[andyt]

US Navy is searching in the Indian Ocean/Andaman Sea (west of Malaysia) based on new info. WSJ reports plane may have flown up to 4000 km after breaking contact.

[Jabberwalker]

A circle with a 4000km radius is a pretty big chunk of the Earth's surface.

3.1416 x 16,000,000 = 50,265,600 Sq. Km. You will need a LOT of aircraft!

[ShepherdsDog]

andyt andyt:

US Navy is searching in the Indian Ocean/Andaman Sea (west of Malaysia) based on new info. WSJ reports plane may have flown up to 4000 km after breaking contact.

Everyone must have been dead or unconscious early on.....chemical poisoning or the O2 supply was compromised.

[andyt]

The telemetry was turned off, so no, that took conscious action. Also I would guess they'd be on autopilot so would have kept flying north east, crash in China.

Pilot on CBC said even if a hijacker made them turn off the telemetry, the pilot has ways of sending a distress signal not noticeable by hijacker.

If this is suicide by pilot, he must really have wanted to fuck with people's mind to turn off the telemetry.

WSJ says they did continue to send signals

[xerxes]

The way I read it is that rolls Royce continued to get telemetry from the engines that suggests. They kept flying for hours after the plane disappeared from radar. But like you said, even if there was a sudden loss of oxygen it doesn't explain why the transponder goes off.

There was an incident some years ago involving a Greek airline where they lost oxygen and ultimately the planes crashed. But it was tracked the whole way.

[andyt]

Christ, even reputable sources are getting into the rumor mongering. I guess in the absence of info, bullshit will do.

$1:

The Wall Street Journal is issuing a correction to its much-talked-about story alleging that the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 continued flying for hours after slipping out of contact very early last Saturday morning. The Journal’s corrected story sticks with that central contention — that the plane continued flying — but bails on how investigators reached that conclusion.

The original story claimed that investigators had secured data from the Rolls Royce engines on the Boeing 777 — data that the engines send to the ground every 30 minutes. Following publication of the story, officials in Malaysia contended that no engine data was received after 1:07 a.m. on Saturday, about a half-hour after the flight took off. So engine data, they said, yielded no conclusion that the flight had continued for four hours, as the Wall Street Journal reported.
Other data, however, did. As a statement from Wall Street Journal spokesman Colleen Schwartz to the Erik Wemple Blog notes:

The Wall Street Journal confirms its report that U.S. investigators suspect Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 stayed in the air for up to four hours past the time it reached its last confirmed location. The Journal has since learned, however, that this belief is based on an analysis of signals sent through the Boeing 777’s satellite-communication link, and not from data sent by the plane’s Rolls-Royce engines to Rolls Royce, as was earlier incorrectly reported. Our report has been corrected.
The Post reports that the critical data about the plane’s flight duration “came from the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, a way that planes maintain contact with ground stations through radio or satellite signals.”
Upshot: The Wall Street Journal got the most important part of the story correct. The continuation of the flight is critical to the story, and it opens up a sea of unthinkable possibilities for the search mission. Search operations in the Indian Ocean may be launched, said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. Yet the data component of the story is hardly trifling. All day long, folks — read: CNN — were trying to game out just who was right: The Wall Street Journal, with its engine-data contentions, or the Malaysians disputing them. At the very least, the Wall Street Journal should consider sending an e-mail apology to the media liaison people at Rolls Royce.

[xerxes]

Well there goes that then.

[Regina]

MAS is saying signals sent to RR was last sent 30 minutes prior to take off. Why is the WSJ speaking for RR? Why isn't RR making a statement of exactly what they have?
Well it's morning there now so their day has begun. Let the games begin!!!!!

[andyt]

OK, the US Navy did send a ship from the east to the west side of Malaysia, claiming new info had come to light, but not saying what. Rereading the WSJ piece, it sounds as if the plane was sending out some sort of signal for 4 hours after contact was lost, presumably indicating it was headed toward India.

Curiouser and curiouser

[Regina]

andyt andyt:

OK, the US Navy did send a ship from the east to the west side of Malaysia, claiming new info had come to light, but not saying what. Rereading the WSJ piece, it sounds as if the plane was sending out some sort of signal for 4 hours after contact was lost, presumably indicating it was headed toward India.

Curiouser and curiouser

It was "suppose" to be sending engine data not Nav data, but as I said in the previous post MAS said the last engine data was sent 30 minutes prior to take off.

[andyt]

$1:

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - The international search for the missing Malaysian jetliner expanded further into the Indian Ocean on Friday amid signs the aircraft may have flown on for hours after its last contact with air-traffic control nearly a week ago.
A U.S. official told The Associated Press that the Malaysia Airlines plane sent signals to a satellite for four hours after the aircraft went missing early last Saturday, raising the possibility the jet carrying 239 people could have flown far from the current search areas. It also increased speculation that whatever happened to the plane was a deliberate act.
Malaysia's Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said the search was expanding further afield, not because of any new information about the plane's flight, but because the aircraft has not yet been found.
Malaysian officials declined to discuss when —or even whether — they had information about signals to satellites, and that they would release details only when verified. Hishammuddin said Malaysian investigators have worked with U.S. colleagues in Kuala Lumpur since Sunday.
"I hope within a couple of days to have something conclusive," he told a press conference.
If the plane had disintegrated during flight or had suffered some other catastrophic failure, all signals — the pings to the satellite, the data messages and the transponder — would be expected to stop at the same time. Experts say a pilot or passengers with technical expertise may have switched off the transponder in the hope of flying undetected.

The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the situation by name, said the plane wasn't transmitting data to the satellite but was sending a signal to establish contact.
Boeing offers a satellite service that can receive a stream of data during flight on how the aircraft is functioning and relay the information to the plane's home base. The idea is to provide information before the plane lands on whether maintenance work or repairs are needed.
Malaysia Airlines didn't subscribe to that service, but the plane still had the capability to connect with the satellite and was automatically sending pings, the official said.
Boeing has not commented.

[BartSimpson]

Here's a CNN story that was updated about 45 minutes ago:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/14/world/asi ... ?hpt=hp_t1

$1:

(CNN) -- Yet another theory is taking shape about what might have happened to missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Maybe it landed in a remote Indian Ocean island chain.

The suggestion -- and it's only that at this point -- is based on analysis of radar data revealed Friday by Reuters suggesting that the plane wasn't just blindly flying northwest from Malaysia.

Reuters, citing unidentified sources familiar with the investigation, reported that whoever was piloting the vanished jet was following navigational waypoints that would have taken the plane over the Andaman Islands.

Flight 370 search expands to Indian Ocean
The radar data doesn't show the plane over the Andaman Islands, but only on a known route that would take it there, Reuters cited its sources as saying.

Andaman Island editor: 'No plane here'

'Significant likelihood' plane in ocean
The theory builds on earlier revelations by U.S. officials that an automated reporting system on the airliner was pinging satellites for hours after its last reported contact with air traffic controllers. That makes some investigators think the plane flew on for hours before truly disappearing.

Aviation experts say it's possible, if highly unlikely, that someone could have hijacked and landed the giant Boeing 777 undetected.

But Denis Giles, editor of the Andaman Chronicle newspaper, says there's just nowhere to land such a big plane in his archipelago without attracting notice.

Indian authorities own the only four airstrips in the region, he said.

"There is no chance, no such chance, that any aircraft of this size can come towards Andaman and Nicobar islands and land," he said.

The Malaysian government said Friday it can't confirm the report.

And a senior U.S. official on Thursday offered a conflicting account, telling CNN that "there is probably a significant likelihood" the plane is on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

Regardless, India has deployed assets from its navy, coast guard and air force to the south Andaman Sea to take part in a search for Flight 370, the country's Ministry of Defense said Friday. The Indian navy is leading the operation, and its Maritime Operations Center in New Delhi is coordinating the effort, the ministry said.

Indian search teams are combing large areas of the archipelago. Two aircraft are searching land and coastal areas of the island chain from north to south, an Indian military spokesman said Friday, and two coast guard ships have been diverted to search along the islands' east coast.

The jetliner, with 239 people on board, disappeared nearly a week ago as it flew between Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Beijing. The flight has turned into one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history, befuddling industry experts and government officials. Authorities still don't know where the plane is or what caused it to vanish.

Suggestions of what happened have ranged from a catastrophic explosion to hijacking to pilot suicide.

Malaysian officials, who are coordinating the search, said Friday that the hunt for the plane was spreading deeper into both the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

"A normal investigation becomes narrower with time, I understand, as new information focuses the search," said Hishammuddin Hussein, the minister in charge of defense and transportation. "But this is not a normal investigation. In this case, the information we have forces us to look further and further afield."

On Friday, the United States sent the destroyer USS Kidd to scout the Indian Ocean as the search expands into that body of water.

"I, like most of the world, really have never seen anything like this," Cmdr. William Marks of the U.S. 7th Fleet told CNN of the scale of the search. "It's pretty incredible."

"It's a completely new game now," he said. "We went from a chess board to a football field."

More on the landing theory

James Kallstrom, a former FBI assistant director, said it's possible the plane could have landed, though he added that more information is needed to reach a definitive conclusion. He referred to the vast search area.

"You draw that arc and you look at countries like Pakistan, you know, and you get into your Superman novels and you see the plane landing somewhere and (people) repurposing it for some dastardly deed down the road," he told CNN's Jake Tapper on Thursday.

"I mean, that's not beyond the realm of realism. I mean, that could happen."

Even so, he acknowledged the difficulty of reaching firm conclusions with scraps of information that sometimes conflict.

"We're getting so much conflicting data," he said. "You veer one way, then you veer the other way. The investigators need some definitive, correct data."

Other developments

On the seventh day of efforts to find the missing Boeing 777-200, here are the other main developments:

• Another lead: Chinese researchers say they recorded a "seafloor event" in waters around Malaysia and Vietnam about an hour and a half after the missing plane's last known contact. The event was recorded in a nonseismic region about 116 kilometers (72 miles) northeast of the plane's last confirmed location, the University of Science and Technology of China said.

"Judging from the time and location of the two events, the seafloor event may have been caused by MH370 crashing into the sea," said a statement posted on the university's website.

• Tracking the pings: Malaysian authorities believe they have several "pings" from the airliner's service data system, known as ACARS, transmitted to satellites in the four to five hours after the last transponder signal, suggesting the plane flew to the Indian Ocean, a senior U.S. official told CNN.

That information, combined with known radar data and knowledge of fuel range, leads officials to believe the plane may have made it as far as the Indian Ocean, which is in the opposite direction of the plane's original route, from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

• Why the Indian Ocean? Analysts from U.S. intelligence, the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board have been scouring satellite feeds and, after ascertaining no other flights' transponder data corresponded to the pings, came to the conclusion that they were likely to have come from the missing Malaysian plane, the senior U.S. official said.

Indian search teams are combing large areas of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, a remote archipelago in the northeast Indian Ocean.

• Malaysian response: In a statement Friday, Malaysia's Ministry of Transport neither confirmed nor denied the latest reports on the plane's possible path, saying that "the investigation team will not publicly release information until it has been properly verified and corroborated." The ministry said it was continuing to "work closely with the U.S. team, whose officials have been on the ground in Kuala Lumpur to help with the investigation since Sunday.

U.S. experts are using satellite systems to try to determine the possible location of the plane, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, director general of the Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation, said at a news conference Friday.

On Thursday, Malaysia Airlines Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said that Rolls-Royce, the maker of the plane's engines, and Boeing had reported that they hadn't received any data transmissions from the plane after 1:07 a.m. Saturday, 14 minutes before the transponder stopped sending information. He was responding to a Wall Street Journal report suggesting the missing plane's engines continued to send data to the ground for hours after contact with the transponder was lost.

The Wall Street Journal subsequently changed its reporting to say that signals from the plane -- giving its location, speed and altitude -- were picked up by communications satellites for at least five hours after it disappeared. The last "ping" came from over water, the newspaper reported, citing unidentified people briefed on the investigation.

[andyt]

I can't see them picking up the crash on the seafloor with seismic equipment. Energy from the plane crashing into the water would dissipate quickly and it would then drop gently on the seafloor. In myth busters they found rifle bullets lost all their speed about 3 feet into the water, there's just too much resistance.

China seems to be full of shit anyway. Their satellite images were very poor quality. Why? Instead of contacting the Malaysian govt about the images, China just published them on a website. Why?

[BartSimpson]

andyt andyt:

I can't see them picking up the crash on the seafloor with seismic equipment. Energy from the plane crashing into the water would dissipate quickly and it would then drop gently on the seafloor. In myth busters they found rifle bullets lost all their speed about 3 feet into the water, there's just too much resistance.

China seems to be full of shit anyway. Their satellite images were very poor quality. Why? Instead of contacting the Malaysian govt about the images, China just published them on a website. Why?

I can see them picking up the crash into the sea with a SOSUS system. I expect the Chinese have a pretty decent SOSUS system given that Clinton licensed the technology for export about twenty years ago.

[Jabberwalker]

andyt andyt:

I can't see them picking up the crash on the seafloor with seismic equipment. Energy from the plane crashing into the water would dissipate quickly and it would then drop gently on the seafloor. In myth busters they found rifle bullets lost all their speed about 3 feet into the water, there's just too much resistance.

China seems to be full of shit anyway. Their satellite images were very poor quality. Why? Instead of contacting the Malaysian govt about the images, China just published them on a website. Why?

I'm sure that the Chinese published those after carefully "detuning" the resolution of their images. They wouldn't want to give away intelligence like the resolution of their satellite imaging. I have little doubt that a Chinese satellite can read "Egg Foo Yong" off of a take-away menu from space.

It's a shame that there is so little ferrous material in a modern aircraft. It would speed things up if they could do M.A.D. sweeps with anti-submarine aircraft travelling at better speeds than those required to be able to spot needles in haystacks.