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General => General Discussion => Topic started by: rumborak on March 12, 2014, 01:52:06 PM
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Surprised to not see a thread about this. How crazy is it that they essentially lose a plane?!
What really stuns me is that a pilot is even able to switch off a transponder (which is one of the scenarios they're having why the transponder stopped transmitting). I can not imagine a scenario where a stop of positional communication to the ground would be desirable, especially when it would give a hijacker a means to let a plane fly completely in the dark.
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Why is the method of turning of the transmission of a plane's position hardware based? If the plane is on, that should be on. No?
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It is pretty insane.
I wonder... was Hurley on that flight?
-insensitive joke-
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I chuckled. :lol
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Why is the method of turning of the transmission of a plane's position hardware based? If the plane is on, that should be on. No?
That's my point. What is the use for being able to switch it off? I mean, I can see the argument that the captain of a plane should ultimately have the control over all aspects of the plane, but being able to turn off something that should arguably never be switched off only invites abuse by hijackers, IMO.
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Langoliers
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I honestly can't believe that plane has yet to be located. It's not like this is 1930. Couldn't "they" look at the passenger list and then from that list identify which of them had smart phones with GPS chips....then hone in on those chips? I don't know.....I'm long past my conspiracy days but this mystery is playing out nicely for some wild speculation. I've noticed headlines of crazy ideas and theories but haven't read any of them. The most likely scenario is this plane went down in the ocean far from where they are searching.
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I honestly can't believe that plane has yet to be located. It's not like this is 1930. Couldn't "they" look at the passenger list and then from that list identify which of them had smart phones with GPS chips....then hone in on those chips? I don't know.....I'm long past my conspiracy days but this mystery is playing out nicely for some wild speculation. I've noticed headlines of crazy ideas and theories but haven't read any of them. The most likely scenario is this plane went down in the ocean far from where they are searching.
That's why this reminds me of a JJ Abrams TV show... it almost invites conspiracy.
There is no reason for the recorder to have been turned off. Wouldn't the place it was last seen on RADAR give an idea on where it is? How far can it have gone after it was lost on RADAR? If it was hijacked and flown somewhere... wouldn't someone know? Planes just don't disappear.
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I honestly can't believe that plane has yet to be located. It's not like this is 1930. Couldn't "they" look at the passenger list and then from that list identify which of them had smart phones with GPS chips....then hone in on those chips? I don't know.....I'm long past my conspiracy days but this mystery is playing out nicely for some wild speculation. I've noticed headlines of crazy ideas and theories but haven't read any of them. The most likely scenario is this plane went down in the ocean far from where they are searching.
That's why this reminds me of a JJ Abrams TV show... it almost invites conspiracy.
There is no reason for the recorder to have been turned off. Wouldn't the place it was last seen on RADAR give an idea on where it is? How far can it have gone after it was lost on RADAR? If it was hijacked and flown somewhere... wouldn't someone know? Planes just don't disappear.
A 777 flies at like 600 mph. It had an additional 7 hours of fuel. Hypothetically, it could have flown 4200 miles in any direction (give or take for wind currents). It's been a while since I've done geometry, but I think that's 55,417,700 square miles. That's a big search area.
Why is the method of turning of the transmission of a plane's position hardware based? If the plane is on, that should be on. No?
That's my point. What is the use for being able to switch it off? I mean, I can see the argument that the captain of a plane should ultimately have the control over all aspects of the plane, but being able to turn off something that should arguably never be switched off only invites abuse by hijackers, IMO.
I'm trying to think of any possible safety protocol that would require the ability to turn that off. Maybe if a plane has to touch down and for national security reasons not publicly transmit where it was landing.
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They were searching around where they last saw the plane on radar. Problem is that once a plane goes below a certain altitude it essentially can't be picked up on most radar systems. So if there was an issue that caused the plane to go down, but glide near the water for awhile (hijack or mechanical), but then eventually crash, we'd be searching in the wrong spot and and location getting devices, such as phones, would be underwater and useless.
It's the only scenario that I can think of that would cause this disappearance to happen.
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It's the only scenario that I can think of that would cause this disappearance to happen.
There could have been an elaborate scheme in place where this plane managed to land somewhere in secret, but that's unlikely.
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They were searching around where they last saw the plane on radar. Problem is that once a plane goes below a certain altitude it essentially can't be picked up on most radar systems. So if there was an issue that caused the plane to go down, but glide near the water for awhile (hijack or mechanical), but then eventually crash, we'd be searching in the wrong spot and and location getting devices, such as phones, would be underwater and useless.
It's the only scenario that I can think of that would cause this disappearance to happen.
Ok that makes sense. I wasn't even thinking about the limitations of radar
It's the only scenario that I can think of that would cause this disappearance to happen.
There could have been an elaborate scheme in place where this plane managed to land somewhere in secret, but that's unlikely.
Watch this turn out to be some huge conspiracy via the Chinese gov't or something...
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I honestly can't believe that plane has yet to be located. It's not like this is 1930. Couldn't "they" look at the passenger list and then from that list identify which of them had smart phones with GPS chips....then hone in on those chips? I don't know....
Just to comment on this, GPS chips are completely passive. They never talk back to the satellite. The only way to get a cell phone's location is a) the GPS chip has a lock, which already is virtually impossible because a plane is a Faraday cage (and trust me, I've tried many times, I've gotten a lock once) and b) the cellphone would have to have a connection to a tower, which isn't gonna happen either.
You can also do basic triangulation with a phone's connection to the towers, but again that would require b).
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I honestly can't believe that plane has yet to be located. It's not like this is 1930. Couldn't "they" look at the passenger list and then from that list identify which of them had smart phones with GPS chips....then hone in on those chips? I don't know....
Just to comment on this, GPS chips are completely passive. They never talk back to the satellite. The only way to get a cell phone's location is a) the GPS chip has a lock, which already is virtually impossible because a plane is a Faraday cage (and trust me, I've tried many times, I've gotten a lock once) and b) the cellphone would have to have a connection to a tower, which isn't gonna happen either.
You can also do basic triangulation with a phone's connection to the towers, but again that would require b).
Gotcha. I was assuming there was better GPS technology than that in a smartphone. Like a particular phone could be singled out due to serial numbers and then activate that individual GPS.
Given Chino's explanation of available fuel and possible distance traveled.....that plane could have crashed somewhere in the Pacific close to California...or basically, anywhere.
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I don't know what a transponder is like in a 777, but in general aviation planes the transponder is placed in standby when on the ground, and turned on just prior to takeoff. However, at larger airports, like those at which most commercial aircraft operate, the transponder remains on while taxiing. This is just to illustrate that there are different operating modes for transponders, not specifically how one works in a 777.
Regarding folks who say "I can find my lost iphone with an app, why can't we find a damn 235 passenger aircraft", GPS is only good for informing the device where it is. It does not transmit this data unless it has access to some data infrastructure. The western pacific ocean is not such a place. I suspect most people here are tech savvy enough to know this.
Also, there is a data uplink service used by many airlines, but it is intermittent, and doesn't constantly stream data. I've read lots of talk regarding this accident about using satellite data communication, but the cost of that can't be justified. And to be clear, it's not a balance between the lives of passengers and cost of satellite data, but between the cost of search and rescue after the fact, and satellite data for all planes all the time.
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Interesting. A Chinese satellite image found another suspected crash area. Maybe this is the one.
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I honestly can't believe that plane has yet to be located. It's not like this is 1930. Couldn't "they" look at the passenger list and then from that list identify which of them had smart phones with GPS chips....then hone in on those chips? I don't know.....I'm long past my conspiracy days but this mystery is playing out nicely for some wild speculation. I've noticed headlines of crazy ideas and theories but haven't read any of them. The most likely scenario is this plane went down in the ocean far from where they are searching.
That's why this reminds me of a JJ Abrams TV show... it almost invites conspiracy.
Personally, I've been leaning more towards the X-Files.
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I've asked the question, as well, about why transponders are possible to disable. At the same time, there isn't a single system on that aircraft that doesn't have a circuit breaker associated with it, and as such there's nothing that can't be disabled. Also, I haven't seen any indication that the transponder was actually turned off. Just because they have no squawk doesn't mean that the airplane wasn't sending. ATC comes in two flavors: primary, which is a blip on a screen that shows altitude and bearing, and with a few sweeps course and speed, and Secondary Surveillance Radar, which sends back an altered return with flight data info embedded into it. What's happening over there is that the military reported some primary returns in various locations, but they don't get actual SSR data back from civvies (they use a different protocal, which while similar isn't the same thing (Identify Friend of Foe, if anybody's wondering)). Radar coverage isn't global, so the aircraft was likely moving in and out of various coverage regions which might or might not have had SSR.
As for the phone issue, that's a simple one. Cell towers are even less global. They're either underwater or they're not within range of a tower, much less the two or three required to triangulate the location.
@Nick, while you're correct, radar is pretty effective over water. It's topography that limits radar to certain altitudes. At sea level you'd pretty much have to be low enough to be behind the curvature of the Earth to hide from radar, and without a sextant and some charts I don't even know if that's possible. :lol
Lastly, I'll point out that Steve Fosset remained missing for a year and a half, and he was smack dab in the middle of So-Cal. Only found him because a hiker stumbled across him. Yes, it was a smaller plane, but they had a lot more to go by with a general location. In Malaysia they're looking for flotsam somewhere on the South China Sea.
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On a sidenote, is Richard Quest deaf or something? Or does he think yelling makes his words more important?
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There are reports of cell phones ringing when called, not going directly to voice mail like they should if the phones or dead, or at the bottom of the ocean.
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I heard that, but that makes me scratch my head whether some of those people have never called anyone outside of their own country. That "when I hear ring tone, the other person's phone is ringing" thing is something that is true domestically, but I have had many calls to Germany where that rule didn't hold up. Frankly, the ring tone is used to buy time to establish connection, and that can mean it never reached the destination. Most people on the plane were Chinese, so this will have been relatives calling from mainland China to a Malaysian network.
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Yeah, anecdotal reports about how cell phones are supposed to work don't interest me in the slightest. If T-mobile showed up and said "uh, this is really fucking weird," we'd be onto something. Until then, it's just peculiarity amongst Asian cellular providers.
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It's definitely also the kind of situation where, people being desperate will cling onto any kind of marginal evidence, even if it's evidence they have formerly dismissed (pretty sure there will have been many cases where those same people had a weird cell phone connection, and simply shrugged it off).
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https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/malaysian-airlines-flight-mh370-crash-site-found-by-chinese-satellite/story-fnizu68q-1226853195656
Possible pieces of the aircraft? They seem to be right in thinking the debris would sink, but what else could these be?
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From what people familiar with the area are saying you can pretty much walk to Vietnam across all of the fishing boats out there. That area is chock full of flotsam. Plus, since we don't know what scale the Chinese satellite is providing we don't have a good idea of the size of that piece. Next, why were the Chinese searching the Straight of Malacca the other day? They had primary radar returns from that area. Now they're searching West of the flight plan? Also, that location is real close to being within the initial search area's 50nm radius. I'm surprised they wouldn't have found that Monday. Given how strange this whole thing is I certainly wouldn't rule out this being the wreckage, but there's a lot I'd want to know before I went buying into it right now.
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From what people familiar with the area are saying you can pretty much walk to Vietnam across all of the fishing boats out there. That area is chock full of flotsam. Plus, since we don't know what scale the Chinese satellite is providing we don't have a good idea of the size of that piece. Next, why were the Chinese searching the Straight of Malacca the other day? They had primary radar returns from that area. Now they're searching West of the flight plan? Also, that location is real close to being within the initial search area's 50nm radius. I'm surprised they wouldn't have found that Monday. Given how strange this whole thing is I certainly wouldn't rule out this being the wreckage, but there's a lot I'd want to know before I went buying into it right now.
The article says that these images were taken one day after it disappeared. What the hell? You're right, they should have found these right away. Very odd.
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Just FYI, in terms of size, it's three pieces which are somewhere around 13x18 meters, 14x19 meters and 24x22 meters. That's not just regular flotsam, those pieces are huge. And they're right in the flight path where the plane should have been.
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Well, the Chinese didn't release them until later. Furthermore, just because you have satellite imagery doesn't mean you've looked at it all. It takes time to go plodding through all of this stuff, and you still have to know where to look. It's perfectly conceivable that they just didn't know what they had until today.
Regardless, it seems the Chinese did provide some scale, and not only are those peaces probably too big to still be floating, but they're actually too big to be from a 777. One of them is something like 20x20m, which would require it to be a wing splayed open lengthwise and unfolded, and even that might not be enough.
edit: Rumorak ninja'd me. However, they're outside of the flight path. N6.7 E105.63 Is the debris point. Last known SSR contact was about 220km ENE.
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Aren't the wings supposedly the part giving a plane the ability to float on water? Yes, the pieces are big, but I could totally see the wings getting ripped off at a hard water landing, and the wings stay afloat for a while while the fuselage goes down immediately.
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Aren't the wings supposedly the part giving a plane the ability to float on water? Yes, the pieces are big, but I could totally see the wings getting ripped off at a hard water landing, and the wings stay afloat for a while while the fuselage goes down immediately.
I suppose it would depend on the fuel state. Jet fuel is lighter than water, but not by a whole lot, so I can't see full tanks keeping a wing afloat. I suspect that there reaches a point where there's enough air combined with the somewhat buoyant fuel to offset the wing's weight. Still, I don't think you could find a section of wing that measures 24x22m.
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I know conspiracy theories are fun and all, but I'd like to remind everyone that when Air France 447 crashed five years ago over the Atlantic, it took five days to find that wreckage.
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Apparently the plane flew for several hours after we lost contact with it.
https://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304914904579434653903086282-lMyQjAxMTA0MDEwMzExNDMyWj
Flight 370 stayed in the air for about four hours past the time it reached its last confirmed location, according to two people familiar with the details, raising the possibility that the plane could have flown on for hundreds of additional miles under conditions that remain murky.
U.S. counterterrorism officials are pursuing the possibility that a pilot or someone else on board the plane may have diverted it toward an undisclosed location after intentionally turning off the jetliner's transponders to avoid radar detection, according to one person tracking the probe.
But the huge uncertainty about where the plane was headed, and why it apparently continued flying so long without working transponders, has raised theories among investigators that the aircraft may have been commandeered for a reason that appears unclear to U.S. authorities. Some of those theories have been laid out to national security officials and senior personnel from various U.S. agencies, according to one person familiar with the matter.
Very weird.
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Do you think this could have been a Payne Stewart plane deal? Sudden loss of cabin pressure? It wouldn't explain the transponder being deactivated unless during the last few seconds of conciousness one of the pilots was panicked and confused as he was blacking out and accidentally shut it off?
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I'm sticking with this:
Langoliers
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They can't hunt for phones because they were all switched off for "safety" reasons! Stupid bloody airline rules...
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I know military flight crew that have confirmed that the "no cell phones during flight for safety reasons" rule is complete horseshit.
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I know military flight crew that have confirmed that the "no cell phones during flight for safety reasons" rule is complete horseshit.
It's confirmed on every flight that flies today. I never turn my phone off, and I'm sure most others who fly don't either. Besides, Mythbusters tested it and declared myth.
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Do you put it on airplane mode?
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Do you think this could have been a Payne Stewart plane deal? Sudden loss of cabin pressure? It wouldn't explain the transponder being deactivated unless during the last few seconds of conciousness one of the pilots was panicked and confused as he was blacking out and accidentally shut it off?
The Payne Stewart scenario is certainly something to consider, and they're bandying that about in the PPRuN, but it's considered pretty unlikely. Besides which, the descent that was reported on radar would have remedied that problem. Set the FMS to descend to FL110 and you'll wake up when you get there.
A pilot who hosts an ongoing AMA thread elsewhere agrees that the cellphone thing is bullshit, but also admits that when he's left his in normal mode by accident he could hear pops on his headset when monkeying with it. It won't crash the plane and it won't interfere too badly with comms but it does interfere somewhat. His greater concern, and one that I wholeheartedly agree with, is do any of us really want to hear even more inane bullshit from people yacking on cellphones an entire flight? All of these people will babble about nothing because they're not the type that can sit idle through a 4 hour flight. I find it refreshing that we don't have to hear all these nimrods droning on during a flight. We've already accepted that your boyfriend/girlfriend just has to fucking wait when you're in the air and I'd just as soon see that remain the case.
Looks like this flight was using the next-gen transponder protocol ADS-B which won't require any further radar coverage. ADS-B sends an active signal from the AC which anybody with an antenna can pick up. Over water you're looking at somewhere around 400nm range, so they should have been well inside of Malaysia's, Vietnam's and Thailand's area of coverage. Yes, this now looks like the xponder was shut off. That's the thing I've been waiting to find out about.
The thing about the engines continuing on for hours has been shot down. Furthermore, the only way they'd know that is if they were receiving ACARS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Communications_Addressing_and_Reporting_System)information, and if that were the case they'd already know where the plane was. That part is actually somewhat problematic because I seem to recall a pilot suggesting that shutting off ACARS wasn't practical from the cockpit. Also, ACARS (AFAIK) is strictly event based. It only reports back when there's something to report; specifically a maintenance issue. That was vital in solving the Air France mishap, but hasn't provided any clues to this one.
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Do you put it on airplane mode?
Once we're way the hell up I do, but only because I have no service anyway and want to save battery.
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They can't hunt for phones because they were all switched off for "safety" reasons! Stupid bloody airline rules...
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I believe we already established in this thread that, no matter whether the phones would have been on or off, it wouldn't have made a difference. Believe it or not, but Verizon has no tower in the Pacific Ocean.
And please, PLEASE, let's not have this thread go into the "omfg, I'm giving the finger to the man by leaving my phone on during flight". This thread is about the lost Malaysian plane.
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Do you put it on airplane mode?
Once we're way the hell up I do, but only because I have no service anyway and want to save battery.
That's why airplane mode exists. It's not to make them safe, but so your phone isn't constantly searching for signal. GuitarCosmo taught me that when we had crappy reception at the gig he was playing.
I was also going to say what Rumbo just said.
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Wow, looks like this might never be found. They're expanding the search to the Indian Ocean now, and that area is beyond massive. If the plane actually kept on flying off course for a long time, it could be anywhere.
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This kind of made me laugh.
https://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/for/4370884298.html
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Wow, looks like this might never be found. They're expanding the search to the Indian Ocean now, and that area is beyond massive. If the plane actually kept on flying off course for a long time, it could be anywhere.
I still don't buy the premise they're using to expand the search out there. If Boeing or Rolls Royce had ACARS telemetry from the engines they'd have mentioned it by now. With out that I don't see any reason to assume the engines ran for 4 more hours.
It does seem that they're sending at least one P-8 Poseidon out there. That's almost certainly the premier ASW aircraft in the world, which is exactly what you need to find a ditched plane. It's adept at finding big hunks of metal under the water and it's toting state of the art avionics. Excellent sonar, radar and passive surveillance suites.
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While those anti-submarine airplanes probably would easily find the plane in the Strait of Malacca, which is pretty shallow, if this plane really went down over the Indian Ocean, I have a hard time seeing how it can be found. It took them years to find the Air France plane, and for that one they had transmission to the last second.
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Analysis of the Malaysia data suggests the plane, with 239 people on board, diverted from its intended northeast route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and flew west instead, using airline flight corridors normally employed for routes to the Middle East and Europe, said sources familiar with investigations into the Boeing 777's disappearance.
Two sources said an unidentified aircraft that investigators believe was Flight MH370 was following a route between navigational waypoints when it was last plotted on military radar off the country's northwest coast.
This indicates that it was either being flown by the pilots or someone with knowledge of those waypoints, the sources said.
www.reuters.com/article/idUSBREA2D0DG20140314?irpc=932&irpc=932
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While those anti-submarine airplanes probably would easily find the plane in the Strait of Malacca, which is pretty shallow, if this plane really went down over the Indian Ocean, I have a hard time seeing how it can be found. It took them years to find the Air France plane, and for that one they had transmission to the last second.
They had the crash location and wreckage inside of a week. The year and a half was to get the FDR/CVR off of the ocean floor. Same thing will happen here. You'll find bodies, seats, small bits of airplane, lots of floating stuff, and the fuselage will be down deep. At least finding the wreckage will put half the mystery to rest.
Analysis of the Malaysia data suggests the plane, with 239 people on board, diverted from its intended northeast route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and flew west instead, using airline flight corridors normally employed for routes to the Middle East and Europe, said sources familiar with investigations into the Boeing 777's disappearance.
Two sources said an unidentified aircraft that investigators believe was Flight MH370 was following a route between navigational waypoints when it was last plotted on military radar off the country's northwest coast.
This indicates that it was either being flown by the pilots or someone with knowledge of those waypoints, the sources said.
www.reuters.com/article/idUSBREA2D0DG20140314?irpc=932&irpc=932
If they have primary tracks of the AC following Nav-aids, that's pretty damned conclusive that somebody intentionally diverted the flight. I think half of the mystery here is because of these countries unwillingness to tell anybody what they know.
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Yeah, Malaysia is really not looking good in this whole investigation.
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(https://i.imgur.com/4Hzuqqw.jpg)
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Yeah, Malaysia is really not looking good in this whole investigation.
We need to send Derek Zoolander over there to have a word with the Prime Minister.
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So I heard on XM that an unnamed general at the Pentagon claims they're seriously considering that the plane may have been landed in Pakistan or Iran. Not sure how viable that theory is; and I only caught a snippet as I had just started up the car when I heard it. WTF?
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It couldn't have had the fuel to get that far, from what I understood. Interesting.
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So I heard on XM that an unnamed general at the Pentagon claims they're seriously considering that the plane may have been landed in Pakistan or Iran. Not sure how viable that theory is; and I only caught a snippet as I had just started up the car when I heard it. WTF?
I'm thinking not a chance. Here's your problem. Toting fuel around is remarkably expensive. Most of the fuel you use flying somewhere is spent carrying the fuel. Airlines go to great length to estimate the amount of fuel you'll need to reach your destination. Add about 20% for "the wife and kids" and that's what you get. They're at the edge of their range flying direct to Pakistan. Unless they were able to traverse 1,000 SM of India without getting lit up by a sophisticated air defense network they couldn't make it that far. Iran is completely out of the question. This was a 777ER, so with full tanks it wouldn't have been a problem, but they were looking at a 2700 mile flight. Then, as one of our colleagues pointed out to me, there was some flying done to prevent radar detection. Flying low is insanely expensive, so that slashes their range. Climbing back up afterward wastes even more fuel. If they made it to Pakistan they'd have landed with fumes in the tanks, and a whole lot of attention from the Indians.
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I wouldn't be surprised if this was some braindead hijack that ended up with the plane running out of fuel over the Indian Ocean.
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I'm sticking with this:
Langoliers
(https://i1272.photobucket.com/albums/y393/Prog_Snob/936full-the-langoliers-screenshot_zpsd22e5ae3.jpg)
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I wouldn't be surprised if this was some braindead hijack that ended up with the plane running out of fuel over the Indian Ocean.
My money's on the pilot right now, and he would have known better. For one thing he seemed to have the wherewithal to avoid radar contacts. Also, he seems to have made the decision to fly standard waypoints blending in with other commercial traffic. Neither of these are things a non-pilot would have thought of. I'm also betting that the plane is in the water, but I doubt fuel is the reason why.
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I wouldn't be surprised if this was some braindead hijack that ended up with the plane running out of fuel over the Indian Ocean.
My money's on the pilot right now, and he would have known better. For one thing he seemed to have the wherewithal to avoid radar contacts. Also, he seems to have made the decision to fly standard waypoints blending in with other commercial traffic. Neither of these are things a non-pilot would have thought of. I'm also betting that the plane is in the water, but I doubt fuel is the reason why.
Pilot suicide maybe? I heard on the news tonight that there are more than 85 current theories. Really? 86 if you count Coz's Langoliers theory. :\ :biggrin:
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There's 108 theories actually.
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There's 108 theories actually.
Okaaaaay....So that number is "more than" 85. Right? :lol
Did you count Coz's Langoliers theory? If not then there is 109.
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I wouldn't be surprised if this was some braindead hijack that ended up with the plane running out of fuel over the Indian Ocean.
My money's on the pilot right now, and he would have known better. For one thing he seemed to have the wherewithal to avoid radar contacts. Also, he seems to have made the decision to fly standard waypoints blending in with other commercial traffic. Neither of these are things a non-pilot would have thought of. I'm also betting that the plane is in the water, but I doubt fuel is the reason why.
Pilot suicide maybe?
Nah, he'd have just crashed it en route and they'd have found it the next day. Somebody decided it was time to go someplace else, and they crashed on the way there. Maybe an uprising. Fuel ran out. Accident. Something like that is my theory.
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Hijack gone bad is my theory. I do find it hard to believe with all of today's technology that they don't have a better grip on this.
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The part I don't understand about the current news stories is that they're looking at a search window that goes up as far as the southern tip of Kazakhstan.
Kazakhstan? That would mean flying over India undetected, for hours, when they must have been low on fuel already when that last satellite handshake occurred.
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The part I don't understand about the current news stories is that they're looking at a search window that goes up as far as the southern tip of Kazakhstan.
Kazakhstan? That would mean flying over India undetected, for hours, when they must have been low on fuel already when that last satellite handshake occurred.
Exactly. Like I pointed out yesterday they're thinking Iran and Pakistan are options, and that puts India right in their path with no fuel to go around. The rule of thumb is that they get enough for their flight, an extra 45 minutes for divert purposes, and a few minutes "for the wife and kids" as the pilots will put it. This flight was supposed to be about 40% of the 777-200ER range, so they were likely about half full when they left. That'd get them to Pakistan if they flew direct and didn't monkey around avoiding radar. Any detours and they're toast. This assumes that they didn't manage to steel a whole bunch of fuel. Suppose that's possible, but the investigators (even the Malaysian ones) would have figured that out by now.
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Just had the idea that maybe it was a failed attempt at a 9/11 against India. That is, all they needed was to get to a coastal city like Chennai and then fly into a building. They had 239 innocent people on board, so it's hard to tell what the Indian air force would have done, I.e. if they would have dared taking it down. Given how Malaysia is mostly Muslim and India has had issues with Pakistan forever, it could be a possibility.
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Don't the Muslims have a bigger bitch against China? I thought there was already some (albeit minor) tension between China and Malaysia.
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Yeah, I think they do, but let's be frank here, I think there's a Muslim extremist shopping mall somewhere where you can pick your gripe of choice. Muslim extremists are like Neo-Nazis in that they hate everybody but themselves.
Besides, given how the plane had mostly Chinese on board, that would achieve both goals (was gonna type the "two birds one stone" phrase initially, but that seemed in bad taste).
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Not worth the added complexity, though. Beijing's airport is on the opposite side of the city from where they're approaching from. Lots of nice, big buildings to fly right into on your way and they'd never have any chance to see it coming.
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Yeah, I think they do, but let's be frank here, I think there's a Muslim extremist shopping mall somewhere where you can pick your gripe of choice. Muslim extremists are like Neo-Nazis in that they hate everybody but themselves.
Besides, given how the plane had mostly Chinese on board, that would achieve both goals (was gonna type the "two birds one stone" phrase initially, but that seemed in bad taste).
I dunno, they don't seem to have such a high opinion of each other either...
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That's what I mean. Muslim extremists and Nazis certainly hate each other, but they hate just about everybody to begin with. The only people they don't hate are themselves.
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Oh no, I mean Jihadists also seem to have a thing with Jihadists from other countries.
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Interesting article:
https://www.cnn.com/2014/03/16/opinion/palmer-malaysia-flight-370/index.html?c=mobile-homepage-t
The point it makes is that all those turns and elevation changes could just as well be explained by a plane flying with an incapacitated crew and the autopilot off. So, say an explosion or fire could have both incapacitated the crew, and maybe that's how the ACARS was deactivated. From there on you have plane that simply tries to keep its speed constant, but will for example veer off through turbulences.
Creepy thought though; assuming the passengers were killed too (asphyxiation, decompression etc), this would have been a flying coffin essentially, transporting dead people for 7 hours until it ran out of fuel.
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Something like that happened with Payne Stewart.
Anyhow, is the whole world looking for this damn thing?
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Interesting article:
https://www.cnn.com/2014/03/16/opinion/palmer-malaysia-flight-370/index.html?c=mobile-homepage-t
The point it makes is that all those turns and elevation changes could just as well be explained by a plane flying with an incapacitated crew and the autopilot off. So, say an explosion or fire could have both incapacitated the crew, and maybe that's how the ACARS was deactivated. From there on you have plane that simply tries to keep its speed constant, but will for example veer off through turbulences.
Creepy thought though; assuming the passengers were killed too (asphyxiation, decompression etc), this would have been a flying coffin essentially, transporting dead people for 7 hours until it ran out of fuel.
That's called a phugoid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phugoid). It's happened in a few noteworthy instances. The famous Sioux City accident, and the JAL disaster are both examples that happened when the aircraft lost all hydraulics. The problem with that as a theory here is all of the maneuvering that took place after LoC. Even assuming that the AP was working and the auto-throttles weren't, then that radar avoiding and light-years-off-course heading would have had to have been programmed in before takeoff, which points right back the the current suspicion.
Also, and here's something I've yet to hear any explanation of, the aircraft allegedly exceeded it's service ceiling by a pretty good margin. Service ceilings aren't a recommendation. They're the theoretical limit of what a plane could fly under perfect conditions. If that plane had been empty and mostly out of fuel, it could probably have reached that point, but it also would have been damn near uncontrollable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_corner_%28aviation%29). Rather than just nosing down when it reached it's ceiling that plane probably would have gone tits-up without a skilled pilot controlling things.
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(https://i583.photobucket.com/albums/ss272/kingshmegland/DEPLANE_zps78e94801.jpg) (https://s583.photobucket.com/user/kingshmegland/media/DEPLANE_zps78e94801.jpg.html)
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King :lol
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I've thought long and hard about this, and listened to some of the most brilliant minds give their theories. After weighing all the facts and analyses, I have to agree that the most logical explanation is definitely langoliers.
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Another theory: https://www.wired.com/autopia/2014/03/mh370-electrical-fire/
Like EB said, I'm not sure how this squares with the flight path after the "event", but an electrical fire seems plausible.
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Another theory: https://www.wired.com/autopia/2014/03/mh370-electrical-fire/
Like EB said, I'm not sure how this squares with the flight path after the "event", but an electrical fire seems plausible.
I see two problems with it. He's certainly correct that if they smell smoke they're heading to the closest acceptable airport (and in a fire "acceptable" is going to be pretty loose criteria). However, Langkawi would have been a terrible choice. Yes, it's an international airport, but it was over 300 miles away from the point where the incident seems to have begun and offers some terrain problems. Meanwhile, on their way out they would have flown a few miles North of Sultan Mahmud Airport. Nice 13k' runway, only 150m back, perfectly aligned with their return heading and jutting right out into the water. I find it hard to believe they would have chosen anything else. Also, it gets them back into communication range a lot quicker, and that's something they would have been mindful of. The other problem is that while I can see pulling circuit breakers to isolate a short, you want the transponder on. You absolutely want people to know there's a problem for exactly this reason. If you ditch in the water that's not a dealbreaker, but only if people know to be looking for you before sun, dehydration and sharks kill all of your pax. There's also an innumerable amount of fishing boats all over the place. If they'd come in like that due to emergency there'd be witnesses. They had to have looked like any other flight. Guess that's three problems.
Still, his might be the best theory yet considering the amazing amount of garbage the networks are spewing. I have a great deal of respect for Sullenberger, but is he really an expert on aviation safety? That's pretty much the norm for the networks; save the one trying desperately to spin this towards terrorism. The only people I want to hear discussing this are former NTSB investigators who know their shit, but more often than not they're just answering dumbed down questions from nimrods. Factor in the amazing lack of info coming from the people involved and I have to doubt almost everything they're telling us. I seriously doubt the plane reached FL450, and it's equally improbably that they flew for 7 hours low enough to avoid radar; fuel consumption is too high down low.
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Since this began, I have thought that whatever happened, baring any hijacking, or act of terrorism, had to have happend pretty quickly. My theory is that the sharp turn may have indicated that once the pilots became aware of a problem they attempted to turn the plane, but were unsuccessful . I think it went thusly: Fire shuts down electrical very rapidly, cockpit is engulfed, pilots make attempt to turn, they are overcome, plane flies on until it crashes or runs out of fuel and crashes. Which I'd not like to think was a possibility because the horror for the passengers was probably mind boggling. I recall seeing a video on some documentary years ago that the NTSB had done with some testing, and fire can nearly engulf a planes cockpit in seconds (as it can anywhere else). I seem to recall they had speculated that had happened to another plane that went down back in the 60's or early 70's. When they recovered the wreckage, the cockpit section was totally burnt out, but the fuselage, and engines were still intact. Mercifully, the passengers should have been dead from smoke inhalation (yeah not very merciful I know) before the plane finally crashed.
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Since this began, I have thought that whatever happened, baring any hijacking, or act of terrorism, had to have happend pretty quickly. My theory is that the sharp turn may have indicated that once the pilots became aware of a problem they attempted to turn the plane, but were unsuccessful . I think it went thusly: Fire shuts down electrical very rapidly, cockpit is engulfed, pilots make attempt to turn, they are overcome, plane flies on until it crashes or runs out of fuel and crashes. Which I'd not like to think was a possibility because the horror for the passengers was probably mind boggling. I recall seeing a video on some documentary years ago that the NTSB had done with some testing, and fire can nearly engulf a planes cockpit in seconds (as it can anywhere else). I seem to recall they had speculated that had happened to another plane that went down back in the 60's or early 70's. When they recovered the wreckage, the cockpit section was totally burnt out, but the fuselage, and engines were still intact. Mercifully, the passengers should have been dead from smoke inhalation (yeah not very merciful I know) before the plane finally crashed.
My only issue with this is that the plane would have hit the water violently if the pilots weren't trying to land it like the guy did in the Hudson. I think it would have blown apart on impact and we would have spotted wreckage by now.
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When they initiate a sharp turn the AP disengages. If they reengage it they return back to their original course unless they had the time and wherewithal to set a new waypoint. If they don't turn it back on then they fly the aforementioned phugoid back over the course they programmed, and certainly don't go on a roundabout radar avoiding track.
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Another theory: https://www.wired.com/autopia/2014/03/mh370-electrical-fire/
Like EB said, I'm not sure how this squares with the flight path after the "event", but an electrical fire seems plausible.
I've also swayed more and more to a "benign" theory like that. And regarding the flight path, as the other article mentioned, a plane with AP off will just try to keep the speed maintained and can massively veer off when it encounters turbulence. And say the electrical fire kept burning, slowly chipping away at the remaining functioning components. I could see how at some point it will start going up and down due to malfunctions.
and certainly don't go on a roundabout radar avoiding track.
How much credence can be given to this "radar avoiding track" btw? I mean, essentially after it flew over that western island they have no information where it actually went. What part of the flight path is supposed to have been stealthily?
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Thai military saw the same flight path as Malaysian one:
https://www.cnn.com/2014/03/18/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
"The unknown aircraft's signal was sending out intermittently, on and off, and on and off,"
???
If that's the case it would certainly point to some malfunction.
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and certainly don't go on a roundabout radar avoiding track.
How much credence can be given to this "radar avoiding track" btw? I mean, essentially after it flew over that western island they have no information where it actually went. What part of the flight path is supposed to have been stealthily?
Fair enough. It does seem that they're basing radar avoidance on the fact that it stopped sending back primary returns. Flying right out over the Indian Ocean would do the same thing. However, what they do know is that it flew a deliberate course, following waypoints used all the time by the airlines. Those waypoints either had to have been programmed into the FMS or flown manually. Neither option jibes with the fire theory.
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"The unknown aircraft's signal was sending out intermittently, on and off, and on and off,"
???
If that's the case it would certainly point to some malfunction.
It's not the case. It's either a lost in translation thing, or CNN taking something out of context. If the ADS-B was pinging intermittently, everybody and their dog would have been picking it up. It's more likely he was saying that the primary returns were hit or miss, and that would make perfect sense. He could also be referring to the satellite signal, which is irregular by design.
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More derp.
https://www.eutimes.net/2014/03/malaysia-airlines-mystery-deepens-after-top-disease-experts-rushed-to-indian-ocean/
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Well... Diego Garcia does have a landing strip that can handle the jet...
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More derp.
https://www.eutimes.net/2014/03/malaysia-airlines-mystery-deepens-after-top-disease-experts-rushed-to-indian-ocean/
The more of this stuff I see coming out just continues to demonstrate that no one has any idea what happened to this plane. I wouldn't be surprised if it tooks years to find the black boxes, like with the Air France flight. Maybe longer, since the airline wasn't on its original flight path.
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More derp.
https://www.eutimes.net/2014/03/malaysia-airlines-mystery-deepens-after-top-disease-experts-rushed-to-indian-ocean/
WHAT..............................................the fuck?? Really??? Who comes up with this stuff?!?! Jerry Fletcher much??? Wow! And I thought the alien theory was out there.
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I would sooooo like to live a day in such a person's mind. I mean, it must be a crazy jumble of interlocking things that is permeated by a sinister undertone.
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If things stay as they are and no new info emerges, this has the potential to become one of the great mysteries of all-time -- like JFK or Area 51. I've heard everything from rumors of alien abduction of the plane, to government involvement, to terrorism, to pilot suicide, to simple mechanical failure. It's hard to believe that commercial plane could just vanish. It's like straight out of Oceans Eleven or Inside Man.
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Dont worry everyone, Courtney Love found it:
https://celebrity.yahoo.com/news/courtney-love-claims-she-may-found-malaysia-airlines-134000084-us-weekly.html (https://celebrity.yahoo.com/news/courtney-love-claims-she-may-found-malaysia-airlines-134000084-us-weekly.html)
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dafuq?
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dafuq?
A website crowdsourced the searching when they thought it was close to the original loss of contact point. They had an ap that displayed satellite imagery of the area in question and when well-intentioned people went to their website it'd throw out random grids for them to scroll through. If you saw something planecrashy you would click the report button. She went there, found an oil slick with some metallic objects and reported it along with hundreds of others since it actually looked quite relevant. Her problem was that she got all excited and tweeted that she'd found it, and since she's a halfwitted junky people are bagging on her.
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So I'm able to partially hear a TV right now, and they're saying that the data on the guy's home flight sim were deleted?? That's...suggestive.
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So I'm able to partially hear a TV right now, and they're saying that the data on the guy's home flight sim were deleted?? That's...suggestive.
I heard and thought the same thing. What interested me was that they said they were "trying to undelete them." This makes me think he might have shredded stuff, which is far more telling than had he just hit delete.
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So I'm able to partially hear a TV right now, and they're saying that the data on the guy's home flight sim were deleted?? That's...suggestive.
I heard and thought the same thing. What interested me was that they said they were "trying to undelete them." This makes me think he might have shredded stuff, which is far more telling than had he just hit delete.
I think they are referring to those forensic teams that can extract data off a hard drive even if it's burned, wiped clean, or smashed.
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So I'm able to partially hear a TV right now, and they're saying that the data on the guy's home flight sim were deleted?? That's...suggestive.
I heard and thought the same thing. What interested me was that they said they were "trying to undelete them." This makes me think he might have shredded stuff, which is far more telling than had he just hit delete.
I think they are referring to those forensic teams that can extract data off a hard drive even if it's burned, wiped clean, or smashed.
Yeah probably, I believe they're called shadow files of something.
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Anybody can download free software to recover deleted files. As long as nothing has overwritten them it's simple enough that even the Malaysians could do it. If they need forensic teams to come in because the HDD was "burned, wiped clean, or smashed" then that points to the pilot being a bad guy.
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yeah, there's different type of deletion. There's the plain one where you just delete the entry in the master table, meaning the actual data is still on the drive, just nothing points to it anymore. Those are easily undeleted. It of course becomes much harder when new data has overwritten the old data. But I think even in those cases they can do stuff. Wouldn't be surprised if they can tell from the actual magnetization on the drive what the previous bit was.
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Yea I think thats why if you use a disk wiper, it like does a write over every bit like 100 times or something so you cant tell what was there before accurately.
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I did some Tomnod-ing earlier today, but it's rather frustrating I have to say. They don't even tell you what spot you're investigating, and there's also no preprocessing done on the pictures. So, if there's a cloud cover, you're staring at a super-white picture, whereas a simple brightness-contrast adjustment would make you able to discern stuff.
Ideally DigitalGlobe would completely open-source the data of that day, so that companies/people could run their own algorithms on it. For example, I couldn't help but think that me staring at a completely featureless spot of the Indian Ocean was a waste of my processing power. At least do some basic identification of images with unusual features (e.g. color), and direct people there.
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The randomizing of Tomnod's search grids makes perfect sense to me. If you let people pick and choose, or even know where they've been sent to you're not going to cover enough ground. I poked around there a few minutes last week, and while it was slow because of all of the traffic I thought the approach was pretty sound.
Also, I'm not sure how you'd go about uncovering the water beneath clouds. Not trying to be argumentative, but is it actually possible to see under opaque objects from satellite imagery?
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It of course becomes much harder when new data has overwritten the old data. But I think even in those cases they can do stuff.
True, but at this point, or beyond... the software isn't gonna be free.
Infact, I think there will be more needed than just software to retrieve overwritten data, I guess it all depends on how many passes were used.
CM
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It of course becomes much harder when new data has overwritten the old data. But I think even in those cases they can do stuff.
True, but at this point, or beyond... the software isn't gonna be free.
Infact, I think there will be more needed than just software to retrieve overwritten data, I guess it all depends on how many passes were used.
CM
It's hard to say since the government isn't exactly forthcoming about what it can and can't do. The CW is that HDD densities have increased to the point where any wiping is sufficient. You're certainly taking a chance against a government with unlimited resources to throw at it, including electron microscope analysis, though. Paranoia aside, the NIST seems to support the CW
Advancing technology has created a situation that has altered previously held best practices regarding magnetic disk type storage media. Basically the change in track density and the related changes in the storage medium have created a situation where the acts of clearing and purging the media have converged. That is, for ATA disk drives manufactured after 2001 (over 15 GB) clearing by overwriting the media once is adequate to protect the media from both keyboard and laboratory attack.
Any basic shredding program is going to use a minimum of 7 passes (the former DOD standard) and if you select it 35 passes (Peter Gutman's specification). When you're dealing with HDDs in the Terabyte range that's pretty much going to cover it. If there actually is a method of retrieving the data Gutman-wiped, it's probably something more sophisticated than analyzing the platters microscopically, which is the last known workable method.
The flipside is that the new DOD standard appears to say that only degaussing the platters will truly be sufficient and don't rely on shredding. I suspect they probably know a thing or two we don't about secrecy. :lol
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The randomizing of Tomnod's search grids makes perfect sense to me. If you let people pick and choose, or even know where they've been sent to you're not going to cover enough ground.
I had the same thought, i.e. everybody would want to search the same area, but then again, if you show a map of what hasn't been reviewed yet, that might be interesting to people.
Also, I'm not sure how you'd go about uncovering the water beneath clouds. Not trying to be argumentative, but is it actually possible to see under opaque objects from satellite imagery?
The thing was, the cloud cover wasn't completely opaque. It just washed out everything below where it was hard to discern anything. A simple graphics preprocessing, i.e. the kind everybody does on their home photos, would help wonders in those cases. And again, also not direct people to a patch that is completely black.
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Btw, if anyone ever wondered how mythologies work, check out the many "eyewitness sightings" that are now popping up.
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The newest "possible debris" is once again too large to be a credible prospect. One is a rectangle the size of an entire wing. With a length of 24m the width has to be 10 or 12 and I just don't can't see such an object on a 777-200.
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(https://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/140320090001-01-malaysia-0320-c1-main.jpg)
To me it just looks like just a different combination of white froth that's everywhere around there.
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Unless that plane is getting packed with dirty bombs or stolen nukes from Pakistan and one day will be used as some sort of 'weapon'....I don't think we will ever know what happened to it.
Doesn't the 'black box' only chime or submit data for a month.....and only a distance of 5 miles or so? If that's the case then they have little time to locate it and the depth of ocean is what....a mile, mile and a half? So, a ship would have to be virtually 'on top' of the wreckage to even 'hear' the black box....and they don't even know where to look.
It'll go down in history as one of those Aviation mysteries.
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The black boxes will ping for a month but they'll retain their data for much longer. They're essentially high quality hard drives so they'll keep data until they're damaged. I think corrosion will be the problem in this case, and they have plenty of time before that becomes an issue. It was a year and a month or two before they turned up AF447's black boxes and they still had plenty of telling data. Also, if they find wreckage and bodies they'll be able to ascertain quite a bit even if they can't get the black boxes.
And I think any link with terrorism is beyond remote. It'd have to be one of the pilots and they'd know about it by now. Hell, we'd have leaked 3 years worth of his phone records by now. Nobody other than an experienced commercial airline pilot could steal that plane and land it somewhere safely.
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I really don't know much about ocean currents, but that spot is southwest of Perth. Isn't that a bit very far off course?
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Since we don't know what his course was it's impossible to tell. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that his plan was to crash the plane in the deepest, most remote part of the world he could reach to rule out ever turning up any evidence at all. As it stands right now he's a hero until proven complicit. Not a bad suicide from that standpoint.
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And I think any link with terrorism is beyond remote. It'd have to be one of the pilots and they'd know about it by now. Hell, we'd have leaked 3 years worth of his phone records by now. Nobody other than an experienced commercial airline pilot could steal that plane and land it somewhere safely.
I don't actually believe that there was any type of terrorism behind this....I was just saying that unless that plane shows back up somewhere/sometime in the future I don't see how they are going to find it if they haven't located it by now. Especially since they don't know where to really look.
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Within a year debris will start to wash up somewhere. That'll at least give some idea where to start looking since global currents are fairly predictable. I won't put a big X on the spot, but it'll give you an arc to start searching. Furthermore, that debris will yield some clues. I agree that there's a real chance that it never gets solved, but I don't think it's at all hopeless.
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So, I had a question for anyone who might know how it works; could a sudden fire damage the electrical systems so bad that it caused the "way points" or whatever to change on their own? Considering where they're claiming the debris field might be now, I still theorize something sudden could have happened and the pilot had just enough time to attempt a turn before becoming incapacitated, and the plane continued on until it crashed. I have no scientific or engineering rationale or evidence to support this theory. I'm merely trying to think of the simplest explanation. It's not right to theorize without all the facts assembled first; and in their absence were only left with simple explanations and guesses really.
I would like to believe that even if the pilot were suicidal, he wouldn't also go out a murderer as well.
If something mechanical did happen, the horror for those possibly still alive on the plane before it went down is nearly too much to comprehend. And this coming from someone who has been in three plane "crashes" (2 private, and 1 commercial...they classified it a crash because we went off the runway).
I mean, I make my living off of my imagination, and maybe because I believe mine to be especially keen, but it's almost too much to think about really.
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So, I had a question for anyone who might know how it works; could a sudden fire damage the electrical systems so bad that it caused the "way points" or whatever to change on their own? Considering where they're claiming the debris field might be now, I still theorize something sudden could have happened and the pilot had just enough time to attempt a turn before becoming incapacitated, and the plane continued on until it crashed. I have no scientific or engineering rationale or evidence to support this theory. I'm merely trying to think of the simplest explanation. It's not right to theorize without all the facts assembled first; and in their absence were only left with simple explanations and guesses really.
I would like to believe that even if the pilot were suicidal, he wouldn't also go out a murderer as well.
If something mechanical did happen, the horror for those possibly still alive on the plane before it went down is nearly too much to comprehend. And this coming from someone who has been in three plane "crashes" (2 private, and 1 commercial...they classified it a crash because we went off the runway).
I mean, I make my living off of my imagination, and maybe because I believe mine to be especially keen, but it's almost too much to think about really.
Those waypoints have to be programmed in before the flight. The only way I could see what you're describing is if there was a previously programmed course that it reverted back to because of some computer freakout, but I don't think they save courses; they change too often. Don't take this as me being conspiracy minded, since I'm not, but I think that it might be possible for the airline's HQ to send new course info (waypoints, among other things) to the aircraft via the ACARS. However, I don't know if these would be automatically programmed or if they'd just go to the pilots who'd have to input them manually. I know the pilot who does the AMA I keep up with has hit on the nav programming several times before, so I'll see if I can find a better explanation tomorrow when I have some time.
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So, I had a question for anyone who might know how it works; could a sudden fire damage the electrical systems so bad that it caused the "way points" or whatever to change on their own? Considering where they're claiming the debris field might be now, I still theorize something sudden could have happened and the pilot had just enough time to attempt a turn before becoming incapacitated, and the plane continued on until it crashed. I have no scientific or engineering rationale or evidence to support this theory. I'm merely trying to think of the simplest explanation. It's not right to theorize without all the facts assembled first; and in their absence were only left with simple explanations and guesses really.
I would like to believe that even if the pilot were suicidal, he wouldn't also go out a murderer as well.
If something mechanical did happen, the horror for those possibly still alive on the plane before it went down is nearly too much to comprehend. And this coming from someone who has been in three plane "crashes" (2 private, and 1 commercial...they classified it a crash because we went off the runway).
I mean, I make my living off of my imagination, and maybe because I believe mine to be especially keen, but it's almost too much to think about really.
Those waypoints have to be programmed in before the flight. The only way I could see what you're describing is if there was a previously programmed course that it reverted back to because of some computer freakout, but I don't think they save courses; they change too often. Don't take this as me being conspiracy minded, since I'm not, but I think that it might be possible for the airline's HQ to send new course info (waypoints, among other things) to the aircraft via the ACARS. However, I don't know if these would be automatically programmed or if they'd just go to the pilots who'd have to input them manually. I know the pilot who does the AMA I keep up with has hit on the nav programming several times before, so I'll see if I can find a better explanation tomorrow when I have some time.
Considering that there appears to be some inconsistencies as to when Malaysia alledgedly knew about certain things, if we use your guess, maybe something happened and they diverted it from the ground. A big hole in this thing now for me is, if the plane crashed where they think they spotted debris, wouldn't Australia have picked the damn thing up?
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I think where they're searching now is well outside of Aussie coverage (of any sort). However, it doesn't matter because it's not the plane. Like I said before, there isn't going to be a 24x12m chunk of that plane floating on the water. It's a piece of boat or a very large cargo container. At this point I honestly don't know what to believe from what we're seeing, but I'm leaning towards nothing. I'm not sure about their satellite ACARS pings. I'm pretty sure the aircraft never hit FL450. I have no real reason to trust the various militaries that claim to have primary returns (but didn't bother telling anybody for days). As far as I can tell that plane might have nosedived right where it was supposed to be at LOC and they just missed it.
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Did a couple of searches and here are some relevant bits concerning the AP.
We program in the entire route, complete with lateral navigation (LNAV) and vertical navigation (VNAV). Once airborne with LNAV engaged, the plane will fly unaided to the destination. In the real world we are often given changes enroute.
The vertical portion requires pilot action. Though the VNAV knows where the descent should be started, it won't start down until the pilot sets an assigned altitude on the Mode Control Panel (MCP). This is because we can't actually start down until the controller has cleared us. If we fly past the descent point calculated by the computer and haven't yet started down, we will get an alert, something like "SET MCP ALTITUDE". If we see this, we would probably ask the controller for lower altitude.
I note that he said "given" changes en route, rather than fed changes or changed en route.
Yes, all the SIDS are stored in the database on the FMC so we simply select the appropriate departure. The waypoints, along with altitude and speed restrictions, are automatically loaded.
SIDs are Standard Instrument Departures and relate to getting away from the airport. STARs (Standard Terminal Arrival Routes) are also preprogrammed and apply to getting into your approach. SIDs are meant to get you heading away from the airport towards a transition point en route to your destination. At that transition point you're going to switch over to the program you input before the flight. This flight would have been well beyond that transition point and switched away from the preprogrammed SIDs which wouldn't have contained any instructions that far out anyway.
My take on all of this is that they were flying a course that they programmed in manually. Whether or not the AP was controlling the aircraft or they were flying it manually is hard to say. I think it's safe to say that the AP didn't switch to some other course on it's own, though.
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OK, here to fan the flames of massive conspiracy. If anyone recalls the story, a few weeks ago two ex-Navy Seals were found dead on the Maersk ship Alabama (yeah that one, Tom Hanks movie). They were working for a US Military contractor, The Trident Group. The Trident Group supplied "escorts" for transit of either extremely high value or chem/bio or nuclear cargo. The story was that they found heroin in both of their cablns and their bodies were dropped off in the Seychelles. Coincidentally, there was cargo on the Alabama that was also dropped off in the Seychelles that ended up on the Maylasian airplane. I can't verify the sources but was reported on a nationally syndicated talk show. Has anyone else heard this? If correct, the dots on the conspiracy theory seem to be a little closer together than before. If this is true, I am sure the white house knows it and although I would understand their silence on the matter until resolved but it would certainly add a couple layers of intrigue.
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That sounds a bit conspiracy, yeah. Besides, how do those sources know some of that cargo ended up on that plane? First of all I doubt this is public information, and secondly I think they said the plane cargo was innocuous.
Just saw the picture of the new piece of flotsam they're gonna check out. This one at least looks like an object to me; the previous two looked more like surf to me.
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It was the Rooskies who were reporting the cargo/Seychelles link. They claim to have been tracking that cargo all along because they thought it was something they needed to know about. It was all n the link somebody posted a few days ago.
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Because I'm that kind of guy, what's interesting me more than the actual story-we know so little, comparatively, and we may never know unless we find the plane what MAY have happened-is how the media is covering it.
This morning CNN took a moment to address the criticism that they're covering literally nothing else but this story. They beat their breasts about it, how of course they weren't, but it was important news, but they certainly weren't covering nothing else.
And then proceeded to cover nothing else for the next hour at least.
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Ok, what the hell:
https://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/23/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
3 weeks in they release information that the plane went down to 12,000 feet, which is what you do in case of some catastrophic event because a) it's below regular air traffic and b) there's enough air to breathe at that altitude, so there's no danger of decompression.
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I believe FL120 is something of a magic number with regards to how the plane will behave pressurization wise. I'm pretty sure going up that's when all of the alarms will start going off if the AC isn't pressurized, so I'd imagine that's when the all-clear would be if descending. I don't think the air traffic thing doesn't really factor into it, though. At that low of an altitude you're getting real close to uncontrolled airspace and you're considerably less safe. Right around that FL is going to be a transition point, above which there is no more VFR traffic and everybody is being controlled by ATC or flying designated airways and flight levels. Up high you know where everybody is going to be because ATC and procedure are keeping them there. Down low at Fl120 you could conceivably wind up getting waylayed by some JFK Jr. type in a Grumman Yankee or something.
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Very cool, they used the Doppler effect on the handshakes to determine that the plane must have flown south.
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OK, seriously, I don't know what the Malaysians are pulling here, but changing one of the most basic facts (the last words transmitted from the cockpit) 3 weeks in just reeks of a cover-up. Add to that the whole thing where the first week was wasted because they didn't release the information about the radar sightings of the plane far west of where they were looking...
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OK, seriously, I don't know what the Malaysians are pulling here, but changing one of the most basic facts (the last words transmitted from the cockpit) 3 weeks in just reeks of a cover-up. Add to that the whole thing where the first week was wasted because they didn't release the information about the radar sightings of the plane far west of where they were looking...
I was wondering if the initial "alright, good night" was actually reported as fact from transcripts, or if some Malaysian dude just said something like "it was a real casual thanks and good night sort of thing." In any event, while it is yet another example of Malaysian silliness, it's completely inconsequential. It's still a non-standard comm, and it's still perfectly normal and something you'd hear all the time in ATC world.
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That might all be true, but the fact that they rectify this thing 3 weeks in, or rectify searching in the wrong spot for a week, either shows incompetence or intentional lack of good communication. IIRC for a while American specialists had to work on "interpreted radar data", which was pretty much useless. Only when the raw data was finally given to them did they make some headway.
As some foreign spokesperson has said, one of the biggest obstacles in the investigation is the " opaqueness " of the Malaysian investigation. It's all very trickle here, trickle there, and many times even plain wrong information. I can totally understand the Chinese being pissed off.
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"C'mon, it's Czechoslovakia. We zip in, we pick 'em up, we zip right out again. We're not going to Moscow. It's Czechoslovakia. It's like going into Wisconsin." - Bill Murray in Stripes
While this is a joke, it should underline something that we sometimes take for granted. Maybe I'm just being naive...but I suspect that many smaller countries are not run with the efficiency that major world players are. Dealing with a government like Malaysia might be like the Governor of California calling the Mayor of Powell, Wyoming.
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My cousins father in law is now retired, but he still serves on the NTSB crash analysis team. He was formerly the chief engineer at G E Aircraft Engines. He was telling my cousin that everday data is downloaded to the data center of all GE engines all over the world. Now I dont know what engines were in this plane, but he seems to believe that there has been quite a bit of blatant misinformation and misdirection. He told my cousin it goes beyond incompetence. He personally feels Malaysia may have information that could incense China and other countries somehow. That something mechanical could have occurred that they should have acted on prior to the flight that they didn't. Which could have serious lasting implications on their future aviation industry. Im thinking of calling him and asking him to elaborate. I havent seen him for some time. I recall many years ago on Thanksgiving we were invited to their home for dinner, and he took a phone call during dinner and came back to the table to tell us his team had called him to tell him a commercial plane crashed with only the crew on board, and the pilots were both killed. Then like it was nothing, he was like, "Can you pass the gravy, please?" His wife said he took those calls all the time.
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My cousins father in law is now retired, but he still serves on the NTSB crash analysis team. He was formerly the chief engineer at G E Aircraft Engines. He was telling my cousin that everday data is downloaded to the data center of all GE engines all over the world. Now I dont know what engines were in this plane, but he seems to believe that there has been quite a bit of blatant misinformation and misdirection. He told my cousin it goes beyond incompetence. He personally feels Malaysia may have information that could incense China and other countries somehow. That something mechanical could have occurred that they should have acted on prior to the flight that they didn't. Which could have serious lasting implications on their future aviation industry. Im thinking of calling him and asking him to elaborate. I havent seen him for some time. I recall many years ago on Thanksgiving we were invited to their home for dinner, and he took a phone call during dinner and came back to the table to tell us his team had called him to tell him a commercial plane crashed with only the crew on board, and the pilots were both killed. Then like it was nothing, he was like, "Can you pass the gravy, please?" His wife said he took those calls all the time.
I believe they were Rolls Royce engines, but the same thing applies. They get telemetry beamed back to them, as does Boeing and the airline. The problem is that telemetry is only sent when something arises (mechanical, not safety) or on a regular but spread out basis. If one of the engines starts to go bad RR will get a big burst of all sorts of data, but if everything is normal they might only get a ping once an hour or something saying "all's well here." This is part of ACARS and it's meant to help all parties know when there's a maintenance issue that will need to be dealt with. It's role in accident investigation is just tangential.
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Well maybe we can add this to conspiracy theories or maybe its true... My father showed me this last night on his phone, but I had to find the article or a similar article today.
https://www.nowtheendbegins.com/blog/?p=17904 (https://www.nowtheendbegins.com/blog/?p=17904)
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Wow.
Hid the iPhone in his ass.
Seriously?
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Man, with all these false leads, they could really use a break at this point.
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Man, with all these false leads, they could really use a break at this point.
Wouldn't it be hysterical if the pings the Chinese picked up today were from some other aircraft that nobody even knew was missing? :lol
Still, they're getting a ping at the correct frequency of an emergency locator beacon that the Aussies say corresponds to what they're looking for, so there's reason to hope that the Chinese just got amazingly lucky out there.
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yeah, let's hope. I mean, the people are dead, there's no question about it. At this point I just want to know what happened.
BTW, I was thinking today, there's gotta be some execs at Boeing who secretly hope the plane doesn't get found. In the current scenario nobody points the finger at the plane, since it really could have been anything. If they find the plane, there's a good chance it was a plane malfunction.
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Honestly, I think mechanical malfunction is out of the question. It was piloted deliberately for apparently quite some distance.
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I don't know. I still subscribe to the "something went badly wrong and they tried to get to the nearest airport" theory, but at some point the crew was so incapacitated that the plane just flew on.
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Can't conjure up a scenario that would take into account for pilot incapacitation, loss of transponder and continued flight of the AC for 4 hours. Add to that there were either course corrections long after the event, or they flew right the hell back over Kuala Lumpur.
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Yeah, never mind. Newest thing is that the plane actively evaded Indonesian radar.
Huh. Maybe a hijack to go to Australia.
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I only now learned that those pingers are actually *audio* pingers. Kinda surprising to hear they don't also have an RF one.
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Every military on Earth is equipped to hear audio pings in the oceans. Most can get a very accurate idea of what and where it is. Helicopters can dip sonar into the water and all aircraft can drop sonobuoys all over the place. Acoustic pingers are quite effective here. Also, I believe that RF transmission underwater is sketchy, at best. Pretty sure they're largely limited to the VLF chunk of the spectrum and I'm not sure how useful that would be in locating something potentially far away.
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One thing I don't understand is, they seemingly narrowed down the search area to a manageable size. Even with ocean currents being what they are, shouldn't they have some floating debris?
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One thing I don't understand is, they seemingly narrowed down the search area to a manageable size. Even with ocean currents being what they are, shouldn't they have some floating debris?
Yeah, they should have. Honestly, their entire approach to this search seems pretty dubious to me. I suppose you have to search where you have leads, but other than the pings they haven't really had any decent ones. I'm not even sure if they've confirmed that the pings are even emergency locator beacons from the AC.
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Wtf, a month in they find out something new about the flight path when it was still in Vietnamese air space.
The more I read about this investigation, the more I get the impression it's a combination of withholding information, and sheer incompetence.
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On Apr 23rd 2014 the JACC reported that "Western Australia Police have attended a report of material washed ashore 10 kilometres east of Augusta and have secured the material." The ATSB is examining the material if there is any relevance to flight MH-370, photos have been taken and sent to Malaysia.
On Apr 23rd 2014 the ATSB described the material as a sheet of metal with rivets, the material appears interesting enough to take a closer look. Malaysia's Transportation Minister commented he had not yet seen those photographs.
https://avherald.com/h?article=4710c69b&opt=0
Probably nothing. Debris already found so far out there turned out to be unrelated. But we'll see.
The above site is great, btw, to follow aviation incidents and studf.
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Breaking News - another MH flight is down in Ukraine - early reports are all on board perished and it MAY have been shot down.
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"Anton Gerashenko, an adviser to Ukraine's Interior Minister, wrote on Facebook that the plane was hit by a missile fired from a Buk launcher over the country's east, the Associated Press reports.
Malaysia Airlines confirmed it had lost contact with flight MH17 and that its last position was over Ukrainian airspace.
A Russian aviation industry source told Reuters that the plane did not enter Russian airspace when expected."
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/17/malaysia-airlines-plane-cras_n_5595516.html#24_report-photo-taken-by-passenger-shows-plane-that-crashed
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Woah, that is pretty crazy.
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It's pretty odd, it came from a European country. And why was it flying directly over a warzone? Some things aren't adding up right.
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Yes, very strange. It left from Amsterdam and were 20 dutch people on board apparently.
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Yea just heard, just insane.
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That's a damn shame. These things do happen, though. We've done it, as have the Rooskies.
The FAA has issued a NOTAM restricting a good deal of airspace over the region, and while this wouldn't apply to foreign carriers, I have a hard time believing that other regulatory organizations wouldn't have, as well. Both sides have been conducting anti-aircraft ops out the ass. The only thing I can think of is that a lot of the region isn't effected. It's possible they were in a "safe zone" that turned out to be not so safe.
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NOTAM?
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Notice to Airmen
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Ah, got it.
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It occurs to me that the likelihood of this falling into the "these things happen" category is probably about the same as it being a deliberate act from either side in the conflict. Seems that this thing would have fantastic false-flag potential.
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Turns out all of the Eurasian airlines are scrambling now to reroute their airliners. NOW! It appears that common sense is something that occasionally requires a government mandate. Honestly, if MA really did fly right the hell over an active combat zone, I blame them far more than I do whoever shot it down.
BTW, the FAA's NOTAM was published mid-April.
edit: Man, talk about a shitstorm:
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BsxJqeECUAEbmFH.png)
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Goddamn, I know one of the guys that was on the plane that was shot down. He was one of my neighbours (student house) and a good friend of one of my roommates. We even went to their party last week (I did not really know him personally myself, though).
Also, some AIDS researchers, including professor Joep Lange, were on their way to a AIDS congres. Apparently a lot of medical experts/researchers died on this plane as well.
And I heard something about 80 kids as well.
Shit man, this is fucked up.
But to be honest, I do not think you can really blame the airlines. They fly at 10 km height, which normal rockets and equipment are not able to reach and neither party is likely to take delibirate aim at civillian planes, due to the international pressure that follows. (It was already forbidden to fly under the 7.900 metres height in the area, but the risks were considered very minimal above that and neither the Ukranians nor Russians issued a statement that they will shoot down airplanes). Planes fly over conflict zones all the time, around the globe. This particular area as well, other planes have been at that place at the same day.
The idiots that shot the missiles are really the ones to blame, as there are methods to identify massive civillian planes and they fly by frequently. But this happens if you give idiot rebels good military grade equipment capable of this stuff. Still, I agree that airlines should avoid warzones to nullify the risks alltogether, as almost 300 innocent people died now.
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But to be honest, I do not think you can really blame the airlines They fly at 10 km height, which normal rockets and equipment are not able to reach and neither party is likely to take delibirate aim at civillian planes, due to the international pressure that follows. .
I've read that the Eurasian airlines were warned not fly over certain areas of the Ukraine specifically for this reason. If that's true, I can 100% blame the airline.
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Well, most of your Eurasian planes were scrambling pretty hard to rework their flightpaths yesterday. While I think there had been an advisement it was still pretty crowded over Ukraine until after the event (it's a ghost town now).
@ErHaO, an Airbus cargo plane was shot down at FL220 a few days ago. At that point all bets are off. Somebody demonstrated mid-range anti-air capability and a willingness to use it on non-combatants. After that (and it honestly shouldn't have taken that) I'm amazed that airlines continued to use those corridors. Personally, I'm putting most of the blame on the airline (the direct route was to save fuel costs). It was a judgement call and they chose wrong, leading to:
Something that'll be lost is the fact that for ages now Malaysian Airlines has been one of the top ranked airlines in the world. The 2014 list had them ranked 5th, and that was after the disappearance of the other AC. Yet in 5 or so more days they'll be insolvent. They can't survive this despite their stellar history.
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But to be honest, I do not think you can really blame the airlines They fly at 10 km height, which normal rockets and equipment are not able to reach and neither party is likely to take delibirate aim at civillian planes, due to the international pressure that follows. .
I've read that the Eurasian airlines were warned not fly over certain areas of the Ukraine specifically for this reason. If that's true, I can 100% blame the airline.
You are right that there was negative advice regarding the area, I did not read that before. And as I said, since a few days it is forbidden to fly under the 7.900 m. That the airlines underestimated the risk is an understatement, otherwise this would not happen.
But still, you cannot put all the blame on the airlines (now knowing there was a clear risk, I definately agree there is blame, though). Shooting a civillian plane at 10 km is what happens if someone decides to give a amateuristic rebel army such equipment. There are ways to determine the identity of such aircrafts. I do wonder though, why was this plane in particular shot? One would think the rebels know by now that it is an air route, so the size of the plane and height should at least ring a bell. There has to be something that triggered them into shooting other than just seeing a plane.
But shit man, today is a sad day. So many children going in holiday, damn...
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Well, if the recordings that the Ukranian authorities put online are genuine (a big if), the people who shot it down weren't expecting any civilian flights over a warzone and seemed confused and panicked by what happened.
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Yes, I don't think they knew it was civilian airplane when they decided to shoot it down.
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Well, if the recordings that the Ukranian authorities put online are genuine (a big if), the people who shot it down weren't expecting any civilian flights over a warzone and seemed confused and panicked by what happened.
That wouldn't surprise me. If it was the rebels I suspect they were shooting at it as a cargo plane. Turns out they've shot two down now (there was another last month carrying troops). Also, the fact that there had been three planes shot down in the last 30 days should have been a pretty big red flag to any carrier in the world to steer clear of the region.
And does anybody even remember that we did damn near the exact same thing 25 years ago? I'm not trying to make any sort of political implication or justification here, but it seems important for people to recognize that the best military in the world, sporting what is probably still (and definitely was) the finest radar and control system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegis_Combat_System) in the world, mistook an Airbus for an F-14 and shot it down. I think a lot of people are greatly overestimating the difficulty in something like this happening.
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The (pro-)Russian separatists-terrorists have been downing aircraft almost as a hobby recently. Before this incident they had downed a couple of cargo planes and Ukrainian ground attack jets (note here that according to Kyiv government the latest downed jet - Su-25 was actually shot on from the territory of Russian Federation). There's also been GRAD shelling from across the Russian border, as well as wishy false-flags by the separatists to provoke Putin to interfere overtly.
This time unfortunately they went too far. This is now out of Putin's control. The separatists downed the Malaysian airplane thinking it was a Ukrainian cargo plane. They boasted with it on social media, including their Muscovite FSB commander - Igor Girkin. When they realised what they'd actually blown up, they started covering it all up...
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Amazing. 6 months of intense searching, and they found jack shit. Not even a shred of debris.
I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes a thing where they only find the plane in 50 years as part of a "Seafloor Project" where they map the whole seafloor of the earth.
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Amazing. 6 months of intense searching, and they found jack shit. Not even a shred of debris.
I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes a thing where they only find the plane in 50 years as part of a "Seafloor Project" where they map the whole seafloor of the earth.
I still think in a year or two lots of debris is going to wash up all over Blob's yard.
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Speaking of planes going down, apparently a single engine plane just crashed about a mile and a half from my house.
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Not the one that they escorted the other day with jet fighters until it crashed, right? There was one that must have been on auto-pilot, but they couldn't make contact with it.
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No, that one landed somewhere near Cuba if I'm not mistaken. I'm talking about a plane that literally just went down... like three hours ago.
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No, that one landed somewhere near Cuba if I'm not mistaken. I'm talking about a plane that literally just went down... like three hours ago.
That one Payne Stewarted it's way to the Caribbean and crashed somewhere off the coast of Jamaica, I believe.
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I didn't think this was quite right for the funny thread (more stupid) .............perhaps not the smartest tweet from a company that tends to lose track of planes
Want to go somewhere, but don't know where? Our Year-End Specials might just help! #keepflying https://t.co/aHt4yRykzd pic.twitter.com/k6hEOZb42s
Malaysia Airlines (@MAS) November 27, 2014
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I'm just absolutely amazed that in this day and age, where I had T-Mobile reception on a glacier in Alaska, we can lose one plane after the other with absolutely no clue where they are.
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I'm just absolutely amazed that in this day and age, where I had T-Mobile reception on a glacier in Alaska, we can lose one plane after the other with absolutely no clue where they are.
I'm just amazed that you can get T-Mobile reception on a glacier in Alaska and I can't get 2 bars in my own God damned Dallas apartment.
Also, the ocean's really big and planes are really fast.
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In regards to the very recent Air Asia crash, they've at least started finding minor debris as well as bodies. Didn't exactly just disappear like MH370.
https://avherald.com/h?article=47f6abc7&opt=0
Just my amateur opinion here...I'm thinking that the thunderstorms in the area had to do with this crash. During the last radio transmissions with the aircraft, the pilots were asking for permission to deviate around a thunderstorm cell, as well as for a higher cruising altitude. It took ATC a couple minutes to coordinate this due to other air traffic in the area, but when they relayed back the permission, they didn't get a call back from the aircraft. I'm guessing the aircraft may have entered the cell, and the resulting turbulence may have caused an unrecoverable situation.
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Also, the ocean's really big and planes are really fast.
It is indeed, but it's not exactly rocket science in the year 2015 to send a positional message every second to a satellite. MH370's position had to be pieced together from Doppler analysis, because Air Malaysia had not subscribed to the service that connects to the satellite.
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In regards to the very recent Air Asia crash, they've at least started finding minor debris as well as bodies. Didn't exactly just disappear like MH370.
https://avherald.com/h?article=47f6abc7&opt=0
Just my amateur opinion here...I'm thinking that the thunderstorms in the area had to do with this crash. During the last radio transmissions with the aircraft, the pilots were asking for permission to deviate around a thunderstorm cell, as well as for a higher cruising altitude. It took ATC a couple minutes to coordinate this due to other air traffic in the area, but when they relayed back the permission, they didn't get a call back from the aircraft. I'm guessing the aircraft may have entered the cell, and the resulting turbulence may have caused an unrecoverable situation.
Storms may well be a contributing factor, but a storm by itself is highly unlikely to crash an airliner. Something else was involved. Also, if it's a storm nasty enough to be a major threat then the pilot's going to go around whether ATC signs off on it or not. Pilots have the same survival instinct that you and I do and they are the top dog insofar as safety goes with their aircraft.
Also, the ocean's really big and planes are really fast.
It is indeed, but it's not exactly rocket science in the year 2015 to send a positional message every second to a satellite. MH370's position had to be pieced together from Doppler analysis, because Air Malaysia had not subscribed to the service that connects to the satellite.
Oh, you're arguing for how things should be done, rather than what was done. I agree.
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I actually read up on it a bit more on it today, and the black box is no better really. It records 2 hours of audio, which it then overwrites. That's 1950s technology.
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I actually read up on it a bit more on it today, and the black box is no better really. It records 2 hours of audio, which it then overwrites. That's 1950s technology.
I never knew that. Amazing.
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I actually read up on it a bit more on it today, and the black box is no better really. It records 2 hours of audio, which it then overwrites. That's 1950s technology.
That's actually about 80 minutes longer than necessary. I can't think of many instances where relevant info was more than 30 minutes prior to the big kaboom. UA232 and JAL123 both flew around for 35 minutes after the initial failure. More often than not you're looking for something within 5-10 minutes. The technology is pretty much state of the art. The time limit is simply a matter of what's needed.
When looking up UA232 I noticed that Denny Fitch died. Went mostly unnoticed. He was a training pilot flying deadhead on that flight and stepped up to assist when things went to hell. His actions pretty much made him the original Sullenberger and a legend in the industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232
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While catastrophic failures only need 10 minutes, kidnappings etc happen over a much longer time down.
And what about video? Even when the plane crashes, they have no video to speak of. No cockpit, main cabin, engines, nothing.
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I feel like there should be three black boxes on a plane. Put one in the cabin, mic the cabin to one in the tail section, and then have one that ejects and parachutes down/floats in the water. It seems kind of stupid to have to dive underwater to retrieve a box. I get that I'm not an aeronautical engineer, but if we can eject a pilot out of a fighter jet at several hundred miles per hour, I would think ejecting a black box would be a relatively easy task.
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I think that the thought process is that you want the black boxes to remain with the bulk of the AC. You find one you find both. Ejecting them doesn't really make much sense, and while floating them does in some ways, drift would cause them to travel pretty far from the wreckage. Plus, they're going to be diving to bring up important bits of the AC and bodies anyway. That said, it does seem like a fuselage mounted marker body that detaches from the AC when submerged seems like a swell idea.
Oh, and the next step in the evolution of telemetry is going to be to have the AC burst transmit the FDR/CVR data to satellites. That will provide timelier info but will likely introduce other problems, as well.
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The ability to stream data in real time, providing air traffic controls with continuous information about an airplanes heading, speed and other info, exists. It would, essentially, use the same technology airlines employ to ensure you can stream 1989 or Guardians of the Galaxy to seat 17D. Using next-generation satellite connectivity from a company like Inmarsat, a system could be designed to transmit all manner of data from a plane in real time. The problem is, all that data, from all those planes, would require far more bandwidth than even the most advanced satellite communications infrastructure can handle.
Even if this were to be implemented, it would do nothing to prevent these accidents. The value is very small.
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The ability to stream data in real time, providing air traffic controls with continuous information about an airplanes heading, speed and other info, exists. It would, essentially, use the same technology airlines employ to ensure you can stream 1989 or Guardians of the Galaxy to seat 17D. Using next-generation satellite connectivity from a company like Inmarsat, a system could be designed to transmit all manner of data from a plane in real time. The problem is, all that data, from all those planes, would require far more bandwidth than even the most advanced satellite communications infrastructure can handle.
Even if this were to be implemented, it would do nothing to prevent these accidents. The value is very small.
It wouldnt prevent accidents, but would definitely prevent planes from going missing which is pretty valuable I think. I cant see how adding streaming simple data would be that big of a bandwidth hog compared to movies.
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Are the movies streamed? I figured they would be saved to a HD on the plane.
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The movies are definitely locally stored. But, more and more airlines offer internet on their flights. Essentially, you could write a smartphone app and make the airplane more secure by having the phone report its location every second :lol
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The only thing you'd need is for the AC to ping a satellite every 5 minutes or so. You'd have a reasonable estimate of speed, location and alt. And even this should only be necessary for trans-con flights. All we're really looking to establish is where to send the corpse handling gloves, after all. If it happens on land you've either got witnesses above or below, and if it's in the woods you've got a flaming crater in the bush.
The flipside of this is that it might well be a good mandatory rule for GA pilots and those flying VFR. Some guy just putzing around in his 172 isn't likely to make a big enough dent to be easily noticeable, and they're likely to be off the beaten path and definitely far from traffic. That Fosset guy comes to mind. A ping within 5 minutes would have put him within a 30 mile radius or so.
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The flipside of this is that it might well be a good mandatory rule for GA pilots and those flying VFR. Some guy just putzing around in his 172 isn't likely to make a big enough dent to be easily noticeable, and they're likely to be off the beaten path and definitely far from traffic. That Fosset guy comes to mind. A ping within 5 minutes would have put him within a 30 mile radius or so.
For GA folks, they are rarely out of radar range (except Alaska I guess), and when they go down, thats what ELT's are for. I don't know the details of Fosset's disappearance, though.
Edit: Actually, there are lots of places out of radar coverage in the lower 48, so I retract what I said.
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The flipside of this is that it might well be a good mandatory rule for GA pilots and those flying VFR. Some guy just putzing around in his 172 isn't likely to make a big enough dent to be easily noticeable, and they're likely to be off the beaten path and definitely far from traffic. That Fosset guy comes to mind. A ping within 5 minutes would have put him within a 30 mile radius or so.
For GA folks, they are rarely out of radar range (except Alaska I guess), and when they go down, thats what ELT's are for. I don't know the details of Fosset's disappearance, though.
Edit: Actually, there are lots of places out of radar coverage in the lower 48, so I retract what I said.
And flight following is strictly at the discretion (convenience) of ATC. You ask and they tell you if they're willing. As for emergency locator xmitters, that's dependent on actually having one (not sure if they're mandatory or simply Darwin apportioned) and activation.
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The only thing you'd need is for the AC to ping a satellite every 5 minutes or so. You'd have a reasonable estimate of speed, location and alt. And even this should only be necessary for trans-con flights. All we're really looking to establish is where to send the corpse handling gloves, after all.
Why have a static interval? You look at the altitude, speed and angle of the plane, and you set the interval adaptively to half of the time it would take the plane to crash. That way, of you're doing a nosedive towards the ground, it will ping its position at increasingly shorter intervals.
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The only thing you'd need is for the AC to ping a satellite every 5 minutes or so. You'd have a reasonable estimate of speed, location and alt. And even this should only be necessary for trans-con flights. All we're really looking to establish is where to send the corpse handling gloves, after all.
Why have a static interval? You look at the altitude, speed and angle of the plane, and you set the interval adaptively to half of the time it would take the plane to crash. That way, of you're doing a nosedive towards the ground, it will ping its position at increasingly shorter intervals.I might turn that quote into a motivational poster and put it in my next cubicle (and future offices).
That's pretty effing brilliant.
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The only thing you'd need is for the AC to ping a satellite every 5 minutes or so. You'd have a reasonable estimate of speed, location and alt. And even this should only be necessary for trans-con flights. All we're really looking to establish is where to send the corpse handling gloves, after all.
Why have a static interval? You look at the altitude, speed and angle of the plane, and you set the interval adaptively to half of the time it would take the plane to crash. That way, of you're doing a nosedive towards the ground, it will ping its position at increasingly shorter intervals.
Sure. Why not. I think it's all overkill anyway, but if that can be none with a minimum of fuss and complexity it sounds fine. It is, as Chino suggested, an elegant solution. What people need to keep in mind is that getting airlines and airframe manufactures to spend money and weight on something new is a real PITA. Replacing the black boxes in all 737s will be akin to getting a new OTC pain med on the market. If it represents a major improvement or critical necessity then it will eventually happen. In something like this which represents neither, it's best to let the market sort it out. Wouldn't surprise me if the 787 has some new and improved telemetry on board. Easier to do at the design stage. Also wouldn't surprise me if Boeing took a "if it ain't broke" approach and stuck with something tried and true (and more importantly, certified).
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Looks like they found the black boxes for Air Asia 8501.
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And the cockpit voice recorder.
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I'm rather curious about this one. Weather alone doesn't crash planes (airliners, at least). If it was a severe enough storm that it might have then the pilots would go around, ATC be damned (easily within their prerogative). So the natural guess would be that the weather created a situation that the pilots couldn't cope with. Yet this looked like a damn good flight crew. These weren't guys they picked up off the street and taught to work the FD over 2 months in the sim. PIC had over 6k hours in the A320 and seemed like a solid sort of guy. The only thing that really sticks out to me is that the AC is still largely intact. Seems they didn't hit the water all that hard. Suggests the pilots had a pretty good idea of what the problem was and that disposition took a fair amount of time. CVR oughta be quite revealing here.
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I read somewhere that some of the passengers were wearing life vests. That would indicate a reasonable amount of time before they came down.
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The closest thing I have to a theory is that severe precip could have caused both engines to flameout and they ditched. They'd have time to don life vests and whatnot, and the pilots would have been too busy with the ditching and the attempts to relight the engines to communicate (aviate, navigate, communicate).
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Jeez. I can't even think about that. I'd rather see a mountain coming at me at 500mph than have engines flame out over the ocean in a thunder storm.
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Jeez. I can't even think about that. I'd rather see a mountain coming at me at 500mph than have engines flame out over the ocean in a thunder storm.
Fuuuuuuuuuuu
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So the AirAsia crash is starting to look an awful lot like AF447. FDR shows a very rapid ascent, likely fast enough to stall the AC. If so then they were unable to recover. My guess is that the flight controller in an A320 won't allow a climb rate even close to the 6000'/m they hit, which suggests one of two things that both point directly at bad air data.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-30902237
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That's freaking scary. What is the rate of ascent that is typical at takeoff?
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6000 fpm seems way too high, especially at altitude. At sea level I'd be surprised if it was capable of much more than 3000 fpm. It's service ceiling is only about 39000 feet, and that is defined as the altitude at which the maximum possible rate of climb is 100 fpm.
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Typical is 1-2k. Three might be doable but would never happen in a commercial airliner. Moreover, the Airbus flight director would prohibit that degree of pitch and/or AoA. That's why I have to figure that the flight director either commanded it (bad air data) or dropped from normal to alternate law (bad air data) and dumped the protections normal law provides. If it dropped to alternate law then the pilots would be able to attempt such a climb right up to the point of stalling the AC (which they'd never do).
This nice fellow provides a handy chart for the various FD control laws. https://www.airbusdriver.net/airbus_fltlaws.htm
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So the AirAsia crash is starting to look an awful lot like AF447.
Exactly what I'm thinking.
There's a good book out there called Understanding Air France 447 if you're into this stuff.
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So the AirAsia crash is starting to look an awful lot like AF447.
Exactly what I'm thinking.
There's a good book out there called Understanding Air France 447 if you're into this stuff.
I think I saw that book mentioned someplace else, I should check it out.
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Man, yet another one, and equally as weird. I saw a graph today of the altitude during the flight (similar to this one (https://media0.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/gesellschaft/2789708400/1.3503422/default/hq/geplante-flugroute-der.jpg)), where it seemed the descent started right when the plane went over ground.
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I read the news as I was about to board my plane from Düsseldorf - Copenhagen. Not the greatest thing to read before a flight. Such a tragic thing!
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This one will get sorted out pretty quickly. There are already people dumping ADS-B data and making charts and they have at least one black box (unknown which once at this point). This one won't be a big mystery.
It does seem that the AC was flying a phugoid after they left FL380, so the speculation is on pilot incapacitation; sudden decompression being the obvious guess there. Some airbus drivers over at PPRuNe are actually trying to piece together that ADS-B data to see if the flight director was calling the shots and what mode it would have been in.
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This one will get sorted out pretty quickly. There are already people dumping ADS-B data and making charts and they have at least one black box (unknown which once at this point). This one won't be a big mystery.
They found the box with the voice recordings on it. They are still looking for the box with the flight data. I still don't understand why this data wasn't being written to a HD on land in real time. They could have had everything mapped before nightfall yesterday.
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This one will get sorted out pretty quickly. There are already people dumping ADS-B data and making charts and they have at least one black box (unknown which once at this point). This one won't be a big mystery.
They found the box with the voice recordings on it. They are still looking for the box with the flight data. I still don't understand why this data wasn't being written to a HD on land in real time. They could have had everything mapped before nightfall yesterday.
The CVR should be pretty helpful, though not as much as the FDR. And honestly, the current black box system really works pretty well. We had one instance where a plane gets sucked up by aliens so there's no flight data, but that was certainly the exception. There's really no reason to go reinventing the wheel here. Moreover, they already have a pretty large amount of data from the ADS-B telemetry. That's only half the story from the FDR, but it's still a huge improvement over 3 years ago.
And the best answer to your question is that any design change on an AC takes years of effort. Things as mundane as the inflight entertainment system take years and years to role out. As a rule, major changes like that only happens when a whole new family of AC are introduced so all of the regulatory stuff can be done at the onset. Once you consider that those regulatory things have to be done for a huge number of governing bodies then you're looking at a ton of effort for a system that A: you try your hardest to insure never gets used, B: only gets used in the tiniest fraction of flights, and C: works surprisingly well in the rare instances it is employed.
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I think much more surprising is that the plane can descend for 8 minutes, and ground control is totally clueless and powerless.
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I think much more surprising is that the plane can descend for 8 minutes, and ground control is totally clueless and powerless.
Yeah, I suspect that's a part of why the speculation right now is around pilot incap. I do know that centre ATC around Germany/Switzerland/France tends to be privatized rather than national, and there have been some lapses before. Wouldn't really be a factor here, but it might preclude them from getting the transcripts immediately.
I suspect you're already familiar with a particularly bad evening with regards to that system, but for anybody else that's interested here's a good read on how a whole bunch of factors (including some really bad luck) can result in an ATC meltdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cberlingen_mid-air_collision
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Jeez yeah, that accident was horrible.
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This one will get sorted out pretty quickly. There are already people dumping ADS-B data and making charts and they have at least one black box (unknown which once at this point). This one won't be a big mystery.
They found the box with the voice recordings on it. They are still looking for the box with the flight data. I still don't understand why this data wasn't being written to a HD on land in real time. They could have had everything mapped before nightfall yesterday.
The CVR should be pretty helpful, though not as much as the FDR. And honestly, the current black box system really works pretty well. We had one instance where a plane gets sucked up by aliens so there's no flight data, but that was certainly the exception. There's really no reason to go reinventing the wheel here. Moreover, they already have a pretty large amount of data from the ADS-B telemetry. That's only half the story from the FDR, but it's still a huge improvement over 3 years ago.
And the best answer to your question is that any design change on an AC takes years of effort. Things as mundane as the inflight entertainment system take years and years to role out. As a rule, major changes like that only happens when a whole new family of AC are introduced so all of the regulatory stuff can be done at the onset. Once you consider that those regulatory things have to be done for a huge number of governing bodies then you're looking at a ton of effort for a system that A: you try your hardest to insure never gets used, B: only gets used in the tiniest fraction of flights, and C: works surprisingly well in the rare instances it is employed.
Reinvent the wheel? How many planes have gone down in the last year and have had issues understanding what happened? We advance all technologies, why is re-thinking the black box idea not valuable? Of course it will take time, that shouldn't be an excuse not to. Technology is much more advanced now. Keep them in place, but add more for real time data being sent "home" It makes too much sense.
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It's a complex thing. I mean, sure, every passenger's smartphone far outstrips the processing and storage power of the black boxes. The problem is the requirements on them. They need to survive hell and back, and store their information for months with almost 100% reliability. Proving that takes years of very expensive certifications.
And the other factor is, as nice as it is to know why the accident happened, the device is needed in extremely rare cases (I read yesterday that this crash was the first for the A320 model after 80 million flights). Spending millions of Euros/dollars on debugging freak accidents is not exactly great ROI in an industry that has 0.5% profit margin.
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To the best of my knowledge there has only been one accident that remains unresolved, and that's the titular Malaysian plane. Like I said, FDRs and CVRs actually work surprisingly well. I think the problem here is that we live in a day and age where people demand answers immediately. This accident, like others, will take several months to issue a formal finding and that's honestly alright. If they discover a fatal flaw early in the process they'll work that problem sooner (as happened with the 737 problem a few years back).
Also, FDRs capture a minimum of 88 parameters (and >300 is the norm, I believe) with a polling rate around 3/second. That's a lot of data to stream in realtime when you're having to capture every AC in the air at any given time (7000+ in the USA alone).
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And it would only help if you're one water anyway. Over ground, even in an inhospitable area such as the Alps, it took them half a day to retrieve both boxes.
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Im not talking about replacing the black boxes, those things are rugged and do work. Im talking about adding something so we can find lost planes and understand what happened faster and I don't think "it takes time and money" is a good excuse. If we can add satellite TV to planes then I think we can add more technology for better tracking and real time data. I should also add that supposedly the black boxes were never found from the planes during 9/11. I think we would all love to have a better understanding of what went on with those planes.
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Im not talking about replacing the black boxes, those things are rugged and do work. Im talking about adding something so we can find lost planes and understand what happened faster and I don't think "it takes time and money" is a good excuse. If we can add satellite TV to planes then I think we can add more technology for better tracking and real time data. I should also add that supposedly the black boxes were never found from the planes during 9/11. I think we would all love to have a better understanding of what went on with those planes.
Yeah, but ADS-B is already doing what you want. The chart Rumbo posted shows a fair amount of flight data and was pieced together within minutes of the incident. And that satellite TV thing is occasionally cited as an example of how hard it is to change something on an AC. It took years to get regulatory approval for that and wound up costing a fortune.
As for the black boxes on 911, that's an interesting point and one which I always found fairly suspicious. In the two cases where giant building fell on top of them I can understand it. In the other two cases it's one of the many peculiarities that give truthers ammo to go on about (and one of the better ones, IMO). I suspect those were salvaged.
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@cramx3: Well, those devices are held to a much different standard though than TV screens. Entertainment stuff is in that "nice to have" category, and they can fail all they want (and often do as everybody knows). Telemetry are likely heavily controlled by FCC regulations.
To give you an example, I personally work on an Android app that soldiers will end up using in the field (not on the front line, only in benign situations). Nonetheless, we had to prove that our app can withstand a whole week of continuous use! Whereas the realistic use case of our app is 20 minutes at a time, at best.
I would think the requirements on telemetry equipment on a plane will be even harder, by orders of magnitude.
EDIT: I think the WTC black boxes simply didn't survive. Regarding the Pentagon ones, they're probably classified simply by virtue of their resting place.
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Actually, the failure of those Inflight Entertainment Systems was deemed a huge problem. For one thing they involve miles of wiring per AC. That's the sort of thing that gives everybody the willies. Furthermore, satellite systems are going to have to be guaranteed to not interfere with avionics and communications. In the case of the wiring, they're built as a completely separate unit from the rest of the AC, completely isolated. Obviously RF interference is a paramount concern.
The plane that crashed out in the field is also suspect with regard to black boxes. There were instances of The Man ignoring or deflecting inquiries on the basis of "what difference does it make, anyway!" I suspect the boxes from both of those AC fell into that "you don't need to know about that" category (which is of course what feeds the truthers).
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I totally get that with the usage, but my point in relating them was in terms of costs, time, and purpose. We can spend significant money and time for entertainment on a flgiht, but not on things that may help locate a potentially lost plane? And if ADS-B does what I am asking, how come the malaysia plane is still missing?
If the black box didnt survive in 9/11 then it doesnt appear to be doing its job (albeit in an extreme circumstance, but isnt that the point of them?). I think in general they were found and just classified, but thats my opinion and not meant for this discussion.
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And if ADS-B does what I am asking, how come the malaysia plane is still missing?
Valid question. The biggest problem is that it relies on ground based reception. When you're over the water you don't have that. I suspect that'll change soon enough, but I believe it's still relatively new, and of course subject to a long delay in full adoption.
Insofar as satellite reception, you do have ACARS which can provide some useful telemetry, but it is utilized for an entirely different purpose. More importantly it's implemented by the airlines and as such only reports back what they want it to. It wouldn't surprise me if there were enough clamoring to have it become more of a requirement to receive basic data, but then you run into the problem of forcing an industry that operates near the margins to implement new requirements that, once again, will almost never be necessary. It was ACARS which provided most of the data for that Malaysian plane, but as we saw, it wasn't exactly a goldmine.
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I totally get that with the usage, but my point in relating them was in terms of costs, time, and purpose. We can spend significant money and time for entertainment on a flgiht, but not on things that may help locate a potentially lost plane? And if ADS-B does what I am asking, how come the malaysia plane is still missing?
Airline A: "We spent $1 million on upgrading our entertainment system!"
Airline B: "We spent $1 million on reporting more accurately in the case of a crash!"
Which airline gets the customers?
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I totally get that with the usage, but my point in relating them was in terms of costs, time, and purpose. We can spend significant money and time for entertainment on a flgiht, but not on things that may help locate a potentially lost plane? And if ADS-B does what I am asking, how come the malaysia plane is still missing?
Airline A: "We spent $1 million on upgrading our entertainment system!"
Airline B: "We spent $1 million on reporting more accurately in the case of a crash!"
Which airline gets the customers?
:lol well when you put it that way...
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Early reports on the black box indicate that one of the pilots was locked out of the cockpit and trying to smash his way back in.
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Suddenly I find myself really hoping the FO was named Dieter von Hamburg and not Mohammad al-Bagdahdi.
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I wonder if this will be a case what we will never know what happened because audio recordings are very limited after all. It implicity assumes that people are talking.
Could be plain old suicide for example.
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Nah, they'll sort it out. We're not hearing anything official at all about the CVR, only a leak from the NYT, so it's likely they know a whole lot more than just the lockout (assuming the lockout is even real). Aside from that there's a ton of details that just need to be sorted out. In fact it's bording on information overload at some of the regular haunts for speculating pilots.
The CW among airbus drivers is that you don't just get locked out of the flight deck. It'd take a deliberate act from the person inside. However, how hard it would be comes down largely to the airline and their protocols. Pilots are reticent as fuck to discuss those protocols online, but the airline will certainly share the information with investigators.
And for the curious minded, here's how the door locking panel works for an A320: https://www.efbdesktop.com/airplane-general/sys-1.3.1.html
There's also some pretty good conjecture from a 320 pilot about the airspeed and the decent that suggests that it was definitely controlled flight; specifically a pilot fighting the FD. He actually posted this pretty early yesterday and posited Controlled Flight into Terrain. Again, just conjecture, but it demonstrates what can be reasoned with even basic transponder telemetry. At this point I suspect the folks at Airbus are doing the same thing and ascertaining exactly how that telemetry they have jibes with their own FD programming and will know (if they don't already) why the plane descended in the manner it did. The logic that makes the Airbus FBW system is insanely complex, but also remarkably easy to understand when you're looking backward at a problem like this. We know that all A320s will behave exactly the same way under the same circumstances, and that behavior is based on very specific condtions. That makes it easy to reason out.
Man, I guess it's a good problem to have, but we're really spoiled nowadays. Here in 2015 we want answers within a day of something like this happening. There have been investigations that took years to piece together, and this one is very likely going to prove quite simple to resolve. Yet we're already clamoring for answers and wondering if they'll even come.
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The more I read about it, the more it looks like suicide. The fact that you can't lock out a pilot without actively locking the door from the inside (and relocking, since there's a timeout), the fact that the plane on autopilot would have maintained altitude... it all seems to point to deliberate crashing.
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Bear in mind, the "pilot locked out of the cockpit" scenario has only been reported by news outlets, not any official investigation.
I have to agree though that it does seem suicidal. The descent looks so controlled. The only other scenario I can imagine off the top of my head is that maybe they had a rapid depressurization, dialed a low altitude into the MCP, iniated the descent, but maybe got forgetful of their surroundings as they were running through checklists. That seems insanely unlikely though; I really can't imagine that someone can become the captain of an airliner and accidentally run a plane into mountains when you have this kind of equipment on board: The A320 (and most modern airliners, to my knowledge) have a terrain display:
(https://mark.theeisners.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/IMG_0686.jpg)
...in addition to automated verbal callouts "TERRAIN, TERRAIN, PULL UP!"
So right now I can't see how this wasn't deliberate unless they were somehow incapacitated after they initiated a desent.
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I think that the thought process is that you want the black boxes to remain with the bulk of the AC. You find one you find both. Ejecting them doesn't really make much sense, and while floating them does in some ways, drift would cause them to travel pretty far from the wreckage. Plus, they're going to be diving to bring up important bits of the AC and bodies anyway. That said, it does seem like a fuselage mounted marker body that detaches from the AC when submerged seems like a swell idea.
Oh, and the next step in the evolution of telemetry is going to be to have the AC burst transmit the FDR/CVR data to satellites. That will provide timelier info but will likely introduce other problems, as well.
el Barto, you're my resident air travel expert, so I'd love your opinion (though I think you've already agreed to this in your own diplomatic way) but I read threads like this where everyone has the next "bright idea" ("we should have orange boxes with drone capability that transmit in real time the biorhythms of every crew member to a server farm we can install on the moon. It's 2015 for God's sake") and it never ceases to amaze me that it doesn't occur to people that yes, while mistakes can sometimes be made and there is always room for improvement, this is one of the most well-thought out processes we have. If a 6-hour ejecting data recorder would be better than what we have now, the odds are strongly in favor of the idea that we would already have it installed.
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Well, the French government is saying this was a criminal act. This would lend credence to the details NYT is reporting.
This is all kind of horrifying....
EDIT: "Screams can be heard before the final impact" "Death was sudden and immediate"
And apparently there is a code the pilot can use to get back in through the locked door, but can be manually overridden from inside the cockpit. So this would have required at least two very deliberate actions on the part of the co-pilot.
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Alrighty, so they've announced that it was the FO, it was a murder suicide and that he was a German. Sorry, but I'm honestly glad to hear this (that he was a Kraut, not the suicide part, obviously). Not the first time a pilot has done this and likely won't be the last. Just glad it won't lead to more kneejerk reactions (and the pilots are pretty quick to point out that locking the doors in the first place qualifies as such, which has now led to the deaths of 150 people).
Millah: the link I posted explains the double locking mechanism. In "locked" mode it disables keypad entry for 20 minutes or until it's deactivated. It's also possible that there's a sliding bolt (can't beat the classics). That said, the pilots over at PPRuNe are pretty clear that with company knowledge this shouldn't be a dealbreaker. They're just also not keen to explain that. It should also be pointed out that there's a fire axe in the FD to be used for: A. breaking out windows in the event that it becomes necessary, and B. splitting the head open of the first guy through the door. Not a factor here, obviously, and moreover the FO was having to manually fly the plane down since the Flight Director would be doing it's damnedest to prevent it. He wouldn't have had time to physically defend against entry.
Stadler: you run into a situation with improvements like this since the airlines operate close tot he margins. For something that needs to be changed it has to be damned cost effective and honestly, improving something that happens after a crash doesn't qualify (unless it's to help survivors, of course). That's not to say that if it's a benefit that it will be done, though. There are plenty of things that the airlines install only after ages pass. Wind shear radar is an example of one of those, IIRC. Adding a new radar system to an AC is ridiculously hard/expensive to do and despite the obvious safety bonus it just didn't work out once the numbers get crunched. One of the problems here is that the FAA has the dual purpose of protecting safety but also promoting efficient air travel. They tend to make recommendations and very rarely issue directives. It's mostly the latter that the companies act on.
As for black boxes, I suspect that eventually they will be reporting back in realtime. There's just no priority for it. The current system is actually quite effective. Considering that they almost always survive and provide useful information on events that happen with increasing infrequency, it's hard to really make a huge case against them. The impetus is going to be something like ACARS, which benefits the companies in their own competitive way, but also provides useful investigative telemetry in the process.
The other thing to keep in mind is privacy. Pilots are understandably reticent to have their final words broadcast all over the world for the sake of morbid curiosity. Very rigid standards were put in place to protect them, which is why you only get transcripts (and occasionally not even that) and never the actual CVRs, which used to be made available. Given the rarity of something like this happening that doesn't trouble me much. None of us would want a camera/mic on us the entire time we're working, and the safety concerns here aren't nearly enough to warrant making pilots an exception to that.
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Oh, and there is one change that will be implemented after this. It varies by company but there are strict procedures for when a pilot has to use the head. Some companies mandate that a FA has to enter the FD and sit in the jumpseat while a pilot is out, that way he can make sure the exited pilot can get back in. I suspect we'll see this implemented across the board. In this case the FA would have been a part of that aforementioned axe scenario, but some fighting back can go a very long ways. Just ask Auburn Calloway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705). (And for people unfamiliar with it, this is serious movie of the week stuff; amazing story.)
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I might be missing your point here, but why are you glad that he's German?
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I assume so that the media and everybody else are less likely to go all "MUSLIM TERRORIST HIJACKING, ZOMG!!!"
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Completely unrelated to the crash, but it's pretty crazy that a new pilot in Europe can go straight from receiving a fresh commercial license/ATPL to the right seat of an A320. This guy barely had 600 (yes, six hundred) hours TOTAL flight time. In the states, at that point, you're still instructing in a small single or twin-engine prop with still at least another year or two ahead of you before you get into even a small regional jet. I'm jealous...in a way; I'd still like to have ample experience before I have that many lives in my hands.
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Completely unrelated to the crash, but it's pretty crazy that a new pilot in Europe can go straight from receiving a fresh commercial license/ATPL to the right seat of an A320. This guy barely had 600 (yes, six hundred) hours TOTAL flight time. In the states, at that point, you're still instructing in a small single or twin-engine prop with still at least another year or two ahead of you before you get into even a small regional jet. I'm jealous.
That's actually a pretty hot topic in the industry. The flipside of this is that there are a ton of US airline pilots living within the poverty level. Look up "food stamp pilots" and you'll see. Since the regionals (and even the big players) know that time is so important they can hire pilots for minimum wage and do avail themselves of that opportunity. The conventional wisdom is that being a pilot is an awesome job but one of the worst careers imaginable.
The truth is that under normal circumstances doing your training in the right seat isn't a big deal. The whole process is automation and rote procedure. The problem is when you get something like the Air France accident a few years ago and you discover that the short-timers never developed rudimentary stick and rudder skills.
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Oh I know. I believe the starting pay for a first year regional airline pilot is roughly $20k a year. It increases pretty significantly though the next year and so on.
At the last airline I worked at, I talked to a pilot who used to fly a Beech 1900 for Great Lakes Airlines...$13,000 a year, not kidding. You'd make more money than that fueling their planes or being a ramper.
The regionals are feeling it right now though; even in light of the 1500 hr rule, they're getting less and less picky because they need people so bad and fewer people, for good reason, do not want to become pilots. I think they'll have to fork over a little more at some point.
I really think they only got away with this because there's a million people out there that wanna fly a shiny jet for a living, and they'll essentially work for free to do it. That might be a stretch, but if someone turns down an offer, chances are the next guy/gal will be willing to do it for less.
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EB, I too am glad that it was a German. That keeps the followup on a rational level, not a "he was a Muslim, Turk, whatever".
But yeah, 28 years old, that's the time where you still have shit ideas that you haven't figured out yet. Maybe not the right age to be in charge of 170 people.
What's still mysterious is why they didn't follow the "2 person in cockpit" rule. Is it not enforced in Europe?
EDIT: Not a rule in Lufthansa flights apparently. You can bet they will instate that now.
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Jesus Christ, CNN has reached absolute rock bottom.
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Almost all network coverage of air disasters is awful. They bring in so-called experts who understand the industry but know little about the specifics of what happens. It does seem that Greg Feith and his butt-ugly ties are a regular analyst for NBC/MSNBC and he's pretty much The Man with regards to these. Unless the person talking is a former NTSB investigator it's best to just ignore them.
As for the two men in the cockpit rule, when it was brought up at PPRuNe half of the pilots said "that's ridiculous! Who let's FA's into the flight deck?" The other half said "yeah, that's our policy." Strictly a company decision. Although, like I mentioned earlier, I suspect that will become mandatory after this. At least up to the point that a pissed off male stewardess decides to axe the copilot and crash the plain himself. I don't know what they'll do after that. Air marshals in every cockpit, maybe?
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Lufthansa already said apparently they have no intention of instating the 2-person rule. But, that might have been an older response to a previous call for it.
In the end, the reality is, it *is* a freak occurrence. Just as with everything in life, you can try to protect yourself to the best of your abilities, but it hard to counteract human ingenuity in circumventing the safety guards.
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Air marshals in every cockpit, maybe?
You and I both live in Dallas so we know the only reasonable measure is to give guns to all passengers.
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Actually, they should go straight ahead and keep everyone in a Mexican standoff during the whole flight. 170 guns, all pointing in various directions.
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In the end, the reality is, it *is* a freak occurrence. Just as with everything in life, you can try to protect yourself to the best of your abilities, but it hard to counteract human ingenuity in circumventing the safety guards.
You and I both live in Dallas so we know the only reasonable measure is to give guns to all passengers.
In a bizarre convergence you're both completely correct. In most places this is just a freak occurrence, but in America we don't tolerate those things. We deserve better than that, so God dammit, implement a solution to random acts of chance! Even more bizarre, it's entirely possible that had this happened over here, the FO could have used his lawfully stowed handgun to clip the captain and not had to worry about locking the door and all that hassle. Another response to freak occurrences.
I do love the Mexican standoff idea, though. Awesome.
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Actually, they should go straight ahead and keep everyone in a Mexican standoff during the whole flight. 170 guns, all pointing in various directions.
makes takeoff, landings, and turbulence all the more exciting!
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The good news is, apparently the passengers were unaware of anything up to the last moment. Screams were only heard at the very end.
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The good news is, apparently the passengers were unaware of anything up to the last moment. Screams were only heard at the very end.
Judging by the way I fly (sleeping pill and knocked out) I probably wouldn't of even noticed my death in that case. Thats good for the victims and hopefully gives their familiy's a very slightly piece of mind that it wasn't a painful death.
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I can also totally see that when you are flying over the Alps, you might think the close mountains are intended. So, only at the very last moment where they are *really* close to the mountain will people notice something is wrong.
Man, what an asshole though. Why can't he just take sleeping pills in his hotel room? What a pathetic loser.
Looks also that the major European airlines are now instating the 2-person rule.
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Yea seriously, if its just suicide, keep it to yourself. Im not sure what one gains out of doing something like that. At least the extremists say they do it for God so one can say they had a reason in their mind to kill innocents.
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Judging from past indicators it might well be that the guy was pissed off at his employer. The Egyptian guy in 19999 had been reprimanded and lost access to the lucrative American routes. There was an incident in Cali many years ago where a non-pilot employee was fired for something quite mundane and trivial and decided to crash the airliner he (as well as the airline's owner) was on at the time. He shot the owner in his first class seat and then the pilots. He was hoping that it'd go unresolved and reflect so poorly on the airline that it'd force them under. That was a landmark case in crash investigations which actually spoiled his schemes. And then there's ole Aubry that I mentioned a few posts up that wanted to crash the plane into FedEX corporate.
I know it was mentioned that there's some disgruntlement going on with European carriers at the moment. Before the details of this even were known he through that out there half jokingly and, well, here we are. I think it might have had something to do with benefits.
Of course it's more likely that the dude was just a dick.
edit: Now that I think about it, I think the whole reason Aubry Calloway was sacked in the first place was that everybody at FedEX thought he was exactly the sort of asshole that might do something like that. I think in Star Trek that would be some sort of predestination paradox or some shit. :lol
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Now of course every random person who remotely knew the copilot comes out with a "I knew it all along" story.
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Almost all network coverage of air disasters is awful.
50% of why I really don't comment in this thread. The other 50% is I really don't have enough interest in the airline/avionics industry to feel I have anything real to add. Not really a fan of fake experts, be it on air or online.
As for the two men in the cockpit rule
Just repeating what I heard; a flight attendant is supposed to go in there when it is down to one in the cockpit. Now if one of those kills the other so they could jihad and/or suicide ... there is supposed to be an override that the other pilot has to get back in that takes a code and a knowledge of timing to enter that code. Of course, that isn't global protocol as it didn't happen here.
But my problem is they just gave away that game plan by announcing it needlessly. If they lock the door to keep terrorists out, and have an override to let pilots back in ... now a terrorist knows they just need to start killing one passenger at a time until that pilot breaks and gives up the code. The pilot will realize that giving up the code just means death anyway? Well, go place yourself in that situation and tell me how well you respond logically under extreme pressure.
I hate airline crash coverage because I more or less abandon the news during the first week so I don't give myself a migraine. Then I miss the "other" stories.
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What Malaysian airplane? Oooohhh that one. I almost forgot.
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Yeah. When you are a loser with people telling you to "kill yourself" and you decide to take that suggestion, then take it literally. Kill just yourself.
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As a systems engineer myself, the true fault was indeed the lack of 2-person protocol. Simply from the fact that airplane design relies on redundancy, just like any other system that is supposed to be reliable. A single point of failure is the Achilles heel of any system; trusting your pilots is admirable, but from a reliability point of view you have to treat them like a faulty component.
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Now of course every random person who remotely knew the copilot comes out with a "I knew it all along" story.
Really? Was he crazy or just a dick? Normally everybody that knows one of these guys seem completely taken by surprise. "He was a quiet guy. Good neighbor. Kept to himself, mostly."
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But my problem is they just gave away that game plan by announcing it needlessly. If they lock the door to keep terrorists out, and have an override to let pilots back in ... now a terrorist knows they just need to start killing one passenger at a time until that pilot breaks and gives up the code. The pilot will realize that giving up the code just means death anyway? Well, go place yourself in that situation and tell me how well you respond logically under extreme pressure.
Dude, that's a simple one. Land the plane as scheduled with a cabin full of bled out corpses and one or more living terrorists. Let Johnny deal with it from there. It's unfortunate but you buys your ticket and you takes your ride. And after the horrible events of 14 years ago (typing that always makes me chuckle) every pilot in the industry knows this and is trained for it, as well,
As for giving out information they've done no such thing. This isn't knowledge that'll help any would be hijackers and even if it were, it's readily available to pretty much anybody. Hell, I posted the workings of the system a page back. What you don't want to give out is the secret knock, or the specific key code, or the location of the emergency entrance breaching shotgun. Add to that, the PAX have a better chance of handling the situation than you do. I'd put a cabin full of doomed passengers against a couple of armed terrorists any day. The former have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
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EB, I too am glad that it was a German. That keeps the followup on a rational level, not a "he was a Muslim, Turk, whatever".
Not to turn this into a P/R thing, but are you suggesting that it is irrational to react a certain way if yet another Muslim goes on a suicide mission and kills a lot of people?
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EB, I too am glad that it was a German. That keeps the followup on a rational level, not a "he was a Muslim, Turk, whatever".
Not to turn this into a P/R thing, but are you suggesting that it is irrational to react a certain way if yet another Muslim goes on a suicide mission and kills a lot of people?
No. I'm saying that people will behave irrationally if it were to happen. Huge difference.
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Now of course every random person who remotely knew the copilot comes out with a "I knew it all along" story.
Really? Was he crazy or just a dick? Normally everybody that knows one of these guys seem completely taken by surprise. "He was a quiet guy. Good neighbor. Kept to himself, mostly."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeo_Ypmba70 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeo_Ypmba70)
George Carlin, classic and pretty much your quote. :lol
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Yeah, definitely classic. :lol
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EB, I too am glad that it was a German. That keeps the followup on a rational level, not a "he was a Muslim, Turk, whatever".
Not to turn this into a P/R thing, but are you suggesting that it is irrational to react a certain way if yet another Muslim goes on a suicide mission and kills a lot of people?
My stance is, if I could choose between a German committing suicide and a Muslim doing it for Allah, I'd choose the German. A because it makes it an "in-house problem" for Germany, and B because the world doesn't need even more animosity between groups.
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Now of course every random person who remotely knew the copilot comes out with a "I knew it all along" story.
Really? Was he crazy or just a dick? Normally everybody that knows one of these guys seem completely taken by surprise. "He was a quiet guy. Good neighbor. Kept to himself, mostly."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeo_Ypmba70 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeo_Ypmba70)
George Carlin, classic and pretty much your quote. :lol
Ya know, I actually deleted the fourth line I had in there which would have made it more Carlinesque than Carlin himself. Whilst humorous, I decided it was too crass given the subject matter at hand.
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Yeah. When you are a loser with people telling you to "kill yourself" and you decide to take that suggestion, then take it literally. Kill just yourself.
Um, not that I'm some sort of social worker, but the two people I know personally that decided to end their lives were anything but losers. They had issues they didn't know how to deal with, and their wiring was such that they defaulted to that option (instead of drugs, or alcohol, or any number of other ways humans mask issues) but they were anything but "losers".
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EB, I too am glad that it was a German. That keeps the followup on a rational level, not a "he was a Muslim, Turk, whatever".
Not to turn this into a P/R thing, but are you suggesting that it is irrational to react a certain way if yet another Muslim goes on a suicide mission and kills a lot of people?
No. I'm saying that people will behave irrationally if it were to happen. Huge difference.
Okay. That's fair. :)
EB, I too am glad that it was a German. That keeps the followup on a rational level, not a "he was a Muslim, Turk, whatever".
Not to turn this into a P/R thing, but are you suggesting that it is irrational to react a certain way if yet another Muslim goes on a suicide mission and kills a lot of people?
My stance is, if I could choose between a German committing suicide and a Muslim doing it for Allah, I'd choose the German. A because it makes it an "in-house problem" for Germany, and B because the world doesn't need even more animosity between groups.
That might be true, but I think things are getting worse either way, sadly.
Yeah. When you are a loser with people telling you to "kill yourself" and you decide to take that suggestion, then take it literally. Kill just yourself.
Um, not that I'm some sort of social worker, but the two people I know personally that decided to end their lives were anything but losers. They had issues they didn't know how to deal with, and their wiring was such that they defaulted to that option (instead of drugs, or alcohol, or any number of other ways humans mask issues) but they were anything but "losers".
Agreed. I used to have "people who kill others too instead of just killing themselves are assholes" stance, but over time, my thoughts have changed. Most people who are so foregone that they are even considering suicide, much less attempting it with real intent to end their lives, are not thinking straight or rationally. It's never black and white.
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It is never black and white, of course. But I can mount zero sympathy for a person who just as easily could have offed himself with a few pills in the hotel room the night before, Instead, he takes down 170 people with him. That's just plain murder (and a convenient one at that, since you don't have to stand trial for it).
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It is never black and white, of course. But I can mount zero sympathy for a person who just as easily could have offed himself with a few pills in the hotel room the night before, Instead, he takes down 170 people with him. That's just plain murder (and a convenient one at that, since you don't have to stand trial for it).
Thats how I feel. People who commit suicide arent necessarily "losers" theres many reasons and problems that lead to that, but going from suicide to mass murderer is something else.
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Agreed. I used to have "people who kill others too instead of just killing themselves are assholes" stance, but over time, my thoughts have changed. Most people who are so foregone that they are even considering suicide, much less attempting it with real intent to end their lives, are not thinking straight or rationally. It's never black and white.
Coincidentally I read a bit about famed clock tower enthusiast Charles Whitman this morning. Here's some loser who murders his wife and mom and then shoots enough strangers to give Sergeant Hartman wood before finally shooting it out with cops and a couple of armed civvies (fuck yeah, Texas!). Real easy to think terribly of this guy. Turns out that he sought help for delusions and paranoia and found none. In his very thoughtful suicide note he implores the coroner to find out why he lost his mind. Turns out he had a 1" tumor mashing up against his amygdala. That would be enough to turn Gandhi into a bloodthirsty psychopath. His actions were absolutely the fault of a physiological flaw that he didn't want and couldn't understand, the remorse he expressed and the importance he placed on being understood in his suicide note make that pretty clear, yet he's still thought of as a real asshole for his actions. I have no idea what the motivations of the German pilot were, it's entirely possible that he was an asshole/loser (which I've flippantly called him myself). It's also perfectly likely that the dude was really fucked up. You mentioned in your post that things seem to be getting worse. I don't know if that's true or not, but I do know that we certainly haven't gotten any better at distinguishing between those two possibilities.
edit: looks like this post is equally applicable to the last two replies.
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they were anything but "losers".
So they wouldn't apply then, right? But if you are somebody that decides the best way to commit suicide is to take as many people with you, then you are a loser. And add the square sign to the loser if the people you kill in your suicide have absolutely nothing to do with what drove you to suicide.
I think you missed the qualifying factor here. You don't have to get me started on the people that actually say "kill yourself". I'm not one of those people. I'm usually the first person to break when there is a gang up on somebody (as is common in forums) that say "hey, that's a bit far. We should back off." It is kind of like what El Barto brought up earlier. The FedEx guy (I think it was him) went over the edge possibly because he was told he was one of those people that might go over the edge.
But I don't think it is all that controversial to call people that turn their suicide into a needless mass murder a loser after the fact.
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My stance is, if I could choose between a German committing suicide and a Muslim doing it for Allah, I'd choose the German. A because it makes it an "in-house problem" for Germany, and B because the world doesn't need even more animosity between groups.
My stance is just to give us the facts as they are. If it's a Muslim Jihadi (which by the way, can also be a German), then that's what it is. It is worse to try and "shape" the story because we worry about hurting the feelings of a group.
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To make matters even worse, the guy could have called in sick on that day, he had a doctor's note. Looks like he planned this ahead, he tore apart the doctor's note in his apartment.
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It is never black and white, of course. But I can mount zero sympathy for a person who just as easily could have offed himself with a few pills in the hotel room the night before, Instead, he takes down 170 people with him. That's just plain murder (and a convenient one at that, since you don't have to stand trial for it).
Look, this is going to come off more argumentative than it really is, but stop looking at this through your own lenses. I'm not defending this guy, or saying what he did was acceptable or right. Conceptually, I am with you; suicide is a personal act. This isn't "suicide", this is mass murder, and oh, by the way, the perpetrator went too, and you'll notice that no one is defending Adam Lanza as a "suicide".
But the point I'm trying to make is that if someone has lost the "regard" for their own life, and knowing that all the data shows that despite suicides being incredibly painful and traumatic for the survivors, suicides themselves believe they are making the lives of those around them better, how can you expect them to keep the sanctity of some life in the back end of the plane that they have never even seen let alone experienced? In other words, to respect other lives, you have to respect your own first, and that is the one thing that successful suicides are lacking as compared to those that don't.
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It is never black and white, of course. But I can mount zero sympathy for a person who just as easily could have offed himself with a few pills in the hotel room the night before, Instead, he takes down 170 people with him. That's just plain murder (and a convenient one at that, since you don't have to stand trial for it).
Look, this is going to come off more argumentative than it really is, but stop looking at this through your own lenses. I'm not defending this guy, or saying what he did was acceptable or right. Conceptually, I am with you; suicide is a personal act. This isn't "suicide", this is mass murder, and oh, by the way, the perpetrator went too, and you'll notice that no one is defending Adam Lanza as a "suicide".
But the point I'm trying to make is that if someone has lost the "regard" for their own life, and knowing that all the data shows that despite suicides being incredibly painful and traumatic for the survivors, suicides themselves believe they are making the lives of those around them better, how can you expect them to keep the sanctity of some life in the back end of the plane that they have never even seen let alone experienced? In other words, to respect other lives, you have to respect your own first, and that is the one thing that successful suicides are lacking as compared to those that don't.
Your comparison to Balock is an excellent point. However, I do see some difference. I tend to look at the motivation for these like this and we honestly have no idea what it was. In this case, was his goal to kill a whole bunch of PAX for some reason, or to kill himself spectacularly? That's really where I'd draw the distinction. Balock set out to kill a bunch of kids and only offed himself when he was done. We just don't know what this guy's story was. I've been calling it a murder suicide up to this point, simply because that's the closest approximation. In the end you'll probably be right, he wanted to go out spectacularly, but I'm not going to slap the mass murderer label on him just yet since I think that would be simplistic at this point.
And As I pointed out with Charles Whitman, his mental state is a huge consideration in how I view the guy.
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Yesterday I learned about the difference between "extended suicide" (when you take out your while family, because you genuinely believe that it is the best option for everyone) versus "homicide-suicide", where you just take out other people for no " rational " reason.
Listen. I'm not calloused towards depressed people and their plight. However, this guy actually had a doctor's note in his apartment that he could have called in sick with. He tore it apart, went on the flight instead and killed 170 people. Argue as you will, I feel no moral obligation to feel sympathy for this guy.
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I'm not sympathetic to him either, at this point. The likely scenario is that he's just a dick, which I've said repeatedly. I'm just also no ready to assume as much. We don't know what his motivations were and we don't know what his mental state is. Also, at this point the doctor's note doesn't mean much to me. I don't know what it said and I don't know the politics of Lufthansa. That note might well have been a career-ender at many airlines making him naturally reticent to play the card.
Also, it seems that he might have gone through and ugly break up. If that's a real factor then I am far more inclined to get on Calvin's loser train. Again, I just don't know much at this point.
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Also, at this point the doctor's note doesn't mean much to me. I don't know what it said and I don't know the politics of Lufthansa. That note might well have been a career-ender at many airlines making him naturally reticent to play the card.
Which, actually, might have added to his quandary. They were saying he was being treated currently, and he had interrupted his training too at some point. Maybe he felt he wouldn't be able to do his job anymore soon. Loss of future perspectives is a major driver in suicides.
Interesting wrinkle in all this: Because of doctor confidentiality, nobody really knows what he was being treated for.
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Actually, I saw somewhere that when he interrupted his training he spent nearly a year in a loony bin.
But yeah, your point is sound. If he felt that he wasn't going to be able to do the one thing he wanted and trained to do, it might well lead to both Suicidal Tendencies and a great deal of anger at people associated with the industry.
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Actually, I saw somewhere that when he interrupted his training he spent nearly a year in a loony bin.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
How does a person like this get to sit at the controls in a damned airliner? :omg:
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Actually, I saw somewhere that when he interrupted his training he spent nearly a year in a loony bin.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
How does a person like this get to sit at the controls in a damned airliner? :omg:
He gets cured. Admittedly the system seems to have failed here, but is the alternative of banning everybody with any psychological issues from flying for life reasonable? Should any pilot taking an SSRI be prohibited from flying? Ambien? As I pointed out in another forum, that might be the best solution, but there needs to be a lot more discussion about mental health than who should be banned from what. There's also Rumborak's quite sensible observation that washing out anybody for anybody mental issues would lead to fewer pilots seeking treatment for any issues at all.
And at the end of the day, this still remains a freak occurrence. There are lessons to be learned, obviously. Closing up the gap that seems to be a factor here is certainly the starting point. That doesn't mean that you need to start creating more and more safeguards. A little sensibility goes a long way, yet it's a difficult thing to muster sometimes after an event like this.
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Just FYI, I had not heard of any time spent in a mental institute by the guy. As I said, Germans are rather strict about their doctor confidentiality, so this would unlikely public information.
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It is a slippery slope, but there's not a lot of room for error here. I don't think I'd have any problem with banning people who have been treated mental illness from obtaining a commercial pilot's license.
I mean, that just sounds like common sense to me.
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It is a slippery slope, but there's not a lot of room for error here. I don't think I'd have any problem with banning people who have been treated mental illness from obtaining a commercial pilot's license.
I mean, that just sounds like common sense to me.
Me too. Of course, they'd have to spell out *which* mental illnesses qualify as ban worthy.
I'd imagine most people have known somebody within their life's somewhat close path that was suicidal and/or a danger to others. Taking the somewhat common "manic depressive", my experience in watching people succumb to their illness is that their personality before it became *bad* determines quite a bit of how that mental illness will affect them. People that were just genuinely nice people more or less stayed nice, just more withdrawn and *silly* for lack of a better/not as harsh term. And people that were kind of dicks became full throttle dicks as the mental illness took over. The former was more likely to end in suicide, and the latter was more likely to end in rampage.
I've known a former (nice type) that was way gone that I felt totally safe around despite the fact that they were getting transmissions through the microwave.
I've known latter (jerk type) that was significantly more functional than the former, but I'd always watch with one eye open.
But that's a chemical thing, not a cancer growth type of situation.
As far as this douchebag pilot, he obviously knew he had something that was a danger to those around him, got the help, ignored it, then let his *destiny* play out. Loser. Douche. Jerk.
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I was just looking on German news sites, and could not find anything regarding a previous mental issue. All that is knows is that he interrupted his training for a medical issue, which was then deemed resolved, and that he was now visiting the Düsseldorf university clinic.
BTW, this can be something as "benign" as diabetes. A friend of mine is a pilot and had to quit because of that.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/28/world/europe/germanwings-crash-andreas-lubitz.html?_r=0
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Yeah, never mind. Now the news site I frequent in German says he was mentally ill.
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It is a slippery slope, but there's not a lot of room for error here. I don't think I'd have any problem with banning people who have been treated mental illness from obtaining a commercial pilot's license.
I mean, that just sounds like common sense to me.
The statistics would suggest that there's a large margin for error. It's just that the results of failure are rather high. We're up to 100,000 flights a day, yet this is a freak enough occurrence that it's a huge world event. Reasonable and sane precautions are always in order, as they were 2 weeks ago, long before this happened. I'm just not of the opinion (yet) that it's time to "ban anybody who's been treated for a mental illness from obtaining an ATP ticket." There are a lot more details to sort out first, and jumping to the strictest measure first doesn't sit well with me.
And as for Rumbo's diabetic friend, if he were to become non-insulin dependent he would likely be able to regain his ticket.
The obstacle here is being able to pass a class 1 medical. If you do then you can fly. This includes a psych evaluation, just a very half-assed one at the moment. Seems to me the sane, sensible approach is better psychiatric diagnostics that would prevent one from passing that medical exam. That's a system already in place that seems to work very well, by and large. Improve that. It would make the crack even harder to slip through and wouldn't mean washing out people who already have their jobs but are perfectly fine to operate.
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Actually, I saw somewhere that when he interrupted his training he spent nearly a year in a loony bin.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
How does a person like this get to sit at the controls in a damned airliner? :omg:
He gets cured. Admittedly the system seems to have failed here, but is the alternative of banning everybody with any psychological issues from flying for life reasonable? Should any pilot taking an SSRI be prohibited from flying? Ambien? As I pointed out in another forum, that might be the best solution, but there needs to be a lot more discussion about mental health than who should be banned from what. There's also Rumborak's quite sensible observation that washing out anybody for anybody mental issues would lead to fewer pilots seeking treatment for any issues at all.
And at the end of the day, this still remains a freak occurrence. There are lessons to be learned, obviously. Closing up the gap that seems to be a factor here is certainly the starting point. That doesn't mean that you need to start creating more and more safeguards. A little sensibility goes a long way, yet it's a difficult thing to muster sometimes after an event like this.
It's changing now for what I feel are positive reasons (i.e. not knee-jerk "we're just avoiding a lawsuit" nonsense, but rather better education and better understanding) but when I was going through law school and contemplating the bar, a fellow student with me had some personal issues she thought a therapist could help her with, but opted NOT to get treatment on the grounds that it would hurt and possibly preclude her chances of being admitted to the bar. So the precedent is there for some consideration as to mental state. We already (at least here in the states) have age and eyesight requirements for pilots. I don't see any philosophical barriers to using these types of issues as a screen, assuming they are well-contemplated and evenly administered.
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^
This is what is unfortunate about the MH field. There is a still a stigma, and a lot of that is in this situation. I am not justifying what the pilot did; it was mass murder-suicide, or vise versa if that matters. But clearly as what has been said, people do not report because it can impact many jobs, getting one or keeping one. And I get that many disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar I, dissociative identity disorder etc) often disable people depending on where it is on a continuum. I would not want specific disorders doing certain jobs. But then where is the line drawn? Someone with well managed ADHD who takes low dosages of Intuitiv, and copes with it well but is then excluded from being a surgeon? A lawyer?
The other issue is the inherent self reporting of mental health. While certainly we can see differences in brains via MRIs and what not, it's not black and white that can be with other non MH conditions. It's not oh, this guy has Intermittent Explosive Disorder, this gal Major Depressive Disorder, that guy Bi-polar 2 disorder and etc. It is limited to stuff like Spectrum disorder and AOD use frequently from what I know.
So when I diagnosis someone, I go off what they say. A psychologist uses measures, and psychiatrists also use primarily what someone says. But if they under report, or over-report symptoms, the diagnosis will fit that. To me, it's not hard to gather questions are going. I'm guessing someone without my training would also be able to figure out where some questions are going, and such fake answers if they wanted.
Sure, always ways to improve measures. But with self reporting still a part of the process, and no way to black and white see conditions, mis diagnosing on the account of false reporting is inherent in the field.
Thinking of "curing" a MH disorder is not fully accurate. Especially from using medication, it's just the managements of triggers and symptoms. Certainly temporary things like grief related depression, adjustment disorders, and depression via a break up often resolve themselves. But schizophrenia, bipolar 1 & 2, Borderline, Anti-social personality, ADHD and so on have no true cures. People manage them with varying degrees of success.
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And just like you can't cure some mental illness (great or small), there is no way to escape the stigma. Because the stigma is actually based off something real. In your social world, you might get along with a kleptomaniac, but you wouldn't leave anything of value alone near them. You wouldn't let somebody with anger issues watch your kids. In the business world, you are essentially responsible for your employee's actions. So moving on to the next candidate w/o the stated problems is just playing it safe because lawsuits are real. And let's not even talk about money or legal obligations. You don't want to see other employees/customers/vendors possibly hurt (or maybe just swindled).
This really isn't that different than
[Y] Have you had a felony conviction?
on the basic employee application.
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Posted elsewhere, but still applicable here:
The picture is starting to develop pretty clearly now. He had long suffered from depressive episodes. He got dumped by his fiance of 6 years shortly before they were to be married. Then the day before the crash he was diagnosed with retinal issues that could very likely have ended the career he'd spent his life trying to attain. Since I'm not well versed on depression I'm not really qualified to examine how much his mental health controlled his actions, but without that knowledge I'm pretty much ready to call the guy a real asshole. I still maintain that people are oversimplifying the mental health aspect in their zeal to poke and prod with their pitchforks, but in the end I'm more and more inclined to agree with the general opinion of this guy.
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There's also really no scenario that I could imagine that could even attempt to lessen the impact of taking 170 people down with you. This wasn't some heat-of-the-moment decision; he had planned this in advance (how long, who knows, but he has said to his gf once that he was going to do something that would "change the system and make people remember his name"). Either way, he was clearly capable of rational thought (being able to steer am airplane), and thus the 170 dead people were callously planned in, maybe in his desire to increase the grandeur of his deed.
The amount of sympathy for such a person is zero, no matter the depression or detached retinas he had.
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Yea, agreed. Those issues are worthy of depression and sympathy alone, but don't make me sympathize when you murder at mass.
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(how long, who knows, but he has said to his gf once that he was going to do something that would "change the system and make people remember his name"). Either way, he was clearly capable of rational thought (being able to steer am airplane),
Well he was right on that. Right now we are debating what to call him. Dick, Ahole, Jerk, Douche, Mass Murderer
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But it's a point worth making: I have said elsewhere, and will continue to say, that it is merely days after this catastrophic event, and we have only the information that is deemed "headline worthy" by various news desks reporting on this. It is foolhardy and irresponsible to be making any kind of meaningful psychological diagnoses on this guy based on that. THAT IS NOT SYMPATHY FOR THE MASS MURDERER. He is ultimately culpable, regardless, and I think the idea that he had to endure several minutes of the pilot banging on the door, and by many accounts the screaming of the passengers, tells me this is something that was planned and was not an ill-fated moment of weakness.
The two ideas are not mutually exclusive.
Why I harp on this is because it is why we have the knee-jerk reactions by governments and interested parties following these catastrophic events and yet these catastrophic events KEEP HAPPENING. I guarantee you that we will have calls for more strict measures involving people diagnosed with "depression" within days, weeks at the outside, and likely by people who have no idea about the real condition that is "depression".
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Apparently an internet subculture called "involuntary celibates - incels" has the motives of the pilot all figured out: https://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/03/27/internet-incels-celebrate-andreas-lubitz-the-alleged-killer-co-pilot-of-germanwings-flight-9525-as-a-legitimate-slayer-and-an-incel-hero/
Checked out their forum, it's the most disturbingly fucked up thing I stumbled upon on the internet since that Armin Meiwes voluntary cannibalism story.
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Now *there's* a forum you want to post in in you want to find yourself being surveiled.
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I can't wait to click that link once I get off work.
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But it's a point worth making: I have said elsewhere, and will continue to say, that it is merely days after this catastrophic event, and we have only the information that is deemed "headline worthy" by various news desks reporting on this. It is foolhardy and irresponsible to be making any kind of meaningful psychological diagnoses on this guy based on that. THAT IS NOT SYMPATHY FOR THE MASS MURDERER. He is ultimately culpable, regardless, and I think the idea that he had to endure several minutes of the pilot banging on the door, and by many accounts the screaming of the passengers, tells me this is something that was planned and was not an ill-fated moment of weakness.
The two ideas are not mutually exclusive.
Why I harp on this is because it is why we have the knee-jerk reactions by governments and interested parties following these catastrophic events and yet these catastrophic events KEEP HAPPENING. I guarantee you that we will have calls for more strict measures involving people diagnosed with "depression" within days, weeks at the outside, and likely by people who have no idea about the real condition that is "depression".
You and I are definitely on the same page here, but I'm not sure why people keep saying that he had to plan this. What he did could have easily been a spur of the moment deal. It had to be deliberate, there's not doubt about that, but he might have decided to do it in the 180 seconds during which the captain was TCB. Those doors are designed to be able to lockdown tight with the turn of a knob (and I still recon there's a sliding bolt, as well) and whilst the Airbus FD would make it a little harder to crash the plane, you or I could still pull it off pretty easily. You couldn't lawn dart the thing but hitting a mountain would be a cakewalk.
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But it's a point worth making: I have said elsewhere, and will continue to say, that it is merely days after this catastrophic event, and we have only the information that is deemed "headline worthy" by various news desks reporting on this. It is foolhardy and irresponsible to be making any kind of meaningful psychological diagnoses on this guy based on that. THAT IS NOT SYMPATHY FOR THE MASS MURDERER. He is ultimately culpable, regardless, and I think the idea that he had to endure several minutes of the pilot banging on the door, and by many accounts the screaming of the passengers, tells me this is something that was planned and was not an ill-fated moment of weakness.
The two ideas are not mutually exclusive.
Why I harp on this is because it is why we have the knee-jerk reactions by governments and interested parties following these catastrophic events and yet these catastrophic events KEEP HAPPENING. I guarantee you that we will have calls for more strict measures involving people diagnosed with "depression" within days, weeks at the outside, and likely by people who have no idea about the real condition that is "depression".
You and I are definitely on the same page here, but I'm not sure why people keep saying that he had to plan this. What he did could have easily been a spur of the moment deal. It had to be deliberate, there's not doubt about that, but he might have decided to do it in the 180 seconds during which the captain was TCB. Those doors are designed to be able to lockdown tight with the turn of a knob (and I still recon there's a sliding bolt, as well) and whilst the Airbus FD would make it a little harder to crash the plane, you or I could still pull it off pretty easily. You couldn't lawn dart the thing but hitting a mountain would be a cakewalk.
Nah, I think we're still on the same page. I mean "deliberate", and you're right, that doesn't mean it has been in the planning stages for any significant amount of time.
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but he might have decided to do it in the 180 seconds during which the captain was TCB.
There is audio where he kept telling the captain to take a restroom break. He was pushing it.
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Apparently an internet subculture called "involuntary celibates - incels" has the motives of the pilot all figured out: https://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/03/27/internet-incels-celebrate-andreas-lubitz-the-alleged-killer-co-pilot-of-germanwings-flight-9525-as-a-legitimate-slayer-and-an-incel-hero/#more-15809
Checked out their forum, it's the most disturbingly fucked up thing I stumbled upon the internet since that Armin Meiwes voluntary cannibalism story.
This is deeply...deeply disturbing.
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Wow, CNN just came in its pants 5 times in a row. They found some debris that looks like it could come from MH370.
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Wow, CNN just came in its pants 5 times in a row. They found some debris that looks like it could come from MH370.
I certainly hope it's the plane. They could probably track down the bulk of the wreckage if they know where a piece washed ashore.
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Shouldn't the source of this debris be relatively easy to determine? I hope this doesn't become a total media circle jerk :\. Just figure out where the damn thing came from.
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Yeah, I wonder how much you could backtrack it given the ocean currents.
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A point I just read that makes sense is that if the part is from a 777, it is almost certainly from MH370, since all other 777 crashes have occurred over land.
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We should be able to get a pretty good idea of where the plane went down if this turn out to be from MH370. We track ocean currents on so many levels.
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(https://dsx.weather.com//util/image/w/Indian_Ocean_Gyre.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273&api=7db9fe61-7414-47b5-9871-e17d87b8b6a0)
Hmm. Not sure, given the time that has passed, theres more information to be gleaned other than, "yeah, it crashed west of Australia".
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A point I just read that makes sense is that if the part is from a 777, it is almost certainly from MH370, since all other 777 crashes have occurred over land.
Yup. If it's a control surface from a 777 there's not much doubt where it came from. I reckon the likelihood is that they'll find more debris pretty soon, although it might be a good while before, if, they find the bulk of the wreckage.
Something that was mentioned on NPR earlier was that the boon for this right now is closure, which is something easy to overlook. There were a lot of families that couldn't be certain of the outcome, and if they start finding wreckage then now they can. I'd have to say that's a significant improvement, even if it doesn't yield a more comprehensive explanation.
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"The international team of experts have conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris found on Reunion Island is indeed from MH370," [Malaysian Prime Minister] Najib said in a televised statement.
I haven't read anything directly from the investigators saying this, however.
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Will CNN cover this or the debate on Thursday?
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They're debating air disasters? I'd kinda like to see that.
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They're debating air disasters? I'd kinda like to see that.
I pray they don't. Leave that to the professionals. Politicians can only screw that up.
Not only will we have to deal with CNN somehow making you not care about an air disaster (that takes real talent), but every 10 minutes we will have to witness a politician grandstanding like it is the debate of our lifetime. Presidents will start demanding Prime Time to address the continuing problem. Aircraft maintenance is the problem. We keep doing it yet airplanes keep crashing. Doing the same thing over and over is the definition of insanity. Therefore, we need to stop all aircraft maintenance.
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Is this even an issue? Sure accidents are going to happen, but the amount of flights vs. accidents is considerably low.
Also, it really puts into perspective how fricking big the oceans are that people just now found this stuff.
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Is this even an issue? Sure accidents are going to happen, but the amount of flights vs. accidents is considerably low.
Also, it really puts into perspective how fricking big the oceans are that people just now found this stuff.
It's the fact that it vanished that made the story so compelling to talk about. Had this thing slammed in the ocean and left a debris field a mile long, news of the crash would have ended quickly.
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It was compelling in the sense that you wondered what happened. But I don't want to tune into a news program to watch them wonder what happened with me.
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Nothing to do with crashing planes but did anyone see the recent footage of the China chemical explosion? Crazy stuff!
https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=0e5_1439474009
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Obviously it was a massive explosion and the blast radius caused serious damage.
But the other part of the equation is when something like that happens, you tend to lose all contact with the world. I'd imagine even cell phone net service had problems. Being in the dark (literally and informationally) after something like that really ups the fear. Probably looked like they were being bombed from the ground.
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Nothing to do with crashing planes but did anyone see the recent footage of the China chemical explosion? Crazy stuff!
https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=0e5_1439474009
I was just about to give this its own thread...and I think it should have its own thread. This is just....wow.
CNN is reporting that Chinese news sources are saying that the company executives "have been taken into custody"... This is just a HUGE disaster, and I wonder what it will mean for the Chinese economy and the government. Maybe a P/R thread on this might be prudent...
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:tup