Malaysian Flight 370

[WR269 367]

C'mon people, use some common sense. Translate "cleared for takeoff" from english to Mandarin, then translate it back again and see what you get. Asian countries are actually quite good as far as standard phraseology is concerned.

 

Sent from my Mobile thing

[tf51d 284]

C'mon people, use some common sense. Translate "cleared for takeoff" from english to Mandarin, then translate it back again and see what you get. Asian countries are actually quite good as far as standard phraseology is concerned.

 

Sent from my Mobile thing

Google translate didn't have a Mandarin option so I tried Thai and got "Clearwater airport". I think it's clear, we are going to need to hear the original tapes to know what was really said!!

[Great Ozzie 101]

 

 

C'mon people, use some common sense.

 

So common sense says the Telegraph ran the transcript thru google translate and then posted?  Ok... I must be quite a dolt not to have first suspected that one... :rolleyes:

[WR269 367]

I remember years ago when a certain Chinese international airline used to assign English schoolteachers as part of the crew so they would do the RT at English speaking ports....a lot of hair was lost in those days....

 

And Ozzie, when has a tabloid allowed common sense to get in the way of a good story? :ph34r:

[Great Ozzie 101]

And Ozzie, when has a tabloit allowed common sense to get in the way of a good story? [ :ph34r:]

 

Ok... my fault for not knowing the Telegraph was a tabloid (a record of "ill repute").

 

Also, I figure they would be clued in that they are really unzipping their fly to post a google translated transcript.

[EngineRoom 205]

Er no, the Telegraph is not a tabloid but a broadsheet, one of the more respectable newspapers in the UK.

[Matthew Kane 1,343]

the Telegraph was on a race for time. They got a transcript and not sure if any of their competitors had it so you either:

 

a. run it through a translator like Google Translator and rush to publish the story before anyone else 

 

OR

 

b. hire a translator to go through 55 mins of dialogue and translate with mistakes as the normal human translators couldn't translate aviation dialogue any ways and would take time to figure things out.

 

I would choose a. - get the story out

[Great Ozzie 101]

 

 

I would choose a. - get the story out

 

That would have been good advice for the Japanese ambassador w/ respect to his meeting with Secretary of State Hull the day of 7 Dec 1941.

(sry... your post reminded me of that scene from Tora! Tora! Tora!)

[ViperPilot 81]

Matthew - Respectfully, I think that's part of the problem. Everyone is in such a rush to 'get the story out', and as a result they're ending up printing erroneous information. We all know there's proper phraseology that should be used in certain situations, and it's obvious what was printed is not correct. If the Copywriter took a little time to do their job, chat with one of their 'experts', or Google 'ATC phraseology' maybe there would be a little more veracity to their story, or perhaps it wouldn't be newsworthy. (Oh yeah, right...)

 

When 'responsible' Broadsheets, Dailies, Journals, Sentinels and all the other fish rags out there resort to releasing incorrect information without fact checking first, then they're stooping to the level of a Tabloid.

 

I predict though, this will fuel the Everlasting Gobstopper of 24 Hour News for a cycle or two...

[LHookins 3,103]

"My hovercraft is full of eels."

 

Anyone ever play "translation telephone" where you start with a story in English, translate to French, translate that to German, translate that to Russian, then translate back to English?  Throw in Japanese for good measure.  Sometimes the story is still recognizable.

 

Try that with ATC dialog some time and see what you get.  I thought I saw Chinese in one of the translation sites.

 

Hook

[Matthew Kane 1,343]

That would have been good advice for the Japanese ambassador w/ respect to his meeting with Secretary of State Hull the day of 7 Dec 1941.

(sry... your post reminded me of that scene from Tora! Tora! Tora!)

 

Big time fan of that movie  B)

 

 

 

Matthew - Respectfully, I think that's part of the problem. Everyone is in such a rush to 'get the story out', and as a result they're ending up printing erroneous information.

 

All good, and that is why they also publish apologies from their earlier story and amend them.

 

I have very limited time spent on the news and have been using this thread for updates on MH370 over the media outlets, folks on here are interpreting things being said in the media which is more interesting.

 

Cheers

[geolpilot 88]

From the Telegraph yesterday (21st March 2014);

 

"Malaysian Airlines today confirmed that flight MH370 had been carrying highly flammable lithium-ion batteries in its cargo hold, re-igniting speculation that a fire may have caused its disappearance.

The admission by CEO Ahmad Jauhari comes four days after he denied the aircraft was carrying any dangerous items and nearly two weeks after the plane went missing.

He said the authorities were investigating the cargo, but did not regard the batteries as hazardous - despite the law dictating they are classed as such - because they were packaged according to safety regulations."

 

In 2010 the FAA isued this report, which to me shows there is really very little packaging one could use to totally prevent a Lithium battery fire (certainly the non-rechargeable metal type, which are banned from any air-transport, but even the rechargeable LI-ion batteries require very special treatment according to this FAA study's recommendations)

 

http://www.faa.gov/news/press_releases/media/safo10017.pdf

 

and

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-14/aircraft-fires-tied-to-lithium-battery-cargo-prompt-new-un-rule.html

 

Given that the Lithium Ion batteries almost certainly brought down the UPS  747-400F at Dubai, and are strongly suspected of causing a near fatal fire onboard a DC8 cargo plane on approach into Philladelphia, I certainly regard Malaysian Airlines view of the batteries as not being hazardous as a little too casual. The report on the UPS 747 plane shows just how drastic the effects of such a fire can be on cockpit operations and aircraft systems.

 

People keep citing that the lack of a mayday or comms from MH370 about a fire negates a fire hypothesis. They forget that, by the time the pilots may have worked the initial items on the checklist to don their masks, handle the cargo fire, secure the cabin, liase with cabin staff, and then wanted to signal their emergency, all comms had already been taken out.

 

Why a fire just at that ATC handover point? FlightRadar24 data shows the plane made a turn to the right just after IGARI, the first really sharp turn on the route. At this point did cargo possibly shift, and two mins later they were grappling with an emergency?

 

As to why the plane flew on for so long, the fire extinguishers may well have done their job on the fire (on the 777 two fire bottles discharge fully, and a further three continue to discharge at regular intervals until exhausted). But they may already have suffered severe avionics and gear damage (the fire on the UPS747-400F took out the gear), and been left with a cabin filled with highly toxic smoke.

I for one hope that, at very least, until the possibility of a lithium battery fire is excluded, the transport of these batteries as cargo on all pax-flights world-wide is totally banned. They can be shipped by cargo plane if the pilots are informed of the cargo and are willing to take the risk, or by boat - at least those guys have a fighting chance of putting out any fires at sea.

[fluffyflops 1,858]

to be honest, here in the UK, apart from Ukraine, (which most people in the UK dont understand)  theres not much in the news to be honest.  Even yesterday BBC new opened with something along the lines of "No news on the missing airplane....." which means the story's running out.  People have only got a certain attention span and unless any "dramatic" things happen, the story will fade out.

 

Going off on a tangent slightly, but you give you an idea of how people need endless simulation through iphone apps, facebook, twitter and 24 hour live news streams.as of 6 months ago at my airline which is pretty big, 200 + aircraft, we now employ a staff of around 10 people to sit and watch twitter and facebook feeds and respond to them. Thats what they do all day and all night, they sit on facebook and twitter.  Recently we lost a premiership football players suitcases, inside was 3 suits which came to £15000, the footballer went mad on twitter and hes got 100's of thousands of followers, Ive never seen the 2 people on shift, who look after baggage claims get given such a rough deal, we loose bags every day, but because this chump put it on twitter, we had a rediclous number of people working on the issue  as it hit the press.

 

We get people going on our twitter calling us the "c" word, about once every 3 days or so, which is a call to the police every 3 days for a pointless tweet, and last week someone tweeting "do XXX airlines employ muslims" in response to the malaysian captain, when he got his house raided.  The bosses went completely nuts as its not a racist comment as such, and they didnt know what to do with it. It sat on the twitter feed for hours while someone wondered what to do with it.  

 

To sign off the story, what got the company to suddenly employ a team of specialist people to manage the Twitter and facebook feeds (we never had one before) was the Korean KSFO incident as the pictures of it where posted on twitter some 6 mins after it crashed, and an industry expert advised us to emply the twitter team    

[vololiberista 205]

Why the Malysians don't just release the actual transcript is a mystery. After all it's not secret information.

 

Confirmation that you are at a FL does not in any way give any proof whatsoever that the a/c has been hijacked. In fact it could point to a faulty radio. The crew not hearing ATC's response discussed it for a moment and then repeated the message or there was another problem that distracted the crew and so they repeated the message.

 

How many times I have had to repeat a message because of static or other interference: Hundreds, thousands over the years. It may well point to some form of distraction. Perhaps one or more CBs started to pop. Reset for a while and popped again. Initially the crew would deal with what they thought was a minor problem so there would not be any need to contact ATC. However once a decision was made to turn back (because things were getting out of hand) there would be the need to contact ATC but by this time the radio had gone silent. A cascading electrical failure is for me the most likely cause.

 

They probably ended up with a darkened cockpit with just perhaps a magnetic heading to go on. At night, over the sea and over large parts of uninhabited land trying to look for civilisation but even so not knowing where they were. I'm not certain they they went as far south as W. Australia because one's spacial awareness would say to you "If we fly in this direction for so long we should be more or less at x", In other words dead reckoning. Once they realised that they were in fact totally lost I can't imagine what was going through their minds. Nothing to see but sea. The current satellite technology is quite dissapointing in that all it can say is that an aeroplane has been lost on Planet Earth. How difficult can it be to add a lat/long to the device that 'pings' Inmarsat.

[tf51d 284]

China has released, a new satellite image of debris they found pretty far West Southwest from the last sighting. Size is estimated to be 22.5m x 13m.

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-26697048