How in the world can we lose an entire jumbo jet today?

I'm wondering if this is not the victim of some sort of an electronic attack. Knowing the redundancy in the systems it's hard to imagine how something not malicious could take out all of the electronic gear without blowing the plane apart.

That or the airplane flew through a time warp.

This brings up so many unsettling questions. These may have no relation to the cause of this tragedy, but are shocking nonetheless...

Why, especially after 9/11, can transponders be turned off?

How can passengers with stolen passports buy tickets and successfully board international flights often enough to barely raise an eyebrow?

There are more, but those two have been bugging me the most.

Prayers for the victims and families...

Mike

The answer to both is because the United States and the FFA can not control what occurs outside of our bounderies on flights not coming to the US.

Seriously, that's your answer??? This is not a US-specific problem, and needs a global solution.

Mike

ALIENS!
'nuf said.

Why do the aliens get blamed for everything?

Without them, we wouldn't even have the computers for you to post such conspiracy theory garbage in the first place, now would we???!!!!!

Mike

Ancient

I saw one blurb that claimed the plane was hit by a meteor.

It was:

Extraterrestrials
Elves
Kidnapped By Terrorists
The Plane Is Hiding Under an Invisibility Cloak
Uighur Militants Attacked the Plane
Life Insurance Scam
North Korea
Exploded Mid-Air and Disintegrated
New Bermuda Triangle
Supernatural
Lost was a prophecy

http://news.yahoo.com/report-chinese-may-show-plane-debris-images-214930324.html

This piece leaves the cause open, but it does share a view of the current status - which is probably old news.

Check out the related stories for your own records. I smell a hostage takeover that went real bad or assassination/terrorism.

I saw that at 11pm last night...it was daylight over there and still no news of whether or not that debris was related to the plane?

Now, that said, I just read that the satellite image is actually from last weekend and (presumably) just discovered. Current and wind may have moved that debris around making it hard to find. There has been so much misinformation on this thing, they're probably waiting until they have something definitive before announcing anything.

Apparently planes went to that location and couldn't find any debris. ...and then another weird piece of the puzzle:

Maybe there's a chance this plane is sitting somewhere in India on a quiet (and long) runway? That plane needs a runway that's nearly a mile long to land...not much chance of hiding it (and certainly not for this long with all of those people and cell phones). Seriously, a west direction for four hours at 550mph is at least Sri Lanka. Looking at Google Earth, that plane could have reached the western side of India with that time / range.\

Too bad those engine signals don't include a latitude / longitude...this is just silly.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/13/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/

So...basically, forget everything you've heard...again. What an example of how not to manage the flow of information.

Truly sad for the families of passengers and crew regardless

what I find incredible is that the concept of the plane flying itself in survival mode (ala 2001 space odyssey) with the entire manifest dead (presumably from decompression at 35000 asl)

The engineer's description of what the plane WOULD do (in a hypothetical situation of rapid decompression/crew unresponsiveness) is almost freaky: slowly shutting down non-essential systems as the plane's

health

deteriorated, sending messages via sub-systems to local air/land/sea receivers, etc.

You'd think someone would have installed a few automatically deployed EPRIB from the tail, or chaffe, or SOMETHING..

Or...maybe the plane was captured in flight by a giant stealth plane... by Dr. Evil. To be ransomed for ONE MEEELLLON DOLLARS

I would not rule out that, not hard to hide something where no one is looking

There has been so much conflicting information coming out it's impossible to say what happened. Did it even actually turn back?

There could be a lot of political face saving going on here, when it comes to releasing data. Remember the Egypt Air crash, where the copilot locked the Captain out of the * then dove the 767 into the ocean? For months the Egyptians tried to blame Boeing and the 767 for that.

If it did turn back, why, and how far did it really get before it either hit the water or went down in the jungle?

If not, and it went down near where the transponder stopped working, where's the debris field?

When I first heard about it, my guess was they had a short in the Electronics compartment, which is below the *. That would explain why the transponder(s) and radios quit working, that would explain the turnback. You don't fly into China with no radios or transponder, unless you want to be shot down.

OK, so say they had such a problem, turned back, but then the problem escalated to a full blown fire in the E/E compartment. Now what? They would be getting smoke in the ****.

They cannot simply go down there and spray it with an extinguisher. But they would want to descend to a lower altitude (below 10,000') and turn off the pressurization, to keep the smoke from circulating.

Now say the fire is out of control and it eventually renders the airplane unflyable. The 777 uses a 'fly by wire' flight control system, electrons tell the hydrolic actuators what you want it to do, but with zero electrics, not so much.

The crew may have been overcome by the smoke when their oxygen ran out, and the airplane did a slow descent into the sea or jungle, if it got that far.

Remember, this happened at 2am. Pitch dark out over the water, no witnesses other than maybe a fishing boat, but at 2am, they were sleeping too, and seeing an airplane in the dark is pretty hard if the position lights aren't working.

If it blew up inflight, due to a bomb or a meteor strike, there would be floating seat cushions, luggage and bodies all over the place.

If the crew was able to set it down gently on the water, ala Sully on the Hudson, (highly doubtful at night) the airplane would eventually fill with water and sink. Again, this was 2am local, it might have floated for a few hours, but still gone under before anyone (like Fishermen) was able to spot it. There are huge 20 man life rafts at every door however, and those would have been deployed and spotted by now, I would hope.

Unless they didn't put it down so gently, and everyone was dead on impact, and it sank. Still, there should be some debris floating by now.

I'm going with Aliens.

We need to get back to Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw. The media today would rather BE the story than report it...

BTW, Todd, if you were trying to be sarcastic about the aliens, I missed that (and I'm sorry).

Mike

would any passenger be able to initiate a text/voice call if anything other than something sudden were to happen (instantly incapacitating all crew and passengers)?

And if a large explosion occurred (enough to completely demolish the plane beyond small pieces), you'd think NSA or some spy agency would see/detect it? I mean really, NORAD isn't totally asleep at the switch here.

And is that the best Chinese satellites can do in terms of resolution? I'm sure they've got stuff as sharp as western nations (heck, they built half the crap in our surveillance satellites). But maybe they have older satellites patrol this area of the globe and use their top stuff to look at other areas (like S.Korea or something)

My money is on something sudden happened, since I'm sure any passenger with a communication device would attempt some contact if a long, drawn out problem happened (like smoke in the cabin, etc)

Yeahbut...you think they are going to get a cell signal from inside the airframe, out over the water?

I seriously doubt it. I can't even get one half the time when I'm on the taxiway in Atlanta!

This ain't the USA we are talking about, it's the third world.

I'll bet it's in the jungle, in a lot of little pieces, far from where they are looking right now. Nobody saw it go in because it was 2am, and until some farmer stumbles across the wreckage, they'll be looking for a long, long time.

Or it might have gone into the water, with a very small or no debris field if it stayed mostly intact.

But if it was something sudden, there should be something to find in the area that the transponder ceased functioning.

A simple automated (and non-tamper-able) spot tracker mounted in the tail or a cabin top pod would resolve all of these questions with about 10 minutes of work. I still can't believe we don't have this ability.

Cell phones wouldn't work out over the open ocean so even if there was time to get a call or text out, they would have had to use the plane's data systems to get it out...clearly those either weren't working or stopped working rather quickly. But, that does bring up another point...if there were a runway large enough to put that thing down, there would probably be a cell phone tower in reach and someone would get some sort of signal out. It's unlikely that plane is hidden somewhere.

Jake, obviously the technology exists for the gps trackers, but like everything else, it costs money. Nobody wants to pay for it, and with 40,000 flights around the globe per day, nobody wants to monitor them all.

We have two transponders, and then there is the 'skin paint' of large metal objects flying through the air, from ground based radar, ie. old school stuff that they say shows the flight turned around and headed back towards Malaysia.

The case could be made that there should be a third transponder which only operates once airborne, from an independent power source (internal battery) which cannot be turned off by the crew or anyone else, that may indeed be the result of this investigation.

why isn't anyone investigating David Copperfield?

This is far from a David Copperfield operation.

Now this: hey, look! Both photos have the same legs?

Seriously, you are scanning these photos for worldwide distribution to try and identify these guys and you don't take the time to scan each one cleanly or (gasp) extract a digital screen grab? Facepalm.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs... rlines-and-the-case-of-the-missing-legs/

How much would that cost compare to the search effort that has everything from satellites to submarines trying to find it? It could be as simple as a something that transmits a constant and simple stream of data by a radio signal. A bottom of the line 777 costs $261M so if it adds .5% to the cost? If you also start to consider the fact that there ~could be~ a (granted, slight) chance for survivors, finding them quickly could make a difference too.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/09/malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-black-box

This right here:

Air traffic controllers today must orchestrate the most congested airspace using primarily voice commands. You can send and receive text messages from most aircraft, surf the web and even stream House of Cards. The system that powers the plane is limited to pre-dial-up internet connection speeds.

There is simply no datalink onboard an aircraft with the bandwidth to continuously stream the volumes of data collected and stored during every second of a flight by the flight data recorder and the **** voice recorder.

I can't prove it, but I'm about positive this is George Bush's fault.

The least exotic explanation is probably what happened. They went down in the jungle somewhere and we will never know where/why. If they went down in the ocean, that is a big piece of water and it can take a lot of time before debris is found.

I suppose they are now searching for the onboard flight data recorder and **** recorder.. 15 mile range for those beacons Timbo?

There are two Emergency Locator Transmitters on the 777's I fly, one in the **** and one in the tail. I'm not sure what the Malaysians use, or if they use any at all. The ELT's are supposed to self activate if they get wet, or if they are jarred loose from their mounts by an impact such as a crash landing.

BUT...if they went down in the water, the ELT signal is going to be very weak, depending on how deep it is. If they went down in the jungle, it should be able to be picked up by any aircraft flying over within about 50-100 miles.

ELT's are in most commercial airplanes in the USA, even in a small 2 seater like a Cessna 150. We often pick up ELT signals when flying around the in the USA, because student pilots will hit the test switch and then forget to turn it off, or someone will bump one and set it off unknowingly.

As far as radio coverage, down there in Malaysia, not so much as here in the US of A. I've flown down there from Tokyo to Singapore many times and we are out of both radar and voice communication a good bit of time between the islands. So even if there were a distress radio call made from the plane, it may have been out of range of any receiver when they made it.

There's a lot of water out there, and a lot of jungle too. It will turn up someday, no doubt. They found the Titanic didn't they? It took a while, but they found it.
BUT...the ELT's are powered by an internal battery and it will only last so long, maybe a week, if it was in tip top shape to begin with, maybe less if it was an old battery.

i wonder if anyone checked the hydrophone network. If they can hear whales fart, they might have heard something they could triangulate.

Or maybe a submarine caught a weird sound.

The jungle scenario makes sense, too. Remember the AirTran that splatted into the Everglades that took forever to find... I mean the WHOLE plane disappeared.