Malaysia Airlines flight MH370-Updates and Discussion

knucklehead6

Tigerandahalf wrote: »

Isn't there reports that the slick is 10/15 miles long. That either indicates the plane was in trouble for a while or was discarding fuel. If it exploded and dropped out of the sky there would be no long trail, no? But why was there no communication?

10 to 15 miles long is not exactly a huge distance. Drift patterns could easily allow for 10 miles over the timeframe since the plane went missingg

Dude111

AlanMcC23 wrote:

This isnt looking good at all

No it isnt......

Its all very sad!!

Sully

An additional person on that flight list is alive and well, according to media reports on the Guardian Live Blog.

The latest is an Austrian, who had his passport stolen two years ago in Thailand.

Kavs8

Tigerandahalf wrote: »

Isn't there reports that the slick is 10/15 miles long. That either indicates the plane was in trouble for a while or was discarding fuel. If it exploded and dropped out of the sky there would be no long trail, no? But why was there no communication?

Because it's basics physics the wreckage along with oil would drop out of the sky and in nearly all cases they land near each other. A trail of 10/15 miles would be an indication they are together even though the distance is quite large, an explosion would see wreckage land in lots of directions and as the oil has only been found it can't be discredited, it would make discovery of black boxes which have now no signal apparently very difficult as the wreckage would be dispersed within the ocean. Let's just hope (sounds wrong I know) that there was a different reason for this accident and that the boxes and passengers are recovered.

I do believe at this stage however with the oil slicks, it seems to have entered the water intact.

Sully

Sully wrote: »

A third person on that flight list is alive and well, according to media reports on the Guardian Live Blog.

The latest is an Austrian, who had his passport stolen two years ago in Thailand.

I know about the Austrian and the italian, who is the third?

thanks.

Penny Tration

Sully wrote: »

An additional person on that flight list is alive and well, according to media reports on the Guardian Live Blog.

The latest is an Austrian, who had his passport stolen two years ago in Thailand.

Three stolen passports?!

This is getting very worrying

Sully

Jake1 wrote: »

I know about the Austrian and the italian, who is the third?

thanks.

Edited original post just as you replied, I was mistaken on the third.

bkehoe

Tigerandahalf wrote: »

Isn't there reports that the slick is 10/15 miles long. That either indicates the plane was in trouble for a while or was discarding fuel. If it exploded and dropped out of the sky there would be no long trail, no? But why was there no communication?

Ocean currents would disperse oil quickly. The slicks were probably seen 12 hours after the accident; plenty of time for them to stretch for miles.
I'd take the presence of slicks and especially the fact there's 2 to imply that there was at least some of the aircraft structure intact at point of impact as the fuel would probably not make it to the ocean, and evaporate long before if there was a major high altitude explosion which had ruptured the tanks.

Thrill

Austrian passport story now also confirmed. It was stolen two years ago.

Austrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Weiss confirmed that a name listed on the manifest matches an Austrian passport reported stolen two years ago in Thailand. Weiss would not confirm the identity.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_ITALY_MALAYSIA_PLANE_?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-03-08-10-05-26

YbFocus

Sully wrote: »

Edited original post just as you replied, I was mistaken on the third.

I was like "As bad as two are, the third would have been the nail in the coffin"

Two is still very bad, I see that and the loss of comms and immediate dissapearence of the plane as two very big factors that point towards what I'd fear being the cause here.

Calina

Roger_007 wrote: »

There seemed to have been a lot of confusion over several hours about this accident, particularly about where the plane went missing. This seems to be the case every time a plane goes missing, particularly over water, and there is always speculation about whether the 'black' boxes can be recovered.
I cannot understand why the black box data is not relayed via satellite back to a central computer on a continuous real-time basis up to the point of loss of contact. That way the accident position could be immediately pinpointed and rescue efforts could me made without searching hundreds of square miles of ocean.
There would also not be such an imperative to find the black boxes to establish the cause of the accident.
Is there any need for black boxes anymore, other than as a backup device?

I would be careful about speculating in this direction. I strongly suspect that certain people knew reasonably where the plane disappeared. FlightRadar had a reasonably accurate view on it compared to comments now and I'd be stunned if the aircraft itself wasn't regularly and automatically reporting back to base. So I would be pretty sure that Malaysian either knew or were able to get their hands on a last known position report relatively quickly. In my view, you perhaps are mixing up a technical problem with a communications problem. One of the key issues appears to have been whether they had crossed out of Malaysian airspace or not and it seems to have been in the zone where they might have done that. I would not necessarily say that we don't appear to have known where the plane was, but that communications appear to have been chaotic.

With respect to the constant streaming data, it would be an ideal solution although it's probably dependent on a number of factors, a key one of which is getting a standard in place for it which would be uniformly used. As it is, we tend to know where a lot of modern aircraft are in the air already depending on local available coverage. In Europe, FlightRadar 24 is very good at this, and it looks like they may have been pretty much on the ball here too.

That being said, you also need to remember that even if we can pin point where the plane ran into problems, we need to know a) the weather and b) the behaviour of currents. Drift can be a problem here as well in terms of locating the aircraft. And depth is a massive issue in some cases although reportedly, in this case, depths of ca 100m max are being reported so probably not as hard to locate as the Air France one a few years back was.

I'd also have to add - one last thing - the black boxes are important but the other thing which contributes massively to air accident cause analysis is the state of the aircraft itself. You just can't be certain of the cause of an aircrash on the basis of the contents of the two data recorders and they contribute to finding the aircraft.

Incidents like this one really concern me though - the big thing with them is without the aircraft, we have no guarantee of identifying the cause. A massive amount is contributed to air safety by carrying out these investigations. We can't just rely on some data and hope it tells us what went wrong because if nothing else, usually it's a combination of things rather than an immediately obvious straight failure.

reports that Vietnam detects signal from missing Plane.

The plane lost communication two hours into the flight in Vietnam's airspace at 1:20 a.m. (18:20 GMT Friday), China's official Xinhua News Agency said. Vietnamese website VN Express said a Vietnamese search and rescue official reported that signals from the plane were detected about 120 nautical miles (140 miles; 225 kilometers) southwest of Vietnam's southernmost Ca Mau province.

http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/national_world&id=9458786

theKillerBite

Jake1 wrote: »

I know about the Austrian and the italian, who is the third?

thanks.

If they are both European passports, it wouldn't make sense that it could be local Chinese or Malaysian terrorists??

EI-DOR

If they are both European passports, it wouldn't make sense that it could be local Chinese or Malaysian terrorists??

Exactly. Doesn't add up. So no point speculating over the Passports at the minute!

Tigerandahalf

No reports of wreckage so far on the water so perhaps the plane was intact when it hit the water.

Reoil

YbFocus wrote: »

Two passport inconsistencies is getting worrying.

In Asia, I would consider this to be normal rather than irrational.

Calina

Tigerandahalf wrote: »

No reports of wreckage so far on the water so perhaps the plane was intact when it hit the water.

I have doubts about that depending on how fast it came down; it would have almost certainly had serious damage on impact leading to wreckage.

Kavs8

Clear evidence so far is how the transponder abruptly stopped receiving altitude and speed information which it send out before quickly ceasing, altitude changed from 35,000ft and speed dropped from 468kts both to 0 within one minute, that would suggest data to the transponder was suddenly cut - there are all sorts of possibilities that could cause such a thing. I wouldn't rule out terrorism. I wouldn't say it is at the same time.

Tigerandahalf

Kavs8 wrote: »

Clear evidence so far is how the transponder abruptly stopped receiving altitude and speed information which it send out before quickly ceasing, altitude changed from 35,000ft and speed dropped from 468kts both to 0 within one minute, that would suggest data to the transponder was suddenly cut - there are all sorts of possibilities that could cause such a thing. I wouldn't rule out terrorism. I wouldn't say it is at the same time.

Is the transponder on the tail wing?

Reoil

If there has been no wreckage found so far and they know the general area of the last known location of the plane, then that would suggest that the plane was intact when it crashed.
If it was a bomb or structural damage then the debris should be pretty easy to locate as is would be pretty wide-spread.

fr336

Reoil wrote: »

If there has been no wreckage found so far and they know the general area of the last known location of the plane, then that would suggest that the plane was intact when it crashed.
If it was a bomb or structural damage then the debris should be pretty easy to locate as is would be pretty wide-spread.

So what could we be looking at then?

UPDATE [10:22pm]: Ships from Vietnam are about 130km from the site. Reports say they will reach in 1 1/2 to 2 hours time. Source (Vietnamese).


heres a link for yahoo malaysia, they seem to be on top on things news wise.

http://my.news.yahoo.com/mas-aircraft-goes-missing--says-airline-023820132.html

flight radar co founder
had this to say.

Mikael Robertsson, cofounder of FlightRadar24, which tracks about 120,000 flights per day with 3,000 receivers around the world, said the last transmission it recorded from the flight was at 35,000 feet. While it’s possible the plane veered into an area too far away from receivers to track it, he said that was unlikely.

“In this case, we have quite good coverage,” he said. “We had a very good stable signal and it just disappeared …. I don’t want to speculate, but something very sudden happened.” FlightRadar representatives also said they believed the plane had lost radar contact about 40 minutes into the flight, not two hours as the airline said.

Kavs8

Tigerandahalf wrote: »

Is the transponder on the tail wing?

In a 777 I have no idea, possibly the forward electronics bay - but let me give my own input on possible scenarios;

Fire - They would have notified someone if they had a fire.

Engine Failure - no big deal.

Cabin fire - Would have declared emergency.

So what ever it was, it was spontaneous and abrupt, for a 777 with no history of such incidents that is worrying and the lines of enquiry reduce further.

Sully

Excuse my ignorance but if the flight went off radar within 40mins, why did ATA or whomever respond so late? Is it normal procedure to wait until the flight is expected to land before declaring an emergency?

Fred Swanson

This post has been deleted.

Tigerandahalf

Kavs8 wrote: »

In a 777 I have no idea, possibly the forward electronics bay - but let me give my own input on possible scenarios;

Fire - They would have notified someone if they had a fire.

Engine Failure - no big deal.

Cabin fire - Would have declared emergency.

So what ever it was, it was spontaneous and abrupt, for a 777 with no history of such incidents that is worrying and the lines of enquiry reduce further.

Is it possible for a pilot/person to disengage communication equipment if they had access to the cockpit? Thus for the flight to go sort of incognito?

Kavs8

Sully wrote: »

Excuse my ignorance but if the flight went off radar within 40mins, why did ATA or whomever respond so late? Is it normal procedure to wait until the flight is expected to land before declaring an emergency?

For example with AF447 we heard about 6hrs after the event, I have no idea why they release it so late, but when a plane disappears of radar there is a minimum time I believe of 20 minutes of trying to contact the flight before a full emergency and recovery operation is declared. MAS in my own opinion have been very forth-coming with information, they previously had a 777 incident where both ADIRUs or IRS (navigation equipment) failed, the flight landed safely but this incident was worrying, it is possible they believed this was the problem - but eventually they did release details coupled with the fact the accident happened sometime after 1am in Malaysia, MAS released details after 7am which seems quick IMHO.

Kavs8

Tigerandahalf wrote: »

Is it possible for a pilot/person to disengage communication equipment if they had access to the cockpit? Thus for the flight to go sort of incognito?

You can but there will always be a radar blip, as was the case in 9/11 - this flight disappeared from radar.

Fred Swanson

This post has been deleted.

Thrill

The view of the oil slick from a Vietnamese Air Force aircraft

http://nypost.com/2014/03/07/malaysia-airlines-loses-contact-with-plane-carrying-239/?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=NYPTwitter&utm_medium=SocialFlow