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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
But lots of JETsam.
I imagine jet wings that are empty of fuel will float around for a while.
Wings that are full of fuel will float too, because jet fuel has a lower density than water.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Uh, no autopilot has the ability to land a plane (intact) on water. Heck, I wonder if the data currently gathered by sensors and instruments would suffice to program one - the difficulty is assessing height and with no ILS beams to guide the AP, the radar altimeter is the only choice and probably not accurate enough for determining precisely when to flare (forget GPS and altimeter). Landing on water is so difficult that whilst it might seem preferable to land if no runway is in the vicinity when you need it, almost any somewhat flat terrain is better because then the landing gear can be used to absorb the impact. Water is hard as concrete at that speed (as you should know). And calm water is bad because it's harder for pilots to see their height by looking at it.
The more interesting question is if they can decipher whether it started breaking up in the air. Wings are very robust and due to their shape they fall slower in in-flight breakups so a large chunk of a wing like that requires more examination - and I'd guess they also check for signs of a fire when that has been one of the more credible theories (+ one possible sighting of a burning aircraft from a sailboat under the believed flightpath). But then too the question is whether it was before or after impact.
Right, but the wing itself doesn't...
Surely you jest. The inside of a wing is almost all empty space or fuel storage. The wing is not a solid piece of aluminum. It's full of sealed air pockets. The flaperon (as it was not the entire wing that they found) is just a small portion of the wing. It is very light and far less dense than water as it would not have any fuel storage, wiring, or other materials inside of it. Unless the outer shell was compromised across several of the inner compartments, it would float quite easily.
Uh, no autopilot has the ability to land a plane (intact) on water.
Matter of fact, no human pilot does, consistently, at sea. Even the largest seaplanes depend on protected water (harbors, lagoons, rivers etc.) for normal operations, and an open-sea landing is an emergency procedure.
When the USS Indianapolis survivors were found, 70 years ago this week, a PBY landed near them with no hope of taking off; it simply served as an improved lifeboat until surface vessels arrived, and was then sunk.
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.
Wikipedia is hardly a valid document for contradicting another source. I'm a pilot with a seaplane rating. You don't land on the open ocean with the intent of taking off again. Interviews with the crew of the PBY and the ship it flew from both say the same thing; they went to be a lifeboat for as many survivors as they could.
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.