The first officer made a laid back radio response after the problems started. This is the whole mystery of the scenario.

That is, of course, unless the first officer was unaware at the time that major systems had been put out of action prior to him giving the RT response.

But if 3rd hourly ping is at the same reduced spacing to the 2nd one , as the 2nd one is to the 1st one that constant spacing tells you it is on a constant heading/trk but nothing about that heading or track.. Do you agree that?

Now you may think that is unimportant or of no use others will disagree a) it is an extra known and B) in IMHO it indicates a flight south, constant track north is eventually going to be spotted by the ground or another aircraft visually.

There was also another post by someone on rhumb lines and loxodromes and he reckons with the other ping arcs you could calculate track and heading do a search on the thread. Way over me.

Be careful with interpreting the "40 degrees" of the red arc.

The angle from the satellite to the opposite limbs of the Earth is only about 19 degrees, since it's very high.

The 40 degrees is the elevation angle of the satellite from the aircraft. [Thanks Sensor Validation]

?Silent Flying MH370
 

Just try to fit that with 3 radar centers equipped with high tech equip. albeit asleep, but recording + normally fairly heavy air-routes crossing that area.:uhoh:

flash8,

But if it was shot down near Malaysia, even at 5000 feet, someone would have found wreckage at sea or on the ground.

Then the "red arcs" would have to be nonsense; why would Inmarsat damage its reputation by publicizing nonsense?

Skyman01, thanks for posting the link. A sensible theory until we know what happened.

Some of the conjecture is so outlandish it's scary and the worst is maligning reputations of the pilots without proof.

Just another wild speculation...
 

Prompted by this remark a few pages back:
The original assumption was that a possible scenario was smoke in the cockpit, which caused the pilots to "aviate, navigate, communicate" and start by turning off stuff to try and stop what might have been a fire or an electrical fault generating smoke. Let's assume for a moment that it was the communications equipment that had a failure; that's not unheard of as far as I understand. Let us also assume that the pilots may not have been at the top of their performance, given the time of day and an uneventful flight. Does it sound preposterous to you experts to propose it might have happened like this:
- Comms equipment develops electrical problem, fails shortly after A/C leaves Malaysian airspace
- Pilots start trying to identify the source of the problem, and in doing so also switch off the radar transponder and eventually unselect ACARS
- At the same time, being trained pilots, they divert, but fail to recognize Kuantan as their best option and instead head towards Langkawi or Penang (for whatever reason - stress, familiarity, you name it)
- Things continue to go pear shaped and the pilots' actions start to become erratic, leading eventually to the plane steering a course over the open ocean which otherwise doesn't make sense.

I would be first to accept that the scenario is weak and can't explain why the aircraft would follow the arc that it seems to have done, but at least there is no Blofeld-style supervillain needed here. What do you think?

Not sure what you mean by fine channels but the inmarsat in use there has global beam ( the area footprint and regional beams within that that add up to the same coverage, it does not have the narrow beam of the next generation 1-4 alpha sats.

I read that Chris Goodfellow blog a couple of days ago and it made perfect sense, even though I am not a pilot, but know quite a few. I wonder if they are searching that sea area on a line SW of Langkawi.

this thread starts really to go FUBAR :8

Yes, the malaysian military shoots down a malaysian widebody with +200 people on board - over malaysian mainland because they believe it must be somebody bad on board since the plane returns. they do it with a super secret missile so absolutely no wreckege is found by 26 countries searching after the shoot down . i tend to agree this is the most probable scenario, well put :ok:

Interesting theory from Business Insider
 

Far too logical. Will never attain V1.

missing ping data
 

The missing data/arcs deduced from earlier pings tells us either:

They don't have the data

or

They do have the data but don't wish to publicly release it [at this stage]


I suspect its the latter (since INMARSATs business is, afterall, data), but I'm afraid that opens up a whole host of new questions, some of which are quite political/troubling...

Its shame my original post on the 10th has vanished. To recap


I commented that the initial rate of turn and subsequent direction would hold some clues.
The rate of turn has still not been reported, lets guess it was 1 or 0.5 ?


I commented on Primary radar which I was told was not available . .
Just to nudge that radar debate along: Even Air Defence Primary radar is sometimes quite inaccurate on altitude, although it does estimate altitude .. so someone needs to fly the route in a 777-200 and see what range of altitudes a level flight returns on each of the same radar screens and where. Then they need to fly the Satellite 40 degree route using the same equipment for similar reasons


I've still not heard of all mobile operators in the region being asked to search for registration attempts by any phone on the flight . .


In fact Sherlock Holmes would be pretty much in despair by now . . .

FJDG its not so secretive as many wonder or wish to be. FYI its used as an official civil ETOPS alt in the Indian Ocean, and some Civil airliners//airlines also are flying there from time to time. Portuguese (my country and aviation colleagues) Air Luxor, (nowadays HiFly) used to went there on very regular basis operating for UK and Oz DoD's with their A330s. Some videos and pics right here on my laptop btw.
Base has more than 3500 staff, between mil and civil, US&UK...so, they are all maintaining a T7 under their noses without saying a single word, sitting shiny on the paradisiac sunny ramp, and feeding/homing almost 300 souls including children in total secrecy?...dont think so :p
Another interesting theory to debate...how many pages this very thread are goin to reach?...i bet 373
PS: Indian Ocean its indeed immense and vast...as well as the West Xinjiang Province.

oldoberon,

I meant that if there is any spectral information recorded, you could get a Doppler shift from the received frequency at the satellite.

Unless the aircraft is flying on a track perpendicular to the satellite, like the red arc, it has an approach or recession velocity, and so could give a link between direction and speed, depending on whether the signal from the aircraft was sufficiently narrow and consistent in frequency to measure the shift hour by hour, and the satellite measures frequency sufficiently precisely.

I suspect it doesn't.

I agree with you that the Inmarsat-3 over the Indian Ocean has a single beam that offers coverage out to 82 degrees away from the point beneath the satellite measured around the Earth.

From the quality and content of a large proportion of the posts here, I would guess they are coming from the media, which could be indicated by the number of first time posters.

Some of the theories are quite alarming to say the least, and if people stopped repeating the same questions and info the whole thread would most likely be 50% smaller with more factual information.

It's unlikely Inmarsat kept anything but the last ping, but perhaps a US spy satellite logged all of them?

Knowing the round trip times for all pings, and assuming MH370 maintained a constant ground speed, plotting the course hour by hour would be a trivial matter.

It's understandable that INMARSAT doesn't publicly release all the data, but I suppose it's been made available to selected parties in order to guide the search efforts.

Above The Clouds.

Stay cool, it's a gossip forum not a debating society.

Ornis

Yes it does. Seems easier to just set up a predetermined automatic periodic "I'm active - do you have any reports for me?/"can I send you a report?" type connection on absolutely everything coming off the line than to try to establish/disconnect such a connection each time an airline might subscribe/unsubscribe from whatever contract(s) - which also includes each time a plane is taken out of an airlines service, so it is not only an airline subscribes/unsubscribes situation.

We also have a couple mentions that almost every airline subscribes to such/similar reports, so not getting it/something is seemingly the exception, not the rule, making the predetermined connection even more likely, imo

Besides, obviously there was such a connection here (well, based off the information we have been told) so why are we questioning it? But even if you really just insisted on knowing why, would you not be better off taking that up with INMARSAT/MAH/Boeing? I mean, how am I supposed to be able to perfectly explain all the thoughts behind what they have supposedly done?

And I am not sure either way if Boeing/RR definitely receives a copy of all ACARS reports (I would think there are some they do, some they just don't have need to know and therefore don't. Boeing & RR bother say they don't have "data" from this one, so obviously some reports they don't, right?) But regardless, either way I am pretty sure it has no barring on the confirmed attempted connection between INMARSAT & the Plane that we supposedly know about because it was an attempt to connect for a non-subscribed Boeing AHM report.