'Contact lost' with Malaysia Airlines plane

With regards to the flight sim.

there are reports that the captain was also doing work for a flight sim company

Although that may have been discredited
 
I think a ground crew engineer placed a piece of malware into the on-board flight computer, possibly months in advance that had a predetermined set of instructions that could disable on board systems and spoof a destination of the perpetrator's choosing and even have false information displayed on the flight deck screens so the flight crew would be unaware anything was happening (at night), that just sat dormant.

When the perps were ready, they simply had a passenger on board with a laptop/smart phone that initiated the command for the malware to do it's thing.

For what reason this would happen, that's another matter entirely.
 
mattyg said:
And that the Radar has a % of accuracy and at the Altitude is way off
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Radar doesn't give you altitude - it gives angle, range and doppler (although search radars will be doppler ambiguous). You can sort of work out altitude from that, but yes there will be errors. How big they are depends on the radar and where the target is.
 
grumpysculler said:
Radar doesn't give you altitude - it gives angle, range and doppler (although search radars will be doppler ambiguous). You can sort of work out altitude from that, but yes there will be errors. How big they are depends on the radar and where the target is.
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One sending station getting returns doesn't get altitude but radars are usually deployed as arrays which allow triangulation. Unless the reflecting surface is planar and perfectly orthogonal to the sending station the returns bounce off in all different directions. Over greater distances these small angular differences are multiplied and you receive fewer returns, and those you do receive are spread out. This makes it harder to be certain of what you are seeing. It's a question of how sophisticated your algorithms are.
 
Westyfield2 said:
Interesting theory about shadowing another plane... http://keithledgerwood.tumblr.com/post/79838944823/did-malaysian-airlines-370-disappear-using-sia68
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Its an interesting theory, one question i have is just how close would the Malaysia plane have to get to the 777 before radar would detect it as a single plane, rather than two very close planes with one active transponder? I know that theoretically you could hide the Malaysia plane in the shadow of the 777 if there was just one radar, but if there is more than one radar station that could pick the planes up, this would be very difficult.
 
Reaper 392 said:
Its an interesting theory, one question i have is just how close would the Malaysia plane have to get to the 777 before radar would detect it as a single plane, rather than two very close planes with one active transponder? I know that theoretically you could hide the Malaysia plane in the shadow of the 777 if there was just one radar, but if there is more than one radar station that could pick the planes up, this would be very difficult.
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Not really, it's just 3D computational geometry.
 
mattyg said:
Pilots on other forums are saying that it couldn't actually get to 45'000 ft. And that the Radar has a % of accuracy and at the Altitude is way off
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The plane has a certified service ceiling of 43,100ft, so no it would not be able to reach 45,000ft. The last time pilots stupidly tried to exceed an airliners service ceiling it destroyed the engines and the plane crashed.
 
Energize said:
The plane has a certified service ceiling of 43,100ft, so no it would not be able to reach 45,000ft. The last time pilots stupidly tried to exceed an airliners service ceiling it destroyed the engines and the plane crashed.
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Absolute and service ceiling are not the same though. It can cruise at upto 43,100ft but could go higher. But not fully laden and not very quickly.
 
robfosters said:
Makes you wonder whether pilots should have the ability to disable the transponder. Maybe an automatic system would be best.
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if an electrical fire started in the transponder electronics you would definitely want to turn them off in flight

*edit*
Moley said:
A sensible view of what might have happened from a pilot, looking at it from the pilot's view and discounting all the speculative conspiracy theories:

https://plus.google.com/106271056358366282907/posts/GoeVjHJaGBz
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I'm too lazy to check, but does this story still fit with the most recent known flight path which has a left turn, right turn, then a further left turn in it
 
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Reaper 392 said:
if an electrical fire started in the transponder electronics you would definitely want to turn them off in flight

*edit*


I'm too lazy to check, but does this story still fit with the most recent known flight path which has a left turn, right turn, then a further left turn in it
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No... just the left turn. It was an interesting read though and not too long ;)
 
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