Malaysia Airlines loses contact with Flight - 239 pax/crew

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SarahZ

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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/08/malaysia-airlines-loses-contact-plane

A search and rescue operation is under way after Malaysia Airlines said that a plane carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew on board went missing en route to Beijing.

The company said that it lost contact with the aircraft two hours after takeoff and it was now working with authorities who had deployed search and rescue teams to locate the aircraft, which had left Kuala Lumpur at 12.41am local time on Saturday (6.41pm GMT on Friday).
 
This is very sad, and almost unbelievable. In today's day and age, an airplane with brilliant safety record like the 777 does not simply "go missing" with no contact for several hours. Something terrible must have happened to it to just drop off radar like this.

Let's wait and watch, hoping for a very unlikely miracle that some (better, all) passengers survive somehow.
 
This is very sad, and almost unbelievable. In today's day and age, an airplane with brilliant safety record like the 777 does not simply "go missing" with no contact for several hours. Something terrible must have happened to it to just drop off radar like this.

Let's wait and watch, hoping for a very unlikely miracle that some (better, all) passengers survive somehow.
The weird thing is that you'd normally be able to spot said terrible thing on radar.
 
Here's all I could find: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/MAS370/history/20140307/1635Z/WMKK/ZBAA.

Looks like the plane dropped off public tracking before even leaving Malaysian airspace. What did the radar operators see?

Here is the usual flight path of MH 370: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/MAS370/history/20140306/1635Z/WMKK/ZBAA.

Accroding to maps, 153 miles south of Phu Qouc Island would put the crash site near the mouth of the Gulf of Thailand, in Vietnamese airspace?
Flightaware is pretty unreliable in that part of the world. Even regular flights "drop off" regularly on Flightaware.

FlightRadar24 has this archived part showing the exact moment the plane disappeared from radar. Look at the "altitude" box on the left change abruptly from '35000ft' to '0ft' and the plane disappears thereafter. This is a heavy simulation, so be patient and let it load fully.

http://www.flightradar24.com/2014-03-07/17:20/12x/6.97,103.63/7
 
Here's all I could find: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/MAS370/history/20140307/1635Z/WMKK/ZBAA.

Looks like the plane dropped off public tracking before even leaving Malaysian airspace. What did the radar operators see?

Here is the usual flight path of MH 370: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/MAS370/history/20140306/1635Z/WMKK/ZBAA.

Accroding to maps, 153 miles south of Phu Qouc Island would put the crash site near the mouth of the Gulf of Thailand, in Vietnamese airspace?
You're not seeing what you think you're seeing. None of those are radar tracks. In the case of the prior flight, the line starts based upon ADS info within the vacinity of the Kuala Lumpur airport, from there no data is available until it reaches Hong Kong. At that point when new info is available, Flightaware simply draws a straight line between the two sets of positions. For the accident, same thing, but since the plane never reached Hong Kong, the feed stops in the vacinity of Kuala Lumpur and goes no further, even though the plane did.

You must remember that in large parts of the world there simply is no enroute radar coverage, or it's very spotty. Sequencing is done the old fashioned way with pilots giving their position and other revelant info to controllers, and the controllers doing some algebra to forecast where planes will be to avoid conflicts.
 
You must remember that in large parts of the world there simply is no enroute radar coverage, or it's very spotty. Sequencing is done the old fashioned way with pilots giving their position and other revelant info to controllers, and the controllers doing some algebra to forecast where planes will be to avoid conflicts.
Indeed! You don;t have to go too far to find such. There is no radar coverage of the trans-atlantic tracks thata re used for flying from the US to Europe. And exactly, sequencing is done the old fashioned way with expected positions being recorded as a plane enters the oceanic route. At each registered checkpoint the plane is supposed to report back. When one doesn't that is when you know something went wrong. There may be other radio contacts like ACARS in case of the Air France flight that crashed into South Atlantic.
 
Apparently two lengthy oil slicks consistent with the sort that one would expect from a large crashed airliner have been located off the southern tip of Viet Nam by the Viet Nam Air Force. Independent confirmation is awaited.

The location would be somewhere north of Igari in flight charts putting it at the border of Singapore WSJC and Ho Chi Minh VVTS control centers, more on the Ho Chi Minh side of the line I think. This would be consistent with reports that the last contact was with Ho Chi Minh.

See this chart. From vague reports the area in question maybe around Abop.

Just to repeat, all preliminary awaiting confirmation. Remember we are at present in the proverbial "fog of initial discovery".
 
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Apparently two lengthy oil slicks consistent with the sort that one would expect from a large crashed airliner have been located off the southern tip of Viet Nam by the Viet Nam Air Force. Independent confirmation is awaited.
Any idea how deep the water is in that area? Locating the black box may be difficult.
 
Apparently two lengthy oil slicks consistent with the sort that one would expect from a large crashed airliner have been located off the southern tip of Viet Nam by the Viet Nam Air Force. Independent confirmation is awaited.
Any idea how deep the water is in that area? Locating the black box may be difficult.
NBC news was stating that it took 2 years to recover Air France wreckage years ago, and was very costly. However, where this crash might have occurred, the countries involved do not have the kind of resources that France had. It looks like a difficult endeavor.
 
Depth of Gulf of Thailand is 45m to 80m. Not anywhere near as deep as the middle of the South Atlantic. Also I have no reason to believe that China's resources are any less spectacular than France's notwithstanding what NBC might think. More than half the passengers were Chinese.

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Unless it was a D.O. Guerrero type event (Airport movie), as time passes and no one takes credit hopefully that will reduce the probability of terror. Now that opens the fear of catastrophic mechanical failure of a ship that has a stellar safety record.
 
Meanwhile today's Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is on its way from KUL to PEK normally. It must be quite a flood of emotions for the passengers taking the same flight today, thinking the same flight yesterday has gone missing with no traces of it even after 24 hours, especially if they go online to check status of their flight and the top results for "MH 370" are all "about crash, lost, missing"
 
Talk about bad karma! If these guys bought those passports they sure didn't get their moneys worth!
 
Why have the searchers still not found the wreck? If the Gult of Thailand isn't that deep they should have found it by now. Right now it's daytime in Malaysia, they should be able to find it before sundown, or they'll really be in toruble. Why not use some satelite imaging?
 
Why have the searchers still not found the wreck? If the Gult of Thailand isn't that deep they should have found it by now. Right now it's daytime in Malaysia, they should be able to find it before sundown, or they'll really be in toruble. Why not use some satelite imaging?
You're looking for something relatively small, without the best equipment, in a relatively large area, with an imprecise location, at best, of where it went down. Even finding a floating ship can be difficult.
 
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