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[tigers_gonads]

Remember that 737 series 800 (Helios Airways  ) that had iirc a gradual failure of cabin pressurisation about 10 years back 

Iirc, the last person alive on that one was a member of the cabin staff with a portable oxygen bottle.
 

The one where they ignored the alarms and just carried on as if everything was dandy until they passed out. I suppose that proved it can happen, but...

At the end of the day, everybody is just pishing in the wind on this ........... nobody has a clue what has happened here but a nice bit of healthy speculation never hurt anybody 
With dodgy maintenance cutbacks and the pressure to get the plane off the ground, anything could have happened here 


Anyway, my money is still on a evil Chinese crime lord with a giant stealth supper guppy type aircraft swallowing it up in mid flight ............ 

Enjoy 

[Steve B]

Yanks said they have an idea where it is.

[Kevin Wood]

Indeed. It's interesting to speculate, but that's all we can do. Rest assured that, sooner or later, the black boxes WILL turn up, and we WILL get to the bottom of it. That is what has made aviation as safe as it is today. Aircraft, on the whole, don't disappear off the face of the earth - not for long, at any rate.

[Field Marshal Dr. Opti]

Indeed. It's interesting to speculate, but that's all we can do. Rest assured that, sooner or later, the black boxes WILL turn up, and we WILL get to the bottom of it. That is what has made aviation as safe as it is today. Aircraft, on the whole, don't disappear off the face of the earth - not for long, at any rate.

Yes.......And then the 'alien abduction theory' will look ever so slightly silly.

Apparently, about 40% of all americans say they  have been 'taken' by beings from another world.

Yanks, don't you just love em'.

[TheBoy]

What was that surreal film based on a Stephen King book about a missing plane in a delayed timezone being eaten by mechanical thingies?

The Langoliers  Loved the book 

Yup, that's the one

[Kevin Wood]

Indeed. It's interesting to speculate, but that's all we can do. Rest assured that, sooner or later, the black boxes WILL turn up, and we WILL get to the bottom of it. That is what has made aviation as safe as it is today. Aircraft, on the whole, don't disappear off the face of the earth - not for long, at any rate.

Yes.......And then the 'alien abduction theory' will look ever so slightly silly.

Apparently, about 40% of all americans say they  have been 'taken' by beings from another world.

Yanks, don't you just love em'.

Yeah, I remember reading about one in my childhood. Took him off his driveway, gave him a ride in the spaceship, fed him pancakes which "were OK, if a little greasy", then dropped him off again. Sound like pretty decent chaps, these aliens.

Or maybe he just spent too long sitting on his porch in the sun?

[cd 2.2]

I really can't believe that they haven't found this plane yet! Maybe they are hiding something ... maybe they have found it, Or maybe it's never going to be found (hard to believe given the size of a  B777)!

This thing will appear in 20 years on an airport runway and all the passengers will be thinking "WTF is all the fuss about? it was only a normal flight"   

[78bex]

It is thoughtt that the US can track Russian subs in deep water on a global scale.
the black boxes transmit ultrasonic signals in water. perhaps we`re just waiting for the US military to crunch the numbers from all their assets. 

[05omegav6]

Radio signals are different to sonar does also assume that the aicraft is underwater...

[Varche]

Indeed. It's interesting to speculate, but that's all we can do. Rest assured that, sooner or later, the black boxes WILL turn up, and we WILL get to the bottom of it. That is what has made aviation as safe as it is today. Aircraft, on the whole, don't disappear off the face of the earth - not for long, at any rate.

Yes.......And then the 'alien abduction theory' will look ever so slightly silly.

Apparently, about 40% of all americans say they  have been 'taken' by beings from another world.

Yanks, don't you just love em'.

Hmmm. Jet Aeroplanes are pretty big things. Big things in the sky are(supposedly) monitored by countries whose airspace they are passing through. What have the Vietnamese got to say about "where is the plane you took over monitoring?" Plus there is sufficient other monitoring of planes, ships etc by other nations (in this case Chinese and Americans) that they must have an idea where it is, especially if it went rogue. Planes don't just vanish but could if alien abducted!

I am favouring slow cockpit decompression. Crew asleep(does happen) with plane on autopilot and then pass out through lack of oxygen. Plane flies on new course when it turned(for whatever reason) and it flew on apparently unnoticed (nightime and air traffic controllers not very vigilant?) before running out of fuel in the middle of the Indian Ocean thousands of miles away from where they are looking.

In police thrillers the cops ask the phone companies to triangulate the location of mobiles (assuming a signal there would have been miscreants on board with their phones switched on).  I wonder if the FBI have done that? 

[Kevin Wood]

In the decompression scenario, though, the aircraft's transponder would have remained working. This would have allowed the aircraft to be tracked accurately and the authorities would have known about the problem before it even crashed. In the past, military jets have been scrambled to intercept airliners that have gone off course (the Helios one being a case in point). I would certainly expect that to happen in the light of 9-11, and if it crossed any borders it shouldn't have.

Once the transponder stopped working, tracking the aircraft would have to rely on primary radar, i.e. a return bounced off the aircraft's hull itself, rather than a packet of data interrogated from the aircraft containing accurate identification and position information. Yes, you'd expect a country to be looking for that sort of thing in its' airspace, but it's a lot more difficult to tie to an individual aircraft, radar range would be much reduced and, if the aircraft was over international waters by then, maybe they didn't care much. You only have to look at the flight's trace on flightradar24.com, etc. to see that it went missing in an area with very good secondary radar coverage, yet no wreckage has been found there.

What would you do if you were going to divert a jet from its' course and you didn't want to be tracked? Wait until you're established en-route over the sea, turn off the transponder, descend to low level out of primary radar coverage, then toddle off to where you want to be, perhaps? Maybe, that's what happened, but the aircraft ditched from low level and thus didn't spread much wreckage and wasn't where it "should" have been, hence very hard to locate?

There's the possibility that the aircraft was carrying satellite based comms equipment, which is often used to update ground stations on the aircraft's status in real-time. It's odd that nothing has been mentioned about that, although I did hear a report that Rolls Royce were still receiving monitoring data from the engine systems via such a link after the aircraft lost contact. It seems inconceivable that such a data link wouldn't also include GPS position.

As for mobile phones - well, an airliner is a pretty effective Faraday cage, so, for a mobile phone to get a signal out through the fuselage is going some. To then make it hundreds of miles to a base station on the ground is impossible. Mobile phones are designed to work within 10-20 of miles of a base site at the most. Besides, digital mobile phone networks have other constraints that mean there are absolute limits on how far a mobile can be from the base site, and how fast it can be travelling, due to round trip delay and doppler issues, so no, I don't think mobile phones on board will have come into play, except that, if the aircraft landed anywhere near civilisation, they would almost certainly have given the game away.

[Sir Tigger KC]

I suspect Vietnamese scrap dealers have nicked it and it's being broken as we speak.  Expect to see a flood of Boeing 777 spares appearing on vbay! 

Industrial espionage?  Maybe the Chinese have nicked it so they can reverse engineer the RR Trent engines! 

[Marks DTM Calib]

I did hear a report that Rolls Royce were still receiving monitoring data from the engine systems via such a link after the aircraft lost contact. It seems inconceivable that such a data link wouldn't also include GPS position.

I know that the setup does not include GPS position info (GE also have a similar system), its due to the bounds of certain regulations regarding data collection from devices on board aircraft and positioning information is not allowed (plus its challenging to get accurate GPS info without good external antennas and base station correction data)

[tigers_gonads]

I suspect Vietnamese scrap dealers have nicked it and it's being broken as we speak.  Expect to see a flood of Boeing 777 spares appearing on vbay! 

Industrial espionage?  Maybe the Chinese have nicked it so they can reverse engineer the RR Trent engines! 

They already have 10 on order from Boeing but that might change in the next few weeks 
You will probably find the Airbus sales team are on a flight to Beijing with a new financial package as we speak 

[Steve B]

In the decompression scenario, though, the aircraft's transponder would have remained working. This would have allowed the aircraft to be tracked accurately and the authorities would have known about the problem before it even crashed. In the past, military jets have been scrambled to intercept airliners that have gone off course (the Helios one being a case in point). I would certainly expect that to happen in the light of 9-11, and if it crossed any borders it shouldn't have.

Once the transponder stopped working, tracking the aircraft would have to rely on primary radar, i.e. a return bounced off the aircraft's hull itself, rather than a packet of data interrogated from the aircraft containing accurate identification and position information. Yes, you'd expect a country to be looking for that sort of thing in its' airspace, but it's a lot more difficult to tie to an individual aircraft, radar range would be much reduced and, if the aircraft was over international waters by then, maybe they didn't care much. You only have to look at the flight's trace on flightradar24.com, etc. to see that it went missing in an area with very good secondary radar coverage, yet no wreckage has been found there.

What would you do if you were going to divert a jet from its' course and you didn't want to be tracked? Wait until you're established en-route over the sea, turn off the transponder, descend to low level out of primary radar coverage, then toddle off to where you want to be, perhaps? Maybe, that's what happened, but the aircraft ditched from low level and thus didn't spread much wreckage and wasn't where it "should" have been, hence very hard to locate?

There's the possibility that the aircraft was carrying satellite based comms equipment, which is often used to update ground stations on the aircraft's status in real-time. It's odd that nothing has been mentioned about that, although I did hear a report that Rolls Royce were still receiving monitoring data from the engine systems via such a link after the aircraft lost contact. It seems inconceivable that such a data link wouldn't also include GPS position.

As for mobile phones - well, an airliner is a pretty effective Faraday cage, so, for a mobile phone to get a signal out through the fuselage is going some. To then make it hundreds of miles to a base station on the ground is impossible. Mobile phones are designed to work within 10-20 of miles of a base site at the most. Besides, digital mobile phone networks have other constraints that mean there are absolute limits on how far a mobile can be from the base site, and how fast it can be travelling, due to round trip delay and doppler issues, so no, I don't think mobile phones on board will have come into play, except that, if the aircraft landed anywhere near civilisation, they would almost certainly have given the game away.

Very interesting site  Just looked. Theres millions in the sky