I suspect crew incapacitation of some sort as being more likely than terror. Fire might explain the lost XPDR if electrical systems were involved. Decompression would not explain the XPDR. Unless the crew inadvertently turned it off while switching to 7700. Or maybe they simply flew out of range of secondary radar in the area?

Somewhere in the chain of what happened is going to be one highly-improbable link...one that will have occurred non-the less. Once that link is identified and proven to a reasonable degree everything else will make sense.

100% agree with you. When I studied abroad in Japan, that was the real eye-opener. I stopped listening to American news after that.

When the earthquake happened in March I would watch japanese news stations/NHK reporting on the event, but then I would call my parents and hear a completely different story that was being told on the American news.

Not to mention, the Sum Ting Wong incident just further exemplified it...

Malaysian 777 missing
 

Thank you Evamodel, for understanding. Спасибо

How about China Southern?

Malaysian 777 missing
 

Did this plane have wifi capabilities? If it did, you would think that they could triangulate the position of the signal.
Also, with over 250 people on board, someone had a cellphone. Even with the phone off...the iphone has a backend way to find its location and it's still powered to retain internal memory. You would think some guru at Apple could code a hack to do this.
I find it hard to believe that a couple of hijackers could get all the passengers to not transmit some sort of a message.
Everyone is looking for the plane to transmit something, they need to focus on the people and what sort of devices they own. With the new era of technology, they have more options.

Way more likely than someone stealing it. You can't just land a 777 somewhere and pull it into a hangar without someone seeing it. A government would have to be behind something like that to pull it off and I think that is very unlikely. Since the engine data news, I've also thought about the crew being incapacitated and the plane flying on autopilot. Remember Payne Stewart a few years back?

Now CNN is reporting the plane may have flown for 'hours' towards the Indian Ocean...

OK; hijacked or incapacitated crew?

It was a few years back anyway. I was in a group that studied the area's implementation of ADS-B and I remember a number of those routes are beyond radar for various short distances. They'd use time and altitude separation at fixes like BITOD though you'd still stay on VHF as usual, and when you got into range the next facility would re-identify you. A lot of gaps are small enough you don't need to give time estimates, but technically they're using procedural/non-radar control there.

Maybe they planned to land it in a country without a government, such as Somalia? If it's true the aircraft took a hard left back over Malaysia, the course looks like it was headed straight toward... Somalia. (dun dun DUN!)

Yep. Keep in mind you usually don't get "unbiased" news, but it is just biased from a significantly different perspective. It used to be one of my favorite things to watch foreign news when traveling. It is interesting to get the whole vibe of America as the "rich obnoxious uncle trying unsuccessfully to meddle in your personal life."

The Malaysia airline incident is simultaneously tragic and fascinating. I hope it does not remain an unsolved mystery forever.

Considering the FOB, there's a big difference between making a hard left and heading toward Somalia and actually getting there. :rolleyes:

The rapid decompression is starting to actually make more sense. Possibly knocked out the transponders, pilots notice too late for oxygen, make a turn toward the only direction the airplane would be guaranteed over water when the fuel eventually runs dry.

I'm disgusted to see all the news reports and internet posts suggesting the pilots had a sinister plan. I like to think anyone trusted to fly pax is also going to be fighting the airplane until the end, unless proven otherwise. Just my .02¢.

Malaysian 777 missing
 

Perfect Example of American media, an Airbus 320 blew a tire on takeoff and had an abort full evacuation and Americans hurt and injured but yet the news can not stop talking about the damn Malaysian flight, because its a mystery oooooo America wants to be part of it but yet in their backyard in Philadelphia something happened and not a single report. Anderson copper and all the CNN reports can... Well you guys know the rest

It may end up being explained by this. An interesting list of incidents is here, beginning with some of the infamous Comet failures. Obviously most people know about the more recent Helios incident.

Uncontrolled decompression - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

around our kitchen table we did!

Very good point, but expand that to ALL news around the world, they all have their slant and the MSM in all countries is FOS.
How did Japan report their recent nuclear incident?
Well, let us just say many facts were excluded.:)

well and at that point i don't know who to believe. i really wouldn't put my money on any one at that point.

I sware to god I had a news channel in America telling California radiation is going to take them over from across the ocean, and one channel telling me the radiation leaked was that of a banana.

Maybe my new strategy will just be believing wherever the median is.

if they were hijacked why didn't anyone use there cells??

As this saga/tragedy unfolds we are being negatively represented by so-called "experts". Today, Michael Savage had an expert on...she was a 32-year flight attendant with Pan Am. She mentioned that the media was reporting that the #370 Captain had an "assimilator" at his house. She said she has never heard of an airline pilot owning an "assimilator" before. She derived that if the FBI looked into his "assimilator" they would find evidence of him training/preparing for his day of glory. I guess all the real experts were already booked at Fox and CNN..oh wait they were also embarrassing in their assessments.

No one ever claimed her to be an "expert", just an idiot that called in with a stupid opinion. It was a funny conversation.

oh, i found the answer

Iranian lawmaker: U.S. ?kidnapped? missing Malaysia Airlines plane - NY Daily News

Wouldn't work over open water, unless somebody had a iridium. And a iridium would really prefer an unobstructed view of the sky...might work if you had a window seat and all the stars lined up.

If they flew over land, you might or might not get normal cell reception depending on altitude and location.

This.

A typical cell-phone has a range of 2-3 miles. The reason they are called "cellular" is because they operate inside a "cell" of a certain electronic boundary. I found when working for an air-ambulance company that the cell-phones for the ambulance would lose coverage at about 150-160 knots on takeoff or landing.

The explanation given to me (which makes sense) is at that speed, the time time spent in a particular "Cell" was insufficient for the towers defining that cell to establish a connection. Just as it was establishing the connection on a specific frequency, it would lose coverage, and the process would start all over.

I also believe the tower propagation patterns are optimized for horizontal coverage, not vertical.

There may be exceptions in the states, where tower density is high. But certainly not over the open ocean, in Asia.

With most cell phones being digital these days this is the case. For example on 9/11 the passengers were able to phone out because the cell system was still largely analog and needed to only pick up the right frequency and not scan for tower after tower (I could be wording that wrong). Analog cell phones were also the reason for the annoying buzz on occasion through the headset.

[Hi all, Network Engineer by career] Regarding a software hack:
I've worked on software for private jets, etc, and the only access points are direct (what we call) "thin net" direct connections.

The idea I've been reading that any passenger can access these, without having breached the cockpit, is absurd. Built-in plane security aside, even a compromise of a floor panel in the passenger area would require complete severing of wires - not to mention the obvious labor to even access the panel in the first place, and the tools to reassemble connectivity between the attacker and the jet.

This is paranoia, and should be put to rest.

95% certainty, Iridium would not work inside an airplane.
At least, it never has for me..

http://o.onionstatic.com/images/25/2...l/700.jpg?0360


KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA—Following a host of conflicting reports in the wake of the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 last Saturday, representatives from the Kuala Lumpur–based carrier acknowledged they had widened their investigation into the vanished Boeing 777 aircraft today to encompass not only the possibilities of mechanical failure, pilot error, terrorist activity, or a botched hijacking, but also the overarching scope of space, time, and humankind’s place in the universe.

The airline, now in its fifth day of searching for the passenger jet carrying 239 passengers and crew, has come under fire for its perceived mishandling of the investigation, whose confusing and contradictory reports have failed to provide definitive answers on everything from how long the missing plane remained aloft after losing contact with air traffic controllers, to whether the flight made a radical alteration in its heading, to the very dimensions of space-time and the nature of reality, and what exactly it is that brought us into existence and imbued us with this thing we call life.

Additionally, the airline confirmed it had expanded its active search area to include a several-hundred-square-mile zone in the Indian Ocean as well as each of the seven or 22 additional spatial dimensions posited by string theory.

“We continue to do everything in our power and explore every possible lead—both Cartesian and phenomenological—to locate the aircraft as quickly as possible,” said Malaysia’s civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, who went on to say that authorities were still actively seeking tips from anyone claiming knowledge related either to the flight, or to the mechanisms by which consciousness arises, or to the question of why anything physical and finite exists instead of nothing at all. “At this stage, we can’t rule anything out: not crew interference with the transponders, not a catastrophic electrical failure, not the emergence of a complex topological feature of space-time such as an Einstein-Rosen bridge that could have deposited the flight at any location in the universe or a different time period altogether, nothing.”

“Could a parallel universe have immediately swelled up from random cosmological fluctuation according to the multiverse theory and swallowed the flight into its folds, or could ice have built up on an airspeed sensor? Those are both options we are currently considering,” Rahman added. “Everything’s on the table. That is, insofar as anything exists at all, which we’re also looking into.”

Rahman assured the press and families of passengers that officials would not rest until they locate the plane, provided that sensory experience can be verified beyond the existence of one’s own mind. Malaysian authorities also cautioned that they were dealing with an unprecedented aviation mystery and that it could take months to ascertain the airliner’s exact fate as well as, for that matter, the fate of mankind itself, assuming a linear theory of space-time in which the future is unknowable and objects travel in a forward trajectory which, authorities hasten to add, is not necessarily the case.

In addition, airline sources attempted to assuage an uneasy public by noting they had brought in top crash investigators from the Malaysian, Vietnamese, and Chinese governments, as well as U.S. Navy personnel, Boeing technicians, leading quantum physicists, theoretical cosmologists, metaphysicians, epistemologists, and determinist philosophers to help scour all conceivable and as yet inconceivable locations in which the plane might be located.

“The bottom line is that we have a sophisticated aircraft fresh off a safety inspection with no prior incident of malfunction, flying in good weather at a cruising altitude,” Rahman continued. “Why didn’t the pilot send a distress signal? Why aren’t we finding a debris path? What are we to make of the contradictory radar information? Where did the universe begin and can it be said to have a limit or an edge? What is mankind’s role in it? Is there a God? If so, what is God’s nature?”

“It’s too early to answer these questions right now, but I can assure you that Malaysia Airlines will get to the bottom of it,” Rahman added. “Our top people are on it right now.”


Malaysia Airlines Expands Investigation To Include General Scope Of Space, Time | The Onion - America's Finest News Source :D

I'm thinking "DieHard" movie plot....no terrorist or high jacking. What was in the cargo bays?

Gold? Diamonds? Bonds? :eek:

"Airport '77?"

I'm the furthest thing there ever was from paranoid, and will crush paranoia like a bug when I find it.

But as somebody with some insight into military cyber capabilities I can almost assure you that the only perfectly secure system is one with zero external connections, wired or wireless and that includes the power source. Military systems can, for example, insert malign code into a control system via an access point that's not even designed to serve as a comms device. Think about it, all you have to do is get the right trons to wiggle, and the trons don't care how you go about that.

The Iranians though the same way you do about their centrifuges ;)

With all that said, the usual suspect bad guys wouldn't have the technical capacity, not even close. This sort of "black magic" attack would probably require a government entity...at least for now.

I'm still going with Snakes on the Plane!

Mods won't let me post the You Tube vid, due to language, but check out Samuel Jackson's rant, "Strap in people we are going to open some windows!"

MH0370- 777 FMS question
 

Hello all. The latest news about "new" waypoints being flown on MH0370 has me stumped.
I, like all of you are trying to figure this mystery out.
I fly the MD11 and have a question for you 777 guys/gals. I'm wondering if they had had a dual FMC failure and were down to using the standby flight plan? Here is my question to all of you.
Early in my 17 years on the airplane, I once caught, during flight, that the standby flight plan in MCDU3 had been activated (once activated it is out of the loop as far as cross talking between MCDU 1and 2) and while we were over the North Pacific, enroute to Japan, our standby flight plan still had a flight plan that was from 3 days prior with a flight from Germany to the US!
Since then, during my preflight, I ensure that the standby flight plan is not "active" in the #3 MCDU in order that all 3 can cross talk.
Does the FMS in the 777 have the same logic when the Standby Flight plan has been activated due to a dual FMC failure?
I can't see an 18,000 hour LCA having an issue with this. The F/O was in training (or had relatively recently transitioned to the A/C) and had the Captain become incapacitated for any reason (strictly conjecture on my part), could this have played a role?
Thank you,
fbh

I think Stephen Hawking addresses this in his book, A Brief History of Time. And I think he came up with a conclusion already. ;)

Now that's some heavy stuff, Clamp. To exclude nothing at this stage is probably a smart move, but to dwell on a rare cosmological event or the reality of existence itself is quite a leap. Before we can go there, we'll need a few more bridges. Parts of the quoted statement, if true, are signs of desperation or red herrings. If you hear the sound of hoofs in North Texas or on the Asian Steppes, chances are it's not a zebra, let alone existence collapsing.

The Onion, best news outlet of all time.

Sounding like whomever was flying this plane west over the Indian Ocean didn't want any gas in the tanks when it crashed into the ocean.

Or to possibly not be over a population center.

I flew Delta's MD11's for 4 years (1996-2000), and I've been on the 777 for the past 8 years. The 777 is not nearly as automated as the MD11. In the 777, you have to turn on all the pumps and packs on the overhead, whereas in the MD, it does all that for you. It doesn't have a "standby flight plan" and the third MCDU is rarely used for anything, other than Sat Com calls or calling the F/A's in Door mode. It doesn't do "Route Copy" either.

It only has Route 1 and Route 2. We only use Route 2 to load our ETPs and our divert airports. It gets reloaded every time we load a new Route 1, unless we are flying a short domestic leg, like ATL-LAX, where we are not going to load a Route 2 with divert airports.

If you lose both FMS heads you can use the third head for Standby Nav, but it's not going to jump over to Route 2 by itself, you have to activate and execute Route 2.

I've got a few questions, but I'm not a B-777 guy, so they may be irrelevant.

Was the ACARS MEL'd inop? If the engine data is passed via ACARS and the system wasn't working from the get-go, there would be no data transmitted. That's when the crew does manual engine data checks and logs them in the maintenance log book to be checked later. Was this aircraft SATCOM equipped? Was this specific aircraft ETOPS certified - or did it need to be? Was there a fuel system MEL? Has anybody checked the fuel slips? When those fans stop turning and everything turns dark - no electrical or hydraulic - NOTHING gets transmitted. I suspect fuel remaining from the previous flight on this aircraft would have allowed them to fly for about an hour???!!!

Had the crew logged onto CPDLC? In that area, WSJC would have been appropriate, and regardless of the transponder, the aircraft would have been pinged for location data. A change in altitude would/should have been noticed on CPDLC and may have resulted in an electronic query from the appropriate controller. The next sector - VVTS - Ho Chi Minh - would have received the hand-off from WSJC and electronic communications established. On my flight from WMKP-RCTP (Penang-Taipei) three days ago, Ho Chi Minh asked us to log on to CPDLC so they could communicate electronically while in radar contact.

For those not familiar with flying on that part of the planet, long range communications are primitive. HF position reports are on radio frequencies that are shared with India, Singapore, Philippines, and Viet Nam on occasion. That segment was short enough that when Lumpur Control said "radar service terminated, check in with Ho Chi Minh at [xxxxx point], there likely was no radar coverage. NONE. Controllers depend on position reports to do manual plots of our position. This isn't like a U.S. domestic flight where ARTCC knows the location of every aircraft all the time. Based on mach number, time estimates at each compulsory reporting point, the long range controllers can reasonably track us (PTAPTP), and still maintain aircraft separation at about 50 NM.

This should be an eye-opener for every airline on the planet. Countries aren't investing to ensure all this new technology (CPDLC, ADS-B) can be used. We rely on WW II technology radios for 21st century communications in many places when NOT in radar contact.

V/R,
Nakazawa

Thank you, Timbo! That answers my question.
Cheers,
fbh