One spec you won't find for these big aircraft is performance in a dive. This plane is said to have exceeded 700 mph in its dive from 45,000ft altitude down to 25,000 and evidently survived intact to continue flying for several more hours. The model 777-200L(ong)R(ange) was demonstrated by flying non-stop eastward from Seattle, Washington, to (get this!) Kuala Lampur, or approximately 3/4ths of the way around the world. It has a payload capacity at take-off of nearly 400,000 lbs (200tons!) If one of these was filled with explosives and dive bombed at a valuable target, virtually nothing could stop it. This event may be a dry run to determine the feasibility of the tactic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777

It is certainly troubling that the verbal "good night" sign off came AFTER the transponder had been turned off. (Particularly in connection with the 'pilot had a simulator in his home' information.)

Many are now asking why a jetliner sold to a commercial carrier would have transponders that can be turned off, anyway. Seems a fair question.

Technology today would allow a 'ghost' passenger to be constantly viewing, recording and transmitting in real time to a land receiver so what happens can be known. Computers can even decide that something is wrong if that signal disappears. All we do now is record on a loop of two hours what is said in the cockpit and that data stays there on the plane. A cheap videocam would capture that and visual at the same time and connect it to the Identification/friend or foe transmitter (they're calling it ACARS) which, by design, should never be accessible to anyone on the plane. The last act of that guy at the gate who waves the light batons to direct the departure should turn on that system. As we know here at FT due to the questions about the 'black box' being invented in Australia, we also know that technology is over fifty years old. What would it cost the airlines a month to buy a cell phone account for each of their planes? Make it mandatory with the only options being the bandwidth each account purchases (meaning the amount of above the minimum data that is transferred). This system would allow the security agencies to turn on the cell phone and use it for GPS purposes. Glue one to the outside skin of each aircraft. No way someone would crawl outside at 35,000 ft and going 500mph to turn it off. It would cost an extra penny a passenger to implement.

Edit to correctly call out ACARS and for those who want to know more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACARS

A few days ago it was reported that the ACARS system could only be turned off by a visit to the below decks electronics bay. Last night it came out that the data bank of information that gets transmitted - the brains of the system with all the data - can be reduced in content from the control center of ACARS on a console between the two flight officers. So now the question becomes did one of them actually turn down/off the data in the cockpit or, (my wonder) did that console receive a shot from a gun in a struggle between the officers for control of the plane? The location 'pings' they talk about receiving are actually an empty message packet from the ACARS system meaning it wasn't turned off but just had the data packet removed from the transmit stream. That means no one had to make a visit down below to cut off the system.
My thoughts on the rise to 45,000 ft may not have been to evacuate the air and disable the passengers but an act to evacuate a lethal gas that had been released into the cabin. The rapid drop to a too low altitude might be a sign that the ?pilot? was succumbing to the gas. The proof of that scenario would require finding out if anyone was boarded who had a gas canister labeled as oxygen (but was actually something else).

This mid morning from the CNN news anchor --
To a geophysicist about the California earthquake: "So how bad is a 4.7 earthquake say on a scale of 1 to 10?" Lets all answer in unison, "4.7".
Then --
To a black box designer just after he's told her that the devices are activated under water, Q1: "What device do they use to hear these pings?" Again in unison, "Microphones". Q2: "So these devices work underwater fine and not so much on land?" In unison, "Get off the air fool."

And just now from another anchor: "The search is going on within this arc." I think that needs some clarification. The two arcs are deduced from the last ACARS empty transmission package. They know the back and forth of the signal took 0.013 sec to take place (my numbers as an example) that lets them know that the distance to and from the plane and satellite was a certain distance (650 miles say) based on speed of electrical transmission through the atmosphere (how GPS works in part). So from the satellite they make a line that is exactly half that length (325 mi) an drop it down to the earth's surface and trace a ring with it, That circle depicts the last possible line on which the last signal could have been transmitted. The signal could not have been transmitted from a point within the circle because that distance would have been something short of 325 mi and therefore would not have registered the time of signal transit that they have on record. The same goes for points outside that circle: longer distance to satellite and longer time for signal transmission. So the plane HAD TO BE on those lines of arc of the 325 miles away from the satellite. The inaccuracy of the calculation comes in when you have to decide what altitude that 325 miles represents. It is a different ring from the ground, from 5,000 ft and from 35,000 ft. That is why an exact ring cannot be decided upon and they are choosing the 5,000 ft related ring because they figure the plane was flying low to avoid military radar. Hope that helps some folk understand the arcs of the ring idea. The anchor clearly didn't understand it.

Those ideas all sound reasonable.

Last night, after I had typed "Many are now asking why a jetliner sold to a commercial carrier would have transponders that can be turned off, anyway," I heard someone on a news show ask that question. The answer given was that all the data-transmitting electronics present a danger of FIRE and therefore it must be possible to turn off the electricity powering them.

The host had no follow-up question. Mine would have been 'surely it's possible to design a system that will transmit information yet not present a fire risk to the entire plane--surely such a system can be walled off in some manner so that fire inside it wouldn't spread...?'

But, Mehaul, your ideas would seem to bypass the "flight crews MUST be able to turn off transmitting devices due to risk of fire" claim.

I really hope that 'fire risk' won't continue to be accepted as a reason. If it is, we are sure to see more and more terrorism committed via passenger jets.

A solar power/battery back up cell phone on the outside of the plane certainly wouldn't do any damage to the plane. In fact, it would 'self remove' if it caught fire and melted the mounting epoxy.

Also, there is much being made about the pilot having a 777 flight simulator at home and I agree it should be investigated. However, he may have used that to run through his normal simulator routines and used the official Malay Air simulator to run other routines: dive, low altitude, climb and other strategies. That simulator should be investigated too and not overlooked as a source of data.

Edit to add (Eddition): that second anchor came back on and said that since the ring drawn went near Yemen, the plane could be in Yemen. Could some one explain to her that at 450 mph, low altitude (gas guzzling for the engines) and 6 hours from the last known position calculates out to about 3,000 miles the plane could have traveled and that Yemen is about 6,000 miles away?

Reports from remote areas are now coming in, which would be expected. It would take days for the event to be known to remote, un-wired locales and days for the reactions to be returned. I don't know how the Maldives are connected to the daily world occurrences but the news is coming in today that a large white plane with red stripes down the side was eye-witnessed by many flying so low across their land that one man said he could count the doors on the morning of the 8th. This would match up to straight line flight path of the last known radar heading, and flight time. The Ping reception satellite is directly above the Maldives! There are many reasons the signal from directly below a satellite can be misread as having come from a distance other than below (The echo signal coming from a bounce off the surface below being one). So the final resting place of the aircraft may be to the west (not much farther) of the Maldives and no one's looking there.

My updated thoughts now: Something like a meteor hit the plane. It turned to return to an airport. A fire started by the meteor impact overcame the passengers and crew. The pilots tried to go up and down to extinguish and clear the fumes from the cabin but succumbed. Having succeeded though in extinguishing the fire, the plane was operable. The plane kept flying on its last, westward heading all through the remainder of the night. It was then seen at dawn by the people in the Maldives in its final moments.

Eddition: There is another eye-witness account that has been ignored for whatever reasons I haven't a clue. A roughneck on an oil drilling rig in the Gulf of Thailand saw a bright flash of an explosion in the sky about where and when the plane made its left hand turn.

Let's hope this debris is it. The news reports are showing just how much is being done to find the wreckage, and one wonders how many millions it is costing. Note that China is still complaining that not enough is being done. Disgracefully hypocritical I am thinking. One wonders how much China would be prepared to help under similar circumstances involving another group of nationals. Cast your mind back to the help provided to the Philippines in recent tragedies and what the differences were in donations.

News reports say that China now has sent seven ships to the area. I thought it was a misprint and they meant 700, but no. The mighty nation so desperate for news and so critical of other nations has only sent seven ships?

I'm not exactly mystified over a missing plane as once I discovered the technology which can locate anyone via their mobile phone cannot locate or identify a plane in the air or the ground or the sea if certain items are turned off or broken. The only element which is a mystery is the radar track showing an interception by another craft when it changed course off the Malaysian coast, and then both dropped off the radar. The theories surrounding that are truly fascinating, albeit unfounded.

I wonder why eyewitness accounts have all been dismissed and the searchers can only rely and act on technological leads? To make light of Descartes: "I see; therefore, I'm not!"

I fear the third wolf cry of a satellite image may be dismissed as another cargo container.

Phones only connect via cell phone towers - which are pointed down to the earth, not into the sky. That's why you don't have cell phone service in flight unless the plane is equipped with special technology (which this pane wasn't).

Not the whole picture there. Cell phones rely on batteries to generate the radio frequencies they use for transmission. The small battery arrays in a phone generate only small fractions of a Watt in transmission power. Power means distance (the inverse square law applies like gravity, after a certain distance the force is negligible). Home cordless phones need to be within a hundred or so feet of their base station. Cell phones need to be within a half mile or so (2-3,000 feet) of a repeater tower to hook into the phone system. Planes traveling at 25-30,000 feet are well outside that range whether above, below, east or west.

Eddition: A little aside about radios and power - at 4W, CB radios are considered line of sight or Horizon range transmitters. Their signal strength goes out about 10 miles in radius in a finals-tuned-to-the-antenna rig (best case scenario). Some cheats will boost their power into the 14 Watt range and in doing so are able to reach the ionosphere and achieve a skip situation and can broadcast halfway around the world. Note: a receiver tuned to the CB frequencies can hear those skip signals no matter what their transmit power is. They do however benefit from the tuned antenna technique to collect low power signals and use audio amplifiers to hear faint signals. So to transmit halfway around the world in most usable high frequency radios it takes about 15 Watts. In researching for the power output level of a typical cell/mobile phone all I quickly came across is that less than one Watt (<1W) transmitted from a jammer is enough to disrupt most phones, meaning to me that most cell phones are operating in the low microwave frequency range (farther travel of signal) in the fractional wattage range (~1/4W).

Well, you've just explained to yourself why your earlier solution wouldn't work.

There is a type of phone that talks to satellites and not repeater towers. The Motorola Iridium System was the first to do so about twenty years ago (edit: first actual call was 15 yrs ago - V.1 - but the prototype surely preceded that date - V.0). They are probably up to the third generation of that technology by now (edit: The second generation is designed and ready to launch V.2 putting the version now on drawing boards as V.3 that's actually 4 generations and highly underutilized). I think the little hand held GPS systems are half the concept. The higher power to transmit to a stationary orbit satellite is an unknown (edit: the units are the size of bricks and that is probably mostly batteries). The common man's cell phone agreed would not cut the mustard as the device I envisioned. Good observation.

Eddition: From the Wikipedia entry for Iridium Communications:
Air Safety Communications
In July 2011 The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a ruling that approves the use of Iridium for Future Air Navigation System (FANS) data links, enabling satellite data links with air traffic control (ATC) for aircraft flying in the FANS environment including areas not served by Inmarsat (above or below 70 Degrees Latitude) which includes Polar routes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_Communications

Inmarsat comments:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26723980

The "mystery" has been "solved" as there has been official announcement of the plane crashing in the Indian Ocean 1500 miles west off Perth. My doubt is, why would a plane that was headed for China, turn 180 degrees south and fly along the southern corridor and crash so remotely off any landing location? If there was some issues, wouldn't it return to Malaysia?

Mystery solved? I am more mystified now

More and more it sounds like an unarmed missile or a meteor crashed through the fuselage and destroyed vital communications equipment and depressurized the cabin/cockpit. The pilots' final struggle being to get to a breathable altitude and head the plane back to Kuala Lumpur which would require a left bank toward Pulau Parak then a second left turn to a southern heading south at that point back to KL. They lost control through asphyxiation before the second turn but the plane remembered. They were after all over 3/4ths of an hour as the crow flies away from KL when whatever it was happened to initiate an irregular action. A circuitous return would have taken an hour. That left the plane with 5 hours of fuel and that being consumed at a high rate due to the low atmosphere. The thing might have crashed in Indonesia! Why else would the Indonesians refuse a US P8 flyover to get to Perth? Maybe they shot down a non-responsive intruder aircraft as a defensive tactic and then found out it was a civilian, out of control flight?

Erudition: The problem here is the satellite pings that went on for 5 hours. If the Indonesians forced the plane down, this scenario has viability, though and leaves the pilots awakened and the passengers alive. The plane could have sat on the runway for hours with the engines running, Does the Inmarsat data definitely indicate movement between handshakes?

Data is not being shared. I can understand that nations want to avoid disclosing information about their various defensive (or offensive) capabilities. It's harder to understand withholding information purely to preserve national pride (which I suspect is going on, too).

So awful for the families. At the very least they must want to know what happened. The stubborn refusal to share data is making this less likely.

Yes.

Thank you, f-m.


I still don't understand the Indonesian actions. Isn't it their radar records that say that the flight went in that circuitous path around Indonesia and it is that changing of direction that most analyst's say it means a pilot was in control. It is I think the only evidence (not seen by anyone else, we have to take the Indonesians' word for it) that requires a pilot to be there. Remove that leg of the flight and everything could be accomplished by auto pilot after that first left turn.

A humorous trivial observation not meant to offend and that I have no thought of it being the real situation, some of my not considered funny by all quipping. Please note I have hidden it. If you cannot bear to hear a humorous take on this after three weeks, don't look:

It was revealed today, after three weeks!, that when the Vietnamese ATC didn't hear from MH370 they asked another Malaysian flight a half hour ahead of it on its way to Japan, to try and contact the Chinese flight. That part may have been known, What was revealed today is that the Japanese flight got a response! This is an action that had to have taken place after the left hand turn. MH370 responded to the hail with a carrier frequency broadcast. That means that someone keyed a mike but didn't respond loud enough to be heard or there was a problem with the speaker's microphone. CB'ers will recognize the tactic as 'throwing a carrier' which essentially blocked others from transmitting on that frequency. Here I think it meant someone tried to respond but their antenna was caputski. Which harkens back to a Boeing 777 maintenance alert to check the antenna used for the ACARS and transponder systems for becoming separated from the airframe, either just losing its groundplane reference or, falling off.
Why has it taken three weeks for this bit of situation to be known? If it was an attenuated reply, amplifiers could boost the signal to hear what was said (if it was recorded).

I also heard today that the Thai radar reported a second left turn toward Indonesia but then a northern turn to avoid Indonesian airspace. So The idea of a trans Indonesia flight is still viable in my mind but now troubled that the Thai's were tracking flights around Indonesia. Just how bad are political relations over there?

Now "they" say the search zone should be a 1,000 miles North and 600 miles East of where they thought before. They have adjusted the location based on the plane possibly having flown at 12,000 feet rather than 35,000 ft. Wait a minute. Those arcs of ring were based on the plane at 35,000 ft being a specific distance from the satellite. A lower altitude would mean that the radius of the arc would shorten, which means that the search area should have moved to the west of where it had been if the plane's altitude was lower. It wasn't quite explained before (even I only pointed out the rigid cord to the surface idea) that what is actually calculated is the resultant of two intersecting spheres. One being the Earth and the other being the sphere around that satellite then figuring where they intersect. The high altitude of the plane is to the east of where the sphere intersects at sea level. So how do they account for moving the southern arc to the east?

Another angle of this search relocation that seems at odds with earlier Inmarsat data is that with the faster fuel burn, shorter travel distance and less time in the air, where then did the last two handshake pings come from? If the plane was in the air less time doesn't that cut short the number of regularly scheduled pings that could have occurred and that a crash would have happened before that last, partial ping? Does this mean most of the Inmarsat data was errant?

I've seen questions about where the term 'Black Box' came from since the boxes are orange in color. My recollection is that back in the late fifties, when they were invented, in physics the term Black Hole was first coined. It meant that it was a thing that whatever went in could never come out, defining a perfect storage device. The avionics engineers, being physicists, borrowed the concept about the plane's operational data going into the box and kept there until special steps were taken to unlock the box and retrieve the data.

I have come to the conclusion that "they" have absolutely no idea at all of where the plane is, if it crashed or was landed somewhere, or where they should be looking.
They keep seeing all this stuff in the sea, but ships seem unable to retrieve it, or if they do it is just general junk, not the plane. I feel so sorry for the relatives. They do need to know what happened for their own peace of mind but finding a definitive answer for them is looking increasingly unlikely.