Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 vanishes without trace

[weltweit]

Malaysia Airlines missing plane: Incident exposes alarming flaw in airline security with over one billion flights made last year without stolen-passport check
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...larming-flaw-in-airline-security-9180189.html

 

[Errol's son]

Is difficult to perform stolen passport check in a lot of countries. In much of Africa there is no fixed line network and mobile telephony remains sketchy and sporadic. How can you check an Interpol database hosted in France or wherever? Malaysia arguably doesn't have that problem.

 

[weltweit]

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370: possible debris may be linked to plane
Search team says two broken objects spotted in sea off Vietnam could belong to missing aircraft
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/09/malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-possible-debris-plane

 

[elbows]

The Star (Malaysian tabloid English language paper) reports the story. Somewhere else (The Mirror I think) has picture from someone who was following the flight on a tracking website. Seen a couple of other mentions. Whether all this information is taken from the person who was tracking the flight, I'm not sure.

I give up, too confusing. Too many different times

With the passage of another day it seems pretty clear now that the flight tracking websites were right, and the initial reports in the press/from the authorities were wrong about it being '2 hours into flight'.

eg in a BBC article from today ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26506961 ):

Flight MH730 left Kuala Lumpur, bound for Beijing, at 00:41 local time on Saturday (16:41 GMT on Friday). But radio contact was lost at 17:30 GMT, somewhere between Malaysia and Vietnam.

Certainly in general there are gaps in flight tracking coverage, so people should not make use of the raw data without understanding it fully, but I'm glad we have such additional sources of info with which to crosscheck official shite and sloppy journalism.

 

[tim]

Stolen passports are common and many flights every day carry impostors and persons using stolen, altered and fraudulently obtained passports.

I would, however, imagine this is a route where there is not a huge amount of trafficking so it is slightly surprising.

But, so far, I am not very convinced these stolen passports have anything to do with whatever happened.

I still think it would be very odd for people on a suicide mission to undertake it under someone else's name. People who go for martyrdom usually expect a little posthumous glory as a compensation.
likewise it seems improbable that an organisation would blow up a plane and not claim responsibility. A terrorist act is, after all, nothing more a rather extreme PR job.

 

[Naiwen]

What happened to the 239 passengers?

 

[N_igma]

.

What happened to the 239 passengers?

They're starring in the new series of Lost what do you think happened to them fs?

 

[Barking_Mad]

Debris mentioned in reports is NOT from the plane.

 

[weltweit]

I still think it would be very odd for people on a suicide mission to undertake it under someone else's name. People who go for martyrdom usually expect a little posthumous glory as a compensation.
likewise it seems improbable that an organisation would blow up a plane and not claim responsibility. A terrorist act is, after all, nothing more a rather extreme PR job.

No group claimed responsibility for Air India 182 or Pan Am 103. Times have changed since then, but perhaps this was an old school outfit...?

 

[Pickman's model]

What happened to the 239 passengers?

what happened to the 12 crew?

 

[Greebo]

What happened to the 239 passengers?

"Everybody's dead, Dave" unless they were extremely lucky. Even if they got out of the plane alive, they'd have to survive several hours in the water afterwards.

 

[Pickman's model]

"Everybody's dead, Dave" unless they were extremely lucky. Even if they got out of the plane alive, they'd have to survive several hours in the water afterwards.

or the plane could have been stolen by a bondesque msster criminal

 

[5t3IIa]

BBC says Vietnam has scrambled rescue helicopters to investigate reports of a yellow object (poss. life raft) in its waters.

 

[Barking_Mad]

BBC says Vietnam has scrambled rescue helicopters to investigate reports of a yellow object (poss. life raft) in its waters.

Not a life raft according to reports.

In 2010, when an Air India Express flight overshot the runway at Mangalore, killing 160, it emerged that 10 of those on board had fraudulent passports.

 

[Greebo]

Not a life raft according to reports.

WTF was it then?

 

[treefrog]

These reports must be torture for the families

 

[Barking_Mad]

WTF was it then?

Don't know..

Vietnam Civil Aviation Authority said the “yellow object” it reported being sighted floating off the coast of southern Vietnam was not a life raft from the missing Boeing.

 

[ffsear]

Update from flightradar24 if anyone follows them. They announced the plane missing before any authorities..

Flightradar24.com
Here is a ‪#‎MH370‬ situation update from Flightradar24 because of the many questions we get.

The ADS-B transponder of an aircraft is transmitting data twice per second. FR24 saves data every 10-60 second depending on altitude. On cruising altitude data is normally saved once per 60 seconds. By analyzing all our databases and logs we have managed to recover about 2 signals per minute for the last 10 minutes.

The last location tracked by Flightradar24 is
Time UTC: 17:21:03
Lat: 6.97
Lon: 103.63
Alt: 35000
Speed: 471 knots
Heading: 40

Between 17:19 and 17:20 the aircraft was changing heading from 25 to 40 degrees, which is probably completely according to flight plan as MH370 on both 4 March and 8 March did the same at the same position. Last 2 signals are both showing that the aircraft is heading in direction 40 degrees.

Today there are reports in media that MH370 may have turned around. FR24 have not tracked this. This could have happened if the aircraft suddenly lost altitude as FR24 coverage in that area is limited to about 30000 feet.

FR24 have not tracked any emergency squawk alerts for flight MH370 before we lost coverage of the aircraft. Playback for flight MH370 is available on
http://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/mh370#2d81a27

If you have questions about how Flightradar24 works, please read
http://www.flightradar24.com/how-it-works

 

[Barking_Mad]

I read the wiki about the Air France flight that crashed after leaving Rio. Dear god, that must have been one hellish way to go - three minutes of a nose up free fall from 35,000ft into the sea.

 

[frogwoman]

terrible

 

[ffsear]

I read the wiki about the Air France flight that crashed after leaving Rio. Dear god, that must have been one hellish way to go - three minutes of a nose up free fall from 35,000ft into the sea.

Horrible. And 74 bodies from that flight were never found. Some were found in the aircraft hull which was 10,000ft underwater, still strapped into their seats. It had been there for 2 years. Awful stuff

 

[treefrog]

I read the wiki about the Air France flight that crashed after leaving Rio. Dear god, that must have been one hellish way to go - three minutes of a nose up free fall from 35,000ft into the sea.

I shouldn't have read that before going to sleep. Bloody hell.

 

[likesfish]

Think you wouldnt be concious for very long when the pressure goest at 35000 feet which is a small mercy.

If there were any survivours they would have been found by now. But humans will comtinue to hope until the wreck is found.

 

[mauvais]

I read the wiki about the Air France flight that crashed after leaving Rio. Dear god, that must have been one hellish way to go - three minutes of a nose up free fall from 35,000ft into the sea.

Seems peaceful to me. Probably some noticeable acceleration as the descent began, then nothing until hitting the sea. After all, the pilots didn't know what was happening.

 

[ffsear]

Its the lack of distress call I find weird. Could have been depressed/suicidal pilot. Turned the transponder off and then plunged the plan into the water. Its happened before.

 

[ffsear]

Seems peaceful to me. Probably some noticeable acceleration as the descent began, then nothing until hitting the sea. After all, the pilots didn't know what was happening.

The plane dropped at 10,000ft per minute. That would not have been comfortable!

 

[mauvais]

The plane dropped at 10,000ft per minute. That would not have been comfortable!

You don't notice speed. You notice rate of change of speed (acceleration), or rate of change of acceleration (jolt or jerk).

 

[2hats]

Think you wouldnt be concious for very long when the pressure goest at 35000 feet which is a small mercy.

Actually that's not always the case. A flight attendant was certainly conscious (though with a degree of hypoxia) at 34kft on Helios 522. Sufficiently aware to move around the cabin and ultimately attempt to control the flight.

 

[ffsear]

A plane with a vertical speed of 0 suddenly increasing to -10,000 fpm is a pretty large acceleration

 

[mauvais]

A plane with a vertical speed of 0 suddenly increasing to -10,000 fpm is a pretty large acceleration

It's 113mph at point of impact. Not a pleasant speed to hit the ground, but if your car took three minutes to do that, you wouldn't exactly be thrown back in your seat - hence the loss of situational awareness by the crew.