Really qooler? http://en.wikipedia.org/...muda_Triangle_incidents

@wanyee that ET abduction is very plausible...a meteor would hv been detected

C&P

6 important facts you're not being told about lost Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

• Fact #1: All Boeing 777 commercial jets are equipped with black box recorders that can survive any on-board explosion

No explosion from the plane itself can destroy the black box recorders. They are bomb-proof structures that hold digital recordings of cockpit conversations as well as detailed flight data and control surface data.

• Fact #2: All black box recorders transmit locator signals for at least 30 days after falling into the ocean

Yet the black box from this particular incident hasn't been detected at all. That's why investigators are having such trouble finding it. Normally, they only need to "home in" on the black box transmitter signal. But in this case, the absence of a signal means the black box itself -- an object designed to survive powerful explosions -- has either vanished, malfunctioned or been obliterated by some powerful force beyond the worst fears of aircraft design engineers.

• Fact #3: Many parts of destroyed aircraft are naturally buoyant and will float in water

In past cases of aircraft destroyed over the ocean or crashing into the ocean, debris has always been spotted floating on the surface of the water. That's because -- as you may recall from the safety briefing you've learned to ignore -- "your seat cushion may be used as a flotation device."

Yes, seat cushions float. So do many other non-metallic aircraft parts. If Flight 370 was brought down by an explosion of some sort, there would be massive debris floating on the ocean, and that debris would not be difficult to spot. The fact that it has not yet been spotted only adds to the mystery of how Flight 370 appears to have literally vanished from the face of the Earth.

• Fact #4: If a missile destroyed Flight 370, the missile would have left a radar signature

One theory currently circulating on the 'net is that a missile brought down the airliner, somehow blasting the aircraft and all its contents to "smithereens" -- which means very tiny pieces of matter that are undetectable as debris.

The problem with this theory is that there exists no known ground-to-air or air-to-air missile with such a capability. All known missiles generate tremendous debris when they explode on target. Both the missile and the debris produce very large radar signatures which would be easily visible to both military vessels and air traffic authorities.

• Fact #5: The location of the aircraft when it vanished is not a mystery

Air traffic controllers have full details of almost exactly where the aircraft was at the moment it vanished. They know the location, elevation and airspeed -- three pieces of information which can readily be used to estimate the likely location of debris.

Remember: air safety investigators are not stupid people. They've seen mid-air explosions before, and they know how debris falls. There is already a substantial data set of airline explosions and crashes from which investigators can make well-educated guesses about where debris should be found. And yet, even armed with all this experience and information, they remain totally baffled on what happened to Flight 370.


• Fact #6: If Flight 370 was hijacked, it would not have vanished from radar

Hijacking an airplane does not cause it to simply vanish from radar. Even if transponders are disabled on the aircraft, ground radar can still readily track the location of the aircraft using so-called "passive" radar (classic ground-based radar systems that emit a signal and monitor its reflection).

The agony the families of the victims are going through can be unbearable

Conspiracy theorists.....Flight 447 took two years for the blackbox, aircraft and majority of the bodies to be discovered ... So "fact" 2 and 3 above is not a fact

So how long did this take? None of the passengers had time to take out the life jacket and jump into the water???

@maka, upper class phones like thuraya can even even receive network in underground gold mines, wachana na middle class sijui smartphones.

@ZZZE123, PANIC GALORE could have conspired to ensure that all passengers got stuck on the doors...herd mentality and I know most of the pax must have put on the life jacket and inflated it while still inside the ndege.

I am an expert in such investigations!

If you have ever flown, that is no rocket science.

So now this Malaysian Flight 370 was last detected flying over a small island hundreds of miles from the flight's usual route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. If this new data is correct, the aircraft was flying in the OPPOSITE direction from its scheduled destination and was on the opposite side of the Malay Peninsula from its scheduled route.

mmhh that's smells of terrorism or some inside job.

c&p

http://www.livescience.c...ery-radar-tracking.html

The mystery surrounding a missing commercial airliner raises a fundamental question: How can a big jet full of people just vanish into thin air in this day and age?

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off from the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur on Friday afternoon (March 7) U.S. Eastern time, headed for Beijing. But air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane less than an hour later as it was flying over the Gulf of Thailand — it just disappeared from the radar. The whereabouts of the Boeing 777 jet, which was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members, remain unknown.

"This is a very unusual event," Sid McGuirk, an associate professor of air traffic management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, told Live Science. "It's highly unusual for an aircraft at altitude — which, at least according to the press, this aircraft was — to drop off the radar." [The 5 Real Hazards of Air Travel]


Two radar systems

Air traffic controllers track commercial jets using two types of radar. "Primary" radar determines a plane's position by analyzing signals that bounce back off the aircraft; the "secondary" or "enhanced" type requests information from each plane, which is then sent by a piece of equipment aboard a jet known as a transponder.

Radar facilities are based on land, and each one has a range of about 200 miles (320 kilometers), McGuirk said. So passenger jets on transoceanic flights do go off the radar map for a period of time — but that doesn't mean nobody's keeping tabs on them.

"The flight crews use combinations of high-frequency (HF) radio, satellite-based voice communication and text-data networks to report to ATC [air traffic control] the exact time, position and flight level when the crossing begins," said Emily McGee of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Alexandria, Va.

"They then update ATC with voice or text progress reports at defined geographic locations and time intervals," McGee told Live Science via email. "Airlines file flight plans, and airplanes are expected to arrive at certain points by certain times. When an airplane crew fails to check in at its next checkpoint, that is when an alarm is raised. This case is an extremely rare event, especially with the highly technologically advanced aircraft in the air today."

Commercial jets can also fall off the map briefly when they fly at low altitudes because radar relies on line-of-sight contact. Mountains and other landforms can block the signals going to and from the closest radar stations, as can the curvature of the Earth.

As a result, low-flying jets can be tough to track continuously, especially if their transponders are disabled — a fact that terrorists took advantage of on 9/11. [9/11 Science: 10 Ways Terrorist Attacks Rocked America]

"The first thing that many of the hijackers did [on 9/11] was turn off the transponder," McGuirk said. "Once they turned off the transponders, then they turned the aircraft back toward whatever their target was."

Someone who wanted to steal the Malaysia Airlines jet could theoretically shut off the transponder and dip down to an altitude of 5,000 feet (about 1,520 meters) or so, he added, while cautioning how far-fetched that scenario is.

"Of course, it's kind of hard to hide a 777," McGuirk said. "Wherever it lands, somebody's going to say, 'Hey! There's a Malaysia Air 777. It didn't crash at all —it was being stolen'" ok that's crazily funny.

Another vanished jet

McGuirk likened the disappearance of MH370 to that of Air France Flight 447, which vanished over the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009 after departing Rio de Janeiro en route to Paris.

Flight 447 went down in bad weather, claiming the lives of all 228 people aboard. It took five days to locate the wreckage and nearly two years to locate and recover the Airbus A330's "black boxes" from the ocean floor.

In some ways, however, the loss of MH370 is even more puzzling. Flight 447 was well offshore, beyond the range of radar stations. But the Malaysia Airlines plane was apparently not far from land, McGuirk said, adding that one Malaysian Air Force official made comments to the media suggesting the aircraft was being tracked by radar just before it went missing.

The comparison to Air France Flight 447 is not encouraging to the friends and families of those aboard MH370, who have already been told by Malaysian officials to expect the worst.

Aviation experts have speculated that the plane's transponder stopped working. This could have happened because the instrument was turned off intentionally or suffered a failure of some sort. Or the jet may have fallen apart, or been blown apart, in the air.