You’re welcome. I’m not the only one though, there are a variety of pilots here with a range of backgrounds.
In case it’s not clear, I believe those arcs aren’t corridors that the aircraft is thought to have flown along but represent the very limited information available from the last satellite “ping” which appears to be distance from the satellite. Knowing distance from the satellite gives you a circle of possible positions around the satellite (actually a sphere but the surface of the Earth can be used to turn the sphere into a circle). you can then limit the circle into arcs of possible positions by using other information such as fuel on board and so on. I’m not entirely sure why the central gap is there, possibly to do with the report that antenna direction for maximum signal strength was part of the ping.
I’m sure it’s just because there’s no need, not because they don’t care. Sounds like the search effort is well covered by countries in the area. The US is involved because it has warships in the area.
But speaking of the US, I know they’ve sent an FBI team to Kuala Lumpur. Haven’t heard from them, although I don’t know if they would be holding anything like a press conference. Makes me think of that Jamie Foxx movie, The Kingdom.
However, the theory among US intelligence seems to be the pilots themselves are the culprits. If that turned out to be true, I’d have mixed feelings. I’d be relieved it was not a case of a lapse in airport security. But damn, how are you going to guard against something like this? The pilot’s been with them for 33 years!
Could be. So far those guys have driven a van through a crowd of people and in the most recent incident they attacked a bunch of people with knives. Hijacking a plane like this seems like quite an upgrade, but you never know.
A correction to the above. Apparently it was the ACARS that was pinging the satellite intermittently for several hours after the aircraft disappeared. But with the data content having been turned off from within the cockpit it was just sending out little “I’m here!” signals. The satellite itself is then able to get a broad direction indication from the signal.
Some newspapers are now reporting that the pilot was an “obsessive” supporter of Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of Malaysia’s opposition.
Ibrahim has been accused of “sodomy,” which is illegal in Malaysia; not long before the plane went missing, an earlier acquittal was overturned, and Ibrahim was sentenced to five years in jail.
Whether there is a connection or not, well, obviously no one knows for sure just yet.
I hate that quote. It’s a complete logical fallacy. Once you eliminate the impossible you are still left with an almost infinite number of possibilities, only one of which is correct. I don’t know what Conan Doyle was smoking when he came up with it.
So was Gameel Al-Batouty, the guy who crashed Egyptair 990. There were absolutely no hints he’d do anything other than go home and retire. He may, in hindsight, have been trying to murder the airline official on the plane who had removed his privilege of flying to the US after that, due to his habit of molesting hotel maids. There were possible motives aplenty for Tsu Way Ming to crash SilkAir 185, too - obvious only after the fact. So you never know.
How much life insurance did Shah have? Dependents? Family/marital life status? Finances? Career situation?
If that’s what happened, I wouldn’t use much time looking for a plan behind the altitude and course changes. Those would be from the thinking of a desperate, despondent man with no real plan and perhaps incomplete commitment to seeing one through anyway.
Based on the time it takes for the ping to get from the satellite to the plane, you can determine the approximate distance between the two. If the exact distance were known, it’d show up as a circle on the surface of the earth centered around the satellite. But, since the distance is actually a range of distances, the location of the ping would show up as a donut shaped area that the plane could be in.
If you draw an arc through that donut based on the distance the plane could have traveled when the ping happened, and intersect that arc with the areas of the donut, you’ll end up with two sections of arc with a gap in between.
But the arcs are centered on the satellite. Someone suggested on another message board that the gaps just represent areas of radar coverage and seeing as it wasn’t detected in those areas at the time, they’ve been ruled out.
CPDLC is specifically a link to ATC where as ACARS typically refers to the datalink back to the airline itself. The wiki link on ACARS and CPDLC suggests that ACARS is a network that includes a data transfer protocol and CPDLC is a type of data that piggybacks on ACARS in certain areas.
But the “distance the plane could have traveled” yields a huge circle, not an arc. Because we only know the maximum distance the plane could have circled.