ianhind wrote:
Re crashes of B777, don't forget the Heathrow incident where both engines stopped producing power just before landing. Everyone survived but if it had happened 5 minutes earlier, who knows?
Opps. ?... How could I've forgotten that!
Remarkable airmamship that saved flight 38.
My thought are with the families and friends of all on that flight. Looks very suspicious as to the cause especially since it appears to have been a catastrohic failure of all communications - all at once and disapearing from radar at the same time apparently.
Airfrance took 2 years to find if i remember rightly, but they had some idea where they were searching. If you believe what you see in the news they cant even decide which sea to look in. The Chinese's satellite photos would put it logically on the right sort of course, but this morning they are saying they sent two aircraft and found no debris. I get the impression there is a lot of political juggling going on, and China are keen to show that there technological expansion can pay dividends. If the images are acurate i suspect you need a suitably equipped ship to scan the sea bed.
That's a shame again that they have not found anything to do with that Chinese's satellite photo, watching the news at 0830 it looked like it may have been something,
Like you say it seems the logical area as it would be to the right of the flight path but of course that depends on what has caused the aircraft to disappear, the other item on the news this morning was the aircraft was just between the hand over from Malaysian ATC to Vietnam control.
It certainly is a mystery, Rolls Royce have not made any comment that i am aware of concerning the tracking of the engines and it is really terrible that it's only due to cost that the signals from the Black Box only radiate out about 10 miles when in water, it's amazing that we can send and receive signals to Mars etc,
I would not be supprised if the US have not sent Bob Ballards equipment out there as it was a Boeing aircraft.
Lets hope they do find it soon, more so for the family's involved.
Roger.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
Last thing I read (which has now curiously disappeared), was the Americans were sending a ship to look in the Indian Ocean because that's where their team thinks it mostly likely is.
May I put forward a theory:
At (two) points, the Malaysians have suggested that the aircraft may have turned to the west around the time it disappeared (and later retracted the suggestion). They also suggested their radar might have tracked it across the land and back out over the Strait of Malacca, finally reporting this unidentified object at around 30,000ft (5,000ft lower) than the original cruise alt. over a small island in that sea. Then they weren't sure and they retracted that statement but they did hand over their radar data to the Americans for analysis. I'm not sure what military primary radar scans look like but from seeing a documentary on the Vulcan attack on Stanley, reading anything from the "green mush" and discerning the Falklands was very hard, so I have some sympathy that these scans might require some interpretation if they're similarly unclear. I can also imagine it's a little embarrassing that something the size of a 777 traverses your airspace in the dead of night at cruise altitude and you either don't notice or don't react.
No ACARS data has been published and the Malaysians claim it ended shortly before the flight disappeared but there are also rumours on the net that it goes on for four or five hours. After the AF447 crash, the ACARS reports of various system failures were made public pretty quickly. They coincided time wise with the aircraft's disappearance so it was clear something fairly catastrophic took place whereas if that's not the case here and if the ACARS data suggests something that isn't consistent with the other things that are known, that could be a good reason for withholding it.
If we suppose the Americans have analysed the radar scans and concluded something, possibly the 77,7 did fly that track at that time and if they have the ACARS data (from one source or another such as Malaysia Airlines, RR or even ARINC) and they also know that it flew on for some time after the transponder and the ADS-B apparently go offline, then if you extrapolate the heading of the supposed radar contact at cruise speed for as many hours as the ACARS data goes on for then might put you in the Indian Ocean.
Anyway, just a theory. As an engineer I spend a lot of time discussing how to stop things from going wrong and in such a case as this I feel it's very important to find that aircraft so we can determine the cause and try to ensure it does not happen again. I appreciate this isn't pprune, but I know there's at least one person on here flying a similar size, similar level of technology aircraft and I'd be interested to know anyone's thoughts.
In my post above I didn't state what I believe to be the cause, but that theory you posted would explain a lot of things, although there's some debate over whether it's applicable to the aircraft in question as apparently it was fitted with a different type of antenna. Something like this or deliberate interference by someone would seem to me to be plausible explanations. The strange thing for me is, and it could just be coincidence, that the last radio communication from the plane is the hand-off with KL and they never made contact with Ho Chi Minh City. If someone wanted the aircraft to "disappear", this would be the perfect moment to do it.
