News Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 crash

[mheslep]

Right now, I'm beginning to think Ernst Stavro isn't dead, after all.

If only. Ernst would have long ago released a hand-on-the-cat video demanding fat stacks and we'd know what had happened.

 

[mheslep]

An incoming object the size of a 777 simply can't be missed with active air search radar looking for targets.

There's a range limit with every radar. With the aircraft's transponder turned on range is about http://public-action.com/911/transpon/ Turn off the transponder and detection range used by commercial aviation ground radar falls greatly, and of course identification is gone.

US military radar can throw out a lot more power, but it can not be everywhere, or look everywhere, at the same time.

 

[arildno]

If only. Ernst would have long ago released a hand-on-the-cat video demanding fat stacks and we'd know what had happened.

Eeh, I think the cat is dead??

 

[mheslep]

Eeh, I think the cat is dead??

Copy cats.

 

[arildno]

Copy cats.

Lol!

 

[nsaspook]

There's a range limit with every radar. With the aircraft's transponder turned on range is about http://public-action.com/911/transpon/ Turn off the transponder and detection range used by commercial aviation ground radar falls greatly, and of course identification is gone.

Sure nothing is all powerful, not even OTH radar that can see for thousands of miles but my point about detection was about fixed defense radars (mainly in India and Pakistan) and their early warning aircraft. The released 'ping' map of possible locations shows it could have been over a huge swath of Earth's land and sea out of the range of almost anything but I think the reports of paths near India air space are unlikely.

India has a very advanced early warning system including a modern BMD.
http://zeenews.india.com/news/natio...e-being-used-for-9/11-type-attack_918414.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordfish_Long_Range_Tracking_Radar

 

[m k]

You need extra timing data from separate points to use Multilateration/TDOA with fixed detectors in space.

Can we assume something from it?
Like no major distance changes.

How about a fake ID, like swap with something that never took off?

 

[mheslep]

but I think the reports of paths near India air space are unlikely.

Those types of long range radars are large, usually fixed location, and expensive. I'd expect those that India has are oriented towards Pakistan and not out over the vastness of the Indian ocean.

 

[nsaspook]

Those types of long range radars are large, usually fixed location, and expensive. I'd expect those that India has are oriented towards Pakistan and not out over the vastness of the Indian ocean.

I agree and that's mainly why I think the plane was lost there (Indian ocean) and never came close (<300 miles) to a large populated land mass that a nation like India would try to protect from a 9/11 hijack type event.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/indian-search-for-missing-malaysian-plane-on-hold/2014/03/16/ff3764be-acc8-11e3-b8ca-197ef3568958_story.html

“So far no sighting or detection has been reported by the units deployed for searches in various designated areas,” India’s Defense Ministry said in a statement Sunday.

“The Malaysian authorities have now indicated that based on investigation, the search operations have entered a new phase and a strategy for further searches is being formulated. Accordingly, search operations have been suspended and all Indian assets earmarked for search operations have been placed on standby,” the statement said.
...
Vinod Patney, a retired air force officer, said it was unlikely - but not impossible - for an aircraft to intrude a country’s airspace undetected.

Officials said there was effective radar coverage in the region, with a large number of flights between Europe and Southeast Asian using this route. Also, India has tightened security in the area, which is a strategic shipping lane for oil tankers.

 

[Dotini]

Focus has shifted to the pilot. According to controversial reporting, he was in the midst of an emotional meltdown.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-trial-jailed-opposition-leader-sodomite.html

The object of his emotions, one Anwar Ibrahim, is featured in this up-to-the-minute wiki article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_Ibrahim

The lid is somewhat lifted on internal Malaysian politics. Malaysia has affiliations with western nations.

 

[nsaspook]

Can we assume something from it?
Like no major distance changes.

How about a fake ID, like swap with something that never took off?

Good point: From my updated original post.

One thing we might be able to deduce from a single detector at that distance is if the plane seemed stationary (at the same measured distance) over several pings. It could mean the plane is circling at a point , landed or is following the arc path.

The planes actual Satellite transceiver has a unique hardwired (read-only) code ID like a MAC address on a PC Ethernet card but don't use Ethernet type collision protocols because of delays. I assume they matched the ID with the correct plane on the ground and followed it.
http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jain/cis788-97/ftp/satellite_data/index.html#MAC

Cloning and spoofing the signal on the ground somewhere to simulate the planes flight path while not impossible would require a very high level of expertise.

 

[AlephZero]

One of the "nuttier" UK newspapers has solve the mystery. It's a copycat of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_714

 

[nsaspook]

Focus has shifted to the pilot.

This might be all true but I was reminded on another forum about how sometimes a sequence of currently unknown events could lead to a crash that was complete out of the hands of the pilot.

The movie "Fate is the Hunter" was about just that.

 

[jim hardy]

This might be all true but I was reminded on another forum about how sometimes a sequence of currently unknown events could lead to a crash that was complete out of the hands of the pilot.

The movie "Fate of the Hunter" was about just that.

One ought to read the book too... it's a good bit different from the movie, which Mr. Gann wanted nothing to do with.. Get the 1961 edition if you can for i remember some mystical parts that were not in later edition.

 

[nsaspook]

One ought to read the book too...

I'll see if I can find a copy.

I've learned (and frequently need to relearn) after being completely wrong uncounted times to restrain from thinking someone intentionally caused a problem unless there is iron-clad information that 'Murphy' was innocent.

 

[mpresic]

To me, a plane disappearing is amazing. This isn't 1937 with Amelia Earhart. Prior to last week, if someone told me their phone app could image the flight path of every flight in real time, I think I would have believed them.

 

[arildno]

To me, a plane disappearing is amazing. This isn't 1937 with Amelia Earhart. Prior to last week, if someone told me their phone app could image the flight path of every flight in real time, I think I would have believed them.

Well, it shows our globe isn't as extensively surveilled as we thought it to be.
For example, some Indian military official recently said that the Andaman/Nicobar isles simply aren't worth the cost having permanent surveillance of (in contrast to the India/Pakistan border), so there isn't really anything strange if Indian military radars haven't picked up any signals from there, since the radars there probably were shut off..

 

[Pythagorean]

aaaand... back to terrorism:

The missing Malaysian airlines flight MH370 may have been deliberately flown under the radar to Taliban-controlled bases on the border of Afghanistan, it has emerged, as authorities said that the final message sent from the cockpit came after one of the jet's communications systems had already been switched off.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-engineers-and-crew-investigated-9195320.html

 

[nsaspook]

To me, a plane disappearing is amazing. This isn't 1937 with Amelia Earhart. Prior to last week, if someone told me their phone app could image the flight path of every flight in real time, I think I would have believed them.

Unless you have actually traveled the area involved on ship or (slow) aircraft it's hard to get an idea of how quickly any sign of man vanishes once you leave the coast and once you hit the ocean you might as well be in space unless you have direct Satcom.

I've done some time on the 'rock', we have good coverage overhead but it's not targeted at civilian air. If you're hot, fast and/or have active sensors with a signature that seems military the probability that someone has noticed is high. We used to hide whole battle-groups from the USSR for weeks (unlikely to be true today) in the IO by only using signal lights , flagmen and complete (EMCON on normal non highly directional emitters) EM silence that included disconnecting active receivers from antennas so even local oscillators weren't detected.

 

[Pythagorean]

As someone who has fished king crab in the Bering Sea... let me tell you, the world is big.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Wired has a decent article up

A Startlingly Simple Theory About the Missing Malaysia Airlines Jet
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2014/03/mh370-electrical-fire/

 

[Dotini]

A key point being made by CNN analysts:
The west turn away from original course was plotted into ACARS maybe 12 minutes before contact was lost. This locks in a premeditated cockpit decision to change course.

CNN analyst's points against the slow burning fire theory:

- there were closer runways than the one supposedly aimed for
- continued course changes made later
- ACARS was transmitting longer than thought. No hint of smoke, fire or even elevated temperatures in the wheel well or elsewhere.

 

[Ptero]

Hello Greg and others from the Dreamliner thread,
It is becoming clear to me what probably happened. Clifford Irving and other sources state that the manifest list includes "an extraordinarily large" number of lithium batteries in the cargo hold. I have been unable to determine the quantity or type but let us assume a pallet load of laptop batteries. If these started shorting and burning, an airline pilot agreed with me that they could burn through the wiring for the automatic communications systems and render them inoperative. We know several things about putting out lithium battery fires that we researched on the Dreamliner thread. One is that you can't put them out. As soon as you pull the Halon extinguisher away, they reignite. Two, they propagate, setting off adjacent battery packs that had no shorts. Three, the only way to get the fire out of the aircraft is to physically remove the battery/s from the aircraft. But what we did not discuss on the Dreamliner thread is the toxicity - particularily the fumes. We assumed at worst the pilots could don oxygen masks and land the plane while the batteries sparked and fumed in their protective shell - and after the "fix" the fumes would vent outside the pressure hull. But there was no protective shell around the batteries in Flight 370's cargo hold.
This is what I suspect happened:
(1) Around 1:00 a.m., the fire begins to smolder, creating fumes of hydrofluoric acid vapor in the pressurized cargo hold.
(2) 1:07 a.m., the last ACARS transmission is automatically sent.
(3) 1:19 a.m., the flight crew signs off with Malaysian flight controllers.
(4) 1:20 a.m., the fire grows. Passengers and crew notice the smell of fumes for the first time.
(5) 1:21 a.m., following procedure for electrical fire, the pilot pulls the main breaker for all accessory systems. This disables the transponder.
(6) 1:22 a.m., pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah puts the 777 in a climb to maximum ceiling of ~45,000 feet as he initiates a turn, programming the coordinates into autopilot for Palau Langkawi, the closest airport. He can tell by his burning eyes that the fire is not electrical in nature and he instantly suspects the lithium batteries in the hold. He knows they have one chance -- the fire might be starved for oxygen if he depressurizes the plane at that altitude.
(7) 1:24 a.m., the toxic fumes grow stronger. As panic grows in the passenger compartments, Shah orders passengers to don oxygen masks.
(8) 1:26 a.m., Shah depressurizes the 777, blowing out the fumes and extinguishing the fire. He flies at this altitude for several minutes. Many passengers fall unconscious during this period. The pilots may have become blind by this time.
(9) 1:28 a.m., Shah brings the plane back down but the fire erupts again, filling the plane with toxic fumes. All personnel and passengers are overcome and pass out, then die, if they are not already dead.
(10) 2:15 a.m., the 777 continues on its programmed course and crosses over the island of Pulau Perak, a flying coffin.

Death by inhalation of hydrofluoric acid fumes is excruciatingly horrible. The maximum level permitted by the CDC is 3 ppm in an 8 hour period.
See http://www.colorado.edu/ehs/pdf/HWMedHFExpo.pdf

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Clifford Irving and other sources state that the manifest list includes "an extraordinarily large" number of lithium batteries in the cargo hold.

Can you provide the sources that state the manifest?

 

[Ptero]

One problem is that many lithium-ion batteries today contain fluorine, which readily combines with hydrogen to make hydrofluoric acid (HF). In accidental battery fires, HF is noxious, dangerous to the touch, and an inhalation danger.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech...rds-at-both-ends-of-the-lithiumion-life-cycle

Chemistry
Investigation of fire emissions from Li-ion batteries
This report presents an investigation on gases emitted during Lithium-ion battery fires.
Details of the calibration of an FTIR instrument to measure HF, POF 3 and PF 5 gases are
provided as background to the minimum detection limits for each species. The use of
FTIR in tests has been verified by repeating experiments reported in the literature. The
study reports on gases emitted both after evaporation and after ignition of the electrolyte
fumes. Tests were conducted where electrolyte is injected into a propane flame and the
influence of the addition of water is studied. Finally three types of battery cells were
burnt and emission of fluorine and/or phosphorous containing species quantified.
http://www.brandforsk.se/MediaBinar...1_Rapport.pdf&MediaArchive_ForceDownload=true

 

[nsaspook]

This is my current time-line of known events of the beginning:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-flight.html?_r=0

The plane took off at 12:41 a.m. on March 8 carrying 239 people headed for Beijing and reached a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet at 1:01 a.m. Six minutes later, at 1:07 a.m., the Malaysian authorities say, the plane sent its last Acars message, which reported nothing amiss.

The authorities have not specified what time the last verbal exchange between the cockpit and the air traffic controllers took place. But Mr. Hishammuddin’s statement means it would have occurred between 1:08 a.m. and 1:21 a.m., when the plane’s transponder stopped transmitting and ground control lost contact with the jet.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/18/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/

The Thai military was receiving normal flight path and communication data from the Boeing 777-200 on its planned March 8 route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing until 1:22 a.m., when it disappeared from its radar.

Six minutes later, the Thai military detected an unknown signal, a Royal Thai Air Force spokesman told CNN. This unknown aircraft, possibly Flight 370, was heading the opposite direction.

1:07 am : Acars (Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System) last message. If there is no emergency it will send the next message 30min later at 1:37.
This is a packet digital system on HF/VHF or Satcom that shares the frequency with others so it's not transmitting at all times.
1:19 am : Last verbal message sent.
1:22 am : Radar Transponders off
1:28 am : plane turns around
1:37 am : No message from Acars.

It's very possible that the same event (accident or human intervention) that took out the transponders at 1:22 also disabled the voice systems and Acars at the same time. If the pilots were busy with a fire in the cockpit or other emergency that required them to move from the flight consoles, quickly punching in a location (that might have been a preprogrammed 'bugout' location) and letting the plane fly on auto to a possible landing location is not a outlandish possibility.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...r-about-mh370/
http://www.airtrafficmanagement.net/...0-satcoms-101/

 

[Ptero]

Can you provide the sources that state the manifest?

Irving said the flight's disappearance had been compounded by "an engulfing fog of speculation, frequently reaching a tone of hysteria".

"People are spooked. They want information that nobody is able to provide. We have come to expect quick enlightenment. That isn’t possible. We demand transparency and coherence. They’re not happening," he wrote.

He pointed out that the Boeing 777's safety record was exceptional but asked if there was an issue in the cargo hold of the missing MAS plane.

"Last week, the National Transportation Safety Board discovered that there was an unusually large consignment of lithium-ion batteries on the cargo manifest.

"This technology is more recently known as the cause of fires that led to the grounding of the Boeing 787 fleet, but lithium-ion batteries for personal electronic devices have been a frequent cause of emergencies in cargo holds and baggage handling," he said.

Irving wrote that the batteries were prone to overheating and combustion and that the FAA’s Office of Security and Hazardous Materials Safety recorded many of these incidents in the US, including a fire caused by a battery on a self-propelled surf board on a FedEx airplane.

But he said the pilots would have had time to report an emergency if there was a battery induced fire in the cargo hold of MH370.

"There is, however, a relevant example of a large airplane being lost over the Indian Ocean after a cargo fire. In 1987, a South African Airways 747 with a 159 people aboard suffered an uncontrollable cargo fire that began with computers packed in polystyrene. The airplane fell into a deep part of the ocean east of Mauritius.
http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/no-facts-to-blame-pilots-of-mh370-yet-says-report

 

[lisab]

"Last week, the National Transportation Safety Board discovered that there was an unusually large consignment of lithium-ion batteries on the cargo manifest.

Do you have a source for this?

"This technology is more recently known as the cause of fires that led to the grounding of the Boeing 787 fleet, but lithium-ion batteries for personal electronic devices have been a frequent cause of emergencies in cargo holds and baggage handling," he said.

Not sure about the cargo/baggage handling incidents. Is there a source for that claim?

The 787 issues are totally apart from what happens to *stored* batteries, in any case. I don't see how that applies to this case.

 

[AlephZero]

This is what I suspect happened:...

Nice story, but there are too many loose ends. Even if the pilots disabled non-essential electrical circuits, that doesn't include the emergency radio transmitter for sending distress messages by voice. That doesn't rely on ground receiving stations, and most other planes within range of several hundred watts of transmitter power would be monitoring that channel. If you plan to make an emergency landing, or a ditching at sea, you want people to know your intentions.

The other implausible part is the creativity of the crew in first guessing what the problem was, and then inventing a plan to deal with it that was outside of the aircraft operating manual. (There is a procedure for depressurizing the cabin, but at 20,000 feet not 45,000 feet. The passengers won't like being depressurized at 20,000 feet, but most of them will survive with nothing worse than nose bleeds and/or perforated eardrums that will heal.) That's not they way flight crews have been taught to think. Right from basic flying training, you don't fix problems by getting creative, you follow the drills and checklists that have been devised by teams of people who collectively know a lot more than you do.

 

[AlephZero]

lithium-ion batteries for personal electronic devices have been a frequent cause of emergencies in cargo holds and baggage handling

I would delete "frequent", but there have been one or two, including http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_6. Note the final comment that

In October 2010 ...The FAA issued a restriction on the carrying of lithium batteries in bulk on passenger flights.