MH370 disappearance: Goodfellow's theory about fire and Langkawi is wrong. • Hacker News Board

Re: MH370 disappearance: Goodfellow's theory about fire and Langkawi is wrong.

#31

Post by erddojo » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 6:57 AM UTC

I absolutely think a fire theory would be valid, after all the plane was carrying a large load of lithium batteries.

However, that's precisely the factor that calls Goodfellow's fire theory into question (for me). If a fire broke out that was strong enough to disable comms and/or knock out pilots, then it was strong enough to set off those batteries.

No way the plane flew seven more hours in that scenario. Even if the fire was contained to the cabin and there wasn't a pilot left to fly the plane, someone at some point in those seven hours would've found a cell signal to call for help.

Unless, of course, there was no 7 hours and that satellite ping was for another plane. In that case, I'm thinking is the plane would've gone down soon after the transponder went off and the wreckage would've been found by now.

Personally, I have no clue what happened to this plane.

Re: MH370 disappearance: Goodfellow's theory about fire and Langkawi is wrong.

#32

Post by effdee » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 7:03 AM UTC

einhverfr wrote: post #27

alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hijacking and crazy pilot theories are most plausible. Hijackera were simply irrational and forced them to go to Australia or something like that. Has happened before. Or the pilot wanted to commit suicide in a bizarre manner. Or he had a psychotic episode. All of these are more plausible than Rube Goldberg mechanical failures or James Bond terrorist plots.

My problem though is that getting the plane onto the ground without anyone noticing (which is the only explanation I can think of that ties in the lack of the transponder to this as well as no followup sightings at, say, major airports). That's a big question, and it suggests a level of clandestine resources I have trouble imagining being the case in Australia.

Australia is out of question. The plane would have been detected by the JORN [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JORN

Re: MH370 disappearance: Goodfellow's theory about fire and Langkawi is wrong.

#33

Post by alexeisadeski3 » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 7:34 AM UTC

einhverfr wrote: post #28

alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple bungled hijacking is very much a possibility.

Flying into the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night with no transponder never to be seen again? If it is a bungled hijacking it is still not a simple "take me to this airport or I will start killing people" case.

"Take me to an airport in Australia, fly low over Malaysia and circumnavigate Indonesia to avoid radar. Disable all tracking tools so that the authorities don't shoot us down. I'm wearing a suicide vest so you must follow my orders."

Then the plane runs out of fuel in the ocean.

Re: MH370 disappearance: Goodfellow's theory about fire and Langkawi is wrong.

#34

Post by leoc » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 7:54 AM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #9

alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #5

The theory was obviously wrong even when it was on the front page of HN two days ago: 1. It does not account for course changes made after the initial diversion from the flight path. 2. It does not account for the final known location of the aircraft along the infamous "arc" off of Australia and Kazakhstan. The popularity of the theory was and remains puzzling.

Dunno. 1 and 2 could be experimental error. Here's his rebuttal cut and pasted: GOODFELLOW REBUTTAL...Interesting analysis of my analysis. New information surfaced today of several people in the Maldives seeing a large white airliner with three red stripes flying overhead at 6:15am the following morning. This coincides nicely with the 2000 nautical mile distance from the original turn made 5 hours before approx. 400…

#2 (the arcs based on the final SATCOM reading) would have to be radically wrong for the Maldives sighting to be a genuine MH370 sighting, or for the straight-west-until-the-end theory to be correct at all. I suppose it's possible that someone got the calculation based on signal strength (or was it latency?) horribly wrong, but wow what a big clanger it would be.

(The Maldives report and SATCOM conflict under any theory of the incident, btw: a 777 simply can't cover the distance from any point on the arcs to the Maldives in an hour.)

For perspective, it seems there are now reported could-have-been-MH370 sightings more or less wherever you want them in the region, such as as south and east of where the transponders were switched off: http://www.countercurrents.org/jkp180314.htm .

Oh, and speaking of eyewitness reports, IIRC the Thai authorities don't believe that MH370 ever entered Thailand (based on their radar data). It's hard to draw a straight line from just south of Thailand to the Maldives without clipping southern Sri Lanka or western Malaysia around Aceh.

#1 is easier to try to knock down, at least partly. One aircraft could be mistaken for another, the readings must have margins of error, and it's not clear that the charts showing a VAMPI -> GIVAL -> IGREX path for the aircraft aren't based on reading something into the radar data which isn't fully supported there. OTOH, supposedly the radar traces attributed to MH370 were verified against the SATCOM readings, though I can't find a good source for that so caveat emptor.

Re: MH370 disappearance: Goodfellow's theory about fire and Langkawi is wrong.

#35

Post by ekianjo » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 9:40 AM UTC

alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #33

einhverfr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flying into the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night with no transponder never to be seen again? If it is a bungled hijacking it is still not a simple "take me to this airport or I will start killing people" case.

"Take me to an airport in Australia, fly low over Malaysia and circumnavigate Indonesia to avoid radar. Disable all tracking tools so that the authorities don't shoot us down. I'm wearing a suicide vest so you must follow my orders." Then the plane runs out of fuel in the ocean.

We can't rule this out completely, but I don't know, it kind of seems unlikely since there would have been attempts at communication from passengers in the plane once they would notice the plane flying very low.

Re: MH370 disappearance: Goodfellow's theory about fire and Langkawi is wrong.

#36

Post by alexeisadeski3 » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 10:27 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #35

alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Take me to an airport in Australia, fly low over Malaysia and circumnavigate Indonesia to avoid radar. Disable all tracking tools so that the authorities don't shoot us down. I'm wearing a suicide vest so you must follow my orders." Then the plane runs out of fuel in the ocean.

We can't rule this out completely, but I don't know, it kind of seems unlikely since there would have been attempts at communication from passengers in the plane once they would notice the plane flying very low.

Even if everyone on the plane were deceased, the phones which were left on should have picked up the network at 5,000ft over the Malaysian Peninsula.

The fact that they evidently did not connect to their networks is... yet another mystery.

It's possible that phone jammers were used.

Either way, mechanical failure theories can't explain the lack of phone-network connections (fire disables all aircraft communications AND all cell phones AND doesn't destroy the plane? Bizarro). Hijacking theories technically can, but only tenuously (jammers? seriously?).