Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

admiralcloudberg.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 457 posts

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

#181

Post by EMM_386 »

LatteLazy wrote: post #65

To me, the most interesting thing about all of this is that civilian airports don't really have radar. You can disappear from an ATC screen just by turning off a transponder. If they'd had radar we would at least of known which way the plane went. A curious controller could have asked "unidentified object at height X, region Y" who they were and why they were in controlled airspace without a transponder on. The artic…

Civilian airports don't all have radar, but approach and departure facilities (known as TRACONs) do, as do enroute centers.

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

#182

Post by mrandish »

hammock wrote: post #163
hiidrew wrote: 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]

That scenario seems wildly improbable. First, the existence of the large U.S. airbase at Diego Garcia isn't remotely secret. As for an accidental shoot-down of an airliner before any visual identification or confirmation, I suppose it could happen but it goes against every policy and procedure the U.S. is known to follow. If an unidentified aircraft approached an airbase, they would scramble an intercept for visual identification - especially in peace-time - in the middle of the Indian Ocean far from any active conflict zone.

In the insanely improbable event that the intercept accidentally shot down the unidentified aircraft before realizing it was a civilian airliner, then it would have been pilot error for not following rules of engagement or, possibly, a flight controller or flight commander error. There's zero reason for the U.S. government to turn an individual mistake into a huge incident by trying to cover it up. Also, there are many examples of the U.S. military making such mistakes and NOT trying to cover it up.

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

#183

Post by yesenadam »

DogLover_ wrote: post #52
bengl3rt wrote: post #18

"Before Fariq can attempt to get back into the cockpit, Zaharie reaches up and flips the pressurization switch, cutting off bleed air to the cabin. The airplane rapidly begins to depressurize." I really want to believe that a single switch doesn't control whether people in the back of the plane can breather or not...

You might want to learn about Helios Airways Flight 522 crash

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522

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

#184

Post by AtlasBarfed »

leplen wrote: post #13
gautamcgoel wrote: post #3

Can someone TL;DR this please?

They never found the plane. Most likely the lead pilot crashed it intentionally, but we don't really know. The person writing this blog post is more certain about that than the Malaysian authorities, but bloggers are allowed to speculate more than government commissions. There's some neat math people used to try and find the plane that gets alluded to, but not explained in depth, and the post is a reasonable summary,…

The smoking gun IMO is that deleted simulated flight path. If that is legit, then I think it's case closed.

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

#185

Post by macintux »

mrguyorama wrote: post #78
yellow_lead wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part where he had flown the route in a simulator is compelling as well. What a long article though

Except why go through all that trouble to take a very weird route to avoid detection and "disappear"? Every other pilot suicide has involved just pointing down. Why would the pilot need to make his suicide plausibly deniable?

Life insurance, to not embarrass his family, to not ruin his name forever, we’ll never know.

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

#186

Post by Symbiote »

thriftwy wrote: post #151
interestica wrote: post #42

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

This story has been going around the world for 50 years, and in different variations. According to some sources, the first time it appeared in a publication in USA in 1958, in the professional magazine "Meat and Game" of the California Associations of Game Producers (proven fact). The authenticity of the story, however, is questionable. The FAA has at its disposal a unique device for measuring the strength of aircraf…

I realise it's a joke, but I think a high speed train can probably withstand a frozen chicken at speed. They would need some defence against vandals throwing rocks, and weight isn't a problem.

This paper shows test impacts of a 1kg steel hemisphere, which damage the windscreen but don't shatter it.

http://koreascience.or.kr/article/JAKO201336447756524.page

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

#187

Post by krisoft »

cm2187 wrote: post #168
mwint wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sometimes. Probably most of the time. But not always.

Petty Officer JD Bridges on a US Navy aircraft carrier got sucked into the intake of a fighter jet. Somehow his body got wedged in such a way that he did not go through the engine and managed to climb out a few seconds later.

Video of the incident in question, also an interview with him the next day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF3Iz7b95-8&t=46s

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

#188

Post by [deleted] »

mannykannot wrote: post #117
digitalsankhara wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The methodology of using aircraft scatter of radio signals encoded in the WSPR protocol is described in [1]. I was so sceptical when I heard about this - mainly due to the normally mangled reporting in mainstream media - that I really didn't think there was any merit in it. The thought of being able to detect aircraft scatter using very low power HF signals over variable ionospheric propagation conditions at long ran…

I took a look at this a few months ago, and when I left off, I was unsure exactly how they conducted the validation of the technique. In particular, there was a test on June 3 2021 where they attempted to reconstruct the path of a flight from Samoa to Australia[1]. Certain phrases in the report leave me wondering whether the test simply amounted to looking for anomalies in the WSPRnet data in close spatiotemoral prox…

[deleted]

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

#189

Post by tjohns »

TylerE wrote: post #104
sopooneo wrote: post #68

Hearing about all the painstaking analysis of this flight made me wonder something: If you look deeply enough, how frequent are inexplicable situations? That is, if you took all the info from a normal flight, and cut it off at the halfway point and gave it to a group of enthusiastic investigators, would they find aspects that contradicted or truly did not make sense? My guess is they would. This is not to say MH370 w…

It's unlikely, since about 98% of the Earth has transponder coverage, so you at least have position and what the aircraft think's it's altitude is, with pretty good precision and sample rate. It's only in a few spots in the middle the ocean that this doesn't exist. This was also relevant in that Airbus crash from maybe 15 years ago between South America and Africa. This is not a problem on the main to/from North Amer…

That number can't be right. 98% of the earth doesn't have primary radar coverage, let alone secondary (transponder) coverage.

ATC radar is line of sight. At an altitude of 40,000 feet, you're beyond the radio horizon and lose coverage after about 380 miles - and that's the theoretical best case.

Oceanic air traffic control is primarily a non-radar environment, using procedural separation. Even over land, most of Canada (outside major cities and the airways between them) doesn't have radar coverage. There's a map showing the gaps here: http://ilanreich.com/Public_Pics/Alaska/Section%20One.htm

(The military does have over-the-horizon radar, but that's mostly used for missile defense. OTH radar isn't used for air traffic control.)

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

#190

Post by outworlder »

nradov wrote: post #66
twelve40 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seems quite addressable if that was the case? just don't let humans disable tracking, what's a sane use case for that anyway?

For safety reasons airliners must have circuit breakers that allow disabling every electrical system in case of a fire, short circuit, or other dangerous malfunction.

Any plane, in fact. Airliner or not.
Post reply on HN