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Makes sense to me. All these wild theories.......

tanker27 wrote:

Makes sense to me. All these wild theories.......

The only problem is that the supposed path for the fire theory doesn't match the two arcs plotted from the last SATCOM ping.

ludi wrote:

Possible bad news for the conspiracy theorists: an experienced pilot decided to try out Occam's Razor and came up with this theory at Wired Magazine, suggesting that the cause was simply a landing gear fire mistaken for an electrical fire, or else an actual electrical fire, and that everything following is consistent with an emergency landing attempt that was derailed when the flight crew was overcome with toxic smoke.

I read the article and found where Mr. Goodfellow says:

Chris Goodfellow wrote:

Evidently the ACARS went inoperative some time before. Disabling the ACARS is not easy, as pointed out. This leads me to believe more in an electrical problem or an electrical fire than a manual shutdown. I suggest the pilots probably were not aware ACARS was not transmitting.

(Emphasis added)

Not sure about this -- the images posted by SecretSquirrel seem to imply that this system can be accessed without much trouble?

Also, for whatever the opinion of another "experienced" pilot on the internet is worth, someone wrote a rebuttal of Mr. Goodfellow's points.

Until more evidence is found/shared with the public, we're destined to be stuck in the theory->debunk->theory... loop.

Australia has satellite images showing something, but we will have to wait and see if it is wreckage of the plane or some other debris in the ocean.

A lot of news outlets are already jumping the gun and are calling it the wreckage of the plane.

And it was nothing

All the available evidence now points to an emergency on board the plane, a sharp turn and rapid decent back towards Malaysia.

An under inflated tire could have easily caught fire on takeoff. This was a hot evening with a long runway and heavy load. A slow burning tire can create a lot of incapacitating smoke. Passengers may have alerted flight attendants something was wrong. The pilots donned oxygen masks as visibility diminished. The captain flew the plane while the co-pilot ran down an emergency checklist including pulling circuit breakers to isolate the problem.

This happened before on a Nigerian DC8. Just like this flight, it took an hour for the smoke to reach the cabin. Pilots never made communication with the ground. They are taught to aviate, navigate then communicate.

This captain knew instinctively where to land. He was taking a direct route to Palau Langkawi, a 13,000-foot airstrip with an approach over water and no obstacles. The captain did not turn back to Kuala Lampur because he knew he had 8,000-foot ridges to cross. The captain did all the right things. He was confronted by some major event onboard that made him make an immediate turn to the closest, safest airport. Thai and Malaysian military radar showed the plane turned back, fisherman saw a large plane flying low in that direction, and Vietnamese radar never picked up the plane.

Unfortunately the pilots were overtaken by smoke before they could land the plane. The tire burned itself out. The plane continued on autopilot until it ran out of gas as confirmed by satellite data. We wouldn't have all these assets searching the Indian Ocean if we weren't sure about the location. The US probably has more information that corroborated this route than they disclosed. I feel bad for the families of the pilots. These guys did everything they could to save the plane and passengers. Until we find something to prove otherwise, we should give them the benefit of the doubt.

NOVA has a new episode titled "Why Planes Vanish" that focuses specifically on Malaysian Flight 370. They follow the evidence trail to date and why it seems to point to a hijacking. The evidence looks to be fairly strong for the hijacking case, but I find it stunning just how much info they gleaned from a basic satcom handshake signal. Particularly given other factors involved such as the Geosat was operating past it's rated lifetime and so was wobbling in its orbit due to minimal fuel reserves. Anyone interested in this topic or aviation security in general would enjoy the show.

There's some other stunning information in the video I'd never heard of before regarding airplane security in general. A Brazilian airline apparently created a tour video of one of its commercial 777's during an actual flight, and that video includes the engineering & electronics bay. For 777's this bay by default has no lock mechanism and the hatch is under the carpet in the forward galley. The biggest thing was a terminal box in the bay that can be used for direct systems access, anyone can use it to override the cockpit systems and actually lock out the cockpit. From there it's simple to give the computer flight commands or direct the autopilot itself to fly the plane where they want via the terminal. As with any commercial aviation equipment anyone can buy of these right off ebay to play with. Key parts of the video itself are on youtube and available for anyone to buy.

The engineering bay had some other surprises. Apparently there is a breaker that if tripped will cut power to the cockpit door. This automatically unlocks the cockpit door in any standard 777. While climbing down into the bay the person also has to walk right by two large oxygen tanks that directly feed the pilot and co-pilot's masks, it'd be as easy as turning off a garden hose to shut down the feed. The Malaysian flight did not follow US security guidelines so it was vulnerable to any of these attack methods, but it seriously makes me wonder about US flights now. Boeing does sell an optional lock kit for the hatch but reportedly few customers elect to buy and install them.

Nah, the best part of a 777 is the crew Love Shack up in the ceiling above the rest of us.

http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-id ... 7039845745

So revisiting this and as far as I can tell from news outlets they really have searched for the wreckage for over a year. To which there is none. In light of that after more than a year missing, why dont they entertain the thought that the flight is indeed on terra firma.......somewhere. Someone is hiding some bit of information that would point to where to look, IMHO.

Well the only trouble is the type of people(or rather agencies) that would have that information if the plane was hijacked would be your CIA and NSA. There are two bases in Australia and Diego Garcia which it would be surprising that they didn't know what has happened to the aircraft. Plus if you add in the spy satellites going over the Indian Ocean it's amazing that no pressure has been put on these agencies to reveal as much as they know (of course protecting how they collected the data).
Also on some news sites one theory has been proposed that the aircraft hit the water at a 90 degree angle which apparently produces next to no flotsam.
The only part about a successful hijacking is you need a big runway to land a fully laden 777.

yeti wrote:

Also on some news sites one theory has been proposed that the aircraft hit the water at a 90 degree angle which apparently produces next to no flotsam.

Frankly, I find that very hard to believe. Looking over past 'modern day' airlines that have crashed in the ocean ALL of them have produced some sort of floatsam within days of the incident. Last fall the ATSB worked on a drift model that would show that debris would appear on the long coastline of Western Sumatra, part of the Indonesian archipelago, by March. Well its June and still nothing.

Call it my tin foil hat conspiracy but I dont think the plane went down in the ocean.

The Odyssey Of Flight 33


I've been watching alot of Twilight Zone on Netflix lately.

There's so much flotsam on the world's oceans that unless you know where to look and look soon after the crash then you will miss the flotsam as it gets spread around and most of it will eventually get waterlogged and sink. Take a look at Air France 447 for comparison. They knew where it had got in to trouble and they found some flotsam within 24 hours and the search for surface debris finished in 25 days. It still took them about 2 years to actually find the wreckage on the sea floor. If you apply those timelines to Flight 370 then they were looking in the wrong place at the point at which there would have been flotsam and they haven't been looking for long enough to find the wreckage on the sea floor. AF447 crashed in a less remote and better known area as well.

Remember Air France Flight 447, where it took almost 2 years to find the flight data recorders & cockpit voice recorders. And even there, the debris field was quite compact. The one difference is that in that case, they did find some floating debris quite quickly. Also, given that we've not heard of the MH370 plane (i.e. the hull) reappearing or being (mis)used, it dilutes the hijacking-for-terrorism angle.

EDIT: Aargh, beaten to it by notfred!

ludi wrote:

Possible bad news for the conspiracy theorists: an experienced pilot decided to try out Occam's Razor and came up with this theory at Wired Magazine, suggesting that the cause was simply a landing gear fire mistaken for an electrical fire, or else an actual electrical fire, and that everything following is consistent with an emergency landing attempt that was derailed when the flight crew was overcome with toxic smoke.

Very plausible. I personally believe that that airplane is somewhere on the ocean floor, it's the only way it could have stayed hidden for so long.

Did a fire cause it to crash? It's certainly very likely.

Scott should do a review in order to discover the answer.

tanker27 wrote:

So revisiting this and as far as I can tell from news outlets they really have searched for the wreckage for over a year. To which there is none. In light of that after more than a year missing, why dont they entertain the thought that the flight is indeed on terra firma.......somewhere. Someone is hiding some bit of information that would point to where to look, IMHO.

I think it is far more likely that their original analysis of the flight path and/or range was flawed in some way, and they've just been looking in the wrong parts of the ocean. The ocean is incredibly vast; if you're not searching the right area, your odds of finding anything are basically nil.

Heck, if a wreck the size of a cruise ship (Titanic) or aircraft carrier (Yorktown) can remain undiscovered for decades, even with fairly accurate knowledge of the location where they went down, what are the odds of finding a jetliner that could've gone down anywhere in an area many orders of magnitude larger?

While I do realize this surely something, somewhere would have been spotted by now. /shrug

The plane went down in the Indian Ocean which is one of the most remote areas of the world. There's hardly any ocean traffic that crosses it and there are little or no islands in the middle of it. It makes a good place for de-orbiting satellites since it is fairly close to the equator and orbital plane of the Earth.

It shouldn't come to any surprise that a plane crash in that area would quickly come to a cold trail. I doubt the plane was hijack at this point, since any party that would try to pull it off would have made some kind of announcement long ago.

If you guys are really interested in the topic then I'd suggest watching Air Crash Investigation's episode on Flight 370. It makes for a neat synopsis of currently known facts, as well as correcting the record on some of the false or incorrect reporting that came out early on.

There hasn't been a plane crash in history that was fully atomized, some airliners have flown into the ocean at nearly mach 1 at sharp angles and still small debris was left. At those speeds control surfaces begin to peel off the plane before impact, including the tail which will simply shear off in a solid piece. There's too many things with this flight to be any simple cause, from the deliberate flight path to avoid radars to to the partial disabling of the sat com system. It's going to take years or a decade before a ship stumbles upon it, but it will be found eventually.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/29/africa/mh ... index.html

Closest thing to real evidence we've seen yet, IF it can be identified as part of MH370.

Was just about to post that, here's some better imagery http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/2111 ... estigation So much for CNN's black hole theory, I guess they did too much reporting on CERN...

After all this time it probably won't be of much help locating the rest of the wreckage, as it could've drifted there from almost anywhere in the Indian Ocean. It'll put a stop to the theories about the plane landing somewhere intact though.

Yes, but there is a great deal of forensics they can now do. They can test what the part has been exposed to, both to narrow down locations in the ocean as well as testing for any chemicals or other traces. They can look at the point of separation and decide if it was a sheering, impact, other force that separated it, and if it was sheering then calculate the amount of force needed to create it and apply that to the plane itself. So they can at least begin narrowing down the scope of theories and can begin recreating the last moments of the aircraft before it disintegrated.

They can also measure the buoyancy of the part to narrow down which currents were most likely to have carried it, and backtrack some of them looking for any other debris. There's lots of stuff they can at least attempt to do with this part.

just brew it! wrote:

After all this time it probably won't be of much help locating the rest of the wreckage, as it could've drifted there from almost anywhere in the Indian Ocean. It'll put a stop to the theories about the plane landing somewhere intact though.

The video on the CNN link shows the usual pattern of the Indian Ocean Gyre, which spins anti-clockwise and would be perfectly positioned to take wreckage from the "southern arc" zone around half of the gyre's circulation and dump it on the north shore of Reunion (which is where it was found).

just brew it! wrote:

It'll put a stop to the theories about the plane landing somewhere intact though.

I'll be honest and say that I was in this camp.

Another theory I just heard just yesterday was that the plane could have been shot down. As the theory goes, communication was lost and it was on a trajectory toward or around Diego Garcia. As some know there is a U.S. Naval base there. This theory says that the U.S. shot it down.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... mh370.html

The parts are from a 777, and MH370 is the only 777 to go missing. Now the retrograde drift analysis comes into play in an attempt to find the crash site.

Still the drift analysis' (or guesses) that I have seen are a huge. Like this one.

tanker27 wrote:

Still the drift analysis' (or guesses) that I have seen are a huge. Like this one.

Well, if that drift map is anywhere near reflecting reality, it's probably a sign that they were looking in the wrong place given that so few of the potential paths make it to the site where they found the wing flap.