They seem to be credible enough that the plane’s flight was re-enacted with another 777, according the[Bangkok Post](http://www.bangkokpost.com/learning/learning-from-news/399096/missing-plane-mystery- continues) (the story is credited to AFP which I think is Agence France Presse):
This story on the same page is credited to Reuters:
These reports are from sources credible enough that I think a mid-air accident of some kind can be pretty much ruled out.
The autopilot may simply have had a flight plan from KL to, say, India in its memory, including the appropriate series of waypoints, and was simply following it after being redirected from the original Beijing flight plan. But then it would have had to be reprogrammed, or deactivated, again to turn south. Maybe the acts of a frantic crew trying to set up an emergency approach to a diversion field, but hitting the wrong entries on the menu (like the route to Mumbai instead of Pulau Ketang), while being slowly overcome by smoke from an electrical fire that required turning everything else off?
It took a while to figure out Swissair 111, caused by that kind of problem, and that was with almost the entire airplane recovered and no loss of communications. This one may not be solved.
Soo Malaysia and Indonesia don’t respond to an unidentified aircraft flying directly over their countries? Interesting…
Has there ever before been a search for anything where the searchers didn’t even have the right ocean?
Perhaps one person was, as the pilots chasing the plane saw a steward enter the cockpit. However, the remainder were either unconscious or deceased as someone would have come forward when the plane start porposing up and down in the sky. If they were alive, then that would have been hell blacking out and coming to again repeatedly not knowing what was going to happen next.
Possible, I guess, but deliberate actions by a capable pilot is a lot more likely. For instance, how would the plane climb to 45,000 feet, above its rated altitude, on autopilot? But the final result doesn’t make sense either in the context of hijacking or suicide, which might be why the accident scenario still has traction.
This story is going to have a lot of firsts when it’s over. If it’s ever over.
If it’s truly where they’re currently looking then we should be thinking horses and not zebras.
the plane was suppose to be carrying lithium batteries. A simple scenario would be a fire in the forward cargo bay that takes out the electronics bay. This destroys communication equipment before an SOS is sent. The pilot dials in the nearest airport which is TGG. The fire cannot be contained and the crew is incapacitated.
What is seen from an oil rig is a brief view of a plane on fire as it banks around. The plane flies on until fuel is exhausted.
No offense, but that sounds more like a unicorn.
I’m leaning towards a repeat of Helios 522. Crew error followed by decompression.
Pilots are incapacitated, oxygen masks drop automatically in the cabin, someone goes to the cockpit to check when the pilots fail to take action, finds an emergency situation, turns off the transponder in a vain attempt to communicate, causes erratic flight path and overshoots the malay peninsula, settles on a lower altitude straight flight until fuel runs out over the southern Indian Ocean.
Its difficult to accept in this high-tech world that this aircraft may never be found and we may never know what happened. I’m struggling with that even though I know its realistic.
There are plenty of people like you, and it surprises me a bit. As you say, it’s perfectly realistic to assume that we can’t solve all mysteries, that our means are limited, that we aren’t omniscient, etc…
I wonder what makes people having such expectations. I mean, the ocean is big, like in really, really big…
I wonder if it’s a matter of generation. I’m in my late 40s, and I view a number of technological progress as akin to magic. I mean, there should be no way that a small item in my car would be able to pinpoint my location at any instant and to tell me exactly how to go from middle-of-nowhere, France, to middle of nowhere, Poland, for instance. So, not finding a plane in an ocean isn’t for me an anomaly but rather a return to the way things naturally are.
Pit latrines exist, and they concentrate literally years worth of waste in a small area, often with it stewing in the hot sun.
Or in Paris, you can take a sewer tour and go past literal rivers of waste.
I wouldn’t hold a dinner party in either one, but the s is manageable.
And yet the aeroplane continues flying for hours?
It would have to be a very special fire indeed to put enough smoke into the cockpit to kill the pilots, enough heat in the electronics bay to kill the communication equipment (but not the autopilot), yet it somehow manages to contain itself enough that the plane keeps flying. This is pretty much unheard of. Typically a fire onboard gives you 10-15 minutes of useful flying time and then it’s all over red rover. The type of scenario you promote is a very complicated solution to the problem.
Agreed Richard. My Occams Razor gut says a mechanical/electrical catastrophic event occurred to MH370 and the pilots turned, hoping to land at the nearest runway. However they were overcome by smoke poisonous gases or hypoxia and the aircraft carried on into the void.
The problem is, there are reported movements of the aircraft to different altitudes and to waypoints on a different heading away from the Indian Ocean. That suggests human control and deliberate decisions being made. Thus the puzzle becomes inexplicable if the aircraft later turned left above the Andaman Strait and set off into the wide blue yonder of the southern Indian Ocean.
I can’t think of any reason explaining why an aircraft with an unconscious crew and passengers would describe such a convoluted path.
Are what we know about the plane’s likely horizontal and vertical path consistent with a NON-pilot (a passenger or flight attendant) trying to fly the thing? This would mean that something incapacitated or killed the pilots, but not everyone else…unlikely but not unheard of (Helios, e.g.). And, it would require either all communications mechanisms having been disabled (directly by the incident, or else by the pilots pre-incapacitation attempting to isolate or control the incident), AND the person later flying the plane lacking the knowledge to get any of these mechanisms up and running again (not an issue if they really were broken beyond repair).
If this is the scenario, to me it means they might have to expand the search area a bit north, closer to that last ping, in case the untrained person crashed the plane BEFORE it ran out of fuel (either because they finally succumbed to the smoke or whatever, or because they attempted a water landing knowing the fuel was getting low, or because they simply made a flying mistake).
If it were during the day, this would be even less plausible – even an non-pilot would try to keep the thing flying over land. Maybe this whole scenario is impossible – it requires someone to have enough skills to fly pretty well for hours, yet no navigational skills at all. Or was the person astute and generous enough to fly in the only direction guaranteed to NOT kill anyone on the ground?
Maybe if the crew, still barely functional, realized their mistake and shut it off, hand-flying in the direction of an emergency airport before losing consciousness entirely. If the plane was then on its own, uncontrolled but trimmed to climb, it would keep going on up to its ceiling, then stalled, then dropped to a lower altitude where the wings could get a bite again …
This may turn out to be another case of a modern airline crew simply not knowing how to fly an airplane, just how to push buttons on a panel and then watch what it does. Colgan and Air France were cases of pilots not applying basic stall recognition and recovery methods (the Airbus control design philosophy did help confuse them in AF447, though). Asiana was a case of not being sure how to set up the auto-everything for a non-standard approach and not looking out the damn window, when it was a perfect situation for the pleasure of a simple hand-flown visual approach - but the crew admitted they weren’t confident they could do that! Maybe if MH370 had been hand-flown to an airport instead of relying on pushing the right buttons …
I see a lot of, if you’ll pardon the term, airy speculation about this flight. The most likely scenario – by orders of magnitude – is crash in the ocean due to something going horribly wrong. Things don’t often go horribly wrong, but when an aircraft disappears, it’s almost always things going horribly wrong, and it happens enough that saying “it’s unlikely” borders on fantasy.
For example, we’ve been speculating about hypoxia due to depressurization, and we have a comment like this:
I don’t know “how.” But the two most famous cases of hypoxia are the Helios Airways 522 and Payne Stewart’s Learjet, and both involved the respective aircraft climbing after the pilots stopped responding.
In the Helios case:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
The aircraft continued to climb until it leveled off at FL340, approximately 34,000 feet (10,000 m).[12] Between 09:30 and 09:40, Nicosia ATC repeatedly attempted to contact the aircraft, without success.
[/QUOTE]
In the Learjet:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
At 1327:18Z (0927:18 EDT), the pilot acknowledged the clearance by stating, “three nine zero bravo alpha.” This was the last known radio transmission from the airplane, and occurred while the aircraft was passing through 23,000 feet (7,000 m).
[/QUOTE]
So the best-known cases involve exactly what posters are describing as implausible – climbing to high altitude uncontrolled.
Blackboxes are obsolete technology. The day will come when this information will be relayed in near real-time via satellite (including cockpit video).
To be fair to the Air France 447 pilots - recognizing a stall in the middle of a storm, at night, with triple pitot failure is not a trivial exercise. Looking out the window would do them no good and their instruments were unreliable/lying to them.
Colgan and Asiana were much more on the pilots, but just blaming the pilots for AF447 ignores the other serious factors at work.
Oh, yeah, because data transmission can never be interrupted by anything… :rolleyes:
Black boxes are not and will not be obsolete. They may become less important, but they’ll serve as backup for when data transmission breaks down.