Surely a fire would have caused the plane to crash in 10-15 minutes, it certainly wouldn't have gone on flying for 6+ hours more! The previous cases of on-board fires I read about all have the plane crashing or landing within 20 minutes of the first systems failures.
MH370: A different point of view
201–210 of 224 posts
Re: MH370: A different point of view
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Airplane fires can and have been so fierce, that pilots barely have time to utter a single sentence to ground control after they know they're in trouble and before they lose consciousness. It really is that time critical. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ValuJet_Flight_592
You cite a source but it doesn't really back up your claims. "Kubeck and Hazen immediately asked air traffic control for a return to Miami due to smoke in the cockpit and cabin, and were given instructions for a return to the airport. One minute later, Hazen requested the nearest available airport." I have yet to hear of a single midair aircraft fire that was not reported over comms.
I did not assert that they didn't have time to talk at all. The Valuejet pilots only knew they had a large scale raging fire onboard when they asked for the nearest available airport. Before that, they would have thought the airtight cargo compartment would extinguish a flame from O2 starvation. My point was that fires can overtake pilots very quickly, going from seemingly minor to terrifying in seconds.
You misunderstood which time interval I was talking about entirely. I am also not espousing a theory that this is what happened to the MH flight. I just wanted to point out to people what timescale these things operate within.
Re: MH370: A different point of view
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't a fire in the electric turn off the telemetry minutes before it gets noticed?
There are alarms for everything under the sun, I don't think it would be possible for a fire to knock off a key system and the pilots not know about it.
In the world of Electrical Engineering ANYTHING can be knocked off without you knowing, because at some stage you just HAVE to assume that given circuitry works. With radio comms, the only way to check if antenna is actually working (a connector is still intact) is to use receiver. That's what commercial radio operators do
Re: MH370: A different point of view
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
or the climb to 45k
That's from primary radar. Those altitude readings are unreliable at that range.
Investigators flew the same exact flight path in another 777 and it should have been apparent if primary radar misreported altitude +/- such a large margin at the distances observed. If they observed primary radar lose no accuracy at that distance, why judge the 45k as inaccurate?
Re: MH370: A different point of view
#205This doesn't explain the zigzagging trajectory of the plane after its disappearance: Indeed, soon after MH370 disappeared, reports emerged that recordings of Malaysian military radar returns showed an unidentified track that could correspond to the flight turning left onto a westward course and descending. At the time it was difficult to assess the validity of that claim. It’s been bolstered, however, by a Reuters re…
"By signing off from Malaysian airspace at 1.19 a.m. on March 8 with a casual "all right, good night," rather than the crisp radio drill advocated in pilot training, a person now believed to be the co-pilot gave no hint of anything unusual. Two minutes later, at 1.21 a.m. local time, the transponder - a device identifying jets to ground controllers - was turned off in a move that experts say could reveal a careful se…
10 minutes later (1:30am), and this is the thing that dooms the article's theory for me, a jet half an hour ahead was asked to radio the plane and request location. The captain did make contact and heard the copilot answer. It's possible there were electrical problems since he said the line had lots of static on it, but in the end there was no mention of an emergency. Once you are communicating I would expect there to be mention of a fire, etc (but maybe not a hijacking).
Re: MH370: A different point of view
#206This doesn't explain the zigzagging trajectory of the plane after its disappearance: Indeed, soon after MH370 disappeared, reports emerged that recordings of Malaysian military radar returns showed an unidentified track that could correspond to the flight turning left onto a westward course and descending. At the time it was difficult to assess the validity of that claim. It’s been bolstered, however, by a Reuters re…
And, just curious though, in case there was a fire and they turned the transponders off on purpose - How difficult would it be to just say "Fire" or something over the wire before turning things off? Does abruptly going cold and switching everything off make sense? Would a fire hit so fiercely that the very first response would be to turn everything off without any communication?
Ordinarily, you keep your plane in the air as your top priority, go where you need to go as your second priority, and communicate as your third priority. So ordinarily, I would say that's too far down your list of priorities.
In this case, however, there was a communication at 1:30, ten min. after the transponder was turned off. Once you are on the radio, it makes sense to say "we have a fire" I would think.
Re: MH370: A different point of view
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're saying the best way to figure out what happened to MH370 is to do nothing, don't think, don't have any ideas, in no way make any effort to interpret the facts as they present themselves or try to fill in the blanks with educated guesses? Nice plan.
I'm curious how idle speculation has been helpful in finding the plane in any way?
It's not, and no one is claiming that it is.
Re: MH370: A different point of view
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plenty of weird reasons to climb like that[1]. I think people dramatically underestimate how mechanical and/or electronic system failure combines with human misjudgement to make things operate in entirely unpredictable ways. I've never been involved in an air crash investigation, but I have done many system outage investigations. The majority of them[2] involve a failure of a hardware/software system, followed by man…
Completely agree. I'm surprised that, especially on HN, the large number of people who won't apply Occam's Razer to the situation. I imagine that most air accident investigations begin like this; confused, competing information from numerous sources of varying reliability. Just with the internet and 24h news, everyone is following along with each revelation (see also the Pistorius trial). Give it some time, let the i…
> I imagine that most air accident investigations begin like this; confused, competing information from numerous sources of varying reliability.
Not to mention that but when things happen on the plane, pilots are given confused, competing from numerous sources. This is why I assumed it was an accident (like Air France 447) at first.
> Give it some time, let the investigators work and report their findings. I'd be very surprised if it's not a combination of system failure and human error in reacting to the failure.
That was my first impulse too. Google "IEEE Automation Paradox Air France 447." However, this is really hard to square with the engine information. So you have three possibilities: the plane flew an uncommanded course on autopilot for 5 hours following an accident, the flight data is wrong, or it is a hijacking.
In this case an investigation is hard because there is so little information. It took until the black boxes were recovered from AF447 to determine what happened there. Here? We don't even know where the plane is, much less the relevant recorders.
Re: MH370: A different point of view
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plenty of weird reasons to climb like that[1]. I think people dramatically underestimate how mechanical and/or electronic system failure combines with human misjudgement to make things operate in entirely unpredictable ways. I've never been involved in an air crash investigation, but I have done many system outage investigations. The majority of them[2] involve a failure of a hardware/software system, followed by man…
I don't know where you got your ATP from, but there isn't a good reason, in clear weather, to climb above the service ceiling for your air-plane. Now, I don't miss-underestimate how failures happen, how they combine, but I know my procedures. If I'm pulling fuses for things, I'm going to first SQUARK 7700, have the co-pilot screaming on 121.5, whilst he is charged with flying the plane (following a heading, not dropp…
> I don't know where you got your ATP from, but there isn't a good reason, in clear weather, to climb above the service ceiling for your air-plane.
You are assuming the pilot was in command, but keep in mind a different B777 operated by Qantas had an uncommanded climb caused by twin air data unit failures. The pilots in that case recovered and returned to the airport for an emergency landing. However, I wonder how different it would be over the ocean and at night.
> The point is, the transponder just happened to turn off at the perfect moment (between two ATC services) after the ACARS had been switched off long before.
Yeah. Recovery over the water at night is one thing. Flying for hours after is a very, very different scenario, and that's what makes the difference for me.
Re: MH370: A different point of view
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
"By signing off from Malaysian airspace at 1.19 a.m. on March 8 with a casual "all right, good night," rather than the crisp radio drill advocated in pilot training, a person now believed to be the co-pilot gave no hint of anything unusual. Two minutes later, at 1.21 a.m. local time, the transponder - a device identifying jets to ground controllers - was turned off in a move that experts say could reveal a careful se…
10 minutes later (1:30am), and this is the thing that dooms the article's theory for me, a jet half an hour ahead was asked to radio the plane and request location. The captain did make contact and heard the copilot answer. It's possible there were electrical problems since he said the line had lots of static on it, but in the end there was no mention of an emergency. Once you are communicating I would expect there t…
Hypoxia?
I know, I know, I'm reaching. But it'd explain the "mumbling."