Here's the shiny, new flight path, polished up and ready for prime time.
INMARSAT Senior Vice President Chris McLaughlin told Megyn Kelly on Monday that the company is certain that missing flight MH370 went down in the southern Indian Ocean. Chris McLaughlin told Kelly the plane went back west over the Andaman Islands and then went south.
http://sofrep.com/34084/alright-goodnight-malaysia-want-know-happened-flight-mh-370/
ReplyDeleteThe author posits that the pilot turned the plane toward thailand/andaman islands and made a demand that the opposition leader be freed or else/by a certain time, and Malaysian officials refused, so he ditched the plane:
“...For the Malaysian authorities this would be a political disaster. Malaysian Airlines is state-owned. If they botched the negotiations with Shah, they would own a big part of the blame for that. If it’s true that the charges against PKR leader Ibrahim are trumped up, it’s even worse for the UMNO-led government, which is struggling to maintain power. The dead Chinese citizens on board are also a big problem for the government. Again, they were business men, not peasants on vacation.
China is not going to be happy with an Islamist government’s railroading an opposition leader and getting Chinese nationals killed in the aftermath. A full disclosure from the government that this hijacking was a political act intended to secure the release of a wrongly convicted opposition leader could reignite sectarian violence in the country and topple the majority government. When you look at the Malaysian government’s parsing of information, or the outright falseness of it at times, I can’t help but conclude that their government may not want to ever disclose what really happened.
via comment at FR
Aircraft fly through radar black spots
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If data link updates were missed and radio contact could not be met, Airways had no way of knowing where an aircraft was. Photo / Richard Robinson
Thousands of flights each year in and out of New Zealand fly through radar black spots relying only on scheduled long-range radio calls to track their position.
A spokesman for Airways, which manages the country's 30 million sq km of airspace, said only 60 per cent of flights were tracked to their final destination by satellite, the rest relying on radio contact.
"It's either via radio or via what we call data link ... through the satellites," head of Auckland operations Tim Boyle said.
Individual aircraft had to opt into the data-link system, transmitting their location every 15 minutes.
However, "if the aircraft chooses not to effectively enter into that contract then we don't actually get any data back from Inmarsat [the UK satellite company] at all."
If data link updates were missed and radio contact could not be met, Airways had no way of knowing where an aircraft was, he said.
An aircraft leaving for Los Angeles would be tracked by radar out to a 321km radius where it would then enter a black spot. It would be picked up by radar around 240km from Fiji before flying through another black spot until it reached US airspace.
A spokesman from Inmarsat said there was no mandate for flights from NZ to transmit data.
Inmarsat senior vice-president of external affairs Chris McLaughlin told Radio NZ yesterday that one of the company's satellites had continued to pick up a series of hourly "pings" from MH370's Classic Aero unit, establishing that it flew for at least five hours after it had left Malaysian airspace.
The operator of the aircraft had not elected for it to transmit location data, Mr McLaughlin said. "There's no, believe it or not, mandate to do so, other than over the North Atlantic route and so for many hours, planes flying from New Zealand and Australia are not necessarily reporting their position."
- Brendan Manning
China casts doubt on Malaysia’s claims that MH370 plunged into the ocean
ReplyDeleteChina casts doubt on Malaysia’s claims that MH370 plunged into the ocean
Pilot of missing jet 'in no state to fly'
ReplyDeleteZaharie Ahmad Shah was 'terribly upset' when his wife told him she was leaving, says a friend, who believes he may have set the plane on its fatal course.
Volcanoes, huge seas in search area
ReplyDelete"PERTH, Australia - Searchers racing to find flight MH370's "black box" face daunting hurdles ranging from undersea volcanoes to mountainous seas as they operate in one of Earth's most remote locations, experts said Wednesday."..."Even if the search does find verifiable wreckage from MH370 on the surface, geologist Robin Beaman said underwater volcanoes would probably hamper efforts to recover the black box flight recorder from the depths."..."Van Sebille said the remote location at least meant searchers did not have to contend with the large collections of random garbage that litter most other oceans, reducing the likelihood they would be distracted by false leads.
"This area of ocean is virtually pristine," he said, explaining that ocean currents in the area naturally moved flotsam north, away from the search area.
He said this meant the large objects that had been sighted by air crews were likely to have come from MH370.
"If the plane would have gone down in any of the other ocean basins I would be much more sceptical that the pieces of debris spotted were actually part of the plane," he said."
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Malaysian Airlines MH370 flight search: 122 ‘potential objects’ spotted by satellite
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U.S. law firm plans to sue Boeing, Malaysia Airlines...
" U.S.-based law firm said it expects to represent families of more than half of the passengers on board the missing Malaysian airlines flight in a lawsuit against the carriers and Boeing Co ,..."
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ReplyDeleteMH370 crash: RMAF did not intercept plane as it assumed control tower ordered turn-back
""The plane was detected by our military radar but we assumed the turn-back done by MH370 was due to instructions from the air traffic control tower," said deputy Defense Minister Datuk Abdul Rahim Bakri during his winding-up address for the Ministry Wednesday.
Abdul Rahim also stressed the plane was identified as a non-hostile aircraft."
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MH370 spent 23 minutes above maximum altitude, may have caused hypoxia, says expert
" The plane's maximum service ceiling is 43,100 feet, but military radar had tracked the aircraft flying at between 43,000 feet and 45,000 feet shortly after the last communication from its cockpit.
"It was tracked flying at this altitude for 23 minutes before descending. Oxygen would have run out in 12 minutes (in a depressurised cabin), rendering the passengers unconscious," said the source.
An expert said although the 777-200ER Boeing aircraft has a maximum service ceiling of 43,000 feet, it can probably fly safely at even greater heights.
But at that altitude, where the atmosphere drastically thins, it would take mere minutes if not seconds for hypoxia – a lack of oxygen – to set in, said the Daily Mail report.
Oxygen masks would have dropped down, but these only supply between five and 10 minutes of gas.
Andrew Rae, Professor of Experimental and Applied Aerodynamics at the University of the Highlands and Islands, told Daily Mail: "The venting of cabin pressure would be a problem at 10,000 feet, 30,000 feet or 43,000 feet, but the extra height might perhaps make things happen more quickly.
The fact that the aircraft flew at 43,000ft should not itself trigger the emergency cabin oxygen supply."
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Military radar tracked this flight and admits it was aware of the unusual altitude for several minutes but dismissed it - did not seek any communication to determine why or if hostile? Wow!
Crucial black box data from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have been erased written
ReplyDeleteTHE black box from the doomed Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have over written key data, preventing investigators from ever knowing what happened during crucial moments of the flight.
Search for the wreckage of the plane continues today with the detection of 122 “credible” floating objects in the Indian Ocean, but an expert has warned the black box may be “impossible” to find.
I thought the transcript of flight mh370 was released already...not according to this-
ReplyDelete11:41 pm
Relatives of Chinese passengers on board missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have reportedly been told that there was sealed evidence that cannot be made public.
According to Malaysian newspaper The Straits Times, the sealed evidence included air traffic control radio transcript, radar data and airport security recordings.
The comments came at a briefing at the Metropark Lido Hotel in Beijing focused on UK satellite analysis which led Malaysia to conclude that flight MH370 ended in south Indian Ocean, off Perth.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/missing-malaysia-airlines-flight-live-3219331#ixzz2x7HcQtxl
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Malaysian PM Announcement About Flight 370 'Ending' in Indian Ocean, Possible Links to Debris are Premature, Expert Says
ReplyDeleteBut aerospace safety professor Anthony Brickhouse says it’s still not clear what happened to the Boeing 777.
“At the end of the day, as an investigator, we need solid evidence, we need wreckage, we need bits and pieces of aircraft before you can make that kind of determination," says Brickhouse.
Brickhouse, who teaches at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, says satellite images alone aren’t enough to find out the final fate of flight 370.
A total of 26 countries are now involved in the effort to find the plane.
Math wizards stand ready to join Malaysia Airlines search
ReplyDeleteNo one has yet asked Metron, a scientific consulting firm, to join the search for the missing Boeing 777, the same firm which helped locate Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic in 2009 with 228 on board, the target was its flight data recorder lying at the bottom of the ocean. Metron mathematicians successfully narrowed down the search area to a circle about 80 miles (130 kilometers) in diameter so that undersea drones could recover it in May 2011.
"That's practically a flyspeck compared to the vastness of the remote section of the Indian Ocean where the Malaysian authorities suspect MH370 crashed.
ReplyDeleteUK Mirror:
Thai satellite spots 300 floating objects near search area for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370
unfortunately,
Quote: "Severe ice, severe turbulence and zero visibility has halted today's search for a possible "debris field" from the jet spotted yesterday"
image provided by media of Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah & family
ReplyDeleteContrast that image with the following quote from his youngest son:
"I've read everything online. But I've ignored all the speculation. I know my father better," Ahmad Seth Zaharie, 26, said in an interview published Thursday by the New Straits Times. He is the youngest son of the 53-year-old pilot, Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah.