IGX

nafod wrote:It'd be easier to make it disappear flying into a forest or a swamp (think the United flight into Shanksville) than into the water. Too many things that float.

I am sure that whatever I think happened is wrong. This one is bizarre.

Fat Cat wrote:I know we have both military and civilian pilots on here, and I am genuinely intrigued by the mystery of this plane's disappearance. The facts as I understand them:

-Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was hundreds of miles off course, traveling in the opposite direction from its original destination.

-It had stopped sending identifying transponder codes before it disappeared.

-The plane's transponder apparently stopped working at about the time flight controllers lost contact with it. I take this to mean that radio contact and transponder contact were lost at the same time, an unlikely accidental coincidence.

-Two passengers entered Malaysia using valid Iranian passports, but they used stolen Austrian and Italian passports to board the missing Malaysian plane.

Does anyone have any thoughts about what might have happened? It's an intriguing mystery to me.

nafod wrote:It'd be easier to make it disappear flying into a forest or a swamp (think the United flight into Shanksville) than into the water. Too many things that float.

Aviation experts said it is far too soon, and too little is known, to speculate on what might have happened. But many agree that whatever happened was sudden and almost certainly occurred at high altitude, scattering the debris over a vast area.
“If something catastrophic happened, that’s seven miles up,” Joseph said. “Winds at that altitude are sometimes over 100 knots. Based on that wind, small pieces are going to be moved a lot of different places.”

Any aerodynamic pieces–wing sections, say, or pieces of the tail–will be blown around like a bag in the wind. Heavier pieces like an engine or landing gear will fall straight down. Fuel and other fluids will be scattered, leaving little evidence below. This is what happened when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry on February 1, 2003. The difference there was the disaster occurred over land. Spotting debris on open ocean is much, much harder.

“It’s very very difficult to spot things in the water unless you’re on top of it,” Joseph said.

It took investigators two years to recover the black box data recorder from Air France Flight 447, which went down over the Atlantic on June 1, 2009.

Fat Cat wrote:They were both Durkadurkites. Pouri Nourmohammadi, 18, and Delavar Seyed Mohammad Reza, 29 both entered Malaysia with valid Iranian passports.

Fat Cat wrote:Still nothing. Let me ask a follow up question; do you think it is likely that the flight recorder will be recovered? And if so, is it likely to hold the answers?

Batboy2/75 wrote:

Fat Cat wrote:Still nothing. Let me ask a follow up question; do you think it is likely that the flight recorder will be recovered? And if so, is it likely to hold the answers?

Didn't hey fish the Airfrance recorder out of the middle the Atlantic? They seem to always find the the recorder.

Grandpa's Spells wrote:The Air France example is the one I thought of, and it turned out to be pilot error, IIRC.

DrDonkeyLove wrote:This is starting to sound like a Tom Clancy novel.