That Missing Plane

Maybe not, but it's not like the information couldn't be found out, at least approximately. It will be great if the Aussies actually do know the approximate path the jet took.

 

if this is true, why can't i find the item in a google 'news' search?... the only reference to an abc reporter is this [dated yesterday]:

6:58pm: David Wroe: The US broadcaster ABC, which had a reporter on board the P-8 Poseidon, reported that plane also had returned home without finding anything.

abc may be embarrassed at having misrepresented his report and pulled the story, since no mention of it has emerged on cnn... and i've been keeping both domestic and int'l channels on all day...

 

I saw it the same night they first sent out a search plane. It was at about 2 am which was later in the day in Australia. I guess we'll soon find out, because everything I've seen lately has said they can't find anything anymore.

 

I had to laugh at CNN this morning. Since the search planes aren't yet finding anything the newscaster exclaimed how bad it was the families' hopes had been raised so high.

She has no clue they are the people responsible!!!!! The official reports I've heard have all been, it's a possibility but not certain. On CNN they've been reporting "debris found" not, a fuzzy image might be debris.

 

The real sad thing is, the Black box recorder only has about a 30 day battery time, and the Malaysian government wasted all those days of searching by all the different governments. So now they might not have enough days left to find the black box while it still has power.

 

I'm not even certain, though how much the black boxes will help. The cockpit voice recorder is unlikely to yield much, since it re-records every 2 hours, so what's really relevant -- the time period when the plane made that initial sharp turn to the west will be long-recorded over and hence, inaccessible. The other black box will be more useful, but IF the plane went down where it did, given that that location is exactly where it was projected to go down when it ran out of fuel, I don't know how illuminating that will be for us, either. The most helpful thing is probably finding the plane or, really, parts of the plane itself and reconstructing it to see what might have been on fire or damaged in an unexpected way.

 

Given the number of things that appear to have failed or been shut down, it's possible the voice recorder was too. So there may still be some useful recording on there.

The data recorder should at least indicate what failed and when, if, say, there was a fire on the plane.

 

The Malaysian govenment is now officially declaring the plane to have crashed in the Indian ocean, siting the availability of fuckall landing locations and coming to the conclusion that the plane couldn't have landed safely on the water.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-flight-370.html?hp&_r=0

 

Such a weird event.

 

I don't quite understand how the Malaysian government suddenly came to this decisive conclusion.

 

It wasn't them. It was complicated calculations and modeling done by the INMARSAT company and not sure but maybe also with help from other countries' expertise like the US, Australia and the UK.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/24/us-malaysiaairlines-flight-idUSBREA2701720140324

 

It still strikes me as a strange announcement from the Malaysian government. Certainly there is more and more evidence pointing in that direction, but it seems like such a strange definitive conclusion/statement.

 

I think they are just tired of putting the families through the trouble that they are, and given the low chances that it could be anything else, it became an educated guess to ease the families' pain.

 

But jumping to a conclusion, no matter how likely it appears that that conclusion may be, isn't helpful. I think the more proper official statement would have been to release the exact analysis, stating that those satellite pings or information indicate that the plane was last flying over the southern Indian Ocean, west of Australia, and they are, for right now, going to operate on that assumption.

 

From what I saw today, the analyst said that by now, that the only section they probably ever will find is the part of the fuselage where the wins intersect and the body is the lightest but strongest. Other than that, everything else will have sunk to the bottom of a very deep part of the ocean or been broken up into very tiny pieces by the choppy waters.

 

There are legal ramifications to prolonging the investigation. With the conclusion that the plane is lost and all aboard perished the heirs of those on board can get assets released, make funeral arrangements, etc.

Until the government declared the plane lost all of those people were in limbo, and the bureaucratic process of death could not be completed.

 

The government could declare the plane lost and categorize the people as dead without stating that it fell into the ocean at that particular spot.

 

I'm not sure what you mean here, or if you read the article, but there was no "particular spot". They said that the plane was over the ocean, couldn't have made it to land, and couldn't have landed safely in the water.

 

They said something along the lines of, "The flight ended in the Southern Indian Ocean." It was oddly worded. Of course, this whole incident is odd.

 

I don't think that's what's going on here @chicagoliz. Basically they finally have enough data, it sounds like it's reached irrefutable, exactly what path the jet took. The data came from analyzing radar and satellite data that came from the jet itself.

It wasn't a simple analysis and took putting together data from different sources that different countries and private entities had. And I think the final piece was comparing the data to data from known jet flight paths with similar data the satellites received.

The reason the Malaysian government made the official announcement was it was a Malaysian jet.

I think a bit of this was known when the US and Australia started putting so many resources in the area to search for debris. At first it seemed like they were just going by the satellite images, but in retrospect, I think there was more information there not yet released to the public.

There is evidence the jet flew at 12,000 feet over land, which keeps it out of active flight paths of other jets. Then it went around the tip of Indonesia turned south and had to have climbed back up to normal flying altitude or it wouldn't have been sending out signals as long as it did. At 12,000 feet the fuel would have run out sooner.

I hope for the families' sake they find debris so the families can have more closure. I don't think they are guessing any more though as to what has actually happened.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/23/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/

Why, OTOH, remains an unanswered question.

 

You would prefer, "Flight 370 crashed into the ocean like a pair of testicles on a balance beam, scattering debris and human remains over an uncaring ocean."?

I think "ended" is the least descriptive, and correct, word.

 

I'm not sure how well a 777 glides but the lighter a plane is the easier it glides. So if it can glide, it glides better once it's out of fuel. Sully landed a plane with engines out, which is a glider. Same thing. But the Hudson is pretty smooth compared to those parts of the Indian Ocean which can have huge swells that make ditching successfully awfully hard.

 

So much sooner that some say they wouldn't have been able to make it to where they said they made it to. The plot thickens.

 

Perhaps you missed a bit. The plane descended but then returned to the typical cruising altitude. The plot already congealed, sill missing the recipe but the ingredients are fairly well agreed upon.

Take a Google gander at the latest INMARSAT reports.