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

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

#81
post #29

Fascinating article. I had a chuckle at this excerpt: >The Malaysian investigators did look into whether the cargo could have started a fire, noting that it consisted mainly of ripe mangosteen fruits along with a small number of lithium batteries. Extensive attempts by the investigators to get mangosteen juice to react with the batteries and trigger a fire were unsuccessful. I'm sure plenty of people here have spent…

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

I got to take a tour of SWRI when I was younger, and they have one of these chicken guns in one of their testing facilities. They also have a locker full of machine guns for testing bullet resistance of vehicles etc.

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

#82
post #63
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…

If you enjoy this sort of thing, I'd encourage you to check out this guy. https://www.youtube.com/user/blancolirio

-- adding mentour pilot: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiNyr6QSO28P2bKMcv2O_... --

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

#83
post #72

As someone who doesn't have intuition about these things: what are the chances that an 777 could have crashed and yet many years later very very few of its debris showed up or were spotted anywhere in the world (also factoring in intense search efforts around the most likely places where it crashed)? Is this one of these 1 in a billion chance thing or is it not as crazy as it sounds? Like even if you were intentional…

the ocean is sadly like > 10K feet deep and many miles away from any land around where the plane is likely to have hit the water

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

#84
post #29

Fascinating article. I had a chuckle at this excerpt: >The Malaysian investigators did look into whether the cargo could have started a fire, noting that it consisted mainly of ripe mangosteen fruits along with a small number of lithium batteries. Extensive attempts by the investigators to get mangosteen juice to react with the batteries and trigger a fire were unsuccessful. I'm sure plenty of people here have spent…

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

After the joke fiasco, and since it's a government job, i'm sure there is someone employed there to thaw them first :D

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

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flight recorders are called black boxes because they originally were black-colored boxes. "Black box" in the sense that you are describing is an unrelated term.

Wikipedia agrees! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_recorder#Terminology

nb: Wikipedia favours verifiability over truth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wp:vnt

> Wikipedia values accuracy, but it requires verifiability. Wikipedia does not try to impose "the truth" on its readers, and does not ask that they trust something just because they read it in Wikipedia. We empower our readers. We don't ask for their blind trust.

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

#86

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…

Even more, I imagine the average flight would look extraordinary. You would always hit some rare event if you looked hard enough. Rare events are so common! What are the odds that this many people on the plane were military / government / communists / CEOs / Jews / elderly? Well, pretty high if you're looking after-the-fact. And if you look into the background of every person and started reaching out a bit it would get weirder. You'd have tons of former whatevers, brother-in-laws of important people, criminals, all sorts. And people would be absolutely certain it meant something.

In the case of MH370, this is why I always found the simulator history of the pilot the most relevant. It doesn't require this long chain of relationships like some other things. It is the most impactful person recently doing something related to the event that is extremely weird behavior.

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

#87
post #26
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about that easy. Of course, masks are a-gonna drop, and flight attendants are going to put on portable oxygen bottles... and of course the crew should descend. But the whole plane architecture is built on the idea that you're trusting the people in the front with everyone's lives.

I think the point being that accidentally hitting this switch is probably of some concern.

It's not going to be accidentally hit. And even if somehow it does get hit accidentally, there's a CABIN ALTITUDE warning that would go off before it becomes a problem.

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

#88
post #72

As someone who doesn't have intuition about these things: what are the chances that an 777 could have crashed and yet many years later very very few of its debris showed up or were spotted anywhere in the world (also factoring in intense search efforts around the most likely places where it crashed)? Is this one of these 1 in a billion chance thing or is it not as crazy as it sounds? Like even if you were intentional…

Not at all unlikely. That is one of the loneliest pieces of a very large ocean. A lot of the recognizable stuff will sink, and the stuff that floats will spend months being broken down by seawater or having stuff grow on it. Eventually it will wash up on a beach where it will be cleaned up with the literal tons of trash that wash up on any beach these days. Or will not be cleaned up because it is a place where humans don’t go.

If you think of a pristine beach its pristine because it gets cleaned up regularly. Any ocean facing beach these days accumulates so much trash. I used to do beach cleanup surveys on windward coasts, and we would regularly find stuff that could have belonged to an airplane (carbon fiber, composite honeycomb, etc.) it was almost never worth investigating since there was almost no way to know how long it had been in that beach and how long it had been floating in the currents before that. This was in the Caribbean, so I mostly assumed that all that stuff was related to drug smuggling planes. The only time we ever got a call back about something we found on the beach is when we found a drift buoy from NOAA.

This is the long way of saying that it surprises me not a bit that nothing much was found. It’s more surprising that anything at all was found

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

#89
post #72

As someone who doesn't have intuition about these things: what are the chances that an 777 could have crashed and yet many years later very very few of its debris showed up or were spotted anywhere in the world (also factoring in intense search efforts around the most likely places where it crashed)? Is this one of these 1 in a billion chance thing or is it not as crazy as it sounds? Like even if you were intentional…

There's not much watching the middle of the southern Indian Ocean, a large fraction of which is literally more than a thousand miles away from any place humans usually inhabit. It's one of the most remote, desolate, hostile regions of the planet. I can see the appeal as a suicide method. You fly out for a while, it's quiet and pleasant, and before long there's no turning back, no possibility of rescue.

And we also have discovered numerous pieces of MH370 debris, all in the kinds of places in eastern Africa where the simulations said they should end up.

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

#90
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they made this up and he never flew that route, on his simulator or otherwise.

Huh? The article has " In 2014, a leaked Malaysian police report revealed that among Zaharie’s saved flight simulator sessions was a very odd route which ran up the Strait of Malacca, turned south after passing Sumatra, and then flew straight down into the Southern Indian Ocean before terminating in the vicinity of the seventh arc. Not only did the track resemble MH370’s actual flight path, it also contained a number…

Simply parroting information that is accused of being fake because it appeared in another source isn’t an argument for its validity.
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