How do you lose a plane?

yes, but bottom-scanning sonar only picks up a relatively narrow picture of the bottom. And you have to have the right equipment in place, which presumably is either just getting on scene or is on it's way. Then there's the issue that they have to know where to look. They had the same problem with the Air France flight in 2008. They had a relatively good idea where it went down but it still took 2 years to find. Then again, the ocean was about 2 miles deep for that crash, and everything that I've heard has this one in significantly shallower water.

Interestingly enough, the two fake passports now look like red herrings. Reports this morning are that the two guys were Iranians who were trying to emigrate to Europe. Their final destination was Copenhagen. That doesn't mean that the plane was not hijacked but that these two guys are no longer any more likely to be suspects.

 

Ok @the_jazz I get that but I guess it just seems like something ain't right about the whole situation. Seems like if it was a terrorist act then some group would have already taken responsibility for it.

 

I once threw a wooden boomerang in a large field. I didn't throw it correctly, so it didn't come back.
I saw about where it landed, but never found it.

Imagine trying to find a plane you didn't see crash.

 

Ralphie, look at it this way - they originally thought they knew where it crashed because of the two oil slicks spotted in the water that were a little south of the flight path. It took a little over a day to confirm that those oil slicks were marine fuel, not jet fuel, so they started looking in the wrong place. That gives a lot of time for things to sink. It's also notoriously hard to spot something in the ocean when the wind is blowing as well, since there are whitecaps and swells.

I completely agree that this is strange, but just because there are no answers now doesn't make it a mystery. There are lots of possible explanations - like a takeover of the cockpit that crashed the plane or diverted it to points unknown flying below radar (a huge stretch and maybe not actually possible) or a very large explosion or a vertical crash. They'll find it eventually, and we'll have more answers then - with some of those answers explaining why we don't have answers now.

 

Why did it take 2 years to find the other plane? Just cause of the depth of the ocean where it went down?

 

Explain that to the families

 

There were a few reasons to explain why. First, it crashed in the middle of the South Atlantic and not near any major cities/ports/places to land planes and dock boats. Second, it took several days to find any wreckage from that crash too. The major difference is that MS370 disappeared near one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Sooner or later something will wash up.

The more I read about the Boeing 777, the more I realize that we're not focused on what's really bizarre here. That plane is outfitted with a computer system that is in constant communication with the airline. They can pull up heading, airspeed, settings, etc. very easily. For that computer to suddenly stop broadcasting at the same time that the plane disappears from radar makes this that much stranger. The Air France flight we're talking about had the same systems, and the investigators had a very good idea of what went wrong before they ever found the plane.

Something very catastrophic happened to this plane. I'm not sure if it's now plausible that it hit the water intact.

 

Chances are 0 now. I believe. I hate it.


You would think with all the technology we have now a plane just wouldn't disappear

 

It keeps getting odder and odder. Apparently the flight took off normally then turned west instead of northeast. That could mean a lot of different things (terrorism still being one of many). The computer system that feeds data back to the airline apparently reported back data an hour longer than originally thought. And there was an attempt by ground controllers (Vietnamese, I think, but I'm not sure) to have another plane contact MS370 - that plane got a "garbled" response back and didn't try again.

Also, the "fly under the radar" theory that I posited earlier is not technically feasible. It would have been in WWII, but not in decades, at least according to the radar experts that I've heard speak.

So how do you lose a plane? Well, something happens and you start looking in the wrong place, no matter how logical it would be to look there. If I lost a plane, I'd start looking along the filed flight path first thing. Only after not finding anything would I look at the computer data. And since it flew another hour at 500 knots, that increases the size of the search zone considerably - which is best demonstrated by the fact that a 12" pizza is twice as big as a 8" pizza. Pi(e) times R squared.

 

What garbled response? I haven't herd that.

 

I think it was hijacked and on the ground somewhere.

 

This was definitely my first thought, and it's looking more & more likely by the day.
There was a nice cross section of humanity on that plane.

 

Funny that I mentioned piracy earlier. The plane headed straight to the Strait of Malacca, the most pirate-infested body of water in the world.

 

Since these are both effectively the same thing, let me stick a pin in these theories. You cannot fly a plane randomly around places without it being spotted by radar. First, there are a finite number of landing strips that can handle a plane of this size. We're talking about reinforced concrete strips over a mile long and half a mile wide. This kind of plane can't be landed on a dirt strip that someone bulldozed 2 weeks ago. You couldn't do that with B-24's or B-29's 70 years ago, and you can't do it now. The plane won't land; it will crash. You also cannot land a 777 on any sort of aircraft carrier.

So that means that it's landing somewhere that we know about - it's awful hard to hide a runway, after all.

The second problem is that you can't fly this size plane "under the radar". You can fly it behind mountains to hide it, but you can't fly low enough in this kind of plane to not be picked up by the simple return of the signal. Radar is effective down to about 50' over the ocean. Since a 777 is about 20' tall and the tail is another 60', that's a very big radar signature to hide unless it is coming directly at the receiver, which would be just about impossible given the air defenses most countries in the region have.

As for the pirate theory, unless they're now in the business of launching surface-to-air missiles and going to pick up whatever flotsam they can get (which most likely wouldn't even pay for the missile), I don't see what one has to do with the other.

This plane is almost certainly in the ocean based on what we know now. I don't see any realistic alternatives that don't posit science fiction or super-spy bullshit. I get why people want to believe that, but I also get why kids want to believe in Santa too.

 

No, no, that wasn't a theory, it was a coincidence and a joke. Sorry about that.