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Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 ended in the Southern Indian Ocean

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(path was planned before the last message according to ACARS info)

I haven't been following this very closely - so maybe this has been answered - but here's what I don't understand, and what I never hear an answer for. We know roughly how long the plane was in the air from the hourly pings from ACARS, and we also know when ACARS was turned off. Some people supporting the fire scenario are claiming an electrical fire could have easily disabled ACARS. If that's the case, would it still have been able to send those pings? Are the pings an autonomous part of the ACARS system that a fire, or pilots pulling out busses, wouldn't affect?

I don't know, still seems premeditated to me.
 

Hiccup

Banned
Sweet

images

This flight mishap is the beginning of Half Life 3

I'm s sorry :(
 
The plane is tiny. West Malaysia alone could fit over 30 thousand Boeing 777 without stacking them on top of each other.

The plane was also tracked.
4L7ndhD.jpg




Pretty much every flight with a catastrophic failure didn't result into a strange new path made without telling ATC (path was planned before the last message according to ACARS info) and then flying until the plane ran out of fuel. The plane flew south for hours until it ran out of fuel while Alaska Air 261 didn't even manage one hour after the stabilizer jammed. The plane also headed the only direction without a place to land unlike AS261 which tried to divert to LAX.
I don't buy the lack of navigation systems when there is no evidence of any failure and the plane had a big analog compass in the middle of the cockpit.

Interesting. But what about those march 20 debris? I haven't seen anything about this.
 

Blader

Member
Given how way way off course the plane was, plus all the other details of the case (preprogrammed route, rose to 45,000 feet, used terrain masking, etc) I don't think pilot suicide really makes sense anymore either. Why do any of that if your goal is to kill yourself? Just dive into the ocean while en route. Doesn't make sense to me that the pilots would want to depressurize the cabin to kill the passengers and then fly 7 hours in the opposite direction to just crash into the water.
 

Maddog

Member
Given how way way off course the plane was, plus all the other details of the case (preprogrammed route, rose to 45,000 feet, used terrain masking, etc) I don't think pilot suicide really makes sense anymore either. Why do any of that if you're goal is to kill yourself? Just dive into the ocean while en route. Doesn't make sense to me that the pilots would want to depressurize the cabin to kill the passengers and then fly 7 hours in the opposite direction to just crash into the water.

I hate speculation but I believe families don't get insurance money if it's a suicide so they could have tried to make it look like not a suicide.
 
Given how way way off course the plane was, plus all the other details of the case (preprogrammed route, rose to 45,000 feet, used terrain masking, etc) I don't think pilot suicide really makes sense anymore either. Why do any of that if you're goal is to kill yourself? Just dive into the ocean while en route. Doesn't make sense to me that the pilots would want to depressurize the cabin to kill the passengers and then fly 7 hours in the opposite direction to just crash into the water.

maybe he had second or third thoughts
 
Given how way way off course the plane was, plus all the other details of the case (preprogrammed route, rose to 45,000 feet, used terrain masking, etc) I don't think pilot suicide really makes sense anymore either. Why do any of that if you're goal is to kill yourself? Just dive into the ocean while en route. Doesn't make sense to me that the pilots would want to depressurize the cabin to kill the passengers and then fly 7 hours in the opposite direction to just crash into the water.

There could be alternative motives at play for making the plane as difficult to find as possible. Time will (or will not) tell.
 

syllogism

Member
I hate speculation but I believe families don't get insurance money if it's a suicide so they could have tried to make it look like not a suicide.
Perhaps more importantly, the motive could be to prevent your close ones, and the public, from knowing that you decided to murder 240 innocent passengers.
 

Ty4on

Member
I haven't been following this very closely - so maybe this has been answered - but here's what I don't understand, and what I never hear an answer for. We know roughly how long the plane was in the air from the hourly pings from ACARS, and we also know when ACARS was turned off. Some people supporting the fire scenario are claiming an electrical fire could have easily disabled ACARS. If that's the case, would it still have been able to send those pings? Are the pings an autonomous part of the ACARS system that a fire, or pilots pulling out busses, wouldn't affect?

I don't know, still seems premeditated to me.

Here's what we know:
- The ACARS transmits every 30 minutes. The last transmission was 1:07 AM.
- The final message from the co-pilot was at 1:19 AM.
- The transponder was turned off at 1:21 AM.
- At 1:37 AM the ACARS did not transmit as expected.

These are the facts we know now. It does not mean the ACARS was definitely turned off before 1:19 AM. It could have been turned off at the same time as the transponder after the final message.
ACARS stopped transmitting data before 1:37AM, but it still pinged nearby satellites every hour. All these pings could tell us was its distance from the satellite which got narrowed down when taking into account overlapping satellite coverage. If I recall correctly it was stated that the last ACARS transmission also included the route change, but I couldn't find a source for this.

If there was a technical failure then for some strange reason it didn't get reported by ACARS or the crew via ATC (ACARS seemingly worked as it kept pinging) and while this somehow knocked out communication the plane worked fine otherwise and continued flying for hours.

My personal belief is that some sort of fight (we may never know what happened after the transponder shut down) after the route changed caused a ghost plane to head south until it ran out of fuel. Have no idea how or why, but I don't see any proof of any technical problem.
 

Trouble

Banned
Probably not wanting other countries having a huge presence in their waters.

Most of this is in international waters. I could see China not wanting U.S. military planes in their airspace (plus they have their own planes searching). We have good relations with the every other country in the search area, so I don't see that being an issue.
 

luoapp

Member
The U.S. only has a single plane in play? That surprises me. I know we are helping in other ways with the investigation (NTSB, FBI, etc), but I figured we'd have more assets out searching.

That's just for the assets in the southern corridor.
 

raindoc

Member
Here's what we know:

ACARS stopped transmitting data before 1:37AM, but it still pinged nearby satellites every hour. All these pings could tell us was its distance from the satellite which got narrowed down when taking into account overlapping satellite coverage. If I recall correctly it was stated that the last ACARS transmission also included the route change, but I couldn't find a source for this.

If there was a technical failure then for some strange reason it didn't get reported by ACARS or the crew via ATC (ACARS seemingly worked as it kept pinging) and while this somehow knocked out communication the plane worked fine otherwise and continued flying for hours.

My personal belief is that some sort of fight (we may never know what happened after the transponder shut down) after the route changed caused a ghost plane to head south until it ran out of fuel. Have no idea how or why, but I don't see any proof of any technical problem.

ACARS is a data transmission system, SATCOM is the plane's satellite radio. ACARS can use SATCOM like an iPhone's Message App can use LTE or Wi-Fi to send texts and photos. The pings have nothing to do with ACARS, but were sent from a satellite and replied by SATCOM.
 

numble

Member
That's just for the assets in the southern corridor.

The Northern corridor is mostly land, and I think that it's being done by those individual countries. The US called off searches via ship after determining that it was inefficient (expensive).
 

PantherLotus

Professional Schmuck
The U.S. only has a single plane in play? That surprises me. I know we are helping in other ways with the investigation (NTSB, FBI, etc), but I figured we'd have more assets out searching.

Not listed:
Submarines, satellites, undisclosed military / surveillance, etc. The US was looking down there from day 2-3 IIRC.
 

Deku Tree

Member
Yeah IIRC a lot of those countries specifically requested no assistance from other countries nearby their boarders because the search planes, and boats, etc, are (as has been said) essentially spy planes, etc. So naturally places like China etc do not want to let USA spy planes fly in their airspace.
 

numble

Member
Not listed:
Submarines, satellites, undisclosed military / surveillance, etc. The US was looking down there from day 2-3 IIRC.

You have a link regarding US submarine use? I've read in the WSJ that no countries are dispatching submarines because 1) risk of collision with other search boats and 2) subs are better equipped to detect movement, not stationary objects, and I've also read separately that Malaysia will start requesting use of submarines after 30 days.
 

jaxword

Member
You have a link regarding US submarine use? I've read in the WSJ that no countries are dispatching submarines because 1) risk of collision with other search boats and 2) subs are better equipped to detect movement, not stationary objects, and I've also read separately that Malaysia will start requesting use of submarines after 30 days.

You really think the American navy would reveal where their subs are hiding to the world's press?
 

FyreWulff

Member
Yeah, I'm sure all countries involved have more assets actually looking than shown. Nobody wants to show where they've got stuff hidden.

Plus for the US, getting our boats there is going to take quite a long time. Everyone else is in the area. But we can get planes there within hours.
 
If it is off the coast of Australia, that points to either a botched hijacking or pilot suicide.
Can't come to that conclusion so easily though. Something bad could have happened that killed the pilots, destroyed the communication on the plane and sent the plane into auto-pilot in which it flew until it ran out of fuel. Something bad like a fire in the cockpit area, hit by a metor, struck by lightning, etc.

Not sure if these things are possible or not but until the plane is found...
 
If it were like contact then it would have been missing for a very short period of time(like hours or a day) yet have the 2 weeks of static.

If it were like Contact they would have received the plans for the plane from a signal from deep space. I was just pissing about.
 
If it is off the coast of Australia, that points to either a botched hijacking or pilot suicide.

Or hypoxia maybe.

Or some combination of the three: Pilot A leaves the cockpit for some reason. Pilot B locks the door, radios that everything is A-OK, pulls the circuit breaker to disable the ACARS and the transponder, depressurizes the cabin to kill everyone plus himself, and lets the plane to follow a pre-programmed course to the most remote part of the Indian Ocean. No fuel, no oil slick - and the crime scene is thousands of miles away from where it 'should' be.

(Edit: But that's just speculation. All that becomes moot until we find the aircraft.)
 

Deku Tree

Member
I thought having a large object on the ocean surface indicates that they tried to slowly land on the ocean rather than a fatal fast crash which would have smashed the plane into bits.

So if the satellite image is really a big piece of the wing or something then they likely possibly actively tried to land on the water... ???
 

Megasoum

Banned
I don't think that infographic is 100% accurate, as I heard on Tuesday that there were at LEAST 2 different U.S. search planes scanning the Indian Ocean. The Poseidon and some newer one I forget the name of.

The Poseidon is the new one, the old one is the Orion.
 

numble

Member
I don't think that infographic is 100% accurate, as I heard on Tuesday that there were at LEAST 2 different U.S. search planes scanning the Indian Ocean. The Poseidon and some newer one I forget the name of.
The US has another plane searching the Northern Corridor. The infographic is only about the Southern Corridor.
 
If there are submarines involved, those also probably won't be listed.

Coins touched on that theory a while back actually:

http://abcnews.go.com/International...irline-crashed-indian-ocean/story?id=22894802
U.S. officials have an "indication" the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner may have crashed in the Indian Ocean and is moving the USS Kidd to the area to begin searching.

It will take another 24 hours to move the ship into position, a senior Pentagon official told ABC News.

"We have an indication the plane went down in the Indian Ocean," the senior official said.

The official said there were indications that the plane flew four or five hours after disappearing from radar and that they believe it went into the water.

I'm betting the indication was a submarine on patrol in the Indian Ocean.
 

Ensirius

Member
Can't come to that conclusion so easily though. Something bad could have happened that killed the pilots, destroyed the communication on the plane and sent the plane into auto-pilot in which it flew until it ran out of fuel. Something bad like a fire in the cockpit area, hit by a metor, struck by lightning, etc.

Not sure if these things are possible or not but until the plane is found...
Shouldn't the Faraday cage protect them from that?
 
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