Malaysia Airlines loses contact with plane carrying 239 people

[ShowtimeSBMVP]

Malaysia Airlines says it has lost contact with a plane with 239 aboard enroute from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The airline said in a statement early Saturday it was attempting to locate the Boeing 777 after it lost contact with Subang Air Traffic Control at 2:40 a.m. It was scheduled to land in Beijing at 6:30 a.m.

China's state-run news agency Xinhua reported the plane was lost in airspace controlled by Vietnam, and did not make contact with Chinese air traffic controllers.

The plane is carrying 227 passengers, including two infants, and 12 crew members. The airline said it is working with authorities to locate the plane.

Boeing said on its Twitter account it is monitoring the situation, and "our thoughts are with everyone on board."



http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/03...ing-23-people/









Malaysian jet probe sharpens focus on passengers, crew as new clues emerge


http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/03...-indian-ocean/

[DrRyan]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

I was thinking about this on my walk to work today.

So let's say you want to hijack an aircraft in the modern world. You probably can't force your way into the cockpit any more, so you need another plan. You're either:

1. claiming a bomb or something and forcing the pilots to fly somewhere, which isn't going to work very well. You can't tell them to power down transponders and stuff and be able to confirm it. If westerners are on the flight they're probably going to bum rush you in this era, but Chinese people won't do it.

2. getting in via subterfuge. That would mean that you're either recruiting a pilot or copilot or (more likely in my opinion) recruiting a flight attendant who'll get the door open for a group of passengers to take over.

If you're trying to steal a plane, you don't necessarily want passengers. My first thought was, 'why not steal a plane off the taxiway or something', but maybe that's harder. I guess you'd probably also end up with fighters following you.

So now you've got the plane. You have to land it somewhere, which means you need an airstrip. You're either taking over some small airstrip or you're building your own. I wouldn't think the Andamans are the best place for that, but there are a couple of islands out that way that are nothing but unfriendly natives who repel civilization. Perhaps someone should go check on them and see if they've all been murdered so the terrorists can build an airstrip.

You've got places in the Philippines where you might be able to build an airstrip undetected, and places in Borneo where you could, but they'd be easy to spot (eventually) by satellite unless you're doing some fast and sophisticated camouflage.

So you land the plane. Now what? Presumably you're going to either fill it with gasoline or put a nuke on it and try to fly it into something. I'm not sure how easy or hard it is to wander into European or American airspace and not get intercepted relatively quickly. I would've thought it would be hard, but then again I didn't know that a plane could disappear in the first place.

The bigger problem is the type of plane. This is apparently a 777-200ER, which has a maximum range of 7,725 nautical miles, or about 8,900 statute miles. http://www.boeing.com/boeing/commerc...00product.page. For reference, the distance from the Philippines to Los Angeles is about 7,300 miles and the distance from Pakistan to New York is about 6,800 miles.

So in other words, that plane can get you pretty much anywhere, though I'll acknowledge that Nebraska may be safe. I'm presuming that's a loaded range and not an empty range, but they're probably loading it up with something.

This thing also has to refuel and take off from that remote airfield, which is probably not easy to do. Do we have the satellite coverage and naval radars to monitor that big an area?

So assuming that you successfully land this thing, refuel it, and take off, do you put a nuke on this thing and try to fly it into a city? It seems like a real long shot to do that, and is a pretty James Bond supervillain thing to do. The thing is, we might need to put some anti-aircraft guns around major airports, but I would suspect that it would be detected and intercepted before it reached a major city.

And of course, for all we know it could be some Uighers hoping to kill some Chinese, but I'd be surprised if they could pull off a hijacking.

Immediately start looking into rural Colorado and find Galt's Gulch.

[Sully]

Rain Man is just bringing it.
I'll admit, I'm more than a little surprised that Pakistan is closer to New York than the Philippines are to LA.

And the drop down engine...I had no idea.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by Sully

Rain Man is just bringing it.
I'll admit, I'm more than a little surprised that Pakistan is closer to New York than the Philippines are to LA.

And the drop down engine...I had no idea.

Yeah, that Pakistan thing made me furrow my brow. I would've bet significant money that it was a longer distance, and almost didn't even bother looking it up.

[Donger]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

Wow. I had no idea that planes had a system like this. I wonder if it's ever been used.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/13/us/mal...html?hpt=hp_t1

Excerpt from interesting overall article:


In a less sinister but equally lethal explanation, some experts theorize the plane mysteriously crashed somewhere because of mechanical malfunction.

Perhaps it was an electrical failure.

It's possible, though pilots have trouble embracing the thought.

"I've been running that in my brain now ever since this thing happened," said Jim Tilmon, an aviation expert and retired American Airlines pilot.

"One possibility would be a total electrical failure which is very, very hard to imagine because it has so many generators coming from different places," Tilmon said.

"If all the engine generators fail, they still have what's called the rack. That's the generator that literally falls out of the bottom of the airplane, has a propeller on it, and ram-air turns that and gives them generating power enough to go ahead and fly the airplane safely.


"Electrical failure -- it'd have to be total ... absolutely incredible like we've not heard of before," Tilmon said.

I seriously doubt that the RAT on a 777 generates enough power to "fly the plane safely."

[Reerun_KC]

Originally Posted by Donger

I seriously doubt that the RAT on a 777 generates enough power to "fly the plane safely."

he could of started the APU to power all the systems..

[alnorth]

It sounds like we're pretty close to ruling out an accident or equipment failure. Two separate communications systems were shut off 14 seconds apart, and the engines continued to run for four hours. We also pretty much know that the plate turned west, and appeared to follow a different known air navigation route in that new direction for the brief time they had it on military radar.

I don't think this was a suicide or sabotage attempt because if you just wanted to crash the plane and you had control of the cockpit you could just send it right down into the drink. This clearly looks like air piracy to me.

It may not have been successful and we may still find wreckage later, but it clearly looks to me like the intention was to steal the jet.

[Donger]

Originally Posted by Reerun_KC

he could of started the APU to power all the systems..

Maybe I read that wrong, but I would think that they would only deploy the RAT if all other generation sources had failed. The APU just acts like a starter for the engines, right? It doesn't continue to power the engines after they are started?

[alnorth]

The only non-human cause I can think of is a massive, unprecedented electrical failure knocking out all communication and navigation systems (yet somehow not knocking out the systems needed to fly), the pilots are forced to take over manually, and they got lost in the dark searching in vain for land until they finally ran out of fuel.

If THAT happened, then the search area is so massive that we may not find the plane for decades.

[mikeyis4dcats.]

Originally Posted by alnorth

It sounds like we're pretty close to ruling out an accident or equipment failure. Two separate communications systems were shut off 14 seconds apart, and the engines continued to run for four hours. We also pretty much know that the plate turned west, and appeared to follow a different known air navigation route in that new direction for the brief time they had it on military radar.

I don't think this was a suicide or sabotage attempt because if you just wanted to crash the plane and you had control of the cockpit you could just send it right down into the drink. This clearly looks like air piracy to me.

It may not have been successful and we may still find wreckage later, but it clearly looks to me like the intention was to steal the jet.

I'm still not beleiving the 4hr thing until there is some assurance the data timestream isn't just a time zone or clock setting issue.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by alnorth

The only non-human cause I can think of is a massive, unprecedented electrical failure knocking out all electrical systems, the pilots are forced to take over manually, and they got lost in the dark searching in vain for land until they finally ran out of fuel.

Even an electrical failure likely wouldn't produce systems going down 14 minutes apart. Perhaps a fire could?

I don't know if they'd radio in about a fire, though. They might be preoccupied, which would explain no contact, but you'd think there'd be some kind of signal if they were battling a problem for 14 minutes that was NOT a complete electrical failure.

When you start looking at single points of failure, there are going to be very, very few of those in the mechanics. The pilots are probably the weakest link in the whole system, both on intent and vulnerability.

[Donger]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

The pilots are probably the weakest link in the whole system, both on intent and vulnerability.

While coming in to land yesterday, I chuckled when I heard the pilots turn off the autopilot a few seconds before landing. The old guy sitting next to me asked why I laughed, so I told him. He couldn't believe that the computer was flying the plane the whole time previously. He just looked amazed.

[alnorth]

Originally Posted by Donger

While coming in to land yesterday, I chuckled when I heard the pilots turn off the autopilot a few seconds before landing. The old guy sitting next to me asked why I laughed, so I told him. He couldn't believe that the computer was flying the plane the whole time previously. He just looked amazed.

Yeah, any accident/equipment failure scenario also needs to keep in mind that asian pilots are apparently not well-trained to actually fly a plane (as we learned in a recent SFO incident, where they had to land a plane manually in clear perfect conditions and screwed it up badly). Over in a lot of asian airlines, they are mostly glorified button-pushers who don't practice emergency procedures often and almost never try to manually land a plane.

[Sully]

Originally Posted by Donger

While coming in to land yesterday, I chuckled when I heard the pilots turn off the autopilot a few seconds before landing. The old guy sitting next to me asked why I laughed, so I told him. He couldn't believe that the computer was flying the plane the whole time previously. He just looked amazed.

You can "hear" them turn off the auto-pilot? Or they announced it?

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by alnorth

Yeah, any accident/equipment failure scenario also needs to keep in mind that asian pilots are apparently not well-trained to actually fly a plane (as we learned in a recent SFO incident, where they had to land a plane manually in clear perfect conditions and screwed it up badly). Over in a lot of asian airlines, they are mostly glorified button-pushers who don't practice emergency procedures often and almost never try to manually land a plane.

Not that it has any relation to this situation, but the language thing has got to be a disadvantage to non-English speakers. Aren't they required to use English on international flights? In an emergency landing or even a routine landing, it has to slow down communications and reactions.

And how did we manage to pull that off anyway? It's nice to be an English speaker.

[Donger]

Originally Posted by Sully

You can "hear" them turn off the auto-pilot? Or they announced it?

Yes, you can hear it if you're on an Airbus and are sitting in the front.