The missing Malaysian airliner

[GUT]

The Australian Prime Minster has just announced that wreckage has been reported as having been found.

Air Force planes investigating as I post.

[Beowulf]

How about the stories that among the crew were a group of scientists spirited away to China...said they knew the secret of cloaking a plane.

or the one where the plane has been hijacked to Iran, to use in a terrorist mission?

[Sunbury]

The Australian Prime Minster has just announced that wreckage has been reported as having been found.

Air Force planes investigating as I post.

To be fair, he was cautious in choosing his words. Hopefully he is right and the families can get some closure. If he is wrong, then the search goes on.

[Penhalion]

Apparently they have found some stuff that MIGHT be part of a plane. No one has had a good look at it yet due to poor weather conditions. There's a lot of stuff out there on the ocean that has nothing to do with this tragedy that no one has seen because, frankly, until now no one has been looking there.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/20/us-malaysiaairlines-flight-idUSBREA2701720140320

[Wickerman]

It could be pieces of the plane, or pieces of a boat.

It could also be ice, pieces are known to break away from Antarctica in summer.
I think the water temperature is about 54 deg F, so if it is ice it won't last long.


What happened next is unclear, but faint electronic "pings" picked up by one commercial satellite suggest the aircraft flew on for at least six hours. That would be consistent with the plane ending up in the southern Indian Ocean.

One wonders if the passengers were still alive at this point.
If the plane did indeed head across the south Indian Ocean, the passengers, if alive, must have questioned what was going on.
The scheduled route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing is mostly over land, so the passengers must have seen that they are too long over water. Plus, the sun would rise on the left side of the plane, but it should have risen on the right side.
Surely the passengers would have brought this to the attention of the stewardesses.

[Cogidubnus]

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

The scheduled route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing is mostly over land, so the passengers must have seen that they are too long over water. Plus, the sun would rise on the left side of the plane, but it should have risen on the right side.
Surely the passengers would have brought this to the attention of the stewardesses.

Hi Jon

Yes, assuming the passengers were still conscious...it's possible to envisage a scenario where either gradual decompression (small non-explosive air leak) occured, or loss of consciousness owing to either poisonous fumes or smoke (perhaps from cargo) occurred...all of these are believed to have happened in the past...in which case, all aboard could have been gradually overcome, and the plane flown on, on autopilot, until the fuel gave out...

At present there are so many media reports of this, that, or the other that it's difficult to know which are true or false...Did the plane change course? Did it really disappear from Radar when the various accounts say so? Was there total blackout?

Bring on the Pall Mall Gazette and let's have some real honest old time reporting...

All the best

Dave

[Ginger]

Bloomberg's has an interesting map of large aircraft disappearances since 1948.

http://www.bloomberg.com/infographics/2014-03-13/vanishing-planes-mapped-since-1948.html

There are a lot, as you'd expect, in the North Atlantic, since that area's heavily travelled. There are a big cluster in SE Asia during the Vietnam War, again no real surprise. There's also a tight little group of planes that didn't make it over the Andes. What really stands out for me, though is how many have gone missing over the Caribbean.

[GUT]

G'day Ginger

In the Bermuda triangle?

[Ginger]

In the Bermuda triangle?

Bermuda Triangle is marked on the map, and only has one in it. Just to the south, though, there are quite a few.

[GUT]

Yeah but Ginger we don't really know where the problems start.

[Ginger]

Yeah but Ginger we don't really know where the problems start.

Regardless, it's an astonishing number of airplanes to have been lost in shallow seas, not too far from land.

[GUT]

Too true.

[Penhalion]

A plane doesn't even have to be over vast uncharted oceans to disappear mysteriously. I live in the southern point of the Great Lakes Triangle.

http://www.iisgcp.org/catalog/downlds_09/What%20is%20the%20Great%20Lakes%20Triangle.pdf

[Cogidubnus]

Oh god, all these triangles...surely we're not back with a Masonic theory?

All the best

Dave

[Wickerman]

Hi Jon

Yes, assuming the passengers were still conscious...it's possible to envisage a scenario where either gradual decompression (small non-explosive air leak) occured, or loss of consciousness owing to either poisonous fumes or smoke (perhaps from cargo) occurred...all of these are believed to have happened in the past...in which case, all aboard could have been gradually overcome, and the plane flown on, on autopilot, until the fuel gave out...

Hi Dave.
Its all these direction changes, manually programmed after the sign-off.



Pilots don't do that, especially when they have a catastrophic inflight problem.
They head to the nearest airport.

There must be some clue on that simulator, among those deleted files...