Missing Malaysia Airlines MH370... Thread 4

[GoldieMumbles]

Thread 1

Thread 2

Thread3

Blimey how many links to the same article are we going to get?

Thanks for the thread Goldie and for everyone's insights and expertise. I'm now wondering about fuel levels and lack of feedback from RR engine.

I had sadly hoped for the fire theory to be reliable. Terrible of course, but air piracy (for cargo) or hijacking by terrorists and mass murder was too hideous to contemplate.

I hope the families have some answers soon. Horrendous for them.

Thank you astrogeek that makes sense!

Can't find anything about the BBC saying the govt are changing their mind over the ACARS being turned off vs breaking down somehow. Guess that will be in the news in the morning.

I had sadly hoped for the fire theory to be reliable. Terrible of course, but air piracy (for cargo) or hijacking by terrorists and mass murder was too hideous to contemplate

I know what you mean. The thing I'm finding really creepy is the possible 45,000ft to kill the passengers. It's so vile, I'm having nightmares.

But flying to 45,000 feet wouldn't kill all the passengers. It might stall the engines as the air is too "thin" to provide lift.

I think the satellite probably wouldn't be set up to record spectral data and since the height of the satellite is vast compared to the circumference of the arc, it would be a near vertical not lateral wave.

But that's my opinion, not fact!

news stations have calmed down and decreased their coverage. Will they find this plane?

But flying to 45,000 feet wouldn't kill all the passengers. It might stall the engines as the air is too "thin" to provide lift

I understood it would kill them quickly if the cabin was depressurised and this has been quite widely discussed as the reason for performing the manoeuvre.

I think Goldie said on the last thread that the cabin wouldn't depressurise simply by virtue of the plane being at 45,000 feet.

If the cabin is depressurised because it is breached, you are just as dead at 33,000 feet!

I'm not sure it's confirmed either that the aircraft went that high or that it went to 5,000 feet - I think both are speculation.

Yes Astro that is what I had read too about the 45000ft altitude.

I think the satellite probably wouldn't be set up to record spectral data and since the height of the satellite is vast compared to the circumference of the arc, it would be a near vertical not lateral wave

I think your opinion is probably right. And the finest minds on the planet are all over it so I should just go to bed.

Me too, night all

Yes that's what puzzled me about the pprune thread - the posters all seemed to assume that 45000ft would cause hypoxia, but as far as I've read the 777 can fly to 43000ft or so with the sane cabin pressure so a couple more thousand feet sounds unlikely that it would make passengers severely hypoxic. However perhaps this isn't the case for most planes and so those on pprune (and the hijackers?) might have assumed it would.

It was interesting to me that on the long pprune thread (which I had to stop reading or I'd never get anything else done), the pilots in general don't seem to know that much about aircraft engineering, or how it all works under the bonnet so to speak. I guess why would they, really, as it's a completely different job; but I suppose I'd assumed they would. This thread has actually been more interesting in terms of info about aeronautics and engineering.

GoldieMumbles Sun 16-Mar-14 09:45:32
One other comment before I have to go.

A lot of people have been going on about the 45,000 feet thing. I'm a bit dubious about that.

As you go up in altitude, the air becomes thinner. You rely on air passing over the wings to generate lift. The less dense the air, the less lift you generate. The aeroplane at the beginning was still quite heavy (with fuel). It would not have been able to climb to 45,000 feet at thst stage because it simply could not generate enough lift. If ithad tried, it would have stalled (stall on a plane is not like stall in a car - it's nothing to do withthe engine. Stall simplymeans there's not enough air passing over the wings to stay in the air any more).

A really, really good practical example of this is the Air France crash.

The pilot tried to climb out of trouble - he put the aircraft in a climb and put the engines to full power. The aeroplane would not climb. It stalled and carried on stalling more or less all the way down til it hit the Atlantic.

I think that this plane is in the same situation - i.e. too heavy to climb to 45,000 feet no matter how much power you put on. In any case, 45,000 feet is above the maximum cruising altitude approved for the 777. Even so, the aircraft would likely stay pressurised but I don't know if it could maintain the normal cabin pressure in the cabin (the cabin is pressurised to the equivalent of 8,000 feet). I suspect not but I don't know because it's never been done to the best of my knowledge.

*same not sane. Autocorrect gah!

Really interesting that RR may have data from the engines.

The Today Programme on Radio 4 mentioned this (unconfirmed) line about how the communications MAY actually have both gone off at the same time, not one after the other.

Lends credence to the idea that there was a catastrophic failure of some kind, rather than deliberate action.

The puzzle is about how it carried on flying another few hours. But surely it must be possible for hypoxia to have somehow occurred if there was an initial event bad enough to cut communications and depressurise the plane but not so bad that it destroyed the plane?

Thanks Goldie.

Props to MN - the threads on here are the most informative and sane I've seen. Kudos Goldie and well done everyone.

So if there was a bad mechanical event at the outset which depressurised the plane and killed everyone, do the rest of the facts we have work with that?
What about the fact that contact was cut somehow at exactly the point when the plane entered Vietnamese airspace? In that the pilots did not report into the Vietnamese air controllers. Was that because the plane suffered an accident at exactly that point (hence the mumbling picked up by other planes)? Or am I able to suggest that one pilot was alive at that point and wanted to cut contact?
If both pilots were dead, would the plane have flown on in the way that it seems it did? Or must it have been either handflown or pre-programmed from the air (or the ground)?
Does any explanation, however weird, actually fit the known facts?
Or do we give up on finding an explanation, on the basis that we are not being given the correct facts?

Cavort, I think read somewhere that MA hadn't subscribed to receive that information from Rolls Royce, so RR wasn't recording it.

My pilot's wife friend posted the fire theory on Facebook, saying she's uncomfortable with the speculation on blame being put on the pilots. I wanted to ask her thoughts on why the plane would carry on for hours if it were a fire but thought the issue too sensitive.

Although the airline wasn't subscribed to receive the data from RR that doesn't mean they still didn't collect it as a matter of course. Plenty of companies do this.

The question is whether RR was able to receive any data once the transmissions had been turned off. It is hypothetically possible that could have happened but again, pure speculation.