Malaysia Airlines Plane "Loses Contact"

[dvs_dave]

scarebus said:

Such a sadness that this forum has become as pathetic as Pprune....

Not quite as bad. Not enough silly arguments involving words like "speculation", "conjecture", "facts" and "sympathies".

[thehawk]

Two people now confirmed boarding the flight with stolen passports. Not sure if that's normal, but sounds sinister to me.

[TeamD]

thehawk said:

Two people now confirmed boarding the flight with stolen passports. Not sure if that's normal, but sounds sinister to me.

Eh? Getting through immigration at kl is a nontrivial experience :S

[easytiger123]

TeamD said:

Eh? Getting through immigration at kl is a nontrivial experience :S

I don't doubt you're right (it's been 12 odd years since I last did), but it does seem somewhat strange under the circumstances that 2 Europeans from different countries had their passports stolen in Thailand in what appear to be separate incidents and then those 2 stolen passports are used by passengers on this flight. Assuming the latest news reports are correct at least.

[Dr Jekyll]

scarebus said:

Such a sadness that this forum has become as pathetic as Pprune....

Rest in peace to all those lost souls, I truly hope that this was not another silk air/Ethiopian disaster.

To be fair to Pprune, all that random speculation often results in a consensus that turns out to be pretty close to the correct answer.

[TeamD]

easytiger123 said:

I don't doubt you're right (it's been 12 odd years since I last did), but it does seem somewhat strange under the circumstances that 2 Europeans from different countries had their passports stolen in Thailand in what appear to be separate incidents and then those 2 stolen passports are used by passengers on this flight. Assuming the latest news reports are correct at least.

Not disagreeing with you, but it does come as a bit of a shock that something like you describe has happened

ETA: Unless those fingerprint scanning pads are just for show.

Edited by TeamD on Saturday 8th March 16:07

[thehawk]

TeamD said:

Not disagreeing with you, but it does come as a bit of a shock that something like you describe has happened

ETA: Unless those fingerprint scanning pads are just for show.

Edited by TeamD on Saturday 8th March 16:07

May as well be for show, it's useless if they haven't already fingerprinted you and you are assuming that they are doing real time matching which they won't be. Your fingerprint will just be scanned and stored, even then I doubt effectively as even in the developed world those systems are generally massive cockups

[TheSnitch]

easytiger123 said:

TeamD said:

Eh? Getting through immigration at kl is a nontrivial experience :S

I don't doubt you're right (it's been 12 odd years since I last did), but it does seem somewhat strange under the circumstances that 2 Europeans from different countries had their passports stolen in Thailand in what appear to be separate incidents and then those 2 stolen passports are used by passengers on this flight. Assuming the latest news reports are correct at least.

Without knowing how often it happens that two people are able to board an international flight using stolen passports, it's impossible to say if this is significant. But then again, how would we even know, if they would have escaped detection in the absence of the crash? Certainly sounds rather worrying

[motomk]

TeamD said:

I for one would be interested in knowing if this plane was the same one that had problems on 1st August 2005 and had to put into Perth,Australia rather sharpish.

Not the same one.

[TeamD]

motomk said:

Not the same one.

Thanks for the confirmation, my Google skills failed me trying to verify that one.

[Roadrunner23]

Wasn't majority of the passengers on board Chinese. I know recently there was that mass stabbing in China which I believe was linked to a terrorist group, unless I'm wrong about that. Just wondering if that could be significant if it turns out it was a bomb.

[XJ Flyer]

Munter said:

The poster seems to be working with the (very common) misconception that things fall faster as their horizontal speed drops.

Probably based on the fact that if you fire two anti tank shells in horizontal flight the one with the highest muzzle velocity will be able to hit a target at the longest range.Which can only mean that horizontal velocity of an object does play a part in the rate of vertical descent.IE you can make something with no lift stay in the air longer by applying more speed to it.

Edited by XJ Flyer on Saturday 8th March 18:02

[Ozzie Osmond]

777s don't usually fall out of the sky without even a chance for the crew to say there's something wrong. Sudden catastrophic failure of an aircraft is very, very rare. (Not like the days of the Comet.) Yes, there seems to have been a probable 747 fuel tank problem at one stage but it's hard to believe the same situation has been allowed to exist on 777.

[XJ Flyer]

Maybe changing the idea of onboard flight data recorders to real time in flight telemetry to ground based stations,as in the case of F1,might help in making sense of such incidents easier and faster.

[RYH64E]

XJ Flyer said:

Probably based on the fact that if you fire two anti tank shells in horizontal flight the one with the highest muzzle velocity will be able to hit a target at the longest range.Which can only mean that horizontal velocity of an object does play a part in the rate of vertical descent.IE you can make something with no lift stay in the air longer by applying more speed to it.

In your example the shell doesn't stay in the air longer, it travels further in the same time because it's going faster.

[Asterix]

XJ Flyer said:

Maybe changing the idea of onboard flight data recorders to real time in flight telemetry to ground based stations,as in the case of F1,might help in making sense of such incidents easier and faster.

Excuse my ignorance but I suspect that would require huge amounts of data storage/processing to log everything the aircraft is doing given how busy airspace can get in certain areas.

Would be great though - could even be set to flag up possible issues to advise the flight crew.

[Mr Happy]

Asterix said:

XJ Flyer said:

Maybe changing the idea of onboard flight data recorders to real time in flight telemetry to ground based stations,as in the case of F1,might help in making sense of such incidents easier and faster.

Excuse my ignorance but I suspect that would require huge amounts of data storage/processing to log everything the aircraft is doing given how busy airspace can get in certain areas.

Would be great though - could even be set to flag up possible issues to advise the flight crew.

Isn't that what ACARS does?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACARS

[Mojocvh]

Ozzie Osmond said:

777s don't usually fall out of the sky without even a chance for the crew to say there's something wrong. Sudden catastrophic failure of an aircraft is very, very rare. (Not like the days of the Comet.) Yes, there seems to have been a probable 747 fuel tank problem at one stage but it's hard to believe the same situation has been allowed to exist on 777.

Do you know what the fuel tank "problem" was? The root cause of the explosion was put down to an ignition source, that source being caused by the use of electrical connector plug sealing "potting" that was not fuel resistant in components inside the fuel tank[s].

But it was alright, it was exactly the spec demanded by Boeing.

[kiteless]

Pesty said:

kapiteinlangzaam said:

Same aircraft with the wing-tip missing a few years ago.



There will be a lot of people with itchy bottoms for the next few weeks.

Are these wings glued on or is that the air bus or did I dream that?

I wonder how you would check the integrity of the bind after something like that,

That was my initial thought looking at the pic. Then again IIRC, a business jet had a mid-air coming together over the Amazon rain forest some years ago that took the wing tip off, and that managed a safe landing.

ATM, this sounds like a repeat of AF447, or that BergenAir 757 crash out of the Dominican Republic

[Dr Jekyll]

Ozzie Osmond said:

777s don't usually fall out of the sky without even a chance for the crew to say there's something wrong.

If the crew experienced a severe control problem they might well have time to tell people on the ground about it, but would be concentrating on trying to fly the aircraft. Talking on the radio is something you only do when you don't have anything more useful to do.