venk

This is a guide to avoid the CSI syndrome (the syndrome where people who watch too many CSI episodes on TV, believe all real life crime should also be neatly wrapped up in an hour or two with equally satisfying outcome where real life is usually nowhere near it).

1. No country is prepared for a unique event like this (or to 9/11 or to Katrina or whatever). Not even the US. The required agencies wing it as best as they can. Real life is complicated.

2. There is usually one person that designated to be the authoritative source for the information. In this case, that person appears to be Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, director general of the Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation. His role is very specific, do not say anything that has not been approved for public dissemination and deflect anything that isn't. This isn't necessarily to coverup anything. The information from such a person has to have been completely and unambiguously verified, cleared that providing that information has no negative side effects that will hinder the operations, etc. His main concern is the families of the affected passengers first and the media second. Rubber-necking public's hankering for satisfying their voyeuristic interest disguised as concern is the least of his concerns! The information provided by such a person is usually time delayed from the information available to the handling agencies and is never the completely available information, a lot of which is still being investigated and corroborated. You will see his statements and phrasing carefully and minimally constructed ("we have lost all contact...") for that purpose and on their own will be consistent and avoids giving any more information than intended.

3. There are always some people in the involved agencies that will talk too much in any such situation, sometimes obfuscating their own opinions with the facts. They may do this to feel important or to impress somebody. The Military officials quoted in this case may have been such people and are usually made to shut up and retract but only after the damage is done from their statements. This doesn't necessarily imply there is confusion within the investigating agencies or that such statements were incorrect but that such loose talk make it difficult for the person above to do his job.

4. What is shared between multiple agencies and countries in their operations will be much more than what is made public because even uncorroborated information can be shared. Frustrations felt by general public with the lack of information or conflicting information shouldn't be transferred on to the involved agencies and countries.

5. The media, on the other hand, is catering to the general unrelated public and need to keep feeding them a stream of information for their business model. The traditional news media which have typically followed an approach to putting information out only after validations (with a few exceptions at times) have had to loosen that criterion for survival purposes because of the emergence of crowd reporting in media such as Twitter, Reddit, etc. The latter sources disseminate anything anyone hears, imagines or makes up with no responsibility to self-censor or verify as we saw in the days following the Boston bombings. In retrospect, SOME of those reports will turn out to be correct even if they were made with no verification and much claims will be made of how the traditional media failed to report the information and social media broke it first (ignoring all the wrong information that was also put out). Some of these social media outlets themselves are vested in promoting this after the fact. Unfortunately, this puts traditional media under pressure to get out information as quickly as they can forgoing the usual verification routes. This is one of the reasons we have started to see sloppy and sometimes irresponsible reporting. It is a slippery slope once started down that path.

6. There may be significant operations under way that cannot be reported in real time for various reasons - to avoid raising false hopes, to undertake sensitive operations, to keep certain things out of the media for safety reasons, etc. While this frustrates the rubber-necking public, the concerned agencies don't care much about them.

If people are patient for the facts to emerge and understand the reality is never clean and well-scripted made for TV episodes, there will be lot less frustration and venting and ethnocentric slurs that are being efficiently deleted in this thread.

The mystery is certainly riveting and the facts as they emerge will likely astound and as in any aviation incident will likely be a combination of events and factors each of which by themselves would have been inconsequential. Until then give the involved agencies and countries a break.

Except for the very unlikely event of a well-planned and well-executed operation to hijack the entire plane to a remote location, the passengers have likely perished. But the official information will never say anything that points in any specific direction until the situation has been conclusively established/resolved in that direction.

Curated sites/forums like this one with people familiar with the domain are usually much better than the coverage in the media!

BA Humbug

Not trying to discredit this, but does anyone know what an inflated Boeing life raft is supposed to look like? It seems strange to me they'd use a black (?) body instead of something more.... neon (reflective?)

Of course, there's not much else I can identify in the photo.

snowbunnytx

Good find, but the re-lost raft is bound to really frustrate people; it read "BOARDING" on one side.

" One of the fishermen, Azman Mohamad, 40, said they found the badly damaged raft floating and immediately notified the Kuala Linggi Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) in Malacca for assistance to lift the raft as it was very heavy.

"We managed to tie it to our boat as we feared it would sink due to the damages," he said.

When the MMEA boat arrived, the fishermen then handed over the raft into their custody.

However, a Kuala Linggi MMEA spokesman said the raft sunk into the sea while they were trying to bring the raft onboard.

Read more: MISSING MH370: Hopes as fishermen find life raft near PD - Latest - New Straits Times http://www.nst.com.my/latest/font-color-red-missing-mh370-font-hopes-as-fishermen-find-life-raft-near-pd-1.509222#ixzz2vjG7guya"

boogaooga

Everything a Google image search returns for 'Boeing life raft' shows a completely yellow raft, unlike this one.

The raft, however, does appear to match these standard marine life rafts:

http://www.indiamart.com/easternship...life-raft.html

The design matches, and if it had been floating in the sea for a while the color could have faded from an orange to more of a yellow. Also, it's a little difficult to tell from the product photos, but it appears they may have placards on the side that say "BOARDING ->" like the one in this photo.

snowbunnytx

For comparison, another Boeing 7X7 life raft with canopy:



Block text on far left side reads "CANOPY ATTACHMENT".

boogaooga

As I suggested pages and pages ago, if the report that it was last spotted on radar at 29,000 feet at the extreme western edge of Malaysian territory is accurate, it seems very possible that it went down somewhere far out into the Indian Ocean. After 4 days, it seems the Malaysian government is finally acknowledging that possibility.

aquaboi924

Last known message from pilots:

BEIJING — The last radio transmission from the cockpit of missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 was “Alright, good night”, Kuala Lumpur’s ambassador to Beijing reportedly said Wednesday during a meeting with Chinese relatives.
Iskandar Sarudin was speaking to passengers’ relatives and friends at a Beijing hotel. A total of 153 of the 239 people on board the aircraft are Chinese.
The flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared from radar screens early on Saturday without making a distress call and no confirmed wreckage has been found, despite a vast search.
The “alright, good night” comment from one of the pilots came as the flight switched from Malaysian to Vietnamese airspace, Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper quoted the ambassador as saying.

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/584809/...mh370-revealed

boogaooga

Also, this from the Guardian:

Add this to the Indonesian colonel's claim earlier that Malaysia told them the plane was spotted turning back on radar. The Malaysians may be denying it publicly for whatever reason, but there seems to be a growing amount of evidence that they know (or at least should have known) that MH370 was heading west towards the Indian Ocean, not E/NE toward Vietnam.

GSP flyer

Also, it should be noted that the Indians have a squadron of the perfect plane for this search, the Tu-142 Bear-F, which has an operational radius of 3,500 miles. It's a converted strategic bomber optimized for maritime patrol and ASW work; they could cover a lot of ocean very quickly.

Kiwi Flyer

I've seen that mentioned.

A billion flyers a year on false passports is completely implausible as there probably aren't that many people who fly each year.

MANman

I think this is an important point. But this is geo-politics. These forces are low on budget and low on combat experience. Now it seems they are low on combat readiness and professionalism. Hence their embarrassment and evasiveness.
Any more comment than that is not really for this thread.

Nrg800

I was starting a map of radar coverage in the area and I will upload that on completion later tonight, but for now here's a quick map of the plane's fuel range, with bathymetric data and histogram if anyone finds that interesting. I'll add in a link to a higher res version shortly.



If this image is too large for anyone's display PM me and I will upload a smaller version.

Dromomaniac

venk, excellent post and quite accurate. Unfortunately, TV and movies have also given the public an unrealistic view of what government is really prepared for and capable of, especially on short notice.

When you compound the unrealistic expectations on top of the complexities of coordinating a multinational response (with the challenges of multiple languages, time zones, etc.), you end up with a lot of public frustration.

We all want to know what happened, but the truth is that it will probably be months and years before the full story can be investigated and then disseminated.

trailboss99

With reference to the above I think we can mostly discount a portion of the area in the range map. If an aircraft of any size not squawking loudly entered into the range of the AU Jindalee OTH Radar system it would have been noted and investigated by either Australia or the country whose airspace it was in. It certainly would have been recorded and by now brought to the attention of the SAR effort.

The coverage offered by this system is displayed on the below map.



I know a little about this system and the people who run it, they are very vigilant indeed.

With reference to the life raft that is an RFD Marine raft. Aviation rafts are of much lighter construction and almost without exception all yellow. The fact it hasn't been in the water very long probably had folk excited but it ain't aeronautical.

With reference to depth in the Malacca Strait it rarely exceeds 40 metres but as soon as you hit open water it plummets to well over 1000 very quickly.

DeanB

Looking at the map, if the plane ended up in the Straits of Malacca from its last reported position, it may well have over-flown southern Thailand rather than mainland Malaysia.

Have we heard anything from the Thai aviation authorities or military yet?