The Guardian has a constantly-updating story here.
Last known position seems to have been over the Mediterranean Sea, about 30-40 miles off the Egyptian coast.
That’s not good!
Apparently, it just disappeared from the sky. No, that isnt good.
Things are somewhat confused at the moment, but there have been reports of a fireball in the sky about the time the plane should have started its descent.
Whose thinking terror here?
Or it could be like TWA Flight 800
I have a question which someone may or may not know the answer to. I often follow the flights of family members on FlightAware. What does it do in the event of a crash? Does it display any type of notice or does the plane simply disappear from the map with no explanation?
They eventually disappear, sometimes after showing an estimated position for a long time. These sites don’t have total global coverage (especially over oceans), so when they lose a plane, 99.999% of the time it means that it’s just flying somewhere they can’t see.
Whose thinking way too damn early to tell here?
Fortunately they should have little difficulty in spotting the wreckage and recovering the data recorders. Speculation seems of little value here as we’ll have actual knowledge soon enough. Could have been terror, could have been a catastrophic mechanical issue, who knows?
Someone on CNN commented that it would be odd to drop the plane over water when there were a number of cities it could have been downed over.
Not ruling out terror but it just seems odd not to maximize casualties.
I wish every news outlet would simply have the sense and courage to stop flapping their gums and speculating about shit they know nothing about.
I had a look a few minutes ago and on the main graph it lists the flight status as “result unknown” with the route map showing it arriving in Cairo. If one then clicks on the “track log & graph” link, you get a speed/altitude graph that cuts off at the point where contact was lost, and a list of waypoints with location coordinates, speed and altitude, with the data ending at 8:29 EDT. The remaining way points into Cairo show location coordinates only,’ with the legend “estimated”.
By contrast, IIRC, the track of that German(?) Airbus that was deliberately crashed in the Alps a while back showed the whole descent until the plane hit a mountain, presumably because the aircraft and transponder were still intact until impact.
This guys explanation is good. He’s been on a few Aircraft Investigation programmes.
CNN’s reporting they found the wreckage.
Zombies. I’m thinking zombies.
The Mediterranean Sea average depth is 4,900. How difficult will it be to recover the black boxes or sunken pieces?
Depend on if that is in inches, feet, meters, kilometers, miles, AUs.
Sorry, feet.
On several sites it looks like Egyptian officials are leaning towards terrorism but are hedging their bets.