Though the USSR did do that with KAL 007...


S

lol

Indeed.

My thoughts though that we live in an age where everyone has an answer/idea.

Without google or the current news cycle there would be less guessin' and less whingin'

As I said - I am waiting for the people with the actual data to get back to us.
If the data is inconclusive/missing - well we shall see.

Hey - a server crashed at work today and that took n of hrs to get moving: I am sure that when a 'plane crashes it is 10x harder.

People forget these very, very basic facts all because they can google faster than people can do their jobs and news agencies love a story.

ROFL.....
What utter tripe!
Obviously the Greeks had enough money to pay the fuel for the 2 F16s from the Hellenic Air Force 111th Combat Wing that were scrambled from Nea Anchialos Air Base in Greece in 2005 to observe Helios Flight 552 which failed to communicate with Air traffic control.......

Any country that had half a brain would send something to check out an aircraft that either couldn't or wouldn't communicate-especially since 9/11.

Obviously the data is missing.

not necessarily. We don't know - can't know...yet...
Remember real life is not like on the Box. Someone might have failed to scramble those fighters.

Real life is not like on TV, or what has happened previously.
When 'special forces' etc do stuff like they are robots - even they *** things up. You should know - I know.

We live in a world where people think things happen well all the time. They don't.

Yes. This is the sort of the thing that is the problem.
If the data is missing the airline is embarassed and all they are doing is trying to manage their PR ultimately.

Blame IT.

(etc)

but let's find the wreckage, shall we?

Whatever has happened, Malaysia has made themselves look like total asses

I like the country and the people and go there a lot but to be honest, they couldn't organise a shag in a brothel

Mr NB says it's all a bit odd up there at the moment.

As Mr NB - this one is odd.

Wait and see.

Malaysian PR are probably thinking - 'now we look like a bunch of *****'.
And we were doing well.

Once the full story comes out - maybe they won't look like such a bunch of *****.

Turns out that 4 hours of extra contact is probably real. The satellites 'ping' the transponder regularly, even if the airline isn't subscribed to the real time data telemetry option. No data gets exchanged, but they handshake. That's what they have 4 hours of responses from.

4 hours at 470 knots gets you a VERY long way.

This article nicely sums up the Malaysian government/authorities - a cosy boys club that is never challenged. Hence their response to this crisis:
http://www.watoday.com.au/world/miss...314-hvio0.html

Well summarised and explained - there have been plenty of articles that have confused the tech side of things - of course - it's all written in journalese : the words used like ping and broadcast can be meaningless.

I've been reading some of the tech articles and one commentator points out that all this technology sounds useful but very few people actually know how it works and what it means for this airframe.

And people have been saying how can you not find wreckage with all this tech where you can read a number plate from space (etc) - the answer is that you need to know where to point your camera even if it's the best one on the planet...

It's a characteristic of SE Asia. Quite apart from the "face" problem, they can work very well when running to an organised script (and yes, this is generalising) but when things come off the rails you can see an almost catatonic lack of initiative. I remember once in Bangkok things going tits-up: everyone in the office was suddenly on the phone, shuffling papers etc. In my naivety I imagined things were being organised to get back to normal - but an hour later it transpired that *nothing* had been done! Displacement activity, yes: action, no.

The Malaysian press conferences remind me very much of that..

I'm not particularly au fait with the data link systems now in use, but I thought I'd seen somewhere that the ACARS went inoperative at the same time as the transponder. In which case the ACMS data wouldn't have been transmitted back to base even though it might still be recorded in the FDR. Gets queerer and queerer.