Malaysia Airlines loses contact with B777-200 / MH370 enroute from KUL to PEK

If it was flown anywhere, then military radar would have tracked it. And maybe that is what happened, and we're just not hearing about it.

 

Could be, but it seems like such an implausible scenario. I just can't figure out why anyone with the capability to ground crew a plane like this would want to take it.

 

A boat actually took samples from the slicks and tested it.

It is NOT from any aircraft.

 

I saw it posited in another thread or maybe this one, that hijacking and landing it to use it in a future terrorist attack could be a motivation.

I dismissed that idea for the same reason you did, but for discussion sake, what would it take to ground crew a 777 if you hijacked it? How much time, maximum, after landing it would you be able to re-start it and get it off the ground without specialized equipment?

 

Oh, I agree. My point was that it would have been tracked on radar to wherever it went.

 

I don't think you need anything special. Some stairs to reach the door, and a couple of fuel trucks. I'm sure you could launch again in 30 minutes if you had fuel trucks right there.

Assuming that the airplane was working okay when you landed it, of course.

You'd need a lav cart if you wanted to service the lav, but if you are a terrorist, I don't think that would be your highest priority.

 

put it on a battery maintainer :=) , top it off, it's good to go... it really doesn't need anything since it has only a single destination if used for a sinister mission

 

You can't just hijack and hide a 777. If the North Koreans had it, we would know about it. There's probably a handful of places you can land a 777 in north korea, and we can easily photograph every one of them with satellites on a daily basis, and there's enough US military presence around there that this would probably have been seen on radar. Not to mention, passengers would have been on their cell phones if the plane was hijacked and we would have heard something. There's no chance this plane is anything but crashed.

 

why is no one addressing the EPIRB... it is activated by inertia ( impact / concussion ) and monitored internationally

if it was activated at altitude, it would take several minutes before it reached the surface allowing for a signal, if the plane somehow ditched there would be a few minutes of signal before sinking, if it made it to land there would be signal until it was consumed (by fire )...d

transponders can be turned off to avoid tracking...

radar is a line of sight transmission... it is easy to fly under it... for military tracking it, it would need to raise some interest in it... fairly easy to avoid radar if direction / proximity is not threatening...

it may be that there are satellite images available, guessing it would take time to correctly identify the plane to get info on the event, it would be like finding a particular ant from the top of a tall building...

lots of possibilities, it's the lack clues, from an event that typically would leave many, as to what happened

 

They were way too busy over the past few days electing their supreme leader to waste time with hijackings. He not surprisingly won with 100% of the vote!

Anyway, there aren't all that many places where one could land a 777 period without attracting much attention... I really can't come up with a good scenario to explain what happened, so I assume multiple major malfunctions occurred simultaneously.

This is a weird one. I was thinking of Amelia Earhart on the drive in this morning... Back then, someone could simply disappear, never to be found again.

 

I read an article today that was a bit of a reminder..it took four days before they found any wreckage from the Air France flight (floating) and two years before the found and recovered the rest on the bottom of the ocean and that was in something like 12000 feet of water?. It's still somewhat early, the plane will turn up. I don't think that people fully appreciate the magnitude of the amount of real-estate that this plane could have crashed in...it could be tens of thousands of square miles.

 

What became of the debris that was thought to be a door?

I read in one report the plane veered off course and it was thought they tried to turn around. It's seems there are plenty of land masses in either direction, could the search need to move onto land? Although without smoke, I suppose it would have had to be a somewhat safe landing, and as mentioned previously people would be using cell phones .....unless cellphones were collected and tossed out the door, which at that speed ripped the door off the plane and that was what was spotted in the water.

If the radar signals were shut off in the cabin from an attack, and the engines were ok, this plane could have been attempted to have been taken back by the passengers and flown to who knows where before crashing into the water.

Prayers to the families and friends.

 

all debris thus far seen, has been trash in the sea and not related to the plane...

oil slicks have been checked and identified as NOT jet fuel...

anything seen or picked up has had nothing to do with the missing plane... there is a lot of territory to cover in the search... the mystery is the lack of clues, along with the need to increase search area...

one news source has the two traveling on stolen passports, tracing their one way tickets back to being sourced in Iran and issued in consecutive number sequence... adding to the conspiracy theory... still a long way from reality, but good gossip

 

ELTs dont transmit worth a damn under water. The CVR and the FDR do have sonar pingers on them but it takes pretty sophisticated equipment to pick that up from very far away.

 

Satellites.

Lots of govts have them (certainly US incl); they have pretty good coverage of that geographic area; there must be enough birds to provide nearly minute by minute coverage (even in darkness??); although US earlier said no sighting of a 'flash'.

Still, hard to believe NOTHING has shown up on ANY satellite? Of course, I realize there may be information known by someone, and not being publicized, but that goes toward conspiracy thinking….

If "they can read your license plate" , surely they can find flotsam and jetsam….

 

And that was the entire vertical stabilizer... pretty large... White with the AF logo on it... floating on the bounding main...

The good news (if any) on possible box recovery is that the South China Sea is much shallower than the mid-Atlantic is... (3,500 ft. vs. 12,000 ft.)


Here's the Fchat thread on the AF incident...

http://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/aviatorchat-com/259810-any-updates-airbus-lost-atlantic.html

 

Spy satellites take very high res imagery of somewhat-large geographic areas. It would take an incredible amount of manpower to analyze satellite photos of open ocean for debris, and that assumes there is no cloud cover. And even if you did spot a piece of junk in the ocean on a satellite, it could be anything. It's possible the Air Force took some photos for the NTSB (or whoever would look at them) to do analysis looking for the wreckage, but it would be akin to finding a needle in a haystack. If the plane crashed on land, it's possible that our IR satellites (SBIRS) detected the explosion, but if that were the case they'd have probably already found the wreckage.

 

Thankyou I appreciate the replies.

This whole event is mind boggling. As others are saying regarding the help of satellites, I wonder how many leads and searches are being performed in surrounding areas that we aren't aware of?
It's so odd that every backup/search and rescue device seems to have failed.

 

A photo surfaced on Facebook, where a local fisherman made a police report, after a commercial airline flew dangerously low, or lower than normal towards the sea. It seems it flew over him towards the south china sea, and towards vietnam.

Little did he know after making the police report (he sighted this at 1.30 am), it wasn't only until the next day, he realized that could be the airliner that went missing.

Not sure if the picture of the police report was a genuine one though.

So now, the plane is still missing, no door, no traces of the oil slick, nothing. Just vanished.

 

What about all the passenger mobile phones, surely if out there still somebody would have answered ... ?
Pete

 

There is a pic in the silver thread from someones facebook page ( does not belong to the poster) that shows a large aircraft on fire in the water off the coast of Vietnam on saturday morning. Why has this picture not been disproven or discussed anywhere?

I saved the pic but do not want to post it outside of the subscribed thread without permission.

PM the mods if you want to see if it can be shared. But it needs to be addressed. None of the folks at work were aware of the pic. I work in aerospace R&D. This is very sad for all of us in the industry.

 

Ok another thought about this ......
It's mentioned, via news, the military ( Malaysia ?)is claiming they tracked a plane to the west coast(?)area?
If the radar tracking of the plane has failed or been shut off intentionally, why can't the cell phones of the passengers be tracked? With the chance the plane did not crash into water, where the radar stopped picking it up, there is a chance not every phone is destroyed.
Our own gov. (U.S.) can track and snoop our phones in ways we can only imagine, how hard would it be to get passengers contact info from the airline or relatives(that are sitting there waiting for answers ) and track the phones. Are they worried about exposing their technology to the world ??