or this one, air transat flight 961 which lost a rudder but landed safely hrs later.

This makes you wonder if there might be wreckage off malaysia and off australia..

Any theory I come up with would be pure speculation. I am pretty certain, on the back of the INMARSAT* data, that the aircraft flew off into the Southern Ocean, at which point it lacked the fuel to reach land. How, why, or who put it there, I haven’t the foggiest.

* a highly reputable satellite company, who wouldn’t make statements like they have without being very sure of their data.

Dan, I am pretty certain too. And I am not dissing Inmarsat, but given the fast moving nature of this investigation and the limited data they had I would not be completly suprised if they were discover an error at some point in the future.

It makes sense though, in as much as an aircraft flying anywhere else would have been detected by that nations military.

Just to throw in my twopenneth. Another ATCO here, and what I find most interesting is, if the debris site is confirmed to be at the furthest limit of the endurance of the flight then I’d assume the aircraft continued at its optimum flight level to be most efficient. If the aircraft was down at 5A then there’s no way it would have made it so far unless it’s climbed back up to its planned level. I’m no expert in how autopilot would control in this situation, but I reckon both pilots were overcome by fumes and the autopilot has resumed a ‘normal’ flight profile. Or the whole 5A thing is a red herring to explain the lack of primary ident.

It makes sense though, in as much as an aircraft flying anywhere else would have been detected by that nations military.

Yeah on primary inspection, but lots UK and US military analysts think that there are holes not just in coverage, but in how flights are monitored.

eat_more_cheese if you look at maps of where the first debris was reported that got the aussies all excited, its at about 80% of range. The later “finds” are after days and days of drifting..

I agree, but when all those military nations going back over primary radar footage, finding nothing, and add that to the INMARSAT data, I think we get “beyond reasonable doubt”

Except it is well documented that they didn’t lose all comms.

I don’t see why motive is such a big deal. It being deliberately flown to crash land in the Southern Indian Ocean fits all the known facts. Pretty much none of the other theories do. Personally I prefer a theory which fits the known facts where you only have to come up with a motive – it’s really not so hard to imagine somebody being mad enough to do that, not given all the cases of blokes driving into rivers with their kids on their cars, or jumping off balconies holding their kids.

Except it is well documented that they didn’t lose all comms.

how so?

What was it they were picking up 7 hours into the flight?

that was the automated ping from the satelite
that checks if the planes computer is still on every hour, im not sure exactly what computer that is!

Engine data

yes well that may have been one of only few systems working after something catastrophic occurred. The point is that your “theory” is just as invalid as any of the others proposed on here, there is very little to go on.

I thought under your theory they pulled all the plugs and lost everything? Again this fails Occam’s Razor – the likelihood of that system remaining live (well that and the autopilot and everything else required for that to keep working) in the event of a catastrophic failure sufficient to take out all other means of comms, including the front end needed to use Satcom for vox is so implausible that it can’t have possibly happened. Not when compared to the pilot doing something mad, which is both totally plausible, but fits all known facts without the need for any unlikely scenarios.

I’m still not sure why the pilot doing something mad is such a difficult concept for so many.

so what did he do to the co-pilot?

Locked out of the cockpit when he went to powder his nose.

Stabbed him?

The homicidal/suicidal pilot seems to be the most probable to me as a total ignorant amateur.

It’s happened before.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990

Again this fails Occam’s Razor – the likelihood of… is so implausible that it can’t have possibly happened.

C’mon, you’re better than that!

This just came up on my Facebook, read it with a pinch of salt but it seems quite compelling.

http://beforeitsnews.com/politics/2014/03/rothschild-takes-down-malaysian-airliner-mh370-to-gain-rights-to-a-semiconductor-patent-getting-rid-of-those-who-stood-in-his-way-2607888.html

To a conspiracy theorist. Not read anything apart from the URL on the basis that 90%+ of stuff like this in FB is conspiracy theory, but the fundamental flaw on the basis of the URL is that the semiconductor folks on the plane weren’t all that high powered and just a handful of the thousands in the company.

I thought under your theory they pulled all the plugs and lost everything?

I do not have a theory, not enough evidence. I raised those points to show you what is possible.

I do not have a problem with the suicide theory. I’m just pointing out that aircraft are complex and designed with many failsafes in mind. Hence the likely hood of an outlier (or what you call implausible) event causing the crash is quite high, whether thats pilot suicide or a perfect storm of failures is going to be tough to determine.

PS I think you misunderstand William of Ockham slightly.

Once again I am underwhelmed by the quality of the “debris” finds, these look like waves, taken on a stormy day. No wonder they cannot find anything, seconds after these images were tken the “debris” ie froth has dissapeared. taken from Ministry of Transport Malaysia’s facebook feed.

I think you are going to have to assume that these images have been studied by people who are used to analysing satellite photos…..

And the quality of images they have will be far higher than what they release to the public.

Its not the quality of the images, its the fact that it just does not look like debris any more than the millions of white things in all the other satellite images of other regions. Spend an hour on tomnod looking at the sea, there is shed loads of white stuff like this.

And to the untrained eye, a bike is a bike is a bike. 😉

Before you assume/accept that I am a pillock and have no idea what I am talking about, just do as I ask and spend some time on tomnod and see what you find in the ocean. Loads of images like those ones.

Before you assume/accept that I am a pillock…

Nah man, I respect your point of view – but I don’t think there’s any value in me going on tomnod and having a scout. This isn’t like keeping an eye open for a missing cat, I ain’t gonna have a clue what I’m looking at – it’s not like the plane’s gonna be floating there with people waving frantically at the passing satellite.

I don’t think you are a pillock, but I do think you are a bloke browsing the internet who is seeking to pass judgement on the work of professionals…..

The chinese and Malaysian professionals thought this was it did they not?
Just because someone has a job and a title doesn’t neccesarily make them experts. I’m just applying a bit of skepticism.

Has this been done yet?

Looks legit Bazz

The GRU had previously, on 14 March, reported their “puzzlement” as to why the United States Navy “captured and then diverted” this Malaysia Airlines civilian aircraft from its intended flight-path to the Diego Garcia atoll, an assessment that has subsequently been verified by radar tracks showing the mysterious US military flights moving about this aircraft immediately prior to its “disappearance.”

😉

Thats some crackpot conspiracy theory there!

What puzzles me is why these nutters thing that if the US miliatry had something so valuable/important that they would be willing to hijack a plane to get it back that they would just load it onto a civilian container ship with only 2 seals to protect it.

Mental.

Has this been done yet?

Someone put a lot of time into putting that “theory” together.

The “photo second right” was from one of the long-ago, above-ground nuclear weapons tests, likely at either the Nevada Test Site or in the S. Pacific, (i.e. Eniwetok or Bikini atolls)—long before the cruise missiles depicted in the photo even existed.

I live in New Mexico and the purported massive explosion hasn’t been reported by any news agencies in the state.

Before you assume/accept that I am a pillock and have no idea what I am talking about, just do as I ask and spend some time on tomnod and see what you find in the ocean. Loads of images like those ones.

Do we think satellites only work in the visible spectrum? Might they work in different frequencies that are capable of highlighting differences in, say, material densities, and be able to differentiate between, say, metal and seawater?

I’m no satellite expert, but I used to work in a field where all manner of images were produced (tranmission electon microscopy and associated techniques), if I stuck my results on a website you’d probably completely misinterpret them. No ones saying youre a pillock, just having a debate.

Infred does temp. Any bit of aircraft that has been in the sea for more than a few hrs will be the same temp as the sea.
I am not an expert in satellites, I know a little about it through a previous job, but not much. I am fairly sure we have, as yet, to develop an optical method of measuring density. There is XRF to do elemental analysis, but I don’t think satellites send Xrays (yet). (I could be wrong).
There is satellite based radar for interferometry purposes, used fro topology mapping. I do not think it could detect half submerged moving around stuff though.
There might be other methods, but we would have heard about it, the reporters are desperate to find a new way of explaining this. The images released are optical,and it is inferred that the “debris” has been spotted optically.

What I am not sure about is I think that the observation satellites are making passes, so they only take one image, and then on to the next sector. So they cannot discriminate if an object appears/disappears (ie the white tops on a wave). If they could take lots of images of one spot I think we would have seen them too. But I am not 100% sure about this..

There is also the issue of resolution, I am sure that the best resolution MIL sats have is about 0.3m, which is the max resolution we are seeing on all those images. it does not get better than that.Commercial resolution is about 0.5m which is probably what most of the of the images are.

Until something is found, it is just “possible debris”. The fact everybody is in this one area says they must be fairly confident of it.

Most satellites aren’t taking snapshots but scanning along track. Transients such as whitecaps wouldn’t persist for long enough.