sensible

I believe it never went down. That sharp turn and the disablement of info equipment says a lot. It was certainly not a Bermuda Triangle incident. The t***h will out eventually.

bmac32 Loc: West Florida

Fully agree, no one knows it's all guess's, educated or not.

boofhead

A lot of the info on what happened came from t***sponder sqawks at first, so if that piece of equipment was affected by the heat/smoke it could have been giving false information before the crew was aware of it. Hence the casual "goodnight".

Similarly the positions, also from the t***sponder, and the altitudes, could have been spurious.

When the crew realized they had a problem they would have started a turn back to home base, and if they stopped the turn when mosly around, due to confusing position data (again caused by the fire/smoke) it could very well have been on the final heading they took afterward.

Those positions and altitudes we were told about make no sense as they were reported, and I suspect that they were inaccurate. For example the airplane was too heavy to have climbed to FL450 even if the crew had wanted to do so.

So now we have a confused crew, maybe suffering from smoke inhalation, on oxygen and wearing smoke hoods, trying to make sense of the situation. They might have been t***smitting an emergency call, but unkown to them the radios were out.

You only have a few minutes to get this right or you pass out. It has happened before. In an ideal world you will be on oxygen, but the mask has to be located and donned, and who knows if they had practiced with the masks as fitted? (check to see if the simulator has the same type of mask, and if the crews routinely practised putting them on. Many airlines do not take this seriously). Or had them plugged in? The radio connection to the masks was probably not plugged in, or they would have managed something.

The Swiss Air crew were forced out of their seats because the fire originated in the cockpit. The heat/smoke was too intense for them to remain and they had to flee to the passenger cabin and could not prevent the final crash into the ocean. they made no radio calls either (the FDR CVR were located and so we know what happened).

The Air France crew had time to make calls but did not do so, fighting for control of their airplane until the last. (there is more to that accident, I am only talking about communications).

So why did the fire not bring the airplane down? If it stays at altitude the fire will be starved of oxygen and go out, after smouldering for a while and filling the airplane with toxic smoke. Again, this has happened before.

When the airplane electrical supplies fail, a standby wind-driven generator automatically extends and supplies some electrical power and hydraulics. It is not enough to run the entire ship but is designed to operate one radio, the auto pilot basic functions, basic flight controls and little more, If the one radio it powers was the one that had failed, they would have no comms.

So with the crew incapacitated, the auto pilot operating in basic attitude mode and altitude hold (this is not particularly vulnerable to electrical supply spikes or failures, while the navigation functions need good power and input to run), it would continue on the last heading selected until it runs out of fuel and goes down.

This makes more sense to me than a takeover by a pilot. If the pilot had taken over he would have wanted to put it into the sea immediately. Why would he continue for up to 7 hours before doing so? He would know that the crew in the cabin would be trying to get in and eventually they would succeed. There are ways to do this. Even if he thought to shut down the pressurization and force the passengers to pass out, they have portable oxygen supplies that would allow some of them to remain active for quite a while. The valve turning on/off the passenger oxygen supply is not accessible by the pilot, and if they had oxygen generators they run automatically and cannot be shut down by the pilot. They would give 20 minutes per passenger, and with half a load, the passengers could use the generators in unassigned seats to get more time.

I can see the Silk Air situation, or the Egyptian Air case, or the Japan Airlines, or Fedex for that matter, but this one does not seem to be a pilot suicide.

no1healey

There have been several reports over the weeks that give you cause ti wonder. One early report was the Pilots wife and kids moved out of their mansion the day before the doomed flight . The other report is the 20 Chinese with "stealth "abiltys to hide a airliner that were on board . There are other strands of "co-incidents" that do cause to wonder at the much larger picture. Oh to be a fly on the wall in high places ..

Augustus Greatorex Loc: NE

If you were Vietnam and you shot down a passenger plane filled with Chinese civilians, what would you do? Tell the Chinese? Claim it never entered your airspace and hide the evidence?

Blacksheep

That idea is so far away from dealing with the facts in this case that I wonder where you've been all this time. The pilot had turned the airplane around prior to saying goodnight to the control tower. That's just for starters. The jet's radio silence was deliberate. Do you really suggest that everything that happened is moot and it was just a misdirected airliner that the Vietnamese decided to shoot at? Really?

Augustus Greatorex Loc: NE

Where is the plane? Tell me that. Until we find something of the plane, one theory is as good as another. And this one doesn't hinge on antiquated Malaysian technology supposedly spotting an unidentified plane elsewhere.

Blacksheep

Where is the plane tell me that.
Right. Like I know.
One theory is NOT as good as another. Your "theory" is like "the earth is flat" compared to the fact that the earth is round.
Where in your "theory" does it explain how that aircraft ended up over Vietnam and why? It's a non-theory. It's just an open-ended conjecture with no theory in it at all.

A theory attempts to tie all the known facts together and reach a logical conclusion. When you just say "Oh, it got shot down by the Vietnamese", you are not presenting anything other than a random idea without the slightest shred of proof. So of course I challenged what you offered.

Wait, wait, I know where it is. It flew to Pango Pango and is being used to t***sport coconuts and bananas. That's pretty much equal to your story, we have no reason for offering either one and we can't prove either one. Thanks for your contribution but surely you can do better than that.

trucksterbud

A very good article on Yahoo News, by a prominent analyst, pointed out that a jet as large as the trip7 CANNOT disappear from radar without the help of GOVERNMENTS.! (Get that one..??) And as a former pilot myself, I can assure you that airplanes leave a "footprint" on radar even if the t***sponder is turned off. There is no way this airplane just "disappeared".... Someone somewhere knows where it is. What about the sighting in the Don Carlos Islands of an airliner flying so low that the observers could see the tail numbers.?? Where is that info..?? That analysts conjecture was the same as the conspiracy theory crowd - that it had been stolen, the humans aboard sent off to be food for the aliens, and the plane was being loaded with weapons of mass destruction for delivery - aka 9/11 style attack - to wh**ever nation is currently pissing off the g*******ts (China). Does this register to anyone else..?? It is my belief that we haven't seen the last of Flight 370, nor will all the distraction by the mainstream news media find the jet and passengers.

Blacksheep

That's an interesting point about the Don Carlos Islands, the only problem is that there's no such islands. There is a Don Carlos Hotel on Islas Baleares, Spain, but that's as close as you're going to get to your fabled islands, and there is NO reference on Google to Any sighting of the jetliner.

Others have also pointed out that there's nothing that can be turned off in a jetliner that has anything to do with it's radar reflectivity. It's still going to be detected just the same.

So far, the lack of evidence is telling the tale, because there should be a pile of it if that aircraft had gone down in the ocean, and currently everything points not to a crash but to a landing.

alex Loc: michigan now imperial beach californa

I hope you don't pick up the i***t news casters habit of calling a plane a jet, the only place in a jet big enough to hold a human is 740 degrees centigrade I don't think a person would last long in there, that is just over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit

alex Loc: michigan now imperial beach californa

there were (I think) 139 Chinese on that plane

alex Loc: michigan now imperial beach californa

PAKISTAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Blacksheep

Jet is pretty common usage as short for jet airplane. When some says "there goes a military jet", I understand. We all do. It's context that matters. Don't be a name N**i.

Blacksheep

Golly, do you think? Oh, no, couldn't be. Why would a terrorist Islamic nation with atomic weapons and no bombers want an airplane like that? No, can't be. France maybe, or T***sylvania or maybe the Falkland Islands.

I can almost see it being refitted as we speak with a bomb bay and the clamps that hold the bomb.