Missing Plane

Enough of the conspiracies please, mate.

 

For me its rather simple,the plane went down for what ever reason and the transponder was not working due to power failure or impact damage.
At some point in days to come they will find the plane at the bottom of the sea,same as they did with the French one a few years ago.
It takes time to search the sea bed maybe even weeks.

 

:smiley-laughing002:

they'll be all shook up if that happens

 

:smiley-laughing002: Yeah but No Woman No Cry!

 

...I think I ruined everything.

 

Sometimes planes crash. But in a post-9/11 world, that story isn’t quite interesting enough. We can't just report that Flight MH370 crashed and we don’t know where or why yet; instead, we have to be able to relay the plot of exactly what happened, using whatever scraps of information we can find.

Sprawling news organisations struggle to feed 24-hour news channels and rolling liveblogs with the meagre rations available, each morsel sniffed and inspected and toyed with hour-after-hour until every last drop of flavour has been extracted from it. And when the facts run out, you can always rely on the efforts of experts-*-story-tellers, spinning yarns from the thinnest and most fragile of evidence.

The Boeing 777 is the nearest thing to real magic that most of us will experience in our lifetimes. It contains three million parts from 500 suppliers, working in perfect harmony for millions upon millions of miles, maintaining a safety record any car manufacturer would kill for. To call it a miracle would be an insult to the skill and effort of the thousands of engineers responsible for building the craft, but each time one of these contraptions makes a successful flight it should be hailed as an extraordinary achievement.

It’s a testament to how safe modern planes are – and how skewed our sense of risk is – that a single crash has generated more headlines than the nearly 2,000 people who died on Britain’s roads last year. The loss of Flight MH370 is undoubtedly a tragedy and an utterly horrible thing for the passengers and their families to go through. But how many lives are lost and how many families are affected each day in accidents involving cars, motorbikes and bicycles?

That’s not the only thing the press have failed to comprehend in their race to build stories and attract readers. Probably the most damaging misunderstanding has been around the stolen passport story, which has been used in the last three days to build an absurd "terrorism" narrative around the disaster on the basis of basically zero evidence whatsoever.

Two passports used on the flight were discovered to have been lost or stolen, suggesting the passengers were travelling under false IDs. That, along with the large Muslim population in the region, was enough to prompt theories about the disappearance being related to terrorism, and for the Telegraph to talk about a "terror fear" – the ultimate combination of fear and terror – over "mystery passengers".

Even as Interpol confirmed that two passports used on the flight matched records in its Stolen and Lost Travel Documents (STLD) database, they also pointed out that up to 40 million IDs could be in circulation, and that checks in most countries were so lax that “passengers were able to board planes more than a billion times without having their passports screened against Interpol's databases”.

It turns out that bogus passports are surprisingly common, but even if they weren’t, do terrorists generally even use stolen passports? The 9/11 hijackers didn’t.

However, none of that stopped the media from clinging doggedly to their narrative. By Tuesday, "air security expert" Philip Baum, appearing in the Daily Mail, had pieced together – albeit hypothetically – a scheme that had the East Turkestan Islamic Movement at the heart of a militant plot to down the aircraft. “Could it be that ETIM, having failed to gain international publicity through its domestic attacks, has decided to go international?” If so, they’re keeping pretty * quiet about it.

One of the more ludicrous theories was the accusation, promoted by the Mail, that 20 employees from the semi-conductor firm Freescale lost on the flight were involved in some kind of electronic warfare experiment. “This could include ‘cloaking’ technology that uses a hexagonal array of glasslike panels to bend light around an object, such as a plane, according to a report in Beforeitsnews.com,” the paper speculated, neglecting to mention that other stories on the site include gems like, “Alien Technology Discovered in Man’s Tooth?!”

At the farthest end of the making-*-up spectrum sits Mike “Health Ranger” Adams, the author of Natural News – a site that specialises in peddling bullshit quackery to anyone dumb enough to take the link bait plastered up on Facebook. Slate’s Brian Palmer observed recently that Adams has become adept at exploiting the social network, with “an uncanny ability to move sophisticated readers from harmless dietary balderdash to medical quackery to anti-government zealotry”. Natural News has its own take on Facebook: “Worse than meth: Facebook is altering your mind and turning you into a slave” – which sounds like something Susan Greenfield might say when she’s drunk. Natural News posts on Facebook probably won’t enslave you, but they may make you an idiot.

Adams has his own theory about Flight 370, if you can call six brain-farts and a non-sequitur a "theory". As with most conspiracy theories, it takes a series of barely-connected, context-deprived "facts" – drawn largely from the observer’s own ignorance – and adds a strong dose of paranoid finger pointing, but fails to draw any sort of cohesive framework together to hang a plausible story on.

To the pseudo-religious mind of the conspiracy theorist, the failure to find the black box or floating debris after four days isn’t simply a sign of how difficult it is to find a tiny box in a vast deep sea (the flight recorder on Air France flight 447 took two years to locate), but evidence of dark, mysterious forces at work.

“If we never find the debris, it means some entirely new, mysterious and powerful force is at work on our planet, which can pluck airplanes out of the sky without leaving behind even a shred of evidence,” Adams postulated. “If there does exist a weapon with such capabilities, whoever controls it already has the ability to dominate all of Earth's nations with a fearsome military weapon of unimaginable power. “

It’s easy to mock internet conspiracy theorists, but what they’re doing isn’t that far removed from the psychology at play in the mainstream media. They’re all filling the vacuum with their own stories; it’s just that some restrict their stories to slightly more plausible territory. There’s just as little evidence for a terrorist attack as there is for a missile strike, and both stories have been built around the idea of a monster under a bed. For conspiracy theorists, it’s the US government or the New World Order; for the Daily Mail, it’s Muslim extremists with scary-sounding names.

The whole scenario sounds almost religious, and perhaps, in a way, it is. It all seems to come back to a deep-seated need for somebody – some unseen hand – to be in control of events. As David Aaronovitch pointed out in Voodoo Histories, the alternative is, in many ways, more frightening – that the universe doesn’t really care whether we live or die, that it has no respect for the narratives we build around our lives and that death can simply just happen, random and unplanned.

The irony is that, buried in this avalanche of speculation, there are some really interesting stories that have been largely ignored. How is it, for example, that for all the supposed increases in airline security in the wake of 9/11, checks at airports are so bad that people with stolen passports can apparently travel at will? And why is it that in an era of high speed 4G broadband, when 40-year-old technology can transmit data back from beyond the edge of the solar system, we still have to send ships and divers to retrieve data from a plane, rather than simply transmitting it in real time?

To me, these questions – and others – are far more interesting than invisible Muslim militant groups or government laser beams.

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/media-conspiracy-theorists-malaysian-airlines-flight-mh370

It didn’t take long for us to get used to being watched. From the CCTV lining our streets to the GPS receivers in our phones, from targeted web ads to the GCHQ agents watching us * away on webcams, we’ve grown accustomed to the idea that wherever we are, and whatever we’re doing, we can be found and seen. For all the criticisms of mass surveillance, we almost seem to want it to be true – to believe that somewhere up in the heavens, a distant spy satellite is watching over us with its beady little lens, giving a *.

Just how far we’ve travelled down that path can be seen in the public responses to two recent stories. When it was revealed that American and British intelligence agencies were collecting bulk data from communication networks, many people were indifferent – 'Of course they can,' we thought. 'We expected that.' In contrast, Flight MH370’s abrupt disappearance from the grid is much harder to comprehend. How is it possible that over 200 people, on an airliner stuffed with modern communications technology, can just disappear?

People seemed to believe, fairly reasonably, that the health and position of any aircraft in our skies is being streamed back to a base somewhere pretty much in real time. But this wasn't true in the case of MH370 – the Rolls-Royce engines powering the aircraft transmit data packets back to the company’s Derby headquarters via satellite, but this only happens a few times in any given flight. It’s not a live feed as some have suggested. In the case of MH370, two packets of data were sent – one on take off and one during the 777’s climb to cruising altitude.

That's not a great deal to go on, but sending a constant stream of data would soon become prohibitively expensive – BusinessWeek’s Justin Bachman dug out a report from 2002, estimating that such a system would cost hundreds of millions in satellite bandwidth fees. Doubtless, things are cheaper now than they were in 2002 but modern planes can accumulate a lot of data, and streaming all that back is still going to be pretty expensive.

Would this kind of live monitoring be worth it? For a manufacturer like Rolls-Royce, the bursts of data they receive from each flight give them vital information that they can use to improve the reliability and performance of their engines, and deliver better value to their customers. For a modern, safe airline and its passengers, the benefits aren’t so clear. The extra data would be unlikely to prevent deaths, just provide slightly quicker information in their aftermath. Would you rather airlines paid for that, or would you rather they spent the money improving safety in the first place?

What about RADAR? The truth is, once you pass outside the range of a shore-based radar you’re largely on your own. Most airliners carry an ADS-B transponder, which broadcasts the plane’s location every half a second – that’s the information used to plot aircraft trajectories on websites like FlightRadar24.com, which published a map of MH370’s last known position recently. If the transponder fails, then the plane could end up pretty much anywhere. In theory, a stricken Boeing 777 could glide for ten or 20 minutes before finally hitting the water, which could easily translate to a hundred miles of travel. Draw a circle with a radius of say, 150 miles around the last known position, and you have something like 70,000 square miles of inscrutable ocean to search. Tough.

A number of people have pointed out that flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders – a plane's "black box" system – are equipped with underwater locator beacons, which is true. The devices emit an ultrasonic scream that can be picked up by sonar systems within a range of a couple of miles. ULBs have a survival rate in aircraft crashes at sea of around 90 percent, which is the good news. The bad news is that you’re only going to detect them if you have a sonar system within two nautical miles of them. If the search area covers tens of thousands of square miles, the odds of finding them quickly are pretty low.

Of course, there was one other class of communications device on the plane – the mobile phones carried by most of the passengers. These have been the source of some of the most stupid reporting in the last few days, when newspapers were amazed to report that some of the passengers’ phones were still ringing when dialled, four days – sorry, FOUR DAYS – after the crash.

The solution to this mystery is that there’s actually no mystery to solve. People assume that when they dial a number and hear a phone ringing, that means the phone is actually ringing at the other end. In reality, that assumption is completely bogus – it hasn’t been true for years – and as soon as you realise that, it’s obvious that there’s actually no mystery to solve. The only puzzle is why so many journalists reported this story without bothering to call a phone company and check it out first.

It isn’t just information from the plane that’s patchy. Many people, myself included, have learned in the last five days that dodgy passports are actually far more common than we realised. Given that Interpol maintains a database of lost and stolen passports, accessible to any airline in the world that chooses to use it, why are a billion passengers each year able to board aircraft without having their passports checked?

Once again, the question rests on a big assumption: that checking whether passports are lost or stolen is going to make much difference to security in the first place. Only two of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 carried dodgy passports – to give one example – and it’s not immediately obvious why any would-be bomber would need to. After all, suicide bombers rarely pull the same stunt twice. Recent history has shown, too, that there are no shortage of fresh recruits to the cause. Extremists have shown a terrifying willingness to attach bombs to partners, children or even babies in the past. While passport checking might have a role in curbing illegal immigration, its use against terrorism seems limited at best, and easily circumvented.

Ultimately, lots more information about Flight MH370 could have been available, or been available faster. Even if that were the case though, our understanding of what happened would still rely on an effective organisation on the ground, piecing together all the parts into a coherent story. Unfortunately, it seems that one of the biggest factors hampering the search is the confused and garbled information coming out of various arms of the Malaysian government.

Amid all the conspiracy theories emerging in the last few days, it’s ironic that it may well be a government that prevents the plane from being found, but through incompetence rather than design. There’s an important lesson in here somewhere: that for all the focus on technological and data-driven solutions to the mysteries of the world – and for all our faith in the powers of surveillance – in the end, it all comes down to people.

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/how-does-a-plane-dissapear-martin-robbins-mh370-malaysia-airlines

 

It's amazing to think of the technology we have in this day and age and no * can find any trace of it whatsoever.

Whole thing stinks.

 

Technology means * all if it crashes into the ocean at full speed, or explodes in the sky

 

Waterproof technology

 

your a hound dog.:bbpd:

 

Not really surely they could have dozens of wireless wee things that would float etc if a plane ever crashed into water etc such technology must exist.

Theres no way its impossible to have some sort of thing, robots can go to mars but theres no wireless, gps sort of thing invented yet that would survive a plane crash

 

If it crashed in the Ocean it wouldn't explain why the Transponder had stopped, only the Pilot can turn it off, and if the plane exploded the flash would have been caught by satellites that watch for those sorts of things

 

Ah, she's a lady, wow wow wow.

 

The conclusion I've come to is that one of the pilots has knocked out or killed the other pilot then turned of the transponder and flown for miles before crashing the plane. I'm sure the media think this as well as they started to come out and say that the co pilot used to break a lot of aviation laws so they're already making him out to be a bad guy.

 

I though at first on Saturday it has crashed into the sea and it was just a matter of time before it was found but now I'm not so sure, surely it would have appeared if it was in the sea.

It's a real mystery, a real one.

 

ah the old ''pilot error'' scenario.

we always seem to get this.
never the fault of the plane owners or the manufacturers.

and the pilot can never defend himself, cos, well he's deed.

 

You would think in this day and age that there would be ample technology to trace the whereabouts of a rogue aircraft?

Haven't they linked one of the stolen passports to a terrorist group?

 

Yes i know it was KL i made the pic and just put some flight paths in as a theory

Aircraft have to stack up before they land, circle at a certain hight then the longer they circle the lower they get before its their slot for landing. Air Traffic Control give them the flight path for coming into land

 

No.