The crisis is about a tiny aeroplane the size of small school. If it landed five miles from your home, you wouldn’t see it. The Earth’s circumference is 24,000 miles both ways. The area the plane disappeared in measures hundreds of square miles and that has been searched constantly. Even New Zealand has an Orion up there helping.
If the plane went in another direction then that makes finding it next to impossible.
Why so long for the data? We are far past the day when men and women peered tirelessly at radar oscilloscopes and recorded their observations in real time. There is simply too much information to comprehend.
That brings us to computers. Very clever machines which record information which is later glanced over or discarded. There is no human watching every aeroplane, every ship, or every highway throughout the world.
At a guess, either Boeing or Rolls Royce or the US military or the Chinese military have analysed their own data and finally the computer has spat out an interesting bit of information.
That would put it in Iran or Somalia. Normally you fuel for the flight time plus a reserve because otherwise you’re flying extra weight that costs fuel efficiency. The weather was good so it would be a matter of record if it was over-fueled. It would be easy to do it without question because pilots are usually authorized to call for additional fuel. But it would still be on record.
What was reported earlier is that the plane appeared to steer toward known navigation points yet at one point it flew above it’s rated altitude. It implies someone knows IFR navigation but not the plane itself.
I don’t know if someone has already posted this as I’ve lost interest in following it, but I noted that Yuri Geller (the famous and noted psychic") announced that he has been asked for his help.
That’s sounds like what the prime minister was saying. Now he’s asking countries lying beneath the potential flight paths to analyze their own radar data. I guess these things take time.
I guess I’m not all that hot at narrowing an Internet search, so I’m asking for help on it. I keep hearing and reading that there are twelve nations involved (is it more than that now?) in the search. What countries have sent/are sending air and sea resources to assist Malaysia in the search?
Suppose it was piracy. Someone offers the pilot a sack of cash to make it look like a crash. Or maybe an outright hijack.
You’ve still got 200 humans aboard, alive or dead as the case may be, plus all their luggage.
And not one cell phone has pinged a tower? There’d have to be some way of feeding 200 hostages, several thousand meals worth at the least by now, which is basically a warehouse full of food and water that nobody has noticed or missed, or else there’s a big pile of bodies and a very bad smell somewhere by now. No ransom demands. No illicit “help!” messages after 200 people have had a week to plot and think.
Yea, I find it unlikely that those people are alive.
I just saw CNN on their website quote the Malaysian prime minister as saying 14 countries, but they didn’t list them. Also 43 ships and 58 aircraft. Offhand I can think of the US, Malaysia, China, Vietnam and Thailand. Maybe even Cambodia.
not likely with the military radar coverage there. Remember the ladywho flew a Piper Colt into Afghanistan from Europe? They tracked her the whole time. That’s a small fabric over tube aircraft.
The more remote the area the more obvious a single radar blip. Something the size of a 777 moving at 500 + mph sticks out.
I think it’s unlikely that they’re still alive too, but I read that the plane had enough emergency food on board to last about a week. I really don’t know how much food that would be though, since really, most people can survive a week with no food at all. They would, of course, need water.
I would imagine that there would be more than *just *6 hours of fuel in the plane in case it had to circle the airport waiting for a runway or bad weather or multiple other reasons. I am not a pilot, however.
He has, but that doesn’t stop him from making ridiculous claims and it doesn’t stop believers from believing them.
On another note…
It seems like the current consensus is that the flight was deliberately controlled; most radio communications manually cut off except the ones the crew didn’t know about or couldn’t access; the plane was rerouted, both up (to 45,000 ft), down (rapidly to 23,000) and sideways (turned sharp left and more) over a vast distance, possibly until it ran out of fuel, landed or crashed.
While I can envision a crazy scenario where humans did all of those things – perhaps hijackers with limited piloting knowledge – is there any reasonable scenario using mechanical and/or electrical failure (even remotely triggered) that could result in the same actions?
Or a combination? Could mechanical/electrical failure (or sabotage) result, much like the Air France flight, in wrong pilot actions due to misinterpretation of data as supplied to them? If the instruments said they were heading north, but actually they were heading west, might they be fooled, disoriented and in the dark for a long time?
Or is deliberate human control the only explanation we have right now?