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suthdj wrote:

Jumping Frog wrote:

philip964 wrote:Novelist believes airliner shot down by US military as it neared Diego Garcia.

If the plane was approaching a naval base at low altitude, it should have been shot down.

Agree, but why hide it if that is what happened.

They wouldn't because it didn't. Typical conspiracy theorist propaganda.

philip964 wrote:It's been quiet awhile on this story.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news ... ot-4075954" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

An expert suggests that the Captain turned off the passenger oxygen with co pilot outside the cockpit. Then did a controlled ditch 4 hours later.

This would explain the lack of floating wreckage.

That was my theory early on as well.

philip964 wrote:http://www.answers.com/article/1207092/ ... =6#slide=1

One of those awful click to get the next amazing fact. 8 facts you didnt know. I knew some of them.

Most of the 'facts' listed sound more like a conspiracy theorist trying to convince you there was more to this than there was. The plane 'vanishing from radar' was actually not 'radar', but ADS-B transponder transmissions that are sent by the plane to receivers on the ground that indicate it's speed, altitude and location. Once the transponder was turned off there were not good radar sites to show the planes true location. Also, once the plane turned back over the Indian Ocean, it is HUGE in area and depth. The black box range is not very far, and when it's potentially 3 miles under water, then it is not going to be vary easily picked up by receivers. Also, the flotsam after a crash would be scattered across the vast area and is probably still floating out there. If the plane somehow went down intact and did not break up, then there would be little to any flotsam to be found anyway.

Bottom line, nothing new in these 8 'facts' IMO.

Dori wrote:Maybe the missile shooter believed the theories about Malaysia airliners being used for terrorism. Tragic.

Yeah, don't think so.

My guess is it was a case of mistaken identity. Will bet it was separatists in the region who were given the BUK missiles and launcher were too quick to target any aircraft flying over that area. My understanding is they had shot down a couple of aircraft in that area in the past month.

The south pole is not a common route for flights. Even the north pole is not a heavily traversed flight path, but is used depending on origin/destination for a non-stop. Here is site that you can see live air traffic as reported via ACARS/ADS-B and FAA data http://www.flightradar24.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. Just know there are blind spots for these routes and unless the aircraft is reporting back to a ground station or via satellite you will not see it on the map.

RoyGBiv wrote:

Dragonfighter wrote:

philip964 wrote:I know the families are hoping the people are alive. If we imagine for a second they are alive. Think of the logistics of detaining 250 people for two weeks. No one escapes, uses their cell phone. None of your compatriots tells anyone where they are being kept. Deserted island somewhere? If it was Pakistan, or some place like that they would have been discovered already.

Time will tell.

If you were taken hostage by hijacking and flown somewhere in the back of a plane, could you tell your loved ones where you are? Provided your phone wasn't discovered and taken in the first place I mean.

Yes... Within a few feet anywhere in the world... My phone has GPS

Provided you had cell coverage to call. A GPS does you no good without the capability of making contact. There is not cell coverage in many large areas of the world. Even the US has LOTS of areas that have limited to no cellular service.

cdc101 wrote:Serious question...does anyone know how they were able to find the Air France plane's black boxes 2 years after that one crashed off the coast of Brazil (I think it was Brazil?)? I keep hearing that the pings only last for 30 days...did they just get lucky with the Air France plane to find them after so long? I realize they at least had an idea of where to look for those.

Still seems like a needle in a haystack for that too.

A life jacket, a seat and a fuel slick was found the next day by search aircraft. This was close enough to the time of the airliner going down they could calculate current flow to track back and get a general point of where the flight would have impacted the water. The longer it goes with this flight any debris they find will be hard to track back the amount of distance and direction it traveled to estimate the impact point.

jmra wrote:Could this be it?
http://www.voanews.com/content/sobbing- ... 74987.html

Objects seen on satellite are off the coast of Perth. Would put the plane way off course if true.

But would be out in the ocean really close to the new search area that had been established.

They are now investigating a report off the southeast coast of Vietnam where a oil rig worker sent an email stating he saw a burning plane in the sky that night. ABC had their 'aviation expert' on and was saying "the guy supposedly saw the plane 7 miles away, and it was at night. you can't even see a plane 7 miles away during the daytime." Uh, excuse me? i see planes at 35,000 - 40,000 feet all the time going over and you can clearly see them, especially one the size of a Triple-7. I also can see planes on approach to DFW from my house on clear days and that is a good 20 miles line of sight. A plane at night burning would be easily visible from 20+ miles away in the sky.

VMI77 wrote: Are you using RTL-SDR for ADS-B tracking? If so, what antenna do you use? I just ordered a TV28T v2 USB DVB-T & RTL-SDR Receiver, RTL2832U & R820T Tuner.

Yes I am currently using an RTL-SDR dongle. I built a collinear antenna myself like the one in this article http://www.arrl.org/files/file/QST/This ... 013QST.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

What's funny is I had just finished setting up my station the day this issue of QST arrived in the mail. Was almost part for part identical. I use RTL1090 software to decode the Mode-S signals and then use the feeder software from the company to send it to them the data.

There are lots of other things you can receive with the RTL-SDR. I use SDR# software to do general reception and have also done some Packet and other digital mode decoding with the receiver. The RTL-SDR dongle is pretty good on sensitivity for a ultra wide-band $15 USB device.

To not drift this topic any further, you can PM me if you have any questions or need input on device setup and use.

A little more investigation shows that previous flights over that area track all the way across the water to over Vietnam. Additionally I was able to verify there are ADS-B stations in Vietnam and they picked up the reception of the flight as it came across without interruption. Now, if someone was able to disable all transponders and flight tracking systems, then it is possible it would disappear to flight tracking systems, but would still be visible as a blip on military radar.

philip964 wrote:http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/ ... 1720140311

Transponder turned off or failed. Hundreds of miles off course. Dropped to a much lower altitude. Tracked by military radar.

This still doesn't smell right. Malaysia would have checked their military radar data first thing, not 4-5 days later. If the plane had that long a flight back across Malaysia they would have known it as the aircraft would have been unidentified and they would have been tracking it at a minimum, including possibly scrambling fighters. I am back to the theory that if they did track it, sent a fighter up and it was not responding to any calls but heading back to Malaysia, they may have given orders to shoot it down and have been covering it up.

baldeagle wrote:They said on Channel 5 News last night that radar only has a range of about 120 miles. After that they are dependent upon the plane to communicate with satellites to report its position. They only do this once an hour. So "disappeared" might not be referring to vanishing off the radar screen. It may mean that they didn't report in when they should have.

Since planes are flying about 300mph, they would cover a lot of territory between transmissions, which would make the search area very large even if they stayed on their flight path. If they diverted, then the search could be off by 200 miles or more.

Actually, this is not totally correct. At the last info received by one of the flight tracking services, the plane was at about 470 knots (540 MPH).

The commercial radar only has a radius of about 125 miles, but Vietnam and Malaysia have military radar that covers all of that area.

The ADS-B information is sent on 1090Mhz and stations can receive a plane at that altitude between 200 - 250 miles out if the antenna is in a good location. ADS-B data is transmitted 2 times a second. The ADS-B reception was lost to station T-WMKC1 (Sultan Ismail Petra Airport ADS-B receiver) at about 17:20UTC on 3/7. It doesn't mean it went down right then, but that it went out off the grid as far as the ADS-B reception went. Without knowing how far out that station can receive the signal normally we can't tell if that is a valid last transmission point or if it just went out of range. I don't believe Vietnam or Cambodia allow real-time tracking of flights to be transmitted out to the Internet, so there would be no private station data from there if the plane came into range. I am one of the private stations here in the US that is a feeder to one of the the tracking services. I am currently using my personal equipment but am being sent equipment from the company to host for them.

Here is the real-time track of the flight http://fr24.com/2014-03-07/17:05/12x/MAS370/2d81a27" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; and a good article on what the service I am part of saw http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/03/10/ ... nly-holes/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

cb1000rider wrote:ADS-B is fed via on-board GPS.
ADS-B coverage isn't everywhere (at least in the USA) - I have no idea about the standard or coverage in international areas.

That area has good ADS-B receiver coverage. You can see other planes go across the Gulf of Thailand from Kuala Lumpur into Vietnam with coverage over the route and the flight track has good data points.

All reports are the plane just disappeared off of radar as well as any flight data being reported via other systems. At that location where the ADS-B stopped it might be poor coverage of radar. If it went into several small pieces at 35Kft it is possible that the radar would have lost capability to have anything big enough to reflect off of and it would appear to have just vanished.

One thing that has not been talked about is the possibility of it being shot out of the sky with an air-to-air missile. I am not a conspiracy theorist but what if a country was flying one of their aircraft in that area and someone screwed up and shot it down, but the country is keeping quiet about it?

K.Mooneyham wrote:As an aircraft mechanic, it bothers me a lot that this plane has vanished like that. The 777 is a great aircraft. Its rated to fly quite a distance away from land on only one engine if one went out (and those engines have a very high mean time between failure), most of the systems that control things are redundant (meaning they have backups that automatically kick in), and even if it went down, there is a beacon that should be going off. Also, its very rare that something happens to an aircraft during cruise; most problems are on take-off or landing. It would have to be catastrophic indeed for this situation to have occurred. My hopes and prayers go out for the folks on that aircraft, and their friends and family.

Definitely had to have a been a catastrophic event. I feed ADS-B received signals to the a couple of the Internet flight tracking services. One of the services allows you to go and play back previous flight data. I replayed the flight and it just suddenly disappears from the map at 35,000' over the water. Just watching that icon go away gave me a queasy feeling in my stomach. No distress call, no further flight data, radar echoes, etc tell me it more than likely disintegrated in flight at cruise. No ELT beacon or no black box ping could be due to it being destroyed or possibly the depth of the ocean at the point of impact. But no debris field or no fuel slicks are just totally unusual and says there may not have been much debris of any size hitting the ocean.

My guess is it blew up for some reason. Could have been terrorism, but could also have been a cargo issue. Hopefully the cargo manifest will shed light on if there was anything declared that could have contributed to a total loss of the aircraft in flight.