Malaysia Airlines flight MH370-Updates and Discussion

pclancy wrote: »

Oh Dear. How on earth would they even have 3G or GPRS up there to send a photo in the first place?

Terrible that this stuff gets past some kind of sanity check before being published.

4G of course
I'm almost surprised there hasn't been more of this type, people must be too busy coming up with new theories.

Happyman42 wrote: »

Have the Guardian quit their live blog...can't find it, for an update on today's search, which I presume has been fruitless?

Don't know about Guardian. But you could check here..
Tomorrows search is already starting and todays finished about lunchtime.

so would the subsequent climb be an over reaction from a less experienced pilot ?

This little video is worth watching, although it's in French

But I'll tell you the gist of it, and the images will do the rest : it's about satellites, and it simply says that stationary satellites, at 36k km are not the most precise, but civil and military orbiting satellites, at 2000 km, are very precise. Civil can identify a suitcase type object, while military can identify down to 10cm objects. So we are mostly shown stationary satellite images, but countries can also discreetly peruse and analyse pics from their military satellites, then pass on more or less anonymously the bits they think might be interesting to the concerned governments/to the public.

So I would guess for example that the French military satellite whose pics we haven't been shown must have seen pretty definite objects for the Australian to share their optimism.

The video is here : http://videos.tf1.fr/jt-we/2014/vol-mh370-que-peuvent-vraiment-traquer-les-satellites-8387865.html

edit : please note, "PUB : 9 seconds" does NOT mean you have to head to the pub in 9 seconds

re edit : watched it again, it also says Europe is participating in the searches with 4 orbiting satellites, these can be programmed 24 hours in advance.

If they are holding back satellite images you would have to presume that the images are very obviously pieces of an airplane right?.. they just don't want to release them in case of the 0.1% chance that it isn't MH370 and everyone has already assumed it's faith just to turn out it wasn't it and give families more hope again

spurious wrote: »

...who remembered his ex was supposed to have been on that flight. Sure I don't even know what country most of my exes are in, much less what flights they are or are not supposed to be taking.

An ex that he hasn't spoken to in months. :rolleyes:
So how exactly did he know she was on that flight. Fake story is terrible.

We examined the Flight 370 and found that the aircraft is designed with 3-3-3 seating, including screen monitors on the back of every seat. This will lead us to believe that this image is in fact ‘real’. Jake shared with us his Gmail account and even showed us where the email was sent from and that it was sent just off the coast of Malaysia.

If we lean on this image being the first surfacing from a passenger who boarded Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, when was this taken and why was it taken? Analyzing Jake’s Gmail account, the image was sent to Jake on March 9th, 2014 at 4:35 Pacific time. According to Jake, there is no explanation to why his ex-girlfriend would send him a picture of the flight. “We haven’t talked in a while. The last time we chatted was 5 months ago, besides that, she comments & likes my pictures on Facebook and that’s just it”, Jake says.

homerjay2005 wrote: »

objects identified and it appears to be significant, ships on route to investigate.

seems that finally they have found something.

Or maybe not ??

the most logical explanation here is the one put forward originally by a former BA pilot - cabin decompression, the course was turned before pilots and all passengers then passed out. it continued on its course, ran of fuel and then crashed.

what doesnt add up however is why the transponder was turned off and why no contact, they surely had 10-15 mins worth of oxygen and if they descended, would have had more.

is it possible that the captain wanted to commit suicide, but wasnt fully willing to experience the crash, so decompressed the plane to knock everybody out, turned off the coms so the plane wouldnt be tracked and then passed out?

thats the only plausible thing i can see here, UNLESS some of the reports about turning, acars/transponder turned off are untrue.

pfurey101 wrote: »

Or maybe not ??

????

Sky reporting that the pilots normally come off the flights and give a statement, but this morning they didnt. a few minutes later, a phone call was made to the Malaysian PM by Australian PM.

homerjay2005 wrote: »

Sky reporting that the pilots normally come off the flights and give a statement, but this morning they didnt. a few minutes later, a phone call was made to the Malaysian PM by Australian PM.

Malay transport minister confirmed it on the news there.


Tony Abbot (Oz PM) said this;

'The crew on board the Orion reported seeing two objects, the first a grey or green circular object and the second an orange rectangular object,' he told parliament on Monday evening.

The HMAS Success is in the area and attempting to recover the objects.

They are different to the pieces spotted by a Chinese plane earlier in the day.

Mr Abbott said a US Navy Poseidon, a second Royal Australian Orion and a Japanese Orion are also en route to the search area.

'I caution again ... that we don't know whether any of these objects are from MH370, they could be flotsom,' he told parliament.

How many communication systems are on board? The main radio (excuse the blunt terminology!) that they use to communicate normally to ATC, is there a back-up radio in case that fails or is there a seperate captain and FO radio on seperate switches for failure redundancy? And isn't there the text based system or is that defunct now?
I'd assume they're not on the same circuit.

ProfessorPlum wrote: »

Who said there was 21 minutes between turning off ACARS and transponder? The only reliable time fix was for the loss of transponder data - the ACARS could have been lost anytime between the last transmission and the next scheduled one, 30 minutes later.

To answer another question, there would usually be 3 VHF radios, two HF radios and 2 SATCOM channels.
The ACARS transmits via either the VHF or SATCOM.

OK, so ACARS would possibly be on the same circuit as one of the radios?
It's just hard to imagine why there was no communication attempt, what could take out many systems and yet leave enough in place for the pilots to be able to head to new waypoints (assuming it was done to land somewhere because of the assumed emergency situation), and be able to adjust flight level to the 12,000 feet that seems to be what the plane was at at some point.


http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2014/03/23/MAS-plane-ducks-nepal/

Don't know if that story was posted here or not, but in that particular incident, the pilots seemed to have a fairly lax attitude to reporting problems to ATC. It might raise questions for Malaysia Airlines practices and pilot training, I assume from IATA or some similar body? Or is there such a procedure for airlines if there is a questionable action following an incident?

Tea 1000 wrote: »

http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2014/03/23/MAS-plane-ducks-nepal/

Don't know if that story was posted here or not, but in that particular incident, the pilots seemed to have a fairly lax attitude to reporting problems to ATC. It might raise questions for Malaysia Airlines practices and pilot training, I assume from IATA or some similar body? Or is there such a procedure for airlines if there is a questionable action following an incident?

Since it was the landing light and not the windscreen that hit (as was broken) by the birds, the pilot probably didn't even know they had hit anything.