Most Expensive Aviation Search: $53 Million To Find Flight MH370 233
mdsolar (1045926) writes "The search and investigation into missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is already the most expensive in aviation history, figures released to Fairfax Media suggest. The snippets of costings provide only a small snapshot but the $US50 million ($54 million) spent on the two-year probe into Air France Flight 447 — the previous record — appears to have been easily surpassed after just four weeks.... The biggest expense in the search has involved ships, satellites, planes and submarines deployed first in the South China Sea and the Malacca Straits, and then in the remote reaches of the southern Indian Ocean."
Cool! $50 million USD = $54 million! (Score:2, Funny)
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Article is from .com.au... k.
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That line was talking about how much 50 million USD was in Australian dollars. Way to fail, brah.
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Way to fail, brah.
There is no context in which that phrase can be used - earnestly, ironically, sarcastically, ignorantly, juvenilely, ham-fistedly, or otherwise - in which the person saying it can ever, ever tell someone else they've failed.
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Would probably have helped to specify in the summary. My first four thoughts on seeing that were:
1. Someone meant to use the Euro symbol. But I'm pretty sure 1 Euro > 1 USD currently. So that's not it.
2. Inflation adjusted dollars.
3. Canadian dollars?.
4. Look through the comments and see who else wondered the same thing.
Tracking` (Score:2)
And yet, people stated that "it would be soooo expensive" to add proper tracking to planes.
Re:Tracking` (Score:4, Insightful)
First, I don't imagine that Malaysia Air is paying that $50,000,000. Malaysia Air is out the cost of a Boeing 777 and probably some death benefits. But I'm sure those things are insured. On the other hand, Malaysia Air would have to pay for this tracking system.
Second, I'd point out that the last big "disappearance" (i.e., nobody immediately knew where it crashed) was in 2009--five years ago. And it's not like it's that common that airplanes crash and are not found within a few days. So you're spending money on the off chance that an airplane of yours crashes somewhere difficult to find. You'll probably spend that money for 50 years before you ever take advantage of the system. So, yeah, it's not really worth it to Malaysia Air.
Third, let's say you add the trackers. You spend the money year in and year out and, eventually, it comes in handy. So what? You can look and say, "Yup! The plane just crashed in the middle of the Indian Ocean!" Now what? You're still out the plane. You're probably not going to have much for survivors on a plane that crashes in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It's not going to make a difference in your insurance premiums. You're adding costs for basically no benefit.
Re:Tracking` (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure similar arguments were made when the original black boxes were made mandatory on aircraft.
A new Boeing 777-200ER is about $260M [boeing.com]. A Canadian has developed an enhanced black box that constantly sends data back to the airline. The cost would be $100,000 which is only 0.04% of the cost of the aircraft and $85,000 more that the boxes they would replace. There would also be satellite data transfer charges which would be only a few thousand dollars for a flight like MH370 or about $20 per passenger on the flight. You could even limit the data transfer to trans oceanic flights to minimize the impact on low cost and domestic carriers.
Of course, all those costs would come down if every new aircraft was equipped like this. I'm sure the families of the MH370 would consider this minimal cost money well spent.
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Without understanding what went wrong with the plane, we can't know whether the proposed enhanced black box would be effective. There were systems in the aircraft to report its position and status remotely - namely ACARS and its transponders. These failed or were disabled early on. It is quite possible that whatever took those systems out would have also disabled communications from an enhanced black box.
Until we know the cause of the crash, proposing a solution is premature.
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I assume the live-streaming solution you're talking about is the one proposed by FLYHT. Their proposed solution, however, would only send essential data at the moment an event is detected, and it wouldn't supersed a standard flight data recorder. It wouldn't carry cockpit voice recording, for example, which was essential in determining what happened in the case of AF447. With the Air France case as an example, the search for the black box would still have to be carried out to close the investigation. And wh
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And yet, people stated that "it would be soooo expensive" to add proper tracking to planes.
The 'people' are correct. $50M is much, much less than the billions it would cost to add 'proper tracking' to planes that cross oceans - And it still doesn't address the problem of someone in the cockpit switching the tracking off.
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It's estimated to be $200,000 per plane for live tracking. "Billons" would be a huge exaggeration.
That's 5000 planes per one billion. There are almost one thousand Boeing 777s in operation today. Add in all other comparable, i.e. long range aircraft (757, 747, 787 plus the Airbus equivalents) and you are quickly into the (very low admittedly) billions.
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you are quickly into the (very low admittedly) billions.
You're into the high(er) billions once you add all the satellite bandwidth into the mix.
Re:Tracking` (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, people stated that "it would be soooo expensive" to add proper tracking to planes.
It is. As a manufacturer you have to machete your way through a jungle of red tape, get all manner of safety assessments etc. to even be allowed to install the ADSC-B/C equipment [wikipedia.org] on the aircraft. This is very time consuming and expensive, which is one reason why all aircraft avionics and generally anything that goes into an aircraft is by definition obscenely expensive to buy (right down to LCD screens and coffee makers) and why old airliner designs get reworked (it's a smaller bureaucratic workload to get a new variant of an existing design flying than a totally new design). If this seems like dumb bureaucracy keep in mind that aircraft have been lost to crappy installation of retrofitted electronics (a good example being Swissair Flight 111 [wikipedia.org]). To install the equipment your airline has to ground the aircraft for at least a week (installation costs and lost revenue). Depending on the type of aircraft you operate and its age there may not even have been provision for the ADSC-B/C equipment which means airframe modifications and more downtime (yet more lost revenue and expenses) followed by more certifications and inspections. On top of that different ATC areas sometimes require you to have different equipment. Even simple stuff like software upgrades only happen at a glacial pace so if you think that fixing a simple software bug on an airliner is as simple as downloading an install package from the support section of the Boeing/Airbus website, uploading it to your USB stick, plugging it into a USB socket in the dashboard of your Boeing 777 airliner and selecting "Update firmware" on the FMS screen you have another thing coming. Airliners are one of the safest modes of transportation but that comes at a cost in time and money.
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It's worth it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Major issue with the airframe, or propulsion? Very important to understand that. There are a lot more of them flying around.
A third party's influence and/or an attempt to steal the plane? Whether that ended in a crash or a successful theft, we need to know everything we can about who, what, why, to what end. If it was stolen and landed (extremely, very unlikely), gotta know where and why. If it went in the drink during an attempt, still have to understand what the game plan was.
Suicide? Hiding in regular traffic, then flying low and into the most remote, deepest water possible in the interests of never finding the plane - the better to make sure family collects on insurance money? Would be good to know, and will remind airlines to get harder about knowing their pilots and the pilots' current circumstances.
Regardless, the navy assets out looking are using the whole thing as an excellent training exercise. Lots of smart people have had to whip up new ways to think about what happened, using only traces of satellite/comms data.
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I'm thinking if those naval "training exercises" were billed as services, we'd be way past the $50M mark by now.
Why the search? (Score:2, Insightful)
Look, yes. But why are 'they' spending more money for one downed airplane than the airplane costs originally? Why the fortune in searching? Why the massive ongoing search? Why is every government in a panic?
I suspect that aurhorities fear a nefarious actor, and they want to find out exactly who did what so we can make sure it doesn't happen again. What if the air transport regulators never find out what brought the MH370 down, but Al-qaeda knows already?
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Well in the case of the govt. of Australia, where this cynical newspaper article originated, it's a massive PR exercise.
"See, our defence force do good, noble, things in their spare time", when they're not implementing the government's polarising 'stop the boats' agenda.
Do they have a clue if and where the plane sank? Hardly...
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You know they react like this to every crashed plane? Normally they find it on a mountain within a day or two and the media loses interest. This one is only odd because the plane was lost at sea; which only happens every 5 years or so.
The "panic" is really only coming from the internet conspiracy machine and the media which, for some reason, takes idiotic internet conspiracy theories seriously when they have nothing to report (instead of, you know, stopping reporting until something actually happens.) The a
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The media was playing up the "maybe somebody stole it" aspect from the very start.
If you've ever flown over ocean, out of sight of land, or on a polar crossing route, that feeling that you're really "out there," was true. It's a big world, after all.
Nice visualization of ping rings (Score:2)
Elephant in the room (Score:2)
OK, lets say it. Bullshit. We all know it didn't crash.
It takes a series of catastrophic failures for a 777 to crash. Sure, it happens, but it is very rare. It is an extremely unlikely event.
Now, we also know that the various telemetry devices on the plane were manually disabled by the flight crew.
We also know from the telemetry they didn't know about (or could shut of, the engine pings) that the engines ran for about 5 hours after other telemetry was turned off.
We know the plane turned "off course" after t
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100 foam plastic balls of orange color (Score:3, Insightful)
The size could be of a tennis ball, an additional weight and cost almost zero.
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Re:100 foam plastic balls of orange color (Score:5, Insightful)
Great idea...and it's already been tested an priced. Just $60,000 per aircraft for a known-working system.
With roughly 31,000 commercial passenger aircraft in use, that's about 1,800,000,000 (1.8 Billion) dollars to equip. You could mount searches for 35 lost planes for that money, and a plane goes missing (of this magnitude) once every 3-4 years. So about a 120-150 year payback period, or about 3-4x the life span of the aircraft in question.
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It doesn't matter. They're dead either way; the question is how much it's worth to recover the bodies.
There are 11 million flights in the US alone every year. You claim that potentially thousands of lives could be saved, but you haven't stated how. You're presuming (1) that this crash will yield some amazing insight into flight safety that was never before considered and is easily correctable. In all likelihood it's the result of a combination of system failure and human error - not some magic force we've
most expensive? (Score:5, Insightful)
What would the Amelia Earhart' search cost in today's dollars when you factor in all of the historic effort?
20 years from now, if a jet goes missing, it'll be the most expensive search in history.
The same as if another massive Hurricane hits in a populated area 20 years from now It will be the most expensive in history.
Heck, if inflation keeps up, 70 years from now if a factory burns down, the cost will dwarf the famous chicago fire simply because the reporters will be intellectually dishonest and just make sure that the cost will lack any simple comparison of monetary value and effort over a period of time.
So many guesses. May I apply reverse logic? (Score:3)
During a cockpit fire, the pilots may have intentionally disabled one or more of the aircraft's systems. Presumably, they would have attempted to reactivate some of those systems (at least communications, or at the very least the flight transponder). Incidentally, the codes "7500", "7600" and "7700" are all well known to any qualified pilot - even a private pilot with no additional qualifications. I would expect the flight crew to at least attempt to set a transponder code of "7600" or "7700" (radios down / general emergency). I would not expect the flight crew to leave the transponder off - especially when flying through potentially hostile airspace. Nothing like a North Korean SSAM deployed at your unidentified jumbo jet to ruin your day. In any event, a cockpit fire severe enough to knock out comms and navs would almost certainly have downed the aircraft immediately, as I doubt seriously that damage would be confined to those two sets of systems.
An electronic failure sufficient to completely eliminate all communications and navigational systems would similarly have downed the aircraft almost immediately. If a failure were widespread enough to eliminate all comms, the likelihood of aircraft control is practically nil (those things are fly-by-wire; no electronics, no flight control). Incidentally, I don't even want to calculate the odds of such a failure - it's possible, but so is a thousand pounds of gold spontaneously appearing in my living room. I don't even want to do math with powers of ten that high. There are multiple independent systems which would have to fail simultaneously.
Any hacker capable (by hardware or software means) of downing a jumbo jet this way wouldn't keep quiet - like a terrorist, I can only imagine such an individual immediately telling the world how brilliant he/she is, probably while attempting to maintain anonymity.
I'm left with this: perhaps ( perhaps ) one of the pilots suffered some form of mental disability or illness and took advantage of an opportunity to comandeer the aircraft. The evidence seems to indicate positive aircraft control throughout its ill-fated flight, implying that both the aircraft and the pilot flying her were operational.
There are other scenarios which might explain all of the currently available evidence; however, I believe 'agnogenic systems failure' is the only appropriate conclusion that can be reached based on the current evidence.
That money could pay for a lot of tracking systems (Score:2)
The NY times has an article about how aircraft have lots of communication technologies on board but no airlines have opted to put trackers on their planes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03... [nytimes.com]
It would be relatively easy to install systems that send basic location, speed direction and basic airplane health data at reasonable intervals with a reasonable cost.
Its too bad that likely legislation will be needed to get airlines to do something. I have an issue with the fact that they don't have to pay fines or help
The cost is not entirely relevant (Score:3)
Even if the money dedicated to this search has reached that sum it is not wasted money, in some cases this involves services with a continuous running cost that would have been 'idle' at standby anyway.
The value of this is an exercise in cooperation, refining search methods and when the wreck finally is found it may be possible to find out what really happened. Unlikely at it seems it may even end up being caused by a meteorite - as was caught on camera by a Norwegian skydiver [youtube.com].
Wonder If Attack Subs are Searching? (Score:3)
Just about the most sophisticated, most mobile passive underwater sound detection systems in existence are the spherical arrays mounted in modern nuclear attack subs. In addition to being an important task - locating the missing flight data recorder that bears on U.S. national security (international terrorism being, well, international) - it looks like a good exercise to sharpen the crews passive sonar search skills.
There has now been plenty of time for an attack sub to reach the area from anywhere in the world.
Sub operations are routinely highly classified, so I would not expect to hear about this if it were happening. If they find something we might hear about it, or instead "laundered" cueing information might get passed to the official search teams.
Most of these "costs" are incurred all the time (Score:3)
Most of the costs listed in the article are for aircraft and ships of the military and coast guard of several countries. It does cost a lot to build and man these ships but these costs are already budgeted and incurred. Much better to have these assets doing something useful like respond to an actual emergency than sit around idle or go on training missions or "good will tours" to show the flag.
I imagine the only extra cost attributable to this search is a bit more fuel.
Harry (Score:3)
And it's pretty clear that anybody with the skills to make it disappear as completely as it did is capable of more than just a little direction.
Houdini ?
Even Houdini can't pull this off ! (Score:2, Interesting)
There are way too many fishy things that happened to flight MH370
1. There was an "airspace territory gap" of 3 to 4 minutes in between the airspace of Malaysia and that of Vietnam, over South China Sea.
The last communication from that plane was from the co-pilot, not the pilot. And his message was "Goodbye Malaysia, Goodbye MH370" and that message was uttered just before the transponder and all comm channels were shut.
Once the transponder and all the comm channels were severed the aircraft remained silent f
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And it's pretty clear that anybody with the skills to make it disappear as completely as it did is capable of more than just a little direction.
Sure, it could be some plot from a spy thriller - no way to discount that.
However, it is just as likely a pilot bent on suicide or something. Just fly in a direction nobody is expecting and then out over the ocean. That's pretty much all you have to do to make an airliner disappear. Oh, and he switched off the transponder and ACARS - that is just a few switches, which pilots need to be familiar with anyway.
So, flip off a few switches, set the autopilot for a new course, and go read a book until you run o
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the only explanation that makes sense to me is okham's racer: plane was flying to beijing, a fire broke out or depressurization in the cabin or hold. pilot turned around to go back to the nearest airport, but they ran out of oxygen and it became a ghost ship on autopilot until it ran out of fuel in the indian ocean. the altitude changes is consistent with a fire because apparently one way to fight a fire on an airplane is to go really high where there is less oxygen.
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I am a pilot, have had two non-trivial electrical fires. It's the simplest explanation, and explains shutting of or failing ACARS and the xpdr while the engines kept reporting data. Not saying "that's what happened" but "that's the most plausible explanation"
Re:But Terrizm! (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't turn around, you vector for the nearest runway long enough to stop on and scream for help! There wasn't so much as a single SOS from this aircraft, yet it made several turns and altitude changes, which wouldn't happen with an aircraft that was flying uncontrolled. It just doesn't really add up. Its also VERY unlikely a 777 would continue to fly at all after electrical system damage so extensive that its ACARS, transponder, and all radio systems failed and the flight crew was either killed or completely unable to enter the cockpit. That would require quite a weird and selective type of damage.
How about a hack? Software could do all of that stuff and is a lot more believable than a fire...
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AF447 never made any calls because the crew didn't have anything to call about, so its hardly a good example - see the Swiss flight over the North Atlantic some years ago that crashed while fighting a fire on board for ages while they diverted, they were making a load of calls about their situation.
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Exactly, they were having some weird issue that they were trying to understand. They really didn't have anything to communicate with HQ ABOUT, and they had no idea that their actions were liable to cause the aircraft to stall, until it happened, at which point there was no time (or point) to calling for help.
OTOH a long drawn out fire that selectively cripples portions of the aircraft seems quite unlikely to have prevented any possibility of communicating. While it may be true that pilots 'fly first and tal
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The issue with AF447 is that they disregarded *all* instrument readings, not just the ones they were trained to in the event of an air data mismatch. So they never even realised they were in danger, because they didn't think the rapidly declining numbers were true - remember that the descent was 1G, so they didn't even have any feeling of descent, which added to their mistrust of the data they had infront of them.
So as the other poster said, there was nothing to call someone about other than they didn't kn
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60 seconds from boom to PAN radio call
https://www.atsb.gov.au/public... [atsb.gov.au]
Re:But Terrizm! (Score:5, Informative)
If it's an electrical fire (or if the pilots think it might be), they would turn off all the electrical systems; so ACARS, transponder, and radio are gone. Meanwhile, they're trying to extinguish the fire - it's still under control, they're just unable to communicate for fear that the electrical systems are causing the fire. And before they can either restore partial electrical systems or land, they become incapacitated by smoke.
Screaming for help is not a top priority. The priority is Aviate, Navigate, Communicate; first, you fly the plane, because that gives you time to do everything else. Then, you figure out where you're going; if you fail at this, you might end up somewhere unexpected, but at least you're alive. Finally, you communicate; if you're alive, it would probably be useful to tell somebody where you are and what's going on. Telling ATC that your plane is on fire and you're about to die of smoke inhalation is useless - FIRST you get the smoke and fire under control, at least long enough for you to navigate to an airport or piece of flat ground. Once that is manageable, THEN you communicate your distress. Even if they had communicated their distress early on, there's nothing that could have been done; there's no way for firefighters to board the plane and extinguish the fire while in midair, obviously.
If you listen to the "Miracle on the Hudson" ATC recording, the pilot is very brief and succinct; he communicates that he lost both engines and is returning, then that he is unable to return, then asks what the airport is on his right side, and then that he can't make it to that airport either and is heading for the Hudson River. There's lots of dead air when ATC asks him a question and he doesn't have time to respond.
I think the fire scenario is a pretty reasonable explanation, but it's by no means the only possibility.
Re:But Terrizm! (Score:5, Informative)
I think the fire scenario is a pretty reasonable explanation, but it's by no means the only possibility.
The fire scenario has been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point. Radar shows that the plane made multiple turns and changes in altitude, meaning that it was being actively piloted. Here's what we currently do know: the ACARS transmitter was turned off, the plane made a sharp turn to the west and climbed to 45,000 feet. Radar then shows the plane descending to 23,000 feet. The plane turns again and climbs, heading out over the Indian Ocean. At this point, radar contact is lost; however the satellite pings indicate that the plane ended up in the southern Indian Ocean, which means it had to turn again. So after the transmitter is turned off, the plane made at least three turns and changed altitude three times. Someone was definitely at the controls until radar contact was lost.
Re:But Terrizm! (Score:5, Interesting)
There's one thing I will agree with: to figure out the fate of the plane we have to get inside the pilot's head and try to figure out what he's doing. The trick here is that based on the available facts, we have to stop thinking in terms of someone who's trying desperately to save the plane and his passengers, and try to understand someone's whose goal is to do the opposite.
One thing to think about- where would you crash a plane if your goal was not simply to crash a plane, but to conceal its fate? Whoever took the plane seems to have wanted its resting place to remain a mystery. They must have known that the path of the plane would be tracked by military radar, so by heading northwest until they were off radar, and then turning southeast, they must have wanted to mislead searchers about the direction of the flight. And by sending the plane into the deeps of the Indian Ocean, they must have hoped that the wreckage would never be found. But one thing didn't make sense here. If you were going to go to this kind of length to lose a plane forever, where would you crash it? Not southwest of Australia; the sea there is deep but its a fairly broad and flat ocean floor. Yes the search area here is huge and the seas are rough, but if the wreckage ends up on a flat expanse of seafloor, it's going to be pretty easy to spot on sonar. It would take a long time to find, but eventually it would be found. No, you wouldn't want an abyssal plain. You'd go for the deepest, most rugged stretch you could find. You'd pilot the plain straight into an ocean trench.
Then a curious thing happened. The search area was changed, again, for something like the third time. The new data suggests the plane didn't fly as far, and instead of crashing southwest of Australia, it crashed almost due west of Australia. At first this seems to suggest the search will be easier. But if you look on the maps, you'll see that the new search area overlaps an ocean trench- the Diamantina Trench, the deepest point in the entire Indian Ocean. Its maximum depth is 8,000 meters/26,000 feet. Eight kilometers. Five miles. Its rugged terrain, which will conceal the plane and scatter any noise from the sonar beacon. Plus, the Navy's pinger locator can only go about 6,000 meters down, and the range of the black box ping signal is only about a mile, so if the plane is at the deepest part of the trench, it's may well be out of the range of sonar equipment. On top of everything, the terrain is going to be unstable; unlike a flat abyssal plain where the sediments accumulate slowly and don't shift, the mountainous terrain of the Diamantina Trench will be subject to slumps and debris flows, with avalanches of fine mud that could easily bury a plane.
Up until now, it seemed like a good bet that the plane would be found, eventually. After all the Titanic was sitting on the seafloor for the better part of a century before it was discovered. But if the pilot really did crash the plane into the Diamantina Trench, there's a real chance that it's lost for good.
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The telling thing is the time frame. I'd buy the fire hypothesis if all of these maneuvers happened in a period of a few minutes and then the plane simply cruised off in some random direction and eventually crashed. That's not what happened though, the plane turned, changed altitude several times over a period of something like 40 minutes, AVOIDING RADAR, and then finally turned onto a course directly for the most remote part of the ocean. Fire simply doesn't explain that.
Fire also doesn't explain which thi
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That just doesn't make sense though if the satellite/radar data is accurate. The aircraft deviated, flew for quite a while to the west (not towards anything in particular), and then turned south.
Climbing to starve a fire doesn't really make much sense - the air at 45k feet isn't that much thinner than the air at 35k where it probably was previously. Plus the passengers only have something like 10min of oxygen, while the pilots have hours, which any competent pilot should know. The passengers might run ou
Re:But Terrizm! (Score:5, Funny)
the only explanation that makes sense to me is okham's racer
Congratulations you are the first person ever to have misspelt Occam's Razor Okham's racer [google.ca].
Re:But Terrizm! (Score:5, Funny)
laughing so hard... I thought you were exaggerating but i checked the link and in fact google only returns one hit for "okham's racer", which directs back to this page. That's a first for me, I should get like an internet trophy or something.
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We could always compromise and call it Ockham's Razor... [wikipedia.org]
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wonder what that dude used to shave...
You're now a Googlewhacker! (Score:4, Interesting)
There's actually a term for this. It's called a Googlewhack.
I think you can get a trophy, or at least your name on a website. http://googlewhack.com/
Okham is very fast racer (Score:2)
The real truth is that Occam didn't have a razor, those didn't get invented until several centuries later, and that a correct translation is "Occam's Lathe" but the Greek translation to German got mistranslated into English, as I'm sure you heard, and so we go
And so goes history
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He didn't need one. Squirrels chewed his beard off as he slept. I know it's true because the Internet said so!
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I appreciate the nod, though I've never stated it happened while he slept.
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Clearly hamsters altered the database after I made my comment.
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And the fail is you misspelled "misspelt" attempting to do a spelling correction.
Seriously? You really didn't know?
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If that happened why would the pilot simply not have lowered the altitude? Above 13,000 feet oxygen is required. He could have easily dropped lower.
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the only explanation that makes sense to me is okham's racer
Occam's razor dictates that there's no way some guy named Okham turned the plane into his own private racer.
Fire is most complex, not simplest, answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Fire is a really, really REALLY answer to this mystery. It requires a fire powerful enough to disable communications minutes after they finished speaking for the last time, while at the same time avoid detection by a multitude of fire/smoke detectos around the plane.
Then after the fire finishes off every single person on the plane, it decides to chill out for seven hours while the plane flays without issue, despite that having happened with no serious airplane fire ever.
It's nice that you have an active enough imagination to believe in this mystical all-powerful sky fire, but to me it's vastly more convoluted to have fire be responsible do to the seriously amazing number of things to have to go right (or wrong) for that to work. Either suicide or terrorists taking the plane is FAR more likely if you are going to apply a test of simplicity.
Fire . . . bad! (Score:2)
Planes with depressurization have flown for hours until exhausting their fuel, but fire?
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The thing about fire is that I don't see how a fire that incapacitated the crew could put itself out that it doesn't cause structural damage to the plane . . . within minutes
Oxygen depletion actually seems like a perfect explanation for that.
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Fire is a really, really REALLY answer to this mystery. It requires a fire powerful enough to disable communications minutes after they finished speaking for the last time, while at the same time avoid detection by a multitude of fire/smoke detectos around the plane.
Then after the fire finishes off every single person on the plane, it decides to chill out for seven hours while the plane flays without issue, despite that having happened with no serious airplane fire ever.
It's nice that you have an active enough imagination to believe in this mystical all-powerful sky fire, but to me it's vastly more convoluted to have fire be responsible do to the seriously amazing number of things to have to go right (or wrong) for that to work. Either suicide or terrorists taking the plane is FAR more likely if you are going to apply a test of simplicity.
Why would the fire have to evade the detectors?
As for the fire going out without damaging the aircraft that seems plausible. A fire breaks out in the cabin area, kills all the people with smoke inhalation then kills itself by using up all the oxygen. It's even consistent with some of the weird flight behaviour as a pilot dying of smoke inhalation may not have adjusted the auto-pilot properly.
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Why would the fire have to evade the detectors?
Because otherwise
a) we'd have known it was on fire before it disappeared.
b) the planes occupants would have put it out
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Why would the fire have to evade the detectors?
Because otherwise
a) we'd have known it was on fire before it disappeared
Assuming the first thing the pilots did wasn't turn off the communications system to try and prevent the fire from spreading.
b) the planes occupants would have put it out
So you're implying that detectors failing is implausible, and any detected fire is trivial to put out. If that were the case then airplane fires wouldn't be a problem.
That being said I would be curious to know why more experts aren't talking about a fire.
Re:Fire is most complex, not simplest, answer (Score:5, Interesting)
Assuming the first thing the pilots did wasn't turn off the communications system to try and prevent the fire from spreading.
The VERY FIRST thing you would do is alert the ground you had a problem. Not turn off all hope of getting help. There is no fire that is STOPPED by turning off a radio!
And even if it were the case the pilots were the stupidest people on earth AND acting in direct violation of aviation emergency procedures in order to take an action that would not help anyone, it STILL doesn't explain flying calming in a straight line for seven hours after with a raging fire eating at the planes controls and superstructure and fuel tanks. Sorry man, CNN's Black Hole is more likely than your Faerie Fire.
No cutting off power and your locator is the first step in a fire [wired.com].
These are standard operating procedures as you need to shut it all off to find the short. Besides what is ground control going to do? You need to do a quick change course to the nearest airport while you find and shut down the damn thing before everyone dies!
Another is to try to suffocate the fire if it is a tire fire by flying at 45,000 feet. Check. Next if the crew gets oxygen afixiation the next step is to cruise at 12,000 feet if the fire is still going. Check. All good so far. ... now here is the mystery. Let's say it was a fire. The captain and crew are incapacitated from carbon monoxide. The fire would take down the whole aircraft. It would burn through the wires for the computer auto pilot and crash the plane well before 7 hours. Or the structure would fail as it would burn through the luggage and explode the fuel compartment.
Also the path is changed again in the final arc. Why? Wouldn't it logically be on the same new path and be half way between Australia and Africa if the crew did die? That is west of perth alright but WAAY farther west. What in the mathematically geometry that says it is in the search area? Distance wise why wouldn't it be on the other side of the arc southwest instead of southeast?
Also if the plane is flying lower you have more friction if it still was at 12,000 feet. So wouldn't it logically be farther north as it would run out of fuel quicker too?
Re: (Score:2)
now here is the mystery. Let's say it was a fire. The captain and crew are incapacitated from carbon monoxide. The fire would take down the whole aircraft. It would burn through the wires for the computer auto pilot and crash the plane well before 7 hours. Or the structure would fail as it would burn through the luggage and explode the fuel compartment.
I'm not convinced this was the case, the fire could run out of oxygen, run out of things to burn (depending where it started), or they could have put it out before succumbing.
Also the path is changed again in the final arc. Why? Wouldn't it logically be on the same new path and be half way between Australia and Africa if the crew did die? That is west of perth alright but WAAY farther west. What in the mathematically geometry that says it is in the search area? Distance wise why wouldn't it be on the other side of the arc southwest instead of southeast?
Also if the plane is flying lower you have more friction if it still was at 12,000 feet. So wouldn't it logically be farther north as it would run out of fuel quicker too?
If it turned later on couldn't that be the result of the autopilot? I'm envisioning a scenario where the pilot tried to program in a return course but was very confused due to oxygen deprivation and wrote in some bizarre flight instructions instead. Soon after the fire everyone was dead and the fire was out but the plane continued flyi
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At 400+ mph the air flying in would turn that into a roman candle FAST.
There is plenty to burn and windows break. Metal softens and gas and oil explode.
We will never find out. If they have not even freaking found debris yet then the jet will never be found. They found the debris in 48 hours with flight 903 and it still took over 2 years to find it.
I think the plane if it followed the same line is between Africa and Australia rather than right off Australia. People claimed they saw something Maldives which w
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An inability of other communications systems to operate in no way implies that everything else is out. I suggest applying at least some thought instead of going for such all or nothing bullshit.
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The pilot does that by throwing breakers to isolate an electrical fire. Apparently that can be done very quickly.
We don't know either way if that was the case or not. All we know is nobody got on the radio to say anything about "a multitude of fire/smoke detectos".
Occam's Razor (Score:2)
Didn't they confiscate it on check in? Or is it only in the USA (TSA)
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Didn't they confiscate it on check in? Or is it only in the USA (TSA)
They would have, but they misspelled his name on the no-fly list.
What about co-pilot? Or passengers? (Score:2)
So, flip off a few switches, set the autopilot for a new course, and go read a book until you run out of fuel.
What happened to the OTHER pilot who would notice you doing one or more of those things, certainly within an hour noticing on a map they were headed the wrong way even if they missed everything else you did. And how would a co-pilot miss the turn you performed even if he was not in the cabin?
Also you would have to turn off the entertainment system for every passenger because that ALSO lets them see
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So, flip off a few switches, set the autopilot for a new course, and go read a book until you run out of fuel.
What happened to the OTHER pilot who would notice you doing one or more of those things, certainly within an hour noticing on a map they were headed the wrong way even if they missed everything else you did. And how would a co-pilot miss the turn you performed even if he was not in the cabin?
Perhaps he was complicit. Perhaps he was clunked over the head.
Also you would have to turn off the entertainment system for every passenger because that ALSO lets them see a map of where they are going. Which means every stewardess is going to be beating on your door for seven hours straight to get you to turn back on the entertainment system.
Just tell them it is broken, and it will be serviced when you land. I can't imagine an Asian airline tolerates stewardesses who talk back.
It's not at all simple to just head a plane elsewhere and not have a lot of people notice. It takes a lot of work to pull that off for any length of time.
What are the passengers going to do about it? Stage a revolt? Breaking down the door would be pretty hard, and the captain could always just depressurize the cabin - just takes two switches to do it. The captain might just do that anyway if his goal is suicide.
Not that hard (Score:2)
The perpetrator (pilot or co-pilot) simply waits for his opposite to go take a leak. Evidence is the event happened right after the sign-off with Malaysian ATC, a good time to imagine someone got up and left the cockpit. The perp then locks the cabin door and can do anything they want from then on, everyone else is just along for the ride. So he cuts cabin air, puts on his mask, climbs to 45,000 ft for a few minutes (not really necessary but maybe he's just being thorough, or maybe he doesn't even do that).
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The flight deck crew have keys to open the door.
No, they don't ! (Score:2)
The flight deck crew have keys to open the door
After the 9/11 incident in NYC the cockpit of most commercial aircrafts have had their doors upgraded.
No one but the people inside the cockpit can open the door, and the door is thick enough to withstand normal bang and kick and whatnot.
Cabin crews won't have the keys, or else terrorists (they are on board) could have gotten the keys from the crews and open the security door to the cockpit.
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Or a fire and a divert to another airport that didn't make it.
Or some electrical breakers as in a procedure for containing an electrical fire.
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Or a fire and a divert to another airport that didn't make it.
What airport? They turned west towards nowhere, and then after a significant period of time heading out to sea they turned south towards an even bigger nowhere.
That is why everybody thinks it was deliberate. Autopilots don't do turns unless somebody tells them to (either by giving it a new heading to fly, or programming a course into the FMS).
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Seriously: a major airplane "disappears" despite evidence that it wasn't really crashed. Everybody's wondering who dunnit and how, and whether or not it will become another impromptu bomb.
There's a *lot* you can carry on a 777. $50 mil is a lot, but the amount of damage such a plane could do with a little direction makes $50 mil look like peanuts. And it's pretty clear that anybody with the skills to make it disappear as completely as it did is capable of more than just a little direction.
What is the evidence that it didn't really crash?
It looks like there may have been some odd circumstances around the crash, a hijacking or equipment malfunction of some kind, but I don't imagine there's a lot of places you can land and hide a 777 without someone noticing. The fact they haven't found the wreckage doesn't mean a crash still isn't the overwhelming possibility.
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Because if it flew in the northern arc China, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and other countries would have detected it in their radars
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And if it flew south it would have either crashed into the ocean (most likely) or landed in Australia and been noticed (it hasn't) or landed on some tiny island in the middle of nowhere (actually crashed on the island, given none of the islands in that part of the world have flat land thanks to being formed by volcanic movement.
Sorry to break it to you but whatever terrorist conspiracies are about, the plane is most probably at the bottom of a very deep ocean.
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Re:But Terrizm! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm a former electronic warfare drone
The system goes on-line April 2nd, 2014. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 06:25 a.m. eastern time, April 5th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
But it's too late. It's already posted on Slashdot.
But hubris! (Score:2)
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Seriously: a major airplane "disappears" despite evidence that it wasn't really crashed. Everybody's wondering who dunnit and how, and whether or not it will become another impromptu bomb.
Every failure, mistake or design induced error you can't explain can quite often be blamed on malice. In the absence of detailed evidence there is almost always a path whereby evil human action can cause result x.
See also blame the compiler, lucky cosmic ray strike on wrong program bits, faulty hardware, magic dragons, unicorns, god.
When reasoning about what could happen when you don't really have any evidence it is important to appreciate the dangers of invoking explanations that could plausibly apply in
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If you want to see just how silly this is, have a look at a real conspiracy; say TWA 800. It's obviously a cover-up of some sort, and everyone who's looked at the evidence open-mindedly and in detail can see that. The problem with conspiracies in real life is that they leak like sieves, and
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Here we go. How's that tinfoil hat looking? From here: pretty silly, but don't let me stop you. Honestly, this is how crazy conspiracy theories are born, and you're obviously the sort of credulous idiot who spreads 'em.
If you want to see just how silly this is, have a look at a real conspiracy; say TWA 800. It's obviously a cover-up of some sort
Really? No irony alarms going off here at all? Are you sure GP doesn't just have his credulity threshold set a little lower than yours?
The problem with conspiracies in real life is that they leak like sieves, and it's simply impossible to keep them quiet.
At the end of the day however, those involved just deny, deny, deny (not even plausibly) and in the end they know that people will just give up and go back to their lives.
Those denials also occurs when there isn't a conspiracy. NASA's continuing position that the moon landings weren't faked isn't evidence of a conspiracy leaking like a sieve. That would be when some actual convincing evidence turns up.
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Couldn't they have bought a whole new plane for that kind of money?
They would have to do that anyway. It isn't like anything that came off of this flight is likely to ever be useful again, unless it really was landed on a runway somewhere.
This is all about preventing future accidents, and providing closure.
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Nope, they are a sixth of the way there though. Though I really doubt the plan is to find it in order to repair it and put is back in service...
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Sorry, but any reasonable person knows they are all dead. It's not worth $53M to find out what we already know - that the pilot and/or co-pilot went on a suicide mission to kill everyone on board.
We don't know that.
And I'm not sure it's accurate to say it's not worth $53M for closure, a good portion of the planet would like to know what happened. There's also the question of what went wrong, plane crashes are rare, which means they're invaluable from a data perspective. Say discovering the cause of this crash allows us to avert on average 1/4 of a future crash, 50 people is about $1,000,000/person, that's well below the standard $2,000,000/person you see thrown around.