Captain_Barfbag

Today's story is that he was trying to get to Somalia. He had no idea where the plane was going. A 16-year-old with no useful concept of geography. It says something about either him or our educational system. I guessing it's a little of both.

No, that was only for the emergency oxygen. If you were OK with being hungry and thirsty, and not using the lavatories, you could keep your wallet in your pocket for the whole flight. But if the masks dropped down, be prepared to swipe and enter the 3-digit security code on the back of your card.

The Queen of England serves as a unifying force and a good person. Until the monarchy fails to do this, I'd suggest to her people that they let her keep the job. She represents all of the people. When I look at the United States, I see no one in that role. Instead, we follow celebrities and movie stars, some with talent, others without. Here in the Boston area, our media dote on quarterback Tom Brady and his supermodel wife. Our so-called "leaders" are led around by their special interest groups. No one represents all of the people, or even pretends to. God save the Queen.

I'm thinking that charging him might actually encourage others to try the same thing. The publicity around a trial would make it look like a "successful" stowaway attempt. A few years ago, a badly-bruised body was found in a suburb of Boston. It had no ID. He had climbed into a wheel well in Charlotte-Douglas. When the gear came down for landing in Boston, he fell. Unfortunately, this is the story that needs to be publicized, as both the most likely and least desirable consequences of doing this.

How about 18 hours? I'll let you know by mid-afternoon if I make it. I used to give up chewing gum for Lent. Not sure if my Mom ever caught on that I never chewed gum anyway. But hey, what else does an 8-year-old kid have to give up?

They never had black box pings from AF 447. So, their search area was much larger, and for most of that 2 years no active searching was going on. The Woods Hole team only took a week of actual searching with their side-scan sonar to locate the wreckage. After that, it took another month before the recorders were brought to the surface. Thanks for all of the great info, Tom. Do you happen to know how often the boxes send out a ping? When we hear that they've detected "2 pings," would that be over a period of seconds, minutes or perhaps hours if they got two consecutive pings?

We should also look at a different impact hypothesis. Instead of a controlled glide, suppose the plane went in nose first? This might have happened if no one was at the controls, or if the person in the cockpit was trying to make the plane disappear, as has been suggested. ValueJet 592, which went down in a Florida swamp, was such an impact: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ValuJet_Flight_592 This plane impacted the swamp at over 500 mph, and was completely destroyed on impact. No large pieces remained.

Yes, but it is chemical energy from combustion, not nuclear energy from the annihilation of matter. But any kind of engineers, locomotive or otherwise, will do this. I still remember taking a long hike in the woods where we discussed how gas refrigerators worked. It was all very thermodynamic. I model in HO scale, by the way, aiming for a dual-era layout where I can run steam in the 1930s or diesels in the 1960s, simply by replacing the engines, automobiles and most of the freight cars.

No, the mass is not converted to energy. Instead, it combines with the atmosperic gasses in a chemical, not nuclear, reaction. If you throw a log into a fire, the stuff that makes up the wood all ends up as carbon dioxide, water vapor and ash. If you could do it, you would find that every atom of the wood was conserved, just rearranged in different molecular forms. My high school physics was only 49 years ago, so I do have the advantage of "newer science."

Well, not really. Einstein's famous formula refers to the amount of energy which would be released if the matter were to be completely converted to energy, as in a nuclear reaction. In a collision event, the relevant equation for kinetic energy would be: Ek = mv2/2 where m is the mass and v is the relative velocity of the two objects. Even for jet planes and meteors, v << c, the speed of light.

My wife was no more than a hundred feet from something that fell from the sky some years back. She was walking along the beach. I was some ways behind her. The flaming object landed in the water. From the bright green color, I would surmise that it was mostly copper and therefore a piece of space junk that de-orbited.

For those who are certain that the plane must be somewhere else because we haven't found the wreckage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_New_Hampshire_Learjet_crash This plane went down in bad weather, and was not equipped with an ELT. It went down on land, not water. Within a few miles, they knew where the plane went down. Within a few minutes, they knew when it went down. It took 3 years to find the wreckage, despite an extensive search. Finding a crash site is not always easy.

Still running XP, and happy with it.

If that were the case, Malaysian Airlines would now be bankrupt and the search would be over. My own conspiracy theory is that there is more known about the flight path than has been released, but it is considered highly classified by the US government because of the sensors that picked the plane up. They don't want to release actual data, because to do so would reveal sensor capabilities that the US wants kept under wraps.

This morning, I remembered one of my goals - to retire from work before I retire from ice hockey. I want to play at night and never have to hear the alarm clock in the morning. It's always way too early. As I've said, we will probably relocate for tax purposes. I've got a decent-sized model railroad that will have to be taken down and moved, and then re-assembled in a new place. That will almost certainly mean some reconfiguration. Instead of seeing that as a chore, I look on it as a chance to fix things that I didn't do right the first time. Having the time to do that will be a blessing. So far, we're both still very active, enjoying downhill skiing in particular. I want to lose some more weight (25 down, 25 to go) which will make bicycling more of the fun it used to be, but in the meantime it will part of the program.

I just turned 67. I'm still working, but there are persistent rumors here of a "voluntary lay off." I could volunteer to be layed off and collect the severance package, which is pretty generous. I'm waiting for that. I heard a rumor that it could happen in the next few weeks. Or, it might not happen at all. Then I have to decide when I want to stop. I remain apprehensive about paying for stuff in retirement. I'm substantially better off than most, but with a statistical 20 or so years to go and a wife who will likely outlive me, I have to wonder how the future economy will affect me. From what I've seen of our so-called leaders of the last couple of dozen years, I see little reason for optimism. We will probably relocate. It's one thing to go to someplace like Maui, because you want to. It's another to feel you have to leave your home to conserve your financial resources and dodge the high tax structure around here.

The American media/public has already forgotten any references to flight simulators. In fact, they've forgotten MH370 and are now totally fixated on basketball. H. L. Mencken wrote: Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Indeed. For the first few days of this particular saga, AVSIM was off the air. Trying to get information from the TV was almost impossible. Trying to carry on an online discussion on news sites was the usual barrage of idiots blaming Obama or outer-space aliens. Thanks for being here, AVSIM.

That's because your government doesn't go out and antagonize the rest of the world, nor does it try to police the rest of the world. To be truthful, I think you're on to something.

It's hard to imagine this kind of operation being a success, though. There are a limited number of runways where this plane could have landed, and a limited number of hangars big enough to hide it. Then, they would need to get jet fuel there, plus whatever else they wanted. After that, they would be flying an unidentified aircraft towards a population center. The chances of detection and interception would be very high. On the other hand, the 9/11 aircraft, fully loaded with fuel, did a staggering amount of damage and the chance of detection and interception was very low. Once they took over this aircraft, they could easily have flown to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok. I don't think there was ever an ELT signal from Air France 447. However, there was debris still floating several days after the crash.

ATC, however, isn't going to give you the global coverage that would have helped with this flight or Air France 447. It is a land-based system, and is relatively short range. The fundamental problem is earth curvature, which you can't fix with ground-based technology, or the ever-popular "more power." AF447 was out of range of ATC long before it encountered problems, which is one reason it took so long to find. MH370, if some of the speculation is to believed, dropped from its cruising altitude of FL350 down to 15,000 feet while deviating from its course and turning west. If this is true, it adds credence to the hijack theory, because the plane could better hide from radar at 15,000.

It seems strange that they would do that, but that exact thing happened just a few weeks ago to an Ethiopian Airways plane. To make that one even more odd, the first officer, who was doing the hijacking, took the plane to Geneva to request political asylum, but the plane's destination was Rome and he could just have landed there and taken a train to Geneva.

The Entebbe plane didn't disappear, though, and everyone knew where it was. Unfortunately, the current story bears a lot more resemblance to AF 447.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/12/us-malaysia-airplane-faa-idUSBREA2B1YN20140312 The article above describes this inspection order. However, MH370 did not have that particular satcom antenna installed, and was not included in the inspection order.

The way the information was released, not indicating what that "strong information" was, makes me think it was some classified sensor that picked it up. Actually, it seems like "the authorities" from all the countries are reluctant to release information. In addition, the generic reporters from the news media don't seem to have the technical expertise to ask intelligent questions.