[Closed] Missing Malaysian Aircraft - is it possible...

I think the issue is that anything is odd given the available evidence.

Indeed.

and it appeared to have more fuel than necessary on board....

There are a variety of reasons for which they will often take more fuel than they strictly need, especially when flying over water.

Well not really. A lot of aviation stuff uses "americanisms" as standard. Meanwhile vertical stabilizer is actually a far more specific term than tail (which would tend to include the horizontal stabilizers, part of the fuselage and typically the APU among other stuff). The photos posted are of the vertical stabilizer, not the tail. The tail isn't actually a type of vertical stabilizer at all - if that was the case, what other types of vertical stabilizer do you think there are? A better analogy might be you posting a picture of a tyre and saying "here's a photo of my wheel".

One of my favourite books when I was younger was called Hijacked - about a plane that got hijacked and the hijackers forced the plane to land on a remote island - maybe someone has took this book to heart.

Also, its one thing landing it on a desert island or whatever and they may even have room to take back off again but how the **** would they fuel it.

Several thousands of gallons of kerosene takes up a fair amount of space and you can't exactly siphon it into the tanks...

You also have to ask the question, why would the hijackers crash land at sea where no one would know?

Hijacked, intended to crash into a populated place, pilot bins it in the ocean to limit fatalities?

All pretty awful. I'm probably like other people who thought this stuff just couldn't happen any more when everything seems tracked all the time.

[i]I thought how do you get a Parrot through customs and hide your accent?[/i]

I can just imagine it, 'Take me to Cubarrr!'

There is a precedent for hijackers hijacking a plane and flying it until it ran out of fuel, it's happened before, so it's not so implausible. Obviously flying the aircraft until it runs out of fuel may not have been their original intention. However post 9/11 I really don't think this would happen. The cockpit doors are armored and in the event of a hijack the pilots wouldn't open the door to the hijackers, they would raise the alarm and land the aircraft. Plus there would be plenty of opportunity for passengers to send text messages and make phone calls. Whatever happened happened without the passengers or cabin crew knowing. They obviously thought they were on their way to Beijing until the end.

I'm favoring the pilot suicide theory. It's the only way the aircraft would be turned around deliberately and flown for at least 4 more hours with no communication to ATC. No other theory makes sense, not even the asphyxiation theory (due to cabin pressurisation problem), because the pilot turned the aircraft around and if he did that because he suspected a malfunction then he would have radio'd it in and called an emergency.

[quote=wobbliscott ]There is a precedent for hijackers hijacking a plane and flying it until it ran out of fuel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_961

Plus there would be plenty of opportunity for passengers to send text messages and make phone calls

Really? Over the sea?

[url= http://www.grreporter.info/en/greek_tanker_has_detected_possible_traces_missing_flight_%CE%BC%CE%B7370/10858 ]Greek tanker spots suitcases [/url]

If they have engine data showing it flew on for hours how does the data end, eg does it stop abruptly or show signs of fuel loss or normal landing signs

If they have engine data showing it flew on for hours how does the data end, eg does it stop abruptly or show signs of fuel loss or normal landing signs

I heard (could be very wrong) that the engine data wasn't being saved, because the airline didn't pay for that option, but the engines still tried to contact home, but didn't actually transmit the data.

Did I make this up or did someone else hear it?

brant - Member
Greek tanker spots suitcases

POSTED 1 HOUR AGO # REPORT-POST

Links been hijacked 😉

brant - Member
Greek tanker spots suitcases

POSTED 1 HOUR AGO #

No. It didn't. It was warned to watch out for them.

[quote=richmars ]I heard (could be very wrong) that the engine data wasn't being saved, because the airline didn't pay for that option, but the engines still tried to contact home, but didn't actually transmit the data.

Not exactly, and not really anything to do with the engines or whether or not there was a contract. It's been described on pprune as "pinging" - what appears to have been happening is "keep alive" messages on the Inmarsat link, which keeps the system appraised of what satellites it is in contact with, so that it is ready for use when required - presumably normally voice comms given they don't seem to have used that link for telemetry.

Hence no data at all from the aircraft, no engine data, no speed, no altitude, not even position. What they do have if I understand correctly is a roundtrip message time which allows them to place the aircraft on a circle a certain distance from the satellite. This then results in the northerly and southerly location "corridors", with the ends of these corridors the range of the aircraft at the time of the last "ping". The reason for two separate corridors rather than a single arc is that part of the possible circle is within coverage of another Inmarsat satellite which didn't receive the "ping", hence this part is also removed from the possible locations.

[img] [/img]

^ it also stopped off somewhere and had a couple of additional engines fitted too! according the that picture.

Good spot; otherwise convincing.

I'm more interested in this Melissa and what she got up to on her hols.

I understand she went to Malaysia and got invited into the cockpit...

I'm more interested in this Melissa and what she got up to on her hols.

At this point I would usually post a link, but it's too sunny to get banned.

[quote=_tom_ said]I'm more interested in this Melissa and what she got up to on her hols.

Purchased some ill fitting garments by the looks of it.

She'll catch a chill.

ampthill - Member
Plus there would be plenty of opportunity for passengers to send text messages and make phone calls
Really? Over the sea?

yeah but it crossed back over malaysia

would the phones not have been talking to cell phone towers?

Im assuming the authorities have the phone details of the passengers?

even if everyone was dead from asphyxiation (unless their phones were confiscated by hijackers and turned off) if the plane was anywhere near land the phones would be traceable

Whoever was behind all this seems to have thought through lots of detail. So perhaps a GSM jammer was being used also.

I'd been thinking about this phone thing as well. Almost certain that someone on the plane would have at least tried to send a message. Probably something like

WR BNG HJKD. LOOOOOOOOOOOooooOOO1111L!

So, options to debunk that?
All passengers gassed/incapacitated/or even killed
All mobiles 'confiscated' by alleged hijackers
Aliens have the plane and their cloaking device also blocks phone signals

can you depressurise the passenger cabin and retain pressure in cockpit?

IIRC the cockpits usually have a chemical oxygen supply to ensure oxygen for the pilots even if every other system fails.

EDIT - wrong way round - passengers get chemical oxygen, the pilots get it from an oxygen cylinder.

Cabin air pressure is just supplied by a bleed off the engines (except on the dreamliner). Don't think the pilot's supply lasts very long: more than the 3 mins the overhead masks give you but not 4 or 5 hours. IIRc it's bottled air whereas the overhead mask as are a chemical generator. Enough time to get down to a safe altitude. Suppose you might be able drop the cabin temperature at the same time to stop people from waking up?

I am a bit rusty (been a while since I've been involved in designing a whole plane) but the pilots have a different oxygen supply to the passengers. The passenger air only lasts long enough to get the plane down to breathable air. The cabin crew have portable tanks so they can get around the cabin to help passengers and/or crew.

On thing to remember is the passengers should have had their mobiles turned off as they were on a plane. There may be a few who left them on silent.

edit: yes, passenger air is a chemical generator and I think pilots are tanks. It is possible to gradually drop the cabin pressure to make the passengers drift off without realising, or at very least by the time they do they are very disorientated and weakened they cannot do anything. You would need to avoid the masks dropping though but that should be possible by keeping the pressure just above the cut off for a long period. You may still need to drop it further but they may well be too weak or not conscious by then.

Cockpit air supply is around 10 - 15 minutes - enough time to drop to lower altitude basically.

On thing to remember is the passengers should have had their mobiles turned off as they were on a plane. There may be a few who left them on silent.

someone always forgets to turn off, despite the announcements.

do phones still ping towers in airplane mode?
and im sure plenty of people forgot/ didnt want to turn them off

oh and to answer a previous question no it's not really possible to de-pressurise the cabin but not the cockpit. The doors are reinforced after 9-11 but not strong enough for that. The pilots would just wear their masks.

Cabin air is 10-15 minutes, not sure about cockpit if it is different. I was sure is was in case there is a windscreen failure and even at low altitude the pilots would need masks due to the speed of the air. Should the main air supply fail and the decent takes longer than normal they obviously need to survive and stay awake to give the passengers any hope.

I reckon ten or twenty percent would have had them on.

most likely yes.

Yep, as above, lots of phones would still have been on. Internal flights I've taken in Asia have been quite an eye opener with people using their phones pretty openly once in range of land.

i fly the same domestic route weekly, 4 flights a week. Loads of people leave their phones on. Especially Iphones..

[url= http://keithledgerwood.tumblr.com/post/79838944823/did-malaysian-airlines-370-disappear-using-sia68 ]Here is an ace conspiracy theory[/url]

Seeing as everyone else is guessing....

Remember a few weeks ago there was a massive stabbing knife terrorist attack in China? Well it was in Kunming, look it up on a map... Yeah?

Chinese aren't saying anything are they? They busy blaming Malaysia for all this, I think they shot it down. That's why there's no radar no trace, it was hijacked by Chinese terrorists and china 'sorted' it

It's a rubbish theory

can you depressurise the passenger cabin and retain pressure in cockpit?

I think we can discount an actual cabin pressure incident, but it [url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522 ]has happened[/url] - chills my blood to think about the last few minutes of the cabin attendant... 🙁

DavidB that is ace!

question for you clever people...The satellite data (IMSAT?) shows the [u]time[/u] the airplane was moving (?). We know that there are 2 arcs, with 2 corridors. So, knowing the plane and the factors related to its [u]speed, fuel load[/u], its precise position should be able to be calculated??? There will be two alternatives on each arc? Or am I being stupid?

they dont know the speed, hence the arcs

they dont know the speed, hence the arcs

Or the direction, either at the point of the ping, or subsequently.

could have made smaller changes in direction many times, and altitude, massivly affecting fuel use. So there has to be a min and max distance. I am so struck by DavidB's post it seems dead convincing. Here it is [url= http://keithledgerwood.tumblr.com/post/79838944823/did-malaysian-airlines-370-disappear-using-sia68 ]again[/url], take a read.

This is probably going over old ground, but it still seems astonishing to me that it's even possible to turn off the transponder on a commercial aircraft. Whay would this functionality be available? I'me pretty sure that if I owned an airline which ran lots of very, very expensive planes, I'd want to know where they all were, all of the time...

everything is on a breaker.

Would be a bit silly to have an electrical system not on a breaker and then lose an aircraft due to an electrical fire that could have been avoided.

I agree IHN ^^ trucks and vans can't turn off the satnav transponders they have so how coe aeroplanes can? I do think the theory linked baove that the missing plane shadowed another is quite credible. The question remains why? and what happened to all the people?

EDIT: But shirley they would be on seperate breakers and therefore not able to turn both off similtanously?

This is probably going over old ground, but it still seems astonishing to me that it's even possible to turn off the transponder on a commercial aircraft. Whay would this functionality be available?

Every electrical system has cut offs and safety breakers. If it malfunctions, there needs to be a way of shutting it down before it causes any problems.

Under normal circumstances, you'd just put out an alert call to say that your transponder is offline and identify yourself by other means, the whole point being that you have several redundant backups. But then if you turn those off too...

That link from DavidB seems fairly believable to my uneducated mind

They need to turn them off at airports otherwise the systems would be overwhelmed by signals from active transponders on the ground.

Ah, gotcha. Every day is a school day.

and the the airport thing. Imagine what a radar screen would look like at Heathrow if they couldn't turn them off.

Edit - beaten to it.

[quote=mangoridebike ]That link from DavidB seems fairly believable to my uneducated mind

I see several people making similar comments. It does look good - apart from a couple of points. Military radar isn't that rubbish - it would be possible to distinguish two 777s flying in close formation, unless they were literally right on top of each other. It would be almost impossible to fly them in close enough formation to evade detection - they're not designed to be flown in close formation and the vortices generated by one aircraft would make keeping station in another one (which isn't designed for that sort of control) pretty much impossible. Remember it was also night which wouldn't exactly make it any easier.

The issue about the oxygen has largely already been covered - from what I've read the passenger supply is 10-12 minutes chemically generated, and the aircrew have a totally separate system with considerably longer duration fed from a bottle. Also some suggestion that the aircraft was taken over 40,000ft - higher than normal, and a height at which the unpressurised oxygen supply for passengers wouldn't have been sufficient to maintain consciousness (even with pure oxygen the partial pressure would have been insufficient). So it does seem possible the passengers were deliberately taken out before passing over land.

Military radar isn't that rubbish - it would be possible to distinguish two 777s flying in close formation, unless they were literally right on top of each other. It would be almost impossible to fly them in close enough

I dont think so, at 30km the angular resolution of radar is about 600m. I heard a radar dude on R4 talking about it lunch time. Secondly, the countries it flew over probably don't have the kit like the 'mericans do.
Typical search radars often do not resolve objects less than 1000m apart.
The only things that can resolve that well are weapons radars and they won't be deployed as typical skywatch type things.

I was finding it hard to believe but maybe it was just an elaborate robbery rather than terrorism.

For the plane or maybe for something in the hold?

If it did land without killing the passengers through hypoxia then 230 people is a lot to feed and provide facilities for for 10 days 🙁

I was finding it hard to believe but maybe it was just an elaborate robbery rather than terrorism.

For the plane or maybe for something in the hold?

Bit impractical to steal a whole plane though. Since you can't really sell it, about the only reason you'd want to steal a whole plane is to turn it into some kind of flying bomb which is a pretty terrifying thought. Even then it's more elaborate than it needs to be - you've got the whole hassle of landing it, hiding it, refuelling it and then taking off again on a suicide mission - whereas you can skip steps 1-3 by just doing a 9/11.

I guess something in the hold is plausible but it would have to be worth a hell of a lot to pull off what is looking like an extremely well planned and very elaborate game of hide-and-seek. If the theory that DavidB posted is halfway correct, that's an incredible bit of flying in a commercial jet to run what is basically an intercept at night without radar or ATC vectoring you onto the target.

https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13cv1gohsmbv5jmy221vrfyiz3vdhbop04#

.

edward2000's link is more plausible than davidB's by a considerable margin
but the fact that the fire happened conveniently as the planes was transferring from malaysian to vietnamese airspace seems a bit far fetched to me

occams razor would suggest that it was the pilot/hijacker who turned off the transponders, turned the plane left and flew off south to ditch in the sea?

The trouble with the hijack scenarios is, why go to all the effort to land, hide, refuel and take off on towards their target, as opposed to taking control of the plane and just going straight on to the target. The latter is much easier.

That last link doesn't seem to tally as well as the "intercept theory" link*. That looked scarily plausible... and hypothetically stacks up with the pilot having an elaborate flight sim at home (former flight sim user wondering out loud why a very experienced captain, presumably with works paid for access to state of the art simulators, would need a home made set up...)

ETA *. Because of the satellite ping data

Not sure if it's been mentioned but I've heard that the plane may have been carrying something very valuable and that it was a robbery but not for the plane - Thunderball but not for a nuclear weapon. Just a rumour of course??

Not sure if it's been mentioned but I've heard that the plane may have been carrying something very valuable and that it was a robbery but not for the plane - Thunderball but not for a nuclear weapon. Just a rumour of course??

I think the problem here is the media, especially the rolling news channels wanting something, anything to talk about therefore coming up with ever more impractical or implausible scenarios so they can drag in some "expert" to interview and pull in the viewing figures.

The best thing the media could do now is to butt out of it and stop with the wild speculation...

I, like many others, have only watched the news updates. There seem to be many theories and plausible speculation yet I find one aspect missing, Chinese or American military comments.
Is it possible they know what/where this plane was heading and took action against it, or perhaps are dumbing down knowledge because the truth about its whereabouts is perhaps too disturbing for us to hear??

Either way this is a very sad and confusing mystery 😐

The chap in Edward2000's link isn't quite as knowledgable as he thinks. I'm a current 777 pilot, and some of what he says is plain wrong. I won't go into specifics, but IMHO he isn't the authoritative figure he claims.

What I don't understand (though I'm sure there's a logical explanation for it), is for less than £100 I can buy a device for my bike which will tell me exactly where I am, accurate to within a few feet.

Assuming any such device on an aircraft would be protected from any kind of human interference (would seem sensible - though hindsight is always a great thing), is it just a case of insufficient satellite coverage over the ocean, or difficulties in sending the signal back to base?

I'd like to think the passengers and crew are still alive, but I reckon it's much more likely the plane has gone down for whatever reason and our imaginations have gone wild with the lack of information. Something we're not used to in the information age.

Found It!

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/ @51.5223891,-0.126281,229m/data=!3m1!1e3

Why did nobody notice it in Russell Sq?

(Sat View)

What I don't understand (though I'm sure there's a logical explanation for it), is for less than £100 I can buy a device for my bike which will tell me exactly where I am, accurate to within a few feet.

Civil plane's tech works on the fundamental assumption it wants to be found, bit of an oversight really. But it's all 'look I'm here' tech.

Switch the 'look I'm here' off and your buggered

The chap in Edward2000's link isn't quite as knowledgable as he thinks. I'm a current 777 pilot, and some of what he says is plain wrong. I won't go into specifics, but IMHO he isn't the authoritative figure he claims.[b]

Are you Malaysian have you borrowed a plane recently and if so what's the biking like where you are

The pilot writing in the link provided by edward2000 reads as very "analogue era", if that makes sense...?

The transponder isn't intended to be like a GPS tracker for a stolen car - its just so the aircraft can be identified by ATC when its flying in controlled airspace.

It was the co-pilot.

Turns out he was a bit of a shagger, this has been used to coerce him and he hijacked the plane.

What happened once he had hijacked it is the mystery

This is the most reasoned, sensible explanation I've seen, especially as there's precedent for this kind of incident:

https://plus.google.com/106271056358366282907/posts/GoeVjHJaGBz

It's like déjà vu all over again...

that link was posted a few pages back globalti

its certainly not as outlandish as others, but the timing of the fire just as they switched from malaysian to vietnames air traffic control seems suspicous and the engines transmitting for 7 hours after?

I just read a super interesting article (from an experienced pilot) and he said the black box would be disabled in a severe enough fire. He also did a lot of research on the pilot of this particular flight and thinks it's entirely possible for him to have tried to land the plane. Still, there are lots of questions left unanswered. Whatever happen is scary and tragic and this whole not knowing is just worrisome. I can't imagine how the families feel...

Global ti - the guy in that link sounds very plausible, but I'm afraid a lot of what he says is just plain wrong. As a current 777 pilot, I doubt he's ever flown a modern airliner, as his understanding of some modern systems way off the mark. To be honest, I wouldn't bed surprised if he hadn't even been a professional pilot.

and the vortices generated by one aircraft would make keeping station in another one (which isn't designed for that sort of control) pretty much impossible.

Agree. Watching planes stacking and coming into land the vortices can really **** up a planes stability if even remotely behind.

Plus for everything to fall into place at the right (lucky) timings smacks of a Jewel-Heist Hollywood movie.

I still say (sadly) its ploughed into a hillside somewhere remote.