Malaysian Flight 370

[The Blue Lotus]

While sad, I can't seem to not watch the news on this doomed flight.
Where is it? How with all the tech we have these days can we not find this massive hunk of metal?
What about these mystery pings, one day they go on for 5 hrs the next day they say 7 hrs. any thoughts?

 

[CupofJoe]

The trouble is that it isn't a massive hunk of metal, it is a fragile metal and plastic/composite X about 200 ft across somewhere in an area getting on for 20 million square miles of mountains, seas, forests etc.
What I want to know is how long the engine telemetry was running... Rolls Royce run real time telemetry back to HQ in Derby to check on engines in flight. This system is independent of any plane system. [and I guess Pratt and Whitney must have the same]
Whatever happened, the stories will always get bigger. And it would have made a great X-Files story...

 

[Chilari]

It's tragic for the families of the pasengers and crew, waiting for news and being given such conflicting information. In all likelihood, those on the plane are probably dead. But until we know for sure, those families are going to continue to hold out hope and they'll never get any closure with all this uncertainty. I was reading the BBC's report on the passengers - who they are, why they were on that flight. Asylum seekers from Iran, a couple on a delayed honeymoon following a miscarriage, people travelling to start new jobs including a Cambridge graduate, a generation of world-class calligraphers returning from an exhibition of their works. And they're who knows where, most likely dead at the bottom of the sea somewhere.

In that context, the rampant speculation of terrorism, sinister plots, a "deranged" pilot and so on from the newspapers cease being amusing, worthy of mockery from the Onion, and become sick parodies of what news is meant to be.

Except the Sunday Sport today. That one is still funny.

 

[The Blue Lotus]

News today makes the industry a laughing stock. In days now long gone it meant fact checking and being impartial with your news delivery.
It is sad.

But, if it smells like fish, chances are it is fish, and to me this whole thing stinks like an old dirty tank.

 

[SeverinR]

they say the cell phones still ring, if true then the plane is on dry land.
There is only so many places a plane that large can land, so rule them out.
Unless something else gives hope assume it crashed on dry land.
Getting a plane load of people to stay off cell phones while you take the plane to some unknown destination is nearly impossible.
If the passingers are still alive that would mean every turned their phones over to the hijackers without a call going out.
Maybe the hijacker said the bomb was tied to a scanner, any signal going out would blow it up?
Why would the hijackers keep the cell phones operational?
Why would the hijackers allow the plane to ping?
If crashed why is the plane only ping'ing some of the time.

Why is a pilot able to turn off the black box? Why isn't the black box only able to be turned off outside the plane for maintanence?

 

[Nagash]

Not to break hope or anything, but it is much more probable that the cellphones actually ring "in the void" (not sure about how to translate it from french). Basically, it just means the signal isn't able to track down the phones since they were compromised, and that it just ends up to the last known location of the cell-phones. Basically it just rings by default, and will continue to do so until the devices are located (which, assuming they were destroyed, won't happen) or the networks just cut loose the connections.

This hypothesis tends to be preferred to any other, since very few cellphones have a battery-capacity able to last for over a week without recharge...

 

[The Blue Lotus]

they say the cell phones still ring, if true then the plane is on dry land.
There is only so many places a plane that large can land, so rule them out.
Unless something else gives hope assume it crashed on dry land.
Getting a plane load of people to stay off cell phones while you take the plane to some unknown destination is nearly impossible.
If the passingers are still alive that would mean every turned their phones over to the hijackers without a call going out.
Maybe the hijacker said the bomb was tied to a scanner, any signal going out would blow it up?
Why would the hijackers keep the cell phones operational?
Why would the hijackers allow the plane to ping?
If crashed why is the plane only ping'ing some of the time.

Why is a pilot able to turn off the black box? Why isn't the black box only able to be turned off outside the plane for maintanence?

The pings they keep talking about are from the Rolls Royce engines. They were never meant to be used to track a plane.
The other tracking systems were turned off inside the cockpit. Why that is a possibility I don't understand. Common sense would say you'd never want the ability to have these life lines cut off by big bad guys.

As for the ringing of the cell phones. Well, here's the thing, if I throw a fit and break my phone in half, which I have done by mistake, when someone calls the phone it will ring on the caller's end, because technically speaking the "line" works fine. There is just nothing left to receive the call. So I discount that because it is fairly simple to explain.

But why did no one make a quick goodbye call if the plan was being jacked?
The passengers of the 9/11 attacks were able to leave text messages and voicemails before their planes went down, why not these people?

Even if one guy walked down the aisle collecting phones, someone in the back would have had time to duck down and send a text message.

I don't think the plane was hijacked, I honestly think the pilot went bat chit nuts. It is the only situation that makes sense.
I could be wrong, but not many people would know HOW to turn off the tracking systems one by one. The pilot signed off as he left airspace, after the gps system went out, I highly doubt there would be someone standing there turning things off and he would say "Good night."
Then there is the supposed elevation changes. That is troubling. No laymen would be able to pull that off without killing himself as well, but a trained pilot, sure.

I don't know what really happened, I have my suspicions, of course, but I can't figure out WHY anyone would take out a plane full of people if they were not hijackers. That is the part that bothers me.

Like I said fishy. Why it is fishy or how it is fishy I'm not qualified to guess.

I can say the situation is sad. I feel bad for them and their families, they need answers and we are not giving them any.

 

[kimsmithauthor]

It certainly sets a precedence, doesn't it? I mean, I am scared to fly anyway, but this really tightens my rope.

 

[SeverinR]

When I call my daughter and she is a dead zone,
it tries to go to voice mail, which she doesn't have set up.
It doesn't continue to ring on my end.

when my phone battery is dead, people have told me the same. It tries to go to voice mail, doesn't ring.

So if the phones are under water, I believe they would be like a dead battery, and not ring.
If they were on dry land, some would still work, and would ring if they had a signal.

The discussion of ringing phones was day 2-3. I haven't heard it recently and the batteries are probably dead now.

Why would Rolse Royce engines ping?

 

[CupofJoe]

Why would Rolse Royce engines ping?

Compressed-burst transmission?
I saw that they can monitor the condition of the engines in [near] real time, record what is happening and often diagnose problems and resolve in flight. Apparently it is especially useful when flying near volcanoes where there may be ash etc that might cause turbine blades a problem [in flight or later when the engine was stopped]. I don't think there is any positional information involved in the transmissions, but I guess it wouldn't be too difficult to reverse engineer where a plane might be if you know how and what all of it's engines were doing... and knew a lot more about planes than I do...

 

[Hagan]

I'll admit ever since I learnt that the plane may still be intact and have landed somewhere, my mind went into overdrive thinking 'Why?'. Why steal a plane? Why kidnap the passengers? Why leave devices like the GPS trackers off switch in easy reach of a hijacker? Why wasn't there a back-up system not tied to the main boards? And more.

The GPS has a handy off switch I'm told, because it needs to be turned off whilst on the ground (its signal interferes with Air traffic tracking once its on the ground) so it needs to be manually deactivated once it begins to taxi down the apron to park up. There are no back-ups because each airline operates to regulation, which states a plane needs a (singular) GPS tracker along with a transponder.

And yes, it really is that stupid a reason.

The engine ping was a more telling piece of information, because like a mobile signal it has a limited range so has to be relayed through communications systems like satellites and radio towers, something which might lead to it being tracked except that the handling data (in particular the location data) isn't included because its irrelevant to an engineer who is only concerned with making sure the engine isn't suffering some major malfunction that requires his assistance to correct.

But that does not mean that the data does not exist! The engineer can supposedly send information BACK to the engine, so there must be some way of tracking where they have to send that information.

As for the phones, not a clue. If a phone is off along with the voice-mail, it should not ring. But again, cell operators have location data for every connection made through the cell networks and transmission towers. If the Phones were ringing, someone somewhere has that location data.

What really bothers me is the WHY's though, I can do depressing thoughts quite well and the reasons someone might want to hijack a plane are somewhere terrifying to say the least. I'm hoping its just a kidnapping for ransom and they are just scattering the passengers over a wide area (intact of course) so they can sell them back one by one without risk of them being discovered and a rescue attempt made. This way, the hijackers have a vested interest in keeping them all alive for as long possible. The other possibilities are just too depressing.

 

[The Blue Lotus]

The news suggests that Hijacking is no longer on the table.
The plane is in the drink someplace. I have doubts that they will find it before the black boxes batteries die out.
Other countries are far too slow to release sat images. I can't help but wonder why. Why wait 3 days to say "hey we seen this here."? Sad, sad, sad.
I'm leaning towards nutty pilot, myself, rather than mechanical issues. Time will tell, but something is not adding up. Those poor people. Their families can't even grieve properly because they can't get closure.

 

[Devor]

I haven't been following the news on this much. But as for the cell phones, when my battery dies, or I turn it off, the phone doesn't ring. But I've also noticed that when I call my wife and she's on the subway coming home from work, I still hear ringing. And when it dies on the subway, I still hear ringing. And when I call her phone because the kids hid it somewhere, the ringing on my phone starts long before the lost phone rings.

From this I can only conclude that the phone tells the system when it shuts off, and sometimes the phone isn't able to send that message.