No, but he was wearing a life west, a mask and and a snorkel. The customers in a Tim Hortons he recently visited, reported that he seemed in an upbeat mood and had purchased 12 donuds of differenrt kinds for provisions in what surely must become one of the most ardie-ous trips on a segway.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 hijacked, official says
- Thread starter Fred Zed
- Start date
I heard today, that they are almost impossible to detect from many miles/kilometers away, this of course is totally unlike radio signals such as when an emergency beacon is going off on land.
The guy who supposedly trained the US Orion crews said on CNN, that the Orion is very very good at detecting the pings from the black boxes, I assume the Orions drop microphones into the sea.
I'm not a big fan of the fire theory for two reasons. Firstly, the fire theory attempts to explain why the plane flew for 7+ more hours after losing communication. It implies the pilots didn't deliberately try to hide or crash. Now, as a pilot, if my bird catches on fire, is it possible that I go for the nearest airport? Absolutely. Not just possible, I will. If fire threatens the safety of my aircraft, I don't even care if it's an airport. I'll land on the highway directly underneath if it means I can't get to the ground and get my passengers out safely. Remember, my job might include aspects like making sure we don't fly in turbulence to keep you comfortable, make sure the air conditioning/heating is working properly so you're comfortable, reassure you that oil leaking from the engine is perfectly normal (even if the leakage is excessive) to keep you calm and feeling safe, not alarm you when something unusual happens, get you from point A to point B on time, etc. Those are all very important parts of my job. But the #1 aspect of my work, the part that is far and away the most critical task I have, is to keep you safe. And pilots have done extra-ordinary things even when there was no hope. Look at Pacific Airlines 314 that crashed in Cranbrook. The pilots broke bones in their feet and hands manipulating the controls with all their energy despite the fact that they knew they'd never be able to control it.
So if something major like a fire breaks out, a severe one, the kind that could kill me or my crew or render the aircraft uncontrollable, I'm going to initiate an emergency descent for the nearest landable surface, or head towards it if there isn't one beneath me. Now, most times we don't just see a fire, we see a little smoke. So you have some time, critical failure isn't imminent. But the proposed theory is that the fire was sudden and incapacitated the crew.
So let's just say I'm in a plane and a fire disables all my communications rapidly... I don't turn and fly out over an unmonitored ocean (and pilots know where radar coverage is on the routes they fly because we're always told when we are being radar monitored and when we leave radar coverage), I know I had communications and radar coverage 12 minutes ago so I make a 180 and head back where I came from. This, of course, presumes the fire remains critical and I can't continue. If I can continue, I don't change course, I continue on my routing because that's what air traffic control expects me to do and the only way to be sure another plane won't be flying through the cloud towards me and we run into each other. But in an emergency, I'd turn for radar coverage.
But let's imagine under the scenario I enter a waypoint to the nearest airport and the autopilot starts to turn for it. Great, now I pull out the checklist....and suddenly all the crew are rendered unconscious from the smoke. The premise of this theory is that the plane then, all on it's own, zigzagged and turned here and there and ended up flying towards Australia. To which I wonder, "Has the guy who came up with this theory ever used a GPS?" If I enter a waypoint and don't get back to clean up the route, once it reaches the waypoint, the aircraft will continue the routing. If it's a waypoint, it'll turn to the next one, which is back on course. And then this crew-less aircraft shows up over Beijing, because that's the route it was programmed for.
The theory that it was a fire is plausible. Absolutely. The theory that the fire caused them to set a waypoint and then knocked them out and that's how the plane ended up headed for the south pole makes no sense at all. The other thing to consider is how does an aircraft that's on fire so badly that all communications are knocked out manage to overwhelm the crew....and then put itself out. That's a laughable theory.
Now if you discount the popular theory that's being spread around the internet and suggest maybe it didn't fly down by Australia but rather turns towards the Strait of Malacca and crashed somewhere there and we just haven't recovered debris yet, then the idea of a fire and a turn towards a landing strip makes sense.
For your second theory, I have no idea why anyone would take the plane off course at all except for - terrorism, suicide, emergency. I don't like the suicide theory. Maybe I'm biased and want to believe what they say about the crew, and I know it's happened before, but the idea that a pilot would kill 239 people doesn't sit right with me. I mean, he wants money for his family, so obviously he's not a selfish guy angry at the world. He obviously is capable of empathy and feelings. Why would anyone capable of empathy kill 239 to benefit a handful of others? Especially when you consider he's a pilot at a major airline, he flies wide-body jets transoceanic. He makes good money. If it was someone else, then all bets are off. People do weird things. We may never know what their rationale was.
Well, to my knowledge they haven't confirmed that the target that the Malaysian military saw over the Strait of Malacca was actually MH370. It's not like military radar can deduce the who it is by magic. It would be a prime target only, a blob of returned radar energy. There's really no way to confirm it was MH370 unless you can correlate that with something else. Id
Well, you see, things that are electronic can short circuit and they can malfunction. If ANY electronic device shorts and is causing interference or starting a fire, shouldn't pilots be able to turn them off rather than risk hundreds of lives? If they malfunction and cause issues with other aircraft's or ATC systems, shouldn't pilots be able to turn them off rather than risk the lives on hundreds of flights?
I understand the desire to say "Pilot's should be able to turn this stuff off to avoid things like this" but you also don't know how many incidents have NOT made the news because the pilots turned off something that was causing a problem. Not to mention how often has this happened? Is it worth the potential risk for the extremely unlikely chance that a pilot turns it off on purpose (which we still aren't 100% is the case)? Don't let the fact that a high-profile case is in the media now convince you that pilots are evil and need to be taken out of the safety process. Yes, the most common reason given in plane crashes is pilot error, but there's often multiple causes given. The fact that pilots might be able to do something different doesn't mean they would have. In some cases, the pilots were clearly in the wrong (Air France 447), but in some cases they are in an impossible situation and later review has found maybe they could have done something different. In those cases, we all study the incident and hopefully learn from it. But at the end of the day, more crashes are avoided by pilots than are caused by them. Just because a suicidal pilot has happened before (and we still don't know exactly what happened in this case so it be premature to say pilots disabled anythine) doesn't mean we should start removing their ability to manage their aircraft's equipment.
Besides, there are some things that can't be turned off. So don't think it hasn't been carefully considered already.
The black boxes are easy to detect from very far away... When they aren't leagues under the water. Waves travel poorly through water. Sound, radio, radar, etc. Not to mention oceans have thermal layers, like the atmosphere can, and you can get weird atmospheric skip from radios too. A station 100km away might not hear you, but a station on the other side of the ocean might hear you perfectly. In water, the signals just don't have the power, nor is it realistic to think you could give them enough juice for it. The idea is that you locate wreckage (usually) within a day or two, so the weak signals that last for a week or two are enough for you to home in on. It's a balancing act, but the engineers never really planned for a 14-day search just locate a crash site.
I've given up on CNN "experts". So many of them have just said thinks that were absolutely false that I can't trust them. Who was the expert they had on today? Some guy who runs a website that ranks airlines by customer satisfaction? And he was giving his "expert opinion" on things like the relevance of deleting hard drive information, or how hard it will be to locate the wreckage. Seriously? Fuck CNN. For all I know, he's the guy who trained a crew of monkeys to use Orion telescopes. All I know is that the found Air France wreckage within a few days, and it still took 2 years to locate the black boxes. I can only imagine what ocean currents can do to the position of the black boxes in 2 weeks. Orion or not, it'll be a miracle if they find those boxes in 2014 let alone this month.
You are right, except for sound waves, which travel better in water than in air. That is why submarine detection is sound based (run silent, run deep). [yes I know about magnetic detection also]. However, as you mention, inversion layers and canyons etc can do stange things ty the sound waves, and the pinger is only working for 30 days.
PS: Thank you so much for the informed answers. Watching CNN is like "amateur hour".
When has there ever been a confirmed case of pilot suicide on a commercial airline?
Isn't it about time that we have black boxes transmit data in real time to the company instead? This would eliminate the need to go deep sea diving to fish them out of the water, not to mention the risk of the boxes never being found or being found but having sustained too much damage to be useful. If the black boxes are transmitting their data in real time then the investigation can start right away since they would already have all the data from them without even needing to locate the wreckage.
As recent as last fall, Mozambique Airlines Flight TM470 . Something like 5 times in the last 30 years, not common, but it does happen.
Yes, the term for which is sonobuoy.
The pingers can typically be heard from about 5-10 miles/8-16 km away
I lived close enough to Moffett Field in California to always see the Orions with their little tail fly out to the Pacific and back.
The second day of an international search for a missing Malaysian airliner has concluded without any sightings of debris in the southern Indian Ocean.
The operation is due to start again on Saturday. with extra vessels joining the search, Australian officials say.
Five aircraft took part in Friday's search for flight MH370, which vanished on 8 March with 239 people on board.
The operation is due to start again on Saturday. with extra vessels joining the search, Australian officials say.
Five aircraft took part in Friday's search for flight MH370, which vanished on 8 March with 239 people on board.
The "MAD Boom."
By the way the RCAF CP-140 Aurora is basically the same airframe, but has a different electronics suite than the P-3.
Missing jet WAS carrying highly flammable lithium batteries: CEO of Malaysian Airlines finally admits to dangerous cargo four days after DENYING it
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-Airlines-finally-admits-dangerous-cargo.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-Airlines-finally-admits-dangerous-cargo.html
