Bono:


I agree with you. Loose lips sink ships and crash planes.

so, anything you know from your work, keep it quiet.

Razoray,

I imagine you are familiar with the recent Ethiopian incident where the FO decided to divert (alone in the cockpit ) from Roma to Geneve, you have the answer to your question there I believe.

NO debris
 

Im still baffled there isn't a single piece of debris located. AF447 wasn't exactly a heavy impact and this still left some traces albeit 50 passengers or so, a tail section and other objects. I cant believe a single body has not been found? Nothing....im not insinuitating conspiracy theories here, but there must be something floating, i can't believe it sank in one piece with nothing floating to the surface?!

Lots of good discussion but it is important that pilots do not give away security secrets about their operation. It can be seen in another part of PPRuNe that there have been close to 11 million views of this discussion.

"security through obscurity"
 

Re: "Please Do Not Reveal Critical Security Info".

Coming from the IT world, it is always interesting to me to see these attitudes, which we refer to as "security through obscurity", and consider to be not-very-secure.

In designing secure systems in the IT world we (most of us) take one thing for granted - that the "attacker" *does* have full knowledge of how the system operates - everything apart from those *actual* secrets (e.g. passwords) that protect the system.

Moving on from that, it is considered beneficial (by many) to expose the workings of any system to full public scrutiny, on the basis that any flaws will be more likely to be spotted.

Whether or not that is an appropriate model for the aviation world is a different matter.

But I *will* observe that these "operational secrets" are not going to be hard to come by for a well-funded adversary.

captains_log,

With respect, an aircraft descending at almost 10,300 FPM with little or no forward airspeed AF would certainly be in the "heavy impact" category. In the Alaska MD case it hit the water almost flat according to pilots who watched it, they said it was a large splash and then pretty much disappeared. Debris came after...

Descending at 10,912 feet/min into the ocean is not a heavy impact????

wes, the old "phantom page" thing seems to have returned due to the immense traffic this thread is getting. Have run into about 7 different phantom pages in the past few days.

In the former case the LKP was pretty accurate and the time late was small.

Here we have no real LKP and the time late is in days.

Leeuwins
 

Lonewolf 50

The aussies have 2 -Leeuwin and Melville albeit based on the other side of Australia.

...and they can radar the ocean floor and come up with a picture as if there was no water on the floor

Each ship is fitted with a STN Atlas 9600 APRA I-band navigational radar.[1] The vessels are fitted with a C-Tech CMAS 36/39 hull-mounted high-frequency active sonar.[1] In addition, the ships carry an Atlas Fansweep-20 multibeam echo sounder and an Atlas Hydrographic Deso single-beam echo sounder, and a Klein 2000 towed sidescan sonar array.[1] The sonars and echo sounders allow the vessels to chart waters up to 6,000 metres (20,000 ft) deep.[2] There are three sets of davits fitted; although normally used to carry the 10.7-metre (35 ft) Fantome class survey boats, they can be configured for other small craft.[1] In addition, they carry a RHIB and two utility boats.[1] The Leeuwins are fitted with a helicopter deck for an AS 350B Squirrel helicopter (detached from 723 Squadron), although lack long-term hosting facilities.[1] They are armed with two single 12.7 mm machine guns.[2] Compliments Wikipedia

There is hope yet.

I can't see how the autopilot would stay on after loss of all generators, there's a time lag for the rat to work. Anybody tried it in the sim.
If the aircraft sank in one piece the air in the wings would not be enough to keep it a float , especially as the cabin fills.
The wings however would be crushed by the water pressure and then still with trapped air inside floated up.

I think you all severely underestimate what the "Bad Guys" already know.

Many First Class or Business Class passengers have first hand knowledge simply by observing what goes on in plain view.

For others it is very easy to Google for information and the basics of flight deck security is readily available online.


SKYbrary - Flight Deck Security

CEO's answer today to L-I in cargo
 

I have my own recording from the live conf. Replayed and checked. Agree he did not say "this", however he did not say "general" either. The question was very specific to the a/c and cargo and it's impact. Not easy to dodge that by generalities I would think. However may be wrong on this.:confused:

as you said the question was specific to mah370, so unless the answer was stated to be generic, it is reasonable to believe the answer was also specific to this aircraft.

I believe HMS Echo is steaming there, ETA next 48hrs(?); she has at least one sounding line (complete with lead weight) over the stern & a rumoured second over the starboard quarter but this has never been officially confirmed. In any case, IF there is anything down there she will find it.

I looked through the spec of the Leeuwin. There is nothing there that can see the seabed 6000 metres down, despite what Wikipedia says. Unless they have a deep tow system for the sidescan and a suitable depth rated sidescan fish which I believe is unlikely. Its not something a coastal survey vessel would normally need.

All they need is a hydrophone on a long cord to listen for the black box ping.

This is questionable.

If the water was not too deep and the tanks were not crushed by the water pressure then they may well break free and float. I believe that was the case with the RNlN Atlantic that crashed off the west coast of Scotland. IIRC parts of the aircraft indeed surfaced after a day or two.

In very deep water, unless the wings broke off early in the descent before the pressure crushed the tanks then maybe. If it went very deep then I would expect the tanks to be crushed.

The other question is what would float. If fuselage was largely undamaged then there may be little escape of buoyant material.

HMS ECHO
 

She will certainly be an added asset.

Data shows she has a record of finding things - eg on central Mediterranean surveying the approaches to the ports of Tripoli and Khoms on the coast of Libya to improve Admiralty charts of the area. She was looking for wrecks that might be hazards to shipping. In 10 days she found the wrecks of one liner, two merchant ships, one landing craft, two fishing vessels, two barges and two large sunken pontoons. She also found at least half a dozen lost shipping containers. The landing craft is believed to be the Libyan Navy Polnocny-class landing ship Ibn Qis, which was burnt out on exercise in 1978.

Albeit in shallower waters but believe she has deeper water capability.

meekmok
rate of descent. - not accurate.
if it had been in cruise when the aircraft or crew had a catastrophic event it would have been in trim with an ias of around 280knots. Assuming both engines flamed out at the same time then it would have descended at 280 knots plus a bit because of the lack of thrust vector from the underslung engines.
This probably gave a ROD in the order of 3000fpm..which might have fractionally decreased as it came into ground effect.
If this didn't happen and it went into a spiral descent it would have broken up in the air.