General News Malaysian airlines flight has gone missing with 229 people on board.

I seriously can't imagine what the families of the missing passengers (& the crew as well) are going through right now. This sounds like Air France Flight 447 all over again.

 

:***:. That's bad. 229 people gone, out of nowhere. Damn.

 

Vietnamese Air Force have spotted two oil slicks in the ocean. Doesn't look good.

 

probably crashed, same thing happened with air france near the brazil coast. i'm flying tomorrow :s

 

This is very puzzling. The 777 has the best safety record of any type in service. Up until this incident there had only been 3 hull loss incidents and only 3 flight related fatalities, and that was due to pilot error.


I read one report that the crew reported disintegration of the fuselage. Which is very odd, but has happened before on other types. It would have to be very bad to bring the aircraft down. Like I said puzzling

 

It doesn't look good. AF 447 had a good stretch of ocean to cover between Brazil and Europe. Malaysian Air did not, per the diagram of the trajectory. If it went into the water (Vietnam's AF has found some oil slicks), some wreckage would also be found, as was the case with AF 447. However, that it would go into the water in a very short span in which it would be over water makes it very suspicious. This is reminding me more of Egypt Air 990. We'll find out everything, I'm sure. However, with that type of aircraft being very reliable and popular, more is starting to bother me about this.

We can only hold good thoughts for those affected at this time.

 

There's a few news sites (NBC & Sky News) saying two passengers were flying with stolen passports, which is raising fears this could be terrorism related.

 

This is scary. So sorry for those on the plane. <3

 

(Aviation major mode kicking in) Based on the flight path, I'm thinking this was either terrorism or a slow decompression/hypoxia.

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You can see from the last known position that they either never made an attempt to follow the flight plan, or worse, it may have been a hijacking and it was flown off-course. If it was a slow decompression, this has happened before, where the cabin slowly depressurized, and the people on board succumbed to Hypoxia, which is when you're getting plenty of air in your lungs, but you're not getting enough oxygen. The pilots eventually passed out and the plane ran out of fuel and crashed. (See Helios Airways Flight 522 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Those are my two theories.

 

What's really starting to bother me, this many hours later, is that they haven't found a trace of the actual plane.

Current homepage news is still "stuck" at the foreign passport issue. Yes, that's a concern. However, the world is still waiting for information on the passengers and the aircraft.

The time delay is what's making this weird. I've never seen such a delay in reporting. Maybe the hunt for the missing aircraft is more challenging than we think.

 

I used to work at NASA Goddard (library), and among the things they do is to track aircraft, even small planes, such that they have a record of where they went down. It's puzzling they don't have a location for such a large craft, unless the transmissions from the 'black box' or related components/radar somehow stopped working. Still, I'd imagine they would have some idea. Very puzzling.

 

You have to find the CVR and FDR first before you can pull the data off it. The FDRs of American flight 11 and United flight 175 (The two that hit the World Trade Center) were never found. If that aircraft went into the water, there's a good chance they'll never find the FDR.

 

Pilot and Human Factors expert here :

These websites operate from the SSR radar, so the aircraft's transponder was still operating when contact was lost, hijackers generally disable the transponder.

Even if they dont find the Data Recorders Boeing 777s like most airliners made in the past 20 or so years have SATCOM installed and would transmit data based on failure to the company HQ if required. AF447 did and if something happened to this bird then so would this.

If it is terrorism they won't need the FDRs since its obvious looking at the aircraft remains (discoloration, buckling from inside the fuselarge, residue etc.)

Flightaware generally freaks out if a flight breaks from what it predicts so it may have not drifted that far off course since it gets its data from fairly inaccurate sources.

The BBC have said the aircraft vanished near Vietnam that screen grab is suggesting the aircraft was still flying.

I spent a Summer living in Malaysia, we were told that terrorist groups are operating over there unfortunately.

One this is worrying me with this, the BBC have said the US is reporting that two passengers were traveling on stolen passports....

 

It still appears that they have not found the whereabouts of the Malaysian Boeing 777. This is truly strange. An article also mentioned something that I already knew - the vast majority of airliner catastrophes occur during take-off or landing, and not at cruising speed at cruising altitude, as most likely was the case with this aircraft and flight from KL to Beijing.

 

I was hearing the plane may have disintegrated, either due to technical reasons or terrorism, at around 35,000 ft. Lockerbie blew up and an Indian airline flight I hadn't heard of before disintegrated at around 31,000 ft. I just hope this isn't the case, and that the passengers are somehow still okay.

 

Pan Am flight 103 was bombed over Lockerbie, that was an act of terrorism, and the only other incident like that I can think of off the top of my head was Aloha flight 243, which was a structural failure and a rapid decompression. The result was the first and only Boeing 737 Convertable:

 

My opinion, the people traveling on stolen passports is a red hearing.

My money is on something similar to AF447.

 

my cousin her coach knows 3 people that were on that flight.

 

doesnt look like slow decompression, if the pilots passed out like in Helios, the plane would have flown for a direction for a long time, and would show up in radars of other countries, for the plane to disappear so suddenly looks more like a rapid, catastrophic event, like a bomb or explosive decompression due to a structural problem like what happened to aloha flight, let's just hope it was not something idiotic like what happened in AF447

one of my students had a childhood friend in the air france 447 flight, he was pretty broken up about it, sad to see him like that after such a silly crash reason

about the two stolen passports, were the passengers that used these passports on the flight? if they were it doesnt sound like a terrorist attack because they would also die, if they were suicide bombers, probably a terrorist group would claim responsibility

apparently there was another plane that managed to contact this one 8 minutes after it stopped contact with ATC, and the pilot said he could only hear mumbling

MISSING MH370: Pilot: I established contact with plane - General - New Straits Times