Slashdot Mirror
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."
was running systemd . It got so pissed
Maybe, but you dont exactly need a 747 full of people who have nothing to do with you or your tendencies to commit suicide. All you need is systemd
How is this still a thing?
Because the plane hasn't been found.
It's not terrorism because the purpose of terrorism is to affect political change through fear and violence. There was no video threat or claiming of responsibility, so no political motivation, so no terrorism.
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.
There was an article in Wired quite awhile ago by a pilot. He said if there was a sudden change in direction, it was probably because the -experienced- pilot who was familiar with all the airports in the area, was looking for a safe airport. In that direction was a 7,000 foot runway. He theorized there was a nosewheel fire, the pilot turned and then everyone was overcome by smoke so the plane continued on untl running out of fuel.
http://www.wired.com/2014/03/mh370-electrical-fire/
"In this day and age of emergency failsafe backups".
What world do you live in? The day and age I inhabit seems to have had it's operating manual written by some clown named Murphy.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
NO ONE KNOWS what happens on that island. NO ONE.
Yet you know that plane has landed there. Sure.
Was it a black smoke plume that changes shape a lot? I'm pretty sure the island is moved by now, likely all are lost.
All these 9/11 conspiracy theories follow the same pattern:
1) I don't know how something happened
2) ?????
3) Therefore the government did it and is covering it up
You're missing a giant piece of logic there on step number 2.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It bugs me that from the beginning the MH370 disappearance does not seem to first be being approached as a possible criminal act. Were there any outrageous insurance claims following the flight? Were known drug kingpins contacted about losses that wouldn't normally be reported? Was there something on that plane worth (to an appropriately depraved mind) killing all of those people for?
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.
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 best theory I've heard is the follows (don your aluminum-foil hats!) --
Suppose you were a terrorism-for-hire organization, or a straight-up terrorist organization that was planning another big strike against a major superpower. Either one works for this theory. And suppose you had some new, amazing high-tech way of taking over a 777 by remote control. What would you do to either (a) test your system, or (b) impress a potential client? Such an ability would be HUGELY valuable, but only if it remained secret. You'd probably select a flight operated by a developing country that would not nominally have been under the same level of scrutiny as one from the first world, and one that could quickly be taken out of normal radar coverage. You'd take the plane over, disable its communication, move it about against the pilot's will (but still within radar range so that the demonstration could be recorded), and then send it off to crash well outside of radar range in a very deep part of the ocean where it might never be found, so evidence of your nefarious actions would not come to public scrutiny.
You'd be able to demand a pretty high price in the elite international terrorism market with such a demonstration. So while the act of diverting MH 370 might not in itself have been an act of terrorism, it still might have been executed by terrorists.
It's far fetched, yes, but it fits the facts better than any other theory I've heard. (Suicide by two non-suicidal pilots? Fire that magically disables communication without affecting navigation? Hijack with modern hardened cockpit access? Etc.)
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Until we find wreckage, we have no idea what happened to the plane, nor how to prevent it from happening again.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
You're implying that I don't think that the Air France plane was worth abandoning after 2 months too.
Looking for things isn't cheap. Looking for things on the bottom of the ocean is actually very expensive. I don't think we got our moneys worth on the Air France plane, and unless we find positive evidence that MH317 was abducted by aliens and we establish first contact as a result, we won't get our money's worth on MH317 either.
There's a point of diminishing returns especially when we're talking about the safety of statistically the safest form of travel by a very VERY large margin. They money would be better spent in programs that could deliver a better return on investment.
Yes likely. So put a dollar value on the safety issues. We have statistically the single safest form of transport. You're far more likely to die on the way to the airport than on the plane itself. How much money should we spend on making it even safer?
Its the same thought process as anti-terror. Terrorism is a rounding error statistically in the ways that you are likely to die. Yet we spend billions on anti-terror while roads with huge potholes, blind corners, kill people every day and yet their repair remains unfunded.
We have my own government telling us on a daily basis that times are tough and we need to make tough decisions and that we shouldn't expect healthcare or university to remain cheap, we should expect the pension to be reduced and to live tougher lives, all while writing a blank check to determine what happened to a plane carrying a number of people who were statistically undertaking possibly the safest activity they could to get from a to b.
Yes this is all statistics. But here's one certainty: When they find MH317 they won't find anything that will make air travel earthshatteringly safer.
We have long ago reached the point of diminishing returns.