Well the Australians think they might have spotted some debris in the south Indian Ocean that could be part of the plane.
Yeah, if it did go south, that's good news; they would probably be able to estimate how far the wreckage travelled and go searching for the aircraft pinger before it runs out. Of course it would also mean there's about zero chance of any survivors by now.
I'm concerned the news media is jumping the gun, they've turned to constant coverage of the Aussie finding. But one has to wonder if the Aussies are going to turn out to be skilled at satellite interpretation while the Chinese weren't. The news in the US certainly hints that the NTSB has more expertise here than China or Malaysia. I am curious how the news is presenting this information in other countries.
Now they are saying on ABC that a U.S. plane flew by at 300 feet and that it was a lost ship and a pod of dolphins, yet all these other stations are still lost. ABC actually had a reporter on the plane, so he really scooped everyone else.
If it landed in the water, though, the plane would have broken up. It simply would have been going too fast not to. There are lots of things in a plane that float, so something would/will eventually be found.
This is one instance where the news is correct -- the US has the most knowledgable, most sophisticated airline disaster investigators and airline crash knowledge. We have much more air traffic than any other country and we were, after all, the first. The FAA ends up investigating or assisting in the investigation of virtually every significant airline crash in the world. And all flying communications, anywhere in the world, are conducted in English.
Are you sure you aren't mixing your satellite images up? They've been covering this on all the 24 hr news stations almost non-stop. Ridiculous considering not much else can be found during 12 hours of night it is over the area at the moment. And some stations, CNN in particular, keep announcing "debris found" instead of the truth, "a satellite image is worth checking out."
Sully Sullenberger landed a jet on the Hudson that didn't break up. It depends on the angle of descent. Of course if it flew until the fuel ran out, one might expect a nose dive, total destruction impact. Unless it was flying at a very low elevation near the end but then that implies an awake pilot or the fuel would not have gotten the jet that far south.
Yes, but that was very rare, and it was a concern. Generally when a pilot tries to ditch a plane on water, the plane breaks up. There's video of an Ethiopian Airlines jet that tried to do just that. If it ran out of fuel, it probably wouldn't nosedive, but glide for a bit, but I still wouldn't expect any sort of soft water landing. If the plane did end up in the area where they're now looking for it, that seems to indicate that it did, in fact, simply travel until it ran out of fuel. That seems to indicate that the pilots and perhaps everyone, were incapacitated, because I don't understand why someone who had an ability to control the plane would just let it go until it ran out of fuel. If they'd wanted to crash it, they could have done it much earlier and could have done it in spectacular fashion.
The "miracle on the Hudson" was a mid-size plane on a particularly still body of water. The ocean surface is MUCH less flat and stable, and a larger plane would be much more vulnerable to sheering forces than a mid-sized one. Water is not a soft surface as far as aircraft are concerned.
I'm curious if they have used the 'secret but not secret' Australian over the horizon defense radar that covers that area of the world to see if it tracked anything. And if they haven't, why not?
Some idiot announcer asked if it could have been sucked into a black hole. http://news.yahoo.com/cnn-black-hole-malaysia-flight-370-theories-144151381.html
Looks to me like at least #2 should have seen the jet unless the pilot programed the route to be just beyond range. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jindalee_Operational_Radar_Network
It's interesting how many people will start creating answers, even ridiculous answers that make no logical sense, in order to somehow understand something that is currently not known. Human behavior is pretty consistent. The fact is we don't know but there are plenty of possible, rational explanations that will make perfect sense once (hopefully) the truth comes out. But that could take years, as it often does.
But the pilot would have no idea what the effective range of the radar system is. Personally I think the pilot has nothing to do with it. It was possibly an electrical fire that knocked out the comms systems and filled the cabin with smoke. The first thing you do is lower altitude and the second is divert to a nearby airport. Who knows why they kept flying. Maybe smoke incapacitated the flight-deck. Their masks can only do so much, as has been proven by many flights that have been brought down by fires or lack of air pressure knocking out the crew - specifically Air Helios.
It was on Wiki, I'm pretty sure that much is at least public knowledge. I thought the jet went up to 45K feet initially.
