Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH-370)

[herky]

news update.the pings the chinese were getting were from their own ship

[piginapoke]

Hopefully the recent signal acquisitions lead to recovery of the recorders.

What amazes me is that no wreckage at all has been recovered. The vertical stabiliser of the Air France flight was found floating along in the Atlantic so large pieces as well as thousands of smaller parts are out there somewhere. Aircraft do not land on water with no evidence of impact or survivors if it's a low speed controlled landing as per the Hudson river ditching.

On a side note, the transcripts of the Air France crash are a good insight into the breakdown of the communication between pilots, the unpredictability of the human thought process and how fault identification, investigation and correction can be very difficult in complex systems like modern flight controls integrating with vital (but failing) external sensors.

[herky]

Originally Posted by piginapoke

Hopefully the recent signal acquisitions lead to recovery of the recorders.

What amazes me is that no wreckage at all has been recovered. The vertical stabiliser of the Air France flight was found floating along in the Atlantic so large pieces as well as thousands of smaller parts are out there somewhere. Aircraft do not land on water with no evidence of impact or survivors if it's a low speed controlled landing as per the Hudson river ditching.

On a side note, the transcripts of the Air France crash are a good insight into the breakdown of the communication between pilots, the unpredictability of the human thought process and how fault identification, investigation and correction can be very difficult in complex systems like modern flight controls integrating with vital (but failing) external sensors.

also on that note any floating wreckage they find will have been floating over four weeks.could have travelled from anywhere in that time

[flightsimmer2012]

the only way to find the wreckage now is deep water sonar. the pingers only have a 30 day shelf life. they may never find that plane cause the depth of the ocean, if it crashed at sea.
as for the flight 447 crash ,that's what happens when you have a crew that's new to an aircraft, and don't know how to recover from a stall. you point the nose down , not raise it like the copilot did, and kept it in nose high.

[Mechanic]

Originally Posted by flightsimmer2012

as for the flight 447 crash ,that's what happens when you have a crew that's new to an aircraft, and don't know how to recover from a stall. you point the nose down , not raise it like the copilot did, and kept it in nose high.

I don't think you can really say that any of the crew were 'new' to the aircraft, the copilot in control of the aircraft had the least amount of hours in-kind at just over 800 hours, but he was pretty new to the route.

Also, the most direct cause of the crash wasn't because they didn't know how to recover, but a failure in recognizing that they were actually in a stall. There were many contributing factors (as there usually are), but one clearly is the copilot initially in control likely didn't believe the plane *could* be stalled. The second copilot may have attempted a stall recovery where he was trying to put the nose down but that was nulled out because the first copilot put his hand back on the stick and continued to pull back.

Especially in this case, I think it's an interesting debate as to when the sequence of events leading to the crash actually began. Less than fifteen minutes before the pitot tube iced over, they experienced static discharges around the windows which the first copilot had never seen before and seemed to be 'freaked out' about. I think it put him in a state of mind where he was just waiting for something 'unusual' to happen and when it did, he didn't respond in a rational way.

[herky]

on news last night they say they are narrowing search area down to 40kmx50km area but they have had no pings since tuesday from recorders

[herky]

just watched the air crash investigation program on tv on the air france flight 447.It took them over to years to locate that aircraft and that was even after the benefit of having floating wreckage.THey found it just 12km north of its last reported position.I dont think based on that sort of timescale there will be any quick resolution to the malaysian airlines disaster.They did mention that the airfrance aircraft sent automatic maintenance information every ten minutes to air france offices,.I have not heard of any similar systems for the B777

[Mechanic]

Originally Posted by herky

just watched the air crash investigation program on tv on the air france flight 447.It took them over to years to locate that aircraft and that was even after the benefit of having floating wreckage.THey found it just 12km north of its last reported position.I dont think based on that sort of timescale there will be any quick resolution to the malaysian airlines disaster.They did mention that the airfrance aircraft sent automatic maintenance information every ten minutes to air france offices,.I have not heard of any similar systems for the B777

It's exactly this automated maintenance information system that, first, informed that the aircraft had continued to fly for hours after the last voice transmission, and second, extrapolating from the engine performance data for distance, and which satellites were picking up the transmissions for a path, that gave them the general area to search in which they picked up the pings.

[herky]

okm hence why they searched off australia.they are assuming from those reports that is where it was headed??

[Mechanic]

Originally Posted by herky

okm hence why they searched off australia.they are assuming from those reports that is where it was headed??

Are you asking if the apparent destination was Australia? If so, no. The heading that the aircraft was maintaining was taking it further and further into effectively nothing but endless ocean.