The missing Air Malaysia Boeing 777
I have held off on posting because there is way to much speculation swirling around.
Graybeard at
The Silicon Graybeard has a good summary -- he works with airplane avionics:
MH370 - This One is Puzzling
Puzzling, upsetting, bizarre, and other terms. Of course, MH370 is the missing Air Malaysia Boeing 777.
Donald Sensing at Sense of Events raises an idea that is undoubtedly going around, that the flight was hijacked and landed somewhere "out of the way".I am reminded of a novel I read a few months ago by either Tom Clancy or Frederick Forsyth, can't recall which. It opened with the hijacking and disappearance of an airliner in Africa, run by a large charter company. The craft was repainted and reconfigured to pass for a scheduled-airline plane with the goal of using it as a kamikaze weapon against an American target. Of course the good guys won, but it makes me think: what could account for the instantaneous disappearance of a Boeing 777 that leaves no trace at all?
The Gormogons refute this idea and most others in their piece:Ghettoputer, the Czar assumes, is blaming alien capture. Mandarin, for his part, is checking to see if he made something dimensional happen and the plane is now happily flying over prehistoric Long Island.
Believe it or not, those two explanations do a better job at lining up with the evidence [than do] pilot error, plane crash, or terrorism.
Since I work in avionics, I thought I might be able to fill in some gaps in your knowledge about the sophistication of these aircraft, but I sure can't provide a definitive answer of what happened. I'm just as blown away as anyone. Much has been made of the aircraft disappearing off radar. When you see an Air Traffic radar display in a movie or somewhere, you see numbers next to the radar returns. These are sent by a box called a transponder on the aircraft. By sensing the amplitude of a pair of pulses sent by the radar, it decides whether it's in the main search beam of the radar or an antenna sidelobe. If it's in the main beam, the transponder replies. Using a data transmission mode, (slow and primitive compared to your phone's data transmission) the aircraft replies with an identification number. When they talk about being off the radar, they probably mean that the transponder is not responding, not that the radar return blip is gone. Transponders have other modes of communication I'm skipping over.
More at the site. We
will find out what happened but I don't think anything concrete will be known for another 48 hours.
Posted by DaveH at March 11, 2014 1:33 PM