Comments

1
Makes you wonder if the pilot cabin lost air pressure, passed out and the plane flew on auto pilot for hours, then crashed thousands of miles off course.

Or can you honestly pass out for that long? Would you wake up at some point?
2
It's already been debunked:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/blog/20…
3
Eli, what the heck? You made this post at 6am, and this was debunked at around 2am.
4
The plane crashed into the fucking ocean. I don't know why you folks are having such a hard time believing it disappeared. It's not even slightly uncommon.
5
@4 The question is where it crashed.
6
Indeed, I am beginning to believe that the plane might never be found. When I read that it evidently changed course after last radar contact and remained flying for hundreds of miles, I thought "It could be anywhere" and probably only over water until it ran out of fuel.

My own hunch is foul play by one of the pilots as horrible as that may sound. Yes, I know that's a remote theory because SOMEONE on the crew had to know there was a sudden change in direction/descent and would have alerted authorities. But, I am simply at a loss. This accident absolutely baffles me.
I do hope they find it. My condolences to the families.
7
@2 All that says is "Those reports are inaccurate", not flat out wrong.
9
@1 It's happened at least once before. In 1999 a charter jet flying golfer Payne Stewart lost cabin pressure mid-flight. Stewart and everyone else aboard lost consciousness and the jet flew on for several hours.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_…

10
@4, you're awfully exercised about this, aren't you?

"It's not even slightly uncommon."

Really? Sure, Amelia Earhart's plane famously disappeared without a trace... more than 70 years ago. And I've occasionally read of small planes disappearing. But I can't recall a single recent incident of a large modern jetliner simply disappearing. With all the electronics on board, and all the ground tracking, it is not common at all for a large jet to disappear. In the closest modern comparison, the Air France jet that disappeared in 2009, searchers started finding bits of debris in less than 2 days.
11
Disputes about time notwithstanding, it may seem strange that a jet's engines are constantly uploading lots of data on every possible parameter of their performance while determining the location of the plane itself seems so subject to chance sightings, whether or not someone turned off the identification transponder, and whether the flight-data recorders are pinging.

Part of the answer is that to continually upload all the information collectable from the flight deck would require a major systems upgrade, probably including a new fleet of satellites, and the other part is that all the terabytes of engine-performance data actually have more economic value (for operational and engineering improvements) than a plane full of people. Purely financial decisions hold sway when they're beyond public awareness. It doesn't seem beyond easy attainment, though, to have basic location data continually sent from every plane via satellite, rather than through the sometimes-unreliable systems that feed websites like FlightAware.
12
@10, yeah, "bits" of debris. It took them two years to recover anything more than that, though (including the "black boxes").
13
@Rob! I read an article late last night that explained that the engine performance data is only uploaded at certain intervals, not constantly or near-constantly.

But it does allude to a record of a transmission from the engine data computers timecoded hours after the jet disappeared from radar/flight control. And the data indicate the engines were operating normally.

I don't recall where I read it. Somewhere on Reddit but it was late and I was tired.
14
@12, true, it took two years to recover the Air France black boxes. But they were recovering bodies within 5 days, and a chunk of the tail section within 6 days. So even without the black boxes, they had a pretty damned good idea where the plane went down less than a week after it disappeared.
15
@7 At the time I posted, that last bit wasn't there.
16
@11 You're just ranting about shit you know nothing about.

That engine data leads to safer, more fuel efficient planes. That helps everyone, and to classify it as simply an economic issue is really fucking ignorant. Unless you think global warming is a hoax.

Furthermore, this isn't some zero-sum game. The reason you don't have full on tracking has a lot to do with the area they're flying around - notice there's a shit ton of water? Notice how it's not under the jurisdiction of the FAA? I mean shit, did you ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe you're expecting everyone, regardless of wealth or location to have the same infrastructure that you find in mainland United States or Europe? Doesn't that sound a little over the top?

So your call here is a whole new fleet of satellites and retrofitting of thousands of aircraft - aircraft that isn't under the jurisdiction of the FAA by the way. How do we get that done, and who pays? Furthermore, how many lives are you actually going to save?
17
" all the terabytes of engine-performance data actually have more economic value (for operational and engineering improvements) than a plane full of people."

Wow, that's the stupidest left wing talking point all week.

Maybe, just maybe, well functioning engines are important to the passengers safety too? Just a thought.
18
@16, your implication that the rest of the world doesn't hew to the same aviation standards as the good old USA is false.

But you're correct about the ocean: it's really, really big. They could search for months and find nothing, even if it's clearly visible, which it might not be.

Speculating about transmission systems is pointless; if the plane is in the water, which it almost certainly is, the fanciest satellite beacons in the world won't help you. Water is really hard on radio waves.

Unless the plane was plucked from the sky by our alien lizard overlords, in which case we'll never find anything, it could be years before anything is found.
19
Blah blah blah. Why is this HEADLINE NEWS??? So much more important events are occurring in the world.

It's the old bait and switch. Let's focus the public's attention on an airplane that disappeared. That will divert their attention from the real news going on in the world.

give em bread and circuses...
20
@18 There is no unified world authority on aviation, so yes, standards are different in different parts of the world. I'm not sure why this is so controversial.
21
@20, members of IATA and ICAO, which is everybody, will be surprised to hear that.

Foreign airlines are just as rigorous in training, regulations, and maintenance as US airlines. You're fifty years out of date.
22
@13, I misspoke—the data is collected continuously but generally offloaded, as you say, periodically in bursts, most often by VHF radio link. With some airlines it's accumulated for the whole flight and then collected by a "gatelink" at the destination.

@16, settle down. My point was that manufacturers had a keen interest in collecting reams of data from engines "for operational and engineering improvements," to quote myself, which obviously INCLUDES efficiency, reliability, safety, etc., and they made it happen on a regular basis quite some time ago, because that helps sell more airplanes. Fuel economy is a big selling point. I have no idea why you thought that suggested I might be a climate-change denier.

Bandwidth, however, is to some extent a zero-sum game, and what I said was that a lot more infrastructure would likely be needed IF airlines wanted to continuously stream all the thousands of flight parameters that are being measured every second (control inputs, actuator feedback, power fluctuations, cabin conditions, etc., etc.) throughout the aircraft. To do so is NOT a safety imperative because analysis takes time. But the patchiness of radar that you mentioned (along with the fact that it can be avoided by flying low) and the fact that normal ident transponders can be manually disabled suggests that frequent position reporting alone, UP TO a satellite rather than by line-of-sight VHF, would be useful in rare instances like the present one and the Air France 2009 flight, and NOT require much in the way of equipment or bandwidth. It doesn't prevent stupidity, like the Boeing Dreamlifter landing 9 miles from the proper airport last November. I'm not calling for a new fleet of satellites and wanting everybody to pay for it. But if you asked family members right now, chances are they'd demand anything and everything that was technically possible—because they don't have any idea what that would mean.

By the way, the WSJ reporter stands by his story about transmissions from the engine-data-reporting system continuing long after the radar track disappeared. He says the Malaysian official worded his denial carefully to include only actual engine-performance parameters, presumably leaving some kind of handshaking signals. We'll see how that evolves.

Fnarf is right about IATA and ICAO, though there can certainly be deviations in practice—such as the report of the first officer on the missing flight bringing women into the cockpit on a previous trip. Not necessarily a hazard during the cruise portion, but it breaches cockpit security and would almost certainly not happen on a U.S. or European airline.

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