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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 cou

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.

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.