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Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

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Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#21
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible for the pilot to depressurise the plane and use their dedicated oxygen system to breathe while everyone else on board will pass out after using their individual masks. Doing so will give them 60-90 minutes of extra air, the passengers' masks don't last that long.

Do you mean underwater? Apologies it's not clear if it's a joke?

Most people can’t breathe at high altitudes due to insufficient air pressure. That’s why airplanes are usually pressurized.

If that extra pressure goes away for whatever reason, people are handed oxygen masks and tanks to help them stay alive. What the GP comment says is that the plane may have been depressurized at one point at high altitude. The pilot’s oxygen mask is usually designed to last longer than any of the other passengers’s masks do. So it’s not entirely implausible that the pilot can still guide the plane into controlled descent, while all the other passengers may have already passed out due to lack of oxygen.

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#22
post #7

In the popular press (1 day ago) "Perfect Hiding Place": Australian Scientist Claims He's Found Where Missing MH370 Plane Is The Malaysian Airlines flight, with 239 people on board, disappeared after leaving Kuala Lumpur Airport in southern Malaysia en route to Beijing, China, on March 8, 2014. Years after its disappearance, an Australian scientist has claimed that he has found the "perfect hiding place" for the miss…

> "This work changes the narrative of MH370's disappearance from one of no-blame, ..." When has that ever been the narrative? It deviated from course, somebody performed that manouver and is "to blame"...

Yeah, that raised my eyebrow also.

I'm in Australia, tangentially connected to the Fugro vessel ocean floor search that followed and almost from the outset heard very little other than "pilot appears to have evaded radar, swung plane about low, and gone waaaaay off course delibrately".

Various 'causes' have been hypoxia, hijacking, suicidal pilot | other flight crew - sans any real knowledge of happenings in the cockpit it's a standing mystery.

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#23
The more certain it seems that MH370 was a murder-suicide scenario, the less comfortable I am with the media's preoccupation with it. News reports about such events may contribute to copycats: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17750236/

> Airplane accident fatalities increase just after newspaper stories about murder and suicide D P Phillips. Science. 1978.

> Abstract: Fatal crashes of private, business, and corporate-executive airplanes have increased after publicized murder-suicides. The more publicity given to a murder-suicide, the more crashes occurred. The increase in plane crashes occurred primarily in states where the murder-suicides were publicized. These findings suggest that murder-suicide stories trigger subsequent murder-suicides, some of which are disguised as airplane accidents.

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#24
post #2

If the descent was controlled gliding, the passengers (at least some of them) should be alive upon landing, shouldn’t they? Where are they now? Which theory could explain the absolute silence?

Even if all passengers were alive at the time of a water landing, getting out of a plane is tricky in the best of conditions. Getting out of a damaged, rapidly sinking plane is very hard or maybe impossible. Also, if you would get out of the plane, you are then in the middle of the indian ocean with just your life vest and the sharks. You get maybe 3 days, because the water is warm. And nobody will find you if they d…

When you get a sailing license, you learn that if a man goes overboard, it's best to be (at east) three. One goes overboard, one orders the other never to let the overboard man out of sight and to point with his arm outstretched in his direction, and the boatman uses the outstretched arm to the man overboard. It is impressive how quickly you lose sight of someone even in light waves.

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#25
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the pilot can depressurize the aircraft at high altitude. In such a case, the emergency oxygen masks for passengers will drop, but those are only rated for 15 to 30 minutes. After that Oxygen runs out, assuming the pilot maintains cruise altitude above 25000ft, everyone onboard will lose conscious via hypoxia within 1 minute, and be brain dead within 15 minutes. No one (except the pilot) would be alive to see the…

Yes, for those interested in this scenario, check Helios Airways Flight 522. I think that's what happened with MH370, except that the depressurization was deliberate. Most likely a single pilot stayed alive and functioning in the cockpit, eventually repressurizing the aircraft. Perhaps the pilot's goal was to hide all the evidence as well as possible, to create a perfect mystery. Then a controlled ditching would make…

We only have a clue where it might be because Zaharie likely powered “the AC bus back up…Unbeknownst to him, the satellite communication unit starts to acknowledge the satellite again. This is his one mistake — but it’s a forgivable one, as hardly any airline pilots knew about this system feature before the disappearance of MH370” [1].

Without that, debris would only hint at somewhere in the Indian Ocean, probably.

[1] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-y...

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#26
post #10
post #2

If the descent was controlled gliding, the passengers (at least some of them) should be alive upon landing, shouldn’t they? Where are they now? Which theory could explain the absolute silence?

https://youtu.be/Y5K9HBiJpuk I think Petter's (Mentour Pilot) delve into it is quite good - there's a lot of detail I hadn't known.

fwiw, it’s a really good YT channel. Nice equilibrium between an accessible discourse and going into every important detail. And nice illustrations with what I guess is from flight simulator.

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#27
post #2

If the descent was controlled gliding, the passengers (at least some of them) should be alive upon landing, shouldn’t they? Where are they now? Which theory could explain the absolute silence?

You can't really "land" in the Indian Ocean in an airliner. There has (famously) been a successful ditching of an airliner in a river, but I don't think there has ever been a successful ditching in the open ocean. Here's the kind of thing you can expect to happen even in much more favorable sea conditions close to the shore:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/3f7fkk...

(There were a number of survivors in this case, though.)

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#28
post #17

If anyone is interested in recently made content that recaps the whole thing, all the available information, some of the speculation, including the most recent news/information: * video by Mentour Pilot - https://youtu.be/Y5K9HBiJpuk * great read, as usual, by Admiral Cloudberg, slightly older: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-y...

“Malaysia Airlines operations…were tracking the plane on the Flight Explorer website, which, as they would only realize hours later, simply continued to display an aircraft’s projected path if its transponder stopped broadcasting position information.” What in the actual fuck. “…the supposed signals from the black boxes must have been false. Only much later was it discovered that the signals had probably come from th…

You look for the keys only under the light pole where there is light. If you can’t find them there assume a black hole materialized and swallowed them then disappeared.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#29
post #27
post #2

If the descent was controlled gliding, the passengers (at least some of them) should be alive upon landing, shouldn’t they? Where are they now? Which theory could explain the absolute silence?

You can't really "land" in the Indian Ocean in an airliner. There has (famously) been a successful ditching of an airliner in a river, but I don't think there has ever been a successful ditching in the open ocean. Here's the kind of thing you can expect to happen even in much more favorable sea conditions close to the shore: https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/3f7fkk... (There were a number of survi…

I don't know why I thought a controlled landing of a plane on water was generally possible. Maybe because of the pre-safety instructions where it sort of implies (maybe it's just me) that if a plane were to land on water, I could just put on a life vest, get the raft and get off. Looking at that footage and the death toll, feels like a miracle even that many people survived.

That makes me wonder if being able to land a passenger plane on water is ever a factor in its design.

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#30
post #2

If the descent was controlled gliding, the passengers (at least some of them) should be alive upon landing, shouldn’t they? Where are they now? Which theory could explain the absolute silence?

Debris of the plane were recovered. The plane crashed.
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