Malaysian Airliner missing?

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/201...tery-new-information-could-change-everything/

'Malaysia Airlines, meanwhile, said it is investigating an Australian television report that the co-pilot on the missing plane had invited two women into the cockpit during a flight two years ago.

Jonti Roos described the encounter on Australia’s “A Current Affair.” The airline said it wouldn’t comment until its investigation is complete.

Roos said she and her friend were allowed to stay in the cockpit during the entire one-hour flight on Dec. 14, 2011, from Phuket, Thailand, to Kuala Lumpur. She said the arrangement did not seem unusual to the plane’s crew.

“Throughout the entire flight, they were talking to us and they were actually smoking throughout the flight,” Roos said.'
 
Fearless Tower said:
Maybe the pilots were incapacitated and a fearless flight simmer took over...
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"This is your NEW captain speaking....."

05.cor_blimey.png
 
Fearless Tower said:
And comparing a 777 disappearing to Steve Faucet in a light airplane VFR is apples and oranges.
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Not really, it's a relative scale. Steve Fossett did not have the Air and Naval forces of multiple nations looking for him. My point is that many people have the misconception that you should be able to just fly to the general area where the disappearance occurred and it will be obviously right there in plain sight.

I mean, how many of us have had trouble finding an airport that's right on the map and much bigger than an airplane?
 
Silvaire said:
Not really, it's a relative scale. Steve Fossett did not have the Air and Naval forces of multiple nations looking for him. My point is that many people have the misconception that you should be able to just fly to the general area where the disappearance occurred and it will be obviously right there in plain sight.

I mean, how many of us have had trouble finding an airport that's right on the map and much bigger than an airplane?
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You are right... Only the CAP was allowed to search.. All others were banned....:mad2::mad2:...

Kinda explains why it took a year to find him..:rolleyes:
 
nddons said:
I've always wondered about this. Do shipping containers ever fall off of ships, and if they do, do they ever float, causing what I perceive would be a hazard to ships?
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Yes, they come off regularly in storms, but that's only a minuscule fraction of the debris at sea. Most of it is plastic garbage blown ad washed out to sea from all over Eastern Asia.
 
CharlieTango said:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/201...tery-new-information-could-change-everything/

'Malaysia Airlines, meanwhile, said it is investigating an Australian television report that the co-pilot on the missing plane had invited two women into the cockpit during a flight two years ago.

Jonti Roos described the encounter on Australia’s “A Current Affair.” The airline said it wouldn’t comment until its investigation is complete.

Roos said she and her friend were allowed to stay in the cockpit during the entire one-hour flight on Dec. 14, 2011, from Phuket, Thailand, to Kuala Lumpur. She said the arrangement did not seem unusual to the plane’s crew.

“Throughout the entire flight, they were talking to us and they were actually smoking throughout the flight,” Roos said.'
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Before 9/11 that happened on US airlines as well.
 
Silvaire said:
Steve Fossett did not have the Air and Naval forces of multiple nations looking for him.
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Part of the problem is that based on the recent release of radar information, they were looking in the wrong body of water.
 
I don't know about anyone else, but the more info dribbles out leads me to consider foul play as more likely. Flying around at low alt, with all comms and signals out doesn't sound like any kind of attempt at salvation or emer procedure I'm aware of.

Curiouser and curiouser.
 
docmirror said:
I don't know about anyone else, but the more info dribbles out leads me to consider foul play as more likely. Flying around at low alt, with all comms and signals out doesn't sound like any kind of attempt at salvation or emer procedure I'm aware of.

Curiouser and curiouser.
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Yep. Turn transponder off, stop comms, make abrubt turns, and fly in different direction in an environment where it's unexpected and might not be seen on radar.

Haven't heard of that happening before. :rolleyes2:
 
docmirror said:
Flying around at low alt, with all comms and signals out doesn't sound like any kind of attempt at salvation or emer procedure I'm aware of.
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Damn. So that's why I failed the divert task in my private checkride...
 
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docmirror said:
I don't know about anyone else, but the more info dribbles out leads me to consider foul play as more likely. Flying around at low alt, with all comms and signals out doesn't sound like any kind of attempt at salvation or emer procedure I'm aware of.

Curiouser and curiouser.
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OTOH, it sounds exactly like what would happen if the plane lost its pressure vessel and disabled the antennas in the process.
 
Could a nearby plane have heard a distress call on VHF 121.5?

I'm wondering if any traffic was close enough. BBC has a video showing the traffic before the flight vanished. The nearest plane looks to me to be at least 100 NM away.

Wikipedia says that the transmission range for an aircraft is up to 200 NM at 35,000 although that is for ideal conditions.
 
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Henning said:
OTOH, it sounds exactly like what would happen if the plane lost its pressure vessel and disabled the antennas in the process.
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There are also some news outlets that are carrying a story about another airliner that allegedly contacted them after ATC lost contact and got a mumbled reply.
 
NoHeat said:
Could a nearby plane have heard a distress call on VHF 121.5?

I'm wondering if any traffic was close enough. BBC has a video showing the traffic before the flight vanished. The nearest plane looks to me to be at least 100 NM away.

Wikipedia says that the transmission range for an aircraft is up to 200 NM at 35,000 although that is for ideal conditions.
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No distress calls, but according to this article, another airliner contacted them on IAD after ATC lost contact. But all they got was mumbling.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/missing-malaysia-airlines-flight-interference-3222529
 
NY Times:

On Tuesday, the fourth day after the plane disappeared while on an overnight flight to Beijing, the country’s air force chief, Gen. Rodzali Daud, was quoted in a Malaysian newspaper saying the military had received “signals” on Saturday that after the aircraft stopped communicating with ground controllers, it changed course sharply, from heading northeast to heading west, and flew hundreds of miles across Peninsular Malaysia and out over the Strait of Malacca, before the tracking went blank.

The air force chief did not say what kind of signals the military had tracked. But his remarks raised questions about whether the military had noticed the plane as it flew across the country and about when it informed civilian authorities.


According to the general’s account, the last sign of the plane was recorded at 2:40 a.m., and the aircraft was then near Pulau Perak, an island more than 100 miles off the western shore of the Malaysian peninsula.


That assertion stunned aviation experts as well as officials in China, who had been told again and again that the authorities lost contact with the plane more than an hour earlier, when it was on course over the Gulf of Thailand, east of the peninsula. But the new account seemed to fit with the decision on Monday, previously unexplained, to expand the search area to include waters west of the peninsula.
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Pulau Perak looks like it is right at the cross between A B C and D in this map:

NewSearchArea.jpg
 
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Henning said:
OTOH, it sounds exactly like what would happen if the plane lost its pressure vessel and disabled the antennas in the process.
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Huh? Ok, I get a decomp, but that somehow is linked to disabling all xmit antennas?

That harks back to the Coneheads on family fued example:

host "Name a common breakfast meal"
Beldar "scrambled eggs and fiberglass"
 
The island gets what the island wants.
 

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Fearless Tower said:
There are also some news outlets that are carrying a story about another airliner that allegedly contacted them after ATC lost contact and got a mumbled reply.
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Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens. My bet is that the wreckage will be found on land in dense jungle because they turned for what could have been their best option airport, and didn't quite make it. So far in flight airframe failure still fits and is the I believe, statistically most likely cause. Personally I'd go 8:5 in favor of structural failure.
 
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docmirror said:
Huh? Ok, I get a decomp, but that somehow is linked to disabling all xmit antennas?
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There has been some discussion about a 2013 proposed AD involving potential cracking around the SATCOM antenna mount on the 777 that if not stopped could result in compromising the pressure vessel. Just one of many theories.

In was mentioned in the thread at ProPilotWorld (can't link it - you have to be a member to view it).
 
Sleepingsquirrel said:
Ringing phones with no answer is just spooky! :hairraise:
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And could be consistent with a crash into a jungle. Dead bodies scattered about, cellphones are sturdy enough to have survived the crash and are still powered up until they run out of battery power or get filled with rainwater.

The cellphone service provider should be able to triangulate location of such phones or at least get a radius of RF coverage distance if close enough to a celltower. If the cellphone still rings, then they can easily tell what tower it is associated to and narrow down an area to search. That has not happened yet, which highly suggests that the above theory is unlikely. Cellphones with "ring-no-answer" is probably just an artifact of how the wireless phone networks there deal with handsets suddenly thrown offline. Soon those mobile numbers will all roll over to voicemail or give an out-of-service message.

My guess is inflight breakup, wreckage under water.
 
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CharlieTango said:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/201...tery-new-information-could-change-everything/



'Malaysia Airlines, meanwhile, said it is investigating an Australian television report that the co-pilot on the missing plane had invited two women into the cockpit during a flight two years ago.



Jonti Roos described the encounter on Australia’s “A Current Affair.” The airline said it wouldn’t comment until its investigation is complete.



Roos said she and her friend were allowed to stay in the cockpit during the entire one-hour flight on Dec. 14, 2011, from Phuket, Thailand, to Kuala Lumpur. She said the arrangement did not seem unusual to the plane’s crew.



“Throughout the entire flight, they were talking to us and they were actually smoking throughout the flight,” Roos said.'
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Must. Avoid. Phuket. Joke. :)
 
Neal Howard said:
And could be consistent with a crash into a jungle. Dead bodies scattered about, cellphones are sturdy enough to have survived the crash and are still powered up until they run out of battery power or get filled with rainwater.

The cellphone service provider should be able to triangulate location of such phones or at least get a radius of RF coverage distance if close enough to a celltower. If the cellphone still rings, then they can easily tell what tower it is associated to and narrow down an area to search. That has not happened yet, which highly suggests that the above theory is unlikely. Cellphones with "ring-no-answer" is probably just an artifact of how the wireless phone networks there deal with handsets suddenly thrown offline. Soon those mobile numbers will all roll over to voicemail or give an out-of-service message.

My guess is inflight breakup, wreckage under water.
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Lots of cell towers in jungles, eh? LOL.

(Granted, they can put receivers aloft and search electronically. A friend was called to the Ground Zero site to put up a panel antenna and "query" the debris for pagers and phones. He doesn't like to talk about that week.)
 
Ringing phones with no answer is just spooky!
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The first thing that happens on a missing person search in the US is a cell phone forensics check. If the phone is talking to a tower (not someone on the phone, just that the phone has registered itself with the tower) they should be able to know that very quickly. They should also know all the towers with which the phone has registered along the way. (Not that there are many towers in the ocean.) So if a victim's cell phone is really connecting they should very quickly have the phone located to within a small circle around one tower.

There is a lot of goofy reporting here. If there was a primary return on the military radar why did it take days for that to be brought forward? Ditto, the cell phone stories but no cell phone forensics activity reported? Nothing mentioned about an ADS-B Out signal, though flightaware's info sort of implies that the track is from ADS rather than from radar.
 
airdale said:
There is a lot of goofy reporting here. If there was a primary return on the military radar why did it take days for that to be brought forward?
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Something to consider WRT that question:

To put it in perspective, if this 777 had disappeared over the North Atlantic a few hunderd miles off the eastern seaboard, the first thing that the US Navy would do is identify any warship (preferably an Aegis ship) in that relative area that may have had the aircraft in question on their radar. Those ships (who likely were not actively tracking or paying any particular attention to the track at the time) would then make data backups and the tapes would have to be sent back to the beach for further analysis and correlation with the civilian ATC radar tapes. That takes time, so it isn't entirely suprising that it would take a few days to process the radar data and make any useful analysis.

In this case, the Malaysian government would have had to round up any ship or shore radar data and analyze/correlate tracks.

There is another possibility, but that is more spy vs spy kind of stuff.
 
denverpilot said:
Lots of cell towers in jungles, eh? LOL.

(Granted, they can put receivers aloft and search electronically. A friend was called to the Ground Zero site to put up a panel antenna and "query" the debris for pagers and phones. He doesn't like to talk about that week.)
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Lol, more than you would imagine. SE Asia is densely populated, even in the jungle. We were trekking in the middle of nowhere Sumatra among the orangutan w and tigers and had cell coverage. Indonesia is the next largest population after the US, and is close, with a lot less land mass.
 
denverpilot said:
Fascinating.
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If it was hijacked my guess would be that its sitting in Somalia. Roughly 3500 miles with nothing but open water between Malaysia and Somalia. Now I don't think that scenario is likely unless they had gas masks and a way to knock out everybody on board. I guess it could be possible. There's just not much of anything that makes sense to me reading all the reports.
 
Ruthless53 said:
If it was hijacked my guess would be that its sitting in Somalia. Roughly 3500 miles with nothing but open water between Malaysia and Somalia. Now I don't think that scenario is likely unless they had gas masks and a way to knock out everybody on board. I guess it could be possible. There's just not much of anything that makes sense to me reading all the reports.
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Those motors, flying at 3000msl, would be sucking fuel like no tomorrow.. I don't think it could have made the African continent flying that low...:nono:
 
Ruthless53 said:
If it was hijacked my guess would be that its sitting in Somalia. Roughly 3500 miles with nothing but open water between Malaysia and Somalia. Now I don't think that scenario is likely unless they had gas masks and a way to knock out everybody on board. I guess it could be possible. There's just not much of anything that makes sense to me reading all the reports.
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Nonsense, if the co-pilot hijacked the plane the passengers would be blissfully unaware that anything was wrong.
 
Ruthless53 said:
If it was hijacked my guess would be that its sitting in Somalia. Roughly 3500 miles with nothing but open water between Malaysia and Somalia. Now I don't think that scenario is likely unless they had gas masks and a way to knock out everybody on board. I guess it could be possible. There's just not much of anything that makes sense to me reading all the reports.
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I think there is still more information that hasn't been released. So far they have said that the airplane turned around and descended 1000 meters and headed west (although the article David linked says at some point it 'climbed' 1000 meters). The latest reports of the military radar tracking say the contact was lost in the middle of the Strait of Malacca, but they have not said whether it simply disappeared from radar or sudden descent. It is also a little interesting that the new search area is north west of the last reported military radar contact.
 
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