And there's also the issue of the time it takes to design something and get it approved. If it's something of your own, you can just add more memory and be done with it. For a system like this, management has to decide it needs to happen, and they may have to get approval from government regulators before they can do anything. Then the engineers make the changes to the design which in the case would probably be just a higher capacity memory chip. But then the system will need to go through significant testing to be sure the new chip can survive all situations it might need to. Then government regulators will have to review and approve the design, and with the speed government takes, that may take a while. Finally, once that's done, the airline can begin to retrofit the new system into planes. By that time, it may have been several years and the new system is already obsolete and way behind the current iPod.
Mystery solved. What really happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 I bet you'll never guess. Spoiler: What really happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Obama did it.
I wonder if the fire/short resulted in the fly-by-wire making he course adjustment on its own. The pilots didn't hit any switch to turn anything off after all... A button is just an input device that sends a certain signal that might also be sent via some fault in the wiring bus. Older airliners with flight engineers and no fly by wire would seem to be a bit more resistant to this kind of fault. An extra man in the cockpit is a help against cockpit intrusions On older aircraft I imagine different devices have different wiring, so a fault/fire at one particular spot doesn't cause problems with another. Take a look at the cockpit photos of this beast: That isn't a cockpit--that's a bridge. http://gelio.livejournal.com/193025.html The crew of the aircraft includes 6 members: captain, first officer, navigator, chief flight engineer, flight engineer of onboard equipment and radio operator.
not to mention because fly-by-wire refers to computer control rather than anything that can be affected by the a simple short circuit (which would have taken systems out). And I'm not sure that the comparison with the AN-225 of which there is only one built and which evolved from the AN-122 which first flew in the 1970s and the flight deck of the 777 which first flew in 1994 (6 years after the AN-225's first flight). Especially as the Russians at the time couldn't match the west on the technology.
And, again, turning off the transponder doesn't render the plane invisible to RADAR it just makes it an unidentified blip on the screen, something likely to be taken as more sinister to RADAR operators.
At first I bought into the Wired story's perspective, but now I don't. It sounds plausible until you really think about it. It's extremely unlikely that you'd go from everything is fine at the "good night" communication to a raging fire that takes out radio and satellite communications systems just minutes later. This raging, fast moving fire takes out just those systems but yet leaves the aircraft able to fly for hours? And, it happens at a very strategic time of handoff from one controller to the next. Sure, that could all happen but it would be an enormous coincidence, one in a billion. In the end, human intervention is more likely. And, it doesn't get around the fact that if the cockpit was filling with smoke, the pilots had various ways breathe and clear it. They have oxygen masks. There is ventilation in the cockpit that could clear it out. And, they could even descend low enough and open the cockpit windows if necessary. The Wired story just doesn't add up. Mr Awe
Yeah, the Wired story (actually a reprint of a story from somewhere else, I believe) doesn't hold up when thought about too much. Especially considering most of the oddities of what happened here (the changes in the flight computer, the change in course during the hand-off, the deactivation of the transponder and ACARS system) happened before or at about the same time as the ATC handoff. So if there was something critically wrong on the plane to necessitate shutting down vital systems and to reroute then they could have told ATC about this. Yet it was a perfectly normal hand-off. Whatever happened seems to have happened/been planned to happen during this "gap" between ATC handlers. Opening a lot of questions.
They're very sensitive and spread all over the cockpit so they can pick up not only the voices and discussions that are meant to be heard, but as you say, the ambient noise in the cockpit. The flicking of switches, the clicking of buttons, the radio, alarms, whispers from someone else in the cockpit who shouldn't be there, nervous mumblings or prayers from the pilots, etc. Anything that can build a more complete picture of what happened.
@Trekker, And there definitely seemed to be human inputs into the system afterwards. So, if you had a controllable plane with people able to operate it, why not just land even if they couldn't communicate? Just doesn't add up.
Well the Trip-7 isn't a plane you can just land anywhere. But, yeah, if they had some level of control over the plane, but no means to communicate, there'd be some opportunity for them to make an emergency landing somewhere but it requires a lot of things to "go right." The end-game of whomever was controlling the plane right now remains a mystery. What exactly happened between the hand-off and wherever the plane ended up is a mystery. But, right now, all indications seem to point to everything that happened was planned and intentional and likely not part of any emergency rerouting as it seemed planned to take advantage of certain gaps in controlled airspace.
If a fire or short circuit broke out that took at the communications equipment in such a quick manner the aircraft would have not remained airbourne. The following is a good example of why. http://www.avherald.com/h?article=44078aa7/0000&opt=0 An Egypt Air suffered a short circuit in the cockpit near the co-pilots oygen mask. The fire was put out quickly but the damage to the aircraft was so severe it was scrapped. It was very fortunate the fire broke out while the aircraft was at the gate and not while flying.
It flew for hours after loss of contact and had plenty of time to return to the origin airport, if not a closer suitable one. Mr Awe
I agree that such a scenario is extremely unlikely, if not outright impossible. My point was to highlight the extreme unlikeness of the Wired scenario. In fact, it starts with that near impossibility and only gets less likely from there! Mr Awe
In any case, the Wired story was written by the author, and posted on Google+, *before* the now-familiar satellite arcs were released: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MH370_last_ping_corridors.jpg If we believe those satellite pings, then there had to be a *second* change of direction for the plane. It started heading west towards Palau Langkawi, but then would have had to have made a course change again, in order to cross the path of one of those satellite arcs. I don't see how that would fit in with Goodfellow's narrative. Basically, Goodfellow's hypothesis might have made sense at the time that he wrote it, but the subsequent details we've learned don't seem to fit.
2 things just occurred to me while catching up with this thread, and so I wanted to run them past the folks in the thread that know more about this: 1. Is there any possibility that this was the result of someone (a sponsored group working for some gov't, Anonymous, etc) testing an ability to remotely take over a plane? I know Toyota recently sued a group for revealing that some of their cars (Prius) could have their steering taken over by making a connection through their wireless tire gauges. Would something as complex as a 777 have more flaws like this because of how complex it is, or fewer because more attention is paid to this sort of security or because the design is too old already to have such flaws? 2. I think the assumption has been that someone wanted the plane/passengers/luggage/etc, or to use the plane as a weapon. Could it be, instead, that the point of this was to get *the information* that the parties involved in searching would be forced to release for an effective search to take place? Where satellites can see and not see, that sort of thing?
They're...... "possible" I guess. In a "everything is always possible" sort of way. But I think neither idea is remotely a sane scenario as to what happened.
Alright. Well, like I said, those were just idle curiosities on my part, and the only thing I'll say in their defense is that they seem to me at least marginally more likely than the black hole thing.