Yes, thank you, Sir or Madam.
It is all decided based on pre-existing rules. Since it would be in international waters, the IATA treaty says that it is the country of the airline, that is Malaysia, that would be in charge. At least, that is my understanding.
A bunch of Americans will probably blame it on God / gay people.
I know one person who won’t blame the gays for this one.
Yeah, but what about the all-too-common delays that happen with a very significant proportion of US flights? The regulations seem too tight for them to be lax.
That being said, yes I am scared.
One thing I haven’t heard about this latest sighting is what the ocean currents are like in the area. If this is wreckage from MH370, that doesn’t mean it crashed there. Whatever the current is, the plane crashed 13 days upstream from where the wreckage is now floating.
I agree with you. It is a very real danger and IMO, it is more of a danger in regional airlines than it is in the big airlines. I would much rather fly American or United than any regional airline.
Remember the movie Rain Man? Perhaps the way the Australian govt is behaving has something to do with the fact there has never been a crash involving Quantas Airlines. At least, that was the point made in that movie. I hope it is still true.
Queensand And Northern Territory Air Service, QANTAS, has not lost a jet nor killed a passenger or crew with one.
It had a jet kissing the mud at Bangkok, didn’t stop before the end of the runway.
More recently it had a jet struggling to avoid mud and fire at Singapore (RR engine explosion not a crash)- They had lost numerous systems, but not the wheel brakes , and Singapore has a very long runway… They felt they should land as soon as they could, which meant nearly full of fuel !. It did stop in time but the passenger were held on the plane for many minutes while the wing leaked fuel.
Firstly this is not an attack on you. Many people share your perspective.
Nevertheless I find it appalling that the media and many posters on internet forums jumped very quickly into blaming the pilots. A suicide mission. Or theft/terrorist conversion of this aeroplane for nefarious purposes.
Anything at a far extreme is possible but let us think about this rationally. There have probably been 1 billion commercial flights since air travel became popular in the 1960s. In all of that time there are only two - repeat, two crashes where a pilot deliberately caused the tragedy. Furthermore the Air Egypt crash is only a guess and has never been accepted by Egypt, which leaves Silk Air as the single deliberate suicide/murder by a pilot.
One incident in history.
That makes the odds of MH370 being deliberately crashed by both pilots vanishingly small. These men have families who will live with these abysmal accusations for at least a generation into the future even once the facts are known. I feel for them.
Well, several American agencies have already volunteered to assist, as has the manufacturer of the airplane. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Chinese offer assistance at some point, if they haven’t already. If the waters are in any way connected to Australia their accident investigators will probably be involved at some point.
Normally, it seems to be either the nation where the crash occurs or, when the territory of the crash is international such as the open ocean, the investigators from the nation of the airline, but as you point out, in this situation there are some overlapping interests.
You forgot the four hijack teams on September 11, 2001 that deliberately crashed airplanes. There are actually 5 incidents in history, and since many people do accept suicide as the reason for the Air Egypt crash that makes a total of six.
That’s still very low odds of that being the explanation, but it remains a fear people have and it’s not entirely irrational. I think a lot of people would like to have that explanation definitively ruled out.
I agree with both of you: the odds are low, so we shouldn’t worry TOO much about it (nor rush to judgement in the current case – as has been pointed out, this is unfair to the pilots’ loved ones), but it’s such a horrific breach of professional trust, it naturally creates a special kind of fear.
I disagree that the 9-11 attackers should count; we’re talking about the assigned, official airline pilots here.
However, EgyptAir should definitely count, IMHO, regardless of what the Egyotian government says.
I assume you included the Angola incident from November 2013 in your tally. I know little about that one, but AFAIK not even the Angolan government is objecting to the findings, so it must be a pretty clear case!
Two things: the plane was out of fuel, and according to the video the breakup was because one of the engines caught a coral reef.
Yes, it’s like finding out a doctor is a murderer. Pilots are supposed to keep people safe in the air and suicide like that is the opposite.
Ah, right, the Angolan 727… although that was not an “officially assigned” pilot either, even if he was able to fly it.
So, by strictest definition that’s 2 such cases and by more liberal criteria as many as 7, 5 of which occurred since 2001. That’s against a background of 100-200 crashes per year, though most are not big wide-body airliners. A quick search of Wikipedia gives 2087 air crashes since 2000, which means pilot-caused deliberate crashes are less than 1% of total air crashes in the world. Odds are this case is NOT pilot-caused, and shame on the Malaysian government for rushing to judgement although blaming the pilot has a long history in aviation.
I think the circumstances of this disappearance make the chances a lot higher than 1%. Not many of those 2,000 aircraft lost communication but continued to fly for a long time, as is probably the case here. There was the aforementioned Helios depressurisation accident, but that plane carried on on its expected route.
First off, I used “pilot” in my post to refer to whomever was controlling the plane, which (IMHO) was likely one of the flight crew but could have been some other well-trained person. Since the intelligence agencies of several nations have gone through the passenger and crew manifest with every tool at their disposal and have not found any sign that there was even a minimally-qualified 777 pilot among them other than the flight deck crew, it seems unlikely that a non-uniformed “pilot” could be responsible.
Second, I’ve proposed two theories here, not uniquely. One is that a “pilot” took it on a suicide mission for unknown reasons. The evidence seems to be that some highly trained person performed a series of complex steps (possibly more than cockpit settings) to take the plane off radar and fly it away on an unknown course. IF that’s the case, and given that no additional candidate has been sifted out of the complement, it means one of the flight deck crew is responsible.
Your argument that it’s only “one in history” is noted, but EVERYTHING is once “only once” and we are in a very weird time - the fact that hundreds of thousands of pilots fly uncounted hours without decking their craft - that we know of! - is not a counterargument. This has every hallmark of being incident #2 - or 3.
The only other general case is crew/passenger incapacitation through accident or error and a truly bizarre string of equipment failures, followed by an intelligent plane randomly selecting waypoints as part of a safety protocol.
I find it far easier to believe one person did it all deliberately - with full intent of making the flight “disappear” rather than just crash - than any other long, complicated chain of events that could produce the results so far observed without human intent. And the evidence is that it was not just deliberate, but highly skilled, and the number of candidates drops to… two.
Pity for the pilots’ families and arguments that this has happened a vanishingly small percentage of civil aviation flights are not convincing - sorry.
Right, suggesting pilot culpability isn’t just grasping at a straw. There’s just as much, if not more, indication for that as there is for terrorism, and I don’t see a point in daring not speak its name.
Latest new theory is a lithium-ion battery fire in the cargo hold. Another possible-but-it-seems-unlikely scenario. There have been aircraft lost to battery fires, but not a lot of them.