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Search on for missing Malaysia Airlines plane with 239 on board

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  • Search on for missing Malaysia Airlines plane with 239 on board

    KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Vietnamese air force planes on Saturday spotted two large oil slicks close to where a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 went missing earlier in the day, the first sign that the ...
    Malaysian Airline System Bhd. said one of its Boeing Co. 777-200 aircraft, with 239 people on board, lost contact with the ground while on a flight to Beijing. A search is underway to locate the plane. News: The last radar contact with the plane, with 227 passengers and 12 crew, was 2:40 a.m. local time, some 120 nautical miles east of Kota Bahru, Malaysia, near the South China Sea.

  • #2
    Vietnamese aircraft spotted what they suspected was one of the doors belonging to the ill-fated Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 on Sunday, as troubling questions emerged about how two passengers managed to board the Boeing 777 using stolen passports.
    --

    Comment


    • #3
      I can't believe it's been three days.. Of course it took them a while to find AF447 too.. It's hard to comprehend the scope of the ocean...

      Speculation is rampant right now.. my thoughts are with the passengers.

      Comment


      • #4
        It does appear strange that no floating debris had been spotted.

        None of the possible scenarios makes sense except two.
        Scenario 1) An unauthorised person gained access to the cockpit. Could happen if a member of the cockpit crew leaves that area. If someone with intent to get in is at the right position at the right time, then he can overpower the person leaving/entering and so gain access to the cockpit. If the other pilot doesn't have time to send a distress then the unauthorised persons could switch off the Transponders etc and it would appear as if the plane simply vanished. A further possibility then could be that they went down far away from where the search is happening now.
        If this was what happened, then I don't know what more measures could be put inplace. It is already such a pain to get aboard a plane.

        Scenario 2) A sudden event happened which was so powerfull that it incapacitated the cockpit crew almost immediately and caused the transpoders to go offline at the same time. Although highly unlikely. But what could happen if say an engine or a wing came off suddenly at high speed. Would that not cause a violent maneuvre which could cause the cockpit crew to become incapacitated? And could it not cause the generators to go offline too? A question still remains regarding this hypothesis is whether such a violent event could cause the plane to break-up further or not. The lack of a debris field suggests that the plane went down without much break-up.
        If something mechanical did happen, then at lease we can learn from it to prevent a re-occurance of a similar event.

        I am actually leaning towards thinking that the searchers are actually looking in the wrong place.
        When the SAA Boeing 747 (SAA295) went down in 1987, the initial search area were in the wrong location. And that was when people on the ground KNEW something horrible had happened. Granted, that was in the days before the marvels of Sattelite tracking etc.

        If the worst have happened then my thoughts are not with the passengers. Sadly, there would not much to be done for them in any case (except if by chance the plane did go down softly and the searchers are just looking in the wrong place - Then there might be hope). My thoughts are with the people they leave behind. I can't imagine how distressed they must be. And I suppose untill the wreckage is found, they will continue to hope that there might be survivors. People tend to cling to hope even against all odds.

        A sad period for aviation in any case.
        --

        Comment


        • #5
          foxnews-

          Interpol said Tuesday that the two passengers who used stolen passports to board a Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared early Saturday morning were Iranians seeking asylum in Europe.
          Interpol secretary general Ronald K. Noble identified the men as Pouri Nourmohammadi, 19, and Delavar Seyedmohammaderza, 29. Noble said that the two men had traveled to Malaysia from Tehran using Iranian passports, but had secured stolen Italian and Austrian passports in Kuala Lumpur for their journey to Beijing and Amsterdam, for which both had tickets and planned to travel together.
          Malaysian authorities said that Nourmohammadi planned to proceed from Amsterdam to Frankfurt, Germany, where his mother lives. The woman contacted authorities when her son failed to arrive as planned. The BBC reported that Seyedmohammaderza's intended final destination was Copenhagen, Denmark.
          The disclosure by Interpol confirmed a report aired late Monday by the BBC's Persian service, which cited a friend of both men who hosted them at his home in Kuala Lumpur as they prepared to travel to Beijing, the final destination of the missing plane.
          Over the weekend, the passports were identified as belonging to 30-year-old Austrian Christian Kozel and 37-year-old Italian Luigi Maraldi. Both men had reported that their passports had been stolen while they were traveling in Thailand.
          It was not made immediately clear how the passports were sent from Thailand to Kuala Lumpur.
          A BBC Persian editor told Britain's Daily Telegraph that the Iranians were "looking for a place to settle." Both Malaysia and Thailand are home to large Iranian communities.
          --

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by fleetlordatvar View Post
            foxnews-

            Interpol said Tuesday that the two passengers who used stolen passports to board a Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared early Saturday morning were Iranians seeking asylum in Europe.
            Interpol secretary general Ronald K. Noble identified the men as Pouri Nourmohammadi, 19, and Delavar Seyedmohammaderza, 29.

            A BBC Persian editor told Britain's Daily Telegraph that the Iranians were "looking for a place to settle." Both Malaysia and Thailand are home to large Iranian communities.
            I guess the authorities no longer believe those guys had anything to do with the disappearance. Which, I'm not surprised by honestly.. I don't tend to think of young Iranians as radicals. Remember there was a student uprising a couple of years ago that was stomped out by the gov't. I think those kids want their freedom from the religious nonsense. I know some Iranian guys and they are educated guys.. who like to have a good time. They are definitely not Taliban.

            I have a feeling the plane just plowed into the ocean without warning, and at such an angle it went straight down... deep down. Admittedly I have absolutely no facts to back theory up.

            Of course, I'd rather everyone were sitting on a magic island somewhere..

            Comment


            • #7
              What haven't been made quite clear (to my knowledge) is if the plane simply vanished at 35 000 (which was the cruising altitude I read somewhere) or if it was tracked for a while either losing altitude, or were they maintaining altitude when the so-called 'turn-back' happened? It appears as if a military radar did track them, but the altitudes have not been provided (as far as I know).

              In any case I would want to know if they still have been under active (civilian) radar coverage or just being 'tracked' over oceanic stages with some reporting (automatic or manual via sat-link) now and then?

              Again, if it simply vanished suddenly then I can only see that either someone switched the tracking off (if there was monitored tracking) or something catastrophic happened suddenly which didn't afford the pilots time to radio their predicament. After all, when you suddenly experience 'loss of control' you first try to regain control before trying to establish contact (which over oceanic distances rules out VHF in any case, so much more involved procedures to get in contact with someone).

              We've had a couple of cases recently where one of the pilots got a bit unstuck. One led to the crash by the pilot of the aircraft (LAM in Namibia) and the other one to the recent Ethiopian flight, which landed safely.

              All these are scenarios will have to be investigated and either discarded or further studied by the investigation team. But that can only happen once the CVR / DFDR are found.

              What worries me as well, if it was an electrical malfunction, would the Flight Recorders have been operational for long enough so that we can know what the pilots said/tried to save their lives? The worst case scenario is if investigators cannot determine with certainty what really happened. That leaves the possibility open that something similar could conceivably happen again. But there are still a lot of searching to do before then. I just hope the recorders can be found and that they can provide good evidence.
              --

              Comment


              • #8
                It is a real mystery.

                By comparison I think AF447 was known to be operating in adverse weather conditions.. From my understanding that is not the case here..

                Perhaps a related question.. Does anyone know what the role of the HF Antenna was in transoceanic flights prior to widespread use of GPS? Was it used for navigation?

                Comment


                • eugenevh
                  eugenevh commented
                  Editing a comment
                  Not sure about the role of the HF Antenna other than for communication use.
                  I think I am correct in thinking that prior to GPS most aircraft out of reach of NDB/VOR beacons used Inertial Navigation Systems (I think at least 3 so that two could 'out-vote' a faulty one). But that system required a very precise fix for the starting point of every flight.
                  Remember KAL007 strayed over Soviet Airspace because they didn't allow enough time for the system to stabilize at their departure airport.
                  That shoot-down resulted in the start of the then-military GPS system to be made available for civilian use if I can recall correctly.
                  Nowadays everything works with electronics. If that fails, you are flying very blind. Over an ocean with minimal to no visual references, you could find yourself in serious trouble very quickly.

              • #9
                Saw this online and thought I'd share on this thread. Apparently after the news broke out that the plane went missing family members of the missing passengers were able to call their relatives phones and it still rang. In fact relatives of passengers also reported that their families who use a service called "QQ" claimed that they saw the passangers screen names "online" for days after the plane went missing. As an Communications tech I find this very eerie because once a phone dies or the service to the provider is interrupted it's only a matter of minutes before the phones stop sending data and the user is considered offline. Very very strange....
                In absence of news, passengers’ relatives stew in anger, rumors and wild theories about vanished jet.
                --

                Cloud Services Admin/Collector since 2006

                Comment


                • fleetlordatvar
                  fleetlordatvar commented
                  Editing a comment
                  interesting, we'll see eventually (soon, i hope) what happened. I just saw a clip where they mentioned that the transponder & the other sys for the airlines that sends data on aircraft performance was turned off on purpose.

                • FireAngelZero
                  FireAngelZero commented
                  Editing a comment
                  Yea Fleet, none of this makes sense. Seeing the map of how it deviated, what you just mentioned about the transponder the article I just posted. It's just really odd how this all happened. I hope soon they find out what's going on, heck I hope they can soon find some evidence of this jet. A 777 doesn't just disappear into thin air. This reminds me of AF447 because of the fact noone knew for almost 2 years what really happened, but at the same time it's not like this jet went into a radio dead-zone like AF447 did. The ocean is a pretty big place, and the fact we know more about the planets around us than our own ocean is what makes this hard. If the jet did "ditch" in the ocean, it could've been in a place that hasn't been mapped which makes this even harder.

              • #10
                FireAngelZero: Forgive the "Bermuda Triangle" reference, but this reminds me of the Flight 19 story.. Anyway there was a famous book by Charles Berlitz that I read as a boy. In it they talked about how Flight 19 continued transmitting even after their fuel would have run out. The last transmission was of course, garbled, and subject to widespread speculation...

                Back in the summer of 2003 I was driving through the San Joaquin Valley (Central California) and my radio picked up Portland, Oregon AM, hundreds of miles away to the North. I'm not a radio or communications expert, but radio does some strange things. I believe cell phones are just little radios.. perhaps you can shed some light on this?
                Last edited by JAL1628; 03-12-2014, 12:19 PM.

                Comment


                • fleetlordatvar
                  fleetlordatvar commented
                  Editing a comment
                  I know a little bit about radio waves/ radio in general. Radio waves are used w/ cell phones, but the freq is different than your car radio. The radio station you received from OR was possible due to the atmosphere & your location. As for the ringing or online status, this might be due to the network they are using. In my last job users were shown using our sys, but they had stopped in some cases up to 30 minutes beforehand. The systems are not the same, but it illustrates how the network/ software might still show an online status. it would depend on how often the info is refreshed; no clue about the ringing though.

                • Sludge
                  Sludge commented
                  Editing a comment
                  If you pick up a radio station from far away, it will be an AM station because AM radio signals bounce. FM radio signals do not.

              • #11
                I think I've heard something similar about radio signals 'bouncing off the ionosphere'. I'm not sure how you can control for this, i.e., if you mean to do it intentionally. But of course I'm not a physicist.

                Theories abound re: the whereabouts of this plane. There was a link on CNN about asteroid fragments.. I seem to recall a LAN flight several years ago that came close to some space debris.

                Comment


                • fleetlordatvar
                  fleetlordatvar commented
                  Editing a comment
                  LOTI, yes you can do it on purpose, ham radio operators do it on a regular basis. You don't have to be physicist to know how to do it. Most ham radio websites will give you info, but i understand the sentiment about explaining how it works. It's not that hard, it's strength of the signal, but when they start to talk about carrier waves & the freq that can be used by the carrier, i get lost.

                  Personally I'm surprised at the emotional level of peoples reaction!, i forget that it even happened until i see a thread about it. This in turn reminds me to check the news for any updates, but it fades from my thoughts almost instantly..

              • #12
                We've been discussing it here at work every day - everyone has a theory. We are however, in the aerospace industry..

                I'm pretty sure my wife has already lost interest in the story.

                Comment


                • #13
                  A CNN story just broke that a Chinese satellite may have found the crash site. Let's hope this is it.
                  --

                  Cloud Services Admin/Collector since 2006

                  Comment


                  • #14
                    Looks like the Chinese are now saying the photos were released in error...

                    The mystery continues..

                    Comment


                    • JAL1628
                      JAL1628 commented
                      Editing a comment
                      There are ****** everywhere. That's one thing I'm certain of.

                    • FireAngelZero
                      FireAngelZero commented
                      Editing a comment
                      I think at this point, people just want to find something even if that's not part of the plane itself. Most of us keeping track of this just want some sort of hope to say "okay this is what happened, and this is why" The fact more questions than answers keep coming is the reason why rumors, and stories like the satellite pictures are coming into light. We all want closure to this. Especially the families of the passengers. I also bet Boeing is eager to have answers too, to know whether this is a flaw with the 777, terrorism, or human error. Like they always say no one airplane crash is caused by a single thing. It's always a domino effect of things going wrong that lead to things like this.

                    • JAL1628
                      JAL1628 commented
                      Editing a comment
                      I stopped just short of conspiracy theories. But I do believe whatever happened, it wasn't the average everyday Clear Air Turbulence (CAT) or icing.. I think this is going to be a significant case.

                  • #15
                    Why passenger cellphones can't help locate missing Malaysian air jet

                    Published March 13, 2014 Associated Press

                    • March 8, 2014: A message "Pray for MH370" is shown by mobile messaging app WeChat on a smartphone at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang, outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. (AP Photo/Lai Seng Sin)



                    NEW YORK – Telecommunications experts say the odds that passengers' cellphone data can help locate the missing Malaysian jetliner are next to zero.
                    Locating the mobile phones of the 239 travelers on the Boeing 777 that vanished Saturday isn't as simple as activating a "Find My iPhone" app, given the speed the plane was traveling, its altitude and the fact it was probably flying over water. Many people assume smartphones to be all-powerful tracking devices. Often police, rescue units and others can use a person's phone to pinpoint the user's precise location. Even so, there are large portions of the planet that don't have the transmission towers that are necessary for mobile communications. In the case of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, smartphones are unlikely to lead investigators to the plane.
                    Here's what you need to know about mobile connections and how they're used to determine location:
                    Q: Can telecommunications providers remotely locate a phone?
                    A: Yes, if the phone is tuned on and is connected to either a cellular or Wi-Fi network, says Ritch Blasi, senior vice president for mobile and wireless at the consulting firm Comunicano. Apps like "Find My iPhone" only function properly when a phone is able to receive a location signal from a GPS satellite and relay that signal via cell connection or Wi-Fi to those who are searching for it.
                    Q: Does this change when you're on a plane?
                    A: Yes, considerably. For one thing, most airlines require passengers to turn their phones off or at least put them in airplane mode before takeoff. That means there's no connection to a cellular network, says Blasi. Even if some passengers left their phones on during Flight 370, it would be tough for their phones to connect with a tower given the speeds planes travel at and the altitudes involved.
                    Q: What about flying over the ocean?
                    A: Flying over oceans reduces the odds of a connection even more, since there just aren't cell towers there. Charles McColgan, chief technology officer for the mobile identity firm TeleSign says that while investigators might be able to determine the last cell tower that cellphones had contact with before the plane started flying over water, if the plane was flying above 10,000 feet at the time, the phones on it wouldn't be able to make a connection with a tower.
                    "Anyone leading the investigation should check, but it is unlikely that pinging a passenger's phone is going to find them," McColgan says.
                    Q: What if the plane managed to crash on land and some people and phones survived?
                    A: If someone could get a signal, in theory they could make a call. But if the plane went down in a remote area without service, then they would be out of luck. Foreign travel also complicates things. Unless a person signs up for local phone service in whatever country they're traveling through, his or her phone may not be able to connect to a network, says Blasi, who spent more than 35 years at AT&T before going into consulting.
                    Q: What about reports of people who claim they called the phones of loved ones who were on the flight and said the phone rang several times without an answer, rather than going straight to voice mail, indicating that the phone might be connected to a network?
                    A: This doesn't necessarily mean that the phone is connected to a network, is turned on, or is even operational. It just means that the cellular carrier's system is taking some time to look for the phone.
                    Q: Is there any hope if the plane crashed in the water and the phones on board were soaked?
                    A: Water and electronics don't mix, so generally speaking the answer is no.

                    --

                    Comment


                    • FireAngelZero
                      FireAngelZero commented
                      Editing a comment
                      The only thing I have to say to this article is look at the past. How many airline accidents have there been in the past 20 years that cell phones have made it to the main stream market where there are reports of passengers calling loved ones and leaving them voicemails minutes or seconds before a crash. It happened on 9/11 when cell phones were more analog. But I've heard it happen on other crashes. Just because a plane is flying at high speed doesn't mean it cannot maintain a cellphone connection.

                    • fleetlordatvar
                      fleetlordatvar commented
                      Editing a comment
                      Correct about the speed & being able to connect cellphone, but here the speed is in reference to the speed taking the plane out of a limited coverage area if any over the ocean.

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