MH370 - 10 years ago today

guitars4you

Hard to believe it is 10 years ago today - Over 100 detailed books have been written about it - Many documentaries - And no 'firm/positive' answers

lovestrat74

Watched a documentary this week where an expert in the field reckons they can locate the plane using radio signals. Crazy stuff. Really hope they find it for closure to all concerned.

CHRISB50

I found this, and still find it quite scary. 

For such a big and traceable object, with so many people on board, to just disappear. 

Poor buggers. Whatever happened to them. 

guitars4you

CHRISB50 said:

I found this, and still find it quite scary. 

For such a big and traceable object, with so many people on board, to just disappear. 

Poor buggers. Whatever happened to them. 

That is the part that you just can't comprehend - No debris - If it had have taken a vertical nose dive into the ocean surely there would be debris sooner or later - Let alone a horizontal crash into the ocean 

The RR engines came from Derby, so close to me - Possibly Derby's largest employer along with British Rail - There was talk at the time about various tracking/monitoring from the engines - Everyone locally knows a RR member of staff - Be it factory floor or management - So it generates rumours of one form or another - Plus one or two high ranking 'technical' staff who refused to say anything as confidential etc  

Cirrus

I think the most likely answer is that the pilot murder/suicided, because of the way radio transponder tracking had to be turned off at a very precise part of the flight, just after a hand off from one controller to another to make it longer before an alarm was raised, then the very specific course to the west the plane went on before heading out south into the Indian ocean.

The lack of debris also points to a controlled landing - the last I knew, the only parts found were parts of the plane that would have likely broken off in a controlled water landing.

Without any direct evidence it's hard to accuse someone of such a terrible crime, though.

sinbaadi

Pilot murders everyone onboard and completes safe water landing before scuttling the plane to the deep si that no-one will know he did it?

Whitecat

Tbf they have found some debris - about 20 pieces, some large. Scattered all over though - South China Sea, Madagascar, Mozambique, Tanzanian coast - ocean currents not much help in this case obvs!

Personally I like the theory that something catastrophic happened that caused hypoxia in the flight crew and they made crazy decisions as a result… strange navigation, switching off transponders etc… 

pt22

What is this "lack of debris" narrative? There are some significant documented and verified pieces of debris, as well as a bunch of non-confirmed by likely debris found scattered across the eastern coast of Africa, Madagascar, Mauritius, etc...  

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2017/jan/17/missing-flight-mh370-a-visual-guide-to-the-parts-and-debris-found-so-far#:~:text=The large piece of debris,became separated from the wing.

All it takes is a quick google. This type of chat just continues to fuel conspiracy theories. No one knows exactly how it went down, but the plane definitively crashed in the ocean.

ICBM

sinbaadi said:

Pilot murders everyone onboard and completes safe water landing before scuttling the plane to the deep si that no-one will know he did it?

Bizarre though it sounds, this is probably the most likely hypothesis.

My guess is that the area of the bottom of the South Indian Ocean around the Broken Ridge formation - very difficult seafloor terrain for towed sonar - was carefully researched and reckoned to be the best place to hide a 777. I think the plane had just enough fuel to reach a specific area called the Dordrecht Hole - the deepest part of the ocean there, just south of Broken Ridge - so that's where I would look first.

I read an analogy for the undersea search... the possible search area was about the size of Germany. Imagine you know an airliner has crashed somewhere in Germany, and to find it you must only search on moonless nights using a hand torch and a bicycle. What are your chances of finding it?

lovestrat74

ICBM said:

sinbaadi said:

Pilot murders everyone onboard and completes safe water landing before scuttling the plane to the deep si that no-one will know he did it?

Bizarre though it sounds, this is probably the most likely hypothesis.

My guess is that the area of the bottom of the South Indian Ocean around the Broken Ridge formation - very difficult seafloor terrain for towed sonar - was carefully researched and reckoned to be the best place to hide a 777. I think the plane had just enough fuel to reach a specific area called the Dordrecht Hole - the deepest part of the ocean there, just south of Broken Ridge - so that's where I would look first.

I read an analogy for the undersea search... the possible search area was about the size of Germany. Imagine you know an airliner has crashed somewhere in Germany, and to find it you must only search on moonless nights using a hand torch and a bicycle. What are your chances of finding it?

Better chance if it was an e-bike and a head torch

Cirrus

pt22 said:

What is this "lack of debris" narrative?




It's people chatting on a forum, which is fine. I even said that debris had been found, so it's a stretch to call it a narrative and ride in like you're an expert.

Shrews

ICBM said:

What are your chances of finding it?

Well, after 10 years, with thousands of people involved, and us good old humans from planet earth searching relentlessly for it, I think the chances are high. 

Trouble is, thousands of people are not involved, we're not good old humans, and we are not searching relentlessly. No doubt someone needs to foot the bill and there's a financial reluctance.

All the above otherwise known as 'nobody really gives a fuck' and in a week or so it will be forgotten about until it's 20th anniversary. 

ICBM

Shrews said:

Well, after 10 years, with thousands of people involved, and us good old humans from planet earth searching relentlessly for it, I think the chances are high. 

Trouble is, thousands of people are not involved, we're not good old humans, and we are not searching relentlessly. No doubt someone needs to foot the bill and there's a financial reluctance.

I think you may be underestimating how almost unimaginably deep, dark and inaccessible the floor of the South Indian Ocean actually is - three miles down, in absolute pitch blackness, and rugged terrain. They could miss it by a few metres and never know - if the plane is intact, they have to cover every single part of the sea floor at a grid size of no more than the wingspan of a 777.

Even if they had a dozen ships searching with ROVs, the chances of finding it without a very specific knowledge of where it actually went down are tiny. It took two years to find AF447, even though they knew much more precisely where it was and it had a somewhat larger debris field.

If the pilot - or someone else - put it there on purpose, and managed to ditch it well enough that it didn't break up, they knew exactly what they were doing. There are possibly some other vaguely credible theories (not the really wild ones), and some suspicion about the parts that have washed up so far, but it still seems the most likely one to me.

Shrews

@ICBM ;

Indeed. 

My point was more about the will and relentless intent to solve the puzzle as human beings. 

I mean, we do have enough human resource to search an area the size of Germany and it's equivalent depth, don't we?

Plus, we have the technical ability to search such an area and the technical resource to do it. Plus, the human brainpower to co-ordinate such a search operation.

If we really, really wanted to. 

Haych

I came across a website a few years back on MH370 written by a pilot.  His hypothesis based on all the evidence on the "return flight" after it turned back from IGARI, was that the pilot was manually flying the aircraft and was trying to return to Penang.  He detailed the specifics on the flight path, the erratic altitude, the waypoints and in particular the approach to several waypoints being the same as Standard Terminal Arrival.

Quite how it ended up in the southern Indian ocean is altogether another thing.  But, after obviously not landing at Penang I find it interesting that the plane then turned north west directly up the Strait of Malacca, almost as if the pilot was trying to avoid flying over Indonesia.  Once it was clear of land, only then did it turn south - had it not turned south it would have continued on to India, another possibly interesting point.

The same reasoning that suggests all this input was a deliberate attempt to avoid detection makes me wonder if the pilot was desperately trying to land the plane in short order before a window of opportunity ran out and then, when it did, he was simply trying to avoid crash landing over heavily populated areas.

It's easy to assume pilot suicide, and maybe that was the case, but I tend to believe something catastrophic occurred on board that set in motion a sequence of events that we may never know.

CavemanGrogg

Shrews said:

ICBM said:

What are your chances of finding it?

Well, after 10 years, with thousands of people involved, and us good old humans from planet earth searching relentlessly for it, I think the chances are high. 

Trouble is, thousands of people are not involved, we're not good old humans, and we are not searching relentlessly. No doubt someone needs to foot the bill and there's a financial reluctance.

All the above otherwise known as 'nobody really gives a fuck' and in a week or so it will be forgotten about until it's 20th anniversary. 

You may want to look into how the search was conducted, ie, it was conducted so that it would come off in a good light in the press for politicians, airlines, and even the heads of various transport safety boards.  They - the people responsible for organising the search not those who actually conducted the search themselves, where more concerned and interested in how far the search vessels where moving each day, rather than how well the search area was being searched and covered, they even prevented searchers from ''updating' the search area as more information became available, which is one of the reasons why there is at least 1 person who has publicly stated in the press that he guarantees he can find the wreckage with just one more search, as in one more trip out with a boat

ICBM

Haych said:

I came across a website a few years back on MH370 written by a pilot.  His hypothesis based on all the evidence on the "return flight" after it turned back from IGARI, was that the pilot was manually flying the aircraft and was trying to return to Penang.  He detailed the specifics on the flight path, the erratic altitude, the waypoints and in particular the approach to several waypoints being the same as Standard Terminal Arrival.

Quite how it ended up in the southern Indian ocean is altogether another thing.  But, after obviously not landing at Penang I find it interesting that the plane then turned north west directly up the Strait of Malacca, almost as if the pilot was trying to avoid flying over Indonesia.  Once it was clear of land, only then did it turn south - had it not turned south it would have continued on to India, another possibly interesting point.

The same reasoning that suggests all this input was a deliberate attempt to avoid detection makes me wonder if the pilot was desperately trying to land the plane in short order before a window of opportunity ran out and then, when it did, he was simply trying to avoid crash landing over heavily populated areas.

It's easy to assume pilot suicide, and maybe that was the case, but I tend to believe something catastrophic occurred on board that set in motion a sequence of events that we may never know.

Yes - if there's an alternative, it's this. If there was a fire in the cockpit, causing depressuration and loss of electrical systems as the pilots desperately tried to fight it, while turning back in the direction of Penang - they got the fire out, but the plane was by then unable to communicate or land, the passengers probably dead, so whoever was still alive decided to fly the plane out to sea as far as possible from any inhabited area it could crash in.

Why a fire? Because firstly, a witness in the South China Sea saw something bright in the sky at about the time MH370 turned back, and secondly this...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_667

Another 777-200ER - the cause of that fire was never conclusively determined, but was related to the co-pilot’s emergency oxygen supply, and if it had happened in the air, the result would have been catastrophic. An oxygen/aluminium fire would burn very brightly, probably bright enough to be seen from the ground even with the plane at cruise.

Interestingly I flew on that exact aircraft many years before it caught fire, when I went to Egypt on holiday… 1997, it was almost brand new then.

tony99

ICBM said:

sinbaadi said:

Pilot murders everyone onboard and completes safe water landing before scuttling the plane to the deep si that no-one will know he did it?

Bizarre though it sounds, this is probably the most likely hypothesis.

My guess is that the area of the bottom of the South Indian Ocean around the Broken Ridge formation - very difficult seafloor terrain for towed sonar - was carefully researched and reckoned to be the best place to hide a 777. I think the plane had just enough fuel to reach a specific area called the Dordrecht Hole - the deepest part of the ocean there, just south of Broken Ridge - so that's where I would look first.

I read an analogy for the undersea search... the possible search area was about the size of Germany. Imagine you know an airliner has crashed somewhere in Germany, and to find it you must only search on moonless nights using a hand torch and a bicycle. What are your chances of finding it?

Well, what kind of bicycle?

pt22

CavemanGrogg said:

Shrews said:

ICBM said:

What are your chances of finding it?

Well, after 10 years, with thousands of people involved, and us good old humans from planet earth searching relentlessly for it, I think the chances are high. 

Trouble is, thousands of people are not involved, we're not good old humans, and we are not searching relentlessly. No doubt someone needs to foot the bill and there's a financial reluctance.

All the above otherwise known as 'nobody really gives a fuck' and in a week or so it will be forgotten about until it's 20th anniversary. 

You may want to look into how the search was conducted, ie, it was conducted so that it would come off in a good light in the press for politicians, airlines, and even the heads of various transport safety boards.  They - the people responsible for organising the search not those who actually conducted the search themselves, where more concerned and interested in how far the search vessels where moving each day, rather than how well the search area was being searched and covered, they even prevented searchers from ''updating' the search area as more information became available, which is one of the reasons why there is at least 1 person who has publicly stated in the press that he guarantees he can find the wreckage with just one more search, as in one more trip out with a boat

How about you provide a source instead? 

snowblind

Saw that doco last week. The WSPR concept looks pretty clever and does genuinely look like it could provide new and useful information. 

Reverend

guitars4you said:

Hard to believe it is 10 years ago today - Over 100 detailed books have been written about it - Many documentaries - And no 'firm/positive' answers

There's good money in suffering.