Interesting thing came up two nights ago on our flight to Las Vegas. I've always been aware that our dispatchers could track our flights, but I never really knew the nuts-and-bolts of this process. I know that we have mandatory position reports during the flight, usually four or five position reports for a transcon flight.

Well, on this flight we get an ACARS message asking us to increase the number of position reports. I send back a plain text query asking what's going on and the dispatcher explains that normally they get a position about every 30 seconds (!) from the FAA, but that there was some problem with that feed tonight.

This made me wonder: if they get positions every 30 seconds, why are we sending the reports? (I ponder things a lot. There's just no "off" position on my curiosity switch. It's been a burden.) So I fire off another text asking this question and, duh, the answer should have been obvious to me. Our position reports also contain other information, e.g. fuel remaining, winds aloft, outside air temperature, aircraft speed and estimate to next position report.

Anyway, maybe not so interesting after all. Just thought I'd share.




cliffs: I didn't know the company gets position updates on our flights every 30 seconds from the FAA and not really relevant to Malaysia Air

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understood ACARS normally reports using radio, but when it's out of range it switches to the satellite. Basing that on something I read somewhere in these past two weeks, recollection might be a little hazy, but yeah.

Seems like the INMARSAT satellite connection is very much separate from ACARS, just happens to be the medium through which it transmits some of the time.

I think you're correct on that. It's all transparent to the pilots. ACARS uses VHF when available and SATCOM if needed.

Is this where the info on flightradar24.com comes from?

Meh, its a fair point that I obviously don't have any in depth knowledge (both from my misunderstanding of the pinging and from my statement that a qualified engineer explaining the damage would change my mind).

To be fair though, if someone is advocating the electrical fire theory that's implicitly making a statement about how they believe the plane is designed.

Yes, ACARS is an application layer communication that is routed through a variety of different communication methods. It can be sent via VHF or UHF radio or via satellite. The sat uplink transmission is an optional service that this particular airline does not subscribe to, however the airframe itself has a live and fully functioning transceiver.

A near analogy would be if you allowed your cell phone contract to lapse and you no longer had cell service, but you kept your phone turned on. Your phone would periodically connect to the nearest cell tower and send its IMEI to the provider. The provider would look up your IMEI and tell the phone to get stuffed -- but it would have a record of the location of your phone if they cared to dig through the data. Immarsat are in essentially the same position -- they see an hourly connection from the aircraft, but they don't get any further than the initial handshake before they tell the plane not to send anything else.

Not at all, we were relying on the expert pilot who said a fire could explain the loss of contact

No offense to W0X0F (and I'm definitely near the top of W0X0F cheerleaders, he'd be my #1 pick in a 2+2 draft) but he's not an engineer familiar with this plane and I suspect he doesn't know how the plane is actually wired and built. I doubt he'd argue that either.

Edit: And its not just about if a fire could explain the loss of contact. Its about how well it fits with the evidence and the relative likelihood of different scenarios.

Not to mention the people I trust most in this (the US investigators) seem to be pretty certain foul play was involved.

That pilot who wrote the article about the fire said pulling the circuit breakers would cause the communications lapse, and that it's quite plausible that the pilots would do that immediately in the case of a fire. Seems like he'd know that and that Wired would fact check that.

Considering everything that has been said or discovered yet, and apparently some new **** today about the pilot receiving a phone call on a sim that was bought with a fake ID I'd honestly be shocked if this was anything but foul play.

Granted after reading so much about this, I just don't know anymore what is fact or lie.

I don't want to keep going back and forth on this. I've explained my problems with that article. If someone has something new to say I'll gladly respond, but otherwise its just the same stuff over and over again.

So I'll just end with this: I will offer an even money bet where loser has to pay $500 to a charity of winner's choice. I win if within 5 years a report comes out saying it was foul play. I lose if within 5 years a report comes out saying there was no foul play. Any uncertainty in the report or if we don't have any answers in 5 years is a push.

Does Immarsat have a monopoly on these satellite connections for aircraft? I'm wondering how the plane defaults to this satellite when it didn't sign up with Immarsat.

You can't simply dismiss anything else but foul play simply because nobody believes in it enough. Its still a possibility. The pings were from the engines on the plane if I have read the articles correctly. It had nothing to do with location or the aircrafts 'main frame'. It was nothing more than attempted engines sensor data being received.

This should be pretty easy to check. There should be an exact checklist that pilots have to follow in case of fire. Perhaps W0X0F can tell us if pulling circuit breakers is part of it and how far down the list it is.

We know there have been fires on planes in the past where the crew continued to communicate so we can at least be certain pulling the circuit breaker isn't the first thing you do. There's different kinds of fires though in different locations so one would expect there's different responses to each.

It's also possible of course that this hypothetical fire spread so quickly the pilots had no way of following any kind of checklist and were just improvising.

lol. It's hardly 6th hand info. It was "The New York Times reports that an American official familiar with the investigation says". If we took no notice of anything with that level of certainty, we'd know nothing about what is going on.

And the electrical fire explanation is not "simple" unless you assume a fire is a magical entity with the power to do whatever you want it to do at any given time. To my knowledge there are no examples in the history of aviation of a fire strong enough to knock out key systems/incapacitate the pilots where the plane then kept flying for hours. Not a single one. That's just one problem with the theory.

As has been gone through a billion times, the point would be to stop the plane being found. Unlike most theories there is precedent for this. The SilkAir 185 pilot shut down the FDR and CVR prior to crashing the plane. This turned out to be insufficient to stop investigators demonstrating that the plane was crashed deliberately. In this case if not for the SATCOM pings the plane would have been located 0% of the time.

This already has been fact checked here, by an actual 777 pilot (the other pilot had never flown the 777):

Read the whole article, it's worth your time.

I mean I know "aviate, navigate, communicate" but there are exceptions. It is ******ed to disable your comms before negotiating a place to land, otherwise you can't get the plane on the ground, which is priority #1 when there's a fire.

I think the likelihood of ever knowing what really happened to this flight is 100% predicated on finding the black box and it having some pretty obvious clues on it; like the pilots saying "omg fire" or "omg terrorists." Otherwise this never gets farther than speculation.

Nah, I'm not certain about this but from what I've read the SATCOM antenna - which is up on top of the plane - has local electronics which handle that ping thing. Much like you could ping a router/modem even if the computer attached to it was destroyed.

Under whichever scenario we choose, we have to suppose that the ability to send and receive ACARS was shut down at the plane computer level, either by fire in the electronics or yanking a breaker or switching it off via the FMS or whatever.

I think the theories that are back in play here are the ones involving hypoxia. They at least are consistent with the now mostly forgotten story about the other plane that contacted MH370, which has never really made sense under any other theory (if it was a pilot trying to hide the plane, why respond? If it was some catastrophe that befell the plane but their comms were working, why not make a mayday call?).

Hypoxia is consistent with the haphazard route the plane followed and the fact that it kept flying for 6 hours. I'm not sure how ACARS and the transponder being disabled would fit in with a hypoxia theory, but there might be some reason this could happen that we haven't thought of yet.

Edit: However, I still think foul play is most likely and that one of the pilots is most likely culprit. Hijacking by someone other than a pilot is another theory that is back in play, since there is no longer any direct evidence of a pilot doing something wrong.

Ok so I've seen a lot of people on a lot of forums discount the whole suicide angle using the "I would never kill myself like that" argument.

1) You dont know what somebody would do if they wanted to kill themselves. This whole idea that "gosh why kill all those people with you? Nobody does that, you would just kill yourself" is an entirely projected point of view. Just because YOU wouldnt do it like that doesnt mean nobody would.

2) "The last pilot suicide involved a nose down straight into the ground". SO WHAT. Just because 1 pilot killed himself like this and there arent that many recorded events of pilot suicide doesnt meant that is the defacto way to do it. It's suicide for christ's sake, you can kill yourself however you want!

3) Perhaps the pilot wanted to lay the guilt of all those victims on whomever inspired him to kill himself. "None of these people would be dead if you hadn't taken the kid from me! THIS IS ON YOU!!1"

4) Some people are pussies and cant actually pull the trigger. The idea of pitching nose down with a cabin full of screaming people at your door might just be too unnerving. Yes I know it's suicide, but that doesnt change the fact that some people choose to jump off a bridge into icy cold water where they will probably painfully drown to death, and others blow their brains out in the tub behind a closed shower curtain. From his point of view he may have wanted to "set the wheels in motion" so to speak, by creating a chain of events that would lead to his inevitable death. There might have even been religious implications behind it, like a "I cannot self-terminate" clause whereby he doesnt consider it suicide if the plane just runs out of fuel.

5) He may have felt that control of plane could be regained by someone if they knew this was a suicide mission. Kinda like how the 9/11 passengers were coerced into staying calm initially under the guise that this was a hijacking and they would all leave safely once their ransom was paid. Perhaps the pilot needed an excuse to keep flying straight and level to prevent chaos. Maybe he was behind the controls the whole time, door wide open, with a fake bomb planted to his chest (which is pretty much what happened on 9/11). Nobody really knows whats going on except for the copilot, assuming he's not dead. And even then he wouldnt realize this was a suicide until they passed the point of no return.

Point is there are plenty of reasons this could be a suicide. Stop discounting it just because you dont understand how/why some guy would kill himself like this. You arent him.

Did anyone else see that town hall discussion they had on Fox? Everyone was middle age white and all shared the same fears of flying. "They had Iranians on the plane!" "We need to start profiling anyone that wants to fly!" I'm surprised no one yelled "Bengazi!"

Retasking the orbit of a satellite is a difficult job. I dont know what the orbital cycle of any given geomapping satellite is, but it could take days or even weeks for one to return back to an area of interest. It's not like we need surveillance of random parts of the ocean on a regular basis, so the satellites that happen to hit this area might do it rather infrequently. They might not even have any capacity to change orbit at all, and are forced to wait until they pass over the area again.

The communications capability of the engines might be varied. Think of it like your phone, you have a cellular antenna, wifi, bluetooth, etc.

Because those governments are governed by people who want to know. And also it is a security concern when something like this happens, so members of the government themselves want to know. Finally it's a safety issue. I mean seriously do I have to explain why the world wants to know what happened to this plane?

I do not believe the plane itself could malfunction in such a manner. There are too many redundant systems designed precisely to prevent this. The only way a sudden onslaught of failures could occur while still allowing the plane to fly would be like a collision of some sort. If they ran into a weather balloon or really really ridiculously high flying seagull that came crashing into the cockpit. Pressurization is lost WITH pilot injury resulting in their inability to properly rectify the situation. After quickly suffering hypoxia they were barely able to set the auto-pilot correctly, and either intentionally sent it over the ocean as a failsafe or were simply too delirious to think effectively.

I dont think hijackers would necessarily be planning to safely land the plane. Even they would have to know there is no plausible method to do this without the world police waiting for you. But lets just pretend they did, well they have a lot of work cut out for them hiding this plane, hiding the passengers, making sure their demands are met, etc. They could conceivably still be executing the hijacking as we speak, before releasing their hostage video/demands to the world.

I dont believe this it all, but I feel it's the only logical explanation if there were to be a ransom.