Heard on the news that the two men who boarded the plane with stolen passports were not 'of asian appearance, but black'. The plot thickens:hmmm:

The stolen passports may be a false lead, in another crash there was found to be 10 people travelling on stolen passports as part of illegal immigration, not terrorism.

False passports are swiftly becoming 'par for the course'....for more reasons than many of us would understand.

So it turned out that oil slick was just from a passing ship. In other news a man claimed to have seen what looked like the white light of a plane falling out of the sky. And finally it seems that an Iranian was the one who bought the tickets that were using the stolen passports for some "friends" of his. I still doubt it was a bombing since no debris have been spotted yet.

Still highly contradictory information coming out about exactly when/where radar and voice contact was lost. Also about the supposed contact via another MH pilot over 121.5 MhZ.

Impossible to speculate cause with anything other than blind guesswork right now.

First clue will be radar tapes and voice logs. Don't expect that for a couple of weeks.

This has a lot to do with the strength of various radar systems.

Civil ATC probably has a large "blind spot" or an area of no radar coverage in the area where they had problems. This is why trans oceanic flights have to frequently transmit position reports in the blind.

a stronger radar might not have this lapse in coverage.

this is why civil ATC says radar contact was lost at point A while military radar says nope it was point B.

The aircraft i flew in part 121 operations had ACARS... it would generally transmit our position and stats every 10 minutes i guess. Sometimes you would hear it chirp in your headset... like a little scratch noise for a second and youd look at the ACARS screen and briefly see "XMIT" when this took place. Our system was land based like cell phones if i remember correctly. I loved ACARS because you could text message your dispatcher from virtually anywhere. "Weather delay, ATC directs us to hold at DELAY intersection, Fuel status 4800lb" and they would calculate our hold times new fuel requirements and coordinate diversions to alternate with our folks on the ground... that way we could focus on the immediate issues of the flight.

I've never flown trans oceanic... so i assume their ACARS systems are probably GPS based, if so... the airline should have a record of these position reports until things went south.

think of air france 447... the airline knew things were hitting the fan through the whole emergency situation. They had data.

also... what was it lik 8 or 10 days before they even spotted debris? could be a similar span of time here with this flight.

That pilot supposedly having contact with them is new. You have a link to the source of that news?

Yeah... i havnt heard that

What would be the logistics involved in google redirecting google earth satellites to take high resolution photos of the region so Google Earth users could search for debris?

didnt they do this with the search for steve fosset's crash?

It can't be all that hard to do. Main problem I see is getting the sats into position to take the photos.

Would depend on where the satellites are now, plus the magnification required, I think it's about a 100 mile radius (assuming a 777 has an unpowered glide ability of about 100 miles from FL350) and then you've got cloud cover to factor in as well.
I imagine the PRC has probably vectored in one or two of their satellites to cover the area, but it really is somewhat of a needle in a large haystack.
Right now we don't even know for certain that it went down in the sea, or that the location where ACARS stopped transmitting is the start point of any glide path.

Ah, just spotted this linked at pprune:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A2A03V20140311

The PRC has deployed 10 satellites to scour the ocean, that should hopefully help a bit. :yep:


EDIT: Here's a bit of a disturbing video I found on pprune, a bit of an electronic Achilles heel in the 777.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLmzvF2qkDY

That video has me thinking. What if the plane didn't crash but instead landed on a hidden airport?

It would be pretty hard to hide an airport capable of supporting a 777 IMHO. They would need at least 8,000-10,000 foot of clear, mostly improved runway for the aircraft to return to the air, and probably fuel in place, and a large enough space to not only park the aircraft but hide it from the view of passing aircraft and satellites

then again maybe hiding such an aircraft facility isnt that difficult, i dunno?

The thought of it being stolen is pretty hair raising. I could only think of a couple of reasons a terrorist organization would have for stealing such an aircraft.

and i cannot think of a way to get into the flight deck in cruise flight to accomplish this feat. When i flew part 121 we would close the door before push back, and it wouldn't be re-opened until at the jet bridge at the destination. I assume this practice is pretty universal this day in age.

One might try to lure a member of the flight crew out of the cockpit somehow, but again... there are procedures for getting into and out the cockpit and reasons that warrant it and many reasons that dont.

A Terrorist desperate enough to get in might threaten to kill passengers one at a time until the door is opened... but we were always advised that more people would almost certainly die if we ever let the bastard in... and even if we did let them in is to be assumed that they would surely all die anyhow in the post 9/11 environment such as it is.

besides, in most situations the crew would have some warning that someone aboard was up to no good these days if an event as described above played out, and they would be able to communicate their plight. ie using the interphone to tell the captain "let me in or ill kill these people"

The only way that a hijacking theft of the aircraft would play out so fast that they couldnt issue a distress call, is (1) if all or most of the folks with the stolen passports were in on the plot (2) they were all seated as close to the cockpit door as possible (3) when, if for some reason the door was opened they all rushed it in an attempt to takeover the aircraft and the crew couldn't close it back fast enough (4) the hijackers had the requisite knowledge to render the aircraft's systems invisible to radar and other means of tracking with immediate effect.

hard to say where it is or what happened - its really all guess work until the authorities figure it out. and as we all know that could take a couple of years.

From yahoo news:

Yeah, the whole "stealing" theory is pretty unlikely to say the least. Anyone who has the resources to stealthily hijack and then conceal a 777 would easily have the resources to buy or lease a 777 of their own. So they wouldn't need the aircraft, and if they were out for anything/anyone on it, there are far easier ways of getting that before/after it's aboard the 777.

Well it's got as much chance as being right as any other theory at the moment. Still shouldn't the black boxes be transmitting homing beacons or something like that?