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How Satellite Company Inmarsat Tracked Down MH370
mdsolar (1045926) writes "Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has announced that, based on satellite data analysis from UK company Inmarsat, Malayian Airlines flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean, and no one on board survived. 'Effectually we looked at the doppler effect, which is the change in frequency, due to the movement of a satellite in its orbit. What that then gave us was a predicted path for the northerly route and a predicted path the southerly route,' explained Chris McLaughlin, senior vice president of external affairs at Inmarsat. '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. Where we then went was to work out where the last ping was, knowing that the aircraft still had some fuel, but that it would have run out before the next automated ping. We don't know what speed the aircraft was flying at, but we assumed about 450 knots.' Inmarsat passed the relevant analysis to the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) yesterday. The cause of the crash remains a mystery."
Presumably, now they have narrowed down the crash site, they can start looking for the black box and the wreck to figure out the cause.
How come the frequency information of the signal received by the satellite was saved? What is the purpose of saving all that data in normal operations?
And why did it take three weeks to do that analysis?
We still have no idea exactly where the aircraft is, how it went down, or what to do now.
Did the Malaysian government just make a statement to the families based on a statistical probability?
Or did they make that statement based on debris found that was positively identified to the aircraft.
"Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everyone, they meet at the bar."
kinda off topic but: the first report i heard was that the plane had four hours of fuel on board. now it is seven? huh?
The article does not make it clear that the satellite signals in question are those of ARINC's ACARS data system, developed in 1978.
ACARS
Kriston
and gravity. Guess they let Sandra bullock drive.
This credible source of information made a complete analysis of another crash.
It's always the same story: The plane stops flying and touch the ground/ocean
It just seems like they have information that still doesn't make sense for what we're told are the available resources. The public info just seems so selective as if each government is trying to hold their surveillance cards as tightly as possible. And, intel from an old satellite seems like a cover story. This is all just so...off.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The cause of the crash isn't a mystery. It most likely ran out of fuel.
The cause of why the whole damn plane went AWOL IS a mystery.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
What happens when an airplane crashes into the ocean? Do the passengers die immediately from the impact?
The calculations show the southern flight path and consequently a water landing. But...how can they be so certain that no one survived? Isn't it possible that the airplane made a controlled glide into a non-powered water landing and that the life rafts deployed and allowed some of the passengers to survive? That has happened before. Admittedly this is very unlikely but can anyone at this point say it is impossible as the Malaysian government is doing?
They have a theory, nothing more. Still no actual debris has been confirmed. They don't have the full picture so its REALLY easy for their theory to be wrong.
God you suck ass at actually posting facts slashdot.
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I am waiting for this plan to land at LAX 2 weeks later with all passengers in good health wondering why they landed in LAX instead of China and have no recollection of anything weird happening like something out of a Stephen King novel.
No, they are completely unharmed by near-instantaneous deceleration from hundreds of miles per hour down to zero, and they can surely withstand crushing and impaction by the deformation of the wreckage around them. No sir, it's the sharks that kill them in the end.
While that explanation is detailed and great and accurate, the real answer is they found out they'd get free advertising through all the press coverage and spent a ton of time and money finding it. That's the short version at least.
Thank you, Mr. Nasty McSnarkenstein.
Ask Captain Sullenberger. Oh, and stop being an idiot.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I may be wrong, but looking at the map it seems the plane was on exactly the opposite course from where it should have been going. Strange problems are not unknown with computer-controlled navigation systems going haywire when crossing the Equator, and oddly enough MH370 went AWOL quite close to the Equator...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
What's most interesting is that the anonymous reports from the US intelligence community the day after the plane disappeared said that the plane was on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. These claims seemed a little odd at the time since there was no supporting evidence at all and rescuers were still looking for debris on the original flight path. But, it's looking like they were spot on.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the only real conspiracy in this whole affair is the US govt's cover up of the initial leak. The plane itself likely just suffered a catastrophic failure and lumbered on until it ran out of fuel. But, the US govt also likely tracked it the entire time. That's why someone was able to make a confident pronouncement so quickly. They knew exactly where the plane was, if not exactly what happened. But, this intelligence capability (tracking all flying objects all the time) is probably highly classified. Rather than give it up for a civilian SAR effort, they decided to keep it under wraps, knowing that eventually the plane would be found and the capability is far more useful if no one knows it exists.
At high speeds, wouldn't an air plane potentially skip across the surface without completely wrecking? Also, couldn't the plane slow down enough to lose altitude before losing altitude, hitting the water not quite as hard, at an angle that perhaps didn't immediately decelerate to zero or shred the plane? That's happened most of the time planes ditched in the water.
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It's virtually impossible to land a large plane in the water "safely"; if either wing or engine touches the water before the other, that side digs in and the plane cartwheels, ripping itself to shreds.
The hudson plane landing wasn't a miracle because of skill on the part of the pilot - it was a miracle because it was astronomically slim odds that the plane would continue in a straight line and remain intact.
Please help metamoderate.
The amount the time delay changes gives you the average velocity between pings from the satellite.
The doppler gives you the momentary velocity at the ping.
Not sure what adding the doppler give them.
Or especially why it would discriminate between a N/S flight path.
this kind of analysis has never been done before, and there could easily be unknown flaws in the calculations and assumptions. Also they appear to be choosing the southern arc because it correlates to the report that the aircraft changed direction. IMO this initial assumption that the aircraft changed directions, is itself potentially wrong. there was a gap in time from the time the transponder was no longer received by malaysian, and the military radar track, this was a very active air corridor, there is a shadow flight theory floating around on the internet, because users have matched a commercial flight (not the missing malaysian one) with the radar track provided by the malaysian military, my belief is it was not shadowing the other flight, but the military radar track is in fact the other flight. The only secret the Malaysian government is keeping is its own incompetence, and some mistakes made with this initial radar analysis.
We call Ben Stiller, and he can end the Malaysian Prime Minister's meddling once and for all!
I have nothing clever to put here...
Anyone knows why this prediction (7 on the picture) differs from military radar info (6 on the picture) ?
* We've had flight recorders on all major airliners for decades now.
* We've had satellite phone technology for decades now. (since 1979 for Inmarsat)
Remind me again why "black box" style cellular data transmitters aren't required to be transmitting cockpit voice data and full telemetry from every major airliner at all times yet? With a system like that, installed in a way that can't be tampered with by the people in t he plane and runs independently of the rest of the electronics in the aircraft, there's no reason we would know the exact location the plane went down and, most likely, why. Hell, even if they decided to be cheap and only have it transmit the telemetry in once-a-minute updates we'd still would have know where the plane was to withing a handful of miles from the first day it went missing...
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#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
This analysis seems to depend of a "last turn" and constant speed for reconstruction. That could turn out to be a bit circular since a Northern track would likely have some turns in it to avoid radar and some speed changes dealing with altitude changes. But, the speed estimate along the line of sight between the plane and the satellite might mimic the straight line assumption in the South if Bhutan were a way point before turning towards the China/Kyrgyzstan border area. You'd get the same small-followed-by-growing Doppler shift pattern. It would be good to know it they modeled paths of that sort in their analysis.
Airplanes landing on water range for "can be used again after drying out" to complete death and destruction. We can assume this instance was toward the death end of the scale because no one removed the emergency beacons from the airplane and turned them on - i.e no one left alive :(
She is, after all, the leading researcher in this effort.
This is a bit of "no duh" but I think that completely depends on the angle of entry and how choppy the waters are, would be hard to say just how "smooth" a plane could land in the middle of an ocean.
I found this article in the Christian Science Monitor to be very plausible. That was on March 18, when they were still looking all over the place for the plane, and it's a scenario that still holds up. Basically, something went wrong, the pilots started to head for the nearest airport, but then passed out. http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2014/0318/Malaysia-Airlines-Flight-370-Why-some-pilots-point-to-mechanical-error-video
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
No.
I think the best assumption so far is that there were no one alive on the plane at that point, due to loss of cabin pressure. That is not completely guaranteed, but it would certainly be my guess.
It is also the thing to hope for. It would have either been quite gentle and slow drifting asleep if the pressure fell gradually, or over within seconds if pressure loss was rapid.
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There were 440 pounds of batteries on one of the cargo items. Fire seems plausible and might explain the alleged radar track to 40k feet. Alternatively other 777 have reported a fuselage cracking problem around the satellite antenna. Decompression from that could explain the dive to below 12000 feet , the loss of some communication ( if the Ping channel a different antenna?) and perhaps incapacitation of the pilots. But this seems less likely.
The most interesting thing about the Inmarsat anaylisis is that it relies on the dubious and odd radar track of the Malaysians that showed turns at VAMPI GIVAL AND IGREX. My theory was that these were mistaken reads miss attributed from SIA 86 another 777 at the same place and time. The Inmarsat people seem to say that the north south symmetry is broken by using that flight path. Yet this path makes no logical sense for an accident. It would have to be volition and shows control .
I'm inclined to go with accident still and thus don't believe that flight path. I thus don't believe the Inmarsat analysis that relies on that. But I do believe their conclusion that it went south.
The perfect correlation with similar flights they report is however a large fly in my ointment. It a remarkable coincidence this flight was so perfectly aligned with the satellites orbital track that it created this north south Doppler symmetry!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Something tells me that this will be banned quickly, worldwide.
"...knowing that the aircraft still had some fuel, but that it would have run out before the next automated ping."
Seems pretty straight forward to me... Ran out of fuel over the Ocean.
As to How/Why?
1) Navigational Error: Instruments on wrong course, path that cannot complete given fuel.
2) Pilot Error: Asleep at the wheel so to speak.
3) Terrorists: Remember hearing about another flight that was hijacked, ordered to go someplace, pilots said we don't have the fuel, Terrorists don't believe them."
Ultimately without some evidence, a mystery.
Also "no survivors"? Why because you didn't find any? Did you look? No? Found wreckage? Anyway at this point given how long it has been it is pretty unlikely but still.
I don't get it. If you are going away from satellite the signal is red shifted. If you are going toward the signal is blue shifted.
Why would there be any change in observed shift if you are going away from geo stationary satellite to the north v away to the south? What explains preferential outcome?
I could understand subtle timing differences due to ionospheric delay or polarization measurements. Ideas?
As another poster stated on the original article:
It would appear that someone on board deliberately, covertly and professionally flew it away, to the remotest spot within fuel range.
Trying to cover his tracks meanwhile, probably to avoid the stigma of being found out.
Pretty sinister, looks like the plane was pretty much flying to the South Pole.
with a strange problem:
Pick up the phone, say clearly:
"Ok, NSA"
Wait for tone
"Help!"
I hope the analysis by Inmarsat is correct, but there are still so many unanswered questions. Military radar has conclusively detected the plane's turn to the west shortly after losing contact with air traffic controllers, but in order for the plane to end up in the southern Indian Ocean, it would have had to make another turn to the south. Why wasn't the plane picked up by radar after the second turn? Is it that the plane went so far to the west that by the time it turned south it was far enough out in the ocean to avoid military radar?
I have no experience in aviation, but could the plane's second turn be explained by an attempt to orient the plane with a nearby airport's runway? Is the magnitude of the turn too great for that to be the case? If scenarios involving a fire or sudden depressurization are true, then perhaps the initial turn and drop in altitude were an attempt by the pilots to protect themselves and the passengers, and the second turn was meant to set an approach to a runway for an emergency landing. It could be that the pilots lost consciousness before reaching the runway, and the plane just continued on. Of course, that would mean the plane had flown back over land, over an airport even, and in that case it would have certainly been detected by radar. But perhaps an instrumentation failure caused them to be far off the mark.
I'm just thinking aloud at this point. But the question stands: why would the plane make a second turn?
Yes but the implication was that a plane landing in the water would disintegrate, i.e. that we know what happened to the plane. The two ways to know what happened are A) to find it, and B) to know what happens to pretty much all planes when they hit water.
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Am I the only one who wants to know more about how they ruled out the northern arc with doppler data? If the satellite is sitting over the equator, it would seem each arc would have the same phasing between two antennas... .or are there three to make a spot beam?
At high speeds, wouldn't an air plane potentially skip across the surface without completely wrecking?
In a word: No.
First: Due to its weight, it would definitely not "skip across the water". Its structure would simply not withstand the shock.
Also, the plane would need to land on water at a very specific angle and with as low speed as possible to "land" and not "crash".
As the plane crashed due to being out of fuel, it is totally unthinkable that it landed at that exact angle, and in perfect balance.
There are two possible conclusions (while unlikely) could still exist -- assuming that the Inmarsat data shows that the distances travelled at each ping point were constant (since they said they assumed it travelled at constant speed)
1) The plane flew at a constant speed lower than 450 knots at a different angle then they showed -- so heading toward Perth or Christmas Island or Cocos Islands, rather than toward middle of nowhere Indian Ocean
2) The plane flew toward Perth, then zigzagged back (luckily) toward Indonesia or Christmas Island or Cocos Islands at exactly the angle perpendicular to the satellite view field -- remember the Inmarsat can only tell distance, it can't tell if its going left or right, only if its getting closer or further away.
So I wish the Inmarsat guys would just publish the exact data they have an various people could do their own analysis rather than us just trusting clueless guests on CNN to interpret crappy looking graphs...
My theory is that the pilot and one person on board had a plan -- maybe blow open a window midflight, the pilot asks the co-pilot to go back and investigate, then the pilot goes up to 43k feet, everybody passes out, then he flies the plane toward someplace (don't know where), but somehow he ends up passing out himself before he can crash the plane where he wants and the plane flies all the way south going nowhere. Maybe his oxygen mask in the cockpit failed after some period of time. If they find that its a fire, the only thing that would make sense would be if the pilot regularly programmed in backup routes in case they had an issue and that is why the system had the extra planned route.
They've been on this 24/7, lack of any new information be damned.
A plane running out of fuel doesn't drop like a rock. Some of them can glide. Some have had full engine failure and landed safely in the Hudson River.
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No.
No it hasn't happened most of the time, ditching is bad, your plane will be bent.
By the way, they were not landing on Lake Placid.
You can not expect any aircraft to survive a landing in that area.
No brain, no pain.
"it just seems unusual to have this information at all, let alone to be able to dig it up out of several days old data."
The systems I've worked with typically store a lot of signal information and keep it for weeks, so when someone calls asking why their data wasn't getting through two weeks ago, the operator can say 'you were transmitting 10dB below nominal', or 'you were transmitting 1.5kHz off nominal', or whatever other problems they might have. Since much of the intelligence in the system is in a device that's not owned by the satellite operator (sat phone, data terminal, etc), and probably not even manufactured by them, they can't tell whether it's working correctly otherwise.
Effectually we looked at the doppler effect, which is the change in frequency, due to the movement of a satellite in its orbit.
You can tell this is the PR guy and not the tech guy. Firstly, "Effectually"?
Secondly. The Inmarsat-3 F1 satellite is geostationary, it moves little and slowly relative to the Earth's surface. There is effectively no doppler shift due to motion of the satellite relative to the Earth. The doppler shift here would be that of the aircraft relative to the Earth/satellite. The absence of doppler shifts is the reason that Copas-Sarsat geostationary satellites cannot determine surface position of a emergency locator transmitter unless the transmitter sends that information. For beacons that do not transmit location the low-Earth orbit Copas-Sarsat satellites, which have motion relative to the surface, are used to determine location by multiple doppler readings (but it takes up to 90 minutes vs. seconds).
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Has anyone bothered to check the Maintenance hanger at the Malaysia Airport ?
Because when you put on that invulnerable coat of protection on something, you still have to hold it somewhere...
With those two big engines hanging down from the wings I doubt a 777 would skip very well. Something like a 727 with then engines in the back up on the fuselage would have a better chance.
A plane running out of fuel doesn't drop like a rock. Some of them can glide. Some have had full engine failure and landed safely in the Hudson River.
The plane which landed in Hudson River had lost the engines, but was under control by an experienced and fully alert pilot.
If a plane flies over the ocean for several hours, it is highly likely that it is flying on autopilot with no pilot controlling it. If there was a pilot controlling it, why would he not try to reach land? Without a competent pilot, landing on water will destroy the plane.
Given all the information, here is the best explanation of what happened:
1. The airplane hits meteorite or some other foreign object causing immediate decompression and damage in the cockpit.
2. The pilots have a few minutes to dive down to thicker atmosphere before the die due to lack of oxygen.
3. They dive the airplane down to be able to breathe.
4. At the same time, able to set the autopilot to fly back to land at a low altitude.
5. They both expire, and the airplane continues to fly on autopilot.
6. As they fly the wrong way, passengers and crew try to get into the cockpit to take over and land the plane.
7. Nobody can break into the cockpit, and after 7 hours the fuel is used up, and the plane dives into the drink.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Lets put on our paranoia hats for a minute. How hard would it be to hijack the plane, land it somewhere, lose everyone on board, make some debris from the plane, fly the debris to the Indian Ocean, and drop it off? I mean, if they've gone through the trouble of getting the plane and losing the people on it, how much harder is it to fake debris?
It may have been snarky (and not necesarily true) but it was funny
http://news.xinhuanet.com/engl...
What if we're not supposed to find the plane at all ? China is all in a tizzy because supposedly a bunch of micro-chip designers were on that flight.
Entertain the thought the plane covertly landed somewhere, dropped off those who wanted out of China and then flew out to sea.
You just don't misplace an aircraft that size in this day and age unless you want to :)
End of crazy theory lol
It is _possible_ to land reasonably safely in the ocean. It requires a lot of skill and luck. Basically the plan has to orient in the same direction as the swells, slow down to just above stall speed (still about 150 knots IIRC), take a nose high attitude to prevent cartwheeling, and basically 'land' as slowly as possible, preferably picking the moment of contact on a wave peak. This of course works much better when the water is flat, which it rarely is in the southern Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean - read up on the "Roaring Forties". Even once you have 'landed', the high waves have enough force to start stressing the plane to the breaking point, and as soon as the doors open the waves are going to play hell with rafts and people trying to get out on them. It's not quite like boarding a raft in a hurricane, but it's close.
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In a word: no, to all points.
Wishful thinking. Don't know where to begin. Start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM7zMW8WVYU
"most of the time planes ditched in water" - that exactly is not reflected in historical record. Aside from the famous Hudson landing, most of the time, terrain landings are spectacularly unsuccessful, with water being the worst of the worst.
"At high speeds, wouldn't an air plane potentially skip across the surface without completely wrecking?" This is water, not subject to non-Newtonian liquid shenanigans. High speed (=more energy) is also worse since loading on that aluminum vessel would be catastrophic.
Then there is configuration / topology; wings at more or less centerline height above the water, engines as great big surfaces to catch the wave.
This is not a oval stone cast from the beach. Ever put your hand out the window when in the car? Imagine doing that traveling in water, and your arm being 4 longer than the car.
Low horizontal speeds on the other hand, would be perfect. But wings need horizontal speed to generate lift. So, we're asking the pilot/system to manage the a 100+ ton mass with a wide and flat (relative to ground) cross-section across the air/water density barrier in the best way possible.
Hudson was a conscious veteran pilot, suffering power loss but all other systems and control surfaces were intact, waters were calm/protected, it was daylight, in urban terrain and plenty of visual references.
MH370 is an unknown air-frame, system and control surface unkonwn, open waters with waves, it was pitch black, in the middle of nowhere, and the pilot may or may not have been active.
Not possible
The cabin crew has a procedure to enter the flight deck IF and ONLY IF the flight deck does not actively prevent entry.
Do you have any idea what an orbit is?
I don't know much about satelites, but how is it possible to determine the flying path based on one sequence of pings with Dobbler effect? from the sequence the pings were received they already knew the plane was flying away and not towards the sattelite centerpoint, what new info did the dobbler effect give. They concluded that it was flying "away" using dobbler effect analysis, but that is true among all points in the ping circles, incl. both north and south.
Imagine you are blind and deaf on one ear. You hear an ambulance siren, the sound of the siren is decreasing so you know its driving away from you, the sound of the siren also tells you that it is driving away (dobbler effect). You compare what you just heard with the other times you heard ambulance sirenses and tries to determine the direction the ambulence went.
As you can see we need more details of the analysis.
Aircraft recorders were designed long ago. Remember when a 40MB cf card was "big"? Remember when a 40MB disk (not 40GB!) was impressive? Aircraft recording is older than that. Today we can do better, but they almost never change existing equipment. Doing so still cost some money - designing certifying a new device usually costs a lot. You can't spread that cost over millions of devices like they do with phones, maybe a few thousand.
Then there is quality. Your phone can hold 1100 hours of audio - will it be able to do so over the 40-year lifetime of a plane? Or could there be a glitch after 15 years of continous operation? You can't even find smartphones that old. Look up the specs of a consumer SD card, will it survive that many write operations?
Will your phone still provide useful data when some submarine recovers it after a few years at 250 meters depth? Or when firefighters recover it from a smoking impact crater?
My point is it was a valid question. Most of the answers haven't said anything specifically about this plane: yours talked about how it's heavy and would need to be in balance and whatnot, which doesn't indicate if this is a property of the plane or all planes. A lot of them are simply ridiculing the question as a dumb question--which I don't think it is, since commercial airliners have a history of occasionally hitting the water and coming away fine (a dead plane and living passengers is coming away just fine--runway skids do this a LOT) after losing power.
More information is useful. But now you're conjecturing that the pilot was AFK, and hadn't come back before the plane crashed, which isn't really a strong statement for why this plane specifically can't hit the water without instantly killing everyone. I mean, they'll all get flotation devices and die of hypothermia in the ocean anyway, but I'm more interested in why the plane necessarily hits the water and immediately shreds or compresses and kills everyone upon impact.
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but I'm more interested in why the plane necessarily hits the water and immediately shreds or compresses and kills everyone upon impact.
We have some pretty good assumptions and some knowledge which will give an inevitable result:
The weight of the plane is about 150 to 200 tonnes without fuel.
The plane most likely lost thrust at pretty close to cruising altitude.
We can assume cruising altitude of approx 20000ft (6000m) give or take a few thousand feet
The plane was flying for hours over the open ocean without any attempt at correcting the direction to land. Australia is easy to find and would only need a small correction. Based on this, we can assume that there were nobody piloting it.
So it is safe to assume that it lost power around cruising altitude, and after that descended uncontrolled to the ocean. Without power, it would lose forward speed. Gravity kicks in. Vertical speed increases. There are nobody in the plane who can convert vertical speed to horizontal speed to enable a soft landing. Water is hard. Very hard. The result is inevitable.
The satellite we're talking about, Inmarsat-3 F1, is not perfectly geostationary. Nothing's perfect. This one's orbit is inclined 1.7 degrees with respect to the equator, which means it oscillates North-South and crosses the equator twice a day. If you know the motion of the satellite at the time of the flight (say it was moving south), then the Doppler shift between north and south tracks would be a little different (the south track would have a smaller shift). Of course, with a 130MHz signal you're talking about a shift of 1Hz or less. How much resolution do their tuners have? Maybe enough.
The data are available here: http://www.airtrafficmanagemen...
"All right.. Good night" We're going to crash the plane now. Awfully calm behavior for a plane in trouble, wouldn't you say?
As retired airline pilot in easy communication with several current 777 drivers, I wonder what the chance is that the handshakes were just random noise having nothing to do with 370. We think the airplane suffered an explosive decompression caused by a windshield blowout during climb. This would convert the flight deck from a calm environment into a hurricane at many degrees below zero making finding and donning oxygen masks problematic. Soon the flight crew was dead, having disengaged the autopilot during the circus. The airplane had a climb power setting and was trimmed to climb. It continued to do so through its assigned altitude, above its maximum altitude for its weight with fuel for Beijing, and far above its maximum service ceiling for any weight, anytime. It stalled, pointed its nose at the Gulf Of Thailand, and went into the water at above the speed of sound. Wreckage will eventually be found in tiny pieces on beaches in the Gulf. It is impossible to explain the airplane leveling off and flying unattended for several hours after it suffered whatever failure caused it to dive 40,000 feet, from 45,000 feet, in one minute as was first reported.