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Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It?

theatlantic.com

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Re: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It?

#81

Post by Lazare »

markbnj wrote: post #35

I enjoyed this write up by Langewiesche, but the one thing that bothered me was the credence lent to the depressurization event without disclosing what if any evidence there is that it happened? Is there some? In the article he simply says "circumstances suggest" by which I assume he means the climb to 40k feet.

There's a fairly obvious argument here:

1) It seems pretty clear the plane took hours to crash

2) If the cabin was full of healthy, alive passengers, they could have done something during that time. (It's not a certainty, but it certainly seems plausible. Armored cockpit doors aren't meant to withstand dozens of super motivated people, including cabin crew, with literally hours of time on their hands.)

3) Apparently nothing was done, so apparently it wasn't full of healthy, alive passengers.

4) Although a number of things could have killed or incapacitated the passengers in the cabin, depressurisation is fast, reliable, under the control of the pilot, and doesn't require any elaborate assumptions about third parties or deus ex machina. There are other possibilities that have been discussed elsewhere (poisoned food, perhaps), but Occam's razor suggests depressurisation.

I think that's what the author was getting at with the "circumstances suggest". Given what is known about the plane, depressurisation is the most logical explanation for one of the mysteries.

Re: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It?

#82

Post by tptacek »

HelloMcFly wrote: post #3

I had no particularly noteworthy interest in the topic beyond empathy for the families at the time. Yet I found this a compelling read. The descriptions and details made the whole thing pretty easy to follow.

Langewiesche is one of the great narrative journalists of the last 30 years; a contemporary and colleague of perhaps better-known writers like Mark Bowden (Blackhawk Down), but I think probably the best of them. It's worth tracking his previous stories down.

Re: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It?

#83

Post by tptacek »

Lazare wrote: post #81
markbnj wrote: post #35

I enjoyed this write up by Langewiesche, but the one thing that bothered me was the credence lent to the depressurization event without disclosing what if any evidence there is that it happened? Is there some? In the article he simply says "circumstances suggest" by which I assume he means the climb to 40k feet.

There's a fairly obvious argument here: 1) It seems pretty clear the plane took hours to crash 2) If the cabin was full of healthy, alive passengers, they could have done something during that time. (It's not a certainty, but it certainly seems plausible. Armored cockpit doors aren't meant to withstand dozens of super motivated people, including cabin crew, with literally hours of time on their hands.) 3) Apparently…

Depressurization also circumstantially connects with the otherwise unexplained climb to 40,000 feet, and with the disconnection and reconnection of the electrical system.

Re: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It?

#84

Post by aglionby »

mrpippy wrote: post #4

William Langewiesche is a pilot himself, and has written many other articles over the last 2 decades detailing accident investigations (among other things). As much as the technical details, he often explains the organizational and political circumstances that are just as interesting. Some that stick with me: the late-90s ValuJet and EgyptAir crashes, and the Space Shuttle Columbia. https://www.theatlantic.com/author…

This article reminded me of a long-form article I read on here (below) about a maritime disaster that was similarly well written. Not surprised that it turns out to have been written by Langewiesche as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16757343

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/inside-el-faro-the-w...

Re: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It?

#85

Post by stephen_g »

Steko wrote: post #69
CamperBob2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems as close to a smoking gun as we're ever likely to get. One interesting counterargument is brought up in a rebuttal at https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-atlantics-william-langewie... . The rebuttal piece mostly just flames Langewiesche, and it doesn't offer any support for any competing theories. But it does pose one question I haven't seen addressed. Why, if Zaharie wanted to commit suicide by flying into…

> The rebuttal piece mostly just flames Langewiesche I would say it raises serious questions about the accuracy of the simulator Langewiesche relies on and his complete omission of the fact that the Malaysian government absolutely wanted to blame Zahierie, a fanatical supporter of the opposition party, but the evidence was pretty thin. Which begs the bigger question of why not just fly the plane straight down into th…

That the crash was intentional is basically the only plausible explanation given the information at hand though, and given nothing was heard on the radios, the most likely explanation is one of the pilots. If it had been an accident, it would make a lot more sense to have crashed much sooner or otherwise have been more like Helios Airways Flight 522. (In that flight, a technician had set the pressurisation system to manual to do a test and forgot to reset it, and then the pilots didn't properly check the switch on any of the three checks they were meant to do. As they ascended, they became confused by the various alarms that went off and didn't put on their masks. Falling unconscious the plan continued on its autopilot heading towards its destination.)

Given MH370 making multiple turns over a long period, and transponder and other electrical systems probably having been manually switched off, it's the most likely explanation. We may never know for sure though.

Re: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It?

#86

Post by koheripbal »

jlgaddis wrote: post #70
CamperBob2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems as close to a smoking gun as we're ever likely to get. One interesting counterargument is brought up in a rebuttal at https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-atlantics-william-langewie... . The rebuttal piece mostly just flames Langewiesche, and it doesn't offer any support for any competing theories. But it does pose one question I haven't seen addressed. Why, if Zaharie wanted to commit suicide by flying into…

> His route took him through populated airspace for no apparent reason. If numerous authorities in multiple countries hadn't been asleep at the switch, there would have been no mystery at all about what happened. We might know what happened in that case... but what, exactly, do you think they could have done to change the outcome? Say that he was "caught", jets were dispatched, and MH370 was intercepted. There's abso…

He could have been talked out of it. Suicidal people are talked out of suicide all the time.

Re: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It?

#87

Post by markbnj »

Lazare wrote: post #81
markbnj wrote: post #35

I enjoyed this write up by Langewiesche, but the one thing that bothered me was the credence lent to the depressurization event without disclosing what if any evidence there is that it happened? Is there some? In the article he simply says "circumstances suggest" by which I assume he means the climb to 40k feet.

There's a fairly obvious argument here: 1) It seems pretty clear the plane took hours to crash 2) If the cabin was full of healthy, alive passengers, they could have done something during that time. (It's not a certainty, but it certainly seems plausible. Armored cockpit doors aren't meant to withstand dozens of super motivated people, including cabin crew, with literally hours of time on their hands.) 3) Apparently…

I agree that it's a likely theory and fits much of what's known, but there can be other reasonable explanations for the things mentioned above. The aircraft was already assigned 35k feet, was a climb to 40k feet really necessary to ensure the passengers and crew would be incapacitated? Might he not have been trying to avoid traffic in established flight corridors, since the transponder was not operating and he wasn't talking to anyone? Anyway, to be clear I'm not challenging the overall conclusion. It's the best theory I personally have heard, but I am also not an expert on any of this. I just felt like the article didn't make it clear enough that the depressurization event was complete conjecture.

Re: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It?

#88

Post by stephen_g »

warp wrote: post #15

I was reading about ADS-B, FlightAware and Aireon [1] earlier. Apparently they've completed a network of satellites in January 2019 and can now monitor (ADS-B equipped) aircraft anywhere over earth? Does anyone know more about how this works, does that mean we will never have a MH370-like situation again because nowadays aircraft can be tracked much better? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aireon

The pilot can switch off the ADS-B transponder, so assuming that MH370 was intentional (which seems to be the best explanation), no, this could still happen.

Re: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It?

#89

Post by baruchthescribe »

sctb wrote: post #21
baruchthescribe wrote: post #10

Diego Garcia, Rothschilds, ARM patents. Just for the record as I know no-one will believe me.

You've been breaking the guidelines quite a bit. Could you please review them and start posting more substantively? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sure. In the meantime, I believe the relevant xkcd - because there's always a relevant xckd - is 137.

Re: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It?

#90

Post by Steko »

stephen_g wrote: post #85
Steko wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rebuttal piece mostly just flames Langewiesche I would say it raises serious questions about the accuracy of the simulator Langewiesche relies on and his complete omission of the fact that the Malaysian government absolutely wanted to blame Zahierie, a fanatical supporter of the opposition party, but the evidence was pretty thin. Which begs the bigger question of why not just fly the plane straight down into th…

That the crash was intentional is basically the only plausible explanation given the information at hand though, and given nothing was heard on the radios, the most likely explanation is one of the pilots. If it had been an accident, it would make a lot more sense to have crashed much sooner or otherwise have been more like Helios Airways Flight 522. (In that flight, a technician had set the pressurisation system to…

> the only plausible explanation

I personally don't find it that plausible. Is it the least implausible explanation? Maybe.

> If it had been an accident, it would make a lot more sense to have crashed much sooner or otherwise have been more like Helios Airways Flight 522.

This is just hand waving, we can just as easily say "if it was a pilot suicide it would have been like the known pilot suicide crashes". The fact is that there are all sorts of mechanical events many of which bear zero resemblance to the most common or best known ones.

> Given MH370 making multiple turns over a long period, and transponder and other electrical systems probably having been manually switched off, it's the most likely explanation. We may never know for sure though.

This is circular reasoning. There's no shortage of other reasons the plane could make multiple turns. There are plenty of reasons the transponder stops working. Both could happen due to a mechanical event.

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