Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68 (another 777)?

stormcell
Thought this may be of interest .... investigators have found that there were five Indian Ocean practice runways in the flight simulator databases on his home PC. These were the following locations:

o Maldives x1
o Diego Garcia x1
o India x 1-2
o Sri Lanka x 1-2

The fact that the aircraft was carrying a large shipment of fruit (coincidence?) suggests that the destination was somewhere where supplies have to be brought in and not grown. There are already eyewitnesses in the Maldives who say they saw a low flying jet.

www.telegraph.co.uk...

I used to play flight simulator games when I was younger (F117 stealth fighter), and flying low was the best way to avoid radar, as well as make an easy landing. Definitely looks like they have been taken somewhere.

edit on 18-3-2014 by stormcell because: (no reason given)

OMG as I suspected... Maldives is on the list! God I hope they're keeping the passengers alive

reply to post by Ivar_Karlsen


And it may turn out that they put it out, or thought they did, and decided they were ok to press to a landing. Or they decided that the risk was as great ditching as flying. If they find the boxes we'll find out.

Zaphod58
Would YOU fly coms out, transponder out through busy airspace, or would you head for a low traffic area where there is almost no chance of a traffic conflict?

Me? I would cross my fingers with anti-collision lights and landing lights and take the chance that ATC could do their job and handle unexpected traffic and recognize an emergency and put that thing straight into the nearest suitable field as fast as I could. Traffic be damned. Barring that, I'd try to put it on the beach like they did in Ethiopia because a fire is the last thing I want to take chances with. Anything more severe and you take your chances asea in an area they will be looking for you.
What I definitely wouldn't do is overfly the peninsula and several potential emergency landing sites then use normal traffic corridors and head out over the Indian Ocean 1500 miles toward Bangalore trusting I would be able to control the plane for more than 10 minutes while there is or was a fire smouldering somewhere aboard.

reply to post by _Del_


And if it was out they may have made that choice. I've seen a lot of accidents where the crew made what turned out to be a bad choice.

reply to post by PeterMcFly


UPDATE:

Upon further analysis, I now consider data from Inmarsat very suspect. It apear those trajectory arcs are simple projection at constant distance of the satellite to surface of Earth, in other words, the satellite's cone of constant Time Of Flight for a pulse. Other Inmarsat bird at 178degE is nearly at horizon or below for this region, TOF triangulation is improbable.

Unless Inmarsat release exactly how they generated these arcs, I no longer consider it as fact.

reply to post by Zaphod58


At the point of deviation, the crew was about equidistant from Vietnam and Malaysia. We'll say that is the point of recognized emergency for the sake of argument. Trying to make it all the way back to Langkawi and off the course where people would expect you would be a poor choice perhaps (I've never flown the region, I don't have charts for the area, and I'm lazy -- perhaps otherthings being unequal that is the nearest suitable field and a better choice than continuing to Vietnam or Cambodia). Overflying Langkawi and avoiding Phuket by roughly a hundred miles and then heading on a course out to sea 1500 miles toward Bangalore after a fire is not a "bad choice". It's comically implausible.

Here is something that I hadn't seen yet.

jihadwatch

At the link you will find a photo purportedly of the pilot wearing a 'democracy is dead' T-shirt. He is said to have been a follower of a fanatical Muslim leader that supports jihad.

reply to post by _Del_


It's a 13,000 foot runway with a straight in approach, and no obstacles. Anywhere near them had mountain turbulence and obstacles.

But hell let's go with the more outrageous theories that require a lot of luck, and everything to go perfectly. Makes sense to me.

At least the sat pings are real data that can be input into known formulas based on science. They might be the only correct thing in all of this.

Given the north path is on the China side of the mountains and India believe it has no radar contact, I tend to trust it. Although I really no longer trust governments. I also think there are many people who are not competent in their position in this world.

reply to post by butcherguy


Plane has probably landed on a frozen lake around the Afghanistan & Tajikistan border. Possibly lake Zorkul.
Most probably did shadow SQ68 or possibly KLM 836, all the time keeping an eye on its ACAS heading, altitude & airspeed, probably 1000 feet or more below it as airliners generally rise a little during flight.



If you want to see the plane disappear follow this link

www.flightradar24.com...:50/12x/4.46,102.41/7


playback 7th March 2014 UTC 1650

edit, sorry, don't worry about it. Mods feel free to delete.

Technically this theory is possible, but highly improbable. Then again, losing a 777 is highly improbable.

The reason I say it is highly improbably is this: range and azimuth resolution on the many military radar systems is pretty good. I was formerly a radar guy for the military, mostly upgrading and maintaining their systems, so I know a little bit about radar. These planes would have had to be flying extremely close to one another, easily within viewing distance. Military systems use both iff/sif and radar height (Geometry) for elevation.So the controllers display would show two elevations for the same blip. The minute he slipped too far from the other flight and his blip was there without any sif paint, he would have been tracked. All it would take is one mistake on his part. If he flew too near the other plane, he risked blanking both planes on the radar screen.

It's possible, but again, highly improbable and very difficult.

just my thoughts.

Zaphod58
reply to post by _Del_

 

It's a 13,000 foot runway with a straight in approach, and no obstacles. Anywhere near them had mountain turbulence and obstacles.

I'm fine with the choice of Langkawi. I just said that. What you have to explain to me is why they would then overfly Langkawi potentially within visual distance of that 13,000' runway, skip it, then enter a way point "Gival" bringing it by Phuket Island 150 miles away, skip the airfield 9000' runway there, and then apparently manually input nav point "Igrex" to lead them across the ocean to ... wherever... all in the middle of an inflight emergency.

The closest point using "Igrex" will be the Andamans more than 450 miles away which has a 10,800' runway. So assuming our last track is MH370, our last point of contact has them flying away from the safety of dry land. It doesn't make sense.

That fire scenario bringing them to Langkawi makes sense in the absence of the facts that they then overflew that area and proceeded on normal corridors toward India according to manual inputs to the nav points and the latest information on the primary radar plots. With those facts, the decompression or fire emergency scenarios make little sense. You don't go on flying for three or four hours after a fire. If it's hypoxia, you don't go inputting nav points following common air corridors.

The eye-witness reports are worthless. Let's throw them out. What we have left is: A) the plane is not where it was supposed to be, B) someone was in control of the plane flying along organized corridors, C) the plane was not piloted in a manner consistent with an inflight emergency

The investigation is something of a Keystone Kops affair so far. I think the idea in the OP is awfully far-fetched and "outrageous", but I think the "mundane" explanations sound far-fetched so far too. I think we'll find it was a hijacking. I doubt anything as complicated as deliberate radar evasion (outside of shutting off the transponders) took place. Pilot-suicide, is possible as well, I suppose. All[i/] the potential scenarios are outside the normal box. Previous commercial flights where the flight crew failed to recognize decompression? A handful in the last 60 years. An onboard fire that takes out all communication and becomes catastrophic before the flight crew communicates a problem? Hasn't ever happened to my knowledge. The simple idea that someone deliberately shut off the transponders is way higher and less "outrageous" in my mind.