JCC The Airline Disaster Thread

Sky News just said a Chinese water bottle has washed up on Reunion. Sounds like this might just be the start of more debris.

 

odd to think of some of the plane wreckage keeping company with all those other thousands of tons of debris floating in the oceans. 270,000 tons just of floating plastic.

 

Yeah - I'm also thinking that some of this debris is probably just that - litter rather than from the plane. I think anything found will have to be definitely ID'd (as they hope to do with the wing part) before it can be called part of the plane or its contents.

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33794012

The found plane wing near Reunion Island is confirmed to be from MH370.

 

Just saw that on BBC News. I wonder if they will shift the search to that area now?

 

Probably not the Reunion Island area itself as the ocean currents likely carried the piece(s) there from further out in the ocean. Best guess is that they'll try looking around points in the search area which would allow debris to drift into the currents.

 

Hopefully they will do something. I think they're just wasting their time where they are.

 

I think it calls into question if they were even in the right area to begin with. Kuala Lampur to Reunion Island is not quite nine hours non-stop. I don't see a reason why MH370 couldn't have been heading in that general direction from last radar contact, as opposed to south of Australia, which is where the search has been focused on.

 

Where they are searching is believed to be where the satellite communications from the plane came in last. They're only searching that area as it is the best lead they have in an otherwise unmanageably large potential search area. If other devices which could locate the plane had been turned on, then they wouldn't have to go on such shaky information, but this is all they have at the moment and so they are going on that instead of nothing at all. Since the search area does overlap where the currents flow, it is very likely that they're not too far off of the mark with regard to where they are searching.

 

Personally I think they are in the wrong area. They'd have seen something floating by now (like this part) if they were in the right area.

 

MH370 wreckage confirmed

 

It is possible for them to have not seen something. If you recall when MH370 first went missing, everybody was looking for it along the flight path it was supposed to take and the bulk of the search was between Malaysia and Vietnam in and around the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea. It wasn't until those searches turned up nothing and the evidence began to point towards the plane taking a more southwesterly route that they began searching in the Indian Ocean. Those ocean currents can move at about half a mile per hour (around 800 meters per hour) which would mean that loose wreckage and debris could easily move 10-12 miles away from the crash site in a single day. It is very possible that any floating debris could have been way out of the search area by the time searchers get/got there.

Also, there were predictions made by oceanographers based upon the ocean currents at the suspected location of where the plane went down and those models were pointing to debris hitting Madagascar, Reunion Island, or Mauritius around this time. This has also proven fruitful which gives even more cause to suspect that the search location is correct or at least on the right track.

 

Sky News is reporting that more debris has been found on Reunion - it includes what could be part of a window from a plane.

 

CNN is also reporting window panes, seat cushions, and lightweight aluminum objects. Plane wreckage detail has got to be one of the suckier jobs on that island.

 

It could be worse. So far no sign of crew/passengers.

 

They're probably at the bottom of the ocean with the fuselage or shark food.

 

THANKS JULIET

 

Possibly. If this is like Air France 447, then the passengers were found still in the aircraft under all of that water for about 2 years. If the bits of debris which are turning up are from MH370 then they may *possibly* be able to determine what happened to the aircraft (blown up, crashed, ditched, etc) and perhaps get a better idea as to the fate of the aircraft. I should point out that this is all dependent upon enough wreckage/debris being found for investigators to piece things together in the first place. The small pieces they have found so far can only tell them so much and the more that can be found, the better a chance at understanding what took place, and a possibility of that wreckage giving some clues as to where the resting place of the plane actually is.

 

BBC News

France is launching air, sea, and land searches around Reunion. Hopefully they will find some more debris.

 

This is where the police start pulling in Russian government officials and checking their alibis.

 

This isn't the first time EgyptAir has had an incident like this. On October 31, 1999, EgyptAir flight 990 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean killing all aboard. It was first thought to be a mechanical problem which brought down the airliner. Egypt's aviation authority was to investigate but gave the task to the US's NTSB which was better equipped for the investigation. What makes this incident interesting is that the NTSB ruled, based on cockpit voice recorder information, that this was the fault of the first officer who deliberately shut off the engines for reasons unknown but widely believed to be suicide based upon the voice recordings from the cockpit voice recorder. The captain, left the cockpit for a trip to the lavatory and seems to have been subsequently locked out by the first officer who then shut down the engines and made some quasi religious statements as the plane began to make it's descent into the ocean with the voice of the captain asking about the situation also being recorded.

This scenario is much like the Germanwings disaster from last year which had a very similar incident where the first officer crashed the plane after the captain left the cockpit. What was also interesting to note about EgyptAir 990 was that the Egyptian aviation authorities swiftly denounced the NTSB findings and said that their own research showed the crash was due to a mechanical malfunction and had nothing to do with any actions taken by the first officer. It is important to note that EgyptAir 990 took place 2 years before 9/11 and so ties to terrorism weren't likely at the forefront of everyone's minds like it is now.

From what I have read so far. EgyptAir 804 lost contact as it entered into Egyptian airspace. Whether this was over water or land has not yet been specified, but my guess would be that this was over the southern Mediterranean. Still too early to tell if this has anything to do with terrorism, a pilot gone bonkers, or a mechanical failure; but the sentiments from the EgyptAir 990 incident will likely come into play here and I would strongly suspect that the Egyptians will outsource the investigation to another body entirely and most likely an organization other than NTSB.

 

According to the Radar plot, contact was lost over water just inside Egyptian airspace.

 

It's all the news people don't want to say the T word, but everyone is waiting for it.

 

BBC News

Debris from the plane has been found near the island of Karpathos in Greece. No mention of the black boxes yet though.