Most Expensive Aviation Search: $53 Million To Find Flight MH370

mdsolar (1045926) writes "The search and investigation into missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is already the most expensive in aviation history, figures released to Fairfax Media suggest. The snippets of costings provide only a small snapshot but the $US50 million ($54 million) spent on the two-year probe into Air France Flight 447 — the previous record — appears to have been easily surpassed after just four weeks.... The biggest expense in the search has involved ships, satellites, planes and submarines deployed first in the South China Sea and the Malacca Straits, and then in the remote reaches of the southern Indian Ocean."

Comments

Cool! $50 million USD = $54 million!

[TrollstonButterbeans]

I am now walking to my local bank and trying to explain how my $5000 USD is actually $5400! I printed a copy of this article as proof!!!!

Tracking`

[nitehawk214]

And yet, people stated that "it would be soooo expensive" to add proper tracking to planes.

Re:Tracking`

[Anonymous Coward]

I kind off question this 53 million number, I think this article is completely false.

This number was the cost from the search of the downed France Flight. The BBC reported that, right now it is guessed that the cost so far will be closer to 10 times that of the French search.

And more to your point, the International Aviation Committee [I cant remember the full name] after the France Flight had a meeting to get new standards, out of the handful of changes that were put on the table, all inexpensive by the way, the only adopted putting underwater ping boxes on the planes. I know there was a story on NPR's web site, from the same group claiming"to make changes", only the BBC reported that they had tried this before and you see where there at yet again.

Look for a magically disappearing plane in the ocean... I can see the ping box has been an overwhelming success [sarcastic comment]

Re:Tracking`

[R3d M3rcury]

First, I don't imagine that Malaysia Air is paying that $50,000,000. Malaysia Air is out the cost of a Boeing 777 and probably some death benefits. But I'm sure those things are insured. On the other hand, Malaysia Air would have to pay for this tracking system.

Second, I'd point out that the last big "disappearance" (i.e., nobody immediately knew where it crashed) was in 2009--five years ago. And it's not like it's that common that airplanes crash and are not found within a few days. So you're spending money on the off chance that an airplane of yours crashes somewhere difficult to find. You'll probably spend that money for 50 years before you ever take advantage of the system. So, yeah, it's not really worth it to Malaysia Air.

Third, let's say you add the trackers. You spend the money year in and year out and, eventually, it comes in handy. So what? You can look and say, "Yup! The plane just crashed in the middle of the Indian Ocean!" Now what? You're still out the plane. You're probably not going to have much for survivors on a plane that crashes in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It's not going to make a difference in your insurance premiums. You're adding costs for basically no benefit.

Re:Tracking`

[CohibaVancouver]

And yet, people stated that "it would be soooo expensive" to add proper tracking to planes.

The 'people' are correct. $50M is much, much less than the billions it would cost to add 'proper tracking' to planes that cross oceans - And it still doesn't address the problem of someone in the cockpit switching the tracking off.

Re:Tracking`

[Savage-Rabbit]

And yet, people stated that "it would be soooo expensive" to add proper tracking to planes.

It is. As a manufacturer you have to machete your way through a jungle of red tape, get all manner of safety assessments etc. to even be allowed to install the ADSC-B/C equipment on the aircraft. This is very time consuming and expensive, which is one reason why all aircraft avionics and generally anything that goes into an aircraft is by definition obscenely expensive to buy (right down to LCD screens and coffee makers) and why old airliner designs get reworked (it's a smaller bureaucratic workload to get a new variant of an existing design flying than a totally new design). If this seems like dumb bureaucracy keep in mind that aircraft have been lost to crappy installation of retrofitted electronics (a good example being Swissair Flight 111). To install the equipment your airline has to ground the aircraft for at least a week (installation costs and lost revenue). Depending on the type of aircraft you operate and its age there may not even have been provision for the ADSC-B/C equipment which means airframe modifications and more downtime (yet more lost revenue and expenses) followed by more certifications and inspections. On top of that different ATC areas sometimes require you to have different equipment. Even simple stuff like software upgrades only happen at a glacial pace so if you think that fixing a simple software bug on an airliner is as simple as downloading an install package from the support section of the Boeing/Airbus website, uploading it to your USB stick, plugging it into a USB socket in the dashboard of your Boeing 777 airliner and selecting "Update firmware" on the FMS screen you have another thing coming. Airliners are one of the safest modes of transportation but that comes at a cost in time and money.

Re:Tracking`

[S.O.B.]

I'm sure similar arguments were made when the original black boxes were made mandatory on aircraft.

A new Boeing 777-200ER is about $260M. A Canadian has developed an enhanced black box that constantly sends data back to the airline. The cost would be $100,000 which is only 0.04% of the cost of the aircraft and $85,000 more that the boxes they would replace. There would also be satellite data transfer charges which would be only a few thousand dollars for a flight like MH370 or about $20 per passenger on the flight. You could even limit the data transfer to trans oceanic flights to minimize the impact on low cost and domestic carriers.

Of course, all those costs would come down if every new aircraft was equipped like this. I'm sure the families of the MH370 would consider this minimal cost money well spent.

Re:Tracking`

[fermion]

Using industry estimates, i calculated that it would cost a few billion dollars to equip the next several years of commercial airplanes, not counting the current fleet. This money to prevent an expenditure 2 order of magnitudes smaller that might only occur every 10 years. It is risk assessment. And there is no way to know if it would have been any more effective than the current system. It would be just as meaningful to say that we should put a battery in the black box that lasts a year, or has a much stronger transmitter.

Re:Tracking`

[AK Marc]

It's estimated to be $200,000 per plane for live tracking. "Billons" would be a huge exaggeration.

Re:Tracking`

[ibwolf]

It's estimated to be $200,000 per plane for live tracking. "Billons" would be a huge exaggeration.

That's 5000 planes per one billion. There are almost one thousand Boeing 777s in operation today. Add in all other comparable, i.e. long range aircraft (757, 747, 787 plus the Airbus equivalents) and you are quickly into the (very low admittedly) billions.

Re:Tracking`

[photonic]

Data charges would be much less than that, $20 extra per ticket would be unacceptably high. Some spokesman for Inmarsat (who obviously has a big interest in making permanent data connections mandatory) said that data costs for such a flight would be on the order of 1$/hour for the whole aircraft. Data rates should also be pretty low, 1 GPS coordinate per minute would have helped enormously for both the AirFrance and MalaysiaAirlines crashes, the detailed high-bandwidth data you can always get from the black box if you can find it.

Re:Tracking`

[u38cg]

One question for ya. Are the people paying for SAR the same people who'd be paying for the trackers? Oh. Thought not.

Re:Tracking`

[Rockoon]

It's estimated to be $200,000 per plane for live tracking. "Billons" would be a huge exaggeration.

If that estimation is correct, then so is "billions."

U.S, Air alone (a single airline) flies 3700 planes with 90 seats or more.

The world stats:

312,000 Active General Aviation Aircraft (private jets, single prop, etc..)
17,770 Passenger Aircraft (jumbo jets)
89,129 Military Aircraft
26,500 Civil Helicopters
29,700 Military Helicopters.

Fail much?

Re:Tracking`

[CohibaVancouver]

you are quickly into the (very low admittedly) billions.

You're into the high(er) billions once you add all the satellite bandwidth into the mix.

Re:Tracking`

[wired_parrot]

Without understanding what went wrong with the plane, we can't know whether the proposed enhanced black box would be effective. There were systems in the aircraft to report its position and status remotely - namely ACARS and its transponders. These failed or were disabled early on. It is quite possible that whatever took those systems out would have also disabled communications from an enhanced black box.

Until we know the cause of the crash, proposing a solution is premature.

Re:Tracking`

[zippthorne]

$200,000 * 1,200 (approx # of 777's built) = $240 Million. Add in the other models of aircraft that make ocean crossings and you can certainly be discussing amounts in the billions.

Re:Tracking`

[S.O.B.]

My estimate of the data costs was from an interview with the man who created this proposed enhanced black box. I think he knows more than either of us what the data requirements of his device are.

Re:Tracking`

[S.O.B.]

I agree but somehow I suspect that it's not as simple as that. All the electrical systems on an aircraft have to be accessible to the crew to troubleshoot and potentially shutdown circuits in the event of a problem. Up until this point no I'm sure no one considered that a flight crew would intentionally disable the transponder (if that is what really happened) so no failsafe was put in place to prevent it. But at the same time you don't want to introduce a failsafe that could prevent them from addressing a potential problem.

Re:Tracking`

[S.O.B.]

I wasn't suggesting putting one of these in a Cessna. This would only be of use in commercial airliners capable of making transoceanic flights. And I never said anything about retrofitting all current aircraft just like the original black boxes were not initially retrofitted into all existing aircraft.

A device like this should only be added to new aircraft and the aircraft I'm talking about are in the tens of millions to buy so a $100k device is not a huge additional cost.

So you can unbunch your panties.

Re:Tracking`

[S.O.B.]

I didn't say that it would have solved this particular problem. I was responding to someone's comment about the cost/benefit of this technology with MH370 and the Air France crash in 2009 as hypothetical examples of it's potential use and that the same arguments were likely made when the original black box technology was introduced.

I agree that until we know for sure what happened we don't know how or even if we could have prevented it.

Re:Tracking`

[S.O.B.]

If you're talking about the idiots that sue McDonalds for being burned by hot coffee they spilled on themselves then I agree with you.

If you're talking about giving grieving families some peace and possibly identifying how to prevent it in the future all for the cost of a few cents per mile travelled then I would disagree with you.

FYI, a black box is not a safety measure, its a forensic tool.

Re:Tracking`

[wired_parrot]

I assume the live-streaming solution you're talking about is the one proposed by FLYHT. Their proposed solution, however, would only send essential data at the moment an event is detected, and it wouldn't supersed a standard flight data recorder. It wouldn't carry cockpit voice recording, for example, which was essential in determining what happened in the case of AF447. With the Air France case as an example, the search for the black box would still have to be carried out to close the investigation. And while it may have narrowed the search area, we already had an idea of where it went down based on transponder and ACARS data. And the ACARS transmissions also provided a good idea of what the precipitating event was in that case. It is therefore unclear what the FLYHT system would have added in value to that event.

As to the MH370 case, as I mentioned it is quite likely that whatever took down ACARS and the transponder systems in the aircraft would have also affected live-streaming by any black box recorder. And even with some data streamed, you would still need to find the cockpit voice and flight data recorder to get a complete picture.

Re:Tracking`

[AK Marc]

How many travel over deep ocean?

Re:Tracking`

[Xylantiel]

Really, if you're listening to reasonable people it's not expensive at all to have satellite-based ACARS enabled on all planes and have it include some basic flight information. In fact we knew from the first day or two that this plane had flown on for hours after the incident, the Malaysians were just not listening to the satellite techs. And if Malaysian air had simply paid the several thousand dollar fees we would have hours data to work with. These "real time tracking" people are just ambulance chasers. The problem here is that the plane flew on for so long after losing ground contact and Malaysian air was not paying for satellite service. So make intermittent satellite relayed updates mandatory. The additional infrastructure costs... $0. It's already in place.

Re:Tracking`

[stoatwblr]

Bear in mind that

1: The pingers don't just suddenly shut down, they fade out

2: 30 days is the _minimum_ guaranteed operational time at full output, at the end of the battery service life (Lithiums have a 10 year shelf life)

Under most circumstances there's likely to be 5-10 days further output at lower levels before the batteries give up the ghost. Apparently the batteries in these particular pingers may have been at or slightly past their use-by date. There's inconsistent documentation (The original pinger makers say the pingers hadn't been refurbished and should have been replaced a couple of years back, however they also pointed out that another outfit may have refurbed them, or the pingers may have been replaced with a 3rd party unit.)

If the aircraft ran out of fuel and went into the water in cruise trim, it's likely to have been nose down and travelling at at least 400 knots. The chances of any large pieces of debris remaining on the surface are small (similar to what happened with Swissair 111, or Valuejet 592)

By contrast Air France 447 stalled into the water and would have had a forward velocity of substantially less than 200knots and substantial vertical velocity - more like an uncontrolled bellyflop. This allowed the fin/rudder to snap off in one piece.

Re:Tracking`

[stoatwblr]

Even if the full service was enabled it's entirely possible that popping the breakers would have interrupted the data stream. The pings were coming from the tranceiver unit on the aircraft (similar to ethernet keepalives), not from the actual data senders.

The only diifference in that scenario is that more data would be available and hopefully someone would have jumped to attention when the data stream cut off.

All of this is just armchair quarterbacking until the data recorders are found. Even then they may not tell us much (It's entirely possible that the CVR was shut off early in the process. The Valuejet and Swissair ones both cut out before crashes, when the power was interrupted.)

Re:Tracking`

[bhiestand]

My estimate of the data costs was from an interview with the man who created this proposed enhanced black box. I think he knows more than either of us what the data requirements of his device are.

He may be a great engineer, but if he's seriously proposing a system that will cost $20/passenger/flight, he's a fool. At that price, it had better guarantee incident-free flight.

Re:Cool! $50 million USD = $54 million!

[Anonymous Coward]

Article is from .com.au... k.

Harry

[invictusvoyd]

And it's pretty clear that anybody with the skills to make it disappear as completely as it did is capable of more than just a little direction.

Houdini ?

Re:Harry

[davester666]

Time for some enhanced interrogation of Copperfield!

Re:Harry

[aliquis]

And it's pretty clear that anybody with the skills to make it disappear as completely as it did is capable of more than just a little direction.

Houdini ?

That goat.cx-guy?

Re:Cool! $50 million USD = $54 million!

[Anonymous Coward]

That line was talking about how much 50 million USD was in Australian dollars. Way to fail, brah.

Re:But Terrizm!

[Rich0]

And it's pretty clear that anybody with the skills to make it disappear as completely as it did is capable of more than just a little direction.

Sure, it could be some plot from a spy thriller - no way to discount that.

However, it is just as likely a pilot bent on suicide or something. Just fly in a direction nobody is expecting and then out over the ocean. That's pretty much all you have to do to make an airliner disappear. Oh, and he switched off the transponder and ACARS - that is just a few switches, which pilots need to be familiar with anyway.

So, flip off a few switches, set the autopilot for a new course, and go read a book until you run out of fuel. Or maybe have some fun exploring the performance limits of the plane while you're at it (thus explaining the apparently odd altitude behavior). Turn the autopilot altitude setting to 55k feet and hit the level change button and see how high it gets before the climb rate drops to zero, etc. The passengers probably wouldn't even notice it if you started that at optimum cruise altitude (the climb wouldn't be all that steep from there).

Re:Well shoot...

[Rich0]

Couldn't they have bought a whole new plane for that kind of money?

They would have to do that anyway. It isn't like anything that came off of this flight is likely to ever be useful again, unless it really was landed on a runway somewhere.

This is all about preventing future accidents, and providing closure.

It's worth it.

[ScentCone]

Understanding what happened could be worth a lot more than $50m, or twice that.

Major issue with the airframe, or propulsion? Very important to understand that. There are a lot more of them flying around.

A third party's influence and/or an attempt to steal the plane? Whether that ended in a crash or a successful theft, we need to know everything we can about who, what, why, to what end. If it was stolen and landed (extremely, very unlikely), gotta know where and why. If it went in the drink during an attempt, still have to understand what the game plan was.

Suicide? Hiding in regular traffic, then flying low and into the most remote, deepest water possible in the interests of never finding the plane - the better to make sure family collects on insurance money? Would be good to know, and will remind airlines to get harder about knowing their pilots and the pilots' current circumstances.

Regardless, the navy assets out looking are using the whole thing as an excellent training exercise. Lots of smart people have had to whip up new ways to think about what happened, using only traces of satellite/comms data.

Re:It's worth it.

[JoeMerchant]

I'm thinking if those naval "training exercises" were billed as services, we'd be way past the $50M mark by now.

Re:It's worth it.

[stoatwblr]

It might be something as simple as an oxygen fed fire in the forward cargo hold. The cargo manifest hasn't been published and liekly wouldn't include "internal" items being shuttled around for maintenance. (It was oxy generators and a tyre which downed Valuejet)

Re:Cool! $50 million USD = $54 million!

[ScentCone]

Way to fail, brah.

There is no context in which that phrase can be used - earnestly, ironically, sarcastically, ignorantly, juvenilely, ham-fistedly, or otherwise - in which the person saying it can ever, ever tell someone else they've failed.

Re:But Terrizm!

[noh8rz10]

the only explanation that makes sense to me is okham's racer: plane was flying to beijing, a fire broke out or depressurization in the cabin or hold. pilot turned around to go back to the nearest airport, but they ran out of oxygen and it became a ghost ship on autopilot until it ran out of fuel in the indian ocean. the altitude changes is consistent with a fire because apparently one way to fight a fire on an airplane is to go really high where there is less oxygen.

One possiblity, this was intentional

[approachingZero]

Let's say you could take over a Boeing 777

http://www.aviationweek.com/Ar...

Or . . . since 911 all aircraft can be sent a special code that renders them inoperable by the crew so the plane can't be used as a weapon . . .

And let's ask ourselves why would anyone choose to direct an aircraft far far out over a deep ocean away from and population areas . . .

Or maybe I read one to many Tom Clancy novels.

Re:But Terrizm!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a pilot, have had two non-trivial electrical fires. It's the simplest explanation, and explains shutting of or failing ACARS and the xpdr while the engines kept reporting data. Not saying "that's what happened" but "that's the most plausible explanation"

Re:But Terrizm!

[Rich0]

That just doesn't make sense though if the satellite/radar data is accurate. The aircraft deviated, flew for quite a while to the west (not towards anything in particular), and then turned south.

Climbing to starve a fire doesn't really make much sense - the air at 45k feet isn't that much thinner than the air at 35k where it probably was previously. Plus the passengers only have something like 10min of oxygen, while the pilots have hours, which any competent pilot should know. The passengers might run out of oxygen before the plane even makes it to the service ceiling in the first place (climbing gets exponentially slower as you exceed your optimum altitude). The pilot would also put the plane on a course towards some airport - perhaps direct to the origin, not just west into the ocean. And even if he did, why then would he turn south after a considerable delay?

Why the search?

[AndyCanfield]

Look, yes. But why are 'they' spending more money for one downed airplane than the airplane costs originally? Why the fortune in searching? Why the massive ongoing search? Why is every government in a panic?

I suspect that aurhorities fear a nefarious actor, and they want to find out exactly who did what so we can make sure it doesn't happen again. What if the air transport regulators never find out what brought the MH370 down, but Al-qaeda knows already?

Re:Why the search?

[ChunderDownunder]

Well in the case of the govt. of Australia, where this cynical newspaper article originated, it's a massive PR exercise.

"See, our defence force do good, noble, things in their spare time", when they're not implementing the government's polarising 'stop the boats' agenda.

Do they have a clue if and where the plane sank? Hardly...

Re:Why the search?

[FatLittleMonkey]

You know they react like this to every crashed plane? Normally they find it on a mountain within a day or two and the media loses interest. This one is only odd because the plane was lost at sea; which only happens every 5 years or so.

The "panic" is really only coming from the internet conspiracy machine and the media which, for some reason, takes idiotic internet conspiracy theories seriously when they have nothing to report (instead of, you know, stopping reporting until something actually happens.) The actual S&R is exactly the same as every other air crash S&R. [In the Air France crash, they didn't stop looking for the black boxes for two years.]

Re:Why the search?

[JoeMerchant]

The media was playing up the "maybe somebody stole it" aspect from the very start.

If you've ever flown over ocean, out of sight of land, or on a polar crossing route, that feeling that you're really "out there," was true. It's a big world, after all.

Re:But Terrizm!

[seyyah]

the only explanation that makes sense to me is okham's racer

Congratulations you are the first person ever to have misspelt Occam's Razor Okham's racer.

Re:But Terrizm!

[ArchieBunker]

If that happened why would the pilot simply not have lowered the altitude? Above 13,000 feet oxygen is required. He could have easily dropped lower.

Re:But Terrizm!

[CohibaVancouver]

the only explanation that makes sense to me is okham's racer

Occam's razor dictates that there's no way some guy named Okham turned the plane into his own private racer.

Fire is most complex, not simplest, answer

[SuperKendall]

Fire is a really, really REALLY answer to this mystery. It requires a fire powerful enough to disable communications minutes after they finished speaking for the last time, while at the same time avoid detection by a multitude of fire/smoke detectos around the plane.

Then after the fire finishes off every single person on the plane, it decides to chill out for seven hours while the plane flays without issue, despite that having happened with no serious airplane fire ever.

It's nice that you have an active enough imagination to believe in this mystical all-powerful sky fire, but to me it's vastly more convoluted to have fire be responsible do to the seriously amazing number of things to have to go right (or wrong) for that to work. Either suicide or terrorists taking the plane is FAR more likely if you are going to apply a test of simplicity.

Re:Fire is most complex, not simplest, answer

[quantaman]

Fire is a really, really REALLY answer to this mystery. It requires a fire powerful enough to disable communications minutes after they finished speaking for the last time, while at the same time avoid detection by a multitude of fire/smoke detectos around the plane.

Then after the fire finishes off every single person on the plane, it decides to chill out for seven hours while the plane flays without issue, despite that having happened with no serious airplane fire ever.

It's nice that you have an active enough imagination to believe in this mystical all-powerful sky fire, but to me it's vastly more convoluted to have fire be responsible do to the seriously amazing number of things to have to go right (or wrong) for that to work. Either suicide or terrorists taking the plane is FAR more likely if you are going to apply a test of simplicity.

Why would the fire have to evade the detectors?

As for the fire going out without damaging the aircraft that seems plausible. A fire breaks out in the cabin area, kills all the people with smoke inhalation then kills itself by using up all the oxygen. It's even consistent with some of the weird flight behaviour as a pilot dying of smoke inhalation may not have adjusted the auto-pilot properly.

Re:Fire is most complex, not simplest, answer

[vux984]

Why would the fire have to evade the detectors?

Because otherwise

a) we'd have known it was on fire before it disappeared.
b) the planes occupants would have put it out

Re:Fire is most complex, not simplest, answer

[quantaman]

Why would the fire have to evade the detectors?

Because otherwise

a) we'd have known it was on fire before it disappeared

Assuming the first thing the pilots did wasn't turn off the communications system to try and prevent the fire from spreading.

b) the planes occupants would have put it out

So you're implying that detectors failing is implausible, and any detected fire is trivial to put out. If that were the case then airplane fires wouldn't be a problem.

That being said I would be curious to know why more experts aren't talking about a fire.

Re:Fire is most complex, not simplest, answer

[Billly Gates]

Assuming the first thing the pilots did wasn't turn off the communications system to try and prevent the fire from spreading.

The VERY FIRST thing you would do is alert the ground you had a problem. Not turn off all hope of getting help. There is no fire that is STOPPED by turning off a radio!

And even if it were the case the pilots were the stupidest people on earth AND acting in direct violation of aviation emergency procedures in order to take an action that would not help anyone, it STILL doesn't explain flying calming in a straight line for seven hours after with a raging fire eating at the planes controls and superstructure and fuel tanks. Sorry man, CNN's Black Hole is more likely than your Faerie Fire.

No cutting off power and your locator is the first step in a fire.

These are standard operating procedures as you need to shut it all off to find the short. Besides what is ground control going to do? You need to do a quick change course to the nearest airport while you find and shut down the damn thing before everyone dies!

Another is to try to suffocate the fire if it is a tire fire by flying at 45,000 feet. Check. Next if the crew gets oxygen afixiation the next step is to cruise at 12,000 feet if the fire is still going. Check. All good so far. ... now here is the mystery. Let's say it was a fire. The captain and crew are incapacitated from carbon monoxide. The fire would take down the whole aircraft. It would burn through the wires for the computer auto pilot and crash the plane well before 7 hours. Or the structure would fail as it would burn through the luggage and explode the fuel compartment.

Also the path is changed again in the final arc. Why? Wouldn't it logically be on the same new path and be half way between Australia and Africa if the crew did die? That is west of perth alright but WAAY farther west. What in the mathematically geometry that says it is in the search area? Distance wise why wouldn't it be on the other side of the arc southwest instead of southeast?

Also if the plane is flying lower you have more friction if it still was at 12,000 feet. So wouldn't it logically be farther north as it would run out of fuel quicker too?

Re:Fire is most complex, not simplest, answer

[quantaman]

now here is the mystery. Let's say it was a fire. The captain and crew are incapacitated from carbon monoxide. The fire would take down the whole aircraft. It would burn through the wires for the computer auto pilot and crash the plane well before 7 hours. Or the structure would fail as it would burn through the luggage and explode the fuel compartment.

I'm not convinced this was the case, the fire could run out of oxygen, run out of things to burn (depending where it started), or they could have put it out before succumbing.

Also the path is changed again in the final arc. Why? Wouldn't it logically be on the same new path and be half way between Australia and Africa if the crew did die? That is west of perth alright but WAAY farther west. What in the mathematically geometry that says it is in the search area? Distance wise why wouldn't it be on the other side of the arc southwest instead of southeast?

Also if the plane is flying lower you have more friction if it still was at 12,000 feet. So wouldn't it logically be farther north as it would run out of fuel quicker too?

If it turned later on couldn't that be the result of the autopilot? I'm envisioning a scenario where the pilot tried to program in a return course but was very confused due to oxygen deprivation and wrote in some bizarre flight instructions instead. Soon after the fire everyone was dead and the fire was out but the plane continued flying with weird instructions entered.

Re:Fire is most complex, not simplest, answer

[Billly Gates]

At 400+ mph the air flying in would turn that into a roman candle FAST.

There is plenty to burn and windows break. Metal softens and gas and oil explode.

We will never find out. If they have not even freaking found debris yet then the jet will never be found. They found the debris in 48 hours with flight 903 and it still took over 2 years to find it.

I think the plane if it followed the same line is between Africa and Australia rather than right off Australia. People claimed they saw something Maldives which would make sense.

If the pilot decided to be real crazy and was conscious he could have landed it like the hudson river landing all intact. The plane would then slowly bob and not sink for many months or years.

We will never know.

Re:Fire is most complex, not simplest, answer

[dbIII]

It requires a fire powerful enough to disable communications

The pilot does that by throwing breakers to isolate an electrical fire. Apparently that can be done very quickly.

while at the same time avoid detection by a multitude of fire/smoke detectos around the plane

We don't know either way if that was the case or not. All we know is nobody got on the radio to say anything about "a multitude of fire/smoke detectos".

Re:Fire is most complex, not simplest, answer

[stoatwblr]

"The VERY FIRST thing you would do is alert the ground you had a problem. Not turn off all hope of getting help. There is no fire that is STOPPED by turning off a radio!"

Only if you're an idiot. I've had friends killed because pilots got so busy trying to sort out mechanical problems that they forgot to fly the aircraft and ended up smearing it across a hillside (The pilot in one incident and a passenger in another)

Emergency handling is drilled into every pilot even at PPL level - Aviate, Navigate, Communicate. The only time I've ever needed to use that drill (blown exhaust valve) I was already looking at a suitable field before making the Pan call.

The British Airways 777 pilot was so busy flying the plane that he almost didn't make a pan call at all. If he'd done so earlier, there's a fair chance that instead of bellyflopping just short of the theshold, the 777 would have wiped out several hundred people on the ground (The approach path for Heathrow passes over a suburban town centre and hundreds of houses in the last couple of miles) and taken out a major arterial road..

Re:Fire is most complex, not simplest, answer

[stoatwblr]

"If the pilot decided to be real crazy and was conscious he could have landed it like the hudson river landing all intact."

Unlikely. The Hudson is millpond flat compared to even the smallest open ocean swell. The best scenario for an open ocean ditching in the south shina sea would be pretty nasty, especially given it'd be 12-16 HOURS from rescue (planes might find it, but ships still have to get there)

Re:But Terrizm!

[noh8rz10]

laughing so hard... I thought you were exaggerating but i checked the link and in fact google only returns one hit for "okham's racer", which directs back to this page. That's a first for me, I should get like an internet trophy or something.

Re:But Terrizm!

[quantaman]

Seriously: a major airplane "disappears" despite evidence that it wasn't really crashed. Everybody's wondering who dunnit and how, and whether or not it will become another impromptu bomb.

There's a *lot* you can carry on a 777. $50 mil is a lot, but the amount of damage such a plane could do with a little direction makes $50 mil look like peanuts. And it's pretty clear that anybody with the skills to make it disappear as completely as it did is capable of more than just a little direction.

What is the evidence that it didn't really crash?

It looks like there may have been some odd circumstances around the crash, a hijacking or equipment malfunction of some kind, but I don't imagine there's a lot of places you can land and hide a 777 without someone noticing. The fact they haven't found the wreckage doesn't mean a crash still isn't the overwhelming possibility.

Excuse Me BUT

[Anonymous Coward]

Has ANYONE looked in the maintenance hanger at Kuala Lumpur International Airport !

Do I have to book a "first class" flight to Kuala Lumpur International Airport and bribe the
Airport attendants and "Guards" to let me in the maintenance hanger to video Malaysian
Airlines Boing 777-200 9M-MRO serial number 28420 sitting in the hanger !

OH YEA ! Question part A) where are the passengers ? and part B) why did the 'Prime
Minister' jump the Shark to "reveal" that terrorists downed MH 370 ?

Answer: Insurance fraud scheme !

On a different and very related note: "What happened to GPS" ? Hells Bells its 30 years
since President Ronald Reagan issued an executive order to declassify GPS for airline
transportation safety !

WTF

Tough Tittle Indeed

Fire . . . bad!

[Latent Heat]

The thing about fire is that I don't see how a fire that incapacitated the crew could put itself out that it doesn't cause structural damage to the plane . . . within minutes.

Planes with depressurization have flown for hours until exhausting their fuel, but fire?

Re:Fire . . . bad!

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing about fire is that I don't see how a fire that incapacitated the crew could put itself out that it doesn't cause structural damage to the plane . . . within minutes.

An electrical fire absolutely could have resulted in this, and most aircraft fires ARE of electoral origin due to all the avionic components on board. An electrical fire very rarely produces open flames, but can produce a lot of fumes. I've been a crew member during many inflight fires. The worst of which was a fire of unknown origin that occurred shortly before landing. We were unable to locate the source of the fire so we decided just to land. We didn't go on oxygen because it didn't smell that bad, and going on oxygen sucks. In hindsight this was a bad idea. Remember that carbon monoxide is colorless and odorless. It was only minutes before we landed, but immediately upon landing everyone started getting sick so we evacuated the aircraft. The crew members closest to the source of the fumes were still showing symptoms of CO poisoning after a week. We were damn lucky that the fire occurred when it did. Afterwards maintenance was unable to locate the source of the fire, and the plane went on to fly multiple flights without incident with the exact same components.

So yes, an electrical fire could have incapacitated the crew without spreading and endangering the airframe. What a fire does not explain is the supposed path of the jet after the initial turn back.

Re:Fire . . . bad!

[tragedy]

The thing about fire is that I don't see how a fire that incapacitated the crew could put itself out that it doesn't cause structural damage to the plane . . . within minutes

Oxygen depletion actually seems like a perfect explanation for that.

Re:Fire . . . bad!

[stoatwblr]

There was a report from an oil rig in the south china sea at the same time as the disappearanmce of an observed fire on an aircraft which then went out.

Re:Fire . . . bad!

[stoatwblr]

The flight pattern mght possibly a preprogrammed triangle (which is the standard distress/attention pattern if radio is out) and "divert to where noone else will get killed" by the captain, on the basis that they might not make it back to land alive.

He was known to be fairly fastidious and the FBI investigation showed he'd run a number of emergency scenarios on his personal simulator.

As for the climb/descent, it could just as easily be a trimmed aircraft flying a route without altitude control engaged. The automatics would have taken it out of a stall if noone intervened.

The real quetions revolve around why the MAF didn't react when they saw a bogey. Petronas Towers is a fairly large target and radar operators are supposed to be watching for that kind of thing these days.

Nice visualization of ping rings

[mdsolar]

You can make some more informed guesses about the plan by looking at the succession of ranging from the Inmarsat satellite here: http://www.duncansteel.com/arc...

Occam's Razor

[rossdee]

Didn't they confiscate it on check in? Or is it only in the USA (TSA)

Re:Occam's Razor

[gargleblast]

Didn't they confiscate it on check in? Or is it only in the USA (TSA)

They would have, but they misspelled his name on the no-fly list.

Re:Well shoot...

[nedlohs]

Nope, they are a sixth of the way there though. Though I really doubt the plan is to find it in order to repair it and put is back in service...

George Washington Library

[AndyKron]

That's only half what the George Washington Library is going to cost US taxpayers.

Re:But Terrizm!

[pushing-robot]

We could always compromise and call it Ockham's Razor...

You're now a Googlewhacker!

[Anonymous Coward]

There's actually a term for this. It's called a Googlewhack.

I think you can get a trophy, or at least your name on a website. http://googlewhack.com/

What about co-pilot? Or passengers?

[SuperKendall]

So, flip off a few switches, set the autopilot for a new course, and go read a book until you run out of fuel.

What happened to the OTHER pilot who would notice you doing one or more of those things, certainly within an hour noticing on a map they were headed the wrong way even if they missed everything else you did. And how would a co-pilot miss the turn you performed even if he was not in the cabin?

Also you would have to turn off the entertainment system for every passenger because that ALSO lets them see a map of where they are going. Which means every stewardess is going to be beating on your door for seven hours straight to get you to turn back on the entertainment system.

It's not at all simple to just head a plane elsewhere and not have a lot of people notice. It takes a lot of work to pull that off for any length of time.

Elephant in the room

[mlwmohawk]

OK, lets say it. Bullshit. We all know it didn't crash.

It takes a series of catastrophic failures for a 777 to crash. Sure, it happens, but it is very rare. It is an extremely unlikely event.
Now, we also know that the various telemetry devices on the plane were manually disabled by the flight crew.
We also know from the telemetry they didn't know about (or could shut of, the engine pings) that the engines ran for about 5 hours after other telemetry was turned off.
We know the plane turned "off course" after the last radio contact.

Given all these facts, do you really think it crashed? Of course not. It landed somewhere.

The cruising speed of the plane is about 560 miles/hour. It was in the air for 5 hours after it's last known location, that's a 2800 mile radius. This gives us a 24 million square mile area to search. If we have 1000 crews searching the area, 80 hours a week. If it takes 1 hour to search a square mile, it will take almost 6 years to find it.

Someone or something was on that plane that someone wanted. The plane was stolen, BY THE PILOTS, and landed somewhere. We will not find the black box, well, maybe on ebay.

Re:Elephant in the room

[Anonymous Coward]

> It is an extremely unlikely event.

This disappearance was also an extremely unlikely event. It happened to just one flights out of thousands.

Stop trying to see patterns in everything.

Re:Elephant in the room

[elbonia]

Your theory makes no sense. For it to land somewhere it would need to fly into the airspace of country. So which one would just let some unidentified aircraft enter it's airspace let alone land on a runway without saying anything? The only place you can fly for hours without being picked up by radar is over the ocean.

Re:Elephant in the room

[vux984]

America, when it flew into Pakistan to pick up Bin Laden, managed to skirt Pakistani radar.

Not in a Boeing 777.

Re:Elephant in the room

[elbonia]

The US used custom Black Hawk helicopters that were designed for radar evasion. Not only that, helicopters are about 1/10 the size of a 777 and hover a few hundred feet above the ground using terrain to hide their signature.

"Also, some governments like Pakistan may be involved in the disappearance."
Have you looked at a map of southeast Asia? Do you know how many countries would also have to be involved in order to get the plane from Malaysia to Pakistan? The plane doesn't have the necessary fuel reserves to fly the known flight path, then deep into the Andaman sea, then to arc around India but be hundreds of miles away to avoid radar, and then cut through the Arabian sea into Pakistan. The only way for the plane to make it to Pakistan is for it to cut through the airspace of several countries including India. Why would all of those countries, especially India, all couloute together and do that?

Re:Elephant in the room

[toddestan]

They could land it in the ocean. It would be tricky, especially in the open ocean, but it would be possible to land the airplane more or less intact. If there was something (or someone) they were interested in, they would have plenty of time to retrieve it/them and transfer it to a boat (or a submarine?) The plane would sink after some time, but since it wouldn't have broken up there would be no debris to be found.

Re:What about co-pilot? Or passengers?

[Rich0]

So, flip off a few switches, set the autopilot for a new course, and go read a book until you run out of fuel.

What happened to the OTHER pilot who would notice you doing one or more of those things, certainly within an hour noticing on a map they were headed the wrong way even if they missed everything else you did. And how would a co-pilot miss the turn you performed even if he was not in the cabin?

Perhaps he was complicit. Perhaps he was clunked over the head.

Also you would have to turn off the entertainment system for every passenger because that ALSO lets them see a map of where they are going. Which means every stewardess is going to be beating on your door for seven hours straight to get you to turn back on the entertainment system.

Just tell them it is broken, and it will be serviced when you land. I can't imagine an Asian airline tolerates stewardesses who talk back.

It's not at all simple to just head a plane elsewhere and not have a lot of people notice. It takes a lot of work to pull that off for any length of time.

What are the passengers going to do about it? Stage a revolt? Breaking down the door would be pretty hard, and the captain could always just depressurize the cabin - just takes two switches to do it. The captain might just do that anyway if his goal is suicide.

Re:"Closure" not worth 53M

[quantaman]

Sorry, but any reasonable person knows they are all dead. It's not worth $53M to find out what we already know - that the pilot and/or co-pilot went on a suicide mission to kill everyone on board.

We don't know that.

And I'm not sure it's accurate to say it's not worth $53M for closure, a good portion of the planet would like to know what happened. There's also the question of what went wrong, plane crashes are rare, which means they're invaluable from a data perspective. Say discovering the cause of this crash allows us to avert on average 1/4 of a future crash, 50 people is about $1,000,000/person, that's well below the standard $2,000,000/person you see thrown around.

Millions in additional cost or simply allocated?

[innocent_white_lamb]

How many of those millions being spent on the search are costs that would not otherwise be incurred in the normal course of business? If Johnny Rescue is flying his plane or sitting around shooting pool and watching TV while waiting for a call, his salary is still being paid. Same for things like fuel: if it's not used in an actual situation, would it otherwise still be used in a training exercise?

I suspect that a large portion of the cost of this search isn't an actual additional cost; this is just a convenient place to park the budget.

Re:But Terrizm!

[Giant Electronic Bra]

You don't turn around, you vector for the nearest runway long enough to stop on and scream for help! There wasn't so much as a single SOS from this aircraft, yet it made several turns and altitude changes, which wouldn't happen with an aircraft that was flying uncontrolled. It just doesn't really add up. Its also VERY unlikely a 777 would continue to fly at all after electrical system damage so extensive that its ACARS, transponder, and all radio systems failed and the flight crew was either killed or completely unable to enter the cockpit. That would require quite a weird and selective type of damage.

How about a hack? Software could do all of that stuff and is a lot more believable than a fire...

Okham is very fast racer

[TrollstonButterbeans]

And the fail is you misspelled "misspelt" attempting to do a spelling correction.

The real truth is that Occam didn't have a razor, those didn't get invented until several centuries later, and that a correct translation is "Occam's Lathe" but the Greek translation to German got mistranslated into English, as I'm sure you heard, and so we go ....

And so goes history ...

Re:Okham is very fast racer

[smittyoneeach]

Personal foul, 15 yard penalty for Type I Error when attempting to correct spelling. Repeat the down.

Re:Okham is very fast racer

[sjames]

He didn't need one. Squirrels chewed his beard off as he slept. I know it's true because the Internet said so!

Re:Okham is very fast racer

[seyyah]

And the fail is you misspelled "misspelt" attempting to do a spelling correction.

Seriously? You really didn't know?

Re:Okham is very fast racer

[mooingyak]

I appreciate the nod, though I've never stated it happened while he slept.

Re:Okham is very fast racer

[sjames]

Clearly hamsters altered the database after I made my comment.

Not that hard

[Giant Electronic Bra]

The perpetrator (pilot or co-pilot) simply waits for his opposite to go take a leak. Evidence is the event happened right after the sign-off with Malaysian ATC, a good time to imagine someone got up and left the cockpit. The perp then locks the cabin door and can do anything they want from then on, everyone else is just along for the ride. So he cuts cabin air, puts on his mask, climbs to 45,000 ft for a few minutes (not really necessary but maybe he's just being thorough, or maybe he doesn't even do that). Anyway, he's now got a 777 to himself and proceeds to lay in a course for the most god-forsaken part of the southern ocean.

Honestly, how hard is this? Its not like people expect this kind of thing. Its even possible a passenger could have done it. The cockpit door would be closed, but again someone may have come out into the cabin, a sudden unexpected rush by someone strong and quick with some training, they could quite plausibly seize the cockpit and then the same scenario plays out.

Re:Not that hard

[radarskiy]

The flight deck crew have keys to open the door.

Re:But Terrizm!

[AK Marc]

The French airliner (AF447) was flown to its destruction by the flight crew over a few minutes, with plenty of opportunity to call, and they never did. They were too busy crashing to tell anyone they were crashing.

Re:But Terrizm!

[Billly Gates]

Because if it flew in the northern arc China, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and other countries would have detected it in their radars

100 foam plastic balls of orange color

[Max_W]

Why about 100 foam plastic balls of orange color with a plastic orange flag and LED light (blinking for 3-4 months after contact with water) cannot be placed inside the fuselage on an aircraft which costs hundreds of millions?

The size could be of a tennis ball, an additional weight and cost almost zero.

Re:100 foam plastic balls of orange color

[mmell]

Better yet - mount one flight recorder externally, designed to detach under certain circumstances (acceleration beyond aircraft design limits, transponder code 7500/7600/7700 set, manual ejection of the log buoy, etc.). Design the damned thing to deploy a parachute upon launch and to float if it hits water. Try to make it tough enough to survive hitting land at speed.

Re:100 foam plastic balls of orange color

[Anonymous Coward]

All your suggestions are great and doable, but you forget one little thing: you are optimising the least likely case, planes are not gone missing every weekend. This is like taking a videogame and optimizing the hell out of a function which only provides a 0.1 framerate percent boost. Money is better spent devising mechanisms to prevent this kind of "missing airplane despite all of the technology" from happening again.

Re:100 foam plastic balls of orange color

[CaptainStumpy]

Why about 100 foam plastic balls of orange color with a plastic orange flag and LED light (blinking for 3-4 months after contact with water) cannot be placed inside the fuselage on an aircraft which costs hundreds of millions? The size could be of a tennis ball, an additional weight and cost almost zero.

This is a great thought. If something like this works it would save tens of millions.

Re:100 foam plastic balls of orange color

[Overzeetop]

Great idea...and it's already been tested an priced. Just $60,000 per aircraft for a known-working system.

With roughly 31,000 commercial passenger aircraft in use, that's about 1,800,000,000 (1.8 Billion) dollars to equip. You could mount searches for 35 lost planes for that money, and a plane goes missing (of this magnitude) once every 3-4 years. So about a 120-150 year payback period, or about 3-4x the life span of the aircraft in question.

Re:100 foam plastic balls of orange color

[mmell]

Yeah, you're right. Remind me, what's the primary function of the flight data recorders?

Oh, right - they're to handle the edge case of an unanticipated and catastrophic failure of the overall system that is an aircraft.

Money is better spent devising mechanisms to prevent this

Yeah, 'cuz the flight data recorders have always been easy to recover when airplanes crash. So tell me - without the data from the "black boxes", where do we go to learn how to prevent future incidents? My suggestion shouldn't cost too insanely much (even when compared against only one jumbo jet getting lost), should significantly enhance our ability to rapidly recover at least the flight data leading up to the unexpected event. Even if a hijacker or terrorist made jettisoning the log bouy their first order of business, that flight recorder would tell us that it was manually ejected. Even the retrofit process shouldn't prove too expensive, I would think?

Or perhaps you have a vested interest in seeing to it that nothing is done to prevent this from happening again? *looks suspiciously at Anonymous Blowhard*

Re:100 foam plastic balls of orange color

[mmell]

I'll use your own math - how much are those hundreds of lives worth? How about the potentially thousands of lives which could be saved?

Re:100 foam plastic balls of orange color

[drolli]

Because they need batteries?

Re:100 foam plastic balls of orange color

[Overzeetop]

It doesn't matter. They're dead either way; the question is how much it's worth to recover the bodies.

There are 11 million flights in the US alone every year. You claim that potentially thousands of lives could be saved, but you haven't stated how. You're presuming (1) that this crash will yield some amazing insight into flight safety that was never before considered and is easily correctable. In all likelihood it's the result of a combination of system failure and human error - not some magic force we've never considered. The chance of finding this one aircraft and the information gleaned from the wreckage to be of unique and revolutionary to the safety of air travel - something which can improve on the 0.999998 reliability of commercial aircraft (based on 2012 US statistics - 23 incidents involving fatalities for 11 million flights) - is very nearly zero.

Re:100 foam plastic balls of orange color

[Max_W]

OK, no batteries and no blinking LED lights (though it is doable and much cheaper than 100 million USD), just 100 orange foam plastic balls with an aircraft's serial number.

Still it is easier to spot than and aluminum wing or a passenger's suitcase on the bottom of the ocean.

But hubris!

[dbIII]

It's showing that we are merely human and can lose track of a large aircraft despite modern technology.

Re:But Terrizm!

[dbIII]

However, it is just as likely a pilot bent on suicide or something

Or a fire and a divert to another airport that didn't make it.

Oh, and he switched off the transponder and ACARS - that is just a few switches

Or some electrical breakers as in a procedure for containing an electrical fire.

Correction!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's $53 Million to TRY to find MH370.

Re:But Terrizm!

[dbIII]

From reading the timeline of events with QF32 after it lost an engine and a lot of control systems, it was some minutes after the engine blew up that they took time to radio in and that was with four pilots on board (two trainers there to do a flight review). They appear to have been a bit busy trying to work out how to stop the situation getting worse in the short term.

Re:But Terrizm!

[WaffleMonster]

Seriously: a major airplane "disappears" despite evidence that it wasn't really crashed. Everybody's wondering who dunnit and how, and whether or not it will become another impromptu bomb.

Every failure, mistake or design induced error you can't explain can quite often be blamed on malice. In the absence of detailed evidence there is almost always a path whereby evil human action can cause result x.

See also blame the compiler, lucky cosmic ray strike on wrong program bits, faulty hardware, magic dragons, unicorns, god.

When reasoning about what could happen when you don't really have any evidence it is important to appreciate the dangers of invoking explanations that could plausibly apply in just about any situation.

Devices like hanlon's razor exist to protect us from jumping to what are more often than not both easy and incorrect conclusions.

Re:Two More Things

[dbIII]

the fire left intact for seven hours the circuitry that responds to the satellite pings but nothing else

An inability of other communications systems to operate in no way implies that everything else is out. I suggest applying at least some thought instead of going for such all or nothing bullshit.

most expensive?

[the_Bionic_lemming]

What would the Amelia Earhart' search cost in today's dollars when you factor in all of the historic effort?

20 years from now, if a jet goes missing, it'll be the most expensive search in history.

The same as if another massive Hurricane hits in a populated area 20 years from now It will be the most expensive in history.

Heck, if inflation keeps up, 70 years from now if a factory burns down, the cost will dwarf the famous chicago fire simply because the reporters will be intellectually dishonest and just make sure that the cost will lack any simple comparison of monetary value and effort over a period of time.

Re:most expensive?

[mdsolar]

Good point. A lot of documentary costs too on that one. Another aspect is that there is more to throw at something like this now than in the past. China has been building its Navy and has more capabilities than it used to.

Re:But Terrizm!

[Macman408]

If it's an electrical fire (or if the pilots think it might be), they would turn off all the electrical systems; so ACARS, transponder, and radio are gone. Meanwhile, they're trying to extinguish the fire - it's still under control, they're just unable to communicate for fear that the electrical systems are causing the fire. And before they can either restore partial electrical systems or land, they become incapacitated by smoke.

Screaming for help is not a top priority. The priority is Aviate, Navigate, Communicate; first, you fly the plane, because that gives you time to do everything else. Then, you figure out where you're going; if you fail at this, you might end up somewhere unexpected, but at least you're alive. Finally, you communicate; if you're alive, it would probably be useful to tell somebody where you are and what's going on. Telling ATC that your plane is on fire and you're about to die of smoke inhalation is useless - FIRST you get the smoke and fire under control, at least long enough for you to navigate to an airport or piece of flat ground. Once that is manageable, THEN you communicate your distress. Even if they had communicated their distress early on, there's nothing that could have been done; there's no way for firefighters to board the plane and extinguish the fire while in midair, obviously.

If you listen to the "Miracle on the Hudson" ATC recording, the pilot is very brief and succinct; he communicates that he lost both engines and is returning, then that he is unable to return, then asks what the airport is on his right side, and then that he can't make it to that airport either and is heading for the Hudson River. There's lots of dead air when ATC asks him a question and he doesn't have time to respond.

I think the fire scenario is a pretty reasonable explanation, but it's by no means the only possibility.

Re:But Terrizm!

[thegarbz]

And if it flew south it would have either crashed into the ocean (most likely) or landed in Australia and been noticed (it hasn't) or landed on some tiny island in the middle of nowhere (actually crashed on the island, given none of the islands in that part of the world have flat land thanks to being formed by volcanic movement.

Sorry to break it to you but whatever terrorist conspiracies are about, the plane is most probably at the bottom of a very deep ocean.

Re:But Terrizm!

[GrahamCox]

Except that the person in question was William of Ockham, a place in Surrey, England. Which is spelled 'Ockham' still. 'Occam' seems like a mediaeval spelling and things have changed a fair bit since then.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_of_ockham

Re:But Terrizm!

[GrahamCox]

Here we go. How's that tinfoil hat looking? From here: pretty silly, but don't let me stop you. Honestly, this is how crazy conspiracy theories are born, and you're obviously the sort of credulous idiot who spreads 'em.

If you want to see just how silly this is, have a look at a real conspiracy; say TWA 800. It's obviously a cover-up of some sort, and everyone who's looked at the evidence open-mindedly and in detail can see that. The problem with conspiracies in real life is that they leak like sieves, and it's simply impossible to keep them quiet. At the end of the day however, those involved just deny, deny, deny (not even plausibly) and in the end they know that people will just give up and go back to their lives.

MH370 will almost certainly turn out to be a tragic accident or act of sabotage, and not a conspiracy. There's absolutely no evidence for a conspiracy, though there's plenty for one almighty cock-up by the authorities in its aftermath. If I'm wrong (and that means proof), I'll gladly retract this and eat my hat as well.

So many guesses. May I apply reverse logic?

[mmell]

Were the disappearance of MH370 the result of a terrorist plot, it is a near certainty that some terrorist group would have claimed credit for the disappearance. After all, what good is committing a terrorist act if nobody is left alive to be terrorized?

During a cockpit fire, the pilots may have intentionally disabled one or more of the aircraft's systems. Presumably, they would have attempted to reactivate some of those systems (at least communications, or at the very least the flight transponder). Incidentally, the codes "7500", "7600" and "7700" are all well known to any qualified pilot - even a private pilot with no additional qualifications. I would expect the flight crew to at least attempt to set a transponder code of "7600" or "7700" (radios down / general emergency). I would not expect the flight crew to leave the transponder off - especially when flying through potentially hostile airspace. Nothing like a North Korean SSAM deployed at your unidentified jumbo jet to ruin your day. In any event, a cockpit fire severe enough to knock out comms and navs would almost certainly have downed the aircraft immediately, as I doubt seriously that damage would be confined to those two sets of systems.

An electronic failure sufficient to completely eliminate all communications and navigational systems would similarly have downed the aircraft almost immediately. If a failure were widespread enough to eliminate all comms, the likelihood of aircraft control is practically nil (those things are fly-by-wire; no electronics, no flight control). Incidentally, I don't even want to calculate the odds of such a failure - it's possible, but so is a thousand pounds of gold spontaneously appearing in my living room. I don't even want to do math with powers of ten that high. There are multiple independent systems which would have to fail simultaneously.

Any hacker capable (by hardware or software means) of downing a jumbo jet this way wouldn't keep quiet - like a terrorist, I can only imagine such an individual immediately telling the world how brilliant he/she is, probably while attempting to maintain anonymity.

I'm left with this: perhaps ( perhaps ) one of the pilots suffered some form of mental disability or illness and took advantage of an opportunity to comandeer the aircraft. The evidence seems to indicate positive aircraft control throughout its ill-fated flight, implying that both the aircraft and the pilot flying her were operational.

There are other scenarios which might explain all of the currently available evidence; however, I believe 'agnogenic systems failure' is the only appropriate conclusion that can be reached based on the current evidence.

Re:But Terrizm!

[digitalchinky]

I'm a former electronic warfare drone (Australian Navy) - I worked with radar and satellite primarily, though I also covered a myriad of other RF systems.

With your logic you also need to discount the southerly route not just because Malaysia and Thailand did nothing, but also because Indonesia never saw the aircraft. Further, Australian agencies have said they never saw anything even though the entire region is bathed in OTH radar. Not a peep from Keeling or Christmas island.

It seems more logical (from my background) that the aircraft went north, though until it is found it would be far more appropriate to assume nothing. The Inmarsat analysis is interesting, but it isn't boiler plate and the lack of intermediate ping data fuels suspicion.

Re:But Terrizm!

[mooingyak]

wonder what that dude used to shave...

That money could pay for a lot of tracking systems

[aqui]

The NY times has an article about how aircraft have lots of communication technologies on board but no airlines have opted to put trackers on their planes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03...

It would be relatively easy to install systems that send basic location, speed direction and basic airplane health data at reasonable intervals with a reasonable cost.

Its too bad that likely legislation will be needed to get airlines to do something. I have an issue with the fact that they don't have to pay fines or help pay for the search when a disaster occurs. It means that a crash could be a profitable event for them (for example if the plane was more than adequately insured, and they had over capacity in the industry, aka liquidation).

If as a person I can buy a Personal Locator Beacon for $200 to broadcast my location to satellite in an emergency for rescue, the technology is clearly there and affordable.

Re:Cool! $50 million USD = $54 million!

[mooingyak]

Would probably have helped to specify in the summary. My first four thoughts on seeing that were:

1. Someone meant to use the Euro symbol. But I'm pretty sure 1 Euro > 1 USD currently. So that's not it.
2. Inflation adjusted dollars.
3. Canadian dollars?.
4. Look through the comments and see who else wondered the same thing.

Re:But Terrizm!

[HeavyDevelopment]

Is the tinfoil hat fitting a little tight tonight?

Re:But Terrizm!

[wonkey_monkey]

I'm a former electronic warfare drone

The system goes on-line April 2nd, 2014. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 06:25 a.m. eastern time, April 5th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

But it's too late. It's already posted on Slashdot.

The cost is not entirely relevant

[Z00L00K]

Even if the money dedicated to this search has reached that sum it is not wasted money, in some cases this involves services with a continuous running cost that would have been 'idle' at standby anyway.

The value of this is an exercise in cooperation, refining search methods and when the wreck finally is found it may be possible to find out what really happened. Unlikely at it seems it may even end up being caused by a meteorite - as was caught on camera by a Norwegian skydiver.

Re:But Terrizm!

[wonkey_monkey]

Here we go. How's that tinfoil hat looking? From here: pretty silly, but don't let me stop you. Honestly, this is how crazy conspiracy theories are born, and you're obviously the sort of credulous idiot who spreads 'em.

If you want to see just how silly this is, have a look at a real conspiracy; say TWA 800. It's obviously a cover-up of some sort

Really? No irony alarms going off here at all? Are you sure GP doesn't just have his credulity threshold set a little lower than yours?

The problem with conspiracies in real life is that they leak like sieves, and it's simply impossible to keep them quiet.

At the end of the day however, those involved just deny, deny, deny (not even plausibly) and in the end they know that people will just give up and go back to their lives.

Those denials also occurs when there isn't a conspiracy. NASA's continuing position that the moon landings weren't faked isn't evidence of a conspiracy leaking like a sieve. That would be when some actual convincing evidence turns up.

Even Houdini can't pull this off !

[Taco Cowboy]

There are way too many fishy things that happened to flight MH370

1. There was an "airspace territory gap" of 3 to 4 minutes in between the airspace of Malaysia and that of Vietnam, over South China Sea.

The last communication from that plane was from the co-pilot, not the pilot. And his message was "Goodbye Malaysia, Goodbye MH370" and that message was uttered just before the transponder and all comm channels were shut.

Once the transponder and all the comm channels were severed the aircraft remained silent for another 7 to 8 hours

2. After the transponder been switched off and all the comm channels cut, the plane took a turn to the West, purposely flying just south of the border of Southern Thailand the Northern Malaysia.

And during that trip from the South China Sea to the northern tip of the Malaccan Strait the aircraft was flown up to 45,000 feet, way over the limit of the safety limit for Boeing 777, and the aircraft flew at that altitude for a full 23 minutes.

At that height, passengers in the fuselage will experience a lack of oxygen.

Even if the emergency oxygen respiration devices dropped down and the passengers put them on, that oxygen supply would only last for 10 minutes - Which meant, all people inside the fuselage would have extreme difficulties getting oxygen for 13 long minutes

Many of them would die. Those didn't would have passed out.

3. When the plane reached the northern tip of the Malaccan Strait it dropped down to 25,000 feet, and then turned north to the Andaman Sea.

At that place, the plane "hug" the Northern Sumatran coastline and flew from the North East side of the Sumatran Island to the North West.

And from that juncture, the plane could have go Northward, or South.

4. Now they are saying the plane went South, based on the "Ping" signals that they received.

Since that "Ping" signal is not a complicated signal, it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to "clone" that signal - and if there was someone behind the hijacking of that plane, they could have done so.

5. Why ? Well ... to lead the investigators into a false trail, a wild goose chase.

There was a comment embedded in the following link allude to such a plot - http://www.themalaysianinsider...

Let me quote part of that comment:

... the possibilities that the aircraft had safely landed in an undisclosed location, and the people (individual or teams of people) who were responsible for the hijacking of that plane either ripped that "ping device" out and then carried that "ping device" (which was still "pinging") on another aircraft and then flown it to the middle of nowhere in the southern Indian Ocean, and then, either drop that "ping device" down into the ocean, or simply shut that "ping device" down, so i couldn't ping no more.

One more possibility is that those people might have "cloned" the "ping signals" using another device that broadcast that "ping signal", and then, when that Boeing 777 had landed safely on that undisclosed location, they immediately flew that "clone ping device" and, did what I have outlined above.

They did that to divert attention, and to create a false lead to the world which will come looking for that plane.

What happened to this Boeing 777 has so many gaping holes yet to be answered - like

* Why it flew for 7 to 8 hours without anyone actively looking for it ?

* Why they purposely switched off the transponder and the comm channels but left that "ping device" kept on broadcasting the "ping signals" ? Is it part of the plan to mislead the investigator ?

* Where is that plane right now ? Where could it possibly had landed ? Thailand ? Laos ? The Philippines ? Malaysia ? Indonesia ? Myanmar ? Bangladesh ? Cambodia ?

Re:Even Houdini can't pull this off !

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It seems bizarre to assume that the sketchy radar data provided by malaysian military is reliable but the publicly-available inmarsat data is somehow not.

It was my impression that the Inmarsat "tracking" was based on using a device for a purpose it wasn't designed for, and that it relied on constraint solving from a scalar response using a number of assumptions. That is why radar and GPS data is considered reliable but the Inmarsat inferences are not: it's the same reason why a hammer is considered a good (safe, reliable, predictable) hammering tool but a rock isn't.

Re:Even Houdini can't pull this off !

[tapi0]

Really? There's so many inaccuracies it'd be easier to say what you'd got right in that post..... erm, that's it.

No, they don't !

[Taco Cowboy]

The flight deck crew have keys to open the door

After the 9/11 incident in NYC the cockpit of most commercial aircrafts have had their doors upgraded.

No one but the people inside the cockpit can open the door, and the door is thick enough to withstand normal bang and kick and whatnot.

Cabin crews won't have the keys, or else terrorists (they are on board) could have gotten the keys from the crews and open the security door to the cockpit.

Re:No, they don't !

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Exactly. The WHOLE POINT of the door is to make it impossible for anyone to get into the flight deck no matter what.

Re:No, they don't !

[radarskiy]

"Cabin crews won't have the keys"

I specifically said *flight deck crew*, not cabin crew. You are correct that cabin crew no longer have keys. C.f. the regulation that would apply in the US: 14 CFR 129.28(d)(1) http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr...

"No person other than a person who is assigned to perform duty on the flight deck may have a key to the flight deck door that will provide access to the flightdeck. "

This does no prohibit the flight deck crew from having keys, which would prevent the scenario where non-complicit flight crew is locked out.

Re:No, they don't !

[radarskiy]

Note that I keep saying "keys" but some planes have an electronic keypad where you enter a combination. Here is a picture of a Airbus 380 flight deck door, with the keypad visible to the right of the door: http://i40.tinypic.com/2vuizut...

Re:But Terrizm!

[Richard_at_work]

AF447 never made any calls because the crew didn't have anything to call about, so its hardly a good example - see the Swiss flight over the North Atlantic some years ago that crashed while fighting a fire on board for ages while they diverted, they were making a load of calls about their situation.

Re:But Terrizm!

[flyingsquid]

I think the fire scenario is a pretty reasonable explanation, but it's by no means the only possibility.

The fire scenario has been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point. Radar shows that the plane made multiple turns and changes in altitude, meaning that it was being actively piloted. Here's what we currently do know: the ACARS transmitter was turned off, the plane made a sharp turn to the west and climbed to 45,000 feet. Radar then shows the plane descending to 23,000 feet. The plane turns again and climbs, heading out over the Indian Ocean. At this point, radar contact is lost; however the satellite pings indicate that the plane ended up in the southern Indian Ocean, which means it had to turn again. So after the transmitter is turned off, the plane made at least three turns and changed altitude three times. Someone was definitely at the controls until radar contact was lost.

Re:But Terrizm!

[InvalidError]

While a fire MIGHT explain some of it, I have a hard time with that theory: this is a fly-by-wire plane so if control wiring gets damaged by a fire, I would not expect it to continue flying very long unless said fire only affected communications between the cockpit and electronics bay but if the fire only affected that, pilots would have quickly realized they were losing control over the plane much faster than anything covered in their flight manual can explain, leaving them little choice but to phone home and request assistance from Boeing engineers to recover control.

Also, as soon as pilots know they have a fire on-board that they cannot put out with 100% certainty, landing the plane reaches the top of their priority list pretty quickly and requesting diversion to the nearest airport preferably with full emergency services due to a fire emergency would be near the top of that procedure so pilots can focus on flying/landing and ground crews can get ready.

With the number of smoke detectors in planes, pilots should have known about the (hypothetical) fire long before instruments and controls started failing and I have a hard time how an event severe enough to take out all external communications practically all at once would have left the plane flight-worthy for hours.

Re:But Terrizm!

[flyingsquid]

There's one thing I will agree with: to figure out the fate of the plane we have to get inside the pilot's head and try to figure out what he's doing. The trick here is that based on the available facts, we have to stop thinking in terms of someone who's trying desperately to save the plane and his passengers, and try to understand someone's whose goal is to do the opposite.

One thing to think about- where would you crash a plane if your goal was not simply to crash a plane, but to conceal its fate? Whoever took the plane seems to have wanted its resting place to remain a mystery. They must have known that the path of the plane would be tracked by military radar, so by heading northwest until they were off radar, and then turning southeast, they must have wanted to mislead searchers about the direction of the flight. And by sending the plane into the deeps of the Indian Ocean, they must have hoped that the wreckage would never be found. But one thing didn't make sense here. If you were going to go to this kind of length to lose a plane forever, where would you crash it? Not southwest of Australia; the sea there is deep but its a fairly broad and flat ocean floor. Yes the search area here is huge and the seas are rough, but if the wreckage ends up on a flat expanse of seafloor, it's going to be pretty easy to spot on sonar. It would take a long time to find, but eventually it would be found. No, you wouldn't want an abyssal plain. You'd go for the deepest, most rugged stretch you could find. You'd pilot the plain straight into an ocean trench.

Then a curious thing happened. The search area was changed, again, for something like the third time. The new data suggests the plane didn't fly as far, and instead of crashing southwest of Australia, it crashed almost due west of Australia. At first this seems to suggest the search will be easier. But if you look on the maps, you'll see that the new search area overlaps an ocean trench- the Diamantina Trench, the deepest point in the entire Indian Ocean. Its maximum depth is 8,000 meters/26,000 feet. Eight kilometers. Five miles. Its rugged terrain, which will conceal the plane and scatter any noise from the sonar beacon. Plus, the Navy's pinger locator can only go about 6,000 meters down, and the range of the black box ping signal is only about a mile, so if the plane is at the deepest part of the trench, it's may well be out of the range of sonar equipment. On top of everything, the terrain is going to be unstable; unlike a flat abyssal plain where the sediments accumulate slowly and don't shift, the mountainous terrain of the Diamantina Trench will be subject to slumps and debris flows, with avalanches of fine mud that could easily bury a plane.

Up until now, it seemed like a good bet that the plane would be found, eventually. After all the Titanic was sitting on the seafloor for the better part of a century before it was discovered. But if the pilot really did crash the plane into the Diamantina Trench, there's a real chance that it's lost for good.

Re:But Terrizm!

[Wild Wizard]

60 seconds from boom to PAN radio call

https://www.atsb.gov.au/public...

Running amok

[12WTF$]

Malay culture blowback
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Re:That money could pay for a lot of tracking syst

[u38cg]

Insurance never covers your whole costs - its an extremely important principle that insurance should never make the insured event as desirable as it not happening. Besides, crashes are not good for your passenger numbers.

Re:But Terrizm!

[rasmusbr]

the only explanation that makes sense to me is okham's racer: plane was flying to beijing, a fire broke out or depressurization in the cabin or hold. pilot turned around to go back to the nearest airport, but they ran out of oxygen and it became a ghost ship on autopilot until it ran out of fuel in the indian ocean. the altitude changes is consistent with a fire because apparently one way to fight a fire on an airplane is to go really high where there is less oxygen.

But hull losses in mid-flight are extremely uncommon, most major accidents happen in the first or last few minutes of the flight or even on the ground at the airport. I've been told that the singe most common class of reasons for hull losses in mid-flight is "deliberate action by a human". If that's true, then Occam's razor would guide us towards the least complicated explanation involving deliberate human action. But all of those hypotheses become extremely complicated once you scratch below the surface. Like, why would anyone bent on terror or suicide (or both) stay in the air until fuel ran out when they could have just crashed the plane into the ocean right away?

My Occam's razor-like hypothesis is that the plane took off, then something went wrong (possibly but not necessarily involving deliberate human action) and then someone onboard flew the plane until fuel exhaustion. That's really all we can say until the black boxes are found.

Wonder If Attack Subs are Searching?

[careysub]

Just about the most sophisticated, most mobile passive underwater sound detection systems in existence are the spherical arrays mounted in modern nuclear attack subs. In addition to being an important task - locating the missing flight data recorder that bears on U.S. national security (international terrorism being, well, international) - it looks like a good exercise to sharpen the crews passive sonar search skills.

There has now been plenty of time for an attack sub to reach the area from anywhere in the world.

Sub operations are routinely highly classified, so I would not expect to hear about this if it were happening. If they find something we might hear about it, or instead "laundered" cueing information might get passed to the official search teams.

Re:Wonder If Attack Subs are Searching?

[tapi0]

probably are loitering around, but one thing to bear in mind is that in an area like that under intense S&R ops then any government should notify what they're doing to all parties, to avoid polluting the area with false echoes etc . More importantly If one government has subs in the area, then others will and pretty much all they end up doing is tracking each other to improve their skills/get latest data on acoustic signatures etc. etc. And the more accurate surface ships may get orders behind the scenes to pay more attention to the subs than the search.

Re:So many guesses. May I apply reverse logic?

[careysub]

Were the disappearance of MH370 the result of a terrorist plot, it is a near certainty that some terrorist group would have claimed credit for the disappearance....

By "near certainty", do you mean a 14% chance? That is the actual fraction of terrorist incidents that have credible claimaints for responsibility.

If the pilot/co-pilot had secretly become radicalized, and acted on their own - there would be no one to claim responsibility.

Also, is not the unexplained disappearance of large airliner with hundreds of people, very unsettling? Maybe, even a little bit terrifying? Mission accomplished.

Re:But Terrizm!

[Giant Electronic Bra]

The telling thing is the time frame. I'd buy the fire hypothesis if all of these maneuvers happened in a period of a few minutes and then the plane simply cruised off in some random direction and eventually crashed. That's not what happened though, the plane turned, changed altitude several times over a period of something like 40 minutes, AVOIDING RADAR, and then finally turned onto a course directly for the most remote part of the ocean. Fire simply doesn't explain that.

Fire also doesn't explain which things failed.

Re:But Terrizm!

[dbIII]

I stand corrected. That was one busy minute.

Re:Cool! $50 million USD = $54 million!

[rubycodez]

then the summary should have said 54M AUD (50M USD)

way to fail, jackaroo

Most of these "costs" are incurred all the time

[mspohr]

Most of the costs listed in the article are for aircraft and ships of the military and coast guard of several countries. It does cost a lot to build and man these ships but these costs are already budgeted and incurred. Much better to have these assets doing something useful like respond to an actual emergency than sit around idle or go on training missions or "good will tours" to show the flag.
I imagine the only extra cost attributable to this search is a bit more fuel.

Re:Most of these "costs" are incurred all the time

[Overzeetop]

" the only extra cost attributable to this search is a bit more fuel."

Your definition of "a bit" makes me think you must work in the government. Otherwise, you'd say shit-ton of fuel. This is way the fuck out in the middle of the ocean - nothing is close and everything they use to get close burns a huge amount of fuel to get there. Unless you compare it to, say, the fuel budget of the US Military, which one of the few places where it wouldn't seem like a lot.

Re:Most of these "costs" are incurred all the time

[mspohr]

TFA is quoting about $500,000 a day for the HMAS Twoowoomba (and also the HMAS Success). I doubt much of that cost is for fuel. Most of it is bloated military "overhead".

Re:volunteer instead?

[Overzeetop]

You're kidding right? How come you haven't ponied up a couple hundred grand for Jet A to send out a recon plane? How about you give you give up the next month of your salary to go hunting?

Re:But Terrizm!

[seyyah]

Except that the person in question was William of Ockham, a place in Surrey, England. Which is spelled 'Ockham' still.

Except it's Occam's Razor.

Re:But Terrizm!

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Exactly, they were having some weird issue that they were trying to understand. They really didn't have anything to communicate with HQ ABOUT, and they had no idea that their actions were liable to cause the aircraft to stall, until it happened, at which point there was no time (or point) to calling for help.

OTOH a long drawn out fire that selectively cripples portions of the aircraft seems quite unlikely to have prevented any possibility of communicating. While it may be true that pilots 'fly first and talk later' they also generally call for help pretty quickly when they can. Its human nature if nothing else to want someone to know what's happening so they can share their predicament. Its not exactly HARD for a pilot to make a radio call. In fact the process of making a distress call is deliberately VERY simple and straightforward. It involves generally pushing a button and talking.

Re:But Terrizm!

[AK Marc]

They really didn't have anything to communicate with HQ ABOUT, and they had no idea that their actions were liable to cause the aircraft to stall, until it happened, at which point there was no time (or point) to calling for help.

They were in stall for minutes. When you see your altitude drop steadily from 30,000 ft to 0 ft, you can call in a mayday.

While it may be true that pilots 'fly first and talk later' they also generally call for help pretty quickly when they can. Its human nature if nothing else to want someone to know what's happening so they can share their predicament. Its not exactly HARD for a pilot to make a radio call. In fact the process of making a distress call is deliberately VERY simple and straightforward. It involves generally pushing a button and talking.

So why didn't AF447 call anyone? It took them minutes to fly the plane from cruising altitude into the ocean. And never once did they press the button.

Confused incompetent pilots will forget everything, like calling someone. And calm pilots will call in quickly. USA 1549 had a "long" conversation with the tower, and less than 1/10th the altitude from double engine failure to "crash" in the water.

Re:But Terrizm!

[Richard_at_work]

The issue with AF447 is that they disregarded *all* instrument readings, not just the ones they were trained to in the event of an air data mismatch. So they never even realised they were in danger, because they didn't think the rapidly declining numbers were true - remember that the descent was 1G, so they didn't even have any feeling of descent, which added to their mistrust of the data they had infront of them.

So as the other poster said, there was nothing to call someone about other than they didn't know what was going on, and they weren't about to admit that to everyone listening.

I wish they had mounted such a search...

[rainer_d]

for Evi Nemeth and the other passengers of the ship she was on.

Re:So many guesses. May I apply reverse logic?

[mmell]

Hmmm . . . I suppose if you count roadside IED's in Afghanistan and Iraq, yes only a small percentage of terrorist acts are claimed. I suppose you have evidence that there is a terrorist group responsible for this, then?

The mere disappearance of a jumbo jet is not especially terrifying to me. As to the other assertion, that a member of the flight crew may have become radicalized - okay. Once more, I assume there's evidence of this? If not, it seems unlikely at best. Possible, but unlikely (especially given the close scrutiny the flight crew have received since the disappearance). I still find a transitory mental aberration to be more likely than an intentional premeditated act.

And I still stand by my conclusion - there is simply not enough evidence yet to make even an educated guess as to the cause of the disappearance of MH370. Speculation is less than worthless here; it's actually an impediment to proper investigation and analysis of the situation.

Since you're already speculating wildly...

[mmell]

...just how was this accomplished? Really, I'd like to know. I might want to try it myself some day - not that I want to blow up a building, but I'll bet I could make a pretty penny selling a jumbo jet (slightly used, ignore the smell of death throughout the passenger cabin, we'll clean that up for you).

The act of terrorism has already come...

[mmell]

Dozens of A/C comments all insisting that this must be part of a terrorist plot. So tell me - shall we invade Afghanistan again? Or Iraq? They may not have had WMD's, but I'll be they have jumbo jets there.

Re:But Terrizm!

[Rich0]

However, it is just as likely a pilot bent on suicide or something

Or a fire and a divert to another airport that didn't make it.

What airport? They turned west towards nowhere, and then after a significant period of time heading out to sea they turned south towards an even bigger nowhere.

That is why everybody thinks it was deliberate. Autopilots don't do turns unless somebody tells them to (either by giving it a new heading to fly, or programming a course into the FMS).

Re:But Terrizm!

[Xylantiel]

Do you have references for that with real re-analysis of the radar data? Ones that aren't confused reporters citing "anonymous sources" that they might be misquoting. Reporters are really bad about leaving out little things like "maybe" or "under the assumption that..." which are night and day when eliminating possible options.

It seems more likely that the earlier analysis of the radar data mixed up the plane with another one after it got across the penisula. Also it has been said that there is quite a bit of uncertainty in the radar altitude measurements during the airplane's supposed altitude changes. Do you have a reference that actually discusses what the radar data can and cannot exclude in a technical way? The search is sure acting consistent with a plane that just flew on to the southwest unpiloted. Surely they have made some assumption about the behavior during this time in computing the current search area. What were those assumptions? I haven't seen any technical discussion of this, and would really like to.

Re:But Terrizm!

[GrahamCox]

Really? No irony alarms going off here at all? Are you sure GP doesn't just have his credulity threshold set a little lower than yours?
No. Have you read up on that case? I'm not a conspiracy-believing type, but in this one case there does seem to be something odd going on. Some very well-respected people think so, and have tried to make their ideas public, with actual evidence and eye-witness statements. Problem is, they get dismissed (by people like me, usually) as conspiracy nuts, and of course by all the usual suspects who appear to be involved. But the reason that that particular case is so convincing is precisely because the conspiracy cover-up has been so poorly executed, and "everybody knows" that lies are being told left, right and centre. That said, the actual reason for it hasn't been laid bare yet. In other words, there seems to be strong suspicion of a conspiracy, but nobody really knows why.

Re:But Terrizm!

[dbIII]

There's some pilots blogs about this that mention an alternative airport that it flew over almost immediately after the first turn. Despite all the noise at this point you could probably still find such things with google.

It had to be an NSA Software attack

[aberglas]

Come on, this is Slash dot.

The 777 is totally fly by wire. Control the computers and you control the plane. Like most other SCADA systems the security is rough. They probably do not actually connect the plane to the internet, but it does download flight info, software patches etc. over a radio link to the airline's computer, which is connected to computers that connect to the internet. Remember that Iran had an air gap that did not protect them from Stuxnet. And these days it probably downloads software patches directly from Boeing.

There are two parts to such an attack. First is to get control of the plane, second is to do something with it. The first would have been developed to do something very benign, or nothing at all. They could then just see if it worked on real planes knowing that it could do no harm. Might even use some Boeing installed back doors.

The second would be some semi-intelligent software that had rules to take over at international borders, fly along standard corridors until out of radar range then dump the plane in one of a number of pre determined locations. This would never be run out of a simulation environment.

Then some manager accidentally picked up the wrong files.

The only other plausible explanation was pilot suicide, and yet both pilots appear to be perfectly normal, balanced, individuals. So it must be the NSA. Stands to reason.

Re:But Terrizm!

[AK Marc]

- remember that the descent was 1G,

No, if it was 1g, they would have instantly noticed the fact they were weightless, and they took much longer to fall out of the sky than 1g descent.

So as the other poster said, there was nothing to call someone about other than they didn't know what was going on, and they weren't about to admit that to everyone listening.

They should have. In both cases.

Where Is It? MH370

[Jerome from Layton]

Most of the large trucking companies track their rigs 24/7 using a system similar to On-Star. There is at least one world-wide cellular phone system (Iridium) operating and there may be more. In any case, an aircraft as expensive as a Boeing 777 rates a tracking system. I would suggest a simple periodic reporter that would activate anytime an engine was in operation. They would all use the same channel was a common format [Aircraft ID, GPS Location, Altitude in Flight Level format]. The transmission length would be about one second and sent once every fifteen minutes. The system could be common access meaning anyone could see the moving spread sheet and, because a lot of people could use it, losing the data would not be a problem. Obviously, it would show up on the Internet. So, for example, you are in San Francisco and wondering where Flight 11 is? Visit the site and enter AA-11. You would see a list of the locations and altitudes starting with the latest and going back at fifteen minute intervals all the back to Boston Logan Airport. Where is the plane now? Draw a 125 mile circle around the last position and start looking.

Re:But Terrizm!

[stoatwblr]

One of the places where smoke detectors aren't (but probably should be), is the wheel wells. Yes, there are temperature sensors on the gear but that may not pick up a tyre smouldering due to underinflation.

Re:But Terrizm!

[stoatwblr]

He had a beard. All the other philospohers kept nicking his razor.

Re:But Terrizm!

[RockDoctor]

Why invent beard-chewing squirrels? Women have been pulling their private and semi-public hairs our by the roots for decades, so what is there to stop a man pulling his own beard out, one hair at a time?

Re:But Terrizm!

[mooingyak]

Explaining the joke here, but.... the idea is that we're shaving Ockham without using his razor.

Re:But Terrizm!

[RockDoctor]

I get the joke. Being a normally-bearded person who recently had to de-beard because of poison gas at work, I was poking fun at the popular convention that men should shave off their public pubic hair. Which is a task that I've always hated.