This Is Quite Interesting

[237SJ]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3178978/Debris-floating-Indian-Ocean-missing-Malaysia-Airlines-flight-370.html

[mikey4444]

Its looking increasingly likely that this was due to a deliberate act by the Pilot, as was proved in the German airline crash in Spain. But unless they recover the various black boxes and cockpit voice recorders, and that seems near impossible, we will never know for sure.

If its true that there are "black spots" on radar, and all those military satellites are no help, than it seems to me that we have a potentially huge problem here.

What are the airlines doing about it ? They have made cockpits impregnable, so a second 9/11 is no longer so easy, but in so doing, they have paved the way for future actions by mad Pilots !

I am not sure I would willingly fly by Malaysian Airlines again !

[rockyracoon]

What about German Wings Mikey? Mad pilots are not airline specific.

[Prudie]

I believe all airlines have now brought in the rule that there must always be 2 people on the flightdeck at all times since the german atrocity. This was not the rule with all of them before. I suppose that would limit a mad pilot to some extent as they'd have to bat the other person over the head before they fiddled with the controls :-)

[mikey4444]

Rocky...I referred to German Wings in my post above.

Prudie...hope what you say is true and that it will effective.

[EDDIE51]

mikey, radar basically operates on 'Line of sight' so long range radar has maximum range of around 250 miles . Most radar has a lot lower range than that around 50 miles.
So any aircraft more than that distance from land will be 'off Radar' this means that most of the time transoceanic flights will not be on any radar.

[Hypognosis]

Maintaining radio contact with transoceanic traffic control is probably dependent on the Heaviside layer, which bounces certain radio frequencies over long ranges but only at night-time.

I don't know to what extent planes have to relay messages between them, to reach ATC at either end but I have seen this aspect mentioned on a TV documentary, some years back. That might have been before satellite communication equipment got approval for fitting to aircraft.

Indeed the satellite link "pings" were what enabled them to draw up the corridors of probabilty, one of which was eliminated. These were only once an hour though, which I found surprising. Every ten minutes would be more like my expectation. Perhaps the up/downlink has limited bandwidth?

[retrocop]

I just heard on LBC news that an expert,being interviewed, stated that the flaperon was almost definitely from a 777. As, of the four 777 crashes,3 have been on land then it is reasonal to presume that this may be the missing Malaysian flight debris.
Unfortunately time,sea currents,drift cannot be tabulated to put a fix on the impact site and recovery of the black boxes so they are no further ahead by the discovery of this debris. :-(