Malaysia Airlines plane missing

[derry]

Sarbe emergency locators/radios carried. Pilot oxygen from a large tank near flight deck. A number of therapeutic bottles about 30 mins. Dropdown masks 12 mins ish.

[Whitey Grandad]

Ok, thanks.

[Grey Crab]

I'm surprised they haven't found it yet given all of the experts on here. Likewise Madeleine McCann.

[Manuel]

Yeah Madeline. Stop hiding and find that bloody plane!

[Viking Warrior]

Re the recent pings at the weekend . I notethere has been no further pings . Does this indicate the black box batteries have died all of a sudden or were these things a false reading or has some been found and is being examined before it is announced to the world ? Given the uk submarine etc or

For the conspiracy theory was somebody with sick sense of humour transmitting something on the said frequency ?

[pap]

Maldives resident furious after authorities concluded his claim false.

 

http://www.maldivesfinest.com/maldives-eye-witness-furious-mh370

[dubai_phil]

Under power the engines are designed to shear but in a water landing would in the act of shearing tip the nose under. I would think landing tail low would cause the engines to hammer the nose in. Landing in open ocean is a much more difficult exercise. That's why I say there is a great deal of luck in it and having a decent pilot doing it. Over my career there were some pilots who really weren't up to it but for a variety of reasons weren't bombed out. Eventually of course they were nailed.

 

I always thought the only nailing Airline pilots ever did was Cabin Crew....

 

It's completely obvious. The yanks choped some bits off the 777 in the hangar in Diego G and then dropped them randomly out into the ocean so that some bits could be found. And of course they edited the whole black box. So simples........

[West Stand]

There seems to be a surfeit of ‘experts’ posting on this thread who may in fact know a little .

However if/when the flight recorders of MH370 are found, have they, these 'experts' stopped to think that it may still not solve the mystery of why and how this happened. Although, then, there may be available to the investigators technical, flight data and speech recording it may not give a definitive picture of what transposed. Even though it is possible with the help of technology to go back on the wire in the voice recorder and extract recordings of previous speech beyond the 30 minutes or one hour of the last period of flight, although it obviously gets fainter and fainter as one tries to recover speech from way back.

As for ditching in the open sea…….. There are so many factors that make it extremely difficult that it has always seemed to me that it will be disastrous( and I’ve thought about it a lot!!!). The difficulty of judging the manoeuvre in ideal conditions is immense, for instance one would want to do it with the undercarriage up, so immediately the height perception the pilot has in his memory for a normal landing on land has to be ignore if one is the achieve a ‘smooth touchdown’. There is so much that can go wrong. One is recommended to land down the primary swell and across the secondary, that alone is difficult, et cetera. Of course with the ditching of MH370 it is being assumed that the person in control was handling the aeroplane, but say the automatics were in charge and one engine failed before the other then there is every chance the aircraft would have flipped upside down.

Finally with a ditching I have always been told that the chances are that the water will kill forward momentum almost immediately, making sure that the airframe and its contents will experience between 11g and 13 g. I have been told that a human body, especially the bones, will turn to jelly under these forces.

My view is still that I think, that some agency and/or government has information that has not been disclosed and for sure the pilot/pilots will get the blame, that is of course unless something really obvious and irrefutable is found/disclosed.

[Halo Stickman]

On reflection, I realise that some of the comments I made yesterday were rather flippant, and, as such, did a disservice to my former colleagues in Ditch Group, some of whom went on to spend their whole careers working hard to improve aircraft safety. For all I know, their efforts may have saved lives on the planes featured in the videos that were posted yesterday. Therefore, I would like to say the following, which will be my final comment on this particular aspect of MH370’s disappearance.

 

Aircraft are subjected to five different forces: tension, compression, torsion, shear and bending. A fuselage is essentially a tube. Many people on here will know that a tube is excellent at resisting tension and compression, pretty good at resisting torsion, but less good at resisting shear and bending.

 

Alongside establishing the optimum conditions and best method for crash-landing at sea, the purpose of Ditch Group was to identify those parts of the fuselage that were subjected to the greatest forces and, hence, stresses. These stresses varied with every aircraft; for instance, longer aircraft were usually subjected to greater bending stresses. Ditch Group would report these findings to the aircraft manufacturers, who, in conjunction with the aviation authorities, would then decide what action, if any, to take. Sometimes the airframe would be locally strengthened by adding trusses or bulkheads etc.

 

However, it is important to acknowledge that aeronautical design – along with most other things in life – generally boils down to a series of compromises. At risk of being flippant again, commercial aircraft are designed to fly passengers through the air and land on the ground, not the sea. To design an aircraft, especially a large passenger aircraft, so that it could land safely on the sea, say, 75 percent of the time, would mean strengthening the airframe to such an extent that the extra weight would mean a vastly reduced passenger capacity.

 

So, essentially, what Ditch Group did was to identify areas where safety factors could be increased by small margins – perhaps decrease the percentage chances of a plane breaking up on impact by a couple of percent. But, as we saw in those videos, sometimes small margins are all it takes to save lives, and this makes the hard efforts of my former colleagues well worth while.

 

West Stand, many thanks for taking the time to share your first-hand knowledge – your expert analysis, along with that of Derry and others, is much appreciated by me and, I hope, everyone else on this forum. Ditch Group certainly recorded g forces of the value you mentioned in some of our tests.

Edited 9 April, 2014 by Halo Stickman

[pap]

My view is still that I think, that some agency and/or government has information that has not been disclosed and for sure the pilot/pilots will get the blame, that is of course unless something really obvious and irrefutable is found/disclosed.

 

I probably have much wilder views than you.

 

The entire search is based on the INMARSAT analysis, and predicated on the idea that the plane must have crashed. The UN didn't detect MH370 hitting the water or exploding, despite assurances that they say then can detect this sort of thing. There's presently no physical evidence to support crash theory, and as I've posted many times before, there are people in the Maldives that claim to have seen a jumbo jet, with seemingly no follow up apart from a disputed denial.

 

If there are governments/agencies covering aspects of this up, it's probably fair to ask who. For me, the Malaysians don't seem to be deriving much benefit from this; their international reputation has turned to shít. They'd need to be getting something huge out of this if they were somehow complicit in its disappearance, because they're going to spend the next few years having to suck up to the rest of the world.

 

China? The plane was going there anyway. Doesn't work for me. Russia? Possible, but it'd require the complicity of multiple governments if MH370 was en-route to somewhere in the Russian Federation.

 

Tim made a point about FiveEyes earlier in the thread. I think that pertinent. Heard this clip on No Agenda. There's a bit of commentary going on.

 

http://pap.centelia.net/noagendaclip.mp3

 

Really trying to find the original source.

[Doctoroncall]

On reflection, I realise that some of the comments I made yesterday were rather flippant, and, as such, did a disservice to my former colleagues in Ditch Group, some of whom went on to spend their whole careers working hard to improve aircraft safety. For all I know, their efforts may have saved lives on the planes featured in the videos that were posted yesterday. Therefore, I would like to say the following, which will be my final comment on this particular aspect of MH370’s disappearance.

 

Aircraft are subjected to five different forces: tension, compression, torsion, shear and bending. A fuselage is essentially a tube. Many people on here will know that a tube is excellent at resisting tension and compression, pretty good at resisting torsion, but less good at resisting shear and bending.

 

Alongside establishing the optimum conditions and best method for crash-landing at sea, the purpose of Ditch Group was to identify those parts of the fuselage that were subjected to the greatest forces and, hence, stresses. These stresses varied with every aircraft; for instance, longer aircraft were usually subjected to greater bending stresses. Ditch Group would report these findings to the aircraft manufacturers, who, in conjunction with the aviation authorities, would then decide what action, if any, to take. Sometimes the airframe would be locally strengthened by adding trusses or bulkheads etc.

 

However, it is important to acknowledge that aeronautical design – along with most other things in life – generally boils down to a series of compromises. At risk of being flippant again, commercial aircraft are designed to fly passengers through the air and land on the ground, not the sea. To design an aircraft, especially a large passenger aircraft, so that it could land safely on the sea, say, 75 percent of the time, would mean strengthening the airframe to such an extent that the extra weight would mean a vastly reduced passenger capacity.

 

So, essentially, what Ditch Group did was to identify areas where safety factors could be increased by small margins – perhaps decrease the percentage chances of a plane breaking up on impact by a couple of percent. But, as we saw in those videos, sometimes small margins are all it takes to save lives, and this makes the hard efforts of my former colleagues well worth while.

 

West Stand, many thanks for taking the time to share your first-hand knowledge – your expert analysis, along with that of Derry and others, is much appreciated by me and, I hope, everyone else on this forum. Ditch Group certainly recorded g forces of the value you mentioned in some of our tests.

 

I've been involved in systems where the focus is to keep it going, rather than working on contingency/compromise plans as any breaches means a catastrophic loss so not worth carrying on. It's a difficult concept to deal with.

[CB Saint]

I probably have much wilder views than you.

 

.

 

That has got to be the biggest understatement ever

[pap]

That has got to be the biggest understatement ever

 

Nice to see it followed by most pointless reply ever.

[buctootim]

The entire search is based on the INMARSAT analysis, and predicated on the idea that the plane must have crashed.

 

there are people in the Maldives that claim to have seen a jumbo jet, with seemingly no follow up apart from a disputed denial.

 

If there are governments/agencies covering aspects of this up, it's probably fair to ask who.

http://pap.centelia.net/noagendaclip.mp3.

 

Is looking increasingly likely, now that the Aussies have re-acquired the ping, that the plane is indeed at the bottom of southern Indian Ocean in a location inline with the Inmarsat calculation . How long before the actual wreckage is found and bought to the surface is moot, but it will be. Whether we learn what actually happened is a different matter.

[Window Cleaner]

Is looking increasingly likely, now that the Aussies have re-acquired the ping, that the plane is indeed at the bottom of southern Indian Ocean in a location inline with the Inmarsat calculation . How long before the actual wreckage is found and bought to the surface is moot, but it will be. Whether we learn what actually happened is a different matter.

 

 

Unsurprising because the "science" used was extremely solid, if indeed that's all they had to go on. Pity a lot of time was spent (or wasted if you like) running after plastic junk seen on satellite images which was pretty obviously far too far south.

[Viking Warrior]

Where does AIS/Cospas-SARSAT fit into the equation re search and rescue?

[Whitey Grandad]

Unsurprising because the "science" used was extremely solid, if indeed that's all they had to go on. Pity a lot of time was spent (or wasted if you like) running after plastic junk seen on satellite images which was pretty obviously far too far south.

 

Yes indeed, a very smart piece of work. You can hardly blame them for investigating every possible sighting though.

[pap]

Yes indeed, a very smart piece of work. You can hardly blame them for investigating every possible sighting though.

 

Except the one in the Maldives

[hutch]

Except the one in the Maldives

But they did. They phoned around all the airlines to see if anybody had lost a jumbo jet. Nobody had.

[pap]

But they did. They phoned around all the airlines to see if anybody had lost a jumbo jet. Nobody had.

 

What i want to know is, if we're okay searching for things based on satellite images and bleeding-edge analysis, several good ol' eye-witnesses should be ignored.

 

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/malaysia-airlines-mh370-low-flying-plane-seen-maldives-081339501.html#Tbss13A

 

Though the last "ping" from the jetliner was received near the Maldives and the US naval base on Diego Garcia, the Malaysian government did not seek help from Maldivian authorities in finding the missing plane, the newspaper said.

[Whitey Grandad]

What i want to know is, if we're okay searching for things based on satellite images and bleeding-edge analysis, several good ol' eye-witnesses should be ignored.

 

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/malaysia-airlines-mh370-low-flying-plane-seen-maldives-081339501.html#Tbss13A

 

I think they asked the Maldives government and when they were told that there was nothing in it they respectfully accepted the answer and moved on. Diplomatically they can hardly say that they don't believe them and insist on sending their own investigators in.

[Crab Lungs]

Can't imagine the Maldives being at the very cutting edge of search and rescue detection equipment or have well drilled specialist authorities which look after this kind of stuff... Then again, who knows...

[cambsaint]

Can any of the experts confirm my view that the most likely vessel to find the plane will be a hunter/killer submarine.

Of course we would never be told how it was found, the Aussies would be told the location secretly and claim that they found it accoustically.

I have no specialist knowledge apart from being pretty sure that modern subs have incredibly sophisticated underwater search systems which we are never going to be told about.

I imagine there would probably a presence near The Maldives to keep an eye on Somalia.

[buctootim]

What i want to know is, if we're okay searching for things based on satellite images and bleeding-edge analysis, several good ol' eye-witnesses should be ignored.

 

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/malaysia-airlines-mh370-low-flying-plane-seen-maldives-081339501.html#Tbss13A

 

Pap surely if you want people to apply more critical or forensic thinking to what they are told then you should focus on the real world issues. Nearly all of the conspiracy stuff is so full of holes and lack of humanity it just alienates people.

 

Some people in the Maldives heard a low flying plane, possibly a jumbo jet a full day after the Malaysian plane disappeared. There was no radar track. Maldives police investigated and found no evidence. The misleading quote you give refers to the fact that the Inmarsat satellite is in orbit near the Maldives so the ping was "received near the Maldives" but the plane wasnt. Indeed Inmarsat produced a possible track. Within those tracks pings have been heard and soon enough the wreckage will emerge.

 

What will you look for then - after the Boston bombing crisis actors, the dummy 7/11 planes and the "where's the blood" Rigby killing? There is more to being a 'free thinker' than blithely lapping up every conspiracy story.

Edited 9 April, 2014 by buctootim

[Whitey Grandad]

Can't imagine the Maldives being at the very cutting edge of search and rescue detection equipment or have well drilled specialist authorities which look after this kind of stuff... Then again, who knows...

 

I don't think that's the point. If they say there's nothing in it then there's not much more you can do. I'm sure you're right.

[buctootim]

Can't imagine the Maldives being at the very cutting edge of search and rescue detection equipment or have well drilled specialist authorities which look after this kind of stuff... Then again, who knows...

 

Surely its a question of basic police work interviewing islanders, logic (it happened nearly 16 hours after the Malaysian plane would have run out of fuel) and matched with radar at Male airport.

[hutch]

Can any of the experts confirm my view that the most likely vessel to find the plane will be a hunter/killer submarine.

Of course we would never be told how it was found, the Aussies would be told the location secretly and claim that they found it accoustically.

I have no specialist knowledge apart from being pretty sure that modern subs have incredibly sophisticated underwater search systems which we are never going to be told about.

I imagine there would probably a presence near The Maldives to keep an eye on Somalia.

Only if they move Somalia to India. It was still in Africa last time I looked.

[Whitey Grandad]

Some people in the Maldives heard a low flying plane, possibly a jumbo jet a full day after the Malaysian plane disappeared. There was no radar track. Maldives police investigated and found no evidence.

 

If it was MH370 then it would have had to have landed and refuelled in the meantime and there's no way you could hide a commercial jet from radar, but the Maldives cover a very large area so radar coverage is limited.

[buctootim]

Can any of the experts confirm my view that the most likely vessel to find the plane will be a hunter/killer submarine.

Of course we would never be told how it was found, the Aussies would be told the location secretly and claim that they found it accoustically.

I have no specialist knowledge apart from being pretty sure that modern subs have incredibly sophisticated underwater search systems which we are never going to be told about.

I imagine there would probably a presence near The Maldives to keep an eye on Somalia.

 

 

I work for an environmental organisation that does a lot of seabed mapping and exploration and tracking pingers. Its bizarre that the gps locators we put onto a shark for £100 or so is more sophisticated than the pingers in commercial airliners. Finding an item on the seabed is not particularly high technology, its been around for years. You use something called a side scan sonar to identify 'features of interest' and then send down an ROV - which is a submersible robot equipped with cameras, lights and a grab to make a positive identification. What does vary a great deal is the amount of ground a piece of equipment can cover in a day and the depths it can operate to.

 

The scanner the Aussie ship has on loan from the US is a sophisticated bit of kit in that you can programme it to make pararells runs up and down across an area for hours and then surface with all the data logged. That said HMS Echo will probably cover more ground faster and in real time given their experienced operatives.

Edited 9 April, 2014 by buctootim

[Bearsy]

yes tim, i am sure you do sell tom-toms to sharks for £100 that totally sounds like a real job + not made up pull other one pls

[pap]

Pap surely if you want people to apply more critical or forensic thinking to what they are told then you should focus on the real world issues. Nearly all of the conspiracy stuff is so full of holes and lack of humanity it just alienates people.

 

Some people in the Maldives heard a low flying plane, possibly a jumbo jet a full day after the Malaysian plane disappeared. There was no radar track. Maldives police investigated and found no evidence. The misleading quote you give refers to the fact that the Inmarsat satellite is in orbit near the Maldives so the ping was "received near the Maldives" but the plane wasnt. Indeed Inmarsat produced a possible track. Within those tracks pings have been heard and soon enough the wreckage will emerge.

 

What will you look for then - after the Boston bombing crisis actors, the dummy 7/11 planes and the "where's the blood" Rigby killing? There is more to being a 'free thinker' than blithely lapping up every conspiracy story.

 

I'm not even close to positing a theory, unlike many others who have already done so.

 

I don't know where you are getting your full day from, sir. The time of the sighting is relatively consistent with the travel time it would have taken to make the flight. There is a margin of error of about forty minutes.

 

Let's recall where we started out here. Three possible outcomes; crashed, shot down or landed. There is as yet, no corroborating evidence of a crash. There is no wreckage, and international bodies that claim that they are very good at detecting these sort of things did not detect this sort of thing.

 

You call me out for latching onto every conspiracy theory going, but look at the theorising people have done to fit their established facts, the inexplicably irrefutable Inmarsat findings.

 

1) The pilot went mad and decided to fly the plane on a southerly direction into the middle of the Southern Indian Ocean to crash him and his passengers.

If that's the case, why not ditch as soon as you've taken off?

 

2) The pilot was negotiating for the release of his friend, and therefore flew around for several hours, negotiating with the Malaysian government before realising he'd failed, then flew the plane into the middle of the Indian Ocean.

 

Again. Why bother making the trip?

 

3) Major malfunction on the plane, which then continued on auto-pilot for several hours before crashing in the Indian Ocean.

The most plausible crash theory so far.

 

4) The perfect ditch theory

5) The Iranians on false passports hijacked the plane, which ended up in the Indian Ocean.

6) Shot down theory.

 

Any crashed or shot down outcome conflicts with the UN's stated ability to detect large aircraft hitting the sea. Maybe they're over-egging their capability, but large organisations are usually reasonably guarded in what they release. Landed is the only outcome, if you take them at their word.

 

Anyway, the Maldives story has been repeatedly ignored by the authorities and the media. Despite several eye-witness accounts, it was never part of the SAR area - despite that 40 minute margin of error.

 

When considering conflicting evidence, what's the best way to resolve it?

 

The cumulative weight and corroboration of lots of pieces of evidence, or the slavish insistence that one piece of data is crucial, uncontestable and irrefutable despite what you might know elsewhere?

 

Everything you're arguing is predicated on the accuracy of those Inmarsat findings, which were released days after the sighting. I'm not suggesting any foul play on the part of Inmarsat - they could be acting entirely in good faith based on bad data. There is no corroboration with other pieces of MH370's telemetry because the rest wasn't functioning. What if the real Inmarsat equipment on MH370 was switched off and they were following something else?

[pap]

If it was MH370 then it would have had to have landed and refuelled in the meantime and there's no way you could hide a commercial jet from radar, but the Maldives cover a very large area so radar coverage is limited.

 

Is it not possible to avoid radar detection by flying low?

[Deano6]

Maldives resident furious after authorities concluded his claim false.

 

http://www.maldivesfinest.com/maldives-eye-witness-furious-mh370

 

If we say that the resident wasn't mistaken and he did see a plane flying on a flightpath towards Diego Garcia, a US military base in the Indian Ocean, would not the most reasonable answer be that he saw a US military plane returning to base? Why would it have to be the Malaysian plane? It's coming from completely the wrong direction for a start.

 

[Whitey Grandad]

Is it not possible to avoid radar detection by flying low?

 

Yes, the RAF go at 50ft, which is not a problem since the highest land is 2.4 metres above sea level, but which radar was avoided? I doubt there's much in the way of radar coverage away from Malé. Wasn't the reported sighting in one of the southern islands? The whole country covers 35,000 square miles.

[buctootim]

yes tim, i am sure you do sell tom-toms to sharks for £100 that totally sounds like a real job + not made up pull other one pls

 

Shuttit Bear. You're not on the 'squeeze my schoolgirl boobies for a £1' thread now - though clearly we would both like to be.

[Whitey Grandad]

If we say that the resident wasn't mistaken and he did see a plane flying on a flightpath towards Diego Garcia, a US military base in the Indian Ocean, would not the most reasonable answer be that he saw a US military plane returning to base? Why would it have to be the Malaysian plane? It's coming from completely the wrong direction for a start.

 

 

We've been to the Maldives a couple of times. The first time we landed straight in on a northerly approach but on the second we flew quite a way to the south and then turned left and flew low over the islands and landed on the northbound approach. The path was very similar to that shown.

[Goatboy]

:p:p Edited 9 April, 2014 by Goatboy
dopey.

[Goatboy]

Shuttit Bear. You're not on the 'squeeze my schoolgirl boobies for a £1' thread now - though clearly we would both like to be.

 

link please

[pap]

If we say that the resident wasn't mistaken and he did see a plane flying on a flightpath towards Diego Garcia, a US military base in the Indian Ocean, would not the most reasonable answer be that he saw a US military plane returning to base? Why would it have to be the Malaysian plane? It's coming from completely the wrong direction for a start.

 

 

Good question. Any answer would be speculation.

 

Plane could be avoiding known locations of installations/ships.

 

I don't think this invalidates the sighting.

[buctootim]

Shuttit Bear. You're not on the 'squeeze my schoolgirl boobies for a £1' thread now - though clearly we would both like to be.

 

link please

 

Sorry Goat'boy' - due to your age and special interests you've been relegated to the GILF thread. Meet up with Tokyo whilst you're there.

[buctootim]

If we say that the resident wasn't mistaken and he did see a plane flying on a flightpath towards Diego Garcia, a US military base in the Indian Ocean, would not the most reasonable answer be that he saw a US military plane returning to base? Why would it have to be the Malaysian plane? It's coming from completely the wrong direction for a start.

 

 

Planes like these

Edited 9 April, 2014 by buctootim

[Whitey Grandad]

They said it had a red stripe. Aren't these KC135s? They're serviced at Mildenhall.

[pap]

Planes like these

 

Not like this, then?

 

http://metro.co.uk/2014/03/18/flight-mh370-residents-on-remote-island-in-maldives-saw-jet-matching-missing-malaysia-airlines-planes-description-4640688/

[buctootim]

They said it had a red stripe. Aren't these KC135s? They're serviced at Mildenhall.

 

They are. Just a suggestion. The plane could even have been part of the Janet fleet used to ferry workers and their failies around.

 

http://www.dreamlandresort.com/info/janet_fleet.html

[Whitey Grandad]

I'm sure they saw something but it wasn't MH370 unless it had landed and refuelled and it was flying in completely the wrong direction.

[Whitey Grandad]

They are. Just a suggestion. The plane could even have been part of the Janet fleet used to ferry workers and their failies around.

 

http://www.dreamlandresort.com/info/janet_fleet.html

 

Who knows? It's entirely possible and if it was US military then they're hardly going to confirm or deny it. The 737-600 only has a maximum range of 3225 miles though, that might be enough to get there from Iraq.

[pap]

I'm sure they saw something but it wasn't MH370 unless it had landed and refuelled and it was flying in completely the wrong direction.

 

The plane had enough fuel to make the trip. The direction of travel doesn't invalidate anything; it may have needed to circle due to other traffic, etc. I am still amazed that no-one bothered following it up. At the very least, i think we can agree that it is in the ballpark.

[buctootim]

Who knows? It's entirely possible and if it was US military then they're hardly going to confirm or deny it. The 737-600 only has a maximum range of 3225 miles though, that might be enough to get there from Iraq.

 

No but if its friends and families transport presumably they would just shuttle them to the nearest international airport - like Male.

[Goatboy]

Sorry Goat'boy' - due to your age and special interests you've been relegated to the GILF thread. Meet up with Tokyo whilst you're there.

 

:)I'll take it:)

[Window Cleaner]

No but if its friends and families transport presumably they would just shuttle them to the nearest international airport - like Male.

 

Doesn't work like that. As far as I know friends and families don't visit Diego. There is a contract charter company, don't know who it is now. There is no family housing and even military couples don't serve there at the same time.

Edited 9 April, 2014 by Window Cleaner