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.

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

The Vietnamese handover is now disputed. The air traffic controllers say there is no _'dead space' at handover., Vietnam claims it asked two other planes to contact the flight as the code hadn't appeared on their system, presumably because the transponder wasn't on.

pass the buck time gallops into view

Do I see Hazy One and Manuel?

Or more apt!

Hear there might be a U-turn on Pensions!

"Angry relatives of passengers on board the missing Malaysia Airlines plane have clashed with police outside Malaysia's embassy in the Chinese capital, Beijing."

Although some of the reactions of the families are due to true grief, loss and group hysteria, I wonder whether some of the reactions are orchestrated and based on hope or expectancy of future compensation.

Although, unless a definite cause of the plane's demise is known, there maybe legal difficulties in pursuing for possible settlements.

bloody hell! .... and i thought i was the cynical one around here

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/03/25/jeremy-clarkson-twitter-malaysia-airlines_n_5025734.html?ncid=webmail2

His excuse that he was on a plane at the time, and didn't know that all on the plane had died, dosen't make any diffence , it was still a missing plane with 227 people on board. What if it was your family Jeremy ?