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A Year On, What Flight Simulators Can't Prove About Flight MH370
NBC News, a year after the loss of Malaysian Airlines flight 370, has an interesting piece about various scenarios that would explain the plane's disappearance. From the article: The theory that the pilots turned west because of an emergency is undermined because they did not head back toward Kuala Lumpur, according to retired NTSB senior investigator Greg Feith. ... Feith said that turning off the communications and taking the aircraft to the remote Indian Ocean was a course of action consistent with someone trying to purposefully lose an airliner. "It's 20,000-plus feet deep there," Feith said. "It's going be very difficult to find." He added that "the first thing you're going to do" as a pilot during an emergency is "don the oxygen mask" and "confess to ATC [air traffic control], 'We've got an issue, we need to return.'" Feith, who investigated other so-called "murder-suicide" airline crashes while at the NTSB, said that he has "always postured at least that this was an intentional act by one or both pilots."
With a similar anniversary of flight 17 shot by Russia-sponsored assholes in Eastern Ukraine (by mistake), Russian propaganda is spreading lunatic rumors about America shooting down MH370.
They don't have to convince anybody with such accusations. They just need to make enough noise to make the perfectly credible accusations against them look similarly lunatic to the short attention-span majority of the world's population...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Yeah, actually, you followed the pattern right there, to fit your idea more clearly:
1) I don't know how WTC 7 imploded due to fire.
2) ??????
3) Therefore the government did it and is covering it up.
You have a giant hole in your logic at #2, and #1 is really an argument from ignorance, a classical logical fallacy.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
He added that "the first thing you're going to do" as a pilot during an emergency is "don the oxygen mask" and "confess to ATC [air traffic control], 'We've got an issue, we need to return.'"
This is quite a surprising statement. In an emergency, the pilot priorities are:
1 - Aviate -- Maintain control of the aircraft
2 - Navigate -- Know where you are and where you intend to go
3 - Communicate -- Let someone know your plans and needs
in that precise order, and not in any other order. They are trained to proceed like this.
That's something I always wondered about with MH370. It used to be that the procedures after smoke in the cabin prioritized trying to locate the source of the smoke and extinguish the fire in-flight. Recently, it's been shifting more towards getting the plane on the ground ASAP (page 33 of PDF).
Except none of the reporters covering this story seem to be capable of actually researching a story. The obvious question to ask when considering the fire hypothesis is, "what were Malaysia Airlines' in-flight fire procedures?" How did they train their aircrew to react in case of a fire? Did the procedures the crew were supposed to follow still prioritize trying to locate and fight the fire? In which case the Wired article seems implausible. Or were they newer procedures which emphasized landing the plane ASAP? In which case the Wired article might be spot on.
Still, the biggest flaw in the fire hypothesis IMHO is that the airliner continued to fly for ~7 hours after the "incident". Fires devastating enough to debilitate the crew typically do not go out by themselves. They burn enough equipment to make the aircraft unflyable, or compromise the structural integrity of the aircraft leading to in-flight break-up with passengers and cargo falling out the bottom.
There are several sources of Doppler shift and compensation. There is Doppler shift between aircraft and satellite, and between satellite and ground station. The ground station automatically compensates for all the Doppler shift between GS and satellite.
The Doppler shift between aircraft and satellite is partially compensated by tracking the Doppler shift in transmissions from the satellite to the aircraft. Without compensation by the aircraft, Doppler shift would be in the region of 300-400 Hz, which exceeds the bandwidth of the channel allocation. The compensation is subject to local oscillator error in the aircraft transceiver, hence individual aircraft will apply the compensation slightly differently.
Although the degree of compensation varies between aircraft to aircraft, it could be fitted with a standard linear regression. This method was apparently verified by Inmarsat on several other aircraft with similar transceivers, and was calibrated based upon transmissions with known locations/velocities.
The AF 447 flight data recorders are leading directly to large and substantial changes to pilot training on stall recovery, high altitude stalls, and unreliable flight instruments. The two year search was worth it just for that.