I have to disagree. For instance, the Air France took 5 days to find, but it was found in an expected location, right along its flight path. The cause of the accident was suspected from early one, based on the ACARS data the plane sent out before it went down: a failure of the pitot tubes, which meant the air speed was unknown, with a catastrophic cascading events that defeated the crew’s best efforts.
This case is about a plane that went way off course, after communication devices were turned off, and then must have crashed, thousands of km off course. It’s not just a plane that went down.
Yeah, with the Air France flight they essentially knew exactly where to look and it still took 2 years to find the box. Already I doubt this thing will ever be found, and if nothing changes in the next week or so I doubt it ever will.
You can say that again. I haven’t done much flying, but I remember my first flight lesson in a 2-seater Cessna. At 5000 feet, my instructor said, “First thing we are going to do is learn how to NOT stall, or recover if we do,” and I practiced. Apparently one AF pilot never got that lesson and the other pilot wasn’t too hip, either.
Malaysian Airlines SOP may vary, but it is SOP in my company that one pilot is never left alone in the cockpit. If one of us needs to get up for a toilet stop or something then one of the cabin crew are in the cockpit until the other pilot comes back. It’s to prevent the case of a single pilot becoming incapacitated behind a locked cockpit door and the other pilot being stranded in the cabin. The fact of it being an FIR transfer point wouldn’t be relevant, it’s just a routine radio frequency change. The only time we are required to have both pilots listening to the radio in the cruise is when we are receiving a clearance. I don’t think you can infer that the captain was there but there should’ve been somebody else there with the FO. again MAS may not have SOPs like that, or the crew might regularly disregard them.
Exactly. There are SOPs and then there is what actually happens. Sometimes they are the same and sometimes not, it depends on the culture of the company.
I am too lazy to Google it, but one crash involved the pilot letting his children play at the controls, and they knocked off the auto pilot without anyone noticing.
I have no evidence to support this opinion. It is only my personal opinion. But I am very skeptical of the competency of most any airline from a smaller country. I don’t know exactly how to define the countries that worry me. A “smaller country” is not exactly right. It is more like a “third world country”.
Countries like Equador, Peru, Chile, Paraguay and, in fact most all South American countries (with the exception of Brazil and Argentina) scare the living daylights out of me when it comes to running an airline.
It may be an unrealistic fear. But I would never, ever, ever fly on an airline from one of those countries. In fact, it may be a lot easier to list those countries that I would trust. They are USA, Canada and most of the industrial European countries.
That is just about it. I may be overly cautious. But I would never fly on an airline from any other country.
In addition, I would never fly on any “regional” airline from any country (including the USA and Canada). I recently read about a terrible fatal crash involving some American regional airline and the cause of the crash had a lot to do with the airline pushing their pilots beyond the limits of safety. They don’t pay them hardly anything and they expect them to work all kinds of hours - regardless of how tired they may be.
I just think the entire airline industry is in very scary shape - especially since the demand for airline travel keeps growing at a very fast pace and the airlines just don’t pay their pilots enough so they can refuse an order to fly when they have not had enough sleep. Very, very scary.
I’m not sure your fears about foreign airlines are well-founded, although you’re right about pilots not getting enough sleep. I think this story has more to do with the incompetence of the Malaysian government and its problems with its neighbors than any issues with Malaysia Airlines, but since we’re still only guessing at what happened to the plane, it’s hard to say that for sure.
So: It looks as if the odds are high that the plane went into the ocean - some ocean, somewhere. Since everything else the pilot did seems to have been deliberate, what could he have done to minimize chances of the plane being found without the most extensive possible search?
It seems like any sort of ordinary, out of fuel/out of control path would impact the ocean surface and create the most possible debris, much of it floating.
My original thought, days ago, was that the plane was taken in nearly vertical, maybe even under power. While the craft would likely disintegrate, the heavy pieces would be virtually driven towards the ocean floor and the entire site would be without traces within the hour. The fuselage might even stay intact enough to torpedo well under water before disintegration or pressure-crush. But there would still be massive breakup, meaning lots of floating things that could be seen were the weather not a factor.
What about… the gentlest possible ditching? The plane would likely not float for more than a few minutes, and would sink, intact and sealed, leaving the next thing to no trace. It could be years or decades or never before even foam components broke free and floated to the surface. If that were the plan, the passengers would have to be incapacitated… which might explain the excursion to 45,000 feet.
I don’t qualify as an experienced air folker, but I do know that landing a big plane on the ocean at 150 knots without catching an engine or a wing on a wave, cartwheeling and breaking up, is incredibly difficult. Sully was an experienced glider pilot and landed on the Hudson River just right; he had both skill and luck. A few inches either way and the outcome would have been fatal for many.
I flew on the old Aeronica, a Nicaraguan airline, in Central America and had no problems. (True, that’s not South America, but close enough.) The wife and I routinely fly Asian airlines and prefer them over any from the US. And we’ve flown Malaysia Airlines before, and it’s always been a solid performer. There are some you should definitely stay away from – for example, Biman Bangladesh Airlines or anything in Cambodia – but many Asian carriers are far superior to many Western ones. (Our usual standby is China Airlines out of Taiwan. We routinely use them for Hawaii and flew them to and from New York two years ago.) The problem with this whole drama going on right now is indeed incompetence among the Malaysian government, as Marley states.
BBC has really been slamming the Malaysian authorities. They’ve repeatedly said the way the Aussie authorities are handling the information, getting it out in a timely manner and all, is like they’re giving a lesson to Malaysia about how it should be done.
Okay, thanks. I guess both were probably in the cockpit at the time, as they would be normally, but not necessarily.
On another note, when the plane first changed direction, it apparently made a 180 degree turn and headed straight back toward Kuala Lumpur for a while before turning to the west. Is there any situation where the proper procedure would be a U-turn like that? Alternatively, would it make sense to avoid Thai airspace, and possibly radar, as it crossed to the Strait of Malacca? (I don’t know if it would have crossed Thai airspace without making the U-turn, but I’ve seen nothing that explains why the plane made that move before turning west.)
I know a Brit who was originally a Singaporean and has lived in Malaysia, and she says a good many Malaysians will be blaming the whole thing on witch doctors.
I’m jumping the gun here, given that we’ve heard nothing promising about this latest search, but let’s say that hypothetically this does turn out to be the wreckage of MH370. Who then gets to run the investigation? A Malaysian airline and pilots operating an American airplane full of Chinese passengers that crashes in international waters under international airspace that is handled by Australian ATC. I’m sure that everybody other than the Malaysians would vastly prefer that Australia be put in charge of the crash investigation. How do they decide?
What makes me nervous about flying in North America, never mind in a Third World country, is the pressure to get planeloads of passengers on board and stay on schedule. The profit margin for airlines is apparently fairly slim and delays can cost money, so my mind imagines mistakes being made in the rush or corners being cut at various steps for business reasons. But I have to admit that it’s an unfounded fear, given the statistical rarity of crashes among the sheer number of commerical flights, so I still fly. But that niggling doubt still pops up.