Flight MH370......

[WillyHeckaslike]

For me there are too many coincidences to accept for this to be accident related and China does have a problem with militant extremists who have a lot of previous ... and they are not strangers to plane hijacking. Click

I don't think that the pilots were party to it.

[MattyC]

Originally Posted by HarryM1BYT

Its a two hour continuous loop. So they will only have the final two hours of the seven hours, which probably will not help. I very much doubt anything will be recoverable of the previous five hours.

Likely it will be a hard disk, rather than a tape. Data is recoverable but only provided it has not been over written.

Most FDRs record approximately 17–25 hours worth of data in a continuous loop

Perhaps though, this is incorrect (it is from Wikipedia after all!); however in this day and age, 2 hours worth of data, regardless of how much is being recorded per second, is not very long. When you have planes costing millions, memory capable of only a 2 hour loop sounds a little miserly?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Data_Recorder

[DerekS]

So IF all the flight responders and gismos were switched off , either deliberately or by some unexplained event , then the cockpit voice recorder would also have been switched off, and it wont ell you anything even when its found . If the pilots were plotting the disappearance, it would be the first to be cut off .

[suzublu]

Bored with it all now, all this conjecture, maybe's, what if's etc, wake me up when they actually discover something real with evidence

[MattyC]

I doubt they can turn the black box off, I think they mean all the equipment used to track the planes position and communicate with her.

As is being suggested now for the future, why at least live (or even delayed) streaming of the data being recorded to the black box isn't already a standard procedure god only knows, although most alarming for most people is probably the fact that any vital equipment can be disabled during a flight by humans on the plane, especially after 9/11.

I'm of the opinion there was probably a complete failure of equipment, we forget how easy it is for pilots flying at 35,000 feet to become disorientated, especially in this modern era where electrical navigation equipment is taken for granted. We only have to look at the infamous Flight 19 to see how hard it is to fly a plane on the correct course when even the smallest doubt remains as to the integrity of you navigational equipment.

[DerekS]

So the satellite can read your numberplate accurately, and knows just where you are, to the nearest 10,000 miles. Thats a relief .

[onefortheroad]

Originally Posted by suzublu

Bored with it all now, all this conjecture, maybe's, what if's etc, wake me up when they actually discover something real with evidence

That's the crappy media for you! Let's make a headline for everyone....

[rashi_g_h]

How come no country is using a submarine to find the missing plane?
The Bluefin-21 could be connected at the belly of the submarine or use its radar and scan the ocean floor bed, then when they find the wreckage they can send the gps coordinates to recover the black boxes. Under water the atmospheric conditions are irrelevant hence there is a better chance in detecting the black box beacon Pings before its batteries run out!

[MattyC]

They're not doing any searches atm, because of the weather IIRC. A submarine is a fab idea, but I don't know if Malaysia has any suitable, and whether any nation would be prepared to use theirs.

It's a silly situation, the most logical reasoning seems to have gone out of the window and replaced with political point scoring. The Kursk should have been warning enough to show why nations must forget divisions and simply work together at times like this.

[HarryM1BYT]

Originally Posted by rashi_g_h

How come no country is using a submarine to find the missing plane?
The Bluefin-21 could be connected at the belly of the submarine or use its radar and scan the ocean floor bed, then when they find the wreckage they can send the gps coordinates to recover the black boxes. Under water the atmospheric conditions are irrelevant hence there is a better chance in detecting the black box beacon Pings before its batteries run out!

Simply because of the massive area needing to be searched at the moment and the extreme tinyness of the aircraft. It would take many years to search the entire Indian Ocean. First they must refine the area down to a practically searchable area, then they can begin a search. It is not only vast, but extremely deep to, needing very specialised equipment.

The French aircraft went down at a known position, that took years to find. They knew roughly where the Titanic went down and in a much smaller ocean, but finding that also took years and was a much bigger target.