MH370: Malaysian Airlines Flight to Beijing carrying 239 people is lost over sea.

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Grayfox
QANTAS has one and it has never crashed
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That's the point I was making, it's surely easier to count the airlines that don't have a 'financial situation' rather than ones that do. The media are bored with the lack of nuclear action in Crimea and have scurried on.

Also, it isn't true to say that Qantas has never had a crash although it's had very few fatalities.
 
TenEightyOne
That's the point I was making, it's surely easier to count the airlines that don't have a 'financial situation' rather than ones that do. The media are bored with the lack of nuclear action in Crimea and have scurried on.

Also, it isn't true to say that Qantas has never had a crash although it's had very few fatalities.
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They've had in air accidents but they have never crashed from what I know.
 
Grayfox
1951 was the last.

Well before my time.
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No one was blaming you! :D

Qantas are one of the safest (if not the safest) airlines in modern aviation, but it isn't true that they've had no crashes or fatalities. You know I'm a pedant ;)
 
I personally think that one of the few ways a plane can "fall out of the sky" these days without so much as a mayday is due to critical airframe failure. You'd literally have to lose a wing or significant portion of the fuselage.

Airframe fatigue, exceptional environmental damage or fuel/device explosion.

Aisde from that it would have to be some health failure of both pilots e.g. fumes.
 
ExigeEvan
Aisde from that it would have to be some health failure of both pilots e.g. fumes.
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Which can probably be discounted as they were cruising and would have been on autopilot. Plus they turned back.

The Pilot in Command and Flying Officer each have a separate oxygen system, it's very unlikely that in the event that oxygen was deployed that both supplies would have been faulty.

I still can't figure out how it was able to turn back (if indeed it did, and the location isn't the measurement of an aircraft piece in ballistic flight) without any automatic or manual transmissions. Hmm.
 
TenEightyOne
Which can probably be discounted as they were cruising and would have been on autopilot. Plus they turned back.

The Pilot in Command and Flying Officer each have a separate oxygen system, it's very unlikely that in the event that oxygen was deployed that both supplies would have been faulty.

I still can't figure out how it was able to turn back (if indeed it did, and the location isn't the measurement of an aircraft piece in ballistic flight) without any automatic or manual transmissions. Hmm.
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I agree on both counts. They should have been on autopilot, but that's not to guarantee that thry were.

It would have to be a fume with an incredibly rapid effect too which make it again increasingly unlikely. I just can't think of many other ways a plane fails without a mayday.
 
ExigeEvan
I personally think that one of the few ways a plane can "fall out of the sky" these days without so much as a mayday is due to critical airframe failure. You'd literally have to lose a wing or significant portion of the fuselage.

Airframe fatigue, exceptional environmental damage or fuel/device explosion.

Aisde from that it would have to be some health failure of both pilots e.g. fumes.
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As a manufacturing engineer on the 777 program for several years, I firmly believe the 777 is the best designed and built currently operational jetliner. I have direct experience in the wing-body join and body section joins. This plane is the closest you can get to a flying bank vault - the safest plane in the sky.

That said, corrosion is a real enemy of any aluminum structure. The top literally peeled off in low altitude flight of an Hawaiian 737 a few years ago.
 
News still concentrating on the 'terrorist' angle, Beeb report that Interpol are "checking all passports on the flight after at least two were suspected to have been stolen".

Of course they are, the converse is that they weren't checking all passports on the flight, which would be ludicrous.

Interesting that they only reference two stolen passports, not sure if that's an update or an out-of-date aggregation. This is the Beeb, and it's Sunday :)

EDIT: Very interesting;

Beeb
At a time as yet undisclosed, a relative reportedly managed to call one of the passengers, who was carrying a Singapore phone. Malaysia Airlines has repeatedly tried to call the same number but no ringtone has been heard.
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Source

Depending on the number of cells that phones on the aircraft were active on (unlikely to be many, I'd imagine) this could give a little extra locational data.

If passengers (or a passenger) were making receiving calls then it won't be long before people start drawing hypothetical comparisons with 9/11. :\
 
Sky news apparently reporting that the stolen passport passengers had also booked connecting flights onwards to europe. So this opens two possibilities... one which is worrying to consider.
 
Robin.
Sky news apparently reporting that the stolen passport passengers had also booked connecting flights onwards to europe. So this opens two possibilities... one which is worrying to consider.
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Just saw that, and as you say one of the possibilities is chilling.

This isn't necessarily related, it's a very obvious avenue of enquiry in any event and at the moment there seems to be little else to go on other than comms/radar logs.

Depending on where in Europe the travellers were going to (not all airports are alike :) ) it may be a journey they make regularly, and in any case they may just be victims of the most awful passport karma imaginable.
 
TenEightyOne
Depending on where in Europe the travellers were going to (not all airports are alike :) ) it may be a journey they make regularly, and in any case they may just be victims of the most awful passport karma imaginable.
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To Amsterdam.
 
Dennisch
To Amsterdam.
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Blimey, suddenly that computes into all kinds of other possibilities.

This from the Guardian feed; "• Interpol warns of ‘great concern’ that two passengers with stolen passports had tickets with consecutive numbers and onward flight to Amsterdam."

It seems obvious that they were travelling together. That means nothing else, of course, but you'd need some serious chutzpah to try to get through Amsterdam on stolen passports.

EDIT: I've seen two feeds saying that some wreckage (or "related ibjects", their spelling) have been found. No good source for that though.

This at the Guardian, pertaining to weather.... not quite as "clear" as yesterday evening's reports had it; "An airline pilot who flew within 100 nautical miles of the route 12 hours before the Malaysia Airlines flight disappeared said there were some large thunderstorms in the area, with some turbulence, but the weather did not appear to pose serious problems for commercial flights."

That's not to say weather was an element, just adding to the known 'facts'.

More feeds now picking up the "wreckage" story, sighting is from search aircraft but it's going dark and can no longer be seem. I guess surface vessels will now move towards that area but I've got no idea how long it would take them to reach it.

It has to be hoped at this point that maybe there's still a human rescue operation to be undertaken although sadly that seems very very unlikely.
 
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Not that I'm aware of, but I'm a pedant.

Anyway, the claims that the aircraft was in good running order when last checked 10 days ago have me wondering whether this incident may lead to aircraft being checked for faults more thoroughly and more regularly in future.
 
TenEightyOne
This at the Guardian, pertaining to weather.... not quite as "clear" as yesterday evening's reports had it; "An airline pilot who flew within 100 nautical miles of the route 12 hours before the Malaysia Airlines flight disappeared said there were some large thunderstorms in the area, with some turbulence, but the weather did not appear to pose serious problems for commercial flights."

That's not to say weather was, or wasn't, an element, just adding to the known 'facts'.
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That's a good catch on the large thunderstorms in the area. They will have tried to avoid that, and not flown through it.
 
suspectd-debris-1-522x293.jpg
 
Robin.
Do planes have a hidden emergency button if they are under duress?
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Here in the States, and probably in most other countries, there are three particular 4-digit codes that we're trained to enter into the radar transponder for either hijacking, loss of radio communication, or emergency. Whether or not any of these were in use is not known, but if the plane was in radar contact and it did use one of these codes then air traffic authorities knew about the situation immediately. The fact that nothing has been reported about this leads me to believe that the plane was either not in radar contact or if it was something catastrophic occurred which left no time for action to be taken.

For the majority of the flight duration across the Atlantic, Pacific or Indian ocean, planes are not in radar contact. For the period of time they aren't in radar contact they make regularly timed position reports to air traffic control and other traffic via radio. Whether this was required in the area the plane was flying I'm not sure but if it wasn't in radar contact then a transponder code would never be received.
 
Robin.
In 2012, for reference. Lost about one metre of wing.
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Even if that area was to fail in-flight, a pilot should still be able to fly the plane and send out a Mayday signal.

Dotini
As a manufacturing engineer on the 777 program for several years, I firmly believe the 777 is the best designed and built currently operational jetliner. I have direct experience in the wing-body join and body section joins. This plane is the closest you can get to a flying bank vault - the safest plane in the sky.

That said, corrosion is a real enemy of any aluminum structure. The top literally peeled off in low altitude flight of an Hawaiian 737 a few years ago.
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The 777 is the best designed and built plane flying today.

The top of a couple 737s did indeed peel back a few years back, but fuselage structures are designed to arrest crack propagation to within a couple of frame bays. Only if a very large failure due to multiple fatigue cracks over a large area meet causing a mid-air break-up, or if a fatigue failure end up significantly damaging flight control surfaces and systems, would a plane completely go down without so much as a distress signal.
 
I do not doubt the design of the aircraft by any means. There's plenty in the air and I know how stringent certification is.

The only possibility is poor maintenance if we're looking at structural failure.
 
The current theory is that the plane disintegrated at altitude, explaining why it suddenly lost contact with ATC, and why there is no debris field.
Robin.
So this opens two possibilities... one which is worrying to consider.
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I assume you are referring to terrorism?

Because it's a pretty stupid terrorist who boards a plane, blows it up mid-flight, and then plans to boards another.

If those passengers were doing anything dodgy, I'm guessing it was drug smuggling.
 
prisonermonkeys
Because it's a pretty stupid terrorist who boards a plane, blows it up mid-flight, and then plans to boards another.

If those passengers were doing anything dodgy, I'm guessing it was drug smuggling.
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One way flights booked with cash are generally considered suspicious. A flight booked with a transfer might be part of the attempt not to provoke further attention.
 
prisonermonkeys
Because it's a pretty stupid terrorist who boards a plane, blows it up mid-flight, and then plans to boards another.
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What if the guy planned to board plane and leave a bomb, to have it detonated on a next flight?
That happened before, Philippine Airlines flight 434

But then again, with no information what so ever, it might as well been beamed up by Scotty.
 

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