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Most. Not all. You can't deny that there are deranged people who commit mass murder before taking themselves out.
There are some, it is not common.
If we consider suicide bombers, they are making political statements and intend to impose terror on the living. So far, there hasn't been any terror on the living, people still get on planes to travel.
They had many "experts" from a variety of places but I heard the following:
The 7:11 am ping and the 8:11 ping were "very close or in the same place" leading some to believe that the plane had landed.
While I believe that to be the case, the pings demonstrate no such thing. All the satellite knows from the ping is the distance from the satellite. The satellite cannot tell if two pings are "close" to each other, only that they are the same distance from the satellite. You can remain the same distance (assuming the satellite is in a stationary orbit) by landing or by flying along the given radius arc. Edit - or by flying on a chord of the arc where the begin and end points are on the radius arc.
I think it landed for several reasons. It appears in the first few hours it was flying along standard air corridors, hitting waypoints. I doubt such corridors would align with the radius arc. And I doubt the pilot could have known this satellite's location to fly along the radius arc. And it wouldn't ping underwater.
My understanding is these pings are the engine diagnostics trying to connect with Rolls Royce servers once an hour. That said, I have tons of questions about these pings. (Update: good info and many answers here.)
1. How many satellites look for these pings? This one appears to be in the center of the Indian ocean, where relatively few planes fly. Surely there must be many more.
2. Why haven't other satellites picked up pings so that we could triangulate. Any system that attempt to achieve wide spread coverage must contain a lot of overlap so I would think this plane was in range of other satellites looking for these pings.
3. What is the range of these satellites? Where are the pings from 6:11am or 3:11am or 1:11am? What was the radius arc? If you can get two different distances you can calculate the estimated air speed with the elapsed time to determine two possible directional paths. Or use a low end and high end air speed to calculate two path cones. (Update: The London-based satellite communications company owns and operates 10 satellites, all in geostationary orbit some 22,200 miles above the equator. Since a single satellite can see one-third of the Earth, multiple satellites are needed to provide seamless coverage and provide redundancy and reliability, the company said.)
4. Are these pings detectable when the engine is on the ground?
5. Does the engine have to be running? I would think so.
6. Is the ping unique to the aircraft? (Update: CNN has learned signals from commercial aircraft to Inmarsat satellites always include a code confirming the identity of the plane.) Can it be spoofed? (It is "virtually impossible" to change an aircraft's identifying code or to confuse one aircraft with another, the Inmarsat official said.) Can it be disable while in the air?
Last edited by oceangaia; 03-17-2014 at 11:07 AM..
Start thinking instead of just arguing for the sake of seeing your comments in print.
Well, as long as we are providing hints on how to post - saying the captain was a Muslim has no logical relevance to this situation. Lots of non-Muslims commit suicide, and lots of non-Muslims commit murder-suicide, and there are lots of terrorists who are not Muslim. One can only conclude that your comment had a racist intent to it. If that was not your intent, than provide more than a four word position statement so we all know what your intent is. Hope that helps.
What about Bangladesh and Nepal? It's only like 50 km of India between the 2 borders.
Exactly. It could have flown over Bangladesh to the Himalayas, and flying along the Himalayas, it may have evaded radar (someone posted earlier that mountains make radar difficult to detect?). It could have flown along the Himalayas to the Pamirs and Tian Shan, and either landed in a western corner of Xinjiang (as reported last week), or in Kazakhstan (also speculated last week).
There could have been someone with a sinister plan who had the connections and set this up in advance. He could have overcome the pilots and forced them to fly the plane on this course.
This has been discussed and rejected apparently by the authorities, according to the news. The reasoning is that it would take long enough for someone to force his way into the cockpit that the pilot could send a message. That and the fact that ACARS was shutdown before the last voice message. And what would be the weapon that the terrorist used to force entry? And how would the passengers be subdued while the person is forcing his/her way into the cockpit? Remember that the 9/11 terrorists purposefully chose almost empty planes. Furthermore, the first pass through the passenger list looking for links to terrorists has revealed nothing.
This could only have been carried out by the cockpit crew, IMO. And since we have not heard a peep from anyone or any country they might have landed in, it seems highly unlikely they landed somewhere. Really the only conclusion you can come to is someone in the cockpit took control with the intention of suicide.
I didn't get a chance to read the whole blog here but the whole thing is so bizarre....hoping they find that this plane landed somewhere and the passengers are alive. I know its not likely but I keep hoping...
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