Aliens appears to be as likely story as anything else at the moment tbh. All very very strange.
Contact lost with Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 | 8th March 2014
- Thread starter Nick 0208 Ldn
- Start date
The fact that no group has stepped forward to take credit is definitely one point against it being a bomb or at least a bomb planted by an organized terrorist group.
Is it possible that some sort of electrical interference like a storm could have shut all communications down and Pilot error due to struggling to fly without electronic assistance could have lead to a crash?
Has there been any speculative scenarios thrown out by any experts yet?
Has there been any speculative scenarios thrown out by any experts yet?
Exactly. I would have thought that would be obvious. People who use bombs want to be recognised.
Here is the debris found off the coast of Vietnam:
A bit more on the Balotelli story.
A bit more on the Balotelli story.
Unless, and just pure speculation here, it was just a lone nut case or a couple of people not working with a larger group. But until we have some evidence, no way of knowing.
Same goes with any sort of hijackign scenario, one would think any hijackers would have some demands that they would want met and not be hiding someplace in secret. If it was even possible to have the jet disappear like that due to hijacking.
Mechanical failure of some kind seems most likely at this point. Though it is natural that much speculation would fall on a criminal act of some kind.
Even in that scenario I doubt anyone would want to conduct a secret bombing that no one knows anything about.
A James Bond style hi-jacking where the plane has been flown into a volcano would be interesting but there would have been some communication. Plus I don't think it would be logistically possible.
I am going with mechanically fault/pilot error or both.
One remote though possible scenario that I read about was the pilot suicided the aircraft. Basically switched off all the transponders and beacons and nosedived into the ocean.
More images of the reported debris (not yet confirmed):
- http://images.tuoitre.vn/Tianyon/Cache/Image/489/694489.jpg
- http://images.tuoitre.vn/Tianyon/Cache/Image/486/694486.jpg
- http://images.tuoitre.vn/Tianyon/Cache/Image/487/694487.jpg
- http://images.tuoitre.vn/Tianyon/Cache/Image/493/694493.jpg
- http://images.tuoitre.vn/Tianyon/Cache/Image/489/694489.jpg
- http://images.tuoitre.vn/Tianyon/Cache/Image/486/694486.jpg
- http://images.tuoitre.vn/Tianyon/Cache/Image/487/694487.jpg
- http://images.tuoitre.vn/Tianyon/Cache/Image/493/694493.jpg
Been done before, or at least supposedly has.
Mechanical failure is vague. If the plane is operated using hydraulics, then if the backups failed, the plane wouldn't be able to correct a stall, or a nose dive, or excessive yawing. If the plane is operated by wire, then an electrical storm could disable it, however backup hydraulics would take over. If one of the engines failed, the others would be sufficient to fly the plane to it's destination. If all of the engines failed, a few minutes at least would be available for the pilots to call Air Control. Those are the obvious options. The fuselage ripping because of some rivets fatiguing could severely destroy the plane, but where is the debris? And was the plane not certified as fit to fly? So many questions.
No distress signals were seen, neither was Air Control notified. Were they drunk? Sleeping, letting autopilot handle the plane?
No distress signals were seen, neither was Air Control notified. Were they drunk? Sleeping, letting autopilot handle the plane?
Just amazing. Crashes can never be prevented, but not finding a plane? Don't they have auto beacons, transponders and such?
Yes but remember it took several days to locate the Air France wreckage. If I remember right the transponders can be damaged in a crash. Being underneath a good deal of water can affect the ability to locate them. It really has not been that long since the plane disappeared and the ocean can be a pretty big place to search. I know in this day and age we expect everything to be instantaneous but the reality is sometimes things take a bit longer than we assume they would.
Pretty good piece to read I think.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/10/opinion/palmer-malaysia-aircraft-air-france/index.html?hpt=hp_t4
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/10/opinion/palmer-malaysia-aircraft-air-france/index.html?hpt=hp_t4
Yeah Boeing's 777 is one of the safest planes out there. They won't find this plane for a while yet and even then there's still a lot of information to discover.
Well its always very difficult to locate the debris in the sea. Unfortunately I think the plane has crashed for some mysterious reason which will be left unanswered.
Some of the crashes beings mentioned in many articles about this current one talk about it taking several years to figure out what exactly happened.
The area in which to search shouldn't be quite so vast in this instance, with the gap in radar coverage during a South Atlantic crossing leaving a lot more uncertainty than you'd imagine would be the case here. The fuselage of Flight 447 was eventually discovered at a depth of 12,000ft, we don't yet know what conditions of geography will come into play.
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Oh yes. Not uncommon for that to be the case. Part of it is that once they find the crash site they begin reconstructing the aircraft, piece by piece.
There's a documentary series called 'Mayday' that looks at various aircrashes and explains what happened. They even did the Munich crash, incredibly informative.
Area roughtly the size of Pennsylvannia according to one source I jsut posted. Roughly 45,000 sq miles or 116,000 square KM.
It also has not actually been that long since the plane went missing.
its all speculation. they don't know what happened...and will not know until the wreckage is found.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/10/missing-malaysia-_n_4933520.html#liveblog
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/10/missing-malaysia-_n_4933520.html#liveblog
China has pointed satellites in the vicinity and found oil slicks:
That's a larger area than i envisaged [a fair bit so], roughly five and a half times the size of Wales or enough to swallow Lakes' Superior and Erie without difficulty. Satellite imagery could help speed things along if a computer programme knew how to scan for and identify objects alien to the environment.
Well it both has and hasn't been a long time i guess, if by some miracle there were survivors of a crash like this every hour alone in the water or floating on debris would matter.
ETA: Just seen x42bn6's post.
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A fisherman has claimed he saw a low-flying plane in the area. Here's a translation I did for another forum:
http://www.sinarharian.com.my/semasa/pesawat-terbang-rendah-dari-biasa-1.258537
[*] This is a bit awkward to translate - he basically is saying that he was only trying to help, without the guilt.
http://www.sinarharian.com.my/semasa/pesawat-terbang-rendah-dari-biasa-1.258537
Just watching the documentary on the Air France crash. It was 5 days before they spotted anything. Surely the same fate has befallen this plane.
Reading through the old thread too is exactly like this one..
https://www.redcafe.net/threads/french-plane-lost-over-atlantic.252195/
Reading through the old thread too is exactly like this one..
https://www.redcafe.net/threads/french-plane-lost-over-atlantic.252195/
Every time one of these crashes happen I get really nervous about flying
The thought up tumbling down 35k feet is fecking scary
The thought up tumbling down 35k feet is fecking scaryRemember it is not the fall that kills you but the sudden stop at the end. But yeah having some amount of time even a few minutes to see it coming, can't be fun.Every time one of these crashes happen I get really nervous about flying
Don't worry. The g force generated during such a fall means that passengers are rarely, if ever, conscious on impact. Apparently, you'll black out fairly early into a steep descent.Every time one of these crashes happen I get really nervous about flying
In light of this and Boeing's response to recommendations prior to the Helios crash, i went back and checked the 777 for incidents in which de-pressurisation was a factor, there are none that i can see [provided all such cases are on record].
Helios 522 albeit a 737:
You would hope that newer designs like the 777 don''t take similarly troublesome risks with their primary and back-up systems. I wonder that the manufacturer was simply allowed to ignore the AAIB's warning.
Do you think that enough progress has been made to improve the survival rate of crew and passengers in the event of an accident? The industry has over time reduced the routes to disaster and procedures are enhanced, yet how far removed is the human aboard a jet today from its counterpart on a Comet or 707 in the past?
Note sure and there is only so much that probably can be done when a jet falls out of the sky at high speed and hits something hard like the ground or a large body of water. Only so much the human body can stand. I know they are working on things like jet fuel that won't burst into flames on impact.
No, we are fragile, soft beings. We are also particularly vulnurable to our brains moving into our skull at such a rate that the blunt force kills us.
I suppose i'm suggesting that we with all of our advanced technology we should to be able to offer some better alternatives when faced with disaster, why must a life threatening plunge be accepted as the outcome once mechanical failures deteriorate? Surely an aircraft could have a way to further arrest its descent or be enhanced to survive better in water?
There are other approaches you might consider yet the expense of even the above would represent a hurdle, and that must be part of the reason [the loss valuable seats and luggage space for something that might never be called into action].
I some cases they have done things, but again you are still talking about a large fast traveling object slamming into something very hard, say the ground. Heck even hitting the water at enough speed is not the soft landing one might expect. I had once heard that from enough height hitting a body of water is akin to hitting concrete.
Of course yes we have advanced technology, but that doesn't mean we have advanced far enough. Then of course you have the issue of what it is that makes flight possible, the aerodynamics necessary to provide lift, I am not sure we have the technology counter all the laws of physics and thing such as gravity. Maybe huge parachutes attached to all jets so that they can deploy and guide the get down safely, now since a 777 weights about 306,000 lbs when empty, now add in fuel, passengers, crew, cargo, and well it would take some pretty strong parachutes.
Then you probably also need to look at what actually physically happens to a jet when it starts dropping out of the air and seeing some TV shows, reading some articles it is not always this nice easy descent it is often violent, uncontrolled, spinning, flipping, depending on what is going on so probably not that easy to prevent.
Though in an article I posted earlier it is stated a 777 can glide for 120 miles after losing both engines. So it seems technology has made some pretty good strides.
Of course to really answer your question we would have to take case by case all the things that can cause an air accident and talk about what could or could not be done.
You're right. Its usually the economics which prevents increased safety levels (beyond a certain point). I think current aviation safety levels are pretty impeccable. But in this age where the idea is to reduce aircraft weight as much as possible to improve the fuel efficiency, i really doubt we still see any major safety innovations which do anything substantial in a major accident. The focus will continue to improve the mechanical reliability over post crash fatality reducing mechanisms i guess.
To be more precise, to answer your question we would need a few experts in aeronautical engineering to discuss the design of aircraft, the cause of crashes, prevention, etc.
Remember one show I saw once talking about autosafety and this one automotive engineer did say that they could make a much safer car, one that would almost guarantee passenger survival in most crashes. Unfortunately nobody would be able to afford to drive it because of the materials that would need to be used and the the excessive weight would make it cost a fortune to operate.
Remember one show I saw once talking about autosafety and this one automotive engineer did say that they could make a much safer car, one that would almost guarantee passenger survival in most crashes. Unfortunately nobody would be able to afford to drive it because of the materials that would need to be used and the the excessive weight would make it cost a fortune to operate.
The Air France plane flattened like a pancake as it hit the water, as it went down horizontally.
Only in the sense that we dont have a clue what happened due to lack of wreckage. What kicked off the AF447 ccrash was incredibly turbulent storms. It was calm as anything the other night. Weather will not be the issue,Watched the Air France 447 documentary. This one looks eerily similar.
No...well, incredibly unlikely.
Forstly, the idea that a 777 could land anywhere without anyone noticing is just incredibly unlikely...but maybe they were hijacked then crashed miles away? still unlikely...
There's been a lot said about the transponders, ill try explain a few things that might clear this up for some.
Yes, transponders can be turned off, ive had plenty of planes under my control get airborne and the pilots have forgot to turn their transponder on. It literally has an on/off switch.
However, most RADAR have two systems...or more accurately two types of RADAR. These are Primary and Secondary RADAR.
Primary RADAR is literally raw RADAR, the RADAR dish emits a beam, it bounces off something (anything) metal (doesn't always have to be metal!) and the computer puts a 'blip' on the RADAR screen where the beam hit. You cant (unless you have a stealth plane) turn that off.
Secondary RADAR is connected to this system but it emits a signal, and then the transponder on a plane hears this signal, and then it replies with a four digit code that ATC give it, lets say its '1234' and other information like altitude/heading/speed This is how ATC know how high and fast planes are going.
The RADAR dish then hears the reply of '1234', it knows that it came from the same place as the other 'big metal thing in the sky' return it got from the primary RADAR and then it tells the computer that this 'blip' is plane '1234' the computer then knows that the plane with code 1234 is...lets say Easy123 and on the RADAR screen it shows the original 'blip' and a label with 'EASY123' next to it with all the data (altitude/speed/heading etc).
So, although the transponder can be turned off or fail, the primary RADAR aspect cannot. The ATC RADAR will see the information (name/altitude/speed) disappear but the 'blip' will still be there, so although they wont know how high it is they will know the area it is.
Now, assuming the RADAR system uses both primary and secondary (i'd be very surprised if it only had secondary...although there are some that do), if the two signals just disappeared, there s only one of two answers, well...one answer...it exploded in mid air. Whether thats by a bomb or catastrophic structural failure, we wont know unless we find wreckage....which if it blew up at 35000 ft, it could be spread over a MASSIVE area.
Not necessarily. Pilots are trained to employ 'Aviate, Navigate, Communicate'. Basically this means in an emergency situation, you sort our whats going on and fly the bloody plane before talking to ATC. If its a catastrophic structural failure or explosion, its likely they wouldn't have had time or will to talk to ATC...after all, what could we do in that situation? So, it may not be THAT unusual.
Hppened before (egypt air i think) but again, why turn off the transponder? Also, see previous point about Primary/Secondary RADAR
They will have an Emergency Locator Beacon (ELT) that will auto turn on when crash happens, it may have been destroyed, and its range isnt that far (bout 5 miles i think). The Cockpit Voice Recorder and Flight Data Recorder (Black Boxes) have locator beacons as well but they are even weaker and they wont get it from the air, they will have to be searching in a boat right over it.
Well, if you take the AFR447 crash as an example, they just glided down after stalling (well, gliding might be a bit misleading). Ive always thought it very likely everyone on board wouldn't have had a clue what was going on until the end...after all the pilots didnt, they only noticed and started to power up with seconds to go.Every time one of these crashes happen I get really nervous about flying
If its an explosion in mid air then you would lose pressurisation, and at 35000 ft you would go unconscious very quickly, and in fact its (apparently) quite a nice way to die as its really quite euphoric apparently!