Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Off Topic What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447?

Analogy or not, Stockholm is still to the north east of London, not the north west!

Also, the story & the plane's route is so well known that I'm not sure that an analogy is needed.

My apologies for the error in the original post.......I've now changed it to "North-East" rather than the original "North-West"

Slip of the fingers rather than the mind

Here is the real flight path for those interested

Whilst not meaning to make light of this tragedy, I find it interesting to note (in Ronnie's graphic) that there were only 2 'infants' on board; < 1% of the total. Most flights I've been on seen to be about 50% screaming kids!

You know it's an oddball when an elaborate kidnap plot starts to look highly plausible (despite the 'first rule of assassination' problems).

Interestingly, as I understand it, if you accidentally/deliberately turned off your transponders in/near the airspace of a NATO country, you'll have fighters launched to intercept your last known position fairly rapidly. Airliners are not allowed to go missing around Europe and North America, even if by accident. I think there may even have been an incident where interceptors picked up a long-haul on approach to LAX purely because they had a malfunctioning transponder, despite radioing the problem in well before anyone managed to get a skin-paint off them.

The whole MH370 thing gives me a similar feel to the one I got after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers. I remember watching those horrific events unfold on a TV in the office (didn't get much work done that day) & despite watching live pictures of it, I couldn't quite believe it. Still can't, really.

MH370 has a similar "I just can't believe it" feel. I see that today the search has entered a "new phase" as the unmanned sub has found nothing having searched the 'likely' area, based on analysis of the pings. So that's another blank drawn, so the next area to be searched is clearly going to have seemed less likely to be the right area than the one that's just proved fruitless.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's never found but then I wouldn't be at all surprised if the plane's found intact on an island somewhere. The story is just so other-wordly that practically anything is possible.

A scarily plausible one is that this was a dry run, to test responses throughout the region to an airliner behaving in an atypical fashion.
There also exists the possibility that someone is trying to get someone else to show their hand by revealing technical means that can locate the plane.

That's a possibility... but it doesn't necessarily explain why the plane, on several occasions, went from 30,000ft to near sea-level and then back again!!... and this when it was out over the sea and miles away from land.

And worst of all... imagine you're a Passenger while all this is going on... for 7-8 hours.

I'm think the Americans used to fly RC-135s in international airspace off the coast of Russia in a similar manner.

Although there are several aspects which it wouldn't cover (the change of course, most obviously), the parallels with Helios Airways Flight 522 are interesting.

I read a suggestion that the ascent to above the 777's safe altitude could be connected with an intentional decompression, producing the same effect as in the above case.

I'm about to get on a plane from Chicago to D�sseldorf. Hope to chat again tomorrow�.

Those two points have a touch too much of the conspirator about them to me.



Particularly the 'dry run' suggestion; surely after MH370, regulations re transponders / ability to track a plane are bound to tighten up considerably making any follow-up considerably more challenging. Anyway, how do 'top' something like MH370? It's up there with Jack the Ripper, Lord Lucan & JFK for ongoing theories & conjecture; up until something's found to resolve the quesions at any rate.

Have a read of the Register's dinner party guide to MH370.

Quite a well balanced article but it didn't add much to what I've managed to glean from Sky news. Virtually anything is possible I think & very little can confidently be ruled out. This one could run & run.

Oh, Mudge, there's a G08 in the Restaurant btw but I don't know if it's a .2