OK – forget the transponder. The transponder can’t be picked up very far from radar stations anyway. Just have permanently enabled satellite position reporting. It can be the ACARS link. If the position source goes bad, it won’t worry ATC because they won’t see it. But the ops dept will be logging it, so if the pilot decides to “go out in style” (as I think this one did) at least they will know where to look for it.
Having every airliner sending data via Immarsat (or whatever) every say 5 mins will cost next to nothing on the scale of airliner operating costs.
Where it vanished, MH370 was received by multiple ADSB receivers and, if I remember correctly, by SSR stations.
What ever happened to this plane, I do not buy the version kept up to date that the primary echo going back over the Malaian penninsula and then turning South was MH370. However, the satellite traces it left seem to indicate with pretty high certainty that it did indeed end up in the south indian ocean. How it got there and what caused the turn off route will only become clear (hopefully) if the recorders ever are found.
I do not really believe in a conspiracy, the search effort involved has been far too costly for all involved if anyone really knew what happened to it. Equally, a story like that, as long as 2 people know the “real” story, it WILL leak. Which, by human nature, is the one argument which will deflate most conspiracy theories almost immediately, especcially one of this magnitude.
I do not buy any theory where that 777 was landed on water without breaking up or at least leave some traces behind. More likely, it ended up like the Helios flight in Greece or the TBM900 near Cuba, flying on AP with a frozen cabin until the fuel ran out. What caused this is a different story.
The Hudson landing showed dramatically that it is possible to land an airliner on water without breaking up….and with the pressurization relief vents open water will flood in…and it will sink….and it is possible due to said valves that it would not implode….so it could be intact on the seabed somewhere…
AFAIK the Malaysians have also never released the cargo manifest.
see here and scroll down a bit. You will find 9 pages of the cargo manifest
http://avherald.com/h?article=4710c69b/035&opt=0
Very interesting is a 2.453kg load of Lithium Ion batteries.
It is far more likely that the problems with these battery’s or some other technical issue started a chain of events than some of the more fanciful things that have turned up in the Internet.
I would hazard a guess that it COULD have gone like this.
1 small electrical Fire starts disabling some systems. May be as a result of a cargo fire.
2 crew notice the problems decide to turn back and so use HDG select to start the turn getting off the airway as the communications with ATC stop working as does the transponder and a bunch of other stuff that lives in the area of the wiring melt down.
3 the fire results in a breach of the pressure hull or the wire fire opens the outflow valve ( that controls cabin pressure ) resulting in a decompression.
4 the flight crew become inccpacitated as they are slow getting the masks on in this high workload situation ( the passengers are using the drop down masks and the cabin crew get onto the walk around bottles.
5 The fire extinguishes due to the lack of oxygen at altitude.
6 The cabing crew being from the Far East are reluctant to question the flight crew and don’t try to get into the flight deck until the passengers start passing out at the passenger oxygen supply becomes exhausted.
7 Eventualy the cabin crew now very short of oxygen get into the flight deck and try to take control of the aircraft and use HDG select to point the aircraft toward the Sothern ocean and change the altitude of the aircraft.
8 The cabin crew run out of oxygen and the aircraft continues flying untill the fuel Is exhausted.
I know this is a lot of holes in a lot of Swiss cheese to line up but it is the best I can come up with and is based on other inccidents or accidents that have happened in the past that does not involve illegal action or conspiracy theory’s.I agree there are tech failure scenarios but IMHO they are just so unlikely; more so in this case where the LHS was a “boffin” pilot who was probably pretty sharp – unlike the two button pushers on AF447.
Is it me, or this gentleman has no understanding of what secondary radar is and how it works?
Peter, it matters not how sharp you are if you are not in the cockpit when the trouble kicks off……… I once went for a very quick visit to the bathroom (In american terminology ) and returnd to find the FO had decided to balance the fuel level in the wing tanks but had cocked up the settings resulting in one engine gravity feeding 15,000 ft above the limit for gravity feed…….. Oh and he chose the only place in Europe that the MSA was above the single engine drift down altitude to do it !!!!!!! doing it unsupervised was also in breach of company SOP.
The Captain of the Air France airbus was in the back on controlled rest when the two computor operators lost control of the aircraft.
It is unsafe to assume that all the crew members were in the cockpit, for obvious reasons you have to leave the controls once in a while.
Here’s a potentially interesting development in this case:
MH370: wreckage found on Reunion ’matches Malaysia Airlines flight
That part really looks like a 777 flap … I compared the picture with some other photos of 777 flaps.
