It IS a valid example. The instance I remember from Safety school was a plane that ran out of gas at several thousand feet. The engine was not operating whatsoever. The eyewitnesses brain "filled in the blanks" to what his eyes were seeing, but his ears didn't hear (because it didn't happen). It is a known phenomenon.

And an equally valid example is the exact opposite when the engine is found to have been operating perfectly, with a full gas tank. Reports of a surging and sputtering engine all the way to the crash, including flames coming out of the exhaust - turns out the crash was caused by a negligent and hugely over max gross weight takeoff followed by crash into a street or houses past the end of the runway.

Actually witnesses who report an engine "surging" are usually just hearing a aircraft in hard IFR doing a tight spiral. The "surging" is just the doppler effect of the aircraft coming toward them and then away from them as it spirals. Often the witnesses will also hear a "boom" followed by components falling out of the overcast. The boom was the sound of the wing spar failing as it was overloaded.

Well, it depends... Not sure if anybody brought this up, but as an example look at UPS 1307, from first smoke to pilots notifying ATC and calling for equipment to meet them was more than 20 minutes. The pilots did as instructed, running checklists and fiddling with the packs trying to solve the smell problem themselves. The fire was a relatively slow progression but ultimately became overwhelming.

It is not too much of a stretch to imagine these pilots troubleshooting on their own, then suddenly losing ability to communicate / electrical failure with a lithium fire in the hold.

On the ground the plane was destroyed (flt 1307).

IIRC it was a suspected Lithium fire also. I forget if they ever got to the bottom of it and found what actually ignited.

https://www.ntsb.gov/doclib/reports/2007/AAR0707.pdf

For the ARFF guys - this presentation was shown to me by one of my friends at my home field, showing what they deal with, pretty interesting stuff. (He is ARFF member and also a patient of mine, long story.) He really finds the theory Malaysia had a fire very likely but obviously nobody really knows.

http://www.apssafety.net/sitebuilder...flight1307.pdf

INMARSAT Doppler Burst Frequency Offset rules out Malacca Straits

On 24 March the Malaysian Authorities released this graph to explain the Doppler frequency shift observed from Satellite handshakes:

http://i257.photobucket.com/albums/h...ps79780073.png

Only problem is that the signal has been inverted I presume either by UK AAIB, the Malaysians or by some electronic signal processing in the satellite because the frequency offset is all wrong.

Doppler shift would increase frequency coming towards the satellite and decrease it receding away. The official version still has Doppler shift frequency increasing at 17:27 UTC when we know the aircraft had just turned east 040 degrees at 471 knots (presumably to BITOD).

The Doppler shift shows no turn west until the handshake ping at 18:25 UTC.

Malaysian Authorities stated MH370 was departing the northern Straits of Malacca at 18:15 UTC climbing through 29,500ft.

MH370 was never tracked west from IGARI across the Malay peninsula and in fact the Malay authorities produced a speculation that if flew low at night below 5,000ft to avoid radar detection, another B/S press release.

To read the Burst Offset Frequency Chart correctly you have to invert the data so that when we know it was flying east prior to 18:25 UTC, the Doppler frequency declines.

This is the known track of MH370 from transponder returns up to 17:27 UTC

http://i257.photobucket.com/albums/h...psff7606e9.jpg

therefore we need to invert the Burst Offset Frequency data to get a correct sense of MH370's progress either east or west.

Flight east is a decrease in Doppler frequency offset (reads down).

Flight west is an increase in Doppler frequency offset (reads up).

If we cross correlate Doppler shift with the timeline corroborated by known direction before 17:27 UTC then there is no way on earth it flew west from IGARI.

http://i257.photobucket.com/albums/h...psc54ae32d.png

When the aircraft was at the gate at KUL airport at 16:30, the BFO was 87 Hz, and at that time the LOS speed (due solely to the satellite motion) was about plus 0.021 km/sec. At take-off at 16:41 the BFO increased to about 125 Hz. This therefore gives us a datum line or longitude to measure if the flight went west or east.

What it shows is that until at least 17:50 UTC it continued to fly northeast (over Vietnam or along the east coast) and at some point after 17:50 UTC it must have reversed course not detected until the handshake ping at 18:25 UTC.

The steepness of the plot line after 18:25 UTC might be explained by the fact it had already flown back west some distance before 18:25 UTC giving a misleading graphic representation.

This is an extraordinary snippet of information because it reveals the Malaysian Authorities misled the investigation suggesting MH370 flew into the Straits of Malacca and all previous assumptions therefore are based on wrong inputs by the Malaysians.

This also makes plausible the long discarded sighting of oil rig worker Mike McKay on Song Mercur of an aircraft on fire for 10-15 seconds west of his oil rig.

The most generous thing one could say is the Malaysian Government did not understand how to interpret the Burst Offset Frequency data and UK AAIB who advised them were pretty clueless themselves.

From the Burst Frequency Chart posted above i would reinterpret the path of MH370 as follows with an orange coloured datum line through Longitude 101.33' E.

http://i257.photobucket.com/albums/h...ps5efdcc99.jpg

However don't forget that the INMARSAT satellite was geosynchronous and not geostationary, therefore it also wobbles around the equator in a small figure of eight pattern which slightly disturbed the Burst Frequency Offset during the time MH370 was airborne too.

Without this slight wobble there would not have been any ability to measure the Doppler shift at all.

To get a correct scaling of the inverted (corrected) data you actually need to vertically compress the data up to about 19:10 UTC.

At around 19:40 INMARSAT in its wobble began to track south and west @ 50 kilometres per hour which actually tightens the curve of the plotted pings across the southern Indian Ocean.

I sincerely urge anybody involved with the search for the seabed wreck to start the sonar search at 3,000nm distant from Con Son Island in the South China Sea, where it intersects the plotted ping line.

There's a lot of ocean out there...:eek:

I doubt it will ever be found, since they have no idea where to look. They may get lucky and stumble across it, but it's a big ocean, and there's just not much real, accurate data to tell them where to start looking. :confused:

The Tip Of A Disastrous Iceberg that is Malaysian Airlines??

- On April 3rd 2014, London bound Malaysian Airlines Flight MH004 was delayed 4 hours due to machanical problems with one of its engines.

- On March 27th 2014, Hongkong bound Malaysian Airlines Flight MH072 was delayed for almost 2 hours to make room for a plane swap as the original plane a Boeing 777-200ER had some sort of mechanical trouble(s).

- On March 24th 2014, South Korean bound Malaysian Airline Flight MH066, An Airbus A330-300, was diverted to Hongkong due to malfunctioning of an onboard power generator.

Precisely why the Malaysian Government is so incentivised to misdirect the search area for MH370, to blame hijackers, to blame pilots, to blame Boeing and anybody else they can think of.

In relation to MH066 which made an emergency landing on 24 March, were you aware that aircraft landed with only the APU working and all other generators unservicable.

Does the Malaysia Airlines MEL permit take off with only two generators?

How many more disasters does this airline need before it is banned from EU airspace?

TIMBO if you use my re-interpretation of the Doppler frequency offset the truth is MH370 probably made it to Con Son Island off Vietnam suffered an electrical fire, turned around and then discovered the fire, which within seconds ruptured an oxygen line.

From Con Son Island it flew back across Longitude 101.33E and just kept going.

My estimate is it flew 6hrs, 29 mins from Con Son Island at about 470kts to where it intercepted the datum line for pings at 00:19 UTC and then glided down to the sea. This should correlate to about 410nm east of Ile Amsterdam.

That is where I would use a sonar search and if not before the b/box quits pinging then that is the area roughly where it might be found some day.

To point out the bloody obvious they keep looking in the wrong place