Malaysia Airlines Loses Contact With 777 en Route to Beijing

[kris]

Note: this is a few hundred miles away of where the Chinese sheep detected the signal for 90 seconds. Nothing against China, but I trust this Australian lead more.

Theoretically the recorders could split, one could sink faster that the other. Two signals are better than one

[Gabriel]

And I gave Brian credit for the murdercide, I thought he said it first, but doesn't matter I think the word should be added to wikipedia!

This is from 2005.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/murdercide/

[Gabriel]

Theoretically the recorders could split, one could sink faster that the other. Two signals are better than one

Except that:
a- How would both recorderds end hundreds of miles appart?
b- As quoted: "ADV Ocean Shield has identified two distinct sources of pings.". So if Ocean Shield identified two different sources in its area, and the Chinese ship detected another one hundreds of miles away, we have what? Three sources? Up to two of them can be from MH 370. And the other?

(Yes, I noted the in your comment)

[kris]

Except that:
a- How would both recorderds end hundreds of miles appart?

Still theoretically, one could somehow float for some time.

b- As quoted: "ADV Ocean Shield has identified two distinct sources of pings.". So if Ocean Shield identified two different sources in its area, and the Chinese ship detected another one hundreds of miles away, we have what? Three sources? Up to two of them can be from MH 370. And the other?

The Chinese could find the same recorder twice. They are using a long cable and the translation could be inaccurate.

Anyway there is IMHO a good chance that at least one signal was valid. Then perhaps the other one (pair) is also valid, or there is a second recorder next to the first one.

Not bad, given the circumstances.

[Evan]

Also got this today from another pilot friend, It is not by me I swear!!

http://www.reddit.com/r/MH370/commen..._flight_mh370/

I don't know. The cold-blooded nerve needed to do this seems to contradict the portrait he paints of the pilot being a sound-minded, human rights driven, non-radicalized veteran pilot.

Consider two previous pilot murdercide events.

Air Eqypt: In the final moments the F/O repeated prays to Allah. He is reciting a sort of mantra. He is obviously under extreme mental stress at this moment. The final act is done on impulse. I do not think he could keep this up for so many hours or even minutes. Suicide in this state of mind is an impulse, not a six hour ordeal.

9/11: The hijackers are highly radicalized and supporting each other thoughout the act. They believe they are about to enter heaven and are propelled by glory. Without this shared sense of glory, I do not think they could deal with the mental stress of what they are doing.

I'm not ruling the theory out. I think it is the best one we have so far. I just realize that such an act places any sane person under extreme mental stress and to maintain that stress for so many hours while flying to the final destination I think a person could lose their mind completely. But then maybe he did...

[Evan]

Off topic and I don't know what expert said that but it is bullshit. There is nothing that prevents an airplane from skimming the water if flown properly, in any flaps config. The problem was that Sully was descending at a somehow slowish airspeed, started to level-off a bit high, run out of speed a bit high, and hence touched down with a bit too much of sink rate.

Here another expert (supposed) pilot tells us that ditching is best done in MAX configuration:

Then sets his flaps to maximum at 30 to allow the plane to fly slow to 170 knots and sets the pitch to 5 degrees nose up, while at the same time throttling the engines back to idle. He hopes that the gentle glide path towards the surface of the Indian Ocean below and the slow speeds will keep the plane as intact as possible to reduce the amount of floating wreckage that a high speed impact would create

Do you disagree with this?

[Evan]

Forget about the search for a moment. What is the industry doing right now to prevent a single pilot hijacking scenario?

Here's where I would start: give each pilot a unique door access code that only they can override. No single pilot could lock the other pilot out of the cockpit.

Now, this seems painfully obvious. That brings up to possibilities in my mind: 1) the bureaucrats who formulate solutions like the current cockpit door locking systems just have no sense of the obvious, or 2) there is a downside to this I am not seeing.

So which is it?

[kris]

Forget about the search for a moment. What is the industry doing right now to prevent a single pilot hijacking scenario?

Here's where I would start: give each pilot a unique door access code that only they can override. No single pilot could lock the other pilot out of the cockpit.

Leaving the cockpit isn't required. One could simply strangle the other unsuspecting pilot to death.

[brianw999]

Leaving the cockpit isn't required. One could simply strangle the other unsuspecting pilot to death.

And if that did'nt work ? Have you ever tried to strangle someone ? It's not as easy as the films might suggest.

[TeeVee]

obviously i'm not a sound or ocean expert. in fact, i'm not an expert at anything. but it's common knowledge that sound travels WAY better and further underwater, so isn't it possible that the "DETECTION" of the sound 300 miles away is just where they happened to pick it up? no one has actually located the source of the pinging.

[Gabriel]

obviously i'm not a sound or ocean expert. in fact, i'm not an expert at anything. but it's common knowledge that sound travels WAY better and further underwater, so isn't it possible that the "DETECTION" of the sound 300 miles away is just where they happened to pick it up?

No. I'm no expert here, but experts say that the range is between 5 and 22 km.

[Gabriel]

The Chinese could find the same recorder twice. They are using a long cable and the translation could be inaccurate.

Anyway there is IMHO a good chance that at least one signal was valid. Then perhaps the other one (pair) is also valid, or there is a second recorder next to the first one.

Not bad, given the circumstances.

The Chinese are using a very basic equipment. They detected one signal for just a couple of seconds and lost it. After hours of trying to regain it, they located it (or another one) again for 90 seconds.

The Ocean Shield is the best equipment they have over there. They detected two sources at the same time during 140 minutes and then lost them. Turned around and detected them again for 13 minutes.

So we have at least 3 different signals: 2 confirmed in the Ocean Shield plus one or two in the Chinese vessel.

I don't know which of them detected a black box (signal is not equal to black box). Maybe neither did. But I bet that at least one of them didn't (there are not 3 or 4 black boxes in the area). And if one of them did, the evidence favor Ocean Shield.

[Gabriel]

Here another expert (supposed) pilot tells us that ditching is best done in MAX configuration:

Do you disagree with this?

I would tend to think that max is best. Airbus doesn't agree. I don't know what Boeing says. You are good at finding procedures online.

The logic for using MAX is being able to touch down with minimum FORWARD (not vertical) speed. Vertical speed is minimized with the flare maneuver.

The logic for using less than max (a middle config that gives most of the lift but with quite less drag) is that a glide with max is too steep and a flare from that will be long (you have to rotate more degrees) and energy consuming, compromising the ability to minimize the vertical speed.

Again, my gut feeling says that if you use config max and make a glide at flaps limit speed for that config, even when it will be a steep glide, you'll have a lot of knots of margin to flare, level off a few feet above the surface, and hold it there slowly raising the nose as the speed bleeds, until finally greasing it on the water.

Again, Airbus doesn't agree and I don't know Boeing.

[elaw]

And if that did'nt work ? Have you ever tried to strangle someone ? It's not as easy as the films might suggest.

Well here in the US we've got that covered with our "guns in the cockpit" program, which makes it possible for one pilot to take out the other quickly and conveniently.

[Gabriel]

Well here in the US we've got that covered with our "guns in the cockpit" program

You made me lough. The official name of the program, Flight Deck Officer, has much better marketing. If the name was Guns in the Cockpit I think people would have more reserves.