While doing the 767 course discussing the ditching scenario we were told that the first thing to hit the water during a controlled ditching would have been the engines that would then be expected to break way from the pylons (or the pylons from the wing).

Is anything from Malaysian "Officials" could be considered as a fact?
 

From CNN TV exclusive: Malaysian PM not declaring passengers dead - CNN.com (April 24th, Prime Minister Najib Interview):
(CNN) -- More than six weeks after Flight 370 disappeared, Malaysia's prime minister says his government is still not prepared to declare it -- and the 239 people on board -- lost.
"At some point in time I would be, but right now I think I need to take into account the feelings of the next of kin -- and some of them have said publicly that they aren't willing to accept it until they find hard evidence," Najib Razak told CNN's Richard Quest in an exclusive TV interview.

From Transcript of Press Conference, 31 March 2014 (March 31st, Press Conference):
Question: Prime Minister, no wreckage has been found. Was your Malaysian counterpart, Prime Minister Najib, too hasty in announcing that everyone has died in this incident?
Tony Abbott: No. The accumulation of evidence is that the aircraft has been lost, and it has been lost somewhere in the south of the Indian Ocean. That's the absolute overwhelming weight of evidence and I think that Prime Minister Najib Razak was perfectly entitled to come to that conclusion and I think once that conclusion had been arrived at it was his duty to make that conclusion public.

Above clearly after an official statement:

From MH370 Lost in Indian Ocean: PM Najib Razak?s full statement - Latest - New Straits Times (March 24th, PM Najib Razak’s full statement):
.../... It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean.../...

Let hope the anounced-next-week-preliminary-report (MH370 Tragedy: Malaysia to release preliminary report next week: PM - Latest - New Straits Times) will not vanish

Uhm. As much as I'd like to see a T7 doing a cobra - the wing will stall at a certain AOA, thrust or not. That angle is obviously A LOT lower than your 45 deg. So your downward component of thrust is the sine of maybe 15deg. Multiply that again with the p/w ratio (~0.3) and you've reduced the lift you need by some whopping single digit percentage.

Sea state, character and winds on March 8?
 

What were the sea state and wind conditions of the current underwater search area on the morning of March 8? Anybody know where to google this?

Ditching switch
 

I cannot tell you what the ditching switch does on the A320 family of aircraft. However, I do know that it doesn't activate the Automatic Fixed (AF) ELT. Other than activation by the "g" switch, only other activation is from the control panel in the cockpit. Normal position on this switch is armed, after lifting a guard it can be moved to reset or on.

Without going into the exact parameters for the "g"switch I can advise that a simple way it is tested by avionics engineers is to hold the ELT like a rugby ball and do a gentle "dummy pass". This is sufficient to activate the ELT, hence my reason for stating in an earlier post that even a controlled ditching would generate sufficient longitudinal de-acceleration forces for it to activate.

I think you would have to be incredibly lucky to be able to accurately fly onto the downside of ocean swell without getting it wrong - given that it is something we never do, and the fact that the ocean swell is constantly changing.



The ditching switch on an Airbus closes all the doors below the floating line; pack doors, outlow valves, avionics cooling doors etc.

IF ONLY.......
 

Now that there are no more signals from the FDR/CVR, it seems that they won't be found for a very long time, if ever.
Surely there is a now a case to fit the FDRs and CVRs higher in the tail or rear bullet of ETOPS and LROPS over water flights that go outside radar coverage. They could be barostatically detached at a specified depth under water and fitted with a hi-vis, flotation device that has a solar-powered ELT. Regardless of cost this must surely be designable to avoid the anguish of the relatives after such an event.
The technology exists to also equip the kit with a simple gyro device which could show its postion of retrieval compared to that of release.
Or are we to assume that this was such a rare event that it is unlikely to ever happen again? Hmmmm.

HMS Tireless stands down...
 

Well they did use satellite data to predict where to search and when they looked in that area they heard locator pings. I'd say that was reasonably good evidence certainly worth following up for perhaps two years bearing in mind they can't actually search all year round due to weather.

What makes you think that investigators haven't been reviewing all the data made available to them on a regular basis? Someone is signing off £million bills and I doubt they would be doing that without regular reviews.

I think that's the fundamental issue here. If the sounds heard underwater were the recorder pingers, they shouldn't be too far from where they were heard, and we just have to find them. Which may still take months if the sound was bouncing around underwater, or prove impossible if they're not with large pieces of wreckage that can be seen on sonar.

If they weren't, all bets are off, and we may never find it.

On the contrary - INMARSAT did some live validation testing using an Malaysian Airlines aircraft and showed that their system was tracking it. They didn't fly the test all the way to the South Indian Ocean, they didn't need to as their tests validated their approach.

What _is_ obvious from this is that the ULBs should be encoded somehow so that there is no doubt what is being heard is a particular aircraft. This is not difficult it could be a modulation or a pattern of pings - that would prevent all these rumors and doubts.

Why? How many active ULBs do you imagine there are under the sea at any particular time? I don't imagine the searchers are in any doubt about which aircraft they would belong to, and nor are they particularly troubled by the rumours and doubts of keyboard warriors on the internet.

If only = Deployable Recorders
 

Quote:

Surely there is a now a case to fit the FDRs and CVRs higher in the tail or rear bullet of ETOPS and LROPS over water flights that go outside radar coverage. They could be barostatically detached at a specified depth under water and fitted with a hi-vis, flotation device that has a solar-powered ELT. Regardless of cost this must surely be designable to avoid the anguish of the relatives after such an event.

US Navy have been using Deployable Recorders manufactured by DRS since 1993 - they are excellent, usually survive and are found quickly despite the momentum with which an F18 can crash and also put out an ELT signal to the satellites as soon as they deploy.
Efforts continue to get ICAO to mandate them as the second recorder and I think we could see them by 2018 or 2020. SARPS grind slowly but 370 will help.

The searchers were the ones that expressed doubts, had searchers go to the initial 'Chinese' report area etc. A very low cost option adding an ID.

Makes me wonder again why the Chinese with a handheld hydrophone claimed to have picked up the acoustic ping...?

Deployable Recorders
 

Quote:
Surely there is a now a case to fit the FDRs and CVRs higher in the tail or rear bullet of ETOPS and LROPS over water flights that go outside radar coverage. They could be barostatically detached at a specified depth under water and fitted with a hi-vis, flotation device that has a solar-powered ELT. Regardless of cost this must surely be designable to avoid the anguish of the relatives after such an event.

CNN ran a piece about 4 weeks ago regarding an existing design. During the discussion, they quoted an installed cost of $100,000 to retrofit one plane. They went on to say the cost was minimal compared to the $1,000,000/plane cost to install Wi-Fi.

For a few days after this was first reported, the media videos not only showed the chap hanging the hydrophone over the side of the boat then showing a display window with 37.5 kHz, but also another operator behind him holding a transmitter clearly labelled 37.5 kHz. Maybe they were recording themselves ?!? Later media coverage shortened the video clip to omit this.

Propaganda. Propaganda. Propaganda.

The great clumsy, clunky great people's blundering mastodon always has to prove it's superiority over the decadent West.

Thus they find "evidence" with an am dram $15 mike where the decadent West couldn't manage it with all the military resources of a dozen nations.

Superiority of the great people's dictatorship proven. QED. :ugh:

Naiive, isn't it? Scary too, that they believe we'd swallow that level of idiocy as thy expect their own domestic drones to do...

100,000 was to retrofit a cloud streaming black box, which have already been designed and are in service, not for detachable black boxes. Detachable black boxes would be much more (structural changes, test, cert, etc), not to mention the host of new failure modes it would introduce (can't wait to run over one of those fod's on the runway....)

As nothing of interest has been found in the current search area, the Chinese location is where I'd be deploying the Bluefin next.