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Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 ended in the Southern Indian Ocean

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NBC: plane autopilot was programmed to turn 12 minutes before "all right, good night "

Here's the article: http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/mi...-u-turn-programmed-signoff-sources-say-n56151

The change in direction was made at least 12 minutes before co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid said "All right, good night," to controllers on the ground, the sources said.

The revelation further indicates that the aircraft's mysterious turnaround was planned and executed in the cockpit before controllers lost contact with Flight 370. But it doesn't necessarily indicate an ulterior motive.

"Some pilots program an alternate flight plan in the event of an emergency," cautioned Greg Feith, a former National Transportation Safety Board crash investigator and NBC News analyst.

"We don't know if this was an alternate plan to go back to Kuala Lumpur or if this was to take the plane from some place other than Beijing," the doomed flight's intended destination, Feith said.
 
NBC: plane autopilot was programmed to turn 12 minutes before "all right, good night "

What's interesting about that is it means that the information that the plane would turn was known on the ground before it turned. It sounds like it was part of the 1:07 ACARS transmission, which is how they know it was programmed in advance. But I assume that nobody monitors ACARS data in real time? Can more knowledgeable people confirm that?
 
What's interesting about that is it means that the information that the plane would turn was known on the ground before it turned. It sounds like it was part of the 1:07 ACARS transmission, which is how they know it was programmed in advance. But I assume that nobody monitors ACARS data in real time? Can more knowledgeable people confirm that?

1:07 ACARS last transmission

12 minutes later

1:19 : All right, Good Night

1:20 to now: silence

If this is confirmed , there is your coerce or coerced confirmation
 
As close to a smoking gun as we're going to get, if true.

Maybe:

The change in direction was made at least 12 minutes before co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid said "All right, good night," to controllers on the ground, the sources said.

The revelation further indicates that the aircraft's mysterious turnaround was planned and executed in the cockpit before controllers lost contact with Flight 370. But it doesn't necessarily indicate an ulterior motive.

"Some pilots program an alternate flight plan in the event of an emergency," cautioned Greg Feith, a former National Transportation Safety Board crash investigator and NBC News analyst.


"We don't know if this was an alternate plan to go back to Kuala Lumpur or if this was to take the plane from some place other than Beijing," the doomed flight's intended destination, Feith said.
 
But then that contradicts his reasoning for how the fire was put out so it won't burn up the rest of the plane.
His basic stance is - there was some kind of fire, which could have generated a lot of smoke, and they became incapacitated while trying to deal with it. Once everyone was unconscious the fire may have died or continued and just taken a very long time to spread. The suggestion about climbing to extinguish flames or diving to extinguish flames is a secondary opinion. His first suggestion is unreliable altitude readings, so there may have been no climbing or diving at all. Just everyone collapsing from smoke and then the plane continuing on a course for hours with everyone unconscious.
 

BearPawB

Banned
Man...that answers a big question but solves nothing.

Hijack still in play.
Pilot suicide still in play.

It makes me doubt the mechanical fire thing even more now
 

tino

Banned
What if the plane never left the airport?

m-night-shyamalan.jpg


"The greatest trick the pilot ever pulled was convincing the world the plane left."






i kid i kid

That mean Malaysia detained 200+ Chinese and Indian to do their secret experience. Time to send out China's refub carrier!

edit: and Indian's junk Russian carrier.
 
Maybe the pilot setup the autopilot in case of emergency and accidentally activated the flight path buy because he was too embarrassed by a simple mistake just flew off into the sunset.
 

Ether_Snake

安安安安安安安安安安安安安安安
Maldives island residents report sighting of 'low flying jet'

Link - http://www.haveeru.com.mv/news/54062

This potentially makes sense since it is in the direction of the u-turn. Meaning if the plane turn then continued to go in one direction it would have headed around there. And then the North to South-East means towards Diego Garcia. If a plane wanted to aim for DG, it would not have traveled directly towards it, it would have sought to make that turn at the last possible time only.
 
You really think if it was an emergency the first communication would be all right good night ?
I think the quote "Some pilots program an alternate flight plan in the event of an emergency" means that they can program an alternative plan in case you have to use it... if there is an emergency.

I mean, if there was an emergency, who would have the time to program a flight plan after the emergency was already happening? The quote can be taken both ways, but it makes more sense if he meant 'in case of'.... don't you think?
 

apana

Member
If it was already programmed, obviously both pilots would have to know about it right? Did anyone look into why these two had at one time requested not to work together?
 

Vamphuntr

Member
NBC: plane autopilot was programmed to turn 12 minutes before "all right, good night "

Well, that proves the fire theory is wrong if the information is reliable. The co-pilot would still have been able to contact for help at that time. The fire theory posted above relies on the fact the pilot took the sharp left turn to reach an airport to land and that all communications were dead because he could have tried to turn off each circuit breaker to isolate the cause of an electric fire.
 

tino

Banned
IMO there is no way in hell the young copilot is in on the hijacking. I think this is a series of human errors linked together.

We will never find out.
 

BearPawB

Banned
If it was already programmed, obviously both pilots would have to know about it right? Did anyone look into why these two had at one time requested not to work together?

you are misunderstanding the "not work together" quote.

They were saying they never asked specifically to work together, as in "they were likely not in on some big planned take over together" They didn't say, "i want to fly with him tomorrow".

The report said they had never specifically asked to work together.
 
If it was already programmed, obviously both pilots would have to know about it right? Did anyone look into why these two had at one time requested not to work together?

They had not requested to work together.

Different from they had requested not to work together.

This news brings up more questions though - what if the plane had been hijacked prior to that point and the pilots were simply co operating under duress?
 

BearPawB

Banned
They had not requested to work together.

Different from they had requested not to work together.

This news brings up more questions though - what if the plane had been hijacked prior to that point and the pilots were simply co operating under duress?

I hate that my mind went their too. But it has been said that pilots can have subtle ways of sending signals that something is wrong. There was nothing. You would think they would have tried something.
 

Vamphuntr

Member
The interesting thing that comes from this news is that if the information is verified and confirmed, it implies that the Malaysian Authorities have some data from the flight computer. If they knew at what time the flight computer was programmed, I suppose they also probably know the new destination they had input on it?
 
The Maldives? WTF? Maybe my geography is screwy, but how could it have been on one of te arcs and then over the Maldives?

Where were they going, Madagascar? Somalia? Kenya?
 
The Maldives? WTF? Maybe my geography is screwy, but how could it have been on one of te arcs and then over the Maldives?

Where were they going, Madagascar? Somalia? Kenya?

Well these fishermen say they saw the plane go down in Malacca Straits (today's news):

http://www.sunstar.com.ph/breaking-...saw-plane-crash-around-malacca-straits-333686

Madlives, Malacca Straits, and the oil worker off Vietnam last week. Too many unreliable eyewitness testimonies to add up to anything.
 

toxicgonzo

Taxes?! Isn't this the line for Metallica?
The change in direction was made at least 12 minutes before co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid said "All right, good night," to controllers on the ground, the sources said.

The revelation further indicates that the aircraft's mysterious turnaround was planned and executed in the cockpit before controllers lost contact with Flight 370. But it doesn't necessarily indicate an ulterior motive.

"Some pilots program an alternate flight plan in the event of an emergency," cautioned Greg Feith, a former National Transportation Safety Board crash investigator and NBC News analyst.

"We don't know if this was an alternate plan to go back to Kuala Lumpur or if this was to take the plane from some place other than Beijing," the doomed flight's intended destination, Feith said.
What does "at least" mean? It could have been programmed during the pre-flight then? It would not be surprising for a pilot to think of possible emergency landing flights.
 

duckroll

Member
What does "at least" mean? It could have been programmed during the pre-flight then? It would not be surprising for a pilot to think of possible emergency landing flights.

I think it means that the alternate route was already programmed in the last ACARS transmission, which was 12 minutes before the final message. We don't know how far back it goes because they're probably still investigating, but Malaysia said that they don't know at this point if it was programmed pre-flight, and that was a possibility.

Edit: This is the last thing I saw about it: http://news.asiaone.com/news/malaysia/missing-mh370-change-flight-path-computer-being-probed

The authorities could not confirm if new coordinates were entered into the flight computers of the missing MH370 before it took off for Beijing, said Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein.
 
I think it means that the alternate route was already programmed in the last ACARS transmission, which was 12 minutes before the final message. We don't know how far back it goes because they're probably still investigating, but Malaysia said that they don't know at this point if it was programmed pre-flight, and that was a possibility.

Edit: This is the last thing I saw about it: http://news.asiaone.com/news/malaysia/missing-mh370-change-flight-path-computer-being-probed

Yeah, it looks to me like the problem is that the flight took off at 12:41, so the 1:07 transmission would have been the first one (assuming as some have said that it transmits once every thirty minutes). But the larger question is what exactly that transmission says. It's one thing to program an alternate route, it's another to program the route as the direct route. And the question is whether those inputs are distinguishable. The former National Transportation Safety Board crash investigator that was quoted in the article as suggesting that caution is warranted does not have direct access to the content of the transmission so I'm not sure how much caution really is warranted. Investigators seem to have expressed some degree of confidence that something deliberate and criminal occurred.
 

MIMIC

Banned
What does "at least" mean? It could have been programmed during the pre-flight then? It would not be surprising for a pilot to think of possible emergency landing flights.

Possibly. But given what we already know (that the data communications were turned off before the last transmission), I think the implication is that it was done for a nefarious purpose rather than for typical emergency stuff.
 

MIMIC

Banned
I believe this is still a debated "fact".

Well yeah, we don't know for sure that it was manually disabled but I think that it's a pretty safe assumption. Two things being disabled without the pilots' knowledge (or more specifically, without the pilots indicating that there is a problem) seems pretty unrealistic.
 

duckroll

Member
Well yeah, we don't know for sure that it was manually disabled but I think that it's a pretty safe assumption. Two things being disabled without the pilots knowledge (or more specifically, without the pilots indicating that there is a problem) seems pretty unrealistic.

No, he's saying we don't know if it was turned off before the last message, period. It's explained in several posts on the page you posted in!
 

MIMIC

Banned
No, he's saying we don't know if it was turned off before the last message, period. It's explained in several posts on the page you posted in!

I thought it was already determined that it was turned off before the last voice check-in:

Although officials have already said that Acars was disabled on the missing plane, it had been unclear whether the system stopped functioning before or after the last, brief words were radioed to the control tower, in which the pilot did not indicate that anything was wrong with the signaling system or the plane as a whole.

During a news conference on Sunday, the defense minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, who is also acting minister of transportation, gave a terse answer: “Yes, it was disabled before.”
 

duckroll

Member
I thought it was already determined that it was turned off before the last voice check-in:

Yeah that's what he said. But it turns out he really doesn't know what he's talking about sometimes (this should be clear from how poor the communication has been on the Malaysian side). The facts are that the last ACARS transmission was at 1:07 AM. The last voice check-in was at 1:21 AM. The ACARS system transmits automatically every 30 minutes, and it didn't transmit at 1:37 AM. So it could have been turned off anytime between 1:07 AM and 1:37 AM. There's no way to tell at this point. It's been clarified since his comments.
 

MIMIC

Banned
LOL, I was just about to edit my post with this:

The airline's group chief executive officer Ahmad Jauhari Yahya told a news conference yesterday that it was unclear exactly when one of the plane's automatic tracking systems had been disabled and the last words from the cockpit, believed to be from the co-pilot, could have been done before the communication system was switched off.

This contradicts an earlier statement by Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein that the communications system had been "disabled" at 1.07am on March 8 – before the verbal sign-off was given to air traffic controllers at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, said a report in The Sydney Morning Herald.

I'm sticking with my earlier theory: there was no plane and there is no "Malaysia"
 

Trouble

Banned
I don't understand the idea of the pilots programming the autopilot nav as a sort of dead-man switch. If they are unable to reprogram it and the plane turns, what good does that do anyone?
 

Falk

that puzzling face
What's interesting about that is it means that the information that the plane would turn was known on the ground before it turned. It sounds like it was part of the 1:07 ACARS transmission, which is how they know it was programmed in advance. But I assume that nobody monitors ACARS data in real time? Can more knowledgeable people confirm that?

Man, if only this revealed the entire programmed flight path and not just proof of a pre-mediated turnback. All neatly in that 1:07 ACARS data package.

It'll be the biggest collective forehead slap in the history of intelligence agencies.
 

TrueGrime

Member
Do you guys think as a result of this entire debacle that there will be policy changes in the airline industry across the board?
 

RevoDS

Junior Member
Do you guys think as a result of this entire debacle that there will be policy changes in the airline industry across the board?

I think for any policy change to be truly effective, we'd first need to know what actually happened here. It's tough to find lessons when you don't understand the event you're supposed to be taking lessons from.

If you don't know what happened, there's no way you can be sure if what you're fixing would have prevented this particular situation.

So the short answer would be no, unless we can retrieve that plane and its black box.
 

Falk

that puzzling face
If nothing else, I think a much more urgent reaction to a missing signal will be in effect.

In an ideal world, the plane may have been reported missing -immediately-, flags would have been raised in every single relevant authority, including mobilizing Malaysian Royal Air Force to be on lookout, which meant that unidentified blip on primary radar, non-hostile or not, would have been responded to in real-time and we wouldn't be in this situation right now.
 

refreshZ

Member
I think for any policy change to be truly effective, we'd first need to know what actually happened here. It's tough to find lessons when you don't understand the event you're supposed to be taking lessons from.

Agreed, though I think the overwhelmingly obvious suggestion that may come out of this is that identification signals/transponders/ACARS are no longer disable-able by pilots once airborne.

Some sort of global tracking system rather than this hand off between ATC controlled zones would be a step forward too, as well as a minimisation of dead zones across open water.
 
I wouldn't be surprised to see an update to ACARS with more frequent communication and more details about what is happening, what changes have been input into the nav, etc.

Also, it shouldn't be something that can be turned off by the pilot.
 

Falk

that puzzling face
I don't see how you're going to be able to make it impossible to turn off ACARS and transponders in-flight without denying access to certain systems from inside the plane (thus no access to emergency circuit breakers) which seems like a bad idea in case of emergencies.
 

MIMIC

Banned
And even still the timing was too close, the pilot didn't report a damn thing. If something was going wrong they would have reported.

Right. If the transponder "stops working" (1:21 am) just two minutes after the check-in (1:19), I think it's reasonable to assume that they would have reported that.

Also, Richard Quest on CNN was suggesting that the ACARS was turned off in order to hide the entry of the turn. He says that if the NBC report is correct (that the turn was programmed at least 12 minutes before the voice check-in), it matches up just in time for the ACARS to send its last message and make it APPEAR as if everything is fine. And right after that message is sent out, it is immediately disabled in order to hide the entry of the new coordinates.

So the theory goes:

1:07 am
-ACARS sends its last message
-moments later, ACARS is disabled
-A new fight path is entered

1:19 am
Voice check-in of "all right, good night"

1:21 am
Transponder turned off

EDIT: I may have misunderstood Quest's statement and this may be MY theory rather than his =p
EDIT 2: OK, although the NBC report doesn't say it directly, I'm assuming that the flight change was WITHIN the 1:07 am ACARS message (which makes sense).

The course of the flight was changed by entering navigational instructions into the Flight Management System (FMS), the cockpit computer that directs the plane along a flight plan chosen by pilots.

Information from the FMS is among the data transmitted by the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) which sends information back to the airline’s maintenance base.

Because how else would they know?

So I probably misheard whatever he said.
 

riotous

Banned
Right. If the transponder "stops working" (1:21 am) just two minutes after the check-in (1:19), I think it's reasonable to assume that they would have reported that.

Also, Richard Quest on CNN was suggesting that the ACARS was turned off in order to hide the entry of the turn. He says that if the NBC report is correct (that the turn was programmed at least 12 minutes before the voice check-in), it matches up just in time for the ACARS to send its last message and make it APPEAR as if everything is fine. And right after that message is sent out, it is immediately disabled in order to hide the entry of the new coordinates.

So the theory goes:

1:07 am
-ACARS sends its last message
-moments later, ACARS is disabled
-A new fight path is entered

1:19 am
Voice check-in of "all right, good night"

1:21 am
Transponder turned off

The NBC report hinges on the turn being part of the 1:07 ACARS communication.

I don't think Richard Quest understood that report.
 
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