MH370 Search Vessel turns off transponder for 3 days

a reply to: Zaphod58

It seems as though most of the avionics were OK. Just a guess of course from here.

As far as the turn, wasn't it speculated that one of the pilots may have turned the plane in an effort to return to an airfield? Could be the fuselage penetration disabled the pilots pretty quickly.

The sat network seemed to be fine. It looked as though the network worked as normal until what may have been a SDU restart at the end.

Thanks for your thoughts.

edit:

I w as thinking of the first turn. Forgot about the other known one and possibly another.

a reply to: ThePeaceMaker

No matter where anyone is coming from, except maybe India, who we're on really good terms with, by the time any carrier group got near them the bombers would either have hit them with antiship missiles and left, or the Navy would be in the area. Ships take a long time to move from point A to point B.

The problem with Diego is that other than ferry flights, there's nowhere to operate fighters to. And if you bring fighters in, that's less room for the bombers and transports. And that ramp is pretty damn small to begin with. Quite a few bombers stopped there and didn't even shut down their engines. One crew jumped off, and a more rested crew continued the flight.

a reply to: roadgravel

A cockpit fire would have only disabled the displays, not necessarily the avionics themselves. But that turn was one reason that I speculated it was a fire. A straight depressurization would have required a dive to lower altitude and they would have been ok. There would have been plenty of time and multiple ways to let people know you were in trouble. But something else going on, you're not going to worry about getting lower or telling people until you had it under control first.

a reply to: Zaphod58
Ah yeah I see your point it's not like you can go sneaking around when you're a fleet of ships and they would be detected well before a threat could occur. Still it looks a nice place to stop off the middle of no where.

a reply to: Zaphod58

As odd as that seems to many people, as you have stated before, there is protocol used to deal with trouble and comm is often lower on this list.

Your point seems like a good possibility. If the fuselage is ever found, maybe it will be clear.

Strange formatting error.....

originally posted by: Pilgrum
Let's hope they can provide some closure on the whole saga of the lost flight. It's hard to accept that something as simple as a transponder fault would warrant a return to base for repairs when they surely have GPS and backups for backups on board as well as extensive communications equipment.

I thought GPS did not work in the southern hemisphere if at sea....

www.perthnow.com.au...

Apparently turned off transponder to recheck areas of interest and not spark speculation they had found it.

Had an inverse effect obviously!

a reply to: AlexandrosTheGreat

The 'G' in GPS stands for Global and I'm not aware of any place on the planet that can't receive signals from the minimum number of satellites to determine exact location - could be wrong though

a reply to: Pilgrum

That's true, GPS works everywhere, but the signal can be "downgraded" or turned off for specific areas by the US, the owners of the GPS system.

a reply to: ArMaP

I know that in the early days of GPS the US military 'dithered' the signals to prevent anyone without the correct decoding gear + correction algorithm using the system for precise navigation and weapons guidance but amateurs worked out how to correct the signal so the 'dithering' was eventually removed opening up the system for use by anyone. I hear anecdotal stories about capability to 'black out' selected areas like military targets in times of conflict but the normal state you only need to be able to see 2 or more satellites from your location to determine geo coordinates.

The satellites are not in geo-synchronous orbits so the number visible varies all the time plus northern and southern extremes near the poles can be problematic due to the equatorial orbits. The middle of the Indian Ocean should have no problems for GPS reception and ships, aircraft cross there every day.

I'm at 43S which is, I believe, much further south than the area being searched and my GPS can 'see' about a dozen satellites at a time here. Granted I'm not in the ocean but nearly all of those satellites would need to be blacked out to prevent me determining my lat/long figures.

I am not sure if this has been covered or not since I haven't really been keeping up to date on this issue I just happened to stop by this thread and had a thought occur to me ..... I'm surprised there isn't a network of geostationary satellites with infrared capability that track every large metallic object that is moving across our planet at all times.

Since this is a conspiracy site I'm sure most of us probably believe that such a network does exist

a reply to: HarryJoy

It would be expensive as hell to do, not to mention difficult.

Given the mystery around this disappearance I’m surprised in a humorous way that people here think the ship going “ghost” for 80 hours wasn’t done on purpose to distract from something else.

If they really did find something, if it really is a big cover up, you think they’d let you know by turning off their locators?

As for satellites, if this is a cover up, if there really is something going on and more to the story the we are officially told such as some new tech, of course there is someone’s satellite watching to see what’s going on. Maybe it’s a friendly satellite maybe it’s not.

a reply to: HarryJoy

Turning off the transponder could have been to test a theory. Perhaps they set the ship on a course, turned of the transponder and after 80 hours, they reported their location. Meanwhile, a crew on land did their best to predict where they ended up by using whatever means such as weather, currents, etc. Then compare the result to the actual location. Using that, they might be able to factor in the margin of error and apply it to MH370.

a reply to: sung47sung

The problem is that there is no reason to climb that high to kill everyone. 35,000 feet works just as well as 45,000. And at that weight, they couldn't have gone that high.

a reply to: fill0000

Interesting!

Pretty 'thin' cover story though...

... The Ocean Infinity-leased Seabed Constructor, the high-tech vessel searching for MH370, had returned to revisit those points of interest discovered on its first sweep and turned off its satellite tracking system so as not to give the relatives false hopes.

The idea was to try and prevent wild speculation it had found the plane.

What happened was exactly the opposite, ...

-PerthNow 8 FEB 2018

It doesn't really take a 'rocket surgeon' to figure out that's exactly what would happen! I'm callin' BS on that story as bunko! That ship probably makes hundreds of circle-back tracks in any given week, if for no other reason than to retrieve the ROV's, not to mention verifying various detections. Why this excursion would be any different is telling.

My hunch is, the real reason they turned off the Seabed Constructor's transponder was not because they found MH370 (necessarily), but rather because they wanted to gauge just exactly what would happen if they did it, what the response would be, and from whom. This, so when and if they do find MH370's wreckage they will better know what kinds of things they should and should not do.

I am convinced the Malaysians (and likely the US / China / Australia) know exactly what happened to MH370. I've said this for a long time. They may not know where it is (exactly), but they know 'what' happened. And, the circumstances surrounding whatever this is must be pretty unsavory, to the point of not eagerly wanting the rest of the World to to be in on the secret just yet. They need to find the wreckage to both validate their understanding as well as ensure there are no obvious 'loose ends' in the wreckage. Once they've accomplished this it will just become another deep sea aircraft salvage effort (difficult as they are in general). I don't think it's about salvage rights nearly as much as it's about not allowing the possibility of anybody being able to get to the wreckage and inspect it prior to accomplishing this task.

I know Zaphod and I disagree on what I'm about to say next, and we've been around and around about it, but the southward (left) turn by MH370 off the west coast of Indonesia that night just ices the cake about there being one hell of a lot more to this whole story than some bizarre / freak accident. It's the one thing not a single explanation to date can account for. There's simply no explanation...other than an intentional course change. And this is particularly true when you examine the course of MH370 preceding this 'turn'. The whole set of maneuvers is a (rather obvious) attempt to stay out of Indonesian airspace. And, the whole reason they'd want to do this is not because they were worried about the Indonesians shooting them down, but rather to avoid arousing suspicion by the Indonesians who might decide to come up and inspect some anonymous aircraft (with no transponder) who just entered their airspace.

edit...it's been far too long, with no coherent explanation, for there not to be a much larger story behind all this. The silence is deafening!

BTW...For my part, I don't necessarily believe there is some big fat juicy government sponsored 'black op' associated with the disappearance of MH370. In fact, I don't think that's what happened at all. I believe there's a far simpler explanation, one that in the end will turn out to be pretty boring (in comparison to all the other wild conspiracy theories).

Personally, I think the final story will be...the captain just decided he didn't want to live anymore, and was just crazy enough to live out some twisted deep rooted fantasy of flying a plane load of people off into the night. Where the plot thickens is the part where the Malaysians knew this early on (very early on, like within a couple days). Anything anyone else knows would have been gathered through top secret intelligence gathering channels, ones which may never see the light of day, else they would reveal methods and sources.

Such a scenario would paint the Malaysians in a very poor light in the international community, and potentially have significant impact on their economy not to mention the devastating effect it would have on their national airline. I believe the Malaysian authorities hoped the furor would just die down by now (and this is consistent with my own personal experiences there). They hoped it would all just go away (like they have with so many other things). They hoped they could get by with a good faith search effort and be done with it, but they underestimated the will of the families, the public at large and the magnitude of the incident on the World stage.

In the end, the Malaysians, and no one else, will have to be the ones who tell the story of what really happened to MH370. No one can (or will) tell if for them. And when that story does finally come out you can bet your bottom dollar it will be a really good, and carefully crafted, yarn for the ages.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Whats the reserve time they would have had with the drop down oxygen masks?
The airline industry has undergone so much cost cutting in recent years, I suppose they would only fly with enough Oxygen for an emergency rapid descent? Pilots might get a little more if they didn't share.