It says “copilot made urgent call” all over the page but the article makes it clear that the phone simply connected to the tower and there’s no reason to believe that a call was actually made. If they can’t reconcile the headline with the article, I’m not holding my breath that any of it is true.
I’ve already posted a scenario that fits this and I went into detail about it.
The flight controls have nothing to do with the comm system. all it takes is a fire in the belly of the plane to take out the wiring to the antenna on the bottom of the plane. Communication is now dead. You can look in the newest freighter currently flying and see the wiring under the belly floor. It’s not armor plated. It’s just regular wire easily consumed in a fire.
What the pilots would do in an emergency is hit “nearest” on the flight computer and then enter that as a destination. Done. The plane now flies that heading and whatever airspeed and altitude is selected. what the plane needs to continue flying and what people need to stay conscious are not related. A fire that produces a lot of smoke will take out the passengers and crew. It’s going to be utter chaos in a smoke filled environment. The same applies to an explosion and sudden decompression. The plane’s computer doesn’t care about smoke or lack of oxygen. The hydraulic system operating the control surfaces doesn’t care about smoke or lack of oxygen. The fuel system and the engines don’t care.
There is nothing particularly odd about a fire that is eventually put out by the fire suppression system system. That’s what it’s there for. The plane doesn’t care about the time involved. The people dealing with smoke or sudden decompression are a different matter. They could be incapacitated. It’s happened before.
If they find the plane in the area they’re currently looking then it’s in a direct line from their last known position to the closest airport which is TGG. That would suggest they had a problem and turned back.
Except it didn’t take out antennas. The satcom antenna was still functioning. So any fire had to take out the actual ACARS system, not the antenna. And it had to provide enough smoke to take out the pilots but not the aeroplane. Unheard of as far as I’m aware.
No, what the pilots do in the event of a smoke/fire emergency is don smoke masks and goggles, establish comms between themselves and the cabin crew, get the aeroplane to the nearest airport and put out a mayday. Once masks are on, they can last for as long as a fire typically lasts for.
Your scenario is a possible scenario but it is no better than many others, and worse than some. It raises as many questions as it answers. It doesn’t fit all of the evidence. For one, there has been no backdown on the earlier statements that the aircraft turned west. This simply doesn’t fit with the hypothesis that it was turned once toward a suitable airport and continued to the current search area. You have to come up with a reason for it being turned west initially and then south.
Not even that. Without a comms system the antenna is useless. What happened was the ground station asked “Are you there plane?” and the plane replied “Yes but I don’t want to talk to you”. So one of the few things we know for a fact is that ACARS didn’t malfunction, and presumably whoever turned it off was not aware of this behaviour.
It wasn’t the ACARS responding though as I understand it, rather it was the basic satcom system that the ACARS piggybacks on when necessary.
I thought that was a distinction made in software but you could very well be right.
one has nothing to do with the other. Different antennas. What’s your point.
:rolleyes: All that’s a given. You’re making a literal argument for the sake of arguing. In the event of an emergency they would absolutely make for the nearest airport. this is consistent with the flightpath they’re searching on. It literally draws a straight line to the search area.
There is no evidence it turned west beyond a statement from the military that was denied.
To be accurate the turn was north-west.
That track was searched in the early stages and nobody would have wasted precious time and resources unless they had credible reports. An aircraft was even flown along this track to check for data comparisons.
However it is possible the “turn” was a mistaken reading and never happened but at the moment we can’t say that.
If they’re on masks then they don’t get overcome by smoke, that’s the point.
Where was it denied?
A couple of new unconfirmed developments from unnamed sources…
And it seems that the jackals have smelled easy blood…
What if this report proves to be true and that a cell phone call was made using the co=pilots cell phone, but only one person in the tower heard the context of the message and relayed it to his supervisor?
Remember this is a “what if” and the message was bad publicity for Malaysian and Malaysian airlines and would be the foundation for a multi-million dollar lawsuit that would bankrupt the airline.
I would think that one we may never hear this last phone call message or two the tower operator along with his supervisor may no longer be alive to tell their story or three they will live a life of luxury being taken care of by the airline for as long as they live or number four the whole thing comes crashing down with a confession of that last message of which we can only guess.
That’s not what a cell phone tower is. A cell phone tower is a piece of equipment in the network, and (I hope this is close to right) your phone makes contact with the nearest tower when you make a call. There aren’t people sitting in towers listening to your cell phone calls. Assuming any of this even happened, they’re not saying the co-pilot spoke to anyone. I think they’re saying his phone might have made contact with a tower for a second.
How much is all this costing? At what point do they say “Well, we tried…it’s lost”?
At this stage it seems to me (and I’ve only been following loosely based on CNN.com headlines) that the “why” is far more important than the “where” with this plane, as in, they want to prove or disprove an act of terror that brought the plane down rather than some other scenario.
Close enough for discussion, definitely. Your phone wants to talk to the tower closest to it, but it might pick one further away but still in range if the tower is for the wrong carrier. Also, if the tower is overloaded, it may instruct the phone to talk to a different tower. Lots of different scenarios to handle things.
None of that is important for the main point here, though.
I saw one estimate of $44 million, but it’s hard to say. I’m sort of confused by all the attention that is being paid to what this costs. Do people really think a handful of countries - including the two largest economies in the world by GDP and Australia, which is also a wealthy country - can’t afford to use their own militaries to search an ocean for a month or so? They’ll find the thing if they can. The search may gradually get scaled back as time goes on so it costs less, but it seems like they’re finally making progress.
If you don’t know why the plane crashed, you don’t know if you can do anything to prevent the problem from happening again. That’s the big issue here. That and the humane impulse to try and allow these families to bury their loved ones.
I didn’t mean to imply that it wasn’t a worthy venture. It was mere curiosity as this seems like such a large scale operation with multiple nations involved. I do also agree that the loved ones of the dead deserve some kind of closure. I suppose it’s just amazing to me in this day and age that a commercial airliner can just disappear like that…ocean or no.
I didn’t mean to assume that was what you were saying. But somehow you do find people suggesting that. It’s really weird.
Yes, that’s still pretty crazy and it seems like it shouldn’t be that hard to fix.
So sorry … I thought he might have meant an airport tower :smack:
You forgot to explain why the triggering incident occurred at exactly the right moment between handoff airspaces, how the plane just happened to immediately climb to an altitude high enough and long enough to disable/kill everyone (not to mention render their cell phones less contactable), then descend below radar and stay between landmasses again then have a final heading requiring hours of travel back at normal altitude right toward the most remote part where one could ditch a plane in an effort to get by with it.
Oh yeah; and make all the turns against known waypoints.
But hey…could be just really really rotten luck, perfectly rottenly timed, repeated many times over.
I’m not sure what you consider the nearest airport, but that flight path takes it across Indonesia, perpendicularly to the busy Jakarta-Medan-Banda Aceh route, without a transponder and into the Southern Indian Ocean.
Unlikely in the extreme it wouldn’t be detected.