Can a plane successfully land (ditch) in the Indian Ocean? Like Capt. Sully did in the Hudson river?

The Hudson pane was a narrow body jet. A wide body jet like the 777 has never been successfully landed on water.

CNN updates from press conference:

-- Reports that the plane was sighted by people in the Maldives are "not true."

-- Some information has been deleted from the flight simulator found at the home of the pilot, Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said. Forensics is trying to recover it, he said.

-- U.S. government official: The plane is more likely in the southern search area


I continue to think the Captain was the instigator (but it does suck to believe that while he may well have heroically tried to save the plane and/or did save it from doing far worse things)

Sad. 3 relatives, absolutely heartbroken tried to enter the press conference in Kuala Lumpur to speak to the press. They were literally man handled and dragged out into another room and not let near the media to talk to by the police!

This is torture. They wont reveal all info because of other countries politics. Like the plane was spotted on other countries radar but they cant reveal that info!!?

Furthermore the Hudson River is a relatively calm and flat surface compared to the ocean.

Reading this PPRuNe thread, it's amazing how horrendous the general public is at probability. This in particular caught my eye:

That's one of the more explicit faliures, but the applied judging of probabilities in actual theories has been awful as well, often a case of the same fallacy outlined above (failure to multiply probabilities). Someone outlined an elaborate theory involving a meterorite exploding mid-air and taking out crucial plane systems and when they got loled at people rushed to the defence with "hey, pilot suicides are really rare too man".

Turns out the plane wasn't seen where it couldn't possibly have been. Incredible development.

One of the things I'm noticing is that, being pilots themselves, they are very quick to dismiss any speculation that the pilots may have been at fault here, despite pilot suicide having occurred multiple times in the past.

It leads them to cling fairly desperately to more far less likely theories of multiple technical failures.

I think it's the same with that fire theory going viral. People like a nice neat theory where everyone is behaving like human beings. They're less likely to think critically about a story like that.

That forum is probably a far more intelligent than average sample of people too. A bit worrying.

Seems like a time to jump back on my favourite soapbox, that critical thinking should be taught as a subject in schools. Attention paid to applied probability, recognition of cognitive bias in oneself and so forth. It's so important in the modern world where we are drowned in floods of information, much of it unreliable.

ChrisV, Amen. It's amazing the errors otherwise intelligent/smart people make when it comes to probability.

Interesting point about simulator deletion is (in addition to it possibly being random/innocent), it would indicate some premeditation, which seems less likely than the theory of tilting the day of due to the political conviction.

Also this is the first story I can remember that I've followed super intensively. And it makes me hate all of my usual news sources like Gawker, TheWeek, Hackernews, and FB friends. Also all the people in all the forums repeating infinitely answered questions.

It's something that doesn't come intuitively to people. None of us are immune. I remember I argued for about 15 minutes when first presented with the solution to the Monty Hall problem.

Deletion of info from the flight sim (on Feb 9th) doesn't mean much. From what I've heard a cache was deleted. I delete my browser history from time to time for various reasons, doesn't mean I'm trying to hide anything.

I think this was discussed earlier in the thread, makes you realise how clueless media outlets are when you see them report on a story that you're an expert on. Most of the time they have no idea what's going on.

I saw that Maldives story reported in the media a billion times today and not once did they mention that it was completely incompatible with where the satellite said the plane ended up. Part of the problem is incompetence, but unfortunately part of the problem is that news and entertainment have been blurred. A lot of "news" online is just click bait, i.e. "EXPLOSIVE NEW THEORY ON MH370! YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHERE LOCALS SAY THEY SAW THE PLANE!".

Abducted by UFO theory probably 80% at this point.

I saw one being reported that someone had seen MH370 on a satellite photo over the Andaman Islands. When I started reading it it turned out the source of the photo had discredited it, because the photo was taken at some earlier time, of course. But the headline and first paragraph or two still made it seem as though this was some major breakthrough.

A nice post in Wired

Ban!

No its not. And its been posted like half a dozen times ITT already.

Hi Gigi. Yeah, i read that yesterday. Its well written but there are a lot of holes in that theory imo

Well very sorry I missed that it was shared. And yeah it's not full of alien theories so might not interest everyone on here. As a fellow pilot I think he at least has the decency to feel shamed by the allegations made towards a colleague that might be completely based on false assumptions.

The nail in the coffin for that theory is that the turnaround had already been programmed at 1:07, well before final radio contact.

Someone deliberately took that plane off course.

Can we also propose a ban for the next person that comes in here thinking they're offering an entirely original and hilarious theory regarding aliens?

I think he has the basics right. Find the nearest airport. aviate, navigate, communicate (since some 'smart' people here find every plausible theory nonsense because the pilots didn't even tell ATC they had a problem/fire/emergency/whatever). And last but not least, a captain is named and shamed in various ways, for all we know this is based on loose facts and this guy might as well have been fighting for his and his passengers life.

But again... no aliens.. So should have probably not shared what I thought was decent food for thought. I'll stick with poker threads from now on, at least there you don't get the word 'ban' as a response because you can't filter through every halfarsed post about conspiracies...