Electronics

[depglass]

I'm watching CNBC, someone has actually invented one. How backwards is the airline industry anyway?

[ChynnaBlue]

I don't know, but it sounds like it comes down to money and I'm really frustrated. 20 people from my company were on that flight and I'm still waiting for them to release names to see if anyone I know is missing now.

I read this earlier and this guy wants to know the same thing:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/09/malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-black-box

[depglass]

I hope the best for your friends. I remember before 9/11 how safety groups were advocating "hardening" the cockpit doors, meaning reinforcing and locking them. The airlines protested because it would cost them $50,000 per plane. What does it take for airlines to get their act together?

[golding76]

ChynnaBlue, I hope that your friends were not on that doomed flight. Sadly, in the end, those lost were somebody's friends. Without a doubt the reluctance to equip airplanes with first-rate technology has to do with the cost. I suppose to some minds, people are collateral damage if things go wrong.

What troubles me when my mind starts to race (and I do have a fertile imagination!) is that I speculate that the aircraft was not blown up but, instead, re-routed to a remote and hostile destination. Perhaps the plane's captain and first officer were overcome one way or another, the transponder turned off and the plane then re-routed to a remote destination by terrorists who are able to pilot a plane. They are the ones who had the phony passports, in my mind. If no terrorist organizations have bragged about this missing aircraft so far, it is because they plan to use this aircraft like a missile, as they did on 9/11, and catch us off-guard. Therefore, they are not announcing anything. Gads, I hope I am proved wrong!

First of all, I do not know if radar can pick up an aircraft even if the transponder has been turned off, and I don't know if it can detect anything if an aircraft has been blown to smithereens.

[I just thought, if the plane had been under siege, someone from the group of passengers or crew would have fired off a text message or something. Can the phones work up there? Since I've never used one while in flight, I don't know. What I do know is that new rules are allowing (or thinking to allow) phone usage once aloft. Now I am thinking a sudden, catastrophic failure took down that aircraft. Otherwise, someone would have messaged a relative or friend if the vessel had been hijacked.]

[Iambeezer]

It's the same reason why WIFI isn't available on all planes and there isn't satellite tracking. It''s too expensive and very hard to accomplish. I would be more concerned on why they find out about the two stolen passports after it goes missing and not before....

[Desertdi]

I believe there's some unwillingness of the countries in the region to share information

[gardenman]

The lack of constant communication with the black boxes is largely due to weight, cost and practicality. Very, very few planes crash and those that do crash typically crash on take-offs/landings where the debris is easy to find. It's extremely unusual to have a plane disappear while in cruise mode. In this case it looks like someone on the plane (Pilot? Co-pilot? Hijacker?) turned off the transponder, changed the course, and flew the plane someplace else. Where and why are the big questions. Even a black box that was communicating with the ground could likely be by-passed by the pilot/co-pilot in a pinch and would likely have been disabled by whoever took control of the plane in this case.

[LeaLeander]

I agree that sending black box data to the cloud would be smart but there are tens of thousands of airline flights a day -- the volume of data is hard to imagine, really.

So it's a financial/practical problem, and to my understanding also the pilots' unions tend to object; they don't like the idea of their every move being subject to scrutiny like that. They fought black boxes for a while, back when.

[Reever]

This is looking more and more like a hijacking to me. Transponders were turned off, the plane reversed course apparently. I am hoping against hope if someone did hijack the plane they managed to land it somewhere and these people are alive and being held hostage. It is very puzzling that no debris has been found.

[gardenman]

This has become a confusing mess. They tell us something at one press conference and then turn around and reverse it at the next one. If I was a family member of one of those on the plane I'd be taking hostages now and demanding real answers.

The transponders were or weren't turned off intentionally. The plane did or didn't turn. It was or wasn't seen on radar reversing its course. The engines were or weren't functioning normally four full hours after it disappeared. Chinese satellite images (extremely blurry and vague at best) show the wreckage, oops, no they don't.

I think it's reasonable to assume the plane didn't crash into the water along it's anticipated flight route. Someone should have found the wreckage/debris by now if it had. So it's reasonable to assume the plane either flew off course or crashed into an unoccupied land mass, likely a mountain range where it's still undetected. The most likely explanation for a plane flying off course is a hijacking by the pilot, co-pilot, or some outsider. If the plane was hijacked, then where is it now? There are rogue states (North Korea, Iran, and Somalia among others) that might try to commit such an act and could theorectically hide a hijacked aircraft. But why???? Somali pirates might be tempted to grab a plane to have hundreds of hostages instead of the few they get from pirating ships. Somalia maybe could have been reached by the plane with the fuel on board. The pirates could have even built a makeshift runway in the desert for the plane to land to avoid notice at the Mogadishu airport. Would they do it though?

Did the plane veer off course due to a structural failure of some sort and crash into a mountainside someplace? Maybe. Did it crash into the ocean far off course? Maybe. Did it crash in a lightly populated area and the people in that region looted the wreckage rather than report it? Possibly. (We occasionally see that with motor vehicle accidents here in the states where the first person at the scene empties the wallets of the victims and then runs off without ever reporting the crash.) The scrap metal value to say nothing of the value of the personal belongings of those on the plane can pose a temptation to people. We'll eventually get answers, but this is taking a lot longer than I think anyone anticipated.