9 ms·

Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

118 points by komape 2y ago

sinuhe69 2y ago
If the descent was controlled gliding, the passengers (at least some of them) should be alive upon landing, shouldn’t they? Where are they now? Which theory could explain the absolute silence?
- thyristan 2y ago
  Even if all passengers were alive at the time of a water landing, getting out of a plane is tricky in the best of conditions. Getting out of a damaged, rapidly sinking plane is very hard or maybe impossible. Also, if you would get out of the plane, you are then in the middle of the indian ocean with just your life vest and the sharks. You get maybe 3 days, because the water is warm. And nobody will find you if they don't know where they should be looking. An airplane life vest doesn't have an AIS transponder, only the life rafts/emergency slides do. If those weren't properly deployed, no chance of a vessel finding you. There are reports of shipwreck survivors about ships passing within a few hundred meters of them in calm seas, and failing to see them.
  - Ringz 2y ago
    When you get a sailing license, you learn that if a man goes overboard, it's best to be (at east) three. One goes overboard, one orders the other never to let the overboard man out of sight and to point with his arm outstretched in his direction, and the boatman uses the outstretched arm to the man overboard. It is impressive how quickly you lose sight of someone even in light waves.
    - Kon-Peki 2y ago
      This is absolutely correct, but is in part due to the complicated nature of getting a sailing vessel to a fixed location in the sea behind the current location of the boat and in such a manner that allows for the boat to be put directly into the wind at the right time to kill forward motion.
      - closewith 2y ago
        That's the drill for all vessels, powered or not.
      - thyristan 2y ago
        Only very small motor boats are agile enough that you can turn on a dime and not loose sight of a man-over-board. And even then, it strongly depends on wind, current and boat speed. Also, orientation on the seas, sense of direction and getting to a remembered position again is very very hard to impossible. Especially when agitated. You might try using compass and GPS, but those are imprecise, overwhelming and useless when there is any kind of waves or current. It is absolutely vital to keep the man-over-board in sight. Practically no exceptions.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- Zealotux 2y ago
  It's possible for the pilot to depressurise the plane and use their dedicated oxygen system to breathe while everyone else on board will pass out after using their individual masks. Doing so will give them 60-90 minutes of extra air, the passengers' masks don't last that long.
  - korm 2y ago
    The crew had 13 hours of oxygen supply for two pilots.
    - akira2501 2y ago
      The supplemental oxygen system was recharged just before this flight as well, so it was at maximum capacity.
  - heavenlyblue 2y ago
    Do you mean underwater? Apologies it's not clear if it's a joke?
    - Hackbraten 2y ago
      Most people can’t breathe at high altitudes due to insufficient air pressure. That’s why airplanes are usually pressurized. If that extra pressure goes away for whatever reason, people are handed oxygen masks and tanks to help them stay alive. What the GP comment says is that the plane may have been depressurized at one point at high altitude. The pilot’s oxygen mask is usually designed to last longer than any of the other passengers’s masks do. So it’s not entirely implausible that the pilot can still guide the plane into controlled descent, while all the other passengers may have already passed out due to lack of oxygen.
      - krisoft 2y ago
        > Most people can’t breathe at high altitudes due to insufficient air pressure. Not most people. Nobody can breath if the altitude is high enough. There are some individual variability in how high is too high. That is of interest if you go mountaineering, but not really in a situation where an aircraft rapidly decompresses at the altitude MH370 was speculated to be flying at.
- Prickle 2y ago
  No, the pilot can depressurize the aircraft at high altitude. In such a case, the emergency oxygen masks for passengers will drop, but those are only rated for 15 to 30 minutes. After that Oxygen runs out, assuming the pilot maintains cruise altitude above 25000ft, everyone onboard will lose conscious via hypoxia within 1 minute, and be brain dead within 15 minutes. No one (except the pilot) would be alive to see the plane crash. Pilot can also re-pressurize the aircraft after 30 minutes, and breathe fine. Pilot oxygen masks are meant to last for at least an hour.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    It's more insidious. At high altitude the drop masks don't provide enough pressure to maintain consciousness for their full rated duration. It's expected that pilots will descend very quickly after a depressurization event to at least 14000 or below. If he stayed at high altitude the passengers probably went unconscious quickly.
  - weweersdfsd 2y ago
    Yes, for those interested in this scenario, check Helios Airways Flight 522. I think that's what happened with MH370, except that the depressurization was deliberate. Most likely a single pilot stayed alive and functioning in the cockpit, eventually repressurizing the aircraft. Perhaps the pilot's goal was to hide all the evidence as well as possible, to create a perfect mystery. Then a controlled ditching would make sense, although it kind of failed considering the debris which eventually reached Africa.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      We only have a clue where it might be because Zaharie likely powered “the AC bus back up…Unbeknownst to him, the satellite communication unit starts to acknowledge the satellite again. This is his one mistake — but it’s a forgivable one, as hardly any airline pilots knew about this system feature before the disappearance of MH370” [1]. Without that, debris would only hint at somewhere in the Indian Ocean, probably. [1] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-years-on-what-do-we-know-about-the-disappearance-of-malaysia-airlines-77fa5244bf99 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-y...
- mcbain 2y ago
  https://youtu.be/Y5K9HBiJpuk https://youtu.be/Y5K9HBiJpuk I think Petter's (Mentour Pilot) delve into it is quite good - there's a lot of detail I hadn't known.
  - pjerem 2y ago
    fwiw, it’s a really good YT channel. Nice equilibrium between an accessible discourse and going into every important detail. And nice illustrations with what I guess is from flight simulator.
- foldr 2y ago
  You can't really "land" in the Indian Ocean in an airliner. There has (famously) been a successful ditching of an airliner in a river, but I don't think there has ever been a successful ditching in the open ocean. Here's the kind of thing you can expect to happen even in much more favorable sea conditions close to the shore: https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/3f7fkk/amateur_video_of_the_failed_ditching_of_ethiopian/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/3f7fkk... (There were a number of survivors in this case, though.)
  - Sakos 2y ago
    I don't know why I thought a controlled landing of a plane on water was generally possible. Maybe because of the pre-safety instructions where it sort of implies (maybe it's just me) that if a plane were to land on water, I could just put on a life vest, get the raft and get off. Looking at that footage and the death toll, feels like a miracle even that many people survived. That makes me wonder if being able to land a passenger plane on water is ever a factor in its design.
    - CalRobert 2y ago
      It's definitely something that is considered, and the miracle on the Hudson included use of the A320's ditch mode if I recall correctly. https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/358285-airbus-ditching-button.html https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/358285-airbus-ditching-butto... Looks to be in a few airbus models. https://simpleflying.com/airbus-aircraft-ditch-switch-emergency-landings/ https://simpleflying.com/airbus-aircraft-ditch-switch-emerge... If I recall correctly I've read that the bigger the plane the less likely it is to work but I don't have sources.
    - krisoft 2y ago
      > I don't know why I thought a controlled landing of a plane on water was generally possible. Because it is possible and foldr is incorrect in stating that it is not possible. On the video he linked panicked hijackers were fighting with the pilots for the controls. Clearly that is not an ideal scenario for any kind of landing. Even more so for a tricky water landing one. But that is more of a reason to avoid hijackers fighting with the pilots, not proof that ditching is impossible. Water landings are clearly not the preferred way to land. They are very risky. But they are also not as impossible as that comment makes them out to be. Here is a list of them from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_landing
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  Debris of the plane were recovered. The plane crashed.
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    No doubt, the question is whether it was a catastrophic crash, a glide down, or an attempted controlled landing; there's no way to land on water without some parts coming off. The brunt of the wreckage has never been found.
  - jtc331 2y ago
    What is in dispute isn’t that it crashed but how it crashed.
    - mytailorisrich 2y ago
      I am replying to a specific comment not to the article in general.
- sinuhe69 2y ago
  If the pilot tried to kill all the passengers to cover his tracks and then killed himself, as many here have commented (which TBH is extremely cruel and insidious), why did he bother trying to land the plane at all? Why not just cut the engine and dump it in the sea? People who commit suicide are the most depressed. They don't care what other people think! Why of all the possibilities, you choose the most vile one and present it as if you know the facts? I'm not making any assumptions about the pilot's motives or the final circumstances. I just wondered about the implications of a controlled glide, as the paper suggested. Is there any uncertainty, any margin for error? There certainly is.
voidUpdate 2y ago
The repeated references to "riddles" feels a bit strange (in regards to the captain's home flight simulator tracks). I'm not sure if it's a strange translation or ESL thing, but it just feels like a strange word choice, like this is the start of a Dan Brown book or something
- KingOfCoders 2y ago
  "Dan Brown book or something" That brings PR. Same as "Perfect Hiding Place"
- grotorea 2y ago
  I'm ESL myself but I feel such poetic language is at least somewhat appropriate for MH370, probably one of the greatest real-world mysteries of the 21st century, no?
  - voidUpdate 2y ago
    Sure, in a news article or something, but it feels out of place in what seems to be a scientific paper
    - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
      And yet, I'd say it's warranted; an entertaining read means more eyes on your paper. Second, the sciences have a reputation for being boring and dry, and efforts to reduce that are good (as long as the core is solid)
defrost 2y ago
In the popular press (1 day ago) "Perfect Hiding Place": Australian Scientist Claims He's Found Where Missing MH370 Plane Is The Malaysian Airlines flight, with 239 people on board, disappeared after leaving Kuala Lumpur Airport in southern Malaysia en route to Beijing, China, on March 8, 2014. Years after its disappearance, an Australian scientist has claimed that he has found the "perfect hiding place" for the missing MH370 plane. The Malaysian Airlines flight, with 239 people on board, vanished from radar after taking off from Kuala Lumpur in 2014. Its disappearance sparked the biggest search in aviation history with the whereabouts of the jet still unknown to this day. Now, Tasmanian researcher Vincent Lyne has said that he believes he has figured out where the plane is. In a LinkedIn post, Mr Lyne claimed that the plane was deliberately ploughed deep into the Broken Ridge - a 20,000-foot-deep hole in the Indian Ocean. "This work changes the narrative of MH370's disappearance from one of no-blame, fuel-starvation at the 7th arc, high-speed dive, to a mastermind pilot almost executing an incredible perfect-disappearance in the Southern Indian Ocean," the researcher wrote. ~ https://www.ndtv.com/feature/perfect-hiding-place-australian-scientist-says-hes-found-where-missing-mh370-plane-is-6426391 https://www.ndtv.com/feature/perfect-hiding-place-australian... Also: https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/mh370-flight-mystery-malaysian-airlines-hiding-spot-b2602901.html https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/mh370-f... https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/perfect-hiding-place-australian-scientist-reveals-where-mh370-could-be/news-story/93450d3ff343cd2111557bba57f0a48a https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/perf...
- netsharc 2y ago
  > "This work changes the narrative of MH370's disappearance from one of no-blame, ..." When has that ever been the narrative? It deviated from course, somebody performed that manouver and is "to blame"...
  - defrost 2y ago
    Yeah, that raised my eyebrow also. I'm in Australia, tangentially connected to the Fugro vessel ocean floor search that followed and almost from the outset heard very little other than "pilot appears to have evaded radar, swung plane about low, and gone waaaaay off course delibrately". Various 'causes' have been hypoxia, hijacking, suicidal pilot | other flight crew - sans any real knowledge of happenings in the cockpit it's a standing mystery.
Tomte 2y ago
There is a fascinating paper about making conclusions about MH370‘s location by investigating the drift of wreckage by analysing balanidae on those parts: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023AV000915 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023AV00...
- gymbeaux 2y ago
  Honestly that’s probably more accurate than anything else they’ve tried so far. I’m tired of hearing about “arcs”.
l33tman 2y ago
What happened to that other research team who used amateur radio network packet metadata that had been saved, to track airplanes including MH370 and showed tracks that also matched the satellite pings? Can't remember the name of that group though...
- netsharc 2y ago
  Wasn't the conlusion they were finding data that match their conclusion, i.e. they said "it could be here in the ocean" and then they found signals to confirm their guess, but it could be any point in the ocean and they'd be able to find such signals. In any case I googled the keywords, it's called WSPR, and also found a critique: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/nils-critiques-the-mh370-wspr-aircraft-scatter-theory/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/nils-critiques-the-mh370-wspr-aircra... And the full critique has suffered from linkrot, but Wayback Machine has it: https://web.archive.org/web/20220221112332/https://dk8ok.org/2021/12/06/mh370-and-wspr-aircraft-scatter-on-hf-a-critical-review/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220221112332/https://dk8ok.org... (Sad how a URL that was live in 2021 is already dead in 2024...)
  - mannykannot 2y ago
    IIRC, there was one test case where the airplane being followed diverted, yet it was 'tracked' to its intended destination.
- GJim 2y ago
  If they could track MH370 using WSPR (amateur radio), then they could logically track other (similar) aircraft. When asked to prove the above and publish a peer reviewed paper, they were unable to do so. The reader is thus invited to draw their own conclusion.
  - beachy 2y ago
    Publishing a peer reviewed paper would equate to handing their IP over for free. Maybe the right thing to do in the face of such a tragedy is to do that. Or perhaps they genuinely have some cool technology, and it could be sold into aero, military industries and they want to monetize it. In that case the right thing to do would be to hand over their projected track data, which it sounds like they did.
sofixa 2y ago
If anyone is interested in recently made content that recaps the whole thing, all the available information, some of the speculation, including the most recent news/information: * video by Mentour Pilot - https://youtu.be/Y5K9HBiJpuk https://youtu.be/Y5K9HBiJpuk * great read, as usual, by Admiral Cloudberg, slightly older: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-years-on-what-do-we-know-about-the-disappearance-of-malaysia-airlines-77fa5244bf99 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-y...
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  “Malaysia Airlines operations…were tracking the plane on the Flight Explorer website, which, as they would only realize hours later, simply continued to display an aircraft’s projected path if its transponder stopped broadcasting position information.” What in the actual fuck. “…the supposed signals from the black boxes must have been false. Only much later was it discovered that the signals had probably come from the scanning equipment pinging itself.” Wat. “ATSB chose to assume that the plane spiraled in close to the seventh arc because it had not received enough funding to extend the width of the search area to 100 nautical miles.” WAT.
  - rdtsc 2y ago
    You look for the keys only under the light pole where there is light. If you can’t find them there assume a black hole materialized and swallowed them then disappeared. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      More generally, sticking with an approach that "works" by some shallow criterion, even though on deeper analysis it doesn't work, because the alternatives are not as good by the shallow criterion. The example I point to is tokamaks for fusion energy.
  - grotorea 2y ago
    After a lot of aircraft accident youtube videos, I can think of a couple where people misunderstanding where their computers get their information from and how they work. * This one where the operations team apparently doesn't understand how their flight tracker works, and/or it fails to inform their users that last contact was X hours ago. * One where the aircraft has a broken altimeter, and the suspicious pilots decide to ask the ATC for altitude confirmation, but the ATC radar only gets horizontal coordinates, the altitude information that ATC sees actually comes from a datastream from the aircraft itself. So they fatally decided to trust that instead of their own aircraft radar altimeter which was correctly telling them they were about to crash. * The aircraft had either a single failed engine or the wheels were stuck outside, and the pilots asked the computer for how far they could travel in their current state, assuming it worked like a car, by projecting current consumption, but actually the computer just uses fixed data that does not take such exceptional situations into account. So they ran out of fuel early. > “ATSB chose to assume that the plane spiraled in close to the seventh arc because it had not received enough funding to extend the width of the search area to 100 nautical miles.” > WAT. It seems the police department has insufficient funding to help drunks look for keys in the dark.
lupusreal 2y ago
The more certain it seems that MH370 was a murder-suicide scenario, the less comfortable I am with the media's preoccupation with it. News reports about such events may contribute to copycats: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17750236/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17750236/ > Airplane accident fatalities increase just after newspaper stories about murder and suicide D P Phillips. Science. 1978. > Abstract: Fatal crashes of private, business, and corporate-executive airplanes have increased after publicized murder-suicides. The more publicity given to a murder-suicide, the more crashes occurred. The increase in plane crashes occurred primarily in states where the murder-suicides were publicized. These findings suggest that murder-suicide stories trigger subsequent murder-suicides, some of which are disguised as airplane accidents.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  That's a bit of a conundrum; on the one side the families of the victims have a right to know, and having free press is a good thing. On the other, reporting on these things may lead to copycats.
- throw310822 2y ago
  The most effective publicity ever for a form of murder-suicide must be the "active shooter" training in US schools.
  - gymbeaux 2y ago
    This. Everyone knows active shooter situation = teachers close blinds and turn off the lights. You aren’t fooling anyone.
- gosub100 2y ago
  There already was a copycat, the German wings flight that flew into a mountain. Or did that precede MH370?
- EdiX 2y ago
  There have been other murder/suicides of this kind (assuming that the theory is correct). Particularly SilkAir 185 and Germanwings 9525 (I think there is at least another one, but at the moment it is escaping me). In fact, my impression has been, for a long time, that MH370 is itself a copycat of SilkAir 185 where the suicide corrected the mistakes that led to the discovery that the accident was in fact caused by the captain. I'm not particularly concerned about this, after the germanwings incident in europe and US (and possibly everywhere else as well) flight decks are required to always have at least two people: if one of the pilots wants or needs to leave one of the flight attendants must take his place.
runxel 2y ago
There is a very good book by the french journalist Florence de Changy about MH370, which "solves" all the issues with most of the theories out there and proposes what really happened. So far I've not come across a more sophisticated theory that still passes Occam's Razor.
- Luc 2y ago
  Summarized here: https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/inside-explosive-claims-challenging-story-of-lost-flight-malaysia-airlines-mh370/news-story/6311e5eb9cc687e16271670c4d831ec4 https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/insi... TLDR conspiracy theory.
  - closewith 2y ago
    Deranged conspiracy theory.
- aguaviva 2y ago
  US shooting down a civilian passenger liner because of hypothesized secret cargo headed for China, and successfully covering it up for 10 years doesn't sound like something that passes Occam's Razor at all -- sounds like the very opposite, in fact. One should look for theories with less sophistication, not more.
  - epolanski 2y ago
    I obviously don't believe anything but deliberate murder-suicide by the pilot. But just know that these things did happen. There's lots of indications that surfaced recently that the Israeli air force secretly shoot down Itavia Flight 870 in 1980 to stop a transport of nuclear technology to Iran. They had mistaken the correct flight because their intelligence in France (were the uranium was being produced for Iran) pointed them in the wrong direction. A very interesting book on the topic has been recently released with a deep and thorough investigation across France, Italy and Israel and it is to date the most credible and documented explanation for who shoot down the flight. The book has been followed by quite a lot of investigative journalism in Italy that gives this theory lots of credit. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213592261-il-quinto-scenario https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213592261-il-quinto-scen...
imglorp 2y ago
In context of the paper, "high-speed gravitationally accelerated dive following fuel starvation", it bears mentioning the L/D ratio of a 777 is around 20. Which means if you lose power at 35,000 feet, you can have at most 132 miles of glide to the surface if well piloted. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/56420/lift-to-drag-ratio-of-airliners https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/56420/lift-to-d...
- gymbeaux 2y ago
  What are the assumptions for the “132 miles” figure? At the very least wind is going to affect that- if you’re in a headwind you could probably make it closer to 150 miles (albeit not a huge gain).
  - imglorp 2y ago
    Yeah that's why I said at most, so assuming still air and perfect piloting. The worst case is lawn dart, 0 glide. 35000 ft x 20 ratio x 1/5280 mi/ft
  - egormakarov 2y ago
    It's other way around, with headwind you will get less distance over ground
Mistletoe 2y ago
https://archive.is/CG0Do https://archive.is/CG0Do This is such a great summary from The Atlantic for anyone, like me, trying to get up to speed on the MH370 story.
tsoukase 2y ago
It was most probably a mass and self suicide attempt by the pilot. The known plane trajectory is compatible and as a mental health professional I confirm there is an unconscious depression state that can be hidden from anyone while leading to such crazy behaviour.

118 points by komape 2y ago

If the descent was controlled gliding, the passengers (at least some of them) should be alive upon landing, shouldn’t they? Where are they now? Which theory could explain the absolute silence?

thyristan 2y ago
Even if all passengers were alive at the time of a water landing, getting out of a plane is tricky in the best of conditions. Getting out of a damaged, rapidly sinking plane is very hard or maybe impossible. Also, if you would get out of the plane, you are then in the middle of the indian ocean with just your life vest and the sharks. You get maybe 3 days, because the water is warm. And nobody will find you if they don't know where they should be looking. An airplane life vest doesn't have an AIS transponder, only the life rafts/emergency slides do. If those weren't properly deployed, no chance of a vessel finding you. There are reports of shipwreck survivors about ships passing within a few hundred meters of them in calm seas, and failing to see them.
- Ringz 2y ago
  When you get a sailing license, you learn that if a man goes overboard, it's best to be (at east) three. One goes overboard, one orders the other never to let the overboard man out of sight and to point with his arm outstretched in his direction, and the boatman uses the outstretched arm to the man overboard. It is impressive how quickly you lose sight of someone even in light waves.
  - Kon-Peki 2y ago
    This is absolutely correct, but is in part due to the complicated nature of getting a sailing vessel to a fixed location in the sea behind the current location of the boat and in such a manner that allows for the boat to be put directly into the wind at the right time to kill forward motion.
    - closewith 2y ago
      That's the drill for all vessels, powered or not.
    - thyristan 2y ago
      Only very small motor boats are agile enough that you can turn on a dime and not loose sight of a man-over-board. And even then, it strongly depends on wind, current and boat speed. Also, orientation on the seas, sense of direction and getting to a remembered position again is very very hard to impossible. Especially when agitated. You might try using compass and GPS, but those are imprecise, overwhelming and useless when there is any kind of waves or current. It is absolutely vital to keep the man-over-board in sight. Practically no exceptions.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Zealotux 2y ago
It's possible for the pilot to depressurise the plane and use their dedicated oxygen system to breathe while everyone else on board will pass out after using their individual masks. Doing so will give them 60-90 minutes of extra air, the passengers' masks don't last that long.
- korm 2y ago
  The crew had 13 hours of oxygen supply for two pilots.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    The supplemental oxygen system was recharged just before this flight as well, so it was at maximum capacity.
- heavenlyblue 2y ago
  Do you mean underwater? Apologies it's not clear if it's a joke?
  - Hackbraten 2y ago
    Most people can’t breathe at high altitudes due to insufficient air pressure. That’s why airplanes are usually pressurized. If that extra pressure goes away for whatever reason, people are handed oxygen masks and tanks to help them stay alive. What the GP comment says is that the plane may have been depressurized at one point at high altitude. The pilot’s oxygen mask is usually designed to last longer than any of the other passengers’s masks do. So it’s not entirely implausible that the pilot can still guide the plane into controlled descent, while all the other passengers may have already passed out due to lack of oxygen.
    - krisoft 2y ago
      > Most people can’t breathe at high altitudes due to insufficient air pressure. Not most people. Nobody can breath if the altitude is high enough. There are some individual variability in how high is too high. That is of interest if you go mountaineering, but not really in a situation where an aircraft rapidly decompresses at the altitude MH370 was speculated to be flying at.
Prickle 2y ago
No, the pilot can depressurize the aircraft at high altitude. In such a case, the emergency oxygen masks for passengers will drop, but those are only rated for 15 to 30 minutes. After that Oxygen runs out, assuming the pilot maintains cruise altitude above 25000ft, everyone onboard will lose conscious via hypoxia within 1 minute, and be brain dead within 15 minutes. No one (except the pilot) would be alive to see the plane crash. Pilot can also re-pressurize the aircraft after 30 minutes, and breathe fine. Pilot oxygen masks are meant to last for at least an hour.
- akira2501 2y ago
  It's more insidious. At high altitude the drop masks don't provide enough pressure to maintain consciousness for their full rated duration. It's expected that pilots will descend very quickly after a depressurization event to at least 14000 or below. If he stayed at high altitude the passengers probably went unconscious quickly.
- weweersdfsd 2y ago
  Yes, for those interested in this scenario, check Helios Airways Flight 522. I think that's what happened with MH370, except that the depressurization was deliberate. Most likely a single pilot stayed alive and functioning in the cockpit, eventually repressurizing the aircraft. Perhaps the pilot's goal was to hide all the evidence as well as possible, to create a perfect mystery. Then a controlled ditching would make sense, although it kind of failed considering the debris which eventually reached Africa.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    We only have a clue where it might be because Zaharie likely powered “the AC bus back up…Unbeknownst to him, the satellite communication unit starts to acknowledge the satellite again. This is his one mistake — but it’s a forgivable one, as hardly any airline pilots knew about this system feature before the disappearance of MH370” [1]. Without that, debris would only hint at somewhere in the Indian Ocean, probably. [1] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-years-on-what-do-we-know-about-the-disappearance-of-malaysia-airlines-77fa5244bf99 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-y...
mcbain 2y ago
https://youtu.be/Y5K9HBiJpuk https://youtu.be/Y5K9HBiJpuk I think Petter's (Mentour Pilot) delve into it is quite good - there's a lot of detail I hadn't known.
- pjerem 2y ago
  fwiw, it’s a really good YT channel. Nice equilibrium between an accessible discourse and going into every important detail. And nice illustrations with what I guess is from flight simulator.
foldr 2y ago
You can't really "land" in the Indian Ocean in an airliner. There has (famously) been a successful ditching of an airliner in a river, but I don't think there has ever been a successful ditching in the open ocean. Here's the kind of thing you can expect to happen even in much more favorable sea conditions close to the shore: https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/3f7fkk/amateur_video_of_the_failed_ditching_of_ethiopian/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/3f7fkk... (There were a number of survivors in this case, though.)
- Sakos 2y ago
  I don't know why I thought a controlled landing of a plane on water was generally possible. Maybe because of the pre-safety instructions where it sort of implies (maybe it's just me) that if a plane were to land on water, I could just put on a life vest, get the raft and get off. Looking at that footage and the death toll, feels like a miracle even that many people survived. That makes me wonder if being able to land a passenger plane on water is ever a factor in its design.
  - CalRobert 2y ago
    It's definitely something that is considered, and the miracle on the Hudson included use of the A320's ditch mode if I recall correctly. https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/358285-airbus-ditching-button.html https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/358285-airbus-ditching-butto... Looks to be in a few airbus models. https://simpleflying.com/airbus-aircraft-ditch-switch-emergency-landings/ https://simpleflying.com/airbus-aircraft-ditch-switch-emerge... If I recall correctly I've read that the bigger the plane the less likely it is to work but I don't have sources.
  - krisoft 2y ago
    > I don't know why I thought a controlled landing of a plane on water was generally possible. Because it is possible and foldr is incorrect in stating that it is not possible. On the video he linked panicked hijackers were fighting with the pilots for the controls. Clearly that is not an ideal scenario for any kind of landing. Even more so for a tricky water landing one. But that is more of a reason to avoid hijackers fighting with the pilots, not proof that ditching is impossible. Water landings are clearly not the preferred way to land. They are very risky. But they are also not as impossible as that comment makes them out to be. Here is a list of them from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_landing
mytailorisrich 2y ago
Debris of the plane were recovered. The plane crashed.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  No doubt, the question is whether it was a catastrophic crash, a glide down, or an attempted controlled landing; there's no way to land on water without some parts coming off. The brunt of the wreckage has never been found.
- jtc331 2y ago
  What is in dispute isn’t that it crashed but how it crashed.
  - mytailorisrich 2y ago
    I am replying to a specific comment not to the article in general.
sinuhe69 2y ago
If the pilot tried to kill all the passengers to cover his tracks and then killed himself, as many here have commented (which TBH is extremely cruel and insidious), why did he bother trying to land the plane at all? Why not just cut the engine and dump it in the sea? People who commit suicide are the most depressed. They don't care what other people think! Why of all the possibilities, you choose the most vile one and present it as if you know the facts? I'm not making any assumptions about the pilot's motives or the final circumstances. I just wondered about the implications of a controlled glide, as the paper suggested. Is there any uncertainty, any margin for error? There certainly is.

voidUpdate 2y ago

The repeated references to "riddles" feels a bit strange (in regards to the captain's home flight simulator tracks). I'm not sure if it's a strange translation or ESL thing, but it just feels like a strange word choice, like this is the start of a Dan Brown book or something

KingOfCoders 2y ago
"Dan Brown book or something" That brings PR. Same as "Perfect Hiding Place"
grotorea 2y ago
I'm ESL myself but I feel such poetic language is at least somewhat appropriate for MH370, probably one of the greatest real-world mysteries of the 21st century, no?
- voidUpdate 2y ago
  Sure, in a news article or something, but it feels out of place in what seems to be a scientific paper
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    And yet, I'd say it's warranted; an entertaining read means more eyes on your paper. Second, the sciences have a reputation for being boring and dry, and efforts to reduce that are good (as long as the core is solid)

defrost 2y ago

In the popular press (1 day ago) "Perfect Hiding Place": Australian Scientist Claims He's Found Where Missing MH370 Plane Is The Malaysian Airlines flight, with 239 people on board, disappeared after leaving Kuala Lumpur Airport in southern Malaysia en route to Beijing, China, on March 8, 2014. Years after its disappearance, an Australian scientist has claimed that he has found the "perfect hiding place" for the missing MH370 plane. The Malaysian Airlines flight, with 239 people on board, vanished from radar after taking off from Kuala Lumpur in 2014. Its disappearance sparked the biggest search in aviation history with the whereabouts of the jet still unknown to this day. Now, Tasmanian researcher Vincent Lyne has said that he believes he has figured out where the plane is. In a LinkedIn post, Mr Lyne claimed that the plane was deliberately ploughed deep into the Broken Ridge - a 20,000-foot-deep hole in the Indian Ocean. "This work changes the narrative of MH370's disappearance from one of no-blame, fuel-starvation at the 7th arc, high-speed dive, to a mastermind pilot almost executing an incredible perfect-disappearance in the Southern Indian Ocean," the researcher wrote. ~ https://www.ndtv.com/feature/perfect-hiding-place-australian-scientist-says-hes-found-where-missing-mh370-plane-is-6426391 https://www.ndtv.com/feature/perfect-hiding-place-australian... Also: https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/mh370-flight-mystery-malaysian-airlines-hiding-spot-b2602901.html https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/mh370-f... https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/perfect-hiding-place-australian-scientist-reveals-where-mh370-could-be/news-story/93450d3ff343cd2111557bba57f0a48a https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/perf...

netsharc 2y ago
> "This work changes the narrative of MH370's disappearance from one of no-blame, ..." When has that ever been the narrative? It deviated from course, somebody performed that manouver and is "to blame"...
- defrost 2y ago
  Yeah, that raised my eyebrow also. I'm in Australia, tangentially connected to the Fugro vessel ocean floor search that followed and almost from the outset heard very little other than "pilot appears to have evaded radar, swung plane about low, and gone waaaaay off course delibrately". Various 'causes' have been hypoxia, hijacking, suicidal pilot | other flight crew - sans any real knowledge of happenings in the cockpit it's a standing mystery.

Tomte 2y ago

There is a fascinating paper about making conclusions about MH370‘s location by investigating the drift of wreckage by analysing balanidae on those parts: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023AV000915 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023AV00...

gymbeaux 2y ago
Honestly that’s probably more accurate than anything else they’ve tried so far. I’m tired of hearing about “arcs”.

l33tman 2y ago

What happened to that other research team who used amateur radio network packet metadata that had been saved, to track airplanes including MH370 and showed tracks that also matched the satellite pings? Can't remember the name of that group though...

netsharc 2y ago
Wasn't the conlusion they were finding data that match their conclusion, i.e. they said "it could be here in the ocean" and then they found signals to confirm their guess, but it could be any point in the ocean and they'd be able to find such signals. In any case I googled the keywords, it's called WSPR, and also found a critique: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/nils-critiques-the-mh370-wspr-aircraft-scatter-theory/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/nils-critiques-the-mh370-wspr-aircra... And the full critique has suffered from linkrot, but Wayback Machine has it: https://web.archive.org/web/20220221112332/https://dk8ok.org/2021/12/06/mh370-and-wspr-aircraft-scatter-on-hf-a-critical-review/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220221112332/https://dk8ok.org... (Sad how a URL that was live in 2021 is already dead in 2024...)
- mannykannot 2y ago
  IIRC, there was one test case where the airplane being followed diverted, yet it was 'tracked' to its intended destination.
GJim 2y ago
If they could track MH370 using WSPR (amateur radio), then they could logically track other (similar) aircraft. When asked to prove the above and publish a peer reviewed paper, they were unable to do so. The reader is thus invited to draw their own conclusion.
- beachy 2y ago
  Publishing a peer reviewed paper would equate to handing their IP over for free. Maybe the right thing to do in the face of such a tragedy is to do that. Or perhaps they genuinely have some cool technology, and it could be sold into aero, military industries and they want to monetize it. In that case the right thing to do would be to hand over their projected track data, which it sounds like they did.

sofixa 2y ago

If anyone is interested in recently made content that recaps the whole thing, all the available information, some of the speculation, including the most recent news/information: * video by Mentour Pilot - https://youtu.be/Y5K9HBiJpuk https://youtu.be/Y5K9HBiJpuk * great read, as usual, by Admiral Cloudberg, slightly older: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-years-on-what-do-we-know-about-the-disappearance-of-malaysia-airlines-77fa5244bf99 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-y...

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
“Malaysia Airlines operations…were tracking the plane on the Flight Explorer website, which, as they would only realize hours later, simply continued to display an aircraft’s projected path if its transponder stopped broadcasting position information.” What in the actual fuck. “…the supposed signals from the black boxes must have been false. Only much later was it discovered that the signals had probably come from the scanning equipment pinging itself.” Wat. “ATSB chose to assume that the plane spiraled in close to the seventh arc because it had not received enough funding to extend the width of the search area to 100 nautical miles.” WAT.
- rdtsc 2y ago
  You look for the keys only under the light pole where there is light. If you can’t find them there assume a black hole materialized and swallowed them then disappeared. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    More generally, sticking with an approach that "works" by some shallow criterion, even though on deeper analysis it doesn't work, because the alternatives are not as good by the shallow criterion. The example I point to is tokamaks for fusion energy.
- grotorea 2y ago
  After a lot of aircraft accident youtube videos, I can think of a couple where people misunderstanding where their computers get their information from and how they work. * This one where the operations team apparently doesn't understand how their flight tracker works, and/or it fails to inform their users that last contact was X hours ago. * One where the aircraft has a broken altimeter, and the suspicious pilots decide to ask the ATC for altitude confirmation, but the ATC radar only gets horizontal coordinates, the altitude information that ATC sees actually comes from a datastream from the aircraft itself. So they fatally decided to trust that instead of their own aircraft radar altimeter which was correctly telling them they were about to crash. * The aircraft had either a single failed engine or the wheels were stuck outside, and the pilots asked the computer for how far they could travel in their current state, assuming it worked like a car, by projecting current consumption, but actually the computer just uses fixed data that does not take such exceptional situations into account. So they ran out of fuel early. > “ATSB chose to assume that the plane spiraled in close to the seventh arc because it had not received enough funding to extend the width of the search area to 100 nautical miles.” > WAT. It seems the police department has insufficient funding to help drunks look for keys in the dark.

lupusreal 2y ago

The more certain it seems that MH370 was a murder-suicide scenario, the less comfortable I am with the media's preoccupation with it. News reports about such events may contribute to copycats: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17750236/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17750236/ > Airplane accident fatalities increase just after newspaper stories about murder and suicide D P Phillips. Science. 1978. > Abstract: Fatal crashes of private, business, and corporate-executive airplanes have increased after publicized murder-suicides. The more publicity given to a murder-suicide, the more crashes occurred. The increase in plane crashes occurred primarily in states where the murder-suicides were publicized. These findings suggest that murder-suicide stories trigger subsequent murder-suicides, some of which are disguised as airplane accidents.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
That's a bit of a conundrum; on the one side the families of the victims have a right to know, and having free press is a good thing. On the other, reporting on these things may lead to copycats.
throw310822 2y ago
The most effective publicity ever for a form of murder-suicide must be the "active shooter" training in US schools.
- gymbeaux 2y ago
  This. Everyone knows active shooter situation = teachers close blinds and turn off the lights. You aren’t fooling anyone.
gosub100 2y ago
There already was a copycat, the German wings flight that flew into a mountain. Or did that precede MH370?
EdiX 2y ago
There have been other murder/suicides of this kind (assuming that the theory is correct). Particularly SilkAir 185 and Germanwings 9525 (I think there is at least another one, but at the moment it is escaping me). In fact, my impression has been, for a long time, that MH370 is itself a copycat of SilkAir 185 where the suicide corrected the mistakes that led to the discovery that the accident was in fact caused by the captain. I'm not particularly concerned about this, after the germanwings incident in europe and US (and possibly everywhere else as well) flight decks are required to always have at least two people: if one of the pilots wants or needs to leave one of the flight attendants must take his place.

runxel 2y ago

There is a very good book by the french journalist Florence de Changy about MH370, which "solves" all the issues with most of the theories out there and proposes what really happened. So far I've not come across a more sophisticated theory that still passes Occam's Razor.

Luc 2y ago
Summarized here: https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/inside-explosive-claims-challenging-story-of-lost-flight-malaysia-airlines-mh370/news-story/6311e5eb9cc687e16271670c4d831ec4 https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/insi... TLDR conspiracy theory.
- closewith 2y ago
  Deranged conspiracy theory.
aguaviva 2y ago
US shooting down a civilian passenger liner because of hypothesized secret cargo headed for China, and successfully covering it up for 10 years doesn't sound like something that passes Occam's Razor at all -- sounds like the very opposite, in fact. One should look for theories with less sophistication, not more.
- epolanski 2y ago
  I obviously don't believe anything but deliberate murder-suicide by the pilot. But just know that these things did happen. There's lots of indications that surfaced recently that the Israeli air force secretly shoot down Itavia Flight 870 in 1980 to stop a transport of nuclear technology to Iran. They had mistaken the correct flight because their intelligence in France (were the uranium was being produced for Iran) pointed them in the wrong direction. A very interesting book on the topic has been recently released with a deep and thorough investigation across France, Italy and Israel and it is to date the most credible and documented explanation for who shoot down the flight. The book has been followed by quite a lot of investigative journalism in Italy that gives this theory lots of credit. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213592261-il-quinto-scenario https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213592261-il-quinto-scen...

imglorp 2y ago

In context of the paper, "high-speed gravitationally accelerated dive following fuel starvation", it bears mentioning the L/D ratio of a 777 is around 20. Which means if you lose power at 35,000 feet, you can have at most 132 miles of glide to the surface if well piloted. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/56420/lift-to-drag-ratio-of-airliners https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/56420/lift-to-d...

gymbeaux 2y ago
What are the assumptions for the “132 miles” figure? At the very least wind is going to affect that- if you’re in a headwind you could probably make it closer to 150 miles (albeit not a huge gain).
- imglorp 2y ago
  Yeah that's why I said at most, so assuming still air and perfect piloting. The worst case is lawn dart, 0 glide. 35000 ft x 20 ratio x 1/5280 mi/ft
- egormakarov 2y ago
  It's other way around, with headwind you will get less distance over ground

Mistletoe 2y ago

https://archive.is/CG0Do https://archive.is/CG0Do This is such a great summary from The Atlantic for anyone, like me, trying to get up to speed on the MH370 story.

tsoukase 2y ago

It was most probably a mass and self suicide attempt by the pilot. The known plane trajectory is compatible and as a mental health professional I confirm there is an unconscious depression state that can be hidden from anyone while leading to such crazy behaviour.