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Missing Airplane Flew On for Hours

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Re: Missing Airplane Flew On for Hours

#181

Post by mikeash »

chrismcb wrote: post #48

Here is what I don't get. A plane, a HUGE plane, supposedly just disappeared. Near China. So this whole "fly under the radar" is just BS? You just need to turn off your transponder, and you can fly wherever you want?

Pretty much no. There is essentially no possibility that this plane flew over, say, Vietnam or China undetected just because it turned its transponder off. There are only a couple of possibilities, in rough descending order of plausibility:

1. The plane exploded or immediately crashed roughly where the last known contact was made. No debris has been found because... well, that's a weird one.

2. The refuted claim that Malaysian military radar tracked it to the Strait of Malacca is actually correct, and it crashed over there somewhere.

3. The plane continued flying but stayed over the open ocean, far enough from land that there was no primary radar coverage, and eventually crashed into the ocean somewhere far away. There isn't a whole lot of room for that in this area, of course.

4. The plane eventually flew over land but the local air defense people were asleep at the switch. It subsequently landed or crashed in that country or in the ocean beyond.

5. The plane eventually flew over land and was tracked by primary radar but this is being covered up, either to hide incompetence, or as part of some crazy plan where the plane was hijacked and stolen by that country.

IMO anything beyond #3 on this list is seriously far-fetched and not a realistic possibility, but I wouldn't rule them out completely at the moment.

Re: Missing Airplane Flew On for Hours

#182

Post by mikeash »

Raptor22 wrote: post #98
brador wrote: post #62

They claim some of the cell phones are still active. Can't they just "traceroute" the call to find the nearest cell tower and search around it?

This blew my mind. Cell phones don't work that far out from range of towers, and they sure as hell don't work at the bottom of the ocean. I heard that those were rumors and that they were false, but if they're true, then that's a major wtf...

It is complete bullshit. The whole story is based around the fact that some people have tried to call their relatives on the plane and have heard the line "ringing" after placing the call. This is exactly what you'd expect to happen when trying to call a phone that's at the bottom of the ocean, as the network will spend some time searching for it and you'll often hear a "ringing" while that happens, but idiots have taken this and transformed it into "the actual cell phones themselves are ringing!"

Re: Missing Airplane Flew On for Hours

#183

Post by mikeash »

mahyarm wrote: post #78

So will autopilots include a mode to drop to an altitude where people can start breathing again if depressurization occurs and is not fixed within 2 minutes?

Sure, then someday an airliner crashes into a mountain because this system got triggered accidentally and it wasn't fixed in time....

Re: Missing Airplane Flew On for Hours

#184

Post by DEinspanjer »

jfoster wrote: post #159
rschmitty wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey man what are you doing! We can finally use our devices during take off and now you hint at keeping them off permanently! Eek! :P I'm sure the first battery meltdown/fire on a plane is going to cause a riot in the news but the odds...

That did cross my mind when I posted it. I should point out that I don't know what is true. It just seems to be a contradiction that every passenger can take on board and use whatever they want in-flight, yet transponders specially engineered to be safe on a plane must be able to be disabled. I suspect the answer is that the transponder doesn't need to be under the control of anyone on the plane.

Maybe it has to do with the location on the transponder? A laptop in baggage or an electrical component buried deep in the bowels of the plane would be hard to get to in the event of a potential fire. A passenger's laptop would be fairly easy to put out with a fire extinguisher.

Re: Missing Airplane Flew On for Hours

#185

Post by throwaway092834 »

TomGullen wrote: post #174

I remember watching a "Mayday: Aircrash Investigation" episode (awesome series by the way) from the 80's I think. It involved an Eastern passenger plane that had miscalibrated it's guidance system and strayed into Soviet(?) territory during a politically tense period at the same time a US spy plane was in the area. The Russians(?) shot the plane down and it nearly started a war. The country the plane was from didn't…

It sounds like you're describing KAL007: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007

There's a larger list of airliner shootdowns here, and this is the only incident which seems to match your recollection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inci...

There's nothing in the wikipedia article about the USA's ability to track planes. We did have a radar station in AK, which may be what you're thinking of? According to wikipedia it didn't produce useful information, and wasn't necessarily tracking the plane at all points anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007#U.S...

I don't think we've ever had the ability to track all planes in the world.

Re: Missing Airplane Flew On for Hours

#186

Post by mikeash »

agildehaus wrote: post #22
United857 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible in some cases for phones to "ring" even if they're off/disconnected, as the tone is generated by the network, not the device itself.

In my experience the network won't ring if it hasn't seen the device in a certain time period. "Straight to voicemail" for that. I'm no expert though, maybe rings are still possible. But if the network is seeing these phones, it seems to me it'd be pretty simple locate these people by just querying the provider for the tower location. This hasn't happened, so the only conclusion is all the phones were destroyed, disa…

Multiple people who know what they're talking about have confirmed that you don't get the "straight to voicemail" behavior if the phone was last registered on a roaming network rather than its home network. As would be the case for e.g. every single Chinese cell phone that was last turned on in Malaysia.

Re: Missing Airplane Flew On for Hours

#187

Post by mikeash »

eklavya wrote: post #99
jonah wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Continuously ringing means the network still thinks the phone's on the network. When you power down your phone it sends a signal to the network saying it's going off. If you just pull the battery or something else where it doesn't send that signal, the network still assumes (maybe only for a time) that the phone is still on but isn't connected to a tower.

But the ringing only starts once the target phone responds to the paging from network, otherwise the network just keeps on searching and after a timeout informs that the target phone is unreachable or out of coverage area.

That's not true. There are cases (e.g. if the phone was last registered on an overseas network because the person was traveling internationally) where the network will generate a "ring" while still searching for the phone.

Re: Missing Airplane Flew On for Hours

#188

Post by TomGullen »

throwaway092834 wrote: post #185
TomGullen wrote: post #174

I remember watching a "Mayday: Aircrash Investigation" episode (awesome series by the way) from the 80's I think. It involved an Eastern passenger plane that had miscalibrated it's guidance system and strayed into Soviet(?) territory during a politically tense period at the same time a US spy plane was in the area. The Russians(?) shot the plane down and it nearly started a war. The country the plane was from didn't…

It sounds like you're describing KAL007: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007 There's a larger list of airliner shootdowns here, and this is the only incident which seems to match your recollection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inci... There's nothing in the wikipedia article about the USA's ability to track planes. We did have a radar station in AK, which may be what yo…

It'll take me ages to go through all the episodes of Mayday, but I'm certain in one of them the US released highly classified radar data to prevent a wider political catastrophe, and that the narrator described the source of the data was from a new type of radar that had the capability to track every plane in the world.

The series is exceptionally well researched and presented.

Re: Missing Airplane Flew On for Hours

#189

Post by zimpenfish »

mikeash wrote: post #171
zimpenfish wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone mentions further down in the comments that they did - just after an "unexplainable" two hours. Presumably it was far too late for any remedial action by that time.

Almost immediately after the fellow finally gained entrance to the cockpit, the plane ran out of fuel. So your "presumably" is completely correct.

You'd feel a right bloody idiot at that point.

Re: Missing Airplane Flew On for Hours

#190

Post by mikeash »

zimpenfish wrote: post #189
mikeash wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost immediately after the fellow finally gained entrance to the cockpit, the plane ran out of fuel. So your "presumably" is completely correct.

You'd feel a right bloody idiot at that point.

I'd be too busy trying to fly the now-gliding plane to worry about anything like that. I'd certainly curse my stupid luck while riding the escalator up to heaven though.
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