Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

oh dear - clearly the plea to get away from the monopoly of uk political punch and judy fell on deaf ears
no real surprise i suppose

Start a political thread ..

Cynic,

You don't have to sniff around on this one.

Return to the recipe thread, or pick a topic to your liking or fancy.

Form you own thread again and I am sure you will have some . followers.

this thread was originally set up by sticky to have wide and varied discussion
it is therefore very sad that it should have been hijacked by the obvious culprits so that it has degenerated almost exclusively into a political soapbox and punch and judy show

while uk politics is certainly interesting, it gets very dull indeed if there is no leavening of other subjects with wider and different appeal

The lesson to be learnt with this Malaysian aircraft disaster is that all planes must be fitted with several satellite pinpointers so that they can all be tracked properly !.....this is essential and it must be impossible to disconnect them except by qualified engineers on the ground !.

as i understand it, one of the major loopholes is that, certainly in this instance and i believe elsewhere in the world, there is a 15 minute "black hole" between leaving one (malaysian) traffic control and the tracking being taken over by the next (vietnam)

it was thanks to this "gap" that the plane was able to change direction entirely and to "disappear" from the radar

given that the plane's speed would have been known, it remains pretty strange that the plane could not be found certainly within say an hour, even if the relevant traffic control had changed yet again

Manuel,

Then it is obvious that you should start a file for yourself and followers, with a title such as the Cynic and Adherents NON POLITICAL Comment thread.

But is strange that some wish to suppress the opinions of others, if the opinions don't concur with their own. Usually, by being abusive of the others, rather than considering the arguments presented.

Also, with the added sniping of the number of contributions made by those who they disagree with, but often swamping the boards themselves with repeated inane remarks.

RF,

Yes, to constant monitoring of commercial flights.

fred - i have no wish at all to suppress political discussion and comment, but it really is very very tiresome that this thread has become completely monopolised by you and a couple of other culprits so that any other subject is usually swamped out and strangled by several yards of "your" brand of japanese knotweed

I would also consider that airlines keep several emergency satellite telephones on board for emergency use and access by control towers to onboard television cameras as extra security...all these things are possible nowadays....some can only be fitted with new aircraft...retro-fitting for some items would be difficult of course...

cynic
It is certainly strange that the plane went AWOL during that gap in time. They say it turned and dropped to a level below radar. The had over air traffic control in Vietnam unfortunately did not complain about the lack of a handover. In fact its whereabouts was not queried until after it should have landed in China.

The pilot may have forgotten something or was not aware of it. That is the sat data from the engines and pings. He may have thought that no one would look in the South Indinian Ocean. In fact, no one did until the sat data came about.

i hear that there are a number of good reasons why communication and other similar systems on aircraft need to be under the control (controllable) of the pilot

for example, when taking off or coming into land, or even when on the ground, the last thing traffic control (and the pilot) needs is interference from extraneous passenger chat or even electrical interference from passengers' laptops and similar

hays - your post is interesting, but is it factual or hearsay?

Who says it's the pilot that's at fault ?.....nothing so far until the black boxes are retrieved...(will need american help for that)...

I spoke to a friend who works for a sat company handling voice traffic. He programs various parts of it. Due to the fact that the geostationary SATs sit at about 35,000km above earth special programming is needed. A sat at that height is achieving the same angular momentum as the earth, but its actual speed is huge relative to the earth as a tin can on the end of a string would be compared to a man spinning with it.

The result is that you get time dilation as per relativity Time passes at a different rate on a sat compared to earth. All the clock software has to follow Einstein's rules.

This explains how difficult it was to do the recent calculations for the position of the lost plane.

Malaysia has said the plane turned and immediately dropped to 12,000ft.

hays - i was asking about the source of "They say it turned and dropped to a level below radar. The hand over air traffic control in Vietnam unfortunately did not complain about the lack of a handover. In fact its whereabouts was not queried until after it should have landed in China"

CNN
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/23/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/

Military radar tracking shows that the aircraft changed altitude after making a sharp turn over the South China Sea as it headed toward the Strait of Malacca, a source close to the investigation into the missing flight told CNN. The plane flew as low as 12,000 feet at some point before it disappeared from radar, according to the source.

The sharp turn seemed to be intentional, the source said, because executing it would have taken the Boeing 777 two minutes -- a time period during which the pilot or co-pilot could have sent an emergency signal if there had been a fire or other emergency onboard.

Manuel,

Was your mother or father a parrot!

quite extraordinary!
at 12,000 feet, an aircraft is comfortably within radar view so knee-jerk reaction is that it casts a dark pall over the professionalism of vietnam air-traffic control