(UPDATED) Australian Maritime Safety Authority reports 10 aircraft searching for debris from Malaysian Alirlines Flight MH370

Is a sudden decompression (brought on by climate change perhaps?) theory possible? I hope they find passengers alive but realistically I hope they find the plane and bring closure to the families.

for better or worse, hopefully there will soon be an answer to the dissapearance of the plane.
meanwhile, Ben Maddison, who accompanied Turney on the Ship of Fools, more concerned about his own/passengers’ schedules than grateful for the rescue:
23 March: Illawarra Mercury: Joshua Butler: UOW academic recalls ice ship drama
It was one of 2013’s most talked-about news stories, and University of Wollongong academic Dr Ben Maddison will this week recount his experiences aboard the trouble-plagued Antarctic research ship Akademik Shokalskiy.
From Antarctica to the pub, Dr Maddison will speak at the Uni In The Brewery event on Wednesday from 5.30pm, sharing stories from aboard the Spirit of Mawson voyage…
“We were quite philosophical about the situation,” he said in response to criticisms in the media about the boat’s mission and the resources expended in the rescue. “It was inconvenient more than anything, it messed up our schedules,” he said.
http://www.illawarramercury.com.au/story/2169365/uow-academic-recalls-ice-ship-drama/?cs=300
28 Feb: Guardian: As Antarctica opens up, will privateer explorers be frozen out?
Alok Jha, who was on the vessel, reports
In the short term, arguments over whether or not the AAE was a scientific expedition will be settled by its outputs. Longer term, persuading the scientific community that projects not funded by national agencies can still do good science could be a long, uphill struggle…
The Antarctic Treaty requires all expeditions to be authorised by government authorities but countries differ in how they implement the rules. For example, British citizens, planes or vessels going to Antarctica are assessed on environmental grounds, whether the expedition will be operated safely and if it is properly insured. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) adds that the UK examines whether or not a proposed expedition is self-sufficient, not just in terms of food and fuel but whether or not the people can get themselves out of trouble without relying immediately on help from a national Antarctic programme.
In contrast, the Australian system only looks at the environmental impact of a proposed expedition, not an expedition’s safety or self-sufficiency…
AAE leader Turney said he had learned lessons but had not been discouraged from working on ways to bring private money to future research expeditions to Antarctica…
The scientists agreed there would be work to do in persuading the wider scientific community that the research aims of any future private expeditions were robust…
To mitigate such criticisms in future, Turney suggess that private expeditions could seek endorsement from an independent scientific panel, perhaps overseen by a learned society, which ran in parallel with their logistical planning…
Turney: “If we hadn’t got caught by that sea ice, and that was an extreme event, we’d achieved almost everything we’d set out to do,” he said. “And that’s the frustration because this model potentially works so well.”…
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/28/-sp-antarctica-privateer-explorers-scientific-research-territory-polar-code

I would like someone with expertise to answer my question. It has to do with this debris in the south Indian Ocean.
Satellite images have found some debris. OK. Based on the wind and ocean currents over the last 14 days, where was this debris when the plane landed/crashed?. Then, how does THAT location compare to the flying range of a fully loaded Boeing 777 flying not at 32,000 feet but at 2,500 feet altitude as reported?
As I see it, if this is farther than the plane can travel, they are wasting their time.
By the way, if it was a hijacking, couldn’t the plane have landed in Bangladesh, also a Muslim country, without crossing the air space of India radar?

@Konrad and others
“Of note is the aircraft rising to over 45,000′ then making a staggering uneven decent. This matches uncontrolled flight out of the flight envelop into “coffin corner” where the speed of aerodynamic stall converges with the speed of supersonic shock stall and the resulting uncontrolled loss of altitude.”
The immediate rise to 45,000 ft and very rapid descent later is consistent with the pilot-in-control depressurizing the cabin and deliberately asphyxiating the passengers. The O2 supply that drops from the ceiling lasts for about 30 minutes (being a burning little block of material that produces O2). If the pilot held out at 45,000 feet ft for longer using both the available pilot O2 supplies, he would outlast the passengers.
As his own supply failed, he would dive to regain breathable air and/or re-pressurize at 20,000 ft. There is no sensible reason to have performed such a maneuver, literally on the limit of the height capability other than to prevent the passengers from somehow storming the cockpit.
I am sorry we have so many competing militaries in that region. It is unbelievable that they do not know where the flight was headed/ended, literally unbelievable. The US has a radar capability that can be parked in Los Angeles and track the movement of a baseball in New York City. The reason I am sure they have an automatic recording of all flights in the region is that CNN put someone on TV to specifically deny it. They did the same immediately after Snowden announced the massive domestic surveillance programme: bring out a codger to announce no one could pull off such a technical feat. Right… No military wants to reveal their capabilities. You think Chinese satellite picture resolution shows a 71 ft object with 15 pixels?
When KAL 007 was shot down over Kamchatka the US produced (a month later) a recording of the pilot receiving orders to pull the trigger. The capabilities of tracking aircraft are far better than they were 27 years ago. Gimme a break, this is embarrassing. Find the tapes; go get the black box.

It find it utterly fascinating how this event has acted as a kind of nucleus around which all kinds of whacky conspiracies have coalesced to form a giant ball of nuttiness; even here on WUWT which is mostly pretty sane.
What amuses me most is how each of the scary scenarios is constructed on the smallest fragments of actual evidence. Remind you of anything?

It may be this is the wreckage: maybe not. Time will tell.
I do not subscribe to conspiracy notions.
In my flying days, a long time ago, there was a useful fellow called George, a very simple autopilot who could fly the aeroplane straight and level. So if you got yourself into serious difficulties, as I did a couple of times, you pushed the tit and George took over while you sorted out the problems and George minded the shop. Certainly George saved my life at least once. .
I do not and cannot know what happened here but I do suspect that something overwhelmed the flight crew and in fairly short order too. It might have been a fire or a decompression caused by structural failure. Or something else. I doubt we will ever find out.
Modern autopilots are very sophisticated, you set in the way points and all the rest and they fly the plane. But all that takes time. I do not think the flight crew had much time. So in desperation they set in a basic course on the autopilot, presumably to what they thought was their nearest emergency field, and then succumbed. And the autopilot simply flew the aeroplane on until it ran out of fuel.
I may of course be entirely wrong, We shall see if the wreck is found and anything useful can be recovered. But I am not hopeful that we can or will ever know.
Kindest Regards

Mark and two Cats (Mar 23 @ 8:16am);
[‘Mark and two cats’ comment was stupidly insensitive and has been removed – Mod]
How would you feel, or would you say the same comment had any family/relatives, friends or work colleges had been on-board of Flight MH370?
I find your comment disgusting and un-called for. You should hang your head in shame.
I also find it offensive to the comments comparing this to the ‘Ship of Fools’. This is a completely, unrelated issue to the ‘Climate Change Wars’ and should have NO references to CC/AGW.
Please people, leave your differences of CC/AGW aside on this very tragic and mysterious incident.

A Boeing 737-31S flying from Cyprus to Athens in 2005 was lost from radar and did not respond, planes scrambled and they would have shot it if it were pointing into the city,but it stayed at 33000 feet on a holding pattern over the airport until its fuel ran out and it crashed in an uninhabited area north east of Athens . The fighter pilots saw a steward who had also piloting knowledge trying to gain control of the airplane a few minutes before the fuel ran out and it crashed.
I still cannot find the reason for the decompression ( the black boxes were sent to France for analysis is all the greek wiki tells me) , but there must have been a decompression that killed the pilots, some of the passengers were found with oxygen masks still on their face.
So accidents and mechanical failures happen , it was not the Turks ( our eternal enemies 🙂 ) nor a terrorist plot.

The US Navy says it is sending a black box locator to an area of the southern Indian Ocean being scoured for the missing Malaysian jet, following a cluster of weekend debris sightings.
The navy called the move a “precautionary measure” in case those sightings confirm the location of the aircraft which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board.
“If a debris field is confirmed, The Navy’s Towed Pinger Locator 25 will add a significant advantage in locating the missing Malaysian aircraft’s black box,” Commander William Marks, a spokesman for the US Seventh Fleet, said in an e-mailed statement.”
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/aviation/chinese-spot-objects-in-search-for-missing-flight-mh370/story-e6frg95x-1226863350195

latest… most will remember the chinese icebreaker, Xue Long – it is on its way to the area:
Malaysia Airlines MH370: Chinese search plane finds ‘suspicious objects’ in Indian Ocean, reports say
Searchers discovered “two relatively big floating objects with many white smaller ones scattered within a radius of several kilometres”, Xinhua said, citing a reporter on board a Chinese Ilyushin-76 plane.
The larger objects were “white and square”, it added…
“The crew has reported the coordinates to the Australian command centre as well as Chinese icebreaker Xuelong, which is en route to the sea area,” Xinhua said…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-24/chinese-search-plane-finds-suspicious-objects-in-indian-ocean/5341692

What is strange is the sudden jump to 40k feet, then dropping. Was this to try and get over a thunderstorm? Or the plane going crazy on its own or with someone at the controls who was having problems handling it. The strong currents in the roaring forties may have swept debris way past where a plane went down. They’ll find it eventually, but maybe they hit really bad weather. But I don’t think they will find any survivors unfortunately.

One needs data to start with and then find theories that best fit the data. The problem is that to many start with a theory and then select data that best fit this theory. Just like climate science? Theories that fit the facts we have so far can be many. We simply need more facts before we can start on theories?

Crispin in Waterloo says:
March 23, 2014 at 10:16 pm
“The immediate rise to 45,000 ft and very rapid descent later is consistent with the pilot-in-control depressurizing the cabin and deliberately asphyxiating the passengers.”
——————————————
Crispin,
no, such an action (climb to 45000) would not be required, and no pilot planning your scenario would attempt it. The reason is even though oxygen systems are better for pilots, they have limited efficacy at that altitude. Water vapour filling the lungs prevents oxygen being much use at this altitude. If a pilot were planing such an action, any altitude above 30,000′ would do. No need to climb.
Secondly the same thing would kill the pilot as the passengers long before their oxygen ran out. That is hypothermia. 30 min at 45,000′ de-pressurised? You’re dreaming. A sudden de-pressurisation of the cabin causes intense adiabatic cooling, means the only way for any, including the pilot, to survive is immediate decent.
Thirdly the radar plots of uneven decent indicates an aircraft out of human control falling out of “coffin corner”. No smooth decent.
The evidence points to accident.

Retired 777 pilot here.
Mostly looks like the captain hijacked his plane. Bumped off the copilot, accounting for the unusual climb to 45 thousand, or locked him out of the cockpit after a restroom break. Turned off the transponders and pulled the remaining comm circuit breakers. He forgot about the engine reporting system, as I would have. The 777 has just too many redundant features for it to be some mechanical failure.
The 777 can store a backup flight plan, so the captain could have programmed that in at any time, then switched over once he’d dealt with the copilot. Just a few waypoints and a gradual decent to down low, then off into oblivion.
NucEngineer has a good point about the range being reduced if they were flying down low to avoid radar. I don’t think they could land anywhere without being noticed, though. The scenarios where they land somewhere northwards takes them through far too many military radars not to be seen.
No cell phone calls is a mystery. If he blamed the sudden climb on turbulence, then smoothed out after the copilot was deceased, no one would notice they weren’t heading in the right direction, so no distress cell phone calls. Once out over the ocean, no cell phone towers.
Depressurization can be done by opening the outflow valves and cutting off the air conditioning packs, but that would drop the passenger masks, good for 20 minutes at least, and it would get really cold, so you get cell phones again. The flight attendants are on the same oxygen system as the pilots, so they’d survive and squawk no matter what.
No debris field means no mid-air breakup. The only way to get no debris for certain is to make a water landing and let the plane sink in one piece, but then you get life rafts and locator beacons. A less certain way would be to take the plane in straight down and hope nothing floated to the surface. It would be nice if there were a bunch of life rafts bobbing away out in the Indian Ocean filled with a bunch of PO’d passengers waiting to be found, but that’s a slim hope.
The Gulf of Thailand is only a couple hundred feed deep, but once you get west of Sumatra and the Andamans, the Indian Ocean can run to three miles deep. The 777 is a big plane, but the Indian Ocean is Big, really Big. Finding the airliner out there is orders of magnitude more difficult than the needle-in-a-haystack problem.
Listening to the “experts” in the media expounding on this has been akin to listening to Algore expounding on climate. Black holes, indeed.

If it was a suicide bid, perhaps the pilot wanted to make the plane disappear without trace so his family could collect insurance, which would be impossible if it could be proved he committed suicide. Hence his direction into the southern ocean.

As someone who has carried out and organized SAR operations I do hope that someone is overseeing these multinational aircraft in the search area. We do not want a mid air collision to add to the problem.

The plane can’t be found because climate change screwed up the ocean currents:
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/03/climate-change-malaysia-airlines-370-search

Dodgy Geezer says:
March 24, 2014 at 3:07 am
“At the moment I incline towards a cabin fire accident.”
——————————————————————
I would concur that this is the most likely scenario. Few would be fool enough to intentionally risk hypothermia spending more than 180 secs at 45000 de-pressurised. Radar plot does not show an even decent of human controlled flight.
Add to this the unwillingness of Malaysian airlines to release cargo manifest to Australian search and rescue. The AMSA is desperate for cargo manifest so floating debris can be identified. Malaysian Airlines are making excuses about “in the hands of local police” and the big red BS flag goes up.
How did Valujet 592 go down? Internal airline transport of HAZMAT for maintenance purposes. Just what were those “small lithium batteries” on MH370?
The only other unusual cargo was 4 tonnes of expensive Mangosteen fruit. Unlike lithium batteries they are not noted for their spontaneous combustion properties. And the worlds most audacious Mangosteen heist seems implausible for two reasons –
1. No one on the passenger manifest resembles John Lithgow or Alan Rickman.
2. There has been no unusual spikes in world Mangosteen prices.

One other important aspect of plane crashes etc in general.
Don’t speculate about any causes until we have found the wreckage and retrieved the black boxes.
We have aviation specialists with tons of experience and we should let them do their jobs without all the media hypes.

I wonder why we have heard nothing more of the report of the woman who saw, or thought she saw, a plane down in the water near the Andaman islands:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2586013/Malaysian-woman-claims-seen-missing-MH370-water-near-Andaman-Islands-day-disappeared.html
Or, for that matter, of the witnesses in the Maldives who claimed to see a large white plane flying very low right over their island:
http://www.haveeru.com.mv/news/54062
That’s on the route to the Sudan, though off the ‘ping’ arcs. Then there is the ‘northern’ arc that could put the jet in Kazakstan or somewhere. . .
Maybe these other possibilities are still being investigated, but the news reports suggest all efforts are being concentrated on the southern Indian Ocean gyre, reportedly a “garbage dump” with lots of flotsam and jetsam.
/Mr Lynn

Aircraft are OK for searching, but what they really need are ships + aircraft, each aircraft searches an area around a ship, if something is seen the ship can go and investigate.
I wonder what the rate of spotting general debris is for a random place in the ocean, pretty big judging by all the junk that washes up on my local beaches.

USA TODAY just reported this from a news conference a few within the last hour,

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razar said Monday that a new analysis of electronic data shows that the missing Malaysian airlines with 239 people aboard went down in a remote area of the Indian ocean and indicated there were no survivors.

This was stated in the past hour prior to verifying any MH370 debris from the Southern Ocean.
I think, if the plane is verified to have crashed in the Southern Ocean by identification of its debris there, then this looks like a planned human act (whether successfully achieving its goals or botched) and not an accident.
John

@David Schofield. actually what you have are a few items of information of highly dubious accuracy and a whole lot of hypotheses, some reasonable many completely crazy. As you point out it’s speculation. Nothing against reasonable speculation, but some of the conspiracy theories aired on here and other sites do nothing but support Lewandowsky.

@Mike McMillan and Dodgy
Mike:”Depressurization can be done by opening the outflow valves and cutting off the air conditioning packs, but that would drop the passenger masks, good for 20 minutes at least, and it would get really cold, so you get cell phones again. The flight attendants are on the same oxygen system as the pilots, so they’d survive and squawk no matter what.”
Thanks for thre expert opinions. I don’t agree with Konrad’s 3 minutes at 45,000 ft but I agree with yours. RE the cell phones: I checked to see the distances involved and at the point where the turn was made, cell communication was not possible. I am not clear if it would have been possible within the lifetime of the O2 packs. Probably not. Someone trying to use a cell phone after 20-30 minutes on a mask is unlikely to find service based on where they started. People climb to the top of Mt Everest without O2 but would not survive at 45,000 ft. Cold, people would cope with, especially for 20 minutes.
On the other hand I agree that the cockpit fire scenario is more plausible than a pilot wiping out the passengers. Maintenance issue? People have too much complacent confidence in complex modern machinery. But if it was a piloted aircraft with a ditching end as the goal, getting rid of the passengers early would have been a move to prevent someone working out how to get through the cockpit door.
The flight path seems to have headed for Jakarta. Could the pilot have done a quick look-up in a smoke-filled seat and picked Jakarta by mistake instead of Kuala Lumpur (which is alphabetically close) and flipped to auto-pilot? The climb could have been initiated to try to put out a fire (oxygen starvation) whether in the hold or the cockpit – standard procedure. There are lots of cargoes that cause fires. Remember the Helderberg and the ammonium perchlorate story. The aircraft depressurised and dived, not climbed.
“The ‘smoke evacuation’ checklist calls for the aircraft to be depressurised, and for two of the cabin doors to be opened. No evidence exists that the checklist was followed, or the doors opened. A crew member might have gone into the cargo hold to try to fight the fire. A charged fire extinguisher was later recovered from the wreckage on which investigators found molten metal”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Airways_Flight_295
But none of that explains turning off the transponders manually.

I doubt the following has any significant role, but it might be worth mentioning. The location off the coast of Australia is pretty close to Beijing with a negative latitude value.

Mike McMillan says:
March 24, 2014 at 1:02 pm
“At high altitudes, the pilots’ oxygen system supplies 100% oxygen at positive pressure, enough to force the oxygen into the bloodstream. Your lungs fill up without effort, then you have to affirmatively exhale, sort of the reverse of how we normally breathe.”
———————————————————-
Fair point, I had forgotten that the flight crew masks were positive pressure not demand. (It was over 8 years ago when I went through the manuals when building the 777 cockpit for “superman returns”)
The issue of temperature still remains. Air temp could drop below -50C at that altitude. Crispin was suggesting an extended stay at that altitude. This seems very unlikely to be a planned action.
As a former 777 pilot do you feel that “coffin corner” would be adequately handled in simulator software?

Opps – translation error – Jakarta should be CGK

My heart goes out to kin and friends of the lost, and to those on ships searching the most cold, stormy, rough and miserable quarter of the bounding main.

I suppose you already know but the air search did find debris, but has been called off because of the weather in the area, but the American ship is ready to find the black boxes. As far as the suicide accusations, I think we should find out what the black boxes reveal.

I heard an interesting scenario yesterday from a pilot:
A fire erupted due to dangerous cargo , the captain took the plane to 45000 feet to put out the fire at the same time changing course towards a nearest airport . The pilot said it was the best thing to do to put out a fire as there was not enough oxygen at 45000 to sustain a fire. The fumes from the fire were toxic and together with hypoxia pilots and passengers were asphyxiated and the plane continued on automatic pilot which had been reset during the up and down. manoeuvring..
Has anybody else heard such a scenario?

The 777 has fire suppression in the cargo bay. Any toxic fumes from a fire there would vent overboard, not into the cabin. I don’t know if going to high altitude would bother a lithium-ion battery fire, but other fires would be suppressed by the system..
If they find the flight data and voice recorders, we’ll know what the plane did, but the cockpit voice recorder won’t have anything on it unless the pilot was talking to himself. It may be that intercom transmissions such as flight attendants calling the cockpit might be on it, but only the last two hours are recorded.