Potential wreckage found. Greek oil tanker supposedly headed it’s way.
Click around and you can see the “debris field” for yourself in Tomnod: http://www.tomnod.com/nod/challenge/malaysiaairsar2014/map/128148
There is constant reference to him at Airliners.net boards. They have some 29 threads now, I could not check all.
Looks like this is it.
Thanks for the link.
But tomnod is not opening for me.:mad:
Right, “flight corridors” must be the wrong term. The plane could have been anywhere on those arcs and going in any direction at the time of the last ping.
Assuming the things that we think that we know (and I know that these might turn out to be false):
- The plane flew for 7+ hours post final communication
- It seemed to take evasive maneuvers
- It made a big change in direction as if targeting a new location
- The prime suspects, the pilots, are very experienced and skilled
This all seems to indicate that the pilots made an attempt to take the plane for whatever reason. Again, I realize this is assumption, but this appears to, at least, be the prevailing hypothesis at the moment.
Is it more likely that the plane crashed and hasn’t been found or landed and hasn’t been found? Is it more likely that the pilots succeeded or failed?
I guess this is the million dollar question, but I have no basis to understand the difficulty of pulling it off and was wondering if anyone here had any knowledge in the field.
CBC reports that the pilots did not request to fly together.so the theory that one killed the other, then locked the cockpit door before diverting the plane, is plausible.
The ground crew is also being investigated now. Does this link up with the reported cargo irregularities?
What we know so far is not inconsistent with the possibility that the plane was hijacked and the pilots were forced to fly according to the hijacker’s wishes, or that a 9/11 type takeover happened.
The only factor that might suggest it was the pilots, not a hijacker, that were in total control would be if there is some secret alarm that pilots could use without a hijacker knowing it. But a sophisticated hijacker or rogue hijacking pilot might prevent or defeat this, so we’re back to square one.
In the US anyway, a pilot can unobtrusively change the transponder code to 7500, meaning “We’re being hijacked”. But whoever is responsible was familiar with transponders and ACAS, and how to shut them off, so if it wasn’t one of the pilots then it was somebody else with at least an enthusiast’s knowledge of airliner cockpit operations.
Anybody know what’s the ocean depth at the potential wreckage location? That stuff looks submerged near the surface, but it wouldn’t be if it were mostly broken-up aluminum.
Also, to clarify, do the satellite ping receptions mean the plane had to have been on one of those arcs, or is that a limit of flight? The reports aren’t clear to me.
No other news site is displaying this “news,” hours later, and the image shown could be seals, birds, or whatever.
So don’t get your hopes up just yet.
The data we know so far suggests a deliberate attempt at misdirection, whether by the pilots or a hijacker – turning off transmitters, sudden changes in direction and altitude, flying for a long time possibly to erase black box data – that I’m wondering why a transponder code of 7500 wasn’t falsely transmitted, to remove suspicion from the pilots. OTOH, it would have alerted the “wrong” authorities, too.
A lot of the above speculations and questions can be answered (or at least set aside as not relevant) by assuming that we are looking at an entirely deliberate act - someone wanted to steal the whole plane, for reasons and purposes unknown, and appears to have done every single thing to slow and confuse the response, diffuse search efforts, create multiple mysteries and in general pull off a full-bore David Copperfield stunt.
In other words, assume that every step and every act that lead to MH370 “disappearing” was planned and deliberate, not random, accidental or lucky.
I just hope it’s on the ground somewhere with the intent of making it an international hostage situation, and not in the deepest part of the Indian Ocean, where it was arrowed in to leave the minimum debris field and extend the whole mystery for terrorism purposes.
All that said… what evidence is there that the crew was not killed or disabled by anoxia - let’s pretend a meteorite struck the crew cabin - and everything else we’re seeing (loss of signals, silence, flying from waypoint to waypoint) is a very intelligent plane doing its best to stay aloft?
Incident happens, simultaneously disabling the flight crew and damaging signaling gear.
Plane takes over automatic level flight but damage causes rise to 43,000 feet; all survivors dead of anoxia.
Plane corrects and chooses next waypoint, then next, then next according to some safety algorithm.
The very latest says the transponder was turned off before the last “goodnight” voice message was sent. If true, the plot thickens.
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/03/16/4770283/focus-turns-to-pilots-as-hunt.html#.UyXv1j-0zAk
The fact that the ACARS and transponder shutoffs were 14 minutes apart.
Could a partial depressurization cause the pilot to act in an extremely confused manner?
I asked that above. Richard Pearse replied that it was technically complex to disable the transponder under oxygen deprivation conditions.
Draw a line east, from where the tomnod folks say the have they found something, to around where the last ADS-B blip was recorded. The line goes over a part of Malaysia where there were a number of eyewitness reports of a low flying jet heading west around the right time.
It should be pretty easy to fly over the part of the Straight of Malacca in question and confirm or discredit the speculation. It appears to be less than 200 km west of George Town.
What if the powers that be already know where it is, having taken it down? It would take quite a while to line up your ducks, politically.
I just think it’s odd that there has been zero mention in the big media about the Tomnod.com observations or the Greek tanker story.
I’ve been following this closely, and have not yet seen a claim of “eyewitness reports of a low flying jet.” Can you give a cite for this?
ETA: Never mind. Here’s one:
But why would an eyewitness wait for 10 days to report it? Or why would the authorities, after receiving such a report, wait 10 days to announce it?
This report was filed 5 days ago:
I agree it’s odd nothing has been mentioned. Admittedly this is coming from random internet people but this looks MUCH more like a plane crash than the Chinese satellite images.