MH370: The Plane That Disappeared (Netflix)

[XelaM]

Has anyone seen this new Netflix documentary about MH370?

It's just unbelievable that in our time a passenger plane can just disappear without a trace.

I find the conspiracy theories in that documentary totally bizarre, but I also feel very sorry for the pilot's family who has effectively been scapegoated without any real evidence that he brought the plane down. If it was a murder-suicide why would he fly for another 8 hours instead of just crashing into the ocean where he was? It makes no sense. It's also an insane coincidence that two of Malaysian Airlines planes suffered tragedies in the space of just a few months in 2014 - nothing to do with any mechanical issues on the planes.

Yes, I can see how the Malaysian authorities would be hugely embarrassed by this. Just like the Russians initially tried to hide the true reason for the 1994 Aeroflot flight 593 crash that killed all on board - the fact that the highly experienced star Captain with an exemplary career let his kids fly the passenger plane to Hong Kong for its flagship state-owned airline!!!! I still can't believe this really happened and it's so unbelievably tragic that his wife also lost her kids because of such an avoidable and unbelievably idiotic prank.

Netflix loves documentaries because they tend to be cheap. But I agree, it's rare that they do a good one. There is usually something generic and banal about them.

Do you mean land on the ocean then sink? The Hudson ditching was a miracle but it had perfect conditions. It wasn't the ocean, it was daytime, it was relatively calm, they were incredibly lucky. Pilots cannot practice ditching a plane (water landings). While I'd like to believe that there is a tiny possibility that a commercial pilot could bring the plane down intact in the middle of an ocean at night without the aircraft breaking up, its highly highly unlikely.

This is exactly what I was left wondering after and why I felt the third theory was actually quite plausible. Also the eye witness accounts seeing an explosion and debris in the South China Sea that night. Was there ever a search of the area where the plane lost comms? The FBI sitting on that flight simulator info for two years seems very strange to me. Also the person receiving a call from their dad who was on the flight.

So it depends how long the scheduled flight to its intended destination actually was. Then add 1.5 hours

??

TBH I don't immediately recognise that rule (though TBF it might be a version of the Aussie domestic, no alternates rules, or perhaps one of the rules used for going to very isolated airports where a concept called island reserve is used))..whatever that rule is that you are quoting it's not how most of the world do it on most Long Haul flights.

A much more typical fuel policy, certainly for Long Haul, requires you to load up with fuel for:

Taxi out
+
Flying the planned route, plus a legally defined buffer ("contingency fuel"),
+
Fuel for diversion to nominated alternate (that's the important bit for what follows)
+
plus a fixed reserve e.g. 30 minutes worth of holding at low altitude at alternate.

So under most policies you'd need to know the alternates to calculate how much fuel you'll expect to have at destination - it's not a fixed figure such as 1.5 hours.

Examples: Coming into Heathrow on a 777 on a good weather day with Gatwick as your planned alternate you might plan to land at Heathrow with about 6 tonnes of gas, (about an hours margin).

Into Heathrow with Glasgow as the alternate for some reason (e.g. crappy weather over all of the southern UK) you might arrive at Heathrow with 10 tonnes plus, which could equate to 90 minutes plus.

The actual answer in the case of MH370 is only given by knowing their fuel policy and then, if they needed to plan alternates, knowing what they were.

HTH.

If it is of any interest:

reports.aviation-safety.net/2014/20140308-0_B772_9M-MRO.pdf

Even mentions stuff like planned alternates and fuel carriage...

No eyebrows have ever really been raised in the professional community about this report in terms of the description of the sequence of events with the flight itself, but as mentioned upthread there are doubts about the local investigation of some of the domestic/personal issues.

Good points.

The South Indian Ocean is huge. It's no real surprise that the plane hasn't been found.

I'm this will be the answer

“Also the eye witness accounts seeing an explosion and debris in the South China Sea that night. Was there ever a search of the area where the plane lost comms?”

The wreckage found in Africa has some pieces that are proven to be from MH370 so whatever the South China Sea thing was, it wasn’t this plane.

FWIW with regard to the search and the South China Sea,

thediplomat.com/2014/03/malaysia-airlines-flight-370-search-and-rescue-cooperation-in-the-south-china-sea/

More comprehensively see pages 20 and 21 of the Safety report (link at bottom of page):

"The search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 commenced on 8 March 2014
and continued for 1,046 days until 17 January 2017 when it was suspended
in accordance with a decision made by the Governments of Malaysia,
Australia and the People’s Republic of China. This involved surface searches
in the South China Sea, Straits of Malacca and the southern Indian Ocean."

Whilst areas South China Sea area was searched initially and as a precaution it quickly became apparent from Primary radar info, and then rudimentary satcom data that the flight had gone west and then eventually south west into the Indian Ocean well away from the area where radio contact and secondary radar contact was lost.

reports.aviation-safety.net/2014/20140308-0_B772_9M-MRO.pdf

“The FBI sitting on that flight simulator info for two years seems very strange to me.”

I don’t know what the truth is, but the report linked to by @notimagain says it was the Royal Malaysia Police who investigated the simulator, seizing it on 15 March 2014 and providing a forensic report 19 May 2014. It may have gone to the fbi thereafter, I don’t know.

Ah, Google says that the FBI helped.

But presumably they aren’t authorised to say anything directly as they were assisting Malaysia. I think that’s different to “sitting on it”, isn’t it?

I don't know about the FBI associated claims either...but yep, ultimately that safety report is pretty much the source document for info on this...not wiki, not reddit, certainly not Netflix.

Yes it's published by the Malaysian authorities but if people look within (p. xiv onwards ) they'll see by the list of significant investigators and others that assisted that it was very much multinational/multi agency effort so I'd treat the aviation/engineering side of what is written as being legit.

It's not a gripping read but most questions that have been asked (e.g. alternates, fuel, oxygen, cell phones, searches etc) are answered within.

Whilst there is an investigation going on, it wouldn’t be right for all details of it to be published as soon as found. It wouldn’t happen in a criminal/police case.

Well, I think I have learnt more about the flight from this thread than the actual documentary!

Thanks to those that answered my question about the transponder, much appreciated and I have been boring dh with my new found knowledge.

Blimey, now you've done it. The US brought it down using top-secret alien technology they picked up from the UFO wreckage found in Roswell. Anything sinister that happens anywhere in the world must be the doings of the US; that's a given.

Watch your back, mate. They don't like it when someone points this out.

Thanks for the recommendation on Deepest Dive, it's very good.

Any ideas on the emergency locator becons?

Posted too quickly. I mean why they didn't go off etc?

That’s what the initial southern ocean search was looking for. But the signal only goes off for 30 days, maybe up to 60. So not long if there’s big uncertainty about the crash site.

Ah right I see, thank you.

The electrical fire sounds like the most likely possibility to me, or the pilot but I really don’t want to believe someone would do that. I wonder why the electrical fire theory wasn’t mentioned in the series, it makes a lot of sense.

Not being awkward but which beacons do you mean? The terminology is important but whichever you mean it's all laid out in the safety report:

reports.aviation-safety.net/2014/20140308-0_B772_9M-MRO.pdf

As a precis:

The various Emergency Radio Transmitters (ELTs) that were installed/available are covered page 52 of the report onwards - they are reasonably long range beacons and one of the main things the Search and Rescue (SAR) people would be trying to detect right from the start of any search.

It's worth noting that as the report states the hull mounted impact activated ELTs are (or at least were) notoriously unreliable at being activated by impact and of course the other manually activated ELTs are of zero use if there's no one to activate them.

FWIW and (this is from memory) the small manually activated ELTs that we used carried in the survival packs on our 777s only had an operating life of 24-48 hours or so.

The other beacons of interest are really onboard to assist the crash investigators, not really the SAR people.

Those are the Underwater Locator Beacons (ULBs), covered from p.133 onwards, and one was attached to each of the two crash protected recorders...those beacons are not radio beacons, they are acoustic, short 'ish range, and as @SheilaFentiman says duration for those is minimum of thirty days.

Hope that helps.

I think a PP with experience of working on that type of plane said they couldn’t see how a fire could be selective enough to knock out eg comms but not other crucial systems which had to have continued working for the plane to fly for 7h.

additionally, the fire wouldn’t explain the sharp manual turn of the plane away from the initial flight path.

the pilot (or other experienced flight crew member) seems the explanation with the fewest improbable parts, IYSWIM.

additionally, the fire wouldn’t explain the sharp manual turn of the plane away from the initial flight path.

The theory is that once there was a fire on board, the pilot tried to return to the nearest airport but couldn't land