Two minutes later, at 1.21 a.m. local time, the transponder - a device identifying jets to ground controllers - was turned off in a move that experts say could reveal a careful sequence."
-Reuters
Turning off the transponder two minutes after communication and turning IMO rules out fire. It would have had to take place in a 2 minute window.
I know, I know, I'm reaching. But it'd explain the "mumbling."
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/world/asia/malaysia-airlin...
That is part of the problem with any analysis of what could have happened.
We don't know for sure if all the input is correct as reported. The old garbage in garbage out.
We don't know if the background checks (some of which are complete some which various countries haven't even released yet) have issues. Everything is speculation based on fuzzy information.
All we know is what is reported and we don't know how much of it is actually correct. Which is what your comment illustrates ""turn off time" is inaccurately quoted".
If there was an electrical fire maybe it disabled the telemetry system before the last radio comm without them knowing? I don't know all the systems on the plane and what the possibility is of an electrical fire going unnoticed for ~12 minutes. That's my only guess for why the transponder was turned off before last radio comm IF we assume this article/post's point of view is correct.
In this case, however, there was a communication at 1:30, ten min. after the transponder was turned off. Once you are on the radio, it makes sense to say "we have a fire" I would think.
"Aviate, Navigate, Communicate"
I have yet to hear of a single midair aircraft fire that was not reported over comms.
You misunderstood which time interval I was talking about entirely. I am also not espousing a theory that this is what happened to the MH flight. I just wanted to point out to people what timescale these things operate within.
I've never been involved in an air crash investigation, but I have done many system outage investigations. The majority of them[2] involve a failure of a hardware/software system, followed by manual intervention done without complete information. The number of times I've seen small problems escalate dramatically by the combination of automatic systems and manual intervention is enough to make me assume accident when something like this happens.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Final_rep...
[2] Ok, the majority that don't involve the deployment of new software.
Now, I don't miss-underestimate how failures happen, how they combine, but I know my procedures. If I'm pulling fuses for things, I'm going to first SQUARK 7700, have the co-pilot screaming on 121.5, whilst he is charged with flying the plane (following a heading, not dropping out of the sky, like AF447!) whilst I then follow the procedures for the kind of electrical fire. Even if it's only for 10 seconds, the 7700 will be picked up, the ATC will see it light up like an angry chirstmas tree. It will not be 'cancelled' by the transponder then being switched off, the operative would have to cancel it, which they wouldn't do until after contact had been reached. In the case of say 7500, they wouldn't take radio as reason to cancel it.
The point is, the transponder just happened to turn off at the perfect moment (between two ATC services) after the ACARS had been switched off long before.
If you had a fire, that had endangered physically separated, redundant systems in that manner, I doubt the plane would be able to fly for 7 hours. The 777 is a fly by wire plane.
However, if you wanted to drop off, un-noticed, it is the perfect time.
Occam's razor n all that. If I thought such failures were possible, as I've said before, I'd shred my pilots license tomorrow.
You are assuming the pilot was in command, but keep in mind a different B777 operated by Qantas had an uncommanded climb caused by twin air data unit failures. The pilots in that case recovered and returned to the airport for an emergency landing. However, I wonder how different it would be over the ocean and at night.
> The point is, the transponder just happened to turn off at the perfect moment (between two ATC services) after the ACARS had been switched off long before.
Yeah. Recovery over the water at night is one thing. Flying for hours after is a very, very different scenario, and that's what makes the difference for me.
I imagine that most air accident investigations begin like this; confused, competing information from numerous sources of varying reliability. Just with the internet and 24h news, everyone is following along with each revelation (see also the Pistorius trial).
Give it some time, let the investigators work and report their findings. I'd be very surprised if it's not a combination of system failure and human error in reacting to the failure.
Not to mention that but when things happen on the plane, pilots are given confused, competing from numerous sources. This is why I assumed it was an accident (like Air France 447) at first.
> Give it some time, let the investigators work and report their findings. I'd be very surprised if it's not a combination of system failure and human error in reacting to the failure.
That was my first impulse too. Google "IEEE Automation Paradox Air France 447." However, this is really hard to square with the engine information. So you have three possibilities: the plane flew an uncommanded course on autopilot for 5 hours following an accident, the flight data is wrong, or it is a hijacking.
In this case an investigation is hard because there is so little information. It took until the black boxes were recovered from AF447 to determine what happened there. Here? We don't even know where the plane is, much less the relevant recorders.
I think that the lack of clear & sufficient information makes Occam's Razer hard to apply.
I am not a pilot, but I would expect both would provide opportunities to refresh memory.
s/drove/stalled/
s/sleeping at the time/had just retired to the crew cabin, taking a rest/
he was only out of the cockpit for 18 minutes.
http://www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601e3.en/pdf/f-cp0906...
http://www.radartutorial.eu/07.waves/wa17.en.html
If the last effect on the page were in effect, you might get a return, know it's relative bearing well, it's range a little less well, and it's altitude not very well at all.
a stall, a recovery, and a randomly meandering flight followed.
adjectives used of the radar data: "inaccurate", "undisclosed".
adjectives used of the flight path: "erratic", "uneven", "zigzagging".
waypoints are thick as thieves, the odds of a flock of birds not hitting three of them are small.
...plus hitting exactly those waypoints makes no sense: the middle zig should have been skipped as superfluous.
Really? On a plane? On my boat they're typically within a few meters.
Indeed, soon after MH370 disappeared, reports emerged that recordings of Malaysian military radar returns showed an unidentified track that could correspond to the flight turning left onto a westward course and descending. At the time it was difficult to assess the validity of that claim. It’s been bolstered, however, by a Reuters report earlier Friday stating that Malaysian military radar showed the flight following a course westward over the Malay peninsula and then heading out over the Indian Ocean, passing specific navigational waypoints as it went.
According to the report, this latter portion of the flight followed an unusual zigzag trajectory as it worked its way toward the north and west. This is a very inefficient way to get from one place to another, but it had some consequences that may have been useful for whoever was in control of the airplane. For one thing, by navigating between well-traveled waypoints, the plane would have seemed to military radar operators to look just like all the other well-behaved commercial traffic traveling over that stretch of ocean. “That’s going to seem like unsuspicious traffic,” says Maarten Uijt de Haag, a professor of electrical engineering at Ohio University. Had the plane left the well-traveled routes and struck out on its own, it would have been far more conspicuous.
Another consequence of the zigzagging trajectory is that, like a fox crossing back and forth over a stream to eluding a pack of hounds, it obscured where exactly it might be heading.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/03/14/mh370_dis...