BoatBanter.com - Warsaw is lovely this time of year...

On 4/23/2014 12:24 AM, wrote:
On Tue, 22 Apr 2014 22:40:07 -0400, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 4/22/2014 10:18 PM, wrote:
On Tue, 22 Apr 2014 20:26:13 -0400, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 4/22/2014 8:07 PM, wrote:
On Tue, 22 Apr 2014 18:15:13 -0500, Boating All Out
wrote:

It has been so long that finding debris would only confirm that the
plane landed in the water. There is still a remote possibility that it
is wadded up on the side of a mountain but then the question of why we
didn't hear an ELT becomes more valid.

The most likely scenario is it hit the water hard and went down before
the ELTs actually got going.

There is so much trash in the ocean that it might be easy to overlook
debris.

What's an "ELT"?

Emergency locator transmitter Basically like an EPIRB. There is one on
every door with a slide and one in the tail according to CNN's 777
geek.

The big question in this tragedy is what caused the flight transponder
and apparently *all* means of communications to be cut off? There are
backups to backups on aircraft like this, designed to operate if there
is a failure in the electrical supply system in any part of the aircraft.

That is why they say this was a conscious effort by someone
knowledgable enough to know how to turn these things off.

There must be a reason but it's hard to understand how *all* power and
means of communications was suddenly and permanently lost yet the
aircraft apparently continued to fly for several hours. The sudden
decompression theory and crew and passenger unconsciousness could
explain why voice communications was lost but it doesn't explain the
transponder. Just doesn't make any sense.

I agree, unless it was a deliberate criminal act.
Someone wanted this plane to disappear without a trace and they seemed
to do a damned good job of it.

The kid who landed in Hawaii seems to fly in the face of the idea that
everyone in a depressurized cabin would have died.
They had a guy on CNN with the statistic that of over 120 people who
stowed away in a wheel well on an airliner about 20% made it.
Some who didn't simply fell out when the bay door opened.

The FDR is really the only thing that might shed some light on this,
if they ever find it. The CVR will have overwritten the first 4+ hours
of the flight.
If someone actually got into the equipment bay and cut power to all of
that stuff, we know it was a criminal act.

It dawned on me what ELT meant after I hit send. I was just reading up
on them though:

In the USA the FAA requires them in international commercial flights as
does several other nations, but not all. There's a question regarding
the ELT(s) that were on the Malaysian 777. It was delivered from Boeing
with four of them in 2002 but they were of the older type (different
frequency) and were not GPS capable. They relied on at least two
satellite passes, using the Doppler effect to determine location. The
newer, current ELT transmit on another freq and are GPS capable for
location determination. Apparently there are no records available at
Malaysian Air as to whether the original ELTs were ever updated ... or
even maintained. The airlines has refused to answer any questions about
them. They could have been the originals that are now 12 years old and
may not have even been functional.

Yup that is the other thing. We always assume everyone has the same
level of sophistication and maintenance as we expect from an American
carrier.
We also assume their air traffic control and military radar is as good
as ours.
I have seen plenty of guys who were paraded on "the airplane channel"
who said these military operations can get pretty sloppy at night or
even during the day. That is why the idea that this plane eventually
headed north is not totally out of the question although it is not
what the data they have released indicates.
There are still people who think the plane will be found somewhere and
that there are survivors. I think they are just in denial.

I am halfway there... I believe the passengers were killed early on with
a climb to 45 thousand and dumping the cabin pressure. This is almost
certain if you think about how AlQueda learns from it's mistakes and
starting with Pennsylvania, several attempts to harm a carrier have been
thwarted by the passengers in the last ten years or so...

I still believe the plane was going "somewhere" besides the bottom of
the ocean or suicide... The only real "ping" type signal they really
have from the engines give an arc that runs from central India almost to
Indonesia... They have extrapolated other possible signals but they
really don't know where the plane is, based on what they have told us..