UPDATE: Missing plane ended in southern Indian Ocean: Malaysian PM
KUALA LUMPUR — Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 ended its flight in the southern Indian Ocean based on fresh data from a UK satellite company, Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak said tonight (March 24).
Mr Najib said British satellite company Inmarsat and the UK Air Accidents Investigation Board (AAIB) had used a new system to calculate MH370’s flight path.
“I was briefed by representatives from the United Kingdom AAIB today and Inmarsat, who had performed further calculations on their existing data,” Mr Najib told reporters.
“They had used a new type of analysis which had previously never been used before in an investigation like this,” he said. The analysis concluded that MH370 flew along the Southern Corridor and that its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, West of Perth.
“This is a remote location, far from any possible landing site,” said Mr Najib. “It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean,” he said.
http://www.todayonline.com/world/asia/mh370-malaysia-pm-najib-razak-holds-press-conference
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I still get the news-feed from AMSA since the Chris Turney Ships of Fools trapped in ice event, and today it looks like they are going all out with an international effort, so I thought I would pass this on for interested readers. Here is the press release, and a map and satellite imagery follow.
24th March, 2014: 11am (AEDT)
Ten aircraft are involved in today’s search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. Two Chinese military aircraft departed about 8.45am and 9.20am respectively. A RAAF P3 Orion departed for the search area just after 9am.
Two ultra-long range civil jets departed about 10.10am and 10.30am respectively. A second RAAF P3 Orion is scheduled to depart about 11am.
A third ultra-long range jet is scheduled to depart about midday.
A US Navy P8 Poseidon aircraft is scheduled to depart about 1pm. The two Japanese P3 Orion aircraft are scheduled to depart after 4pm.
Media Note: Updated search area charts are now available in AMSA’s media kit for this search. These can be accessed at the following link under Day 7 search area charts: http://www.amsa.gov.au/media/incidents/mh370-search.asp
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Source: http://www.amsa.gov.au/media/media-releases/2014/
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Here is the current search area. Click to enlarge.
Satellite imagery of debris. Click to enlarge.
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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.
Speed says:
March 23, 2014 at 9:25 pm
Mark and two cats wrote, [‘Mark and two cats’ comment was stupidly insensitive and has been removed – Mod]
The contents of his website clearly explain his propensity for crass comments. Engage brain before punching keyboard.
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?
TBear says:
March 23, 2014 at 11:21 pm
“Could we please stop cracking jokes about this? It is just not funny.”
TBear, I see you have included yourself among the jokesters, but are now rightly calling a cessation. What goes?
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.
‘A Chinese plane hunting for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane has spotted “suspicious” objects, state media say, as more nations joined the search.
Searchers saw two “relatively big” objects with “many white smaller ones scattered within a radius of several kilometres”, Xinhua news agency said.
Australia said it had been informed and would try to locate the objects. ‘
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-26678492
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.
Why has anyone claimed that the aircraft climbed to 40+K feet? How do they supposedly know this?
Looking at earlier incidents, I note that an Egypt-Air had a cockpit fire while on the ground. It was reported to have immediately forced the pilots out of the flight-deck, destroyed the controls and the communications systems, put a hole in the aircraft skin and (because the fire involved the oxygen bottle) been unable to be put out by on-board extinguishers. Luckily, it happened on the ground.
The reported movements of MH370 are generally consistent with a cockpit fire, the pilots reversing the plane direction towards the nearest airport in the early stages, then being forced out of the cockpit, and everyone being killed by hypoxia or smoke/fumes shortly afterwards.
No specific cause for the fire seems to have been established, and there were no precautionary changes made to the Boeing fleet as a result…
MikeMcMillan= I agree. The pilot is involved and with a plan. His motive I think has to do with the recent unrest in China with the Oeigoere. So another suicide fundamentalist killer.
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.
@Mike McMillan
…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….
The pilot is in control of all system circuit breakers, so he can probably disable deployment of the passenger masks if he wishes. In any case the mask deployment must be able to be disabled for testing the pressure detection circuits.
I thought that the cabin staff had portable oxygen equipment, which they would need to do their work properly. However, these would be short-lived and the flight-deck door is reinforced. And, of course, if the mask deployment and warnings are disabled, they would never know to put the masks on before they fell unconscious…
Mass murder by hypoxia is a credible scenario which explains all the communications failure and later maneuvering which we believe to have occurred. That might be terrorism or some other illegal act. But a long straight path towards Antarctica sounds more like a plane where all are dead – perhaps suicide, perhaps an accident. At the moment I incline towards a cabin fire accident.
Of course, this is speculation with very little data to go on. Let us hope we get more soon…
Missed out a few words – the Egypt-Air plane was a Boeing 777 of exactly the same model…
Why no drones in the area? They can stay aloft for many more hours than manned aircraft and can search day and night. Sadly, I think we are possibly seeing a crew mutiny/hijacking suicide. The idea of an on board fire that disabled all communications and tracking without destroying the plane seems unlikely. I find it difficult to think that the plane was pirated away to some BFEistan for weaponizing without intel picking up any evidence by now.
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.
Without facts all this speculation about terrorism, hijacking, conspiracies and plots is nonsensical. Don’t support Lewandowsky’s thesis please. Or don’t ‘skeptics’ need evidence any more?
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
Why not put a water soluble sea dye pack in all aircraft? Similar to military pilot rescues.
And Chris there is plenty of evidence we are aware of so speculation based on that is perfectly acceptable.
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.
What’s the problem, we loose on average 1.2 aircraft with more than 14 passengers every year since 1948 without any trace.
If that scares anybody please stay away from the statistics for boats.
http://www.bloomberg.com/infographics/2014-03-13/vanishing-planes-mapped-since-1948.html
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.
@ur momisugly R. de Haan
…What’s the problem, we loose on average 1.2 aircraft with more than 14 passengers every year since 1948 without any trace…
A little cherry-picking here I think?
That data is for planes CAPABLE of carrying 14 or more passengers. Looking at the graphs, I see that losing big passenger planes was fairly common in the 1950-70s, but became much less common after that. There was a little bulge of planes lost over the last 5 years – drilling into the data shows these to have often been larger older aircraft being ferried to a destination with only a single pilot, over water, in a third-world country like Africa which has no Search and Rescue capability. Old DC3s (probably badly maintained and bought cheap) are the largest single type.
Losing a full modern airliner in a sophisticated country is not common at all. Oh, and many of the data items on that list are for aircraft which were missing inexplicably at the time, but have since had crash sites identified…
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
[Oh rats. Used my WordPress ID instead of Disqus. Mods, can you change to Mr Lynn? Thanks.]
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.