First we hear the flight climbed to FL450 when it disappeared now the latest is it descended to 5,000ft to avoid radar detection. 9 people around 01.30 reported a low flying aircraft with landing lights on to local police.

Why are we only just hearing about this now? Can we trust any information coming from the Malaysian government? The plane cannot be at FL450 and 5,000ft at the same time.

FO was the last voice heard and expat pilots relayed a message from Vietnam after last official comm (the handoff) was heard. The relay message was broken with lots of static. Suggesting it was further away that it should have been.

If it did descent to 5,000 ft how was it detected at 08;11 so far away without refuelling?

Did it land, now we are told it could have been on the ground.

Seems every day we hear more information that just raises more questions.

This also raises an interesting possibility:

Keith Ledgerwood ? Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?

Might as well say the Singapore pilots were an accessory to whatever happened to 370. That would require a lot of coordination or just sheer luck.

If it was planned that way the MAS flight would be dependent on the Singaporean jet flying the exact flight plan with no shortcuts or weather deviations, would need to be departing exactly on time, etc.

Possible but not likely? I can't see how MH370 could fly so closely to SIA68 for a relatively lengthy period of time w/o military radar detecting two blips @India or @Pakistan.

This, and many related theories seem far-fetched, and don't seem to address a big problem in my mind: the passengers.

It seems impossible to me that the passengers had no idea what was going on.
The in flight entertainment system shows the GPS position of the plane, and I believe it can only be turned off by the flight attendants
(are there controls for the Entertainment system in the cockpit?)

Even if it could be disabled, there is always the chance that a passenger looks out the window and realizes they're over the ocean when they should be over land.
A passenger could even have a GPS.
(I've had my GPS on an occasional flight and watched it for fun.)

If there was this big, nefarious plot, it must involve dealing with the passengers, or just straight-gambling that they don't notice what is going on. That's a big chance to take in a James Bond / Lex Luther style plot.

As a result, until there's some evidence that the passengers were controlled in some fashion, I don't accept the conspiracy theories, and continue to believe this is some bizarre, tragic accident.

Would there be a scenario where the pilots could've been disabled w/o the pax's knowing about it? Considering Bill Palmer's scenario, AP flies on its own into open ocean, runs out of fuel, drops - by the time pax's realize what's going on and try using cell phones there is no comm - no cell towers in open ocean. Have to consider that most people go to sleep asap in red eye flights, and that the probability of someone with a sat phone is a possibility but how likely?

If they know how to put the xponder into standby and pull the ACARS circuit breaker, then it would not be illogical to assume that they also know how to pull the IFE circuit breaker.

The pavement has to be thick enough to hold a widebody...big-airport runways are probably 6-10feet thick concrete.

So is the Mona Lisa...but who is going to buy it? There are a relatively small number of 777's in existence so there would be no way you could just re-paint it and use it.

I do at this point.

Not if it hit the water at high speed.

The debris/oil slick would have dissipated in the open ocean, possibly within hours before anyone started looking.

Because the perp(s) are fishfood.

Acars and transponder were the two c/b's that had reporting capability, how many more c/b's were inop?

Does anybody have access to the smoke/ fire checklist and can supply info into which busses are lost and equipment shed if they are actioned?.

Or nobody was watching their position because the pressurization had failed or been dumped. Dead people don't fight or make phone calls.
No claims of responsibility are made for failed missions to hijack a plane.

Assuming the aircraft was either hijacked or the pilots went rogue, the problem of controlling the passengers could be accomplished by opening the outflow valves.

Once the masks drop, the passengers are immobile. At 45,000 feet the oxygen supply is reduced, more than likely less than the 12 minutes advertised.

Re-pressurize when able.

Disclaimer, I'm not saying this is what happened.

Motive is the pertinent question in my view.

If suicide, why fly 7+ plus hours? Standard hijacking, where are the demands? If 9/11 style attack, they missed badly. Where is the wreckage?

Very strange.

Pointing at the ocean is suicide. Flying till the jet runs out of gas is Inshallah. Particularly if you have a full pack of cigarettes.

Threw the last part in to help the race baiters label me a racist.

Long meandering flight after the first turn means whomever was in control succumbed to the low pressure and perished.
If the aircraft actually got to 45k and stayed there awhile, those masks aren't going to completely protect you. The Dixie cups in the back are less than useless under those conditions, pax would be gone in minutes.

Also, if the goal was suicide in the middle of the ocean, why set way-points? I would've just flown VFR by compass-heading and starlight.

To me, GPS and points are for when you want to get some place specific. When flying for fun, (or ultimately, to die?) a precise course wouldn't matter.

So, I have a question.
The media is reporting that "authorities" have specific times that the Xpndr and ACARS were "turned off".
How the hell do the "authorities" know this?
My understanding is; they were not in radar contact at the time and unless ACARS was in the middle of a transmission, I don't know how they could know these times so specifically.
Am I missing something here?
Also if ACARS is off, what system is pinging the satellites?
I'm old but I don't get this.

Graybeard

Nobody new anything real time. However everything is recorded. They are simply going over all the data from every source and connecting dots.

I do but I'm certainly not going to tell you or post it on a public forum.

The news media has forgot the first week of the Olympics Interpol put out an alert that there was a possibility for a "tooth paste" bomb. Was Interpol correct with their info but were wrong on the place/time/target?

Don't Believe everything you hear in the news media. They reported the other day that a plane cant fly at FL400 because the masks would drop. No news media its your that drop...ed the ball that is!

I would also like to point out the fact that if there was some type of emergency on FLT 370 the crew would most likely have turned the plane to that exact 90 degree turn that happened. Here is why:

1) they were half way between Malaysia & Vietnam...Where would you have gone if there was an emergency in the middle of the night, over the ocean, half way between your airline home country or fly to a foreign country?

2) the turn was the shortest route to countless airports that were long enough to land a triple 7...just google Malaysia airport map & Malaysia Airline own website

3) pilots would know there countries landmarks/Airport SID if there was in fact a emergency vs flying to Vietnam with out a radio/vfr charts handy

4) Both pilots were from the northern area of Malaysia...did they learn to fly in that area making them more familiar?

5) Turning back to their takeoff airport would have been a 180 turn and appears to be a longer distance then going to the northern Malaysia airports

6) What was the traffic volume out of their takeoff airport that time of night = possible mid air collision vs going to the less traffic airports up north.

7) Company maintenance facility on Malaysia

8) Passengers custom issues would be less because they had already been in Malaysia vs going to Vietnam pax would need to obtain visas to leave the airport to go to a hotel.

9) Dealing with 230 passengers the next day to move them to their final destination...logistic would be much easier out of Malaysia.

The thought of a perp driving a plane with 237 (238?) dead bodies in the back for 5+ hours gives me the creeps - to me it changes the magnitude of the crime, if indeed there was one. I hope this is wrong for the sake of their relatives and everyone involved.

Unitedflyier I found an EK one online.

You can build a fully functional 777 sim in your basement, UF doesn't think someone could find an emergency checklist or some schematics online? I guess he missed the memo about the age of the Internet, it started over ten years ago.

I been thinking that for a while...Just creepy to have that many dead bodies , at night, over the ocean...Waiting for the fuel to run out so you nose dive into the abyss...

What do you do? Smoke and have a few drinks...Maybe walk around whistling thru the cabin???

You'd go all nacraphiliac on the hot corpses, of course! :eek::eek::D

I think the "authorities" are full of crap, and looking for a scapegoat. :rolleyes:

They have crappy radar coverage, crappy security at the airport, and Air Malaysia probably does crappy mx on their airplanes.

It's really easy to blame the dead pilots, rather than admit you allowed hijackers with knives/bombs on board, or you didn't do any MX on your airplanes.

You're all going to want to turn on CNN right this minute, Don Lemon is going to tell us the "Warning Signs that your pilot may be suicidal..."

Even I can't make this crap up, but CNN is pretty good at it!

There might be an off-shoot of the SIA68 theory. What if what the radar tracked was actually SIA68 and not MH370? Radar altitude readings potentially have large margin of errors. MH370 could've dropped off radar and gone right instead of left. Focus on the left hand while the right hand does something else.

Closer to ~16 inches.

There's obviously a softer base underneath that, but not really a requirement for a single landing and maybe a departure.

The ~16" thickness is so that the runway doesn't have to be replaced so often. You could go much much thinner for a one-time use.

The authorities and a bunch of idiots that call themselves pilots as well........!:rolleyes:

As silly as the SQ 68 theory is, the offshoot is, too. SQ would have been squawking on SSR so there would be NO confusion on him.

GF

Timbo,

An, I'll bet on any given day, 30% of all crews, regardless of flying machine, exhibit one or more of Lemon's warning signs in the pax minds. Following the posts here and at PPRUNE would drive you nuts.


GF

Thanks for indulging me and responding to my post.

I guess I'm having a hard time understanding how/why this could have happened. It seems so strange that the person at the controls was able to do as much as he did and didn't have an end game. Conversely, if the end game was just to crash it, why would he fly for hours first?

As soon as I heard the transponder had been turned off, I believed it had to be something malicious. But even that doesn't add up with all the other evidence unless he could land it somewhere intact.

The Malaysians have to know much more than they're saying and that's super frustrating.

I've seen runways under construction, much deeper than 16 inches. True you could use a thinner runway but only up to a point...a big airplane would break through if it's too thin.

That's what I thought until they built a flight plan to go to points west of Malaysia.

Classic projection.

FTD vs Simulator
 

Not unless you've got $20 million or so and a lot more expertise than any one individual has.

What Cpt Shah had was an FTD (Flight Training Device), and presumably an uncertified one, at that.

He had access to a certified FTD at work, and to a real simulator. With 20,000 hours, he didn't NEED one at home; he was apparently a computer geek on the side.

I don't need to practice putting a weird flight plan into my FMS; I can do it in less than a minute if I have access to the charts (or even if I don't; the waypoints and airports are all stored in the FMS, anyway).

Checklists, on the other hand, are not secret, nor are they secured.

That's all well and good. But the transponder was turned off which throws the whole thing out the window.

Wait a minute, I'm the shrink here. But, yeah, "projection" is the correct term :)