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That was brought up much earlier in the thread as well. I think there was no way anyone who knew was going to say because it might divulge the capabilities to track submarines and virtually any ship at sea.
Sorry I'm not buying it especially when the USN, the RN and the RAN are pulling out all the bells and whistles to find this aircraft. If it were a matter of subterfuge, folks could have just puttered around the oceans until a descent amount of time and just jump up and down screaming Eureka, but a month and goozillian dollars, pounds and Euros into this search and all they've really done to this point is find the haystack that the needle might lie in?
As for the Russians, NATO and the Russians have been playing these ASW cat and mouth games for years and the capabilities of both nations are fairly well know to each other.
That part about landing it and painting it, then using it for another purpose was one of the prevailing theories by pilot friends of my husband who work in that part of the world. It would almost seem that a lot of them are expecting something like this, just waiting for it to happen. They seem to think that there are a lot of people behind the scenes with a lot of connections, like a network, that could make this happen. These would be people who work for airlines, work at airports and so on.
You have to make that theory fit with the data. So, how does it? Particularly the final handshake received by Inmarsat at about 8 hours into the flight, that put the plane's location over the southern Indian Ocean.
You know there really isn't much point to hijacking a plane if know one knows that you hijacked it. The whole idea is propagandizing the deed. No deed, no propaganda.
Yeah, it seems that any of the talking head experts on CNN who don't buy into this being pilot-caused, don't get to say much or aren't on the air much...some of the pilots still do believe it was mechanical or fire.
There was a man on last night who said he had no confidence in these pings....I thought Don Lemmon was going to fall off his chair in disbelief. My questions is if there is only one black box (or maybe two), then why would these pings be heard in all different locations, I would think it would be fundamental that they would be coming from just one location... I mean, the box isn't likely to be moving around down there.
It's a big ocean. The sound carries a long way. They don't just hear it when it's directly underneath.
Not exactly. The range of the pingers is 2-3 miles; this has been reported many times. They have to be almost right over it.
Nobody believes that the Chinese actually picked up the pinger, so we can discount that data point. And it was reported yesterday that the data obtained by the detectors dropped from a plane were also unreliable. I believe that only leaves the data from the Ocean Shield, which is pretty localized.
I read today that the SAR team will not send down the submarine until they no longer are picking up pings. They think that can be several more days, depending on the batteries.
If so, then we have to endure talk show pundits for several more days. It really does not matter what they think, whether they think the pings are real or not. As my ma used to say - the proof is in the pudding. If they find the black boxes, the pings were real. If they don't, well they probably weren't. Just have to be patient.
If that turns out to be true, the impact will be felt immediately for any airline using the 777. The reputation of the aircraft will be tarnished significantly.
Not necessarily. A plane can be very reliable, but if it gets shoddy maintenance, its more a reflection of the airline than the plane itself. One thing that could have happened is a service truck (Food, baggage, etc) could have hit the plane while it causing damage and the person said nothing fearing losing their job, which could have lead to a decompression in mid air, but that still wouldnt explain why the pilots would not radio that in.
No matter how bad we try to say a catastrophic event happened to the plane, there is way too much redundancy on these aircraft where the piolt would not attempt to make contact with ATC and atleast say may day. Every thing about this points to the pilot or someone with bad intention that took control of the plane, but how many crooks know how to fly a 777 and escape radar at the same time.
Elaine Thompson/AP Clive IrvingAs I discovered at the time, there were people at Boeing who had yet to be persuaded that a jet as large as the 77
By early 1995, Boeing had put the 777 through many demanding test flights and they were about to start delivering it to airlines. Everything they had learned about making airplanes safer was absorbed into its development, including the use of new alloys that were much more resistant to corrosion and metal fatigue and a cabin that was more robust to make crash impact more survivable for passengers.
But the purpose of flight testing is to push a new airplane to the limits to see if anything breaks, particularly when as, in this case, many innovations were involved, including Boeing’s first use of “fly-by-wire” controls, in which digital commands are sent to the control surfaces instead of the old mechanical system. The 777 tests proved the value of this advance in making such a large jet smoother to handle. When trouble came, however, it came suddenly, unpredictably, and in the form of a very basic mechanism.
On February 2, 1995, a media junket was under way at Boeing Field, Seattle, to celebrate the delivery of the first 777 ordered by British Airways. But before this 777 appeared, another came in, descending rapidly for an emergency landing. It was the second 777 to be built and still deep into the flight test program. Watched by the media assembled for the British Airways event, it was greeted by fire trucks and ambulances.
The test plane had been flying north of Seattle at 43,000 feet—the upper limit of its flight envelope—when it suffered a rapid decompression. The pilot had to make an extremely fast dive to get down to 10,000 feet, where the pressure of air in the cabin begins to become equalized with the pressure outside.
Deprived of oxygen by the decompression, the flight test crew had to grab for oxygen masks. Four were not able to do so in time and were rushed to hospital for hyperbaric chamber treatment—as are divers who suffer the “bends” for decompression sickness.
Had the pilot not responded as quickly as he did, the results could have been a lot worse; as it was it then transpired that another 777 on a test flight had suffered a similar failure the day before and made an emergency landing in Hawaii.
The cause of both failures was traced to air conditioning packs in the belly of the 777. Hot compressed air “bled” from the engines goes through these packs to cool it before it flows on into the cabin. A relatively simple valve in the packs, supposed to stop leaks, had broken open and released pressurized air from the cabin into the outer atmosphere in an explosive surge.
The flawed valve was rapidly replaced by a more robust system. But the episode raised eyebrows among Boeing engineers because it was what is called a “single point” failure—there was no backup system to cover for the failed valve. (Since the fix, there have been no recurrences of this failure.)
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03.27.14 The Exemplary Plane at the Heart of the MH370 Mystery
With just two engines, the Boeing 777 wasn’t supposed to be safe for long flights over the ocean. Then it proved everyone wrong. Or did it?
There is at least one other victim of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 besides the 239 people who are presumed dead: the airplane itself. The disappearance of the flight and the lack of information about it is a terrible tragedy for the families of those lost, but for as long as it remains a mystery, it will also cast a shadow over an airplane with an exemplary record for safety: the Boeing 777.
Right from its conception in 1990, the 777 became in Boeing’s eyes more than just a new airplane. It became the vehicle for a game-changing cause—for a concept that would upset a long-settled orthodoxy about the safety margins for long-haul flights over the ocean.
Boeing would use the 777 to drive a long campaign to change the minds of regulators—and to undermine the plans of its main competitor, Airbus.
Driving the campaign was a simple equation: What was the most economical way to fly between 300 and 400 passengers over long transoceanic routes?
The answer was clear but controversial. It had to be a big wide-body airplane with only two engines, The Big Twin. For the airlines seeing the same equation, it was a mouth-watering dream of an as yet unattainable return on the heavy capital costs of buying new airplanes.
And it was controversial because nobody had ever built an airliner this large with only two engines. From the beginning of the jet age the safety regulators remained adamant: If you flew long distances over water where for much of the flight the airplane would be hours from the nearest airport you needed three or four engines in case one failed.
This view was crystalized in 1980 when the then-head of the Federal Aviation Administration, Lynn Helms, told Boeing: “It’ll be a cold day in hell before I let twins fly long-haul over-water routes.”
However, in the decade that followed, a smaller Boeing twin, the 767, had proven so reliable flying over water that the FAA began to relax the regime and allow twins to fly routes where they could be as much as 180 minutes from the nearest airfield. And it was toward the end of that decade that the form of what would become the 777 took shape—what Boeing touted would be the first 21st century airliner.
“It’ll be a cold day in hell before I let twins fly long-haul over-water routes.”
As I discovered at the time, there were people at Boeing who had yet to be persuaded that a jet as large as the 777 could be safe over oceans with only two engines. The four-engined 747 had already shown that it could lose two engines out over an ocean and still make it back to land, and this level of “redundancy” was hard-wired into the generation of men who created the 747 in the 1960s.
The designers at Airbus felt the same way. As Boeing drew up plans for the 777, they were building a competitor, the A340, with four engines, also aimed at the very long transoceanic routes. Nobody doubted that the Big Twin was more efficient. For the same number of passengers it used significantly less fuel. But Airbus and Boeing were soon conducting very public disagreements about the safety issue.
Boeing knew that the Big Twin would need to be the most dependable airplane they—or anyone else—had ever built if it was to meet their goal. And that dependability rested as much on the engines as on the airplane. Its engines would need to be a step change in both the power they delivered and in their reliability.
So the 777 was not just big itself but its engines were very, very big—giant turbofans. All three major engine makers, Pratt & Whitney, General Electric, and Rolls Royce, developed engines for the 777. All were betting that airlines would love the airplane and they could not afford to be left out of such a promising new market.
By early 1995, Boeing had put the 777 through many demanding test flights and they were about to start delivering it to airlines. Everything they had learned about making airplanes safer was absorbed into its development, including the use of new alloys that were much more resistant to corrosion and metal fatigue and a cabin that was more robust to make crash impact more survivable for passengers.
But the purpose of flight testing is to push a new airplane to the limits to see if anything breaks, particularly when as, in this case, many innovations were involved, including Boeing’s first use of “fly-by-wire” controls, in which digital commands are sent to the control surfaces instead of the old mechanical system. The 777 tests proved the value of this advance in making such a large jet smoother to handle. When trouble came, however, it came suddenly, unpredictably, and in the form of a very basic mechanism.
On February 2, 1995, a media junket was under way at Boeing Field, Seattle, to celebrate the delivery of the first 777 ordered by British Airways. But before this 777 appeared, another came in, descending rapidly for an emergency landing. It was the second 777 to be built and still deep into the flight test program. Watched by the media assembled for the British Airways event, it was greeted by fire trucks and ambulances.
The test plane had been flying north of Seattle at 43,000 feet—the upper limit of its flight envelope—when it suffered a rapid decompression. The pilot had to make an extremely fast dive to get down to 10,000 feet, where the pressure of air in the cabin begins to become equalized with the pressure outside.
Deprived of oxygen by the decompression, the flight test crew had to grab for oxygen masks. Four were not able to do so in time and were rushed to hospital for hyperbaric chamber treatment—as are divers who suffer the “bends” for decompression sickness.
Had the pilot not responded as quickly as he did, the results could have been a lot worse; as it was it then transpired that another 777 on a test flight had suffered a similar failure the day before and made an emergency landing in Hawaii.
The cause of both failures was traced to air conditioning packs in the belly of the 777. Hot compressed air “bled” from the engines goes through these packs to cool it before it flows on into the cabin. A relatively simple valve in the packs, supposed to stop leaks, had broken open and released pressurized air from the cabin into the outer atmosphere in an explosive surge.
The flawed valve was rapidly replaced by a more robust system. But the episode raised eyebrows among Boeing engineers because it was what is called a “single point” failure—there was no backup system to cover for the failed valve. (Since the fix, there have been no recurrences of this failure.)
Last edited by mag32gie; 04-11-2014 at 01:43 PM..
Reason: didn't copy this right
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Elaine Thompson/AP
