You have to be able to stop the transmission if the system is sending out incorrect information. And if it starts to burn you have to be able to shut off power.Originally Posted by Dayuhan;
You have to be able to stop the transmission if the system is sending out incorrect information. And if it starts to burn you have to be able to shut off power.Originally Posted by Dayuhan;
"We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene
Since the aircraft was flying at night, is it possible that a malfunction could lead the pilots to losing their direction? I'm not familiar with the technical aspects of flying and aerial navigating. Is it also possible that a series of technical malfunctions or human error led to the sequential loss of navigation, transponder, and communication system(s) before the total loss of the aircraft (perhaps running out of fuel)? Does the 20-something minutes between the shut down of the data reporting system and the transponder preclude, say, the loss of cabin pressure and the aircraft operating on auto-pilot? And if the flight was deliberately taken off course, what destinations are in the Indian Ocean? Did they get lost? I'm also not familiar with the history of hi-jackings in this part of the world.
When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles. - Louis Veuillot
American Pride:
There is probably a plain magnetic compass in the cockpit. Every airplane I've flown had one and there appears to be one in the 777 cockpit photos on the net. It was mandated on the smaller planes I'm familiar with and probably is on a 777 too.
If that didn't work I'll bet at least one of the pax had a hand held gps in their carry on bag. That would be good enough to find your way.
(The above is if the primary nav systems all fail. I should have said that.)
There have been at least two accidents that I know of where the crew and pax passed out due to oxygen deprevation due to depressurization. Both planes eventually crashed. But that probably doesn't account for the transponder not working.
Beyond that I don't know anything.
Last edited by carl; 03-14-2014 at 06:30 AM.
"We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene
None of us do at this point, though the evidence that the plane may have been flying for some time after the last contact does provide a reasonable explanation for the failure of the search so far.
This quote:
does not specify the nature of the "indication", but if it was sufficiently compelling to redeploy a destroyer it must be something fairly substantial.U.S. officials said earlier that they have an "indication" the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner may have crashed in the Indian Ocean and is moving the USS Kidd to the area to begin searching.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”
H.L. Mencken
Not only would they have a backup set of rudimentary aviation and navigation instrumentation, they have a lost-comms approach procedure for KL which they'd be very familiar with.
The pressurisation system is one of the checklist items, and if I recall correctly, it's a simple mechanical knob that you turn to increase or decrease the pressure. It's pretty unlikely for a crew to miss setting it up correctly on the ascent, so the question is what caused the depressurisation?
Why the aviation experts explain the engineering an technical aspects I will stick with my universal small wars, big wars, basic Police theory that People cause crimes and wars. in this case I say the backround of the flight crew stinks. Start with the pilot.
It's happened in the past a few times, so I'm open to the possibility. Do you have anything to add to the background of the flight crew beyond what you've said? All I can say to be aware of is that the Captain was incredibly experienced, the FO was reasonably experienced for an FO, and I know nothing of any other crew.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”
H.L. Mencken
There's a conspiracy theory doing the rounds that suggests that there was a large proportion of the staff of a semiconductor company on board, and that a competitor might have planted a bomb on board to assassinate them.
I don't yet buy into the hijacking theory. I don't see enough evidence just yet.
There's really not a lot that can go wrong in terms of navigation. Part of the pre-flight process is to set up the waypoints along the appropriate airway (think of it as an imaginary multi-level highway in the air) in the flight control system, and most airlines these days tend to make it SOP to do nearly everything on autopilot post-takeoff. Everything is done by checklist.
A very mild decompression loss would explain most of the unknowns reasonably well at this point. The scenario would effectively be that the crew would catch the onset of hypoxia early enough to start an emergency descent (spoilers and speedbrakes, close throttle, set the autopilot MCP to a lower altitude which might or might not initially have been FL295, hit HDG mode to change course and get out of the airway, transponder to 7700) but late enough to not go through the second part of the emergency descent checklist before succumbing. In this case, you'd have an aircraft that could fly until it ran out of fuel with no human input.
The transponder seems to be the most troubling aspect. Two other aircraft in the relevant timeframe experienced anomolies in their transponder output in a fairly small geographic area, KAL672 and CCA970. Some are suggesting perhaps an electronic warfare surface vessel might be responsible, but I don't really want to speculate too much on that. It might very well have been accidentally turned off in the rush to get the emergency descent procedures started, which would be within the realms of possibility. I'm neither familiar with the transponder in question nor MAS's checklists and I'm going from input from B777 crews from other airlines. It might very well be necessary to turn the transponder to standby before putting in the new code.
The ACARS data is one of the pivotal pieces of data right now. If it's true that there were data packets of any kind being sent from MH370 beyond 0107 local time, then the entire game changes in terms of searching for wreckage.
The question isn't purely technological. It's also a question of whether the owners of the technology (ie, various defence forces) are willing to share with the civillian world in real time. I would be extremely surprised if at least some of the event wasn't tracked by Jindalee, for example.
Biggus:
We have a gift for posting at the exact same time.
Do you know if they can backtrack and get an approximate position of a satcom transmission, sort of like triangulating?
"We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene
I don't know about that. I just read a lot from the big jet drivers and look for solid explanations.
I'm out of my depth on this question. I have three possible answers, though:
1. Yes 'they' do, but they're not sharing.
2. No, they don't.
3. They have the ability to do so, provided the transmission is live for x amount of time, and the nature of pinging a satellite with a few small packets of data precludes the ability to locate.
I did just notice this:
Apparently ACARS does include location data. MAS did not subscribe, so I wonder whether the slow leak of this is simply because RR don't want to let on to everyone that they're monitoring their engines regardless of the wishes of the airlines.Originally Posted by WSJ
I would say that you're probably correct.
The other question mark in my mind is the airworthiness of the aircraft. It had had all scheduled maintenance, it had been repaired properly after the accident a few years ago where it lost a wingtip (evidently, given the existence of data suggesting the aircraft remained airborne for several hours after last contact), and it's next scheduled trip to the maintenance shop was still little way off. On paper, it was perfectly serviceable.
MAS has a history of cutting their budget a bit fine, though. Not that long ago, they were caught landing at well under the required reserve of fuel on a regular basis at a UK airport, and were only allowed to continue to use the airport on condition of allowing the airport staff full access to not only raw fuelling data but also having staff present for fuelling events. Given that they were operating from home territory and heading for China (which is a little more lax than the UK in terms of ensuring compliance), I do wonder whether the ground crews missed an important item.
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