I’m sure there’s a good, reasonable explanation…but even with it, this recent news story creeps me out.
Not sure if this has been clarified in this thread: the ACARS system automatically sends out a full status message only a few times during a flight, including just once sometime during cruising altitude. That didn’t happen, apparently, at a moment useful for this investigation.
However, the ACARS system also can be set up to send smaller, more frequent messages directly to, say, engine manufacturing companies which want to keep tabs on more specific types of data. There WERE a couple of ACARS messages of this kind which might prove useful in this case, according to this article.
(ACARS is totally separate from the transponder system well covered in several posts above.)
I read somewhere that’s probably got more to do with international roaming than anything - the phones might roaming from a network in (say) China and when people call it, the signal is going from China to the Malaysian cellular network (hence the ringing) before the Malaysian network tries to contact the phone, can’t do it, and reports a “This phone is currently switched off or unavailable” status.
And if the phones were on, don’t you think their position would have been triangulated by now?
Like I said earlier, there is something unbelievably odd about all this, and the Malaysians aren’t helping anyone with vague and/or contradictory statements.
And I’d still like to know how a jet airliner could fly across the Malay Peninsular without anyone noticing. You’d think the RMAF would be scrambling jets to intercept unidentified objects showing up on their radar over their own country, especially when it did not identify itself.
That’s for a normal landing. If you don’t mind shaving the safety margins you can probably do it in about 6,000-7,000 feet.
You couldn’t take off fully loaded on a runway that length, but I presume they’d want to offload passengers and luggage anyhow prior to using the airplane for whatever purpose they intended when they stole it.
Yes. You could. It’s basic road building, you just need to make sure it’s built well enough to support the weight of the airplane. It’s not rocket science.
Wow. China calls on Malaysia to be more transparent. Kind of like Hitler calling you out for your treatment of Jews.
Since all we seem to have right now is a big fat nothing, time to float whacky theories. My guess is they flew the plane to Somalia and are going to hold it ransom.
Truthers know how.
I don’t know if this is wacky, but after discussing all the high-tech and automated systems that should keep track of an airliner, I wonder if the answer will be that people relied too much on the technology. If you think that nothing can go wrong, (and that the machines will beep at you if it does) that’s when you let your guard down. If that tech goes wrong for some reason, it can take a while before someone wakes up enough to notice.
I’ve started a thread on that issue: What happens when a cell phone is physically destroyed?
I just heard my new favorite conspiracy theory about it.
The plane was hijacked. Not by crew or passengers or anyone on board, but by a hacker or hackers. The plane, this guy claims, is “hackable” – remotely. The transponder can be shut off, the autopilot can be reprogrammed, etc. Could be by a government, could be by a teenager in his parents’ basement.
Has anyone checked the hangar? Are we sure it even took off?
Does Malaysia, the country, even exist? Mrs. Map used to be a Malaysian citizen, but is no longer…so there’s one data point for the whole country’s current non-existence.
Could it be that people are thinking of mayonnaise the sandwich spread?
Good points.
We may be nearing the truth of the matter at last.
I haven’t read the whole thread, but why is it even possible to turn off the transponder in a plane? What possible good reasons would there be for this functionality?
When the plane is landed. When it is used as a spy plane.
This story of a dead man’s phone calling friends and relatives must be hair-raising:
But wouldn’t it be visible to satellites?
Malaysia is now saying they saw something in the Straits of Malacca around the expected time, but can’t confirm it was the missing plane.
I guess I’ll have to let this go instead of repeating myself. The prolonged search has gone badly, especially since it sounds like maybe they spent a few days looking in the wrong place, and maybe there are lessons to be learned for the next time this happens.
Being a piece of equipment, it can fail. One way it can fail is to transmit bogus information which distracts/annoys controllers, who request it to be shut off.
Or there can be an electrical fire which requires shutting off *everything *electrical.
because it creates screen clutter with aircraft landing and taking off. It can get so bad that at events like the Oshkosh fly-in the instructions are to turn the transponder off in a 20 mile radius.
ACARS would send anything out of the ordinary in real time. This is how they knew what happened with the Air France flight.
Finally found someone who at least asked about the ACARS data. “Flightglobal asked Malaysia Airlines about signals from the 777’s Aircraft Communications and Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), but the carrier declined to comment citing “pending investigations” by Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation”.