How do you lose a plane?

The site is very overloaded, but it dropped me by something that looked like man-made debris. I tagged it and will try again tomorrow.

 

Please define transponder. Herd on the radio that right after it versed off course they lost the transponder signal.

 

OK then WHY is it made to be turned off???

 

terrorism by the fake passport holders has now been ruled out since the two iranian holding these passports were about to seek asylum in germany.

my guess? mechanical failure, and it hit the side of a mountain in a deserted jungle somewhere. that doesnt explain why there was no smoke though. better than the alien conspiracy theories though

 

A new report suggests Fariq Ab Hamid, the co-pilot of missing flight MH370, may have had a lax attitude to security in the past.
South African Jonti Roos, who flew with Hamid on a 2011 Malaysia airlines flight, and said that he and the captain of that earlier flight invited her and a friend into the cockpit with them.

I would hate to think that the plane was destroyed because the captain was trying to get laid and something happened.
I have this strange feeling of deja vue like when that cruise ship ran aground in Italy because the captain was showing off.
Can't be worse than any of the other reasons people are coming up with.

 

i thought most planes are on auto-pilot most of the time, except when they need to intervene during turbulence/bad weather , as well as take off and landing. There is always a second captain on international flights, so even if the guy was trying to get laid, it shouldnt really matter. Not unless they were having an orgy in there.

But of all the airlines, the ones least likely to be hijacked would probably be the ones owned by muslim nations if it was going to be carried by islamic terrorists. For the sake of air security, i hope it wasnt mechanical failure. For the sake of the 1.7 billion muslims in the world, i hope it wasnt islamic terrorists. Either way its a no win.

 

I was having the same thought.
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Now the Malaysian Air Force is denying that reported the plane heading west. If they didn't say it went west, who did and why are they looking in the water west of Malaysia in the Andaman sea?

 

How do you lose a plane?

Alternatively...

 

On a commercial flight??

 

When we finally get answers to these things, they are more often than not a permutation of "human error." Humans built the plane, maintained it and manipulated it. Humans (most likely) screwed up somewhere in that chain of actions. Why is that a problem beyond the fact that a bunch of people died, let's try not to screw up like this again?
Pilots fly drunk, mechanics miss things, tiles fall off space shuttles and they burn up.

Call me a Luddite, but it is more mind-blowing to me that we get these huge flying vehicles up, than it is when they fall down.
Every time I fly, I look out the window and think, "We should not be up here." And yet, we are.

 

Those stats scare me. Too many parts and they all need to be working just so to keep the plane in the air.

Sad. Such beautifully intricate machines must depend on humans to keep them perfect.

 

The soap dish in the forward lavatory? The door to the luggage cabinet over seat 19A? Some parts are not as important than others.
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Measured as deaths per passenger mile, flying is MUCH safer than driving.

Measured as deaths per passenger hour, flying is almost as dangerous as driving.
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That article is just wildly wrong when it comes to rail passenger deaths. 931/year average in just the U.S.??? That must include things like people killed in car-train crashes, including the much more numerous freight trains.

For the passengers, train travel is considerably safer than car travel.

 

Death, death it's all around us! Even staying inside is bad.
Mortality (USA 2010)

All injury deaths

• Number of deaths: 180,811
• Deaths per 100,000 population: 58.6

All poisoning deaths

• Number of deaths: 42,917
• Deaths per 100,000 population: 13.9

Motor vehicle traffic deaths

• Number of deaths: 33,687
• Deaths per 100,000 population: 10.9

All firearm deaths

• Number of deaths: 31,672
• Deaths per 100,000 population: 10.3

Source: Deaths: Final Data for 2010, table 18

 

The complexity of the mechanism honestly has little to do with its safety. The most dangerous item in a cartoon? The simple, one-piece anvil. The two most dangerous items to pedestrians? The car and the phone.

I fly more than most of TFP combined (waiting on flight #23 of 2014 right now, had over 90 in 2013). I've been in rough landings and interesting takeoffs nothing that has ever been noted as something outside of the norm.

And, as is par for the course in this thread, most of you are focused on the wrong things (beyond the simple threadjack that is going on now). Yes, there are 3,000,000 parts on a 777, but how many of them are REDUNDANT? There are 2 transponders - the primary and the backup. There are redundant hydraulics, electronics, instruments, sensors, etc. So if System A is made up of 1,000 parts, System A (backup) adds at least an additional 1,000 parts.

As for the fact that it was computer designed, that's just a fucking stupid point. Sorry, there's no other way to state that - EVERYTHING is computer designed these days if it is mass produced. Your cell phone - computer designed. The new store that just moved into that empty space where the Borders used to be - computer designed. The new water fountain that can fill up water bottles - computer designed. If that's somehow an important criteria for you - in which case, you need to come to terms with the fact that you are actually a Luddite or an idiot (with no 3rd option) - then you should only buy things made before about 1995 and prepare to starve to death since most food production lines have been computer designed for 20 years.

Today, I've heard that the plane disappeared because the Chinese were experimenting with applied stealth technology (which is somehow a good idea to do in a such a way that the entire world knows you did it), that the plane was hit by a meteor (certainly within the realm of possibilities but doesn't explain a bunch of things, like why the transponders were switched off) and that the cell phones were still live and on (that's just the cell network trying to find the phone, just like if you call my phone when I'm in the air it doesn't go straight to voice mail). Which just proves my theory that when faced with a mystery a significant chunk of any population will always gravitate to the dumbest possible explanations. Everyone wants to be Sherlock Holmes in Victorian England; usually they end up being slack-jawed yokels in London, OH c. 1850 instead. (and yes, I mean you. For the record.)