Malaysia Airlines MH370

Ah, yes. Can't forget Flight 19.

_Howard wrote:

TWA 800 crashed 12 minutes out of New York and they could only guess at the cause of the crash (a short in a fuel gauge wire. Maybe.).

I remember that crash now, Wayne Shorter's wife was on-board.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Amelia Earhart and the Bermuda Triangle are antipodal to MH370, just sayin'.

The Earhart and triangle incidents happened when we had far less technological capability to track than today, which makes MH370 disappearance all the more shameful for aviation.

I'm quite sure there's a small black hole orbiting the Earth that intersects both the Bermuda Triangle and Malaysia.

SAI2 wrote:

The Earhart and triangle incidents happened when we had far less technological capability to track than today, which makes MH370 disappearance all the more shameful for aviation.

The black box technology we use today dates back to the 1950s. I have no idea why they don't use GPS tracking on aircraft. If Apple can track millions of iPhone users, it would seem trivial to track a few thousand airplanes every day.

Quote :

The likelihood of finding any debris on the ocean's surface is "highly unlikely," Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Monday. By now, most of the debris is probably waterlogged and has probably sunk, he said.

So officials are moving on to the next phase: a more intense underwater search that will use private contractors and could cost about $56 million.

Crews will now scour a much larger area of the ocean floor -- 60,000 square kilometers. The process could take at least six to eight months, officials said.

I think the resolution to the "mystery" is worth the expense of the answers. Who should pay the bill is another matter.

$234,309.62 per victim, not including what's already been spent.  Don't you think that money could be better spent?  I mean, what could they possibly learn?

Recovery of bodies (what's left of them...) is just a fool's errand.

Good point. However, it's not so much that we already know what needs correcting, but what we don't know, that we don't want to have happen again.

Exactly. How many GPS units would $56m buy?

How much more money and lives will be wasted if it turns out MH370 went down because of a design defect, or an equipment failure on those planes, or... if it were deliberate, those unknowns could bite another flight in the ass again...

Or, any other possible yet mysterious unknown that we have decided to leave be because it cost too much to find out. Granted, I don't know where a line should be drawn. But it is better for the aviation industry in the long run to know, rather than not know, what brought MH370 down.

I think the lives of another plane load of people is worth the added expense. Again, I just don't know where that attitude becomes absurd.

The bottom line is it's up to the parties involved and who ends up having to pay the bill.

The airlines rejected the idea of using real-time position location (GPS) because of the expense. Taking that into consideration, my opinion is that the airline industry should be liable for all costs incurred in finding one of their aircraft.

I discount mechanical error. This is only the second 777 to have crashed, and the first one was demonstrably pilot error.

If they knew where the wreckage lay I'd agree with you, we should find out why it went down. But we don't even know where to look because, as Howard pointed out, the airlines were too cheap. Therefore, money spent looking for it is quite possibly going into a black hole with absolutely no return.

I say, time to pull the plug.

I'm willing to concede a limit should be set as to how long to search and how much spent. I agree with Howard that airline industry should absorb the expense.

If they can. See "TBTF and Culpability."

All searches for MH370 were called off long ago. This video presents a plausible explanation for what happened.

What Netflix got WRONG - Malaysian Flight 370

Wow. Stunning simulation. Photo realistic animation.

Yeah okay.  There's an incredible amount of detail in that recreation, but a lot of it has to be pure speculation (which they don't mention).  Things that couldn't be known from the available electronic communications from the aircraft. Important things.  Crucial things.

This raises my hackles, and makes me wonder how much else they're making up.  The checkable facts seem to agree with what's known, according to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370

But the big point here, the really big point, is never once mentioned in the video. And that of course is why?  

• Why would an experienced pilot, with no known personal dramas, decide to scuttle an aircraft with 269 souls aboard?
  
• He flew the same route to Beijing previously, it was probably his assigned (or chosen, with that much experience)l route.
  
• If the pilot was suicidal, there are a lot of easier ways to kill oneself.  
  
• A pilot with that much seniority would probably have a lot of pride in his work
  
• And sense of responsibility for the passengers
  
• More like Sully Sullenberger
  
• If he wanted to crash the airplane, there are a lot closer places to dive into the ocean.
  
• Why down a jet full of innocent Chinese passengers?
  

In short, the video explains a possible HOW, but does not address the bigger WHY.

Unless there's substantial new evidence on this case -- which I haven't followed since 2014 -- I'm not buying the video's conclusion.

I mean, look at this screenshot:


The plane could have pinged the satellite anywhere along the red arcs, right?  That means the flight path could have been north over China, or west over India. Was there any evidence it was south over the ocean, aside from debris washing up in Madagascar?

I guess I need to watch that Netflix special.

Wikipedia wrote:

Two men boarded Flight 370 with stolen passports, which raised suspicion in the immediate aftermath of its disappearance.[239][240] The passports, one Austrian and one Italian, had been reported stolen in Thailand within the preceding two years.[239] Interpol stated that both passports were listed on its Stolen and Lost Travel Documents (SLTD) database, and that no check had been made against the database since the passports were first reported as stolen.[42][241] Malaysia's Home Minister, Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, criticised his country's immigration officials for failing to stop the passengers travelling with the stolen European passports.[242] The two one-way tickets purchased for the holders of these passports were booked through China Southern Airlines.[239] It was reported that an Iranian had ordered the cheapest tickets to Europe via telephone in Bangkok, Thailand, and paid by cash.[243][244] The two passengers were later identified as Iranian men, one aged 19 and the other 29, who had entered Malaysia on 28 February using valid Iranian passports. The two men were believed to be asylum seekers.[245][246] The Secretary General of Interpol stated that the organisation was "inclined to conclude that it was not a terrorist incident".[36]

This was not mentioned in the video.  The flight path directly in front of the last known position of MH370 would have taken the aircraft straight to Iran.

The video does say (admittedly at the end) that it doesn't suggest why the guy wanted to commit suicide. Their point being that it doesn't appear that anyone has seriously asked that question, because it's so unthinkable.

But the specific hypothesis that the video promotes is that what evidence there is suggests that the plane was maneuvered in such a way as to deliberately hide it from the ground controllers, and then be crashed in an area where it would likely never be found. There were only two people on the plane capable of doing that, and the captain was the one with the suspicious data on his home flight simulator. The suggestion is that the captain would want to disguise his suicide to avoid dishonor for himself and his family, and that is why the plan for the plane to completely, mysteriously, disappear was necessary.

richard09 wrote:

...the captain was the one with the suspicious data on his home flight simulator.

This is farther down in the Wikipedia article:

Wikipedia wrote:

The United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reconstructed the deleted data from Captain Zaharie's home flight simulator, but a Malaysian government spokesman indicated that "nothing sinister" had been found on it.[258][259] The preliminary report issued by Malaysia in March 2015 stated that there was "no evidence of recent or imminent significant financial transactions carried out" by any of the pilots or crew, and that analysis of the behaviour of the pilots on CCTV showed "no significant behavioural changes".[20]: 20, 21 

In 2016, New York magazine wrote that a confidential document from the Malaysian police investigation showed an FBI analysis of the flight simulator's computer hard drive found a route on the pilot's home flight simulator that closely matched the projected flight over the Indian Ocean and that this evidence had been withheld from the publicly released investigative report.[260] New York wrote as follows:

   New York has obtained a confidential document from the Malaysian police investigation into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that shows that the plane's captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, conducted a simulated flight deep into the remote southern Indian Ocean less than a month before the plane vanished under uncannily similar circumstances. The revelation, which Malaysia withheld from a lengthy public report on the investigation, is the strongest evidence yet that Zaharie made off with the plane in a premeditated act of mass murder-suicide.

   The document presents the findings of the Malaysian police's investigation into Zaharie. It reveals that after the plane disappeared in March of 2014, Malaysia turned over to the FBI hard drives that Zaharie used to record sessions on an elaborate home-built flight simulator. The FBI was able to recover six deleted data points that had been stored by the Microsoft Flight Simulator X program in the weeks before MH370 disappeared, according to the document. Each point records the airplane's altitude, speed, direction of flight, and other key parameters at a given moment.

Malaysian authorities didn't find the flight sim data on the hard drive?  Only the FBI found it?  I may be conspiratorial but that sounds suspicious.

richard09 wrote:

The suggestion is that the captain would want to disguise his suicide to avoid dishonor for himself and his family

Exactly why taking 239 other people with you is so illogical.

I'm not saying it COULDN'T have happened the way the video depicts. It's just really odd if it did.

NoCoPilot wrote:

I guess I need to watch that Netflix special.

Started it.  Like most reviewers I quickly concluded it's crap.

That, and it's a series of several episodes, and my interest level really isn't that high.

Wikipedia wrote:

... an FBI analysis of the flight simulator's computer hard drive found a route on the pilot's home flight simulator that closely matched the projected flight over the Indian Ocean

How many OTHER flight paths did they find on his flight sim? This says "found a route" -- not found THE route.

Sorry, it still sounds to me like somebody's trying to close the case by blaming the victims.