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Okay, so we have a general saying it is in Pakistan, the Russian equivalent of our CIA? saying it was in Afghanistan. Eye witnesses saying they saw it on fire or crashing not too long after it turned back past Malaysia. An Australian organization that thinks they have spotted it in the Bay of Bengal.
That would seem to point to attempted or successful hijacking or trouble with the plane (possibly caused by its contents.)
(just adding up some of the non scientific evidence, some that seems to have been hushed up.) Now I'm skeptical of the scientific "proof" that it has to be in the deep Indian Ocean. Pings and Immarsat and all. But how and why could the "proof" be wrong? I'd like to know and I am not a 100% fan of science as absolute. Could they have heard pings and still be wrong? Could Immarsat have made those incredible calculations and have been wrong?
The pings weren't wrong, imo. The plane followed the NW arc, not the SW arc, that's all. They say the GeoR location is off the arc. But it's not that far off, really. The arc showed a route skirting the Himalayas heading toward Central Asia, which jibes with their original theory of a hijacking into that region. So all those elements make sense, imo. Could be the plane experienced a fire, as some witnesses reported, or that the hijacking attempt was thwarted, and the plane crashed.
(just adding up some of the non scientific evidence, some that seems to have been hushed up.) Now I'm skeptical of the scientific "proof" that it has to be in the deep Indian Ocean. Pings and Immarsat and all. But how and why could the "proof" be wrong? I'd like to know and I am not a 100% fan of science as absolute. Could they have heard pings and still be wrong? Could Immarsat have made those incredible calculations and have been wrong?
I will see if I can find a link to something I heard the other day on NPR. They were replaying a CNN interview with a science guru for PBS. That guy was basically saying he still leaned with data supporting the main search; but that Inmarsat had in fact not released all it had & was refusing to do so. Which of course casts doubt yet again. Not saying it's true or not, just more fodder for discussion......
Pings and Immarsat and all. But how and why could the "proof" be wrong? I'd like to know and I am not a 100% fan of science as absolute. Could they have heard pings and still be wrong? Could Immarsat have made those incredible calculations and have been wrong?
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Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth
The pings weren't wrong, imo. .
Inmarsat was wrong once. Remember when the search was in a more southwestern portion of the Indian Ocean, where the distance was so far that it gave only a small window of time for planes to search every day, and the waters were very treacherous? Then, oh-wait! We were wrong. It's up here, in much calmer seas, closer to the shore. That just seemed so convenient to me after all the stories and retractions about this tragedy up to that point.
in_newengland, are you talking about the satellite pings or the pings in the ocean? I am wondering how those could be something other than the plane, since they say they heard them with the towed pinger locator.
First off, I never said an alien abduction IS what happened to the plane, just that I believe this is what happened to it.
Evidence(or the lack of ) certainly points in that direction.
Evidence? What evidence, or lack thereof, is consistent with an alien spacecraft abducting a 777 aircraft? What precedent is there to follow with this sort of situation to make you believe as such other than fanciful wondering?
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Originally Posted by CALGUY
I don't believe the plane ever touched land or sea from the moment it disappeared.
Based on what? Consistent documented evidence of aircraft never touching land or sea again?
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Originally Posted by CALGUY
If by some strange event it is found some where on land or the sea, that in no way would prove me wrong.
Right, because once an alien abduction occurs in your mind, it can't be taken back. That's the problem. You're not really basing this on anything. You believe it was an alien abduction but you'll hold on to that point of view no matter what. Even if they pull the flight recorders up, they review the flight parameter data you probably don't know much about (that's OK, most people don't I'm not faulting you for that) and they can definitively say what happened, you'll still believe it was aliens. At some point, you have to allow for logical explanations to come in to play when it comes to unexplained events.
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Originally Posted by CALGUY
I only stated what I believe happened, and there is no solid evidence to back up my contention, but neither is there any evidence proving it ditched in the ocean, or landed some where on land.
There is a precedent, CALGUY. Of millions and millions and millions of flights that have taken place, they have either:
Crashed in the ocean
Crashed on land
Landed on land
There are ZERO recorded cases of alien abductions of a spacecraft. You don't know what that would look like even if it did happen. You only assume you do.
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Originally Posted by CALGUY
My theory is just as valid as all the others, until proven otherwise.
No. It's not. Not knowing something does not give you the freedom to use creative licensing and then call it equivalent to any other hypothesis. Using your logic, I can say that it's equally as likely that cute little miniature gremlins were housed on the aircraft, accidentally fed after midnight, and then hatched into a bunch of mean, devious little gremlins that wreaked havoc on the aircraft.
There is a probability factor involved. Based on the fact that ALL other flights have either crashed in the ocean, crashed on land, or landed on land, it is far more probable that the same happened to this flight.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CALGUY
We earthlings don't even want to consider that this could be an alien intervention, because we are not equipped to handle that technology wise, or emotionally, still, it is a real possibility.
Bob.
I would love for there to be aliens, CALGUY. I truly do. I wish we could find life out there and I wish they'd make contact. But, you assume far too much about them and then use those assumptions as evidence of their existence. Even worse, you put those "evidences" up and say that they're equally valid to credible scientific hypotheses. The problem is this:
You cannot define what a documented alien interruption of an aircraft in flight looks like. There is no precedent with conclusive evidence to dictate what that might look like. From that standpoint, it is only an assumption at best with a fanciful imagination at work at worst.
Any attempts to define what alien abduction would look like would most likely interfere with more logical, reasonable explanations defined by every day Earthling physics and mathematics. Is it more plausible to believe that aliens created an electrical outage on the aircraft (to do this externally... they'd have had to defy some pretty stringent laws of physics) or that there was, simply put, an electrical problem? Given that I make a living on repairing electrical problems on aircraft, I've never once fixed an airplane using the alien abduction hypothesis. Every time it boils down to a prediction I make about the condition of the wire based on looking at the wiring diagrams and schematics. Every time. Never a miss.
Finally, I can tell you with explicit detail documented millions of times over, what an aircraft behaves like when it lands on land. I can tell you, generally speaking, what happens to an aircraft when it hits the water (whether it breaks up or not depends on speed, angle of impact, and a bunch of other factors), as well as what happens when an aircraft crashes on land.
Before you can even contend that your hypothesis is AS plausible you need to provide a basis for the concept of what an alien abduction would look like and how we would distinguish that from a normal EARTHLING physics perspective. Yeah, I get that it would hypothetically disappear but you first have to rule out all EARTHLIKE possibilities that could explain it. Then, you have to prove that aliens are capable of abducting a 777 aircraft mid-flight, and then you have to prove that that's what happened. To say that your hypothesis is on the same ground is inaccurate, and falsely elevates your position to one of equivalence when it simply isn't.
I'd like to know and I am not a 100% fan of science as absolute. Could they have heard pings and still be wrong? Could Immarsat have made those incredible calculations and have been wrong?
The great thing about science is that when new evidence (based on rigorous testing and harsh empirical peer review) comes along to discredit what we currently know, what we "know" can be turned over. Science is not personal opinion, political affiliation, or otherwise... It's simply a compilation of what we know and what we don't know. Sometimes it's convenient because it lines up with what we believe and many times it's not. But, it's far more rigorous than personal opinion.
Sometimes, though, what we know lines up so perfectly with mathematics (something whose proofs have self-defined axioms and are also subject to peer review) that we can be certain to a very finite degree (in real science there is almost always a margin of error) that what we are looking at is the truth or very, very close to it.
Here's the deal with the IMARSAT pings... The mathematics they used to develop a northern or southern arc is very simple. In fact, a freshman in college with a C in Calculus or Trig ought to be able to figure it out. I laid it out on a post way, way back when the northern and souther arc thing first broke.
Second, as I've said on here numerous times, Doppler Shift is a well understood phenomenon and whose effects are still used by some military aircraft today as a tertiary or quaternary navigation device. It's not AS accurate as radio tower triangulation, GPS, or INS, but it's pretty darn good. The principle can pretty much be described by the following math formula (from Wikipedia but I checked elsewhere... It's correct):
f = ((c + vr) / (c + vs)) * f0
Where c is the velocity of waves in the medium,
vr is the velocity of the receiver relative to the medium. That'd be the satellite. If it was moving towards the waves the number is positive. Else, negative.
vs is the velocity of the sender relative to the medium. That'd be the aircraft. If it was moving away from the receiver, it'd be positive. Else, negative.
f0 is the emitted frequency. That'd be the infamous "ping" we're talking about.
Now, the above formula works if the satellite and aircraft are moving directly towards or away from one another. Due to a number of factors, most specifically the angles of incidence between the satellite and aircraft, some calculus needs to be done. Again, citing Wikipedia (again, I checked elsewhere and it's accurate), as long as the relative velocity between the two objects (satellite and aircraft) is small compared to the speed of the wave (which is traveling very near the speed of light), the observed frequency will depend on the changes in velocity.
So, what do I suspect IMARSAT did? Simple. They took probably 10-20 sample speeds of assumed aircraft velocity. Then they found out what the exact position of their satellite was when it received the ping. Here's the interesting thing: When the satellite is in space, it "warbles" ever slow slightly. This is due to the gravitational effects of other surrounding bodies but it is measurable.
Based on this very slight warble, they were probably able to determine whether the satellite was moving towards or away from the aircraft at the exact time the ping was received. Had the plane been moving on the northern arc, the value of vr would have been positive or negative. Whichever it was, would have left no other choice but that the value if it had taken the southern arc would have been opposite.
From there, you then fill in the assumed sample speeds and since you know what arc it was on, you go from there. The only problem is that you still don't know if the velocity at the time of the ping was constant for the entire 7 hours. It's entirely plausible the aircraft flew slower at certain points in flight. That's why the initial search probably ended up much further south from where they heard the underwater beacons...
Speaking of which... I'm not sure if you noticed or not but the location of where they heard the beacons is pretty much right dead smack on the red line of IMARSAT's 7th assumed aircraft velocity red arc...
So, to sum it up, you have highly sophisticated mathematics and engineering giving you a projected arc of travel. Somewhere along that projected arc of travel, heck pretty much right on top of it, you hear an acoustic ping transmitting at the exact frequency of an aircraft underwater acoustic beacon. I'd say as far as leads go... That's a pretty good one.
The fact that the ocean IS MASSIVE and that underwater "pings" can travel in all sorts of different ways doesn't make the task easier. I agree that the acoustic beacon is dated. No doubt about that. Don't forget, the beacon may be somewhat further away from the wreckage... But, that's why they're not really following up on the Bay of Bengal lead and that's why they keep deploying these submersibles in this area.
I really would be genuinely surprised if the math and science don't add up on this.
Inmarsat was wrong once. Remember when the search was in a more southwestern portion of the Indian Ocean, where the distance was so far that it gave only a small window of time for planes to search every day, and the waters were very treacherous? Then, oh-wait! We were wrong. It's up here, in much calmer seas, closer to the shore. That just seemed so convenient to me after all the stories and retractions about this tragedy up to that point.
in_newengland, are you talking about the satellite pings or the pings in the ocean? I am wondering how those could be something other than the plane, since they say they heard them with the towed pinger locator.
They were not wrong. They based their Doppler Velocity measurements on the fact that the aircraft HAD to be traveling a certain speed when the ping was received from the satellite. Because they did not know the data for the previous 7 hours of flight, specifically how fast it flew for those 7 hours, they could only assume a more or less constant velocity for those 7 hours. That's why it brought them that far South. But, to say they were wrong is really unfair.
As I just pointed out in another post, the underwater acoustic beacons were heard pretty much dead smack on the trajectory of their 7th sample calculation. That's pretty powerful stuff.
Thanks for the time and effort you put into your posts, GCSTroop. Thx for sharing your expertise.
No problem! It's a very rare occasion that people are interested enough in aviation and the science surrounding it that they'll let me get up on the lectern.
They were not wrong. They based their Doppler Velocity measurements on the fact that the aircraft HAD to be traveling a certain speed when the ping was received from the satellite. Because they did not know the data for the previous 7 hours of flight, specifically how fast it flew for those 7 hours, they could only assume a more or less constant velocity for those 7 hours. That's why it brought them that far South. But, to say they were wrong is really unfair.
As I just pointed out in another post, the underwater acoustic beacons were heard pretty much dead smack on the trajectory of their 7th sample calculation. That's pretty powerful stuff.
Do you know how many sample calculations were there? Did they get a better idea of the speed of the plane, based on the pings, that led them to the new search location? I'd like to see an expanded version of that map.
Do you know how many sample calculations were there? Did they get a better idea of the speed of the plane, based on the pings, that led them to the new search location? I'd like to see an expanded version of that map.
Well, once you fill in all the other parameters, it becomes pretty simple to write a computer program that can calculate thousands of sample speeds very quickly. That's the route I'd have taken and then I'd have used some other math to determine probabilities based on other flight characteristics and educated guesses to narrow it down to, say, ten or twenty very reasonable guesses. The fact that the pings were heard on "Guess #7's" arc tells me that they probably had ten or twenty really good, solid guesses???
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