What’s the procedure if no wreckage or remains are ever found? At some point (weeks, months??) is it just taken for granted that the aircraft was involved in a crash and that everybody on board perished? What sort of investigations can take place without any physical evidence?
This is just getting curiouser and curiouser and my heart goes out to those poor family members waiting for some, any news at all.
To quote my father’s email:
I doubt it will ruin their vacation, though. They’ve dealt with tragedy before.
I would guess that most people would be happy to help with this search in any way they could.
I wouldn’t see it as an “interruption” to my vacation. Instead, I would see it as an opportunity to help some people who are suffering - perhaps with the most tragic part of their lives.
I can’t imagine anyone who would feel this was an interuption to their holiday. That would strike me as an incredibly selfish attitude.
However, I suppose that some people may well feel that way. Oh well, under these circumstances, a friend of mine would just say, “God Bless” and wish them well. Unfortunately, I am not as enlightened as he is.
Maybe like the ValueJet flight 592 that went into the everglades. Fire?
Those that left assets, or life insurance policies, will have to be declared legally dead before the property can be distributed or the insurance pays off. This can take years in the U.S., but I don’t know what the process is like in the countries involved here. Probably each person would have to have an individual proceeding in their home jurisdiction.
I would assume that having a court declare the victim legally dead would be a condition precedent to filing the wrongful death suits, but I’m wondering if this situation would toll the statute of limitations…
I think you misunderstand.
I wasn’t saying people were walking complaining about their holiday being ruined. What I said was most would be more than willing to help and it was a sad disruption to a holiday. That is, the vacation was disrupted in a horribly sad way and people would want to help.
I was wondering how upset Alessan’s parents must of felt and how sad they were.
Thank’s for sharing what he wrote. What a profound moment to be a part of. I hope you understood that I wasn’t suggesting your parents weren’t standing around bitching about their vacation being ruined.
But then we are talking an event that would have lasted over a period of time. This would have allowed the plane to signal Kuala Lumpur that an IFE (in-flight emergency) was in progress and to date no one has stated that this occurred. Also the are major difference between this and Air France, including:
[ol]
[li]Air France 447 was in an area was there really isn’t much radar coverage.[/li][li]There a severe storm going during the disappearance of the Air France. No storm was reported in this instance.[/li][li]Air France wasn’t reported as being missing until it failed to contact an air traffic controller in either Senegal or the Cape Verde islands. This plane disappeared off radar which was tracking its flight.[/li][li] It was a completely different type of aircraft.[/li][/ol]
Whatever this was, it won’t be anything like the Air France disaster.
It frightens me to think about it, but what if the plane ended up being hijacked? What would be the fate of all those innocent people?
No matter what happened, it’s just very sad.
If the transponder were deliberately shut off by someone, just about anything could ensue. The plane could have landed in any number of locations, or crashed into the ocean, and nobody would know.
If they loose electrical then the transponder goes and radar contact is limited to distance without altitude. without electrical they have to immediately trim to a specific power setting or they stall the plane at that altitude. IE: Air France. It simply falls out of the sky.
A fire that destroys electrical equipment creates 2 major problems to deal with. I’m just throwing out a scenario where the plane “disappears” without ACARS giving them useful information.
It’s very odd that they don’t have ACARS clues to what happened. If nothing else it should tell them at point A things were good and 60 seconds later at point B it ceased transmitting. Point B is a relatively small search radius from point A.
Unfortunately, this is somewhat inaccurate.
Had the Boeing 777 in question performed in the same manner as the Air France flight, its descent would have been visible to the radar systems tracking it. To date, no one is saying that there were any sign of this occurring after it “disappeared” from its previous altitude.
Also, unless it was a VERY fast moving fire, the crew would have had time to declare an IFE. A fire that damaged the electrical system quick enough to completely disable it would almost certainly have to have been started by an external agent.
Different plane with a different design.
Probably a different reason (or reasons) for the accident.
If the transponder is off then all the radar returns is location. It simply “falls off” the radar if it flat spins down. There is no altitude indication. I’m giving a scenario that fits the current description. Plane disappears without any indication of a problem. That means there was a problem that was rapid and did not allow for 2 modes of communication (pilots and ACARS).
I’m not suggesting this is what happened just giving an example of what type of event fits the evidence.
Passenger action
cut/blow up critical part
disrupt pressurization so suddenly the pilots don’t have a chance to deploy masks
Crew action:
Flight deck
dis-connect autopilot - wouldn’t this have been tracked by the real-time beeps Boeing uses?
power dive
deploy thrust reversers at altitude - a sure-fire way to shred a plane quickly
Cabin
Would require either ground assistance (conceal something in food cart or ?) or an extremely trusted (can gain access to flight deck by asking) to attack flight deck crew and win.
“Act of God”
Not many could take out a modern transport
I had trouble parsing this sentence. What do you mean when you say: “they loose their flight instruments”? Are you using “loose” to mean “deployed”? Similar to writing “loosing arrows” to mean something like deploying them??
But here you use the word “loose” again and I can make even less sense of your usage this time around so maybe something else is going on…
This is an international message board so it’s possible that English is not your first language and you are simply misspelling a word–maybe you meant “lose” instead of “loose”?
Not intended to be snarky… over the past 5 or 10 years I’ve increasingly seen people misusing (or misspelling) the word “loose”. Just trying to help out in case you’re not a native English writer.
There may be survivors.
When the Titanic sank, the Captain of the Carpinthian shut off the passengers hotwater so that he would have more steam for his engines, and steamed full speed through the ice field to the rescue.
What a wonderful moment that would be, if that were to come true.
If the plane disintegrated in the air there would be a large floating debris field. At this point it had to descend rapidly on it’s own power or in a stall. One is a catastrophic loss of control and the other is a hijacking. Drawing an arc around the origin airport I can’t imagine a hijacked plane ducking radar and landing somewhere without eventually being tracked. So at this point I’m leaning toward a catastrophic loss of control and stall resulting in an intact crash into the sea.
I have keys that stick and spell check doesn’t catch words that are spelled correctly. Not that I haven’t typed it incorrectly before.
Surely it would not take anything like years in the case of occupants of an aircraft missing at sea.
Especially since the Carparthia is also currently at the bottom of the sea.