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Missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 - Thread 5

975 replies

KenAdams · 21/03/2014 01:20

Thread 1

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BertieBotts · 26/03/2014 21:45

I do actually suspect that the reason these threads have been left to stand is that they are in chat. Speculation is often not allowed to stand, it's more risky for MNHQ in a permanent part of the site.

Can anybody explain what a "fire suppression bottle" is from the link HoneyBadger gave? I can see it's something related to an aircraft and in the general area but I didn't know if it was supposed to indicate something more significant.

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jamtoast12 · 26/03/2014 21:48

I read that they think it's from a plane but no indication it was from this one at all....and the suggestion it was from a plane was based only on the image.

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DieselSpillage · 26/03/2014 21:49

Malaysia said on Tuesday that the U.S. "Towed Pinger Locator" would not arrive in the search area until April 5, which would give it only a few days to find the black box before the beacon battery would be expected to run out

Voila ! the superpower's contribution...

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jamtoast12 · 26/03/2014 21:54

It's only, guaranteed for 30 days, the beacon can last for much longer - air France was still beeping for two years! This is the same locator that found that plane.

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naturallysparkling · 26/03/2014 21:57

Lambstales… Why would you suspect the debris will not be found in the Southern ocean…?

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DieselSpillage · 26/03/2014 22:00

and they reckon that as the black box only records 2 hours and then repeatedly records over the top of the last 2 hours ...it''s unlikely to have anything relevant recorded on it, given that all the action seemed to happen 7 hours before the plane suposedly crashed.

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Burmahere · 26/03/2014 22:12

I think speculation is normally frowned upon when it is an individual being discussed rather than the er whole world Hmm?

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BeyondTheLimitsOfAcceptability · 26/03/2014 22:18

Afaik, the rules on speculation are anything that could affect a current investigation/prosecution. (Possibly only in the uk too)

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GarlicMarchHare · 26/03/2014 22:39

I've just learned it couldn't possibly have been a decompression incident. No closer to knowing what did happen, obv, but am :( because I wanted to think of them all having peacefully died before the flight ended.

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allisgood1 · 26/03/2014 22:43

Where did you hear that Garlic?

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GarlicMarchHare · 26/03/2014 22:51

From my much-derided, and admittedly obsessive, reading of discussions among aviation workers/enthusiasts. Goldie said the same ages ago - following previous decompression incidents, the altitude warnings on 777s are now so sensitive, so in your face, and so ubiquitous that you couldn't miss them even if you were off in happyland on nitrogen. They would have descended, radioed for help, and/or sent an SOS. (Ground control will respond to even a partial SOS.)

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BeyondTheLimitsOfAcceptability · 26/03/2014 22:55

Well, that only means it wasnt an accidental decompression, it still could have been if the person driving wanted it to? Which is not good either, but means a more peaceful death for the others?

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GarlicMarchHare · 26/03/2014 23:16

Yes, I kind of hope for that! There are warnings in the cabin, too, and I haven't the faintest clue whether senior cabin crew could or would then get through the flight deck door, nor what they'd do once there.

It does look - to this amateur - more & more like a precisely planned 'hijack' by a pilot. With what intention, and why it went wrong, we probably never will know. But there are certainly a lot of lessons learned for the future already, with more to come.

It's so upsetting. I can't quite understand why I'm so engaged in it, as I've no personal connection here and WW3 is trying not to start so much closer to home ... I can't distract myself, though, so figured I may as well go with it & learn stuff for a few weeks Blush

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DowntonTrout · 26/03/2014 23:37

garlic you don't have to explain yourself. A lot of us feel that way.

wannabe I'm sure you have better things to do with your time than read these threads. We don't all believe in cyber attacks. Most of us are just having a, you know, discussion.

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wannaBe · 27/03/2014 01:16

They may never know what happened but that doesn't necessarily make it a conspiracy. The air france black box pinged for two years - the 30 day battery life is merely a guarantee iyswim. But if it was a highjacking or a suicide the pilot or co pilot may have disconnected the circuit breakers thus meaning the black boxes would cease recording. This happened in the silkair crash meaning that no information could be recovered and the conclusion to an investigation had to be mostly based on information such as that the black boxes had stopped recording at x/y times. In the silkair crash the plane hit the river so hard (it was travelling at the speed of sound as it went down) that the wreckage started to detach as it crashed, but was so badly smashed and spread that only 70% of it was recovered, and that was on land. So imagine dropping a plane into a two mile deep ocean from 35000 feet and it hitting that ocean at the speed of sound, the wreckage would be spread far and wide and most likely sink like a stone.

I would imagine that a highjacking would have had someone claim responsibility by now. After all, even if the plane had crashed you could still claim that it was possible to kidnap a plane and fly it into oblivion, and who knows where the next one might end up .

But a suicide would be explainable on the basis that the pilot might choose to fly the plane into the part of the ocean which was least explored, so that it could disappear more easily and be less likely for more of it to be found. The less evidence that could be found of a suicide, the more protected his family would be, and things like insurance policies would still likely pay out if suicide could not be proven.

Downton of course not everyone thinks it’s a syber attack, but people have certainly suggested it could be. Even suggesting that this is why the governments are all keeping quiet to stop mass panic. There has been suggestion that this is the US, Alqaeda,that inmarsat are in it for the glory, if the Americans are involved then it’s deemed to be suspicious, if they’re not it’s deemed to be suspicious. As it is the FBI are involved in analysing the flight simulator and despatching the black box locator, there are already dozens of planes and ships out there from different countries, the US getting involved in that as well just makes things even more difficult than they already are...

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themaltesefalcon · 27/03/2014 03:07

Oi, no talk of deleting these threads yet, please! I want to copy and paste some of Goldie's fascinating posts before they disappear from Chat.

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LoopyDoopyDoo · 27/03/2014 03:54

The following has been floating around on Malaysia FB pages, blogs etc. I don't think I can believe much of it, but is interesting anyway:

Have you heard of this conspiracy theory re the disappearance of MH 370? The story goes like this:

The American is withdrawing from the Afghanistan, one of their command and control system (used for controlling the pilotless drones) was hijacked by the Talebans when the American transport convoy was moving down from one of the hill top bases. The Talebans ambushed the convoy and killed 2 American Seal personnel, seized the equipment/weapons, including the command and control system which weighed about 20 tons and packed into 6 crates. This happened about a month ago in Feb 2014.

What the Talebans want is money. They want to sell the system to the Russian or the Chinese. The Russian is too busy in Ukraine. The Chinese are hungry for the system's technology. Just imagine if the Chinese master the technology behind the command and control system, all the American drones will become useless. So the Chinese sent 8 top defense scientists to check the system and agreed to pay millions for it.

Sometime in early Mar 2014, the 8 scientists and the 6 crates made their way to Malaysia, thinking that it was the best covert way to avoid detection. The cargo was then kept in the Embassy under diplomatic protection. Meanwhile the American has engaged the assistance of Israeli intelligence, and together they are determined to intercept and recapture the cargo.

The Chinese calculated that it will be safe to transport it via civilian aircraft so as to avoid suspicion. After all the direct flight from KL to Beijing takes only 4 and half hours, and the American will not hijack or harm the civilian. So MH370 is the perfect carrier.

There are 5 American and Israeli agents onboard who are familiar with Boeing operation. The 2 "Iranians" with stolen passports could be among them.

When MH370 is about to leave the Malaysian air space and reporting to Vietnamese air control, one American AWAC jammed their signal, disabled the pilot control system and switched over to remote control mode. That was when the plane suddenly lost altitude momentarily.

How the AWAC can do it ? Remember 911 incident ? After the 911 incident, all Boeing aircraft (and possibly all Airbus) are installed with remote control system to counter terrorist hijacking. Since then all the Boeing could be remote controlled by ground control tower. The same remote control system used to control the pilotless spy aircraft and drones.

The 5 American/Israeli agents soon took over the plane, switched off the transponder and other communication system, changed course and flew westwards. They dare not fly east to Philippines or Guam because the whole South China Sea air space was covered by Chinese surveillance radar and satellite.

The Malaysian, Thai and Indian military radars actually detected the unidentified aircraft but did not react professionally.

The plane flew over North Sumatra, Anambas, South India and then landed at Maldives (some villagers saw the aircraft landing), refuelled and continued its flight to Garcia Deigo, the American Air Base in the middle of Indian Ocean. The cargo and the black box were removed. The passengers were silenced via natural means, lack of oxygen. They believe only dead person will not talk. The MH370 with dead passengers were air borne again via remote control and crashed into South Indian Ocean, make it to believe that the plane eventually ran out of fuel and crashed, and blame the defiant captain and copilot.

The American has put up a good show. First diverting all the attention and search effort in the South China Sea while the plane made their way to Indian Ocean. Then they came out with some conflicting statement and evidence to confuse the world. The Australian is the co-actor.


The amount of effort put up by China, in terms of the number of search aircraft, ships and satellites, searching first the South China Sea, then the Malacca Straits and the Indian Ocean is unprecedented. This showed that the China is very concerned, not so much because of the many Chinese civilian passengers, but mainly the high value cargo and its 8 top defense scientists.

Don't believe the story? I don't expect you to but let's wait and see how the episode unveils itself. Or perhaps it will never be known until the next Snowden emerges.

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TheDoctrineOfSnatch · 27/03/2014 07:12

The Inmarsat pings were detected after seven hours flying time though. The plane has to have been on that arc after seven hours. How could it have done so with two landings and refuellings? And if it was on that arc but not so far south as is believed, why didn't the handshake an hour later work since the refuelled plane should have been flying well by then.

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mileysorearse · 27/03/2014 07:59

Ah but Doctrine, Inmarsat were obviously in on it Hmm 20 tons is an awful lot of mangosteens too.

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DieselSpillage · 27/03/2014 08:13

which brings us back to the point I made earlier...

20 March 2014: Inmarsat has announced that General C. Robert Kehler, United States Air Force (Retired), has been appointed as a non-executive board member.During this time he was directly responsible to the US President and Secretary of Defence for the plans and operations of all US forces conducting strategic deterrence, and Department of Defence space and cyberspace operations

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singersgirl · 27/03/2014 08:19

What an extraordinarily convoluted and unlikely theory. The question you conspiracy theorists should ask yourself is who is putting out these conspiracy stories and what their agenda is. It could be like yours- a bit of 'harmless fun' - or it could be much more sinister.
Usually when the choice is between massively complex Hollywood thriller type plot or human error/ineptitude of one sort or another, it's human error.

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DowntonTrout · 27/03/2014 08:28

I don't believe INMARSAT and the AAIB are "in" on a cover up like that. I also don't believe that the US would cull all the passengers on a civilian airplane in those circumstances.

Let's face it, no theory so far is a perfect fit, at least, not with the information which is in the public domain.

Is there no news this morning?

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backinthebox · 27/03/2014 08:28

LoopyDoopyDoo - excellent name choice! Your post is quite bonkers. As a Boeing pilot with 15 years experience, I can assure you that while many changes were made to aircraft and procedures after 911, fitting remote control systems to all aircraft was not one of them! And if they were fitted to all Boeings and Airbuses, what about all the Tupelovs, Mcdonnell Douglases and many other lesser popular but still fairly numerous airliners round the world?

The only thing the professional pilot community are prepared to stand together and say at the moment (and by professional, I don't include about 80% of the contributors on Pprune) is that everything so far is speculation, there are very few known facts. Until there are more known facts, most of us are not prepared to hazard a guess as to what has happened here.

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mileysorearse · 27/03/2014 08:33

backinthebox, it's interesting that you should say that about pprune. I know someone who is at CTC and they have been told not to take notice of anything written there, ever, as its full of fantasists.

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DowntonTrout · 27/03/2014 08:37

backinthebox

You may not want to hazard a guess but you must have a gut feeling. I understand you don't want to speculate but is there an obvious answer with the few facts available? I'm thinking particularly of the phrase "deliberate act". Was the "deliberate" part the cause or a reaction to something?

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