AN2 driver,
 

If you mean the Vung Tau sighting,
Sorry to disappoint you but in previous postings the flight plan route was over the Vietnamese mainland via BITIS over TSN and HCMC.

Despite some critics, it seems authorities giving there best:

Asia News | South East Asia News | AsiaOne

In 1979 a Varig Boeing B707 took off from Tokyo Narita to Los Angeles. The cargo aircraft lost radio contact 30 minutes after takeoff.

The remains of the aircraft nor of the crew were never found.
The cause of the incident was concluded as cabin depressurization, which killed the crew.

1979 Boeing 707-323C disappearance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Egyptair 990, intact, went straight in 60 NM off Nantucket. Very little debris on the surface. Small oil sheen on the surface when the first Coast Guard ship arrived near the position where transponder contact was lost. Depth at the site was 250-270 feet. U S Navy found the boxes from the pingers, and what happened in the cockpit was subsequently revealed.

Excerpts from the ATC transcript:
If the co-pilot had waited until mid-way across the pond, might never have found him.

@Wire_Mark - agreed, but so far as I am aware, ERCs are to be found in sparsely populated interior regions, like Australia, Canada, Russia etc. I don't know if there any in the area under consideration.

On the 19 whose phones have "rung", thinking about it, I suppose the home network could be configured to provide ring tone to the calling party while the mobile is paged. This isn't done in European and N American networks, but I don't know about China. I do know that so called "Colour Ring Back Tones" are very popular in Asia, where the caller hears music while the called party is located. This may be behind this story. Either way, examination of the signaling records will reveal whether it is "synthetic" ring tone, or the mobile genuinely has responded to a page. I expect the Chinese have looked into this.

Re the 1979 Varig Boeing B707 cargo that disappeared in the Pacific with some painting collection and was never found.

"The cause of the accident was concluded as cabin depressurization."

Hmmm.

That quote is not particularly credible. If you look at the source, it sounds more like pure speculation. Newspaper article twenty years later.

(I lived in Brazil at the time. The captain, who had survived the Varig Ermenonville fire and crash, frequented the same car dealership which I patronized. After that first crash, he was said to go weekly on a pilgrimage to Aparecida.)

Malaysia's civil/military declared PSR (ENR 1.6) coverage depicted here:

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/320...0/802/o7va.jpg
Google map version

From here perhaps? But being serious, those people are asking about the lack of ELT signals, just think back to the crash of Air Inter 148 where the ELT was destroyed on impact, they aren't indestructible......

Post 1334 - I was wondering the exact same thing, are the Trent Engines monitored in live time (via ACARS?) by RR?? no answers I've seen thus far, and I was under the impression possibly these days, that faults and alike are automatically sent back to the engine manufacturer for remedial action(s)?

Common sense, logic!
 

I am not a professional pilot, so I will not be trying to add anything to that side of the thread, although I have read all the comments with interest.

I am a retired police detective inspector, serving in the UK and HKG, leading serious crime squads and intel units, who moved into AVSEC after my police service. I spent several years managing airport security ops for a number of airlines at a couple of 'hot' Asian airports.

Therefore, I will restrict my comments to the case-solving and AVSEC side of these events concerning MH370. First up, common sense and logic invariably worm best when trying to figure out these cases. Somebody, somewhere, knows a lot more than they are letting on for public consumption and I'd wager that various nations and agencies are not sharing what they know with the others involved.

A large object, such as a B777 cannot simply disappear without somebody having some knowledge of its last known whereabouts. Failure to plot it on military radar seems highly unlikely. Failure to share that information seems rather more likely. In a busy shipping area it also seems highly unlikely that somebody wouldn't have seen something.

It seems highly unlikely that it could have evaded detection and landed somewhere after a highjacking. First, it would need a considerable runway to accommodate it and, second, it would have had to overfly a hefty chunk of land and somebody would most likely have seen something.

It seems much more likely, unfortunately, that it has gone down somewhere and the fact that nothing at all of it has been found strongly indicates that the search is not being conducted in the right area.

That brings back round the loop to the failure of parties to share what they know of its whereabouts from various military and government services who track even the smallest of aircraft flying in airspace around their nations' borders.

But there is pretty much no other logical conclusion that they are looking in the wrong places.

If there was a structural failure for what ever reason, I have no doubt we will find the aircraft.

If a government wanted the aircraft or the people on board for what ever reason, then I doubt we will find it. It would not be that hard to spoof the ATC system with another aircraft with a mode s transponder strapped to the boeings call sign.

A B777 sure can't. And that's what we're talking about in this thread?

@mabuhay_2000
 

A worthy, analytical, and common sense post.

We know the plane disappeared, but where is it.

I think you are correct in that they are looking in the wrong place.

To add to the recent postings from Telecoms people -I am not a mobile phone expert but I do know about undersea cables and one of the big problems here is elapsed time since the incident if there are significant surface or sub surface currents in the area.
Even a modest surface current of 3 or three knots can expand the potential search area by an enormous amount after three or four days creating a classic catch-22 where the longer it takes to find a trace means the harder it is to find a trace.

Sub surface currents are not always well documented and do not necessarily act in the same way as surface ones. So rather than a predictable drift of say 2 knots eastwards they can add a sort of crosswind component effect creating a north or southeast vector making the SAR job harder still.

Otherwise it seemed very unlikely from the start that there is, whatever the cause, going to be a very sad outcome

If said airliner's transponder was inop (either intentionally or not), then whilst there might be a radar return, would it necessarily be recognised (and recorded) as belonging to that particular aircraft?

Latest info at 15.30 today suggest possible debris now found a long way from its final known position. We have been here before though so lets hope its true this time.

CNN reporting the two people who produced the stolen passports allegedly looked Iranian and African ??

Also seen reported elsewhere that after ATC lost contact with MAS 370 they asked a Vietnam Airlines pilots to try and contact the plane. He was 30 mins ahead of the MAS plane. Reported that he made contact but seems voices from the cockpit were very muffled as if it was miles away.

Malaysian Authorities are still not commenting why they have been searching the Maccalan Straights, which is in completely the opposite direction from where it had been heading.

This is what confuses me. Assuming they have a half decent military radar system they will know or not if MH370 crossed back over the country. That is why they are searching there after all...but if they know this then why still bother to search along the flight path and up towards HK.

Unless they don't actually know anything more than FR24! :confused:

@selfin

Many thanks for your efforts, it is one of the most informative posts in the past 500 (if not 1000).

I would have assumed that an aircraft would NOT be able to cross the peninsula without appearing on PSR but apparently this is not the case (though we do not know how many military radar sites are there that are unpublished in the AIP).

selfin's diagram demonstrates that theoretically even a T7 could cross the peninsula without showing up on radar. However if it does show up for any period, I'm sure the radar return would be investigated, especially if ATC is aware that there is a missing aircraft. Of course there is always the possibility that a weak return beyond the effective range was recorded, but not displayed. ATC radar screens no longer show actual signals from the radar antenna, rather a computer generated image that is based on the processed signals. There are very complex algorithms to filter out backscatter and other noise (one of the most closely guarded secrets of military radar manufacturers), and whether a faint real target makes it on the screen will be a function of whether the computers can distinguish between noise and target. Also the radar display may be set for a certain range, so even if the actual radar antenna captures a more distant target, it will not necessarily display on the screen. However the primary signals are stored for a period of time, to be retrieved in situations we are now discussing. Also as it had been discussed previously on this thread, the military operates more sensitive radar stations the existence of which are not necessarily in the public domain, and their data may be available. Using more sensitive (hence slower) algorithms much more may be retrieved from the raw signals than what was originally displayed on the screen. Undoubtedly this had already been done, and may have prompted the search along the western coast of the peninsula.

However this is not an exact science. There might be some very faint radar returns that may or may not be the missing aircraft, first they need to be cross checked against other identified traffic. Also these faint signals at the edge of the theoretical range usually don't form a continuous track, but are intermittent pings as reception conditions fluctuate between poor and nil. I can easily envision that Malaysian radar picked up something that might have been MH370 given the place and the time, but authorities would not want to make a public statement about it in case it turns out to be a cold trail just like so many others - however the possibility is high enough to allot some SAR resources to follow it up, especially after three days of searching in the primary area yielded nothing.

I am wondering why they have not pulled the records off any of the shipping traffic that would have traversed the area. That is a high traffic region, and those ships would have most likely had such systems, as outlined in Wiki:
Voyage Radar

ppl
 

Yes, Rolls Royce at their Derby HQ do track live the operational performance of all their aircraft engines, but not exact location. They would at least have noted when transmission stopped, probably the same time as radar transponder.