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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| Post subject: Malaysian airlines plane missing |  |
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I thought I'd start a new thread for this as, in to paraphrase a quote from Alice in Wonderland, it's getting curiouser and curioser.
It looks like China and Vietnam are becoming progressively more pissed of with how Malaysia is dealing with things.
Couple of half decent articles from the Murdoch press:
| Quote: | | THE last radio transmission from the cockpit of missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 was "All right, good night'', Kuala Lumpur's ambassador to Beijing reportedly said today during a meeting with Chinese relatives. |
http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/mh370-pilots-last-words-revealed-as-search-area-for-missing-malaysia-airlines-plane-widens/story-fnizu68q-1226851991393
| Quote: | IS Malaysia laying a deliberate smokescreen?
As the world waits for answers about missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, the families of its 239 lost passengers and crew are getting fed up with official furphies.
And they're not the only ones.
Vietnam has just announced it is suspending its air search for missing flight MH370 and scaling back its sea search as it waits for Malaysia to clarify the potential new direction of the multi-national hunt - not the first clash between the two countries on the issue.
Malaysian authorities have made a number of conflicting statements since Saturday, while failing to address rumours about the plane. |
This one has some good facts about the magnitude of the task facing people searching.
http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/is-malaysia-airlines-telling-us-the-truth-about-flight-mh370/story-fnizu68q-1226852704012
And just to mess with peoples heads even more, it's alleged that one of the co pilots had a habit of not exactly following security protocols
| Quote: | A CO-PILOT at the controls of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 invited a Melbourne tourist and her friend into the cockpit where he smoked, took photos and entertained the pair during a previous international flight.
In a worrying lapse of security, it’s been revealed pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid and his colleague broke Malaysia Airline rules when they invited passengers Jonti Roos and Jaan Maree to join them in the cabin for the one-hour flight from Phuket to Kuala Lumpur. |
http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/mh370-mystery-investigation-shifts-focus-to-thailand-crime-gangs-as-debris-discarded-as-evidence/story-fnizu68q-1226850965067
In other news, it seems as though the 2 blokes on stolen passports are in the clear as far as terrorism goes (read that earlier, don't remember where so no link) but the old antipathy between different Asian nations is really coming out now.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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think positive 
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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What about the sharp left turn (of course) and continue for an hour before disappearing? Planes go a $£$%^%%$ long way in 1 hour!
I'm telling you, it's on lost island!!
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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swoop42 
Whatcha gonna do when he comes for you?
Joined: 02 Aug 2008
Location: The 18
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Why did it take days for the Malaysian military to declare that they had tracked the plane for an hour after the signal was lost which crucially would have dramatically altered the search area?
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He's mad. He's bad. He's MaynHARD! |
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ronrat
Joined: 22 May 2006
Location: Thailand
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I am travelling on MAS next week , KL to Singapore. Luckily Singapore home. Normally it an ok airline. Thai news , BBC , Al Jazeera all have different stories as does the Australian network. My guess is we will never know.
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Annoying opposition supporters since 1967. |
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Lazza
Joined: 04 Feb 2003
Location: Bendigo, Victoria, Australia
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| ronrat wrote: | | I am travelling on MAS next week , KL to Singapore. Luckily Singapore home. Normally it an ok airline. Thai news , BBC , Al Jazeera all have different stories as does the Australian network. My guess is we will never know. |
From my experience of travelling to Sri Lanka, MAS is only good from Melb./Syd to KL. It has terrible service and shocking attitude between KL and Colombo. I swore never to fly with them after a SL trip last year. |
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sixpoints
Joined: 27 Sep 2010
Location: Lulie Street
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Morrigu 
Joined: 11 Aug 2001
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This just gets stranger and stranger!
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304914904579434653903086282-lMyQjAxMTA0MDEwMzExNDMyWj
Vietnam can't find wreckage at the Chinese coordinates.
The WSJ is now reporting that the plane may have flew on for 4 hours after contact was lost. http://on.wsj.com/1lYx08l
Edit: WSJ paywall for some. Here's some of the copy. Sorry for the length.
Missing Airplane Flew On for Hours
U.S. investigators suspect that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 stayed in the air for about four hours past the time it reached its last confirmed location, according to two people familiar with the details, raising the possibility that the plane could have flown on for hundreds of additional miles under conditions that remain murky.
Aviation investigators and national security officials believe the plane flew for a total of five hours based on data automatically downloaded and sent to the ground from the Boeing Co. BA 777's engines as part of a routine maintenance and monitoring program.
WSJ has confirmed that the pilot had the ability to manually turn off the transponder on Flight MH370. A mid-air catastrophe could have destroyed it. Why is the transponder so significant? WSJ's Jason Bellini has #TheShortAnswer.
That raises a host of new questions and possibilities about what happened aboard the widebody jet carrying 239 people, which vanished from civilian air-traffic control radar over the weekend, about one hour into a flight to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
Six days after the mysterious disappearance prompted a massive international air and water search that so far hasn't produced any results, the investigation appears to be broadening in scope.
U.S. counterterrorism officials are pursuing the possibility that a pilot or someone else on board the plane may have diverted it toward an undisclosed location after intentionally turning off the jetliner's transponders to avoid radar detection, according to one person tracking the probe.
The investigation remains fluid, and it isn't clear whether investigators have evidence indicating possible terrorism or espionage. So far, U.S. national security officials have said that nothing specifically points toward terrorism, though they haven't ruled it out.
But the huge uncertainty about where the plane was headed, and why it apparently continued flying so long without working transponders, has raised theories among investigators that the aircraft may have been commandeered for a reason that appears unclear to U.S. authorities. Some of those theories have been laid out to national security officials and senior personnel from various U.S. agencies, according to one person familiar with the matter.
At one briefing, according to this person, officials were told investigators are actively pursuing the notion that the plane was diverted "with the intention of using it later for another purpose."
As of Wednesday it remained unclear whether the plane reached an alternate destination or if it ultimately crashed, potentially hundreds of miles from where an international search effort has been focused.
In those scenarios, neither mechanical problems, pilot mistakes nor some other type of catastrophic incident caused the 250-ton plane to mysteriously vanish from radar.
The latest revelations come as local media reported that Malaysian police visited the home of at least one of the two pilots.
Boeing officials and a Malaysia Airlines official declined to comment.
The engines' onboard monitoring system is provided by their manufacturer, Rolls-Royce PLC, and it periodically sends bursts of data about engine health, operations and aircraft movements to facilities on the ground.
Rolls-Royce couldn't immediately be reached for comment.
As part of its maintenance agreements, Malaysia Airlines transmits its engine data live to Rolls-Royce for analysis. The system compiles data from inside the 777's two Trent 800 engines and transmits snapshots of performance, as well as the altitude and speed of the jet.
Those snippets are compiled and transmitted in 30-minute increments, said one person familiar with the system. According to Rolls-Royce's website, the data is processed automatically "so that subtle changes in condition from one flight to another can be detected."
The engine data is being analyzed to help determine the flight path of the plane after the transponders stopped working. The jet was originally headed for China, and its last verified position was half way across the Gulf of Thailand.
A total flight time of five hours after departing Kuala Lumpur means the Boeing 777 could have continued for an additional distance of about 2,200 nautical miles, reaching points as far as the Indian Ocean, the border of Pakistan or even the Arabian Sea, based on the jet's cruising speed.
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“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.†|
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Nick - Pie Man
Joined: 04 Aug 2010
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I love a good mystery.
It was probably the aliens on the moon that caused this |
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Dr Pie
Dr Pie
Joined: 08 Nov 2007
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I understand how a plane could have disappeared without trace in the 1930s but eighty years later we have radar and satellite tracking. How the f--- do you lose a large plane in the days of 21st century technology?
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Born and raised in Black and White |
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What'sinaname
Joined: 29 May 2010
Location: Living rent free
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Aliens
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Fighting against the objectification of woman. |
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Lazza
Joined: 04 Feb 2003
Location: Bendigo, Victoria, Australia
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| Dr Pie wrote: | | I understand how a plane could have disappeared without trace in the 1930s but eighty years later we have radar and satellite tracking. How the f--- do you lose a large plane in the days of 21st century technology? |
NFI....  |
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Culprit 
Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Port Melbourne
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I can see a TV movie coming up with a 60 Minutes Thread, Airline Disaster thread.
Yep Aliens is what I am going for as well. |
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| Dr Pie wrote: | | I understand how a plane could have disappeared without trace in the 1930s but eighty years later we have radar and satellite tracking. How the f--- do you lose a large plane in the days of 21st century technology? |
Same way you always lost 'em - the world is a very, very, very big place.
Radar isn't magic, nor is it ubiquitous, nor is there an unlimited fund of billions upon billions with which to watch and record and analyse screens on which, 99.9999999% of the time, nothing happens that we would ever want to know about. Radar operates under the ordinary laws of physics; it is limited in range and detail resolution (different types of radar are differently limited; your police speed gun, for example, is completely useless for an air to ground search, while an aircraft search radar is useless for booking motorists). Radar, like sonar, simply beams out radiation and looks for reflections of that radiation. All sorts of objects reflect radiation, and there is no magic recipe to distinguish the various reflections of an aircraft, a flock of birds, a tin roof, a school of fish, a rock, or a layer of warmer water. Think of the view that radar provides as being like the view you get from your car windscreen during a downpour with the wipers off. Yes, we have lots of experience and clever electronic tricks to pull, but in the end, radar doesn't show everything, and even if it did there aren't enough computers and eyes in the world to see everything it does show, let alone record it.
Notice that many military actions - an air strike for example - take place regardless of radar coverage: opposing forces can always find ways to go around or trick or avoid radar coverage. And this, remember, is under circumstances where the defending side has the ultimate motivation - if they can't find the attackers and shoot the down, they get killed. (I'm not suggesting here that the MA 777 tried to avoid radar, of course, I'm simply pointing out that radar misses a lot of stuff even when the operators are desperate to pick up everything they can, never mind when there is no apparent need to watch in a particular direction.)
In short, radar can detect all sorts of things under all sorts of circumstances, and very often does, but it equally often fails to detect things outside of its (typically quite narrow) area of best coverage, and is always prone to ambiguities and false positives. Once you get outside the region of close coverage (typically, the areas immediately surrounding busy airports where radar is vital for traffic control), the quality of coverage falls off rapidly (as it should - there is little need for it elsewhere) and air traffic control outside these designated areas relies largely on pilots (a) reporting their position and course from time to time, (b) sticking within designated flight parameters which are registered with ATC and planned and approved beforehand - in particular, these include strict altitude rules such that aircraft traveling in different directions are never at the same height, and (c) aircrew vigilance - i.e., being aware of other traffic in the vicinity, communicating with other crews by radio to make sure everyone is on the same page, and (yes, still!) good old-fashioned looking out the window.
Satellites are generally used to provide communications links (essentially radio relays of many kinds) and navigation data (GPS, amongst other things) to the crew. In other words, the satellite is there to provide information to the aircraft; the aircraft isn't there to provide information to the satellite. Aircrews always need to know where the aeroplane is. Other people (the airline traffic department, air traffic controllers, other aircraft nearby) only sometimes need to know where it is, and if they need to know they just ask. There are always at least two well-trained, certificated, expert people on every commercial aircraft ready to respond to any request for the aircraft's position - dealing with radio traffic is a major part of the crew's duties; typically during busier times one pilot manages the aircraft itself (flying manually or by supervising the automatic systems; either way he needs to know what is going on at all times) while the other assists with a range of subsidiary tasks, the most time-consuming of which is handling the radios. In general, the crew are very busy for takeoff and climb, and even busier for approach and landing, but don't have a great deal to do during the cruise phase. If you want to know where they are, just ask.
In short, the worldwide air navigation system is designed to provide accurate aircraft position information to the people who always need it (the aircraft crew) and (outside high-traffic areas near major airports) is not really designed to provide that information to people who don't generally need it or want it. This system works very well indeed and is constantly being improved. The fact that we are all talking about this particular instance where we can't find out the position of an aircraft in the normal way (i.e., by asking the crew) is itself an illustration of just how rare and unusual the event is.
Would it be possible to institute a worldwide, transoceanic global tracking system for all commercial aircraft? Of course it would. But who is going to pay for it? And if you are going to spend that vast amount of money to deal with this sort of 00.000000001% chance, why aren't you spending it on something that would provide a thousand or even a million times more benefit at similar cost? (Any number of examples come to mind, from better maintenance procedures - mind you the current ones are very, very good in most countries - through more training for aircrew - most air accidents happen because of crew mistakes, and most of those happen because of poor communication) and on to more rapid replacement of older fleets, particularly in third-world countries.)
Simply, the cost-benefit is just not there.
However, we will see much more comprehensive tracking over the next decade or so, but not for the reasons considered above (which don't stand up to any rational cost-benefit analysis). It will come in as a mere side-effect of tracking for completely unrelated reasons, in particular the need to save fuel and hence both cost and carbon emissions by ever-more sophisticated tweaks to routing, cruise altitude, and climb and descent profiles. Airlines are very keen to do this and it is already happening, bit by bit: traffic control authorities around the world are working with airlines and aircraft manufacturers to roll out new systems which, by very sophisticated examination of real-time data, allow aircraft to take advantage of flexible routing to eke out the maximum possible fuel economy. Obviously, to do this, the ATC system has to know where the aircraft is at all times so that it can make sure there is no risk of collision with other aircraft doing the same thing. It is a huge task with many interlocking complexities - much more difficult than the casual eye would expect - but it has been underway for a decade or so now and the phase-in of new components in this vast and complex system will continue over the next decade or two.
In short, Dr Pie, realtime global tracking will be pretty much as you imagine one day, but it isn't yet, and won't be for quite some time - probably another decade or possibly even two.
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�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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Morrigu
Joined: 11 Aug 2001
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Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 deliberately flown off course: PM
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-15/malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-deliberately-off-course/5323338
Malaysia's prime minister says investigators have not confirmed Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was hijacked, but the plane's movements are consistent with the "deliberate action" of someone on board.
Speaking at a press conference this afternoon, Najib Razak confirmed that the plane's systems were gradually switched off and the plane deviated far to the west of its flight path.
The Boeing 777-200ER disappeared a week ago with 239 people onboard during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Mr Razak says new satellite data shows "with a high degree of certainty" that communications and reporting systems on MH370 were turned off before the plane reached the Malaysian peninsula.
He says a short time later the aircraft's transponder was switched off.
"It then flew in a westerly direction back over Peninsular Malaysia before turning north-west," he said.
"Up until the point at which it left military primary radar coverage.
"These movements are consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane."
The search for the plane originally centred on the South China Sea, but authorities have shifted their focus west of the intended flight path to the Indian Ocean.
Mr Razak says 14 countries, 43 ships and 58 aircraft have been involved in the search.
"It is widely understood that this has been a situation without precedent," he said.
Earlier an unnamed Malaysian official told Associated Press that hijacking was no longer just a theory, but "conclusive".
The offiial said no motive had been established and it was not known where the plane had been taken.
Poor family and friends of those who were on board - must be a nightmare 
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“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.†|
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