Chronus

From your declared profile, I will forgive your ignorance, on this occasion, but request that appreciate that you have 2 ears and 1 mouth, and suggest you use them in that proportion to learn from those that are professionals.

It is perfectly normal around the world to report when you are maintaining your cleared level, for ATC information as much as anything. Often it will alert them to the possibility of re-clearing another aircraft to a FL you have now cleared. Quite often it allows you to benefit, and be cleared to your requested level and save some fuel by getting a climb a minute or so before ATC might have noticed on secondary radar that you were maintaining your level. When it comes to primary only radar cover, a report of maintaining cleared FL is even more inportant.

As I said before, sometimes you forget is you called level. It is then simpler to repeat the call to be sure. Nothing should be inferred from it, none of us has 100% total recall.

Good night.

Live telephone interview this Wed morning with Angus Houston, retired chief of the Australian Airforce, who is in charge of the new joint agency MH 370 coordination centre, including search organisations, governments, industry, family and media.

He said the ATC transcript appears as a normal pilot exchange.

He also stated that they will continue to search and to search with vigour.


There is no time frame, but if nothing is found on the surface they will have to make other plans.

He reiterated that search was based on satellite datum and unambiguously kept referring to the plane in the Ocean.

When asked, he said was not aware that a British submarine was to join the search and commented that it was currently 5am his local time.

ABC shortly after the interview stated that an Malaysian minister announced the subs involvement via twitter in the early hours.

why to ask Q about com
 

even an RF com can be forensically distinguished to be or not to be spoken by only one person or more, doesnt it

The transcript....and the "pause".

Sounds like it could be due to anything "minor".
It's NOT a long pause. Five seconds or less until the reply (and it'll take a second to finish the rest of his sentence, so 3 or 4 seconds at the outside).

The "odd" bit is, they included it in the transcript !

2dPilot
Yes. You often get more than one station transmitting at the same time. The transmissions interfer with each other and all you get is a 'garbled' or 'unreadable' transmission. Once again completely typical and nothing to be getting our knickers in a twist over.

Is it SOP for Malaysia Airlines to state the tail number as part of the pushback clearance read back?

IATA Operations Conference
 

IATA chief: 'We cannot let an aircraft simply vanish' - 4/1/2014 - Flight Global

"International Air Transport Association director general and chief executive officer Tony Tyler, speaking in Kuala Lumpur at IATA's annual operations conference . . . says a viable process for tracking aircraft in airspace beyond radar coverage must be agreed by December this year. . . .

Tyler says IATA will convene an expert task force, that will include ICAO. 'This group will examine all of the options available for tracking commercial aircraft against the parameters of implementation, investment, time and complexity to achieve the desired coverage. This group will report its conclusions by December 2014, reflecting the need for urgent action and careful analysis,' he says."

IATA task force to explore live data streaming: Tyler - 4/1/2014 - Flight Global

"IATA director general Tony Tyler says that the loss of an aircraft such as Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 must never happen again, and that live streaming of data is something that needs to be seriously examined. . . .

The IATA Ops conference has a very strong focus on safety, but its presence in KL during the MH370 crisis is a coincidence, as it was organised months ago. . . .

He said that live streaming of data is an issue that should be 'looked at quite carefully,' but questioned the technical practicality of having 100,000 flights daily streaming all data."

Now, what remains is to explain why the aircraft changed heading many times and why it made those turns in places which are far removed from any alternate airports. You have to be much more specific to have viable hypothesis.

Who is "we" in this case? I, for one, had not a bloody thing to do with MH 370 vanishing, and neither did most of the people he was talking to.
When I hear the term "must never happen again" I immediately wait for the other shoe to drop, as whomever is saying that is either selling something or an utter moron.
Ah, a grain of sense entered the proceedings ...

Sorry I was not aware that we all had to search for your immediate needs.
The thread starts at 1. Just start reading.

Primary Radar Coverage and use by ATC
 

There have been some posts regarding the use of primary radar (PSR) by ATC. The normal configuration for radars used by ATC in Malaysia is a 60 nm range PSR, co-mounted with a 200 nm range SSR, turning at 15 RPM. Of course these ranges are limited by the radar horizon and any terrain obstructions to the line of sight signal. The Military ATC radars are configured as a 50 nm PSR co-mounted with a 250 nm SSR, rotating at 15 RPM. See the Malaysian AIP ENR 1.6 for details.
The PSR/SSR configuration described above is common in many other countries, including Australia. In theory you can do without the PSR and just use SSR, however for busy approach control airspace (within 60 nm), PSR is used as an insurance against non-transponder aircraft (equipment failure, not switched on etc.). The PSR/SSR co-mounted configuration is the most economical way to provide ATS.
Long range PSR is much more expensive, and the rotation rate has to be slowed to about 5 RPM to obtain ranges to about 200 to 230 nm. 5 RPM will not normally support the use of 3 nm separation in approach airspace, thus reducing capacity. Hence the use of short range PSR/long range SSR @ 15 RPM – it provides surveillance for both approach control using PSR and SSR, and enroute surveillance using SSR only. ADS-B and Multilateration surveillance data are now also displayed at many ATCCs, but these, like SSR, are dependant or cooperative systems – no transponder and you are not seen.
It should be noted that at the time when MAS 370 disappeared, the airports and approach control services at Kota Bharu and Langkawi were closed. However the radars were turning to send SSR data to the KL ATCC at Subang for enroute surveillance. Butterworth/Penang, Kuantan, Subang and KL were open. In all cases all radar data would have been recorded.
Singapore ATCC has 220 nm range PSR, and 250 nm SSR coverage surveillance. However the LKP is 340 nm from Singapore, 96 nm from Kota Bharu and 290 nm from HCM and would be out of ATC PSR coverage. The Air Defence Radars are/should be a different story.
As an ex ATC (including time in Malaysia) I agree that the transcript shows a normal situation. I would be more interested in the transcripts of air/ground and ATC coordination communications after the MAS 370 data block disappeared from the ATCC displays. These may be revealed when the initial investigation report is released.

funny to see the official narrative coming out of Malaysia focusing on the criminal act. They are over it, want this story to be gone and what best than "lost at sea at the hands of a criminal".

watching CNN is sadly too funny.

A question which has not been raised, if the airplane goes missing, or radio contact is lost, then why no aircraft painting occurred immediately upon loss of communications. Seems that if ATC is unable to contact the airplane via radio, then their tracking becomes key in where the airplane might be. Since they had confirmed transponder contact, then loss, some passive contact would have still been possible. I would think that any thing being painted at or around this time would be of extreme interest.

In this case the flight did not go missing for Malaysian ATC - they had handed the flight off to Vietnamese ATC. The Vietnamese did look on primary radar once they determined it was missing from their ATC radar; they saw what could only have been MH370 headed west, back towards the Malaysian landmass - and they reported this to Malaysian authorities (we don't know exactly when or how but they have said that they did do so.)

Interestingly enough, the Malaysian military much later acknowledged tracking a flight on primary radar at about that time and on about that course until it went out of their range somewhere in the Malacca Strait at 2:40 am local time.
A week or ten days later the Thai government piped up and said that their military had also tracked (apparently) this same flight at that time.

The interesting part is that on March 8th, in the first reports of a plane missing, the Malaysian government issued a statement that the last sighting of MH370 was at 2:40 am on the 9th. We know this for a fact!
So we know that the Malaysian government was aware of MH370's filght path out of the South China Sea from the very beginning of this event.

Now, why did the Malaysian government let 8 nations search the South China Sea looking for an airliner they knew wasn't there for the next week??

Can anybody answer that question?

Many airlines require the captain to handle the aircraft on the ground. RT would be covered by the PM. Perhaps the co-pilot took over and the subsequent RT was handled by the captain could be one theory. Also, generally ATC will often parrot a crew's phraseology and vice versa.

Point of interest: It is a transcript, so I would imagine there are no shortcuts and what is written is exactly what was said.

Quite common in my experience, 2dpilot, particularly at a large airport with many A/C on the same frequency.

A quick gander at a map tells the story very well - track is well out of radar range because it is far from any populated land masses.

Coastal evidence
 

A few posters have mentioned the possibility of some items of wreckage washing up on West Australian beaches.

We have some very isolated areas where debris items could remain undiscovered for long periods of time before anyone ventured there. It would depend entirely where the items were carried to, but we can only hope that if this does turn out to be the case, something lands in a more populated area where people frequent the coastline on a regular basis. This is a very big state with a small population.

Partial Ping and Fuel Starvation
 

I noticed there was a dispute a few days ago about the "partial ping" and fuel starvation and I agree with Porterhouse that this is unlikely. The reason is that even assuming there was enough residual power from the ram turbine or some other source to power the SATCOM the fact is that the firmware of the terminal has to go through a boot sequence when it is powered on again--the length of time which is unknown. The boot sequence could be as little as a few seconds or as long as a minute or two. As an illustration: when the power flickers on and off in one's home the refrigerator powers off and then immediately powers back on again. On the other hand, when the power flickers on and off one's computer simply turns off an does turn on again until one presses the power button and goes through the entire boot sequence.

So it would be a hell of a coincidence for the power to go off from fuel starvation, come back on as the result of the ram turbine or something else, the boot sequence in the SATCOM firmware to comeplete, and just at the precise millisecond it is sending a ping to log-on to the system again the power dies again. :suspect:

In the 777 at least, the door unlocks if the aircraft depressurises.

And to the person talking about biz jets and cloaking the radar...please....

Wow. That certainly throws some water on the whole "intentional depressurization to knock out the passengers" theory. Although - is that just the "standard" door lock? Can someone on the flight deck still override that?

"In the 777 at least, the door unlocks if the aircraft depressurises."

Any 777 drivers or techs able to advise at what cabin altitude this mechanism unlocks the cockpit door?

If it doesn't activate until (say) 15-20,000 feet, a gradual cabin depressurisation would likely go unnoticed & generate no response.