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Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Experts Unable To Replicate Inmarsat Analysis
McGruber (1417641) writes "The lynchpin of the investigation of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been the pings from the plane to one of Inmarsat's satellites. The pings are the sole evidence of what happened to the plane after it slipped out of radar contact. Without them, investigators knew only that the plane had enough fuel to travel anywhere within 3,300 miles of the last radar contact—a seventh of the entire globe. Inmarsat concluded that the flight ended in the southern Indian Ocean, and its analysis has become the canonical text of the Flight 370 search. It's the bit of data from which all other judgments flow—from the conclusive announcement by Malaysia's prime minister that the plane has been lost with no survivors, to the black-box search area, to the high confidence in the acoustic signals, to the dismissal by Australian authorities of a survey company's new claim to have detected plane wreckage. But scientists and engineers outside of the investigation have been working to verify Inmarsat's analysis and many say that it just doesn't hold up."
really?
The aircraft did not crash; it was hijacked by the US Government, and flown to Diego Garcia under remote control after all the passengers were killed by asphyxiation at 45,000 feet. After landing the plane was refuelled, its logos painted over/covered up, and its valuable cargo (next generation radios with SDR technology) removed. It then took off again and flew on to its final destination--probably Kandahar, Afghanistan--where it will be outfitted with a large bomb (read: nuke). It will then be flown into an American city to cause a 'false flag' attack which will be blamed on Iran, North Korea, etc, as a casus belli for World War 3.
I would tell you more but som....hang on, there's a knock at the door.
The author of the article claiming that experts cannot replicate the data appears to be the editor of a social science / STS journal, not by training an engineer. Although I don't myself know enough about the subject to be able to refute either the Inmarsat claims or this article's refutation, I think it's notable that the people supporting the claim are engineers who specialize in satellite stuff, while the person refuting the claim is what appears to be a philosopher; I'd also add that the author portrays himself as an "investigator working on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370", but this appears to be a self-assigned title rather than his position as part of any formal or professional investigation. Looking at the scholarship of the journal he edits, it appears to have some level of rigour--IE it does not appear to be a vanity publication, so I'm not trying to cast out the guy as a crank, just to caution that I think the strength and balance of the headline and the post here place an awful lot of confidence in the article's credibility.
If Inmarsat haven't released all of the data used in the analysis, why is anyone surprised that they can't recreate it?
Not so. These critics may or may not be correct when they raise several issues, including the plane seeming to be moving at a good clip before it was taking off. But on the most critical of factors, they're totally wrong:
"Recall that the Marco-Polo math alone doesn’t allow you to tell which direction pings are coming from. So how could Inmarsat claim to distinguish between a northern and southern path at all? The reason is that the satellite itself wasn’t stationary."
No, the slow drift of the satellite wasn't a factor. I've yet to hear Immarsat formal statement of their rationale, but their graph shows quite clearly what it was. Their reasoning hinges on the fact that the plane began its deviant flight above the latitude of the satellite. That is quite important.
If the plane flies northward along a relatively fixed course, the doppler shift will aways show it moving away (down doppler). However, it the plane flies southward on a steady course, there'll be a short time (one ping it turns out) when it is approaching the latitude of the satellite and thus giving a more up (or less down) doppler. That's what you see in the Immarsat chart. Once the aircraft has crossed the satellite's latitude, then its southward path will have it traveling away from the satellite just like the northern route. It's that notch DOWN at between 18:30 and 19:30 followed by a rise upward that says southbound.
That said the critics do raise some relevant issues and they do point out the Immarsat needs to release a detailed report with all their reasoning, so it can be more intelligently critiqued.
I've yet to see a reasonable explanation for the loss of telemetry and apparent maneuvers to avoid radar.
So far the implicit assumption is that whoever was at the controls failed in their plan and the plane crashed.
Considering the Indonesian 'navy' is a bunch of pirates, I would start by looking there.
We still don't know what was in the cargo hold or if there was a billionaire on board. Did that plane have a richer suite?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
40K people die every day of hunger and the while the USD 60M or more that were spent so far on this stupid search couldn't have prevented that, it would have helped a lot of people have another chance.
Either you say you care about the lives of people and then you just shake your head about this pointless waste of money or you don't care and then you wouldn't care about ML370 either. But you unless you're related or friends of anyone onboard that flight, you're just a for caring about the lives lost there and not about the people that die every day of hunger, war, and such...
Peter.
I think it's pretty interesting that a number of devices detected pings, but there is apparently (as per the article) nothing was found in the area where they heard the pings.
So what did they hear? How can you get a false positive on a listening device looking for a specific frequency?
I wonder if instead of just sending out pings, a black box when hitting water should send out a burst of broad spectrum very high powered radio waves that satellites around the globe could detect...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The satellite transponder is just an amplifier and a modulator, things go up one frequency and come down another frequency and louder. The satellite and the transmitter are in motion relative to each other and the receiver. Hence there is Doppler and my understanding is that the analysis of the Inmarsat data was based on this Doppler. So does Inmarsat record and retain sufficiently detailed information about every signal sent through their satellites such that they can deduce their findings from analysis of played back signals, or are they managing the receiver in this case and analyzing the log from the receiver.
Nullius in verba
In a world where spy satellites have 1m resolution, the fact that no country says they found anything within a few days, speaks loudest.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
If we're going to entertain the notion of a cover up, the most plausible theory in my mind is it was hijacked, and later intercepted by fighter jets from some country's air force and shot down. There's plenty of reasons for keeping that scenario a secret.
Sounds like the next time we'll hear about mh370, the plane will be on its way to a building near you...
There is a claim that would seem to open the door for that.
BREAKING: Lt. Gen. McInerney Says #MH370 Is In Pakistan – ‘I Got A Source That Confirmed It Yesterday’
Hopefully it is just another conspiracy theory.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Like the signal reflecting off the ocean below instead of coming directly from the aircraft.
The only sure way to is to duplicate the flight path with a similar size aircraft using the same Engines and monitoring stations, using similar SAT positions. Only this time use a plane with extended range 777-200LR(verses missing 777-200ER) with minimal payload&maximum fuel and/or safely replicate the flight path in sections.
Use the resulting SAT/GPS data to help calibrate mh377 final resting spot.
They are already writing their books, guaranteed
The entities that have the data are not credible and those who might be credible do not have all the data. What's a poor boy to do?
One thing to note, Georesoance did NOT find a plane. Further investigation into the company (though skipped over by the media outlets that got suckered by them) showed them to be just another shell company run by people with a long history of pseudoscience scams. They buy up defunct exploration companies in order to reuse the name, bilk some small investors that are eager to buy into the idea that a small pluky company has magic technology that 'the establishment' does not believe in.. usually ending up much poorer for the experience.
So basicly the media got fooled by some high tech psychics who normally would have been dismissed completely but somehow got just enough attention to be taken seriously.
Transponders were left on during 9/11.
if they allowed cell phones on planes the NSA would know EXACTLY where it went!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Because next time there's a fire in the transponder circuits, the victim's families will be demanding it be put back in at great expense.
No mayday, hours more flight based on satellite pings.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Because that makes so much more sense than just buying a used 1980s airliner for a couple of million bucks.
analysis. An anti-Inmarsat analysis annointed another answer anew.
The rest of the explanation is that the crew were overcome by smoke/fumes. (They're supposed to have independent (bottled) oxygen supply, but it's happened before.) The aircraft flew on autopilot on the last entered heading until it ran out of fuel. (Which has also happened before.)
Why didn't they call a mayday earlier? The rule of thumb for pilots is: Aviation/Navigation/Communication. First you get control of the aircraft, understand what is happening. Then you work out your position/course and heading (actual and intended). Then, and only then, do you worry about telling anyone about it. If they were caught between "Navigation" and "Communication", that would explain their actions and their silence.
You are probably scoffing and going "Bah, what are the odds of that!" But your alternative scenarios are "Plane was hijacked by... conspiracy... secret landing... passengers killed/being held.... etc..."
So the contrast is, "Thing which has happened to aircraft several times before", versus "Bizarre conspiracy by shadowy forces". I prefer the odds of the former until there's actual evidence of the latter.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
So the contrast is, "Thing which has happened to aircraft several times before", versus "Bizarre conspiracy by shadowy forces". I prefer the odds of the former until there's actual evidence of the latter.
How often has an aircraft caught fire so badly that it killed everyone on board... yet still flown on for six hours?
As much as I'd like to believe that explanation, I don't find it much more convincing than the 'they flew through an alien wormhole' theory.
That theory is dumb on so many levels. First of all, "stealing" an aircraft is a ridiculous idea since to take off again with it requires too much cooperation from too many international parties for it to be feasible at all (there's a reason why aircraft don't have locks on the doors...). Second, if you wanted to use an aicraft for nefarious purposes a stolen widebody would be the worst choice ever. A small corporate jet would be the easiest to file an unusual flight plan for since the uber rich are reclusive and eccentric so that way you might get slightly closer to your target before any alarms are raised. Not to mention that any in-flight intercept would see just what's been filed and not the most wanted 777 in the world. And finally, there are much, much easier ways to get your hand on an aircraft if you have access to the same resources as would be needed to steal an aircraft in-flight (because that and maybe being swallowed by a black hole are the two theories that can be excluded completely). There are plenty of old aircraft that are practically given away if you have the resources to come and get them. Faking that paperwork is not a problem, if you have the same resources that you must have to get a stolen plane to take off. Old aircraft are so abundant because aircraft never get "too worn to fly" since they're maintained properly even in the third world due to international regulations. They only stop making economic sense to fly because new aircraft consume so much less fuel and at that point the old aircraft in perfect condition are nevertheless worthless.
Why wouldn't the Iranians simply build a nuke here, rather than try to fly one in?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I have never been on a flight where everyone has turned their cellular telephones off, especially international flights where you will see a passenger light up a cigarette while in their seat (not even sneaking a drag in the bathroom) before being kindly asked to extinguish it.
Any aircraft not on the ground should be in direct contact wit the ground traffic controllers – no switch – no exceptions!
You're answering your own question. Transponders are turned off when the plane is on the ground. No need for a transponder signal when the plane is in a hangar, or when it is in maintenance, or at the gate planing and deplaning passengers.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
is it really possible that the plane landed anywhere but the ocean?
Diego Garcia airport is a designated emergency airport for trans-Indian-Ocean flights. An unknown plane approaching the island would not be shot at.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I would have to think so, yes. Spy satellites relying on cameras have limited coverage at any one time. The plane only has to land and move to a hanger to be hidden. That doesn't take very long.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Couldn't one look at the satellite ping data from MH370 from a week earlier or whenever the latest "good" flight was and compare ping data of the doomed flight? Also look at ping data from a flight that matches close to the flight path of the projected path of the doomed flight and see if satellite ping theory is actually plausible. That's one way to narrow down the possibilities.
The fire in the cargo hold of SAA 295 might have been burning for hours. The voice recording was never found but the data + ATC communications imply that.
In this case, if the fire incapacitated the crew but didn't damage the aircraft structurally, it's not impossible to think that it flew on autopilot. Based on what I've read on pprune the autopilot could make the plane climb or descend in steps at waypoints. However, the autopilot cannot be programmed to first climb and later descend without manual intervention and thus the final descent of this flight must look like a glide due to fuel exhaustion or otherwise something was done manually. But based on the released information that I've come across so far, what is known about the flight path is not precise enough to say one way or the other. The 777 pilots on pprune that described the autopilot didn't go into detail about other features it has, which has left me wondering about what features it has for saving routes. Could the crew accidentally have loaded some saved set of waypoints and set the AP to fly that just before they were incapacitated. I know that a tonne of bureaucracy is involved to make sure that responsibility and blame is placed correctly so despite being sophisticated computers, features such as saving routes for later use might simply not be included in autopilots to prevent ambiguous responsibility if crew X loads a route entered by crew Y and then fly into a mountain because crew Y had flown at a different altitude.
Or any of the millions of shipping containers roaming around the world every day, for a few grand.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I doubt they "lied" about the last cockpit words. At first they said it was "all right, goodnight" then they said "goodnight Malaysian three seven zero" Their inability to get it right the first time is just incompetence. They have shown themselves to be incompetent from the start. That's all this is.
soylentnews.org
The fire in the cargo hold of SAA 295 might have been burning for hours. The voice recording was never found but the data + ATC communications imply that.
Sure, there's no question that a small fire could burn for hours, possibly without even being noticed by the crew. But, in the SAA 295 case, the plane crashed a few minutes after the last communication, it didn't fly on for hours after kiling everyone on board.
You need a pretty magic fire to knock out most of the electronics, kill everyone on the plane, but not be serious enough to make it crash until it ran out of fuel hours later. It's possible, but doesn't seem any more likely than other theories.
The article is irrelevant since the ocean floor around the pings is still being searched.
Since the article can't even get a basic fact correct, I don't even trust their analysis.
FTA:
But now the search of 154 square miles of ocean floor around the signals has concluded with no trace of wreckage found. Pessimism is growing as to whether those signals actually had anything to do with Flight 370. If they didn’t, the search area would return to a size of tens of thousands of square miles.
The link the article uses to "prove" that says something different:
The hunt for a missing Malaysian passenger jet entered a new phase as an international team abandoned its aerial search and said efforts to find wreckage on the ocean floor may take as long as eight months.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
It looks like slashdot just linked to another conspiracy theory. Please quit doing that.
Until officials provide more information, the claim that Flight 370 went south rests not on the weight of mathematics but on faith in authority
Wasn't the main evidence against a northern path the fact that the plane would have to have flown over some (unlike Malaysia) heavily monitored airspace?
The company claimed that they have confirmed their methodology using data from other airplanes flying in similar area.
No sig today.
You need a pretty magic fire to knock out most of the electronics
That's not what was said. Learn to read.
First step when the pilots identify an electrical fire is to pull the breakers. (If it works, you reintroduce them one at a time until you isolate the fault.)
Second step is to turn towards a suitable landing site. The closest runway had an approach over mountains, so the pilots seem to have turned to an airport with a more open approach, then changed course again a little later (suggesting the issue had become more serious), they may also have increased altitude to try to starve the fire. That seems to be their last intentional manoeuvre.
There may have been a depressurisation during the climb (caused by the fire), pilot error, or some other screw up. Most accidents have a primary cause, but a bunch of other stuff going wrong. AF-447 was initially caused by a faulty air-speed sensor, but ultimately a series of mistakes by the pilots killed the plane.
there's no question that a small fire could burn for hours
MH-370 had only just taken off. Pilots who've discussed this are thinking nose wheel-well fire filling the cabin with toxic smoke. The question is why the pilots didn't use their own oxygen supply. (They might have delayed turning on the main cabin oxygen, fearing feeding the fire (a la SAA 295), but why delay using their own supply?) Bad decision by the pilots, or flaw in the 777?
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Which is why pilots are able to turn off the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.
Exactly.
Oh, wait... you think they're not. Maybe you should learn something about the subjects you're posting about.
There actually is a device, already, that can't be turned off by the crew in flight - a black box.
Is this another Anonymous Coward who knows nothing about ariliner electronics, or the same one? Why do people keep posting this crap when a few minutes' searching the web will immediately show it's untrue?
You are probably scoffing and going "Bah, what are the odds of that!"
Indeed. You haven't even got to the part where the plane apparently flew around Indonesian radar.
But your alternative scenarios are "Plane was hijacked by... conspiracy... secret landing... passengers killed/being held.... etc..."
No, the alternative scenarios simply involves a suicidal pilot, which has happened before. This one may be holding a grudge against the Malaysian gov, and trying to inflict maximum political damage by crashing the plane and making it as hard to find as possible.
The electronics started going off some time before the last communication with the plane. If you believe the crew were disabling them due to a fire, then you also have believe they would then just say 'goodnight' to ATC in their last communication rather than 'help, we've got a freaking fire on board'.
If you believe a short burst of toxic smoke filled the cabin and killed the crew without the same fire causing enough damage to kill everyone else and bring the plane down, you also have to believe that no-one else on board tried anything to get help, not even turning on their cell phone and trying to make a call, or picking up the satellite phone and using that.
None of these things make sense.
Does anyone have the actual origin of that quote? My recollection is that it came from a UK tabloid, based on a translation of a Chinese news story of a briefing given to family members without press present. Later it was repeated by Malaysian politicians, but not by the Prime Minister or Minister of Transport AFAICT.
One ping I could easily see being some aberration. But I remember reading one of the detectors, I think it was the Australians, hearing a series of pings.
As the other poster said, the ping can't really be that far from you as the water dampens the signal (ha!) quite a bit.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, exactly, it's such a minor difference that it could have arisen in any number of ways. There is too great a tendency for people to conflate ineptness with a conspiracy.
soylentnews.org
None of the electronics went off before their last communication. Where is your source for that? There were alot of blogs that assumed that since the last Acars signal was at 1:07 am and the last communication, "Good night Malaysian three seven zero", was at 1:19am it was turned off. However that means nothing since Acars works in 30 min increments so it's next message wouldn't have been till 1:37 am. The system could have failed anytime between 1:19am and 1:37am.
Cell phones would not have been able to work at that distance and speed.
The flight's satellite phones wont work if eletronics are off.
The number of suitable hangars with suitable runways to land on nearby is pretty limited. Maybe all of them should simply be checked.
That's been considered, and I assume the checks would already have been completed.
You can see all the known runways on this map: http://i.imgur.com/Iwa6Ali.jpg
The rest of the discussion here is interesting as well. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
What I'm saying is that the incompetence that is being blamed on the authorities is in a lot of cases actually coming from the media itself repeating second hand information from unreliable sources. Probably the most incompetence on the part of the investigation team is not refuting these media reports quickly enough.
In a Boeing 777 there are circuit breakers for the cockpit voice recorder & the flight data recorder however they do not stop them from working. Once the breaker is tripped they switch to their internal battery supplies. Both boxes contain batteries to power themselves since they each have sonar beacons used to locate the boxes in an underwater crash.
Far 25 25.1459 states that "Any single electrical failure external to the recorder does not disable both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder." So disabling the bus on these box wouldn't have been enough.
Every proposed scenario has holes in it. But planes have flown for hours with everyone in the cabin knocked out, the flight crew knocked out, and the cabin crew on emergency oxygen, which doesn't last that long. Like ol' Sherlock said, once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however unlikely, must be the truth.
Keep spending, world. A hundred mil? Not enough. We've got to find that plane! It feeds CNN, after-all.
More specifically, it collapsed as though the FIRST floor could no longer support the weight of the entire building on top of it. You can see that in the videos.
You can see the exact same thing in your kitchen if you have a gas stove. I know it's more fun to read spy stories than to actually try an experiment, but just know that I'm going to ignore any replies from you until you try the experiment yourself.
Go get a few wire coat hangers or similar metal wire, and some pans. In your kitchen, set up some wire supports to hold a pan four inches above the flame. Try to make the supports symmetrical, like the way a professional building would be designed. Pretend that the wire costs a million dollars per inch, so you'll use the minimum amount of wire necessary to hold the pan up. A bundt cake pan or something with a central opening would be the best simulation, simulating the center elevator columns.
Also keep in mind WTC 7 was tricky to design because the first couple of floors were built around / over an existing power station, so it was designed to use fewer, stronger supports than most buildings would. (You can't put a 40' wide support column right through a part of the power station).
Once the first pan is in place, add three more "floors" (pans), so you have four or more floors, each a few inches apart.
Now tturn the fire on high and wait 5-15 minutes. What Wil happen is that the heat will soften the metal supports just a bit at first, then more so as they heat up. At some point (as high as 500-600 degrees), they'll get soft enough that they collapse under the weight of all those pans. The stack will drop, just like WTC 7.
I KNOW yyou want to argue with me right now. That's cool, you can do that. But first, go in your kitchen and give it a try. Then you can argue from actual knowledge as opposed to repeating silly ghost stories about topics you're unfamiliar with.
It is known that the MH 370 pilots programmed in new way points that were completely off the planned destination. Are you saying that the had time to dick around with the programming but did not have a few seconds to call in a Mayday? While pilots are trained to FIRST FLY THE PLANE, that applies only for a very short time - a few minutes. They must try to communicate as soon as possible.
They had two young Iranian guys with stolen passports and they ruled out their involvement in a few days. Thats either quick work or misdirection.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
By the way, what Freescale releasrd in February was the world's smallest ARM processor, just 2mm square. It's also the world's most efficient, meaning best battery life. Tiny ARM processors are used in all manner of consumer electronics. Tiny processors aren't really helpful in big devices like "military radar". Size is key in portable devices like smart watches and medical applications such as pacemakers.
No-one is saying the fire took out the electronics and killed everyone. People are saying that a very likely scenario is a fire (which can be small) which caused smoke. The pilots, in that situation, would disconnect all electrical systems to isolate which circuit (if any) is causing the fire, starting by pulling them all, and re-enabling them one by one to see if any are failing. If there was a problem with their oxygen supply at that time, then they could have passed out due to a lack of oxygen. It's not the fire which would have killed them, it's the smoke. So yes, it's far more likely than the bizarre conspiracy theories. Just because you don't know these things doesn't mean they aren't out there ready to be known.
Until officials provide more information, the claim that Flight 370 went south rests not on the weight of mathematics but on faith in authority
Wasn't the main evidence against a northern path the fact that the plane would have to have flown over some (unlike Malaysia) heavily monitored airspace?
I reckon you could use terrain masking along the Himalayas.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
They'd have to have flown over Bangladesh, Myanmar completely undetected, and even once they're there India keeps its airspace very well monitored.
I'm not so sure about that. I'm not saying the media are blameless, but the bulk of the fault would seem to lie with the Malaysian authorities. They did several really silly things. These were things the media didn't concoct or misreport.
They should have admitted far sooner that the plane was lost and all those aboard presumed dead. When the plane still hadn't been located at such a time that the fuel would have run out then that's it: it's gone and everyone's almost certainly dead. This is how the French reacted when AF447 was lost. They reported everyone on board as "presumed dead" before even any wreckage was found. The Malaysians clearly didn't say this. In fact, even weeks later, some government idiot was reported as saying "miracles can still happen". This is all denialist bullshit and it coloured the way they dealt with the whole thing.
The second major fuck up was the way they involved and then treated the families. This was a missing airliner: there is no rescue site, and there's nothing for the families to do. Keeping them in a hotel in Malaysia wasn't useful for anyone. It gave the relatives false hope and removed them from their family support structure back home. It led to a very stressful situation for the relatives. We all saw the breakdowns they had and the daft way the Malaysian authorities dealt with this. The relatives would have got news just as quickly if they were back home. The only reason the relatives were on-site at all was to make it look as though the authorities in Malaysia were doing something. Anything.
soylentnews.org
Except the last words were not goodnight, they were "malasian 3-7-0"
1. It was accidentally shot down somewhere.The country that found out about if first or has something to do with it is staying quiet because it could start a war. 2. It was forced to land somewhere, the passengers were taken hostage and that country is keeping quiet about it because it could start a war.
The "molten" stories trace back to two original sources. One is describing what they saw, the other is describing a photo. Both refer to red hot beams in the days after. An exact quote is "lifting a molten steel beam". Obviously if it were truly molten, it wouldn't be a beam anymore and noone would be lifting it.
This makes sense, because there's nothing that would maintain molten steel for weeks. About the only things that could do that would be certain types of fault lines or an underground coal seam. Some silly people who have clearly never messed around with thermite have mentioned thermite as if it had some magical properties. From someone who HAS made thermite, I can tell you it burns several milliseconds, not several weeks. That's how it gets so hot - by releasing all of its energy quickly.
Your local auto shop or machine shop can put a piece of brick or concrete in their 20,000 pound press and you can see it turn to dust. Or just hit a piece with a big hammer. Now imagine MILLIONS of pounds crashing down, rather than a two pound hammer.
So the contrast is, "Thing which has happened to aircraft several times before", versus "Bizarre conspiracy by shadowy forces". I prefer the odds of the former until there's actual evidence of the latter.
I would tend to agree with you but there is one point I'd like to make. When the number of "Bizarre conspiracies by shadowy forces" that have been confirmed true by leaks starts to go up into higher numbers it makes you rethink anything about the official story as being possibly true.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
There has been no evidence that there were new waypoints programmed in. If the last ACARS report (17:07UT) had included new waypoints, I would have expected them to be mentioned somewhere. I believe the reported stories jumped to this conclusion based on reports about specific waypoints and the the ACARS system. 1) The Military Radar Plot shows the MH370 'blips' flying directly over two waypoints (VAMPI, MEKAR), which has been used as evidence that the plane was flying a programmed route. and 2) the incorrect assertion that ACARS was manually disabled following the last update at 17:07UT, allowing the pre-programmed flight plan to be altered.- All that is known about the airplane ACARS subsystem is that it did not communicate when expected at 17:37UT. There is no evidence that can indicate why. There is no way to tell how the plane was being flown. A trained pilot could have flown over those waypoints manually, or they could have manually set directional control (Heading or Track) in the Flight Management System (FMS), or they could have entered waypoints into the FMS, and then set them as the active flight plan. Each possibility leads (or comes from) different assumptions about what the person was trying to do, when they did it, and why they did it. Unfortunately, we don't have any factual information on the actions in the cockpit, or the intentions of the people involved. -Bill
If you believe a short burst of toxic smoke filled the cabin and killed the crew without the same fire causing enough damage to kill everyone else
Although there have been fires that have killed the pilots but left passengers alive, that's not what I said, nor is it any kind of requirement of the "fire scenario". I'm not sure where you got that idea from.
Aside: If you think the passengers would have tried to communicate/get-help if the plane was damaged, then you should also believe the passengers would have tried to communicate if the plane was hijacked. Making the various hijacking theories even more unlikely. (And certainly, post-9/11, no-one just sits there and obeys hijackers anymore.)
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
If "suicidal pilot" was the most insane of the theories being thrown around (and intensely and angrily believed by so many people), we wouldn't be having most of these arguments.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
We don't know they were undetected, and in any event, primary radar is short range. Without transponders it is fairly easy to evade.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Okay, so both spellings exist, but they're not on equal footing.
http://grammarist.com/spelling...