I stand corrected. In checking a few stories about it, I see that the headlines say the plane crashed, but the text of his email doesn’t say that at all.
A couple of things about his description still don’t sound right. At one point, he questions whether it was a plane–“I observed (the plane?) burning at high altitude…”. And he gives a rough estimate of the distance at 50-70 kilometres, awfully far away to distinguish an airplane, I’d think.
And it’s been pointed out that it’s highly unlikely that a burning plane will fly for another seven hours.
This Washington Post graphic lays that information out on a map. It includes a turn to the northwest over the Strait of Malacca, based on Malaysia’s military radar, before subsequently turning to the south, rather than a straight path to the Indian Ocean.
That could point to a bomb explosion, large enough or well-placed enough to sever a power bus but not enough to render the aircraft incapable of sustained flight. The reprogrammed autopilot doesn’t fit well with that, though.
I don’t think that the Washington Post graphic lays out the same information at all. It gets the timing wrong, for example implying that the transponder stopped operating after the plane changed course, and assumes other things to be true that are by no means established fact, such as the possible changes of altitude.
Maybe in the future all transponders will have a “goodbye” signal, so it can be determined whether they were turned off or suddenly disabled? Doesn’t seem hard to do.
Maybe we should just pass a law that says airplanes can’t disappear without telling anyone first. Not hard to do at all, and likely to be just as effective.
Live web cam for the cockpit and the passengers would work for me … I don’t think cheating husbands would like the wife to see them buying drinks for a sexy passenger though.
Someone chatting all the time would’ve given more clues too …
One scenario I haven’t heard of is the captain/pilot saying F*** you Malaysian airlines on his final good-by before the plane disappeared doing its (now they say it was gradual) 20 degree left turn around to fly low over the Malaysian mainland in the opposite direction.
If the pilot said anything they would never release it due to the $5,000 offered per passenger would then go to $5,000,000 per passenger.
Were you aware that the pilot had two homes and that he had separated from his wife and children and that he was living with his parents?
You’re right, there’s no indication of the turn back in the text. It just mentions the last signal from the transponder as the plane is cruising at 35,000 feet, while the graphic depicts the plane’s turn (sixth button). And the only mention of unusual altitude is when it “returned to 29,500 feet” without having indicated any change from its normal altitude (eighth button). Rather than getting anything wrong, though, it looks to me more like another bit of incomplete and sloppy work from the media. Yet again.
But while the graphic might be flawed, the sources for the information are given as Inmarsat, Malaysian Gov’t, and U.K. Air Accidents Investigation Branch, which I think are about as credible as we can expect. Since it mentions the changes in altitude (partially) and shows the plane turning north and west over the Strait of Malacca, rather than going straight south to the Indian Ocean, I think that’s as much confirmation as we’re going to get.
But in the Malaysian context, having two homes and living with parents are both very unremarkable - so much so that I wouldn’t be willing to draw any inferences at all from the behaviour.
It’s maddening that we don’t have anything to go on. cargo doors have come off and caused catastrophic decompression. Fires have taken down aircraft. Terrorists have taken down aircraft. Bizarre weather conditions have brought them down. Even if it’s found the voice recorder won’t tell us what triggered the event.
I think we have a responsibility to find it and find out if there’s a problem that needs to be fixed.
What continues to fascinate me is the level of delayed communication between some of the parties. It is now reported that a Thailand satellite picked up images of between 200 to 300 floating objects on Monday. They only passed on this information to the Malaysian authorities on Wednesday, a full two days after the sighting.
Folks, WTF? That’s two days of current, drift and swirl. Why the fuck wait two days?
It’s not unusual for pilots to have more than residence, typically at either end of a long route, or one where it’s convenient to get to work i.e. near their base airport and another would they prefer to live. In Asian cultures adult children moving in with parents or vice versa isn’t particularly unusual. Spousal separation and divorce are likewise common among pilots. In other words, none of that strikes me as particularly suspicious.
With respect to the Thai satellite information, I would assume it’s because satellite feeds are not continuously monitored in real time. As well, if the satellite is taking pictures continuously, that’s a lot of data to sift through to find images of smallish pieces of debris in a very large ocean.
Just because a satellite took the images on Monday it doesn’t mean that a human saw that picture on Monday. There are probably thousands of images that have to be eyeballed. I can see how they could be several days behind in such a task.
That’s assuming that the process isn’t automated using pattern recognition software, but even if it’s automated the process still wouldn’t be instantaneous.
