[Jabberwalker]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

The US Navy is doing a full-court press to aid in the search for the missing airliner. We've sent two destroyers into the South China Sea to help and we've also sortied two more surface ships from Guam into the SCS. We've got P-3 flights coming out of Whidbey and Guam to help, too.

Conveniently, all of this assistance is also deliberately intruding Chinese-claimed territory in the SCS.

Chatter from some friends of mine indicates that a shoot-down of the airliner by a PLAN ship in the SCS has not been ruled out given that one of their ships went to high speed and bugged out of the area at the same time the airplane went missing.

Be kind of interesting to see how the average person in China would react to find out their navy shot down and killed a bunch of their own people.

They've been threatening to do something like that, haven't they?

(... shoot down aircraft in that box, not their own people ...)

[andyt]

$1:

A senior source involved in preliminary investigations in Malaysia said the failure to find any debris indicated the plane may have broken up mid-flight, which could disperse wreckage over a very wide area.
"The fact that we are unable to find any debris so far appears to indicate that the aircraft is likely to have disintegrated at around 35,000 feet," said the source.
Asked about the possibility of an explosion, the source said there was no evidence of foul play and that the aircraft could have broken up due to mechanical causes.
Still, the source said the closest parallels were the bomb explosions on board an Air India jetliner in 1985 when it was over the Atlantic Ocean and a Pan Am aircraft over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988. Both planes were cruising at around 31,000 feet at the time.

[Count_Lothian]

It's weird how they can't get a signal from the black boxes.

Are they always giving a signal even if the plane is in normal conditions?

[Jabberwalker]

Very few radio frequencies penetrate water. Submarines, for example do not /cannot chatter away with the surface as the only wavelength that is practical to reach a submarine is so incredibly long that it transmits a character a minute ... or something as equally ridiculous. The Black Boxes are probably beeping away merrily but no one can pick up their signal.

[Count_Lothian]

CBC had an expert on and he said they only start to beep when they go down.

I think it's a hijacking for kidnap ransom.

[Jabberwalker]

Count_Lothian Count_Lothian:

CBC had an expert on and he said they only start to beep when they go down.

I think it's a hijacking for kidnap ransom.

If they plane went down "catastrophically" the beep would be heard for a minute or two as they fell, until they were under water. Maybe, it's not long enough for detection or to get fix on it.

[DrCaleb]

Jabberwalker Jabberwalker:

Count_Lothian Count_Lothian:

CBC had an expert on and he said they only start to beep when they go down.

I think it's a hijacking for kidnap ransom.

If they plane went down "catastrophically" the beep would be heard for a minute or two as they fell, until they were under water. Maybe, it's not long enough for detection or to get fix on it.

$1:

If a plane crashes into the water, this beacon sends out an ultrasonic pulse that cannot be heard by human ears but is readily detectable by sonar and acoustical locating equipment. There is a submergence sensor on the side of the beacon that looks like a bull's-eye. When water touches this sensor, it activates the beacon.

The beacon sends out pulses at 37.5 kilohertz (kHz) and can transmit sound as deep as 14,000 feet (4,267 m). Once the beacon begins "pinging," it pings once per second for 30 days. This beacon is powered by a battery that has a shelf life of six years. In rare instances, the beacon may get snapped off during a high-impact collision

http://science.howstuffworks.com/transp ... k-box8.htm

[Count_Lothian]

Sooo the kidnap theory is sound (pun intended)((pun might be the only thing to come of this theory)) (((i love brackets)))

[Jabberwalker]

The Atlantic is seriously wired for sound, yet that Air France fight than crashed a few years ago off of South America was not heard. The black boxes were viable and when they were eventually recovered, told the whole story. The only thing heard were wispy bits of confusing telemetry data from the plane that was being broadcast in real time as the crew was responding in vain to seriously flawed data from their computers. The audio beep would only work if someone s listening. Is there a Sosus net in the South China Sea?

[Count_Lothian]

Should they not have found any debris though, the oil slick was not the plane's.
Odd they never mention such an Oceanic Environmental disaster .
are huge oil slicks at sea common place?

[Jabberwalker]

Yes ... and there are many causes. One of the causes is airplanes in trouble dumping their fuel over water prior to a dangerous landing. Lake Ontario gets covered in turbine fuel quite regularly. Its a bt odd, being in the middle, out of the sight of land and swimming in the odour of kerosene.

[BRAH]

The lame stream media is loving this because they're playing the terrorist card with the usual talking heads it's an act of terrorism or a dry run as some passengers possibly used stolen passports but that doesn't directly mean terrorism.

[Jabberwalker]

I KNOW! The Russians did it to get themselves out of the headlines!



It's been years since they shot down an airliner.

[Public_Domain]

[Regina]

If it crashed in The Gulf of Thailand as is thought, then it shouldn't be hard to find the black boxes if they are Pinging. Sound travels very well in water and that sea is not that deep with a maximum depth of approximately 275'. Nothing at all like trying to find the Air France flight that crashed in the Atlantic.

A few things strike me as odd here. One being the tracking of it by other sources never mind ground controllers. There are many web based tracking systems that do a great job in real time. I use http://flightaware.com It's got more information that most can understand but it also gives real time radar, speed, altitude, heading etc. In real time it will show you every turn and records it, even the holding patterns and landing direction. So where is that kind of information?
Here is the route MAS 370 took today. http://flightaware.com/live/flight/MAS370
Here is the missing flight. http://flightaware.com/live/flight/MAS3 ... A/tracklog

Another thing is the the oil slick but nothing else. Wouldn't matter if it blew up at 35,000' or crashed nose first into the water.......there's should be a shit load of debris. The only difference being the size of the debris field, which will be much bigger if it blew up at 35,000'........and easier to spot.

Which leads me to the last oddity. If it didn't blow up at 35,000' and didn't do a nose dive then it must have made some sort of water landing. So at 35,000' that plane can glide for up to 40 minutes which unless there was no communication capabilities, there would be more than enough time to broadcast an emergency. Even if they accelerated a decent to make the water landing it would probably take 5 or 10 minutes, so there is lots of time to call and emergency.

My guess is that they just haven't been able to find a debris field but it's there.....close to the oil slick. May also be that they already know more but aren't saying anything just yet. So all we have is media pushing a bunch theories and rumours.