Featured Flight MH370 mystery gets deeper and weirder

KRN, time to admit your "source" on the civil aviation board is a fake. He "saw" stuff that ain't there.

 

Heck, I could see that from the "bad" photos shown on Fox. :laugh:

That brings another issue to mind that I thought of this morning, and I wonder why all these "talking head experts" on the various news channels don't mention it.

1) The unidentified debris is floating at the very edge of the 3,200 mile flight-and-glide-path circle of which the aircraft was capable with its fuel load.
2) It was spotted eight days after the disappearance of MH370.
3) The location of the debris is smack in the middle of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.
4) A portion of the current breaks off to the north and becomes the West Australian Current that flows near the west coast of the continent/country.
5) Eight days before MH370 disappeared, the debris spotted 1,500 miles southeast of Perth would have been hundreds or thousands of miles west.
6) Four days after being spotted, it would be either a thousand miles or so further east, or floating up the west coast of Australia.
7) Therefore, debris spotted by the satellites couldn't possibly be debris from the aircraft.

Now, let me be the first to admit, I'm a dummy. But I figured that out. I'm pretty sure everybody who actually is an expert also figured it out. Yet they remain silent.

So what is this dog and pony show all about, anyway?



(That's a rhetorical question, by the way.)

 

Nope. Essentially, the government is a dictatorship. Nursultan Nazarbayev is the president, and before being "elected" to that post, he was the Communist Party Secretary for the "republic" when it was a Soviet satellite. He's a buddy of Putin's. Putin doesn't care about the flight. Nazarbayev doesn't care about the flight. No cooperation.

 

It would, and definitely needs to be considered, but until the actual wreckage of the aircraft is found, it is irrelevant. The lithium battery cargo could indeed cause an on board fire. Several incidents have been reported. UPS Flight 6 crashed trying to return to Dubai in 2010 when a lithium battery cargo fire erupted and smoke entered the cockpit. The aircraft was still climbing at the time, and had not leveled off. Confusion between Bahrain air traffic control and the crew due to communications failure had the plane trying to fly all the way back to Dubai instead of finding a closer airport. The plane's initial approach upon returning to Dubai was too high, it attempted a tight turn to return the airport, but crashed before it could line up for another approach.

UPS lost another plane on the runway due to a lithium battery fire during rollout after the plane landed in Philadelphia in 2006. The crew escaped. In both cases, crews were able to communicate with air traffic or ground controllers to report their situation, and they did this despite the emergency and the demands of their attention on the aircraft. Since 2006, there have been 22 such incidents, and no less than 30 new directives issued by the FAA and international agencies to air crews regarding on board cargo hold fires to address the situation. By the way, all these have been fires -- no explosions as this article incorrectly claims.

Business Insider actually published such a scenario the other day, and it does fit the moves we know for a fact happened. The following bullet points are deep in the story, but nonetheless provide a plausible theory.

This Is The Most Plausible Theory For The Plane's Disappearance We've Heard Yet ...​

Strangely, it is not an aviation expert who wrote this story, but former equity research analyst Henry Blodget, who was senior Internet analyst for CIBC Oppenheimer and the head of the global Internet research team at Merrill Lynch during the dot-com bubble. He's got a good theory here, and one that may actually explain the events that have the world all shook up.

There are a few problems with it. The first is that FAA and international emergency procedures dictate a climb to 20,000 feet upon realization there is a cargo hold fire, in order to deprive the fire of oxygen. The plane was already at cruising altitude of 37,500 feet. The cargo hold containing cargo -- not pets or other animals in shipment -- is depressurized. There would be no fire at that altitude caused by lithium batteries. It couldn't burn.

There could have been another fire, however, from any number of causes, that fed off available oxygen inside the cabin, and once the pilots realized they had lost the aircraft, they would have put in a distress call with the outside hope that they could somehow get to an airport or even pull off a "Sully Sullenberger" landing at sea, and air-sea rescue could be scrambled from the regional coast guard agencies to rush to an approximate landing area. This is the second problem. No communication. I've heard numerous "expert talking heads" the last two weeks claim "They were too busy trying to fly the plane to communicate." That's utterly ignorant on their part. And though an immediate and catastrophic event would have prevented communication, such an event would have the plane down in minutes, if not seconds, and the debris would be in the Malacca Strait or on land in northwestern Malaysia.

Even in the direst of straits, the pilots would have made that call despite having to fly the aircraft, for one because they would be looking for a place to set down ASAP and would need air and ground controllers' cooperation in that effort, and for another, with the potential for being rendered unconscious, they would be hoping against hope because they were pilots, and pilots never give up. That's the way they are trained. Blodget didn't take that into account in his neat little but not-quite-realistic scenario.

The third problem is, had they pulled the busses, as he suggests, to extinguish the fire, that action would have also killed the auto pilot. Regarding that, he is just plain wrong. The autopilot is not powered separately. The plane would have gone down almost within sight of land. It would not be capable of continuing on as a flying coffin, as did golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet in 1999 when the aircraft lost pressurization and all aboard died within minutes. The Learjet is a lighter, more maneuverable aircraft, and with a dead stick goes first into "stick shaker" mode to alert the pilot, then engages the auto pilot automatically. There is no such function on a far larger, more cumbersome and complex aircraft like the 777.

Blodget's postulation is possible, if the pilots were overcome by the smoke in the fashion he describes, and didn't pull the power busses to extinguish the fire. Otherwise, it's another theory that doesn't quite explain it all. And like it or not, even though it may sound like a "conspiracy theory" that certain people on this board reject because it isn't "their kind of conspiracy theory" the terrorist event remains a more than plausible explanation of the whole thing.

 

Exactly. That's why Blodget's theory doesn't hold enough water to drink, and due to the fact the plane was above 20,000 feet, the lithium battery scenario doesn't hold any water at all. We're just going to have to wait and see.

I remain convinced someone took the aircraft. It is entirely possible it crashed anyway. Perhaps passengers pulled a "Flight 93" on the hijackers. But until we find wreckage, we just don't know.

 

... would have the object now some 500 miles away, due to the speed of the West Australian current, not to mention it would likely have been thousands of miles away to the west, toward the Cape of Good Hope, On March 8 when the aircraft disappeared. So why are they going back to the same area, yet again?

Given that speed and the fact that March 18 is ten days after the flight's disappearance, why in the world does anyone think these pieces of debris have anything to do with MH370?



This time, those aren't rhetorical questions. Any answer that is remotely plausible will do.

 

Not plausible. The search area is at the very edge of the 3,200 mile radius of the plane's last known location, the distance it could have flown, then glided, after that contact. As pointed out, the debris had to drift into the search area over the time frame between the aircraft's disappearance and the spotting of the debris on satellite photo.

If they are going to find debris from a southern route and crash, it will be northwest or south of Australia by now, depending on whether the wreckage was caught in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current or in the West Australia current. It is not going to be where they are looking.

Try again.

 

Hey, I said I'm a dummy! :laugh:

It's scary if I can figure this out and they can't, don'cha think? The problem is, it's too obvious to ignore, yet the media of all stripes and the talking heads are doing just that.

 

Under KRN's scenario, the fire started before the known turn to the southwest. That means everyone was still in cell phone range. It just doesn't add up.