about 0615 local. It also mentioned that it was low enough for the observers to make out the a/c doors.
The information is not on the latest update. Surely if the doors were visible, the logo/colour-scheme would be too? Could they possibly mean the lights in the cabin? Would it still be dark in The Maldives at that time in the morning?

@OleOle
 

Am I missing something here?


Surely these additional pings would just give us a series of extra arcs that tell us nothing more than the average speed for each hourly portion of the flight and whether the aircraft was traveling away from or towards the satellite?

I appreciate all ideas and inputs...
 

This is a forum and in such, members can publish whatever they want as long as they follow the rules. The MH370 event is for all of us an incredible and unreproducible event. I appreciate to read other opinions and ideas what could have happened and everybody can make his own conclusion. All I can say is, that since 9/11 for me EVERYTHING can be possible, think outside the box. All I can do is hoping the best but expecting the worst...

if they were over written we would have been told ( because no one wld be guilty of anything)

There are reason to not produce them I gave a hypothesis where by I believe it would be possible to show to show it was on a constant track/hdg but have no idea what it was or where in the area it was.

However I argue a constant track/hdg is more indicative of a southern route than a northern (nothing to detect them down there.

The excellent maps showing the fuel range, satellite 40 ring and Jorn short the southern arc considerably albeit it leaves the most inaccessible section of it as the target.

Right now it appears more effort is being focused south

Means nothing, just as Tsu's alleged (and I mean just that) debts meant nothing, scurrilous, the crew are totally innocent until proven otherwise beyond reasonable doubt.

This focus on the crew is simply the most convenient way to scapegoat as the media have to focus upon something supposedly tangible.