Missing Malaysia Air plane

[KenAdams]

It's so sad. They still haven't found anything, but thinks it's crashed into the sea.

For anyone that hasn't heard

I don't think all countries give a toss about liquid restrictions either. I flew from Uganda to Dubai in 2007 and could take whatever I wanted on the flight drinks wise. Then from Dubai you can get a flight to wherever and as you're already air side I'm not sure they recheck whats in your hand luggage.

R4 lunchtime news mentioned that the airline check-in (not passport control) is where passports are examined on an outbound flight, & the airlines don't have access to the Interpol database.

Time they did then!

If nothing else I hope this tragedy will lead to a major overhaul of international air security. I had sort of assumed that after 9/11, when it was revealed how lax US security used to be, it would be tightened up worldwide.

Weirdly I watched Cast away last night and blindly keep going that survivors will be found :-(

You'd have hoped they would hve fund at least some trace by now surely?

How awful for those family and friends waiting for news.

The aircrew forum, pprune, has an extremely long discussion going on.

They seem as puzzled as the rest of us.

Iirc the restrictions on liquids are soon to be lifted. And for all those calling for tighter security, we don't actually know that terrorism is a factor here, there is no wreckage, no organisation has come forward, there is no evidence to point to it.
There are hundreds of reasons why someone might travel on a false passport, any numbers of crimes and I doubt it's uncommon.

Apparently the supposed Italian and Austrian (stolen passports) were Asian in appearance. They think it may be a Chinese ethnic group terrorist attack with Al Qaeda training?

no, they are black - specifically NOT Asian

wannabe, I don't care if this particular case was terrorism or not - I would prefer people in general not to be able to travel on false passports!

Caitlyn - I've been reading pprune as well. But the mods seem to be deleting a lot of posts, which makes the thread hard to follow.

I've been following the Pprune thread since it began, it's an intriguing mixture of detail from those who have been involved in such cases, those who know the area, and wild conspiracy theorists!

Beibg a wild conspiracy theorist is one of the qualifications necessary for being a pilot - they have to have something to talk about when trapped together in a tiny space for hours on end.

DH is now arguing with me that more than about 3 no-shows is unusual.

It's a mystery. Sadly there is very little hope of a happy outcome.

Oh and the liquids rule has only been kept to to reassure the public for years now. It's been circumventable for years.

That's a particularly conspiracy strewn prune thread though!

I think I'm just going to lay it to rest now. The whole thing, for the time being. It's just too close to home for comfort. Even when I was reading the initial headlines the aircraft type was changing to the type one of my lot flies which is a totally different make altogether, and the one who does fly a Boeing I knew was on leave and not at work but it was still very scary.

The number of no-shows isn't relevant, providing their luggage was offloaded.

I've been reading pprune for a few years now. It's not so good as it used to be, mostly because most people who might have a clue, e.g. pilots, engineers, gave up on that bit of the forum a while ago - because of all the conspiracy theories that get posted there.

Is it true that there have been 10x 7700 squawks today?

If so, why?
That's a crazy number!

I can well understand, Caitlyn. It's a very difficult time for those with connections to the airline industry.

I got drawn to pprune because my late father was a senior aircraft maintenance engineer, and he was the one who signed off an aircraft as being airworthy. One of "his" aircraft disappeared off radar (pilot/ATC issues, total loss of life, long time ago) so I tend to think about the maintenance people and how many of them have been thinking about the work they did on the Malaysian aircraft, and worrying if they did something wrong.

I understand.

Our whole life is 2nd generation aviation from flight deck to engineering to cabin crew to ground crew.

To be honest I hate hearing about the odd occasion when one will tell one of the others about having a wee tickle up my spine today.

Its all just so very sad and scary, this situation.

Where did you hear that Beaver?

I guess you get it from all sides, Caitlyn, in your family. People in all manner of occupations use a kind of shorthand talk, such as a "wee tickle". It works for them, but it's not easy for someone who's listening to it.

Beaver - are you saying that there have been ten 7700 squawks today? Obviously I'm no expert, but I would think that ten 7700s is possibly not very significant. But I'm only basing that on the number of aircraft in the sky at any one time, from looking at www.flightradar24.com

7700 is a general "emergency" code, which could mean anything as it's not very specific.

Also, I've looked up transponder codes on wikipedia, and an example is given there about being careful about changing squawk codes:

"Care must be taken not to squawk any emergency code during a code change. For example, when changing from 1200 to 6501 (an assigned ATC squawk), one might turn the second wheel to a 5 (thus 1500), and then rotate the first wheel backwards in the sequence 1-0-7-6 to get to 6. This would momentarily have the transponder squawking a hijack code (7500), which might lead to more attention than one desires."

That's written in a somewhat lighthearted fashion, but I wouldn't want to be an air traffic controller getting a 7500 squawk.

The world of aviation has expanded hugely, which means there are vastly more people travelling by air, and vastly more people working in the airline industry. Even though travelling by air is incredibly safe, there are millions of us who in some way or other feel connected, hence the need to know why.

I was listening to US television today and a man from the NTSA (National Transport and Safety Authority) very level headed and vey knowledgeable obviously.

He was asked to speculate at the end of the interview why it had taken so long to find any wreckage or distress signal.

He suggested an unlikely but possible cause was a slow deoxygenation of the cabin that could put the entire crew and passengers to sleep and the plane fly on for hundreds of miles in a random pattern path until it finally slowly descends and crashes into the sea.

The main issue which is absolutely staggering is that in large parts of the world there is no radar coverage and planes do not emit a GPS signal so know one knows exactly where they are. Pilots in those out of radar contact locations have to report position and heading regularly but if they don't then no one knows where they are.

Astonishing that individual shipping containers are tracked across the vast oceans by GPS no matter where they are on the planet at every minute of night and day but an airliner no one is tracking it. Just watching it on a radar if they are in range otherwise up to the pilots.

That is why no one knows where this plane crashed. There is no record or tracking of where it was exactly and if the black box transponders are destroyed or under water it will be hard to find.

The other suggestion was it had gone of course somehow or for some reason and crashed into a remote jungle location on land well away from the current crash search area which means the search at sea is potentially useless.

Jungle crash sites in remote locations are hard to spot.

I wish people wouldn't post stuff as fact. There hasn't been anything posted on here that has turned out to be true.

Nothing found at all, stolen passport users not of Asian appearance, is what the Beeb have said. I am not taking notice of anyone else's reports.

MoreBeta I have read today that the plane does have GPS but I am not saying it as a fact.