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Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)

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Re: Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)

#161
post #24

Just noticing the medium author, this guy posts fantastic breakdowns of plane crashes on r/catastrophicfailure Have to say the simulator part makes me lean heavily towards the pilot crashing it purposefully, from the article - "The most widely reported piece of evidence tying Zaharie to the disappearance was a course he had charted on his home flight simulator about a month before the crash. Zaharie had a number of h…

> it was a series of brief clips lasting no more than a few seconds each, indicating that Zaharie had programmed it in advance then skipped along it to various points without actually playing through the entire hours-long flight

I'd be curious which parts of the flight path those clips represented. Were they at important navigational landmarks? Were they nice vistas, places he wanted to see before a suicidal plunge? If they were only a few seconds each, that might indicate that he was checking those points for intentional reasons, rather than for fun.

Re: Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)

#162
post #118

> ... reaches up and flips the pressurization switch, cutting off bleed air to the cabin. The airplane rapidly begins to depressurize ... I cannot believe that a "kill everyone" switch actually exists, and if it really does this seems like a bug. Especially because not hitting the switch would also kill everyone.

[deleted]

Re: Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)

#163
post #24

Just noticing the medium author, this guy posts fantastic breakdowns of plane crashes on r/catastrophicfailure Have to say the simulator part makes me lean heavily towards the pilot crashing it purposefully, from the article - "The most widely reported piece of evidence tying Zaharie to the disappearance was a course he had charted on his home flight simulator about a month before the crash. Zaharie had a number of h…

[flagged]

Re: Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)

#164
post #158

> However, engineers also could not rule out that some or even most of this frequency offset was due to the crystal oscillator inside the transmitter warming back up after the power interruption. Didn't the plane have two power interruptions, the first of which it is known that the plane wasn't in the process of crashing at high velocity? I wonder what effort was made to compare them, possibly allowing the effects of…

20 years In college we had a link between campuses for the mainframes. Occasionally systems go out. When that happened. It was my job to replace the lightbulb that sat on the transmitter to keep it warm.

Re: Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)

#165
post #91

The strangeness of this story - a 777 disappearing into thin air in one of the most surveilled and monitored (due to geopolitics) places on earth leaving no traces behind - has spooked people so much that there is a section on the wikipedia page debunking theories related to black holes.

> By treading the line between the two countries, he hopes that both will view the unidentified plane as the other country’s problem. (Indeed, this is what happened: Thai military controllers saw the plane but assumed Malaysia was handling it; Malaysian military controllers, on the other hand, probably weren’t paying attention at all.)

On Malaysian military:

> Why didn’t [the Malaysian military] intercept the unidentified aircraft as it was crossing the north of the country? The military claimed it was because the plane wasn’t a threat. But how could they have known that unless they had identified it as MH370, rather than a foreign incursion? And if they had identified it as MH370, why didn’t they tell anyone until days after the crash? The most likely explanation was that the military simply wasn’t monitoring its own radar at the time that the plane flew through Malaysian airspace.

Re: Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investigations have some weird bits. I've always wondered if there's a certain title for the person who prepares the chickens for the 'chicken gun' in airplane testing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_gun

[flagged]

I love how this reads completely differently after the final sentence implies the birds are still alive.

Re: Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)

#167
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? A lot[0,1,2] has been done considering how little we know about what has actually happened and a trivial search would enlighten you. Also, real-time streaming of GPS position for the thousands of flights in the air at any given time is not a trivial problem (but technology is improving and ICAO is pushing for such solution[3]). [0] https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/08/us/mh370-fifth-anniversary-ma... [1] https://www.c…

Satellite phone text messages cost about $1 each. Sending one every 5th minute seems sufficient. That's $120 for a 10 hour flight. Seems technically quite doable with existing technology at a reasonable price? I imagine there are optimization that could be done to reduce the cost further. Big customers with constant rate usage can probably negotiate a more favorable price etc.

How much did they spend trolling random places in the Indian Ocean? There are some pretty substantial saving to be reaped just from the making the search more sane.

I suspect that there are some extra costs making it "flight ready" and all that stuff, but the fact of the matter is that GPS chips are cheaper and more plentiful than ever, we have Starlink coverage in Antarctica now, and they're send more and more satellites up every week now. There are costs in securing it and then receiving the data and such but it all seems really inepensive compared to the planes, the insurance payouts and the search and recovery efforts.

Re: Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)

#168
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I love how this reads completely differently after the final sentence implies the birds are still alive.

To be honest being swallowed into a jet engine is as quick of a death as you can get

Re: Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)

#169
post #24

Just noticing the medium author, this guy posts fantastic breakdowns of plane crashes on r/catastrophicfailure Have to say the simulator part makes me lean heavily towards the pilot crashing it purposefully, from the article - "The most widely reported piece of evidence tying Zaharie to the disappearance was a course he had charted on his home flight simulator about a month before the crash. Zaharie had a number of h…

[flagged]

I'd rate the ability of the US Gov't to successfully keep something like that a secret to be roughly zero, plus or minus zero.

Re: Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)

#170
post #118

> ... reaches up and flips the pressurization switch, cutting off bleed air to the cabin. The airplane rapidly begins to depressurize ... I cannot believe that a "kill everyone" switch actually exists, and if it really does this seems like a bug. Especially because not hitting the switch would also kill everyone.

Are you also astounded that the pilot controls the plane with a "kill everyone" lever? One that if they push forward for long enough will kill everyone on the plane?

But also, _not_ using the lever during landing would also kill everyone. Wild stuff.

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