And thinking that means that the ACARS was tampered with (which of course it doesn’t).
So far the only report I have seen that contains real data that seems like it was done by someone with half a brain was the email from that oil rig worker. It contained lat/long - compass bearings - and the admission that he couldn’t judge distance (which made it all the MORE credible to me).
I think the Vietnamese responded something like - “yeah we checked - nothing there”. Not exactly inspiring.
Has there been actual raw data released with time stamps & lat/long? Sorry if mentioned above - I’ve been in and out and may have missed it.
Is it at all plausible that the way various countries switch to DST at different times could be causing any confusion? I would assume most use GMT for data, but the incompetence here seems beyond amazing. I deal with data all the time. Sure I sometimes have to interpret the data and make changes to stuff, but the raw data is still there - and it almost appears they are changing things that should be immutable. I do not know enough about radar to really say though.
I think your point is a good one. Yesterday on CBC Newsworld, a retired military commander, who was tasked with designing and flying missions in his career, said that the actions of MH370 were too deliberate and seemed evasive to be considered a suicide attempt in his opinion. He said, if he were planning a flying mission where the aircraft had to disappear, or fly out of where authorities were expecting them to fly, he would have done what MH370 did, take a sharp left when no one was expecting it.
That seems contradictory to me. If you wanted to commit suicide unobstructed, you would do exactly what someone would do “where the aricraft had to disappear.”
The actions, so far as we know, are entirely consistent with a pilot(s) suicide and obfuscation – set the autopilot, depressurize the aircraft to kill everyone, including the pilots, then the plane keeps flying, covering its tracks by overwriting the CVR until it runs out of fuel and crashes in a deliberately deep part of the ocean, with everyone on board dead anyway.
So far, I see nothing inconsistent with that theory.
I have not heard any discussion of this, so let me throw it out and see what flies.
Of the 200 or so cell phones that took off on that plane, if just one of them was left on or was later turned on, and if it is now above ground somewhere, it is pinging, or at least it continued to do so until the batteries died. All the phone numbers of all those cell phones is, or can be, known, just by asking surviving friends and families of the passengers.
As I understand it, it would be very simple for investigators to dial all those 200 cell phone numbers, and determine if any of them is pinging in response, and trace the source of those pings geographically. Has this been done?
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If your intent was to kill yourself and your crew/passengers (i.e., suicide as opposed to hijacking), why would you care about “making the aircraft disappear”?
If the intent was to kill yourself and not reveal the details (insurance? embarrassment?), you would certainly want to make it disappear to cover the evidence. Ideally, you’d make it disappear so much that your death would be up to the courts since you couldn’t be found.
I was not aware that it has been confirmed that it is in the ocean. There is credible speculation that it is not, and if so, what I described could establish that, or at least, where the plane left the array of towers.
Is telephone technology such that given a list of phone numbers, it is possible for priviledged entities such as government investigators to positively determine if any of those phone numbers is turned on and within range of a tower, simply by dialing the number and tracing, even if the call is not answered?
And, the follow-up question:
Has this been done for the known cell phone numbers of the passengers?
With that said, if the plane was landed somewhere unexpected, it’s extremely unlikely that any passengers phones would automatically connect to local towers even if they were turned on.
Seems to me, a better answer would be to wait until the other pilot leaves the cockpit and lock the door behind him. Then, start yelling about engine failures.
Shut down the engines.
Yell MayDay as you pull the plane into a stall at 30,000’
Hold the stall, splat into the ocean.
Everyone dies - and the rest of the world thinks you did your best, but crashed due to aircraft malfunctions. And no one speculates that you are a terrorist and hijacked your own plane.
You wouldn’t need to dial the numbers. If they are on and in range of a cell tower, they would be sending location information back. The network needs to know where the phone is before someone sends a call to it.
If they’re not near a tower, I suppose you could equip a search plane with a “fake” transmitter that would cause a phone to try and attach to the network, but I’m not sure what the effective range would be and if it would be better than any other method of searching.
I’m not sure I understand your meaning here. It looks to me that you are saying we know of certain actions taken on board the jet that I wasn’t aware were public knowledge, or even known by anyone investigating.
Did you intend to say that it is known that someone aboard the plane:
set the autopilot (I guess you mean at some abnormal time during the flight)
intentionally depressurized the cabin to kill passengers and crew
deliberately flew the aircraft long enough to overwrite earlier portions of the cockpit recordings
crashed the plane deliberately in a deep part of the ocean
I’m not aware that any of this is known. If I’m missing something, please let me know.
That’s exactly what I am saying. While we can’t say any of that is known, it is entirely consistent with what we do know. Intentional pilot suicide or control by a hijacker might be behind it.
Of course, this is not the only possible explanation for the event, but at this stage of the game, it might be the best one we have.
Why do you say that? Modern tri- or quad-band phones can connect to just about any country’s network, so if they were on and a tower was within range then I don’t see why they wouldn’t connect. I went on a round-the-world trip more than a decade ago and even then my phone hooked up to the local network in most countries with no problems. (I think just about the only place that had no phone signal anywhere was the Cook Islands.)
Yeah, this is why I don’t understand why they keep bringing up the pilots connections to the opposition party. If he wanted to make a statement, he did a pretty crappy job.
Considering how absurd this story keeps getting, I’m assuming now that this all a huge distraction from some elaborate Ocean’s 11 style heist where they’re breaking out that leader going to jail. The final shot will be him sipping champagne on some private beach. When we zoom out we see the plane parked safely behind him.
A 777 pilot on CNN last night said ACARS system was in a compartment below. They showed this compartment and the pilot said he had no idea what all the stuff in there was and that he would have no idea how to disable the ACARS system. Another pilot said that it would be a pretty intensive task to do so.