With AF447 they did find some debris after 5 days so they at least had somewhere to focus the search. If they don't find anything at all then they can't focus a smaller search anywhere so they can't scale back the search much if they hope to be able to actually find anything.
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Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 missing
- Thread starter quagmire
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With AF447 they did find some debris after 5 days so they at least had somewhere to focus the search. If they don't find anything at all then they can't focus a smaller search anywhere so they can't scale back the search much if they hope to be able to actually find anything.
Yes, agreed - the Air France search was much simpler.... but there are also politics involved. The search will be scaled back immensely, of course, in time if nothing else substantive is found - but I think there will be some searching going on for a very long time. Malaysia will need to be able to say that they are still searching to keep public criticism contained. They may pay a firm to search for metal bits on the ocean floor. Needle in a haystack - but they can point at the ship(s) and tell their public they haven't given up hope. China has it's own restive public - but more importantly this gives them an excuse to deploy some cutting edge technologies both to test it and to showcase to the world what they can do. And it's an excuse to keep some naval units in an area where they would not necessarily be welcome in otherwise. If China does maintain a presence in the area then I can see the US and Australia also maintaining a scaled back search effort as well just to balance the Chinese effort and to keep an eye on them.
The problem we have with this incident is that there are simply too many unknowns.
Are this juncture we don't even know if the plane crashed. It could have been commandeered, flown to some spot in central Asia, and be hidden under camouflage netting.
If, on the other hand, the plane crashed into the sea - either the southern Indian Ocean (as the searchers now seem to think) or some other chunk of saltwater closer to its planned flightpath - sooner or later some identifiable debris will show up somewhere.
It simply isn't possible for an aircraft that large to crash into the ocean without breaking up. And there are a lot of things on an aircraft that float. Seat cushions, insulation, passenger luggage, etc. etc. Even if the plane corkscrewed into the most inaccessible part of the Southern Ocean, sooner or later ocean currents and winds are going to deposit an identifiable piece of debris on a beach or rock, someone is going to find it, and then - for better or worse - family members might begin to have some closure.
If and when debris is recovered, flight safety investigators are going to have some additional information on which they can base their further searches. Smoke or fire damage on the debris would offer additional clues, as would residue from explosives.
But if, for example, six months from now an identifiable piece of wreckage washes up on the coast of Peru or South Africa, what does that tell us? Not much, I'm afraid, at least when it comes to the final resting place of MA 370.
MH seems to be running on misfortune lately.
Yesterday, MH 114 got hit by a flock of ducks while landing at Kathmandu. It shattered the windshield.
Earlier today, I heard that a MH A330 (KUL-ICN) suffered an engine failure and was diverted to HKG.
What's next?
EDIT: The A330 that was diverted to VHHH (HKG) did so not because of an engine failure, but because of a failed electrical generator. The flight involved was MH 66.
Yesterday, MH 114 got hit by a flock of ducks while landing at Kathmandu. It shattered the windshield.
Earlier today, I heard that a MH A330 (KUL-ICN) suffered an engine failure and was diverted to HKG.
What's next?
EDIT: The A330 that was diverted to VHHH (HKG) did so not because of an engine failure, but because of a failed electrical generator. The flight involved was MH 66.
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A Chinese military aircraft has spotted ( with eyes ) two large white objects surrounded by a bunch of smaller objects in the search area .it has just landed back in Perth. There will be a news conference at 2:30 AM PDT . I'm curious if they took any photos since they spotted it with their eyes.
Might be a break or another needle in the haystack.
Might be a break or another needle in the haystack.
An Australian P3 Orion has also spotted objects. It has marked the location and HMAS Success should be there soon to retrieve the objects found.
It's too early to say if it is the wreckage or just flotsam.
Not that I place any stock in it, but I thought the bad luck cycle involved crashes and not necessarily the same airline?
At this point I would totally discount any possibility that the plane was commandeered and hidden. The number of people and resources involved in a conspiracy to successfully carry out that plan makes it highly unlikely that they could keep it a secret for this long. The intelligence arms of the US, Israel, the UK, and China - at a minimum - will have been tasked to assume (until there is hard evidence to the contrary) that the plane was hijacked and hidden to be used in a terrorist plot. They haven't found it - and they are good at what they do.
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Breaking news... the Malaysian PM just announced that the INMARSAT data analysis shows that the plane was definitely flying over the southern Indian Ocean.
I hope they find enough of the wreckage to be able to figure out why it ended up flying that way, it doesn't seem like there is any real logical reason why it took that route.
I agree. Depending on what they find, and its condition, they may only be able to eliminate theories. For instance... if they find piece of debris from the cockpit (like a seat cushion) and there is no sign of fire or smoke damage they could discount a fire on the flight deck. Which leaves the mystery.
There is one hypothesis I've read that I think provides a logical reason why it ended up in the southern Indian Ocean. If there was an electrical fire that initially caused the failure of the communication systems the pilots would have made a turn generally to the south to return to an alternate runway. If the pilots were then incapacitated by the fire (smoke, for instance) then the plane would have continued to fly south until it ran out of fuel. At a minimum they will need to find debris from the flight deck to either confirm or eliminate this possibility. I hope that the families involved will be able to find some closure now.
This just sounds like a huge botch job by Malaysia Airlines. Why did it take this long to find this new data. It almost seems like they were siting on this information in the hopes of good news but when more sat imagery came about they decided they had to go public with their findings.
USA Today made it sound like the airline didn't find this new data, Inmarsat and British accident investigators did.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/03/24/missing-malaysia-jetliner/6814799/
This incident was certainly beyond the scope of any airline. Heck, it was beyond the scope of a single country. It appears that multi-national cooperation is what has brought enough pieces of the puzzle together for Malaysia to announce the airliner crashed.
Michael
But the announcement that the plane crashed in the southern Indian Ocean simply creates more questions than it answers.
If, as Immarsat and the Malaysian Govt. claim, the plane crashed there - how did this happen? If the pilots were disabled by smoke or fumes from a fire, then how come it smoldered so slowly that it let the aircraft continue flying for an additional six or so hours, eventually running out of fuel?
Also unanswered, why did somebody deliberately disable the aircraft's transponders - yet somehow fail to take the (literally) couple of seconds needed to declare an emergency by radio? ("MH 370, smoke in the cockpit.")?
In my very humble opinion, the Malaysian Government is making this announcement today because they want this issue to go away. Unless and until we see actual physical evidence that the plane crashed in the southern Indian Ocean (a charred liferaft, etc.) I'm going to remain skeptical.
I agree. Right now, Malaysia (Government, not airline) is wanting to save face with the world, because with all of the botched reports that came out since the incident occurred, their credibility really took a hit.
I wouldn't believe anything, especially with the transponders and all conspiracy theories until we locate and decipher the CVR/FDR. That way, we'll at least have some inclination of what may have happened.
As far as his simulator goes, Capt. Shah was prominent in the flightsim community, used either FSX or P3D, as he had purchased PMDG's 777 add-on. Odds are more that he used it to hone his craft, and/or flew it just for the sake of flying it and enjoying virtual flight as much as he did real world flight.
BL.
This incident seems to be unusual and uniquely challenging at almost every turn. The Malaysian government probably could have handled certain aspects of this better but the management of critical incidents never goes perfectly according to plan. When this is all over I'm sure Malaysia with update their readiness plan and am guessing the international community will join together on a protocol to help manage future similar incidents.
No doubt they will, but the damage has already been done. They can only try to make things better, but the problem was of their own doing to begin with. They could have handled the release and dissemination of information a lot better.
BL.
Perhaps but the view in hindsight is pretty good from all the way up in the cheap seats. Why don't we let the search continue and once this is over figure out what could gave been done better with the benefit of all the information?
How's this for speculation: hijackers took over the aircraft. Pilots cooperated in turning off transmissions. Situation deteriorated, and instead of losing control of aircraft, the hijackers released a nerve agent that killed everyone and the plane continued on its last heading until it ran out of gas.
I'm not smiling, but I've been thinking why fly out into the Indian Ocean and it makes no sense, unless someone wants to hide something. What would that be? Which brings me back to one of the original theories, pilot suicide and he wanted to spare his family from shame, by trying to dump it somewhere nobody would locate it and figure out what happened. In that light it's really maddening that someone would have no compunction of taking an entire aircraft of innocent people with him.
I'm not smiling, but I've been thinking why fly out into the Indian Ocean and it makes no sense, unless someone wants to hide something. What would that be? Which brings me back to one of the original theories, pilot suicide and he wanted to spare his family from shame, by trying to dump it somewhere nobody would locate it and figure out what happened. In that light it's really maddening that someone would have no compunction of taking an entire aircraft of innocent people with him.
Everybody who got on board has had their backgrounds checked extensively - both by government agencies and the media. Nobody is even hinting that anybody on board had any ties to any group that might want to hijack a plane.
More importantly, no group has claimed responsibility for this. If this was an act of terrorism we would have heard from the perpetrators by now.
Until the remains of the aircraft are found we are still largely just guessing.