Malaysia Air Airliner missing

[LATB]

Originally Posted by onedef92

Me, too. Our human nature instinctively fears death. Remember, even Jesus was afraid of dying and prayed to get out of it three times in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Death is something we were never designed to experience in the first place as we are all created beings of eternity.

Fortunately, Jesus paved the way to eternal life through his glorious resurrection. He conquered hell, death and the grave in one fell swoop and has prepared a place for us to live with him forever as friends in his kingdom. What love the father has for his children!

[Kevin_73]

Originally Posted by theriver

If memory serves me correctly it was just over 10k feet. I saw the altimeter gauge frozen at that height as the pieces of the aircraft were mapped out on the floor of a former Navy hanger in Calverton, LI when I was involved with the recovery.

I remember them saying between 10 and 12,000 and about 6-10 miles offshore when it blew.
Even a 747 looks pretty tiny at those distances, which would help explain the widespread confusion from the eyewitnesses.

[wwomanC6]

Right now God only knows what happen! God Bless all those on board.

Prayers for there families!

[Grey Ghost]

Originally Posted by Dixievet

Temperatures at that height would be pretty cold - not likely that they would live since 1) there is not enough oxygen at 35k to support life 2) the temp would be around -40 to -60* (guessing based on previous flights).

My last flight to PI I remember seeing the temp at -91*F when we were at 35k ft - but we were over Siberia at the time....not sure if global position matters that much when at that altitude, but it was at night.

My guess - if the plane breaks apart at those altitudes - the people would immediately freeze and suffocate in about the same amount of time. They would only see a very brief moment of the disaster before they blacked out and death occurs

I saw a lot of WW2 bomber documentaries and even the WW1 open cockpit guys. Most missions for WW2 happened at 35k. The crews went on oxygen at 10k. They only had heavy leather jackets, trousers, and boots. Electrically heated suits were available to wear underneath, but I don't think they were very common. Frostbite would occur to any exposed skin. The WW1 guys just bundled up with what they could wear and had very limited time at altitude above 10k.

[MrPeabody]

Originally Posted by Grey Ghost

I saw a lot of WW2 bomber documentaries and even the WW1 open cockpit guys. Most missions for WW2 happened at 35k. The crews went on oxygen at 10k. They only had heavy leather jackets, trousers, and boots. Electrically heated suits were available to wear underneath, but I don't think they were very common. Frostbite would occur to any exposed skin. The WW1 guys just bundled up with what they could wear and had very limited time at altitude above 10k.

My dad flew in a B24 in WWII. He said temps of 50 below zero were common. He says the electrically heated suits were a necessity. The gunners wore a sort of mitten that had one finger in them for the triggers on the 50 cal guns.

When his crew flew over to Italy, the picked up the plane in Tucson, flew to South America, then the Azores, then North Africa then on to Italy. One of the guys bought a monkey in SA for a pet and it froze to death on the next leg of the flight. Sad but true story.

[LATB]

Originally Posted by Grey Ghost

I saw a lot of WW2 bomber documentaries and even the WW1 open cockpit guys. Most missions for WW2 happened at 35k. The crews went on oxygen at 10k. They only had heavy leather jackets, trousers, and boots. Electrically heated suits were available to wear underneath, but I don't think they were very common. Frostbite would occur to any exposed skin. The WW1 guys just bundled up with what they could wear and had very limited time at altitude above 10k.

Originally Posted by MrPeabody

My dad flew in a B24 in WWII. He said temps of 50 below zero were common. He says the electrically heated suits were a necessity. The gunners wore a sort of mitten that had one finger in them for the triggers on the 50 cal guns.

When his crew flew over to Italy, the picked up the plane in Tucson, flew to South America, then the Azores, then North Africa then on to Italy. One of the guys bought a monkey in SA for a pet and it froze to death on the next leg of the flight. Sad but true story.

Those men were usually quiet, humble brute warriors. What they endured most of us can not relate.

[Mike Mercury]

just read this: "the mystery of the two passports seems to have been mostly solved, with authorities confident there is no terror link. The two Iranians travelling on stolen passports were thought to be asylum seekers heading for Europe. "

update:

"It changed course after Kota Bharu and took a lower altitude. It made it into the Malacca Strait," the senior military officer, who has been briefed on investigations, told Reuters.

That would appear to rule out sudden catastrophic mechanical failure, as it would mean the plane flew around 500 km (350 miles) at least after its last contact with air traffic control, although its transponder and other tracking systems were off.

A non-military source familiar with the investigations said the report was one of several theories and was being checked.

Malaysia's Berita Harian newspaper quoted air force chief Rodzali Daud as saying the plane was last detected at 2.40 a.m. by military radar near the island of Pulau Perak at the northern end of the Strait of Malacca. It was flying about 1,000 meters lower than its previous altitude, he was quoted as saying.

There was no word on what happened to the plane thereafter.

The effect of turning off the transponder is to make the aircraft inert to secondary radar, so civil controllers cannot identify it. Secondary radar interrogates the transponder and gets information about the plane's identity, speed and height.

It would however still be visible to primary radar, which is used by militaries.

Malaysia military tracked missing plane to west coast: source | Reuters

[onedef92]

Crowdsourcing the Search for Malaysia Flight 370

Mar 10, 2014 6:43pm

DENVER – As the mystery of what happened to the 239 people on board Malaysia flight 370 deepens, a Colorado satellite imaging company is launching an effort to crowdsource the search, asking the public for help analyzing high-resolution images for any sign of the missing airliner.

Longmont, Colo.-based DigitalGlobe trained cameras from its five orbiting satellites Saturday on the Gulf of Thailand region where Malaysia flight 370 was last heard from, said Luke Barrington, senior manager of Geospatial Big Data for DigitalGlobe.

The images being gathered will be made available for free to the public on a website called Tomnod. Anyone can click on the link and begin searching the images, tagging anything that looks suspicious. Each pixel on a computer screen represents half a meter on the ocean’s surface, Barrington told ABC News.

“For people who aren’t able to drive a boat through the Pacific Ocean to get to the Malaysian peninsula, or who can’t fly airplanes to look there, this is a way that they can contribute and try to help out,” Barrington said.

DigitalGlobe will use a computer algorithm to determine whether users start tagging certain regions more than others. In-house satellite imaging experts will follow up on leads, Barrington said.

“We’ll say, ‘Here are our top ten suspicious or interesting locations,’” Barrington said. “Is it really an aircraft wing that’s been chopped in half or is this some other debris floating on the ocean? We may not be 100 percent sure, but if this is where I had to go pick a location to go looking for needles in this big haystack, this is where I’d start.”

The company runs a fee-based First Look Event Service that can compare before-and-after images for clients. In the past month, the company activated the service to observe wildfires in Australia, violence in Ukraine and the aftermath of ice storms in Atlanta, Ga.

In November, the company launched a similar crowdsourcing campaign after Typhoon Haiyan devastated Southeast Asia. The company says users placed more than 400,000 tags, identifying 38,000 damaged buildings and 101,000 damaged homes.

[onedef92]

US to Get Fingerprints of Malaysia Airline Passengers With Stolen Passports
Prints and Photos to Be Compared Against List of Known Terrorists and Criminals

March 10, 2014—

Fingerprints and photos of two men who boarded the doomed Malaysia Airlines passenger jet are being sent to U.S. authorities so they can be compared against records of known terrorists and criminals.

The cause of the plane's disappearance has baffled investigators and they have not said that they believed that terrorism was involved, but they are also not ruling anything out.

The investigation into the disappearance of the jetliner with 239 passengers and crew has centered so far around the fact that two passengers used passports stolen in Thailand from an Austrian and an Italian. The plane which left Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was headed for Beijing. Three of the passengers, one adult and two children, were American.

Today Malaysia's Civil Aviation Chief Azaharuddin Abdul Rahman said officials had reviewed surveillance tape of the plane's boarding "from check-in right to departure."

When asked about the two men who used the stolen passports, Rahman replied, "We confirmed now they are not Asian looking males."

When pressed to describe them, he said indicated that one of the men is black.

Do you know a footballer by the name of Bartoli? Do you know what he looks like?" Rahman asked.

Reporters corrected him asking, "Mario Balotelli?" and asked whether the man with the stolen passport was black. Balotelli, who is black, is an Italian soccer player.

"Yes," Rahman replied.

Rahman refused to further describe the two men.

U.S. authorities plan to run the photos and fingerprints of the two men against databases of known criminals and terrorists in hopes of finding a match, a senior official said. Another senior counter-terrorist official said that finding out more about those two men could be the key to understanding how and why the flight suddenly disappeared mid-flight Saturday.

“Until we get more information on the two people using the stolen passports and ascertain whether they were involved, or they [search parties] find the debris and do forensics, it’s all just conjecture,” the counter-terrorism official said.

While there has been rampant speculation about the possible role of terrorism in the missing plane, the counter-terrorism official and other high-level U.S. officials have said so far there is no evidence to indicate that’s the case , beyond an unverifiable claim of responsibility by a little-known Asian extremist group.

“The U.S. is not picking up any intel, no chatter,” the counter-terrorism official said, referring to communications often intercepted by American intelligence in the wake of a terrorist attack that can often lead to clues about suspects. “The bad guys aren’t even discussing it… It’s an awkward situation. There is nothing from which to draw any firm conclusion yet.”

Rahmam, speaking about the surveillance video, also said, "I can confirm that all security protocols had been complied with."

Rahman indicated that investigators were not any closer to determining what happened to the Boeing 777 jet, a plane with an excellent safety record, or where the plane was. Samples from an oil slick off the southern coast of Vietnam determined it was not from the plane.

And Vietnam’s National Committee for Search and Rescue told ABC New that an orange object spotted floating in the ocean over the weekend originally thought to be a life raft from the plane had nothing to do with the plane wreckage,

During an earlier press briefing today, a reporter asked Malaysia's Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein about reports that a media personality received an open letter from the leader of Chinese Martyr Brigade claiming responsibility for the incident. When asked about the letter, a Malaysian official said, "Yes, there is sound ground to say it is true, but again, we have said from the beginning that we are not taking anything for granted."

But at the later news conference, Rahman said, "We don’t know what happened to the aircraft, so we cannot speculate... We cannot do guess work."

He said the search area was being expanded to include an additional expanse of ocean as well as land at the northern tip of Malaysia. The search grid was divided into boxes with individual ships assigned to each box. It was now nighttime in Asia, which brought a search by air to a halt. But he said planes would resume crisscrossing the search grid for signs of the plane at daybreak.

Dozens of aircraft and ships have contributed to the search, including crews from Vietnam, China, Singapore, Indonesia, the United States, Thailand, Australia and the Philippines, Rahman said at a press conference today.

The U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet is using a P-3C Orion marine surveillance aircraft to search in the northern section of the Strait of Malacca today, according to the group’s Facebook page.

[Cybercowboy]

Originally Posted by Mike Mercury

just read this: "the mystery of the two passports seems to have been mostly solved, with authorities confident there is no terror link. The two Iranians travelling on stolen passports were thought to be asylum seekers heading for Europe. "

update:


Malaysia military tracked missing plane to west coast: source | Reuters

Wow, something very strange is going on here.

[ApexOversteer]

Originally Posted by onedef92

Crowdsourcing the Search for Malaysia Flight 370

This technology has been used recently to discover new geological features on Mars, and to find new planets orbiting far away stars, by releasing images and data for the public to study. In the case of the planets it was said that the public did in 48 hours what would have taken scientists several years.

I hope it is as successful in this application.

[onedef92]

Missing Malaysia Airline Plane: What We Know Now
Plane Disappeared Without a Trace Friday

March 10, 2014— Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur on the morning of March 8, but lost contact with air traffic control an hour later and disappeared off the radar.

No trace of the plane and the 239 people on board have been found and few details about what could have happened to the plane have been released.

Here's what we know now as of now about the investigation into missing flight MH370.

Timeline of Events:

12:41 a.m. (Malaysia): Flight MH370 departs Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia headed for Beijing, China.

12:43 a.m First time the flight shows up on radar

1:20 a.m. Air traffic control and radar lose contact. The last signal from the flight showed the plane at 35,000 feet. It went off the radar about 140 miles off the coast of Vietnam.

The Investigation

Hijack: Investigators are "not discounting" the possibility of a hijack, but there is no evidence pointing to it.

Separatist Group Claiming Responsibility: A Chinese media personality received an open letter allegedly from a group of Chinese separatists called the "Chinese Martyr Brigade" that claimed responsibility for the incident.

The letter said it was revenge for Malaysia persecuting them and for China suppressing the Uigurs. The Uigars are an ethnic minority in China. Last week, an extremist Uigur group allegedly perpetrated a knife attack in a Chinese train station that left 29 dead and more than 100 injured.

Plane May Have Turned Back: A radar recording indicates that the plane may have turned back toward Malaysia after taking off, but the pilots made no such indication on the radio.

Oil Slicks Tested: Oil slicks spotted off the Vietnam coast were thought to be signs of the downed plane, but tests have come back showing they had nothing to do with the aircraft and were not related to the disappearance. Also, a piece of debris thought to be from the plane also proved to be unrelated.

Fake Passports Used By Two Passengers

Investigators discovered that two passengers used stolen passports, one from Austria and one from Italy, to board the flight.

Interpol criticized Malaysia for not checking the men's passports against the international database of stolen passports, where they would have seen that the passports had been reported stolen in 2012 and 2013. Both were stolen in Thailand.

The two individuals who used the stolen passports were identified on CCTV footage and described by a Malaysian official as "not Asian-looking."

One of men was identified as Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad, 19. The Iranian has no known terrorist connections, and he was likely trying to enter Germany to seek asylum.

The Search for Flight #MH370

Nine countries are now searching for the plane or any sign of it: Vietnam, China, Singapore, Indonesia, USA, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines. The U.S. Navy has sent the 7th Fleet's USS Pinckney, carrying two search and rescue helicopters and a maritime surveillance aircraft.

40 ships and 34 aircraft are involved in searching.
The search for evidence of the flight, including any debris or wreckage, was expanded today and now spans 100 nautical miles around the west coast of Malaysia.

The plane was a Boeing 777-200 with a clean flight history; Malaysia Airlines has a good safety record, according to the Flight Safety Foundation.

The Passengers

239 people were on board the flight, made up of 227 passengers (including one infant and one toddler) and 12 crew members.

Three Americans, including two children, are among the missing. Philip Wood, a 50-year-old IBM executive, had just come from Texas where he was visiting family on his way to Beijing.

A total of 14 different nationalities, though 152 passengers were Chinese.

Twenty passengers on the plane worked for the Austin, Texas, company Freescale

Semiconductor. Another passenger, Chng Mei Ling, worked as an engineer for the Pennsylvania company Flexsys America LP.

Pilot Zahari Ahmad Shah, 53, was a veteran pilot who joined Malaysia Airlines in 1981 and had over 18,000 flying hours.

[onedef92]

Originally Posted by ApexOversteer

This technology has been used recently to discover new geological features on Mars, and to find new planets orbiting far away stars, by releasing images and data for the public to study. In the case of the planets it was said that the public did in 48 hours what would have taken scientists several years.

I hope it is as successful in this application.

Me, too.

[Ryan Bell]

Originally Posted by Mike Mercury

what I find misleading in the news reporting is that they make it appear as if the plane crashed when it turned off it's transponder; claiming the plane "disappeared from radar" at that moment... which it did not disappear from radar. The plane simply stopped sending it's transponder transmissions, but was still visable on "real" radar... and still flying.

Funny you mention that. I was thinking the exact same thing. What's the deal with that?

[Mike Mercury]

what I find misleading in the news reporting is that they make it appear as if the plane crashed when it no longer was sending transponder information; claiming the plane "disappeared from radar" at that moment... which it did not disappear from radar. The plane simply stopped sending it's transponder transmissions, but was still visable on "real" radar... and still flying.

Military radar confirns -at least- 350 miles of flight after the transponder stopped working.

[Stangkiller]

A coworker suggested this morning, rapid decompression rendering the pilots unconscious, but allowing the plane to continue flying, while that doesn't explain turning off the transponder, i thought I'd read due to terrorism concerns they didn't use the transponders like they usually would due to their location?

[Cybercowboy]

Originally Posted by Ryan Bell

Funny you mention that. I was thinking the exact same thing. What's the deal with that?

How did you quote a post that came after this post?

[Mike Mercury]

Originally Posted by Cybercowboy

How did you quote a post that came after this post?

expect a visit from the Time Cops.

I had too many spellin errors; and decided to delete the post and retype it. RB posted during that time frame...

[Ryan Bell]

Originally Posted by Cybercowboy

How did you quote a post that came after this post?

Secrets.

[Mike Mercury]

it gets weird...

a few relatives said they were able to call the cellphones of their loved ones or find them on a Chinese instant messenger service called QQ that indicated that their phones were still somehow online.

A migrant worker in the room said that several other workers from his company were on the plane, including his brother-in-law. Among them, the QQ accounts of three still showed that they were online, he said Sunday afternoon.

Adding to the mystery, other relatives in the room said that when they dialed some passengers’ numbers, they seemed to get ringing tones on the other side even though the calls were not picked up.

The phantom calls triggered a new level of desperation and anger for some. They tried repeatedly Sunday and Monday to ask airline and police officials about the ringing calls and QQ accounts. However unlikely it was, many thought the phones might still be on, and that if authorities just tracked them down, their relatives might be found. But they were largely ignored.

According to Singapore’s Strait Times, a Malaysia Airlines official, Hugh Dunleavy, told families that the company had tried calling mobile phones of crew members as well and that they had also rang. The company turned over those phone numbers to Chinese authorities.