• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 ended in the Southern Indian Ocean

Status
Not open for further replies.

Oersted

Member
the problem is the flight attendants, if not the passengers, would notice

(I'm not sure if the flight crew could be locked out, but I recall an article on that topic a few pages ago that dismissed the idea)

My biggest problem with the suicide theory is that it seems such a hassle. Don't you want it easy when you want attempt suicide?
 

#1 If the plane went down in the ocean, it would have broken up on impact and debris would be easily spotted

dat rock solid proof.

Most likely explanation at this point: The aircraft is being turned into a weapon

I wouldn't even put it past these people to now secretly sink some aircraft debris in the Indian Ocean so they can "find it" and thereby complete the cover-up.

incredible levels of paranoia
 

gutshot

Member
That's in the running for dumbest article I've ever read. It blatantly disregards facts and gets a lot very, very wrong.

Edit
^ lol

Great minds think alike. Stupid ones like to trot out half-baked conspiracy theories on terrible websites littered with ads.
 

Ty4on

Member
I thought ACARS only relayed info about the health of the plane and its systems (speed, engines, etc.), not location.

ACARS in that flight sent out its position every ten minutes. The plane crashed just four minutes and 28 seconds after the last one.
sidebar-AirFranceMap_288734.jpg

If you'd done some research you could have found a quite detailed outline of what ACARS transmitted on Wikipedia.
An Air France spokesperson stated on 3 June 2009 that "the aircraft sent a series of electronic messages over a three-minute period, which represented about a minute of information."[32][33][Note 2] These messages, sent from an onboard monitoring system via the Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), were made public on 4 June 2009.[34] The transcripts indicate that between 02:10 UTC and 02:14 UTC, 6 failure reports (FLR) and 19 warnings (WRN) were transmitted.[35] The messages resulted from equipment failure data, captured by a built-in system for testing and reporting, and cockpit warnings also posted to ACARS.[36] The failures and warnings in the 4 minutes of transmission concerned navigation, auto-flight, flight controls and cabin air-conditioning (codes beginning with 34, 22, 27 and 21, respectively).[37]

Among the ACARS transmissions in the first minute is one message that indicates a fault in the pitot-static system (code 34111506).[34][37] Bruno Sinatti, president of Alter, Air France's third-biggest pilots' union, stated that "Piloting becomes very difficult, near impossible, without reliable speed data."[38] The twelve warning messages with the same time code indicate that the autopilot and auto-thrust system had disengaged, that the TCAS was in fault mode, and flight mode went from 'normal law' to 'alternate law.'[39][40] The 02:10 transmission contained a set of coordinates which indicated that the aircraft was at 2°59′N 30°35′W.[Note 3]

The remainder of the messages occurred from 02:11 UTC to 02:14 UTC, containing a fault message for an Air Data Inertial Reference Unit (ADIRU) and the Integrated Standby Instrument System (ISIS).[40][41] At 02:12 UTC, a warning message NAV ADR DISAGREE indicated that there was a disagreement between the three independent air data systems.[Note 4] At 02:13 UTC, a fault message for the flight management guidance and envelope computer was sent.[42] One of the two final messages transmitted at 02:14 UTC was a warning referring to the air data reference system, the other ADVISORY (Code 213100206) was a "cabin vertical speed warning", indicating that the aircraft was descending at a high rate.[43][44][45]
 

Falk

that puzzling face
You must be new to Malaysia. This is par for the course for their government. They really are that useless.

The Malaysian government really is just that bad. It's what happens when a government stays in power for around 55 years straight.

Not saying I don't disagree in certain respects, but having followed this whole thing really, really closely I believe the people who were in charge of this (for better or worse) handled this as well as they were able to barring the first few hours after it disappeared off secondary radar.

Getting immediate help from AAIB/NTSB/etc. pretty much was the right thing to do, and you can not hurry up a schedule that simply can't be hurried. Barring one or two obvious screw-ups in terms of information flow (the sequence of ACARS/transponder shutoff for example) making sure to only release verified information was the most responsible course of action.

The main fault here lies in that:
1) The alarm was not raised immediately/sufficiently and/or propagated to all relevant parties after the plane disappeared from secondary radar.
2) Stemming from 1, an unidentified plot on primary radar flew through sovereign Malaysian airspace without any real-time response. (The official answer/excuse is 'it was non-hostile')

Those two alone pretty much let the whole situation spiral out of control, leading to the huge amount of expended resources/etc leading up to the situation we have today.

Would there have been a different outcome had military aircraft tailed the plane in real time, all the way to its final destination?

Would the opposition government have handled this any better had they won the elections last year? (Which I assume is very, very relevant as a subtext to the two quoted posts)

Those two questions are difficult to answer, and my personal opinion would be a "yes" to the former and "I don't know" to the latter.
 

Funky Papa

FUNK-Y-PPA-4
Natural News is an 'alternative news' outlet which makes its money from supervitamin chomping, antivaccination imbeciles. Believe its BS at your own peril.

hAhvP.jpg


Edit: oh, so you were pulling our leg. You cheeky rascal, you.
 

MIMIC

Banned
ACARS in that flight sent out its position every ten minutes. The plane crashed just four minutes and 28 seconds after the last one.
sidebar-AirFranceMap_288734.jpg

If you'd done some research you could have found a quite detailed outline of what ACARS transmitted on Wikipedia.

Well my "research" led me to this Washington Post that said that ACARS doesn't transmit that kind of information...which was on par with all of the information being revealed about ACARS in light of the missing plane:

Okay. So can this technology tell us where Flight 370 is?

Not necessarily — it can really only tell us whether the plane is still functioning.

"Normally, ACARS doesn’t send an actual location," Waldock said. "They're sending essentially system data. They don't indicate altitude or direction. But as long as it’s pinging, you know the airplane is not down."

I already saw that Wiki entry....and was wondering why not a single link I came across said that ACARS "also" sent location information. Sorry for not immediately deferring to Wikipedia.
 

Ty4on

Member
Well my "research" led me to this Washington Post that said that ACARS doesn't transmit that kind of information...which was on par with all of the information being revealed about ACARS in light of the missing plane:

I already saw that Wiki entry....and was wondering why not a single link I came across said that ACARS "also" sent location information. Sorry for not immediately deferring to Wikipedia.

This interim report (PDF that is linked as source on Wikipedia) says on page 9 that:
At 2 h 10, a position message and some maintenance messages
were transmitted by the ACARS automatic system.
ACARS is just "Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System" so I think the data transmitted varies between airplanes.

Edit: Comment on the article, but I really don't know why the ACARS has been mentioned so many times with MH370 when it didn't do anything other than turn off .

Edit2:
Natural News is an 'alternative news' outlet which makes its money from supervitamin chomping, antivaccination imbeciles. Believe its BS at your own peril.

hAhvP.jpg
:O
Almost as bad as dihydrogen monoxide...
 

Metaphoreus

This is semantics, and nothing more
Natural News is an 'alternative news' outlet which makes its money from supervitamin chomping, antivaccination imbeciles. Believe its BS at your own peril.

hAhvP.jpg


Edit: oh, so you were pulling our leg. You cheeky rascal, you.

Weird. Here I always thought oncology was the study of your father's brother.
 

benjipwns

Banned
That was the dumbest article I've ever read.
That's in the running for dumbest article I've ever read. It blatantly disregards facts and gets a lot very, very wrong.

Edit
^ lol
dat rock solid proof.

incredible levels of paranoia
"natural" was enough to know it was bullshit. Eat bananas to cure cancer!
Great minds think alike. Stupid ones like to trot out half-baked conspiracy theories on terrible websites littered with ads.
Oh please. The Malaysian government is incompetent while at the same time capable enough to dupe all the countries involved?
I really hope you're just posting this so we can laugh at how stupid it is. Sadly I don't think that's the case.
smh, this is exactly the kind of low-bar thing they'd put out to cover up the real conspiracy and you all fell for it.
 

MIMIC

Banned
This interim report (PDF that is linked as source on Wikipedia) says on page 9 that:

ACARS is just "Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System" so I think the data transmitted varies between airplanes.

Yes. I was wondering why Air France gave coordinates in its ACARS transmission, even though there wasn't a single indication that ACARS provided such a thing. So I made the assumption that Air France didn't provide coordinates, partly because I thought all of this ACARS information was regarding ALL planes and not just a select few.

But back to my original point: we have supposedly narrowed down the area where the Malaysian flight supposedly is, through data analysis, satellite imagery, etc. They even have a well-defined "search area". Why, after all of this, have we still not been able to find a single piece of the plane? How long does it take to comb that area before they realize that nothing is within those boundaries?

Oh yeah....what happened to that "debris" that was supposedly going to be within the possession of the authorities "within a few hours"? That was almost a day ago.

EDIT: Australian Defense Minister to give news conference at 12AM ET. CNN will carry it live.
 

Amon37

Member
This mayhave been asked and answered, but with all the heightened security why werent secutiy cameras installed in the cockpits of planes? Maybe they are now but not every single plane got one yet?
 

Linsies

Member
Per CNN, Malaysia Air is offering $5,000 per passenger to the families. It also says they are "preparing to make additional payments".
 

luoapp

Member
Per CNN, Malaysia Air is offering $5,000 per passenger to the families. It also says they are "preparing to make additional payments".

$5000 doesn't count towards the final compensation. It's for their daily expenses when the families waiting for the news. The negotiation hasn't started yet.
 

numble

Member
Because you have no evidence of negligence of any sorts...?

Who are you suing and for what reason? Boeing? The airline? Why?

But that's the problem. If you don't know what happened because it's so early you don't know who was at fault and you certainly can't offer enough evidence to win a lawsuit.

http://www.aviationlawmonitor.com/2...-flight-370-was-diverted-by-crew-or-hijacked/

Airline’s Obligation to Compensate Family Members

An airline’s obligation to compensate the families of those lost in the crash of an international airliner is governed by an international treaty known as the Montreal Convention. The Montreal Convention requires the airline to compensate the families of those lost whenever the crash was the result of an “accident.” An “accident” is defined as “an unexpected or unusual event or happening that is external to the passenger.” Whether the crash was caused by a pilot’s wilful misconduct, a hijacking, or even a terrorist attack -- it doesn’t matter. The crash counts as an accident and the airline is liable.

Cap on Airline Liability

An airline is strictly liable for a family's loss up to 113,100 “Special Drawing Rights,” an amount equal to about $175,000. The airline can avoid liability for sums exceeding that amount only if it can prove it was totally “free from fault.” That is usually an impossible task for an airline, even if the crash was caused by a terrorist. The air carrier can seldom show that there was nothing it could have done to avoid the accident. It’s the problem of proving a negative. Thus, if in fact flight 370 was lost in a crash, it’s unlikely the Convention’s “cap” on liability will come into play.
 

MIMIC

Banned
So now that they've pulled out because the weather is turning for the worse, they'll go back they'll say that the possibility of wreckage sighting will become more and more remote? I guess that works well for them: conclude what happened to the plane and say that it's impossible to verify the conclusion. Then again, I'm just presuming how this is going to play out in the next few days....

Anyway, this discrepancy was brought to my attention. I wasn't really paying attention to the altitude changes, but Inmarsat says one thing while CNN says another:

Military radar tracking shows that the aircraft changed altitude after making a sharp turn over the South China Sea as it headed toward the Strait of Malacca, a source close to the investigation into the missing flight told CNN. The plane flew as low as 12,000 feet at some point before it disappeared from radar, according to the source.

[...]

The official, who is not authorized to speak to the media, told CNN that the area the plane flew in after the turn is a heavily trafficked air corridor and that flying at 12,000 feet would have kept the jet well out of the way of that traffic.
CNN

As far as they can tell, the plane was flying at cruising height, above 30,000ft. They found no evidence of fluctuating heights being reported.
BBC
 

Fjolle

Member
Anyway, this discrepancy was brought to my attention. I wasn't really paying attention to the altitude changes, but Inmarsat says one thing while CNN says another:


CNN


BBC

As that google+ pilot pointed out was the radar track right at the edge of the radars range, and could have been inaccurate. On the other hand I don't really know how Inmarsat would calculate the altitude. And they only have one ping every hour and everything could happen between two pings.
 

DiscoJer

Member
This article does a good job of explaining how they figured it out

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...centre-of-blame-game-over-crucial-delays.html

Inmarsat, which owns 11 telecommunications satellites, supports the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System free of charge, as a public service, to help locate stricken ships and aircraft.

The day after MH370 disappeared, Inmarsat began calculating the aircraft’s movements based on the hourly pings, which carried on until 8.11am on March 8, meaning the 777 had flown for around six hours after it was last tracked by military radar off the west coast of Thailand.

The pings contain no information about location, heading or speed, meaning the only information Inmarsat had to go on was the wavelength of the pings when they reached its satellite orbiting 22,245 miles above the earth.

Variations in the wavelengths proved that the aircraft was still moving until at least 8.11am. But they did not provide any clues about direction, meaning Inmarsat could only predict that it flew either north or south along two curved “corridors”.

By adding in the aircraft’s expected speed, Inmarsat worked out that the 777 was likely to have come down somewhere at the end of the two arcs.

The firm’s spokesman Chris McLaughlin said: “What we discovered was a correlation with the southerly route and not with the northern route after the final turn that the aircraft made, so we could be as close to certain as anybody could be in that situation that it went south.
 

MIMIC

Banned
Meh, this is tiring and I'm past caring. Call me a conspirator, but I think that this "ended in the ocean" info came out simply to make it appear as though the authorities (particularly Malaysia) have actually made some headway in this mystery. The families have been hounding them for more info, so they just go ahead, jump the gun, declare everyone dead and give a kinda-sorta approximate location of the plane....and just hope that everyone takes their word for it.

(obviously they're probably all dead now, regardless of what happened)

Maybe I'm wrong, and I'll gladly admit that I'm wrong when this thing is finally resolved. But as it stands now, I refuse to give this story any more attention until there is visual confirmation of (a part of, or something related to) the plane, or confirmation of a signal emanating from the plane.
 

Slayer-33

Liverpool-2

Exactly how I feel.

so they just go ahead, jump the gun, declare everyone dead and give a kinda-sorta approximate location of the plane....and just hope that everyone takes their word for it.

Instead of admitting that they don't know what the fuck happened or where the plane is they are definitely jumping the gun.. This whole shit has been handled so incompetently it's not even funny.
 

Falk

that puzzling face
Well, they have been quoting agencies based in USA, UK and France now and not a single one of those agencies have stepped forth to refute Malaysia's official statements, I'm not sure how you're basing the validity of the statements solely on the incompetence (perceived, or otherwise) of Malaysian authorities. Unless you're implying that the FAA, NTSB, AAIB, Inmarsat and French investigators are all complicit in a massive international coverup.

Considering the two of you have consistently had the worst posts in this thread outside of obvious jest posts, I guess it's a good thing you've stopped caring?
 

Totakeke

Member
If anything according to the telegraph article, the main question is why they have not made the link sooner.

Inmarsat knew the day after MH370’s disappearance that it was likely to have flown along one of two “corridors” that later became the focus of the investigation, but vital resources were expended on looking in the wrong places because of a seeming breakdown in communications.

Imagine if we could have narrowed down to the Indian Ocean by day 3 instead of 2 weeks later.
 

Totakeke

Member
That's not as good at generating viewership numbers or site clicks then a terrorist plot to hide the plane in Central Asia somwhere.

If you mean the authorities conspired to generate viewership numbers...

Anyway, certainly satellite data such as Inmarsat's have to get precedence in the future. Only the Malaysian authorities themselves would know how much noise they had to deal with in determining what to pursue.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom