What's it doing now ???
 

Words of wisdom from anther forum: "A word of caution is always given to pilots when first learning the LNAV/VNAV system: it's best to study well and always keep an eye on what it's doing. It is only as good as the person punching the buttons, and the most common thing heard in today's modern cockpits is "What's it doing now???""

Latest map of the search areas and whats been located can be found here

MH370

Where we are now
 

RE: Coagie, I won't address your personal attacks.
Are you sure that you understand what I meant by obfuscate?

I am in agreement with the way this forum has been moderated. I have no complaints about the redundant and off topic posts being removed. I've read most of them, there's no loss in the ones I've seen removed. This forum is for discussing the disappearance of MH370; IMO anything not germane to that discussion should be removed, including redundant posts.

I think that the stage we are now at will be seen as the "looking for a debris field" portion of the effort locate the wreckage. There are specialized vessels who are best used in their design mode, searching the bottom, but the search effort almost certainly must find a debris field first; anything from a 777 would make it possible to make a logical prediction for the likely location of the source, and from there a search with some possibility of success can be mounted for the location of the bulk of the wreck. The ping seems to me to be a long shot.

If the plane broke up on impact, as likely, there will be floating debris. It's unlikely that there will be significant radar reflections from the small pieces that are most likely to turn up.

Spotting anything real soon is unlikely, there is a lot of clutter in those waters and the weather is deteriorating. It would be hard to overestimate how difficult it must be to to spot a (probability off white or black) piece of floating debris among the whitecaps that are the norm there. Even if the short term fails to turn up anything, assuming that the aircraft broke up on impact, the debris, or remnants of it will almost certainly turn up somewhere, maybe next year on the Zealand's West Coast. But stuff will turn up someday somewhere if the aircraft broke up on impact.

1a sound asleep. Military radar doesn't need a nicely compliant transponder to ascertain height. Equally, I'm sure that no one is going to spill the beans on the accuracy of their height finding radar.

You are right. Google depth of ocean and range of MAD.

A 12,000ft altitude does not correlate with lost radar contact at 200 miles,

TWITTER UPDATE FROM AMSA
 

According to AMSA twitter feed the IL76 spotted the debris from 33,000' enroute back to YPPH, US Navy P8 then tasked to search the sighting area but nothing was found.

Neither you nor I know exactly how FlightRadar24 processes the data it gets from enthusiasts, so I certainly wouldn't make any assumptions about the astuteness, or otherwise, or their programmer(s).

My point is simply that the data we see in those pseudo-messages isn't necessarily what was transmitted by the aircraft verbatim. If you don't believe that, look at the penultimate altitude readout (and others) before it reached FL350 - there is no encoding schema for either Mode C, Mode S or ADS-B that's capable of transmitting an altitude of 34591 feet.

You're on the button there! :ok:

With the amount of energy and cost going into this search, news organizations and "unnamed sources" should be held accountable for the breaking news they broadcast to the world.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 dropped in altitude after sharp turn - CNN.com

This kind of information, if true, would be crucial to the search effort.

Unnamed "officials". Sources "close to the investigation". Everyone seems to be anonymous. The video that goes with the article also goes on to make other claims about fishermen interviewed by the journalist that saw the plane etc.

I find it disgusting, given what is at stake her, that this kind of journalism is splattered out by CNN. I think of the families in the hotels reading this, then bombarding the Malaysian authorities for verification. Who knows if CNN had the forethought to take it to them as well. But of course, all the sources are anonymous. So who's to know how that information came out, if someone is being paid to hand it over, what CNN did to verify it etc.

What a way to torture people. Let alone the constant timeline switching of the Malaysian Transport Authority, the effect of which also completely changes the likelihood of various scenarios that searchers have had to consider.

I can't think of a better example of poor crisis management, spurious information and wild speculation than with the disappearance of this aircraft.

See my previous answer, even 25k does not correlate with the last radar position.

Then there was a suggestion to increase range but flying more slowly and reducing fuel burn. It does not work that way. There are 3 speed ranges:

Maximum - gets there fastest but uses lots of fuel.

Range - goes furthest for the fuel burn.

Endurance - flies for longest time but not as far.

To fly the farthest is follows it would need to fly at best speed which is Range speed and cruise climb.

In this particular case and others that went before it, the FR24 range of this station was at its limit. Corrupt data due to that alone is more likely the case.

EMP, EM - Not in this case.
 

EMP or EM has been mooted a couple of times as a possible cause of electronics failure in this incident.

That didn't happen. Aircraft operate in nasty EM environments as a matter of course. On the ground, they are exposed to nearby in-band transmitters (aviation frequencies). They are also exposed to high power microwave from ATC and ground control radars, and various other radio transmitters from ATC to cell phones to public safety and ground handling radios. In the air, they fly through thunderstorms and are hit by lightning quite frequently. Lightning is an extremely high power EMP source, with characteristics similar to a couple of components of nuclear HEMP (the "EMP" threat one reads about).

This means that aircraft electronics are well protected against EM and EMP threats (although nuclear-generated HEMP *might* damage some systems). Short of nuclear weapons or lightning, getting high powered damaging EM or EMP into an aircraft in cruise altitude flight is virtually impossible. I don't believe there were thunderstorms on the known flight path, and even if they were present, it would be very unlikely they could have caused this particular set of events.

EM/EMP/ESD did not take down this aircraft.

I'm wondering how long it will be before it is announced that the South China sea is to be revisited.

Dillboy,

Only when Inmarsat's senior people appear wandering round London in sackcloth and ashes. They've been very clear.

Before the Inmarsat statement, there was no reason to look anywhere else but the South China Sea. Now there's no reason to look there.

Yesterday's French radar note was interesting, but it's gone quiet since. It might be that it took France two weeks to extract the information, and so it'll take everyone else with similar tools another two weeks to confirm it.

And you do realize that those batteries are now better designed and in armoured battery boxes that have been tested in FAA certification tests to show that they contain a battery failure by inducing a battery fire inside them?

KL Live
 

Australian search a/c locates 2 objects

2 orange objects spotted by searchers

10 a/c being used for search. Additional planes dispatched to search area.

Nothing concrete though. These are just leads.

HMAS Success could retrieve objects "within hours"

Right. What makes me curious is the hole in the Malaysian radar track. They somehow lost the aircraft about 100NM out, just past Pulau Perak, and then reacquired it later as it was moving away. This is very strange for an aircraft at constant altitude, but it could be explained if it descended low to cross Malaysia and started to climb back out to FL350(?) when it was out into the sea.

Line-of-sight distance for an aircraft at FL120 is just above 100 NM.

The question then becomes, how much range would it lose by dropping to FL120 for ~1 hour and then climbing back?

No. Read up on altitude encoding/decoding.

No matter how many bits of the AC may have been corrupted, if any, it will still only resolve to an altitude that's a multiple of 25' or 100', depending on which encoding schema is used. There simply aren't enough bits in the ADS-B packet to encode altitudes to the nearest foot, despite what the FR24 data implies.

so ma rep just said there was 200kg of lithium batteries in the hold ...