On the positive side, MH370 is now the 2014 World Hide-and-Seek champion.
No, it’s in the very rear of the aircraft, in a box designed to survive anything you can throw at it.
With each day there are new headlines and new theories, but unfortunately for the families waiting on word about what happened, there are no answers. I do hope that they get those answers soon. . .
You can’t erase the CVR unless you are on the ground with the park brake on, but if you know in advance that you don’t want the CVR to record, you can pull the circuit breaker. On the type I fly this is in the flightdeck. This has historically been typical of other types as well but I don’t know if the B777 has it accessible by the crew or not.
In a box designed to survive anything an aircraft might go through. But probably not a dedicated attack.
This theory seems as plausible as any. Onboard fire, the pilots kill the electrical systems and set a course for the nearest big airport, in this case Langkawi. Everyone is then overcome by fumes and the plane continues on autopilot on that heading. If you plot the course on the map it ties in with the reports of a low-flying plane seen over Kuva Hudavhoo island in the Maldives.
OK there are a few flaws, such as reports that the pilot reported all was OK after the transponder was turned off, and the supposed arcs plotted from the satellite signals. But there’s so much misinformation around that those reports could be false.
If I had to put money on it, I’d bet on the wreckage being found in the southern Arabian Sea/northern Indian Ocean between the Maldives and Somalia.
With all the misinformation, leaks, reports and retractions floating around, who knows what the exact timeline is. But my understanding from articles I read today is that the ACARS sent its last signal, then 5 or 10 minutes later there was the last radio transmission, then a couple minutes later the transponder shut off. At first they were saying this meant the ACARS was shut off before the last radio transmission, so it looked deliberate.
But then I read today that the ACARS normally sends a transmission every 30 minutes, so all we really know is that the last radio transmission and then the transponder shutoff were within the 30 minute window before the next expected ACARS transmission. So it’s entirely possible that the ACARS and transponder were both lost/shut off after the last radio call (“good night”). So there’s no way to know for sure if it was deliberate or not.
A related theory (mine, I haven’t seen it anywhere else yet) is the pilot(s), determined to commit suicide but not get caught or interrupted, set the autopilot to fly high, then to a really good place over the deep ocean, then killed themselves, perhaps by not wearing oxygen masks and depressurizing. Then, even if intercepted or detected, their task would be completed. Or, the fuel would run out and the voice recorder would be overwritten. I’d call this plan “set and forget.” I’ll bet, if they were alive today, they would be surprised that nothing happened until hours or days later.
And that low-flying plane eyewitness report has never been confirmed. Major news media have been ignoring it, much like the Greek tanker steaming towards debris.
It can’t be accessed though, so you can’t attack it.
The biggest problem with that theory is that it appeared to be flying an airways route after it “disappeared”. Primary radar had it tracking via several published waypoints. This requires either typing each waypoint into the flight management computer individually or selecting the airways route by name, either way it is not the way you setup an FMC to get somewhere fast in an emergency. If they had an emergency and wanted to go to Langkawi, they would press the DTO button (direct to), select the airfield then press enter. Three button presses instead of about twenty or more.
So according to the information we’ve been given, it was flying on a published route, but not the one it was originally on, flying a published route is not an efficient way of going to an airfield, and there is some suggestion that the new route was entered into the FMC before the transponder and ACARS stopped transmitting (ACARS can report that the FMC flight route has been changed.)
With that in mind, a catastrophic failure just doesn’t seem to be the most likely explanation.
I can tell you that on a Gulfstream, the flight data recorder is in the hell hole with the APU.
There is no way to access it while you’re in the air. It’s at the very rear of the plane and is only accessible by a hatch for the APU bay underneath the plane.
It also has a battery backup, so it can continue recording for 20+ hours even if the circuit breaker is pulled.
No idea how well that relates to a Boeing 777, though.
Exactly. I don’t expect this to make sense or to be rational any more than a school shooting. Even though we know lots of details of school shootings, none of them are rational acts.
My pet theory is the co-pilot strangled the pilot, said “good night” to air traffic control, and diverted the plane. Why did he fly for 7 hours? I imagine he was in a confused state and he wasn’t totally sure if he wanted to take the passengers with him. Perhaps he wanted to leave open the possibility of turning around the plane and turning himself in. But he kept flying south over the ocean until he ran out of fuel. Or perhaps he wanted to terrorize the passengers for a long time and was making strange announcements while they tried to break into the cockpit.
Whatever happened was probably terrible and wouldn’t make any sense even if you knew all of the details.
That makes sense. Thank you for the answer.
BBC reported that now Malaysia is saying both types of communications systems may have shut off at the same time, leading them back once again to mulling a theory of a catastrophic mechanical or electrical failure.
Some of the passengers’ families in Beijing are threatening a hunger strike if they don’t start getting more information.
release of political prisoners. 2 hrs prior to the flight the captain attended a political rally in support of a political opposition leader jailed on charges of sodomy. The pilot’s family vacated the house the day before.
If the plane had an emergency then the crew would have selected “nearest airport” and the plane would have flown there on it’s own. That would have been TGG which they flew by earlier. This did not happen. They flew along standard airways and the easiest way to do that would be pre-program them into the FMS ahead of time as a route. The route is then called up and activated at will.
If they did indeed fly over land at low altitudes then people would have heard it. But it would have to be a desolate area to make it stand out. There are low flying aircraft in my area all the time because of all the airports. Reports from the Maldives islands don’t make sense because flying at low levels there would burn up a tremendous amount of fuel. They’d have to be landing nearby. If they flew over at a high altitude then they would be heading for Somalia and again, someone would hear a jet landing there.
I have to believe that once that add up all the radar summaries from various nations including naval stations and ships that they will have a track of the plane.
If this plane did crash, would we at least start to know that it happened in a few months to a year when the bodies and pieces of the plane start washing up ashore?
I really don’t buy the pilot suicide theory, and I find it pretty disrespectful that it’s gaining so much traction with not a shred of evidence.
I had to go to the grocery store and buy some more salt.
In the last week, every time Malaysia said something about the missing the plane, I consume another grain of salt.
No telling what my blood pressure is this week.
Almost two weeks in and we don’t even know what order the things we think we know happened. I’d really like to believe this hypothesis, that things were fine until an electrical fire forced the crew to shut everything off suddenly while they tried to divert to Pulau Langkawi, but were overcome by the smoke and the plane just wandered off by itself into the ocean. But that requires assuming a particular sequence of events - if the FO’s casual “Good night” call was after the autopilot reprogramming and electrical shutoff, and if those were all at once, then he’s the suicide/hijacker.
Here’s my question - would passenger cell phones work during the flight? I assume they would, and if the plane flew over any land area (as proposed with the left-turn information), then I would suspect if the passengers were under distress, at lease one of them would have tried a cell phone to call for help.
Another question: Is it possible for the plane to have had a serious mechanical problem and then descent gradually and at slower speed, eventually crashing into the sea, then sinking whole, with everyone and everything on board going down with it? I recall the Miracle on the Hudson plane essentially landed on the water, then floated for a while, but was whole and not broken into pieces.
Could that have happened to this flight? And in this case since it was a red-eye, everyone may have been asleep and when something detectible to the passengers did occur (hitting the water) they would not have a lot of time to react before the plane sank to the bottom.
Not for voice. Discussed above.
US1549 did have a rupture in the aft bottom of the fuselage, despite a feather-soft landing on smooth water, and was half-sunk by the time it drifted to the tip of Manhattan. So, no.