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Indian Ocean Debris Believed To Come From Missing Flight MH370
McGruber writes that air crash investigators, though maintaining that it is "too early to tell" with certainty, have 'a high degree of confidence' that a piece of wreckage found on the Indian Ocean island of La Reunion is from a Boeing 777 — the same model as the doomed MH370 which disappeared in March 2014. Investigators will need to examine closely the wreckage to link it to MH370, but MH370 was the only Boeing 777 ever lost over water.
A 'badly-damaged' suitcase has also been found in the same area: Google Translation of French-Language news report
If big wing sections broke off it suggests the onboard computer was not able to cruise the plane to a gentl landing (or maybe it tried and slammed into a giant wave). Anyways, if the plane broke up then the sonar signature for the jet is probably not what they're looking for and the pieces of the plane could be scattered over a very wide area. I imagine jet wings that are empty of fuel will float around for a while.
But lots of JETsam.
One of the early postulates was that a software bug caused the autopilot to fly along 90 E towards 0/0. If it ran out of fuel on that course ... I wonder what Indian Ocean currents look like. Given the time and some current mapping it might be possible to estimate the splash zone now.
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If you look at the currents in the Indian Ocean, and trace backwards from Reunion (it and Mauritius are the two dots east of Madagascar), you pass right through the area they've been searching off of Australia.
I wouldn't be surprised if they could get some more specific clues on what water it's been in - for example, marine growth species types or isotopic ratios - to help pin it down better than just general drift calculations (lots of places could dump debris on Réunion). There are could also be potential clues on how much sun or what temperatures it's been exposed to, such as rates of plastic degradation, and perhaps that might also help give them better ideas of what areas it's been in based on weather patterns since the flight was lost.
There are so many potential clues... each one rather vague on its own, but all together, I imagine they'll get pointed in the right direction.
Also, I can kill you with my brain.
there's marine life attached to the wing
i was wondering two things:
1. if not by species, then maybe by subspecies, or some sublte variation within a species, that they could attach an area to where the wing developed the attached creatures
2. if there are variations in isotopes the marine species would absorb differentially by area, if that can be pinpointed to an area. that would probably be very subtle and not helpful. just an idea
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So an autopilot malfunction caused the plane to lose all contact with the outside world completely and fly in a corridor, in three dimensions at the right altitude, precisely where different air traffic controls would think it was each other's responsibility and allow it passage? You think that if it gives you comfort. However, there is no getting away from the fact that this is the most alarming plane disappearance in history and even finding wreckage is unlikely to yield the answers required.
Had this part been on the plane at the time of a "gentle" ditching, it likely would have been dragged to the bottom with the rest.
It's a flap (and high-speed aileron). In a 'gentle' ditching, it would have been one of the first things to hit the sea, at over 100mph. I'd be amazed if it wouldn't be one of the first things to be torn off the plane, after the engines.
Hopefully Boeing can work out whether the damage is consistent with ditching or an uncontrolled impact, but I wouldn't make any claims yet myself.
THAT is a close to a gentle ditching as you are going to get
Well, no it isn't, actually; US Airways 1549 is. That one took place on smooth water, not the high seas, but there have been numerous other ditchings in moderately higher sea states that were non-catastrophic. It's a crapshoot.
Underwing engines are held in place by shear pins that will break in a ditching and let them be carried away, so if everything goes just right, the wings won't be ripped off and the airplane will have a chance of floating for a while. Flaps, OTOH, would be down for minimum speed and would very likely come off.
This is the video of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 trying to land on the ocean. THAT is a close to a gentle ditching as you are going to get and you think it would have remained intact???
A minor detail that derails your argument - the flight crew of Ethiopian Flight 961 were fighting hijackers in the cockpit while attempting to dead-stick the jet with no power after it ran out of fuel. The crew was a bit task-saturated, to put it mildly.
Airliners can be ditched more or less intact in calm seas - that is why they are equipped with floatation devices, rafts, detachable inflatable escape slides. There are established check-list procedures for at-sea ditching.
See U.S. Air 1549 for an example of a successful ditching. An engine did break off during the landing, but otherwise the aircraft was intact and all of the passengers and crew survived.
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Auto pilot wouldn't have been able to detect the water level and who knows what it would have been trying to do with no power and a glide decent.
In that situation, with no power, the autopilot would have automatically disconnected, there is no way the aircraft would have been under autopilot control after the fuel ran out and the RAT (ram air turbine, the emergency power system) deployed.