The search ship will arrive in the new search area today

https://www.airlineratings.com/news/mh3 ... 1417-days/

It should have been roughly a week now. Based on the article, that would be more or less the time it takes them to scan the "hottest" 5000sqm area. Does anyone know what would be the first media to issue an announcement in case of some positive news? Malaysian government?

Carlos01 wrote:

It should have been roughly a week now. Based on the article, that would be more or less the time it takes them to scan the "hottest" 5000sqm area. Does anyone know what would be the first media to issue an announcement in case of some positive news? Malaysian government?

I would expect this to spread like wildfire and not take long at all to spread through all mainstream media outlets throughout the world. Searching again ins't huge news so it's buried, but actually finding MH370 will be big news.

MatthewDB wrote:

Carlos01 wrote:

It should have been roughly a week now. Based on the article, that would be more or less the time it takes them to scan the "hottest" 5000sqm area. Does anyone know what would be the first media to issue an announcement in case of some positive news? Malaysian government?

I would expect this to spread like wildfire and not take long at all to spread through all mainstream media outlets throughout the world. Searching again ins't huge news so it's buried, but actually finding MH370 will be big news.

I suspect the news will first be broken here in Perth, the search area is about 1800km WSW of Perth and it was reported that when it is found it could take a few days for the news to come out due to the remote location of the search area. If I were to put money in who breaks the story I would say it would be Geoffrey Thomas as he and airlineratings.com have covered MH370 quite closely

qf789 wrote:

I suspect the news will first be broken here in Perth, the search area is about 1800km WSW of Perth and it was reported that when it is found it could take a few days for the news to come out due to the remote location of the search area. If I were to put money in who breaks the story I would say it would be Geoffrey Thomas as he and airlineratings.com have covered MH370 quite closely

Why would anyone bother talking to GT about this ?

Any and all information should only be released by the Malaysia Ministry of Transport or the ATSB.

The 4000sq km area that had being identified by the CSIRO as a hotspot for the wreckage to be found has been swept and no wreckage has been identified

https://www.airlineratings.com/news/mh3 ... o-hotspot/

qf789 wrote:

The 4000sq km area that had being identified by the CSIRO as a hotspot for the wreckage to be found has been swept and no wreckage has been identified

https://www.airlineratings.com/news/mh3 ... o-hotspot/

Here is a link to the first report: https://oceaninfinity.com/wp-content/up ... port-1.pdf

First images of search area but no debris found

https://www.airlineratings.com/news/mh- ... ebris-yet/

The second phase of the search has started:
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/detail/ ... y/30338957
Some nice graphics in this link:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-07/m ... an/9401892

Update dated Feb. 27: http://www.mh370.gov.my/en/mh370-underw ... sh-version

No significant contacts identified to date

even they find the wreck now it will remain a mystery forever. IF it is there I am pretty sure the perpetrator has destroyed the FDR and everything else will have decomposed.

Maybe I missed it earlier, but looks like an end date of the current search is mid June. Hopefully they find something before then.

http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asi ... icial-says

At this point it's two and a half months to go, but that will fly by. Let's keep the hope alive.

Here's hoping that Phase 3 of any possible search,is dedicated specifically to Diamantina Deep. (not Broken Ridge)

I first eluded to Diamantina Deep back in 2014.

Currently,the only serviceable submersible according to Wikipedia is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiaolong_(submersible)

There are approximately 3 deep sea trenches within range of Kuala Lumpur.

1: Mariana Trench - Close to China.
2: Java Trench - Close to Malaysia.
3: Diamantina Deep - Long way from China/Malaysia.Serviceable from Australia, but not without Chinese submersible.

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/wha ... world.html

I'd like to see foreclosure on this mystery,but it's up to Imarsat,NTSB & Air Maylasia to say hey...'we needed to think outside the square'.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MH370/comments ... h=73b3258b

While I get why the reasons for the disappearance occured, is it still worth the cost for the search? Seems all they are looking for is the how/why. Several years later, I'm just not sure finding the aircraft will make a difference.

Australian man claims he has found MH370 on Google Earth while pouring over images for the past 4 years

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/ma ... spartanntp

From what i have heard internally, there is no cost if they don't find anything, but a sizeable payday if they do....

qf789 wrote:

Australian man claims he has found MH370 on Google Earth while pouring over images for the past 4 years

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/ma ... spartanntp

Sad to say but I think the grief of loosing family made this man loose his mind. That isn't even satellite imagery, Google Earth Water is all cgi. In addition, there is no way the wreckage would be visible to satellite cameras.

If .... and I say if as there are other possibilities... the pilot deliberately flew the plane into the Indian ocean, how is it not possible...assuming that he was smart enough to turn off the transponder... that he also turned off the data recorders so that even if the plane is located we will learn nothing. Maybe they can't be turned off/disabled, but I think when data needs to be preserved, such as a close accident, they can be disabled. Maybe that is only possible on the ground.

Since many years have passed. Can we assume the cause will be known only if:
1) the plane water-landed and then submerged; or
2) an engine or other large parts of the airplane are found and show an explosion/decompression

I am not familiar but would be surprised if the black boxes can be recovered and meaningfull data obtained.

airtechy wrote:

If .... and I say if as there are other possibilities... the pilot deliberately flew the plane into the Indian ocean, how is it not possible...assuming that he was smart enough to turn off the transponder... that he also turned off the data recorders so that even if the plane is located we will learn nothing. Maybe they can't be turned off/disabled, but I think when data needs to be preserved, such as a close accident, they can be disabled. Maybe that is only possible on the ground.

Exactly my thoughts.

airtechy wrote:

If .... and I say if as there are other possibilities... the pilot deliberately flew the plane into the Indian ocean, how is it not possible...assuming that he was smart enough to turn off the transponder... that he also turned off the data recorders so that even if the plane is located we will learn nothing.

We can learn a lot just by finding out whose bones are found on the flight deck.

airtechy wrote:

If .... and I say if as there are other possibilities... the pilot deliberately flew the plane into the Indian ocean, how is it not possible...assuming that he was smart enough to turn off the transponder... that he also turned off the data recorders so that even if the plane is located we will learn nothing.

If the FDR's circuit breaker was pulled, that is a pretty big piece of evidence in itself.

The bigger worry is whether the FDR and CVR storage media will still be readable when the plane is found. I say "when" because I'm 100% confident it will be... someday. Whether it's now or 100 years from now, who knows, but somebody will find it at some point. Even if it's now, though, it's been in salt water a long time. Before AF447 was found, the same worry existed - that the storage media would have physically broken down to the point that it could no longer be read. Luckily it could still be read in that case, but there's no guarantee that'll be true in MH370's case and the longer it's in the water, the less likely it is.

There'd *still* be plenty of physical evidence to go on, but it would be a lot more difficult to definitively determine a cause, especially if it really was deliberate (in which case there might not be definitive positive evidence, just a lot of negative evidence for other causes). We might be stuck with a "likely" cause in such case.

The baffling thing is that if it were done on purpose, no reasoning was left behind to explain the motivation. If it was political, suicide, hijack, etc. Usually the perpetrator would make some statement to show their motivation. Why make a plane disappear so that no one knows why?

buzzard302 wrote:

The baffling thing is that if it were done on purpose, no reasoning was left behind to explain the motivation. If it was political, suicide, hijack, etc. Usually the perpetrator would make some statement to show their motivation. Why make a plane disappear so that no one knows why?

You may look into suicide cases and attempts and you`ll get an idea. Look up Fedex 705. The attacker had lost all perspectives. His marriage was in shambles, one day after the attempt, he would have faced loosing his job due to lying regarding his flight hours. Nearly every aspect of his life was hopeless. He was ready to kill three totally innocent people, he didn`t care at all and fought hard to kill them for minutes. The only thing left for him that mattered was his kid. He wanted him to be well- and to remember him in good faith. He didn`t want him to know he committed suicide. So he planned to cover it up. He could have brought a gun and with it, his success would have been guaranteed. But those bullets would have proven his suicide. The insurance wouldn`t have paid anything for his kid. The day before his carefuly planned suicide, he transfered all his money to his wife to care for their child.

He brought a guitar case with a hammer, a knife and a fish gun. Unsuspicious objects. He attacked the pilots with the hammer, broke their scull to make it look like crash related injuries. He pulled the cvr circuit breaker before flight, but the engeneer saw it and reversed it. He probably planned to fly for 30 minutes afterwards before crashing to erase audio recordings of the flight.

But to his suprise, unbelievably, the flight crew, badly ingured, survived and fought back. And ultimately won. A miracle. There`s a dramatic mayday episode covering it.

If he would have succeded, his son would have benefitted from his suicide due to insurance paiments and wouldn`t have known that he took his own life and murdered three innocent people he didn`t even knew.

Another interesting case to get an idea on how planned suicides look like is SilkAir Flight MI-185.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/19/news/unexplained-disaster-insufficient-evidence-of-murder-3-years-after.html
The pilot`s career went downhill fast, his marriage was problematic, he had huge losses. The cvr circuit breaker was pulled first when he left for the loo, and when his copilot left the cockpit, the fdr was pulled too.

After that the plane made a dive and impacted into a river. As the circuit breaker makes a popping noise when it triggers, this noise is the last thing captured on tape. This noise wasn`t on the cvr, so ntsb concluded suicide, as there was no other malefunction observed, but the indonesian investigators didn`t concur and blamed technical malfunction. I don`t know if the insurance money was payed to his familiy.

So there are examples of carefully planning suicidal pilots in the past that wanted to turn their suicide into a profit for their families and hide the shambolic fact that they commited suicide.

The captain of MH370 was in process of divorce. He lived with his family in a expensive guarded priviledged neighbourhood. There is little known of how his career was going. But somewhere I read that this was his first flight since three month. I don`t know if this is normal for pilots and if this is a bad sign. He had some political agendas with the malaysian government too.

If, and I really mean if this was like the others, he might have tried a new coverup. Every other reachable destination with the amount of fuel at hands would have been in busy shipping lanes, and debris would have been found very soon. Down way south in the indian ocean, very few ships pass. Very few airliners cross the flightpath. And if it worked out, without transponder, nobody would have thought to look where the search takes place now. If he really planned this well, he might have looked up ocean maps for depth where the effective AF447`s robotic submarines can`t operate and aim for them.

If a mystery looks planned like avoiding radar etc., it probably is.

If I would have to investigate the mystery, I would take a look if a malaysian IP adress browsed for AF447 on wiki or google, the autonomous submarines and their capabilitys (only very few views on them, so ip`s are easy to analyse), the silkair flight , 705, and other suicide flights, wiki page of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, and i would ask high-ranking google websides with depdh and ocean information for weblogs. I would also look at logs on Websides covering Indonesian, thai and malaysian radar sites, pilot navigation websides where you can look at flight points in the indian ocean. I think I would look for logs covering 2-3 weekls before MH370 vanished.

If there is an IP in several of this logs, gathering all this information, and you could link that information to a person, the plot thickens. I would then analyze what that ip also searched for e.g. on wiki to get additional information for the search area determination.

Probably too late now, nobody keeps weblogs for so long.

And I don`t buy the intended depressurization theory. 10 days before MH370 vanished, another plane was hijacked by the pilot. The passengers did nothing for hours.

So he could have known how passengers reacted to hijacking, and if he continued for all these hours with the depressurization idea, his oxygen suppy would have been empty way before he could glide the plane as far as possible while creating as little debris as possible.

I don`t know why they ruled out an piloted glide due to retracted flaps. In this scenario, he wouldn`t want anybody to survive and use rescue beakons. He would have tried to bring it down in a leathal manner with the least debris as possible. And flaps would have slowed the plane and reduced the gliding distance. So far, only extrerior debris was found, it looks like the fuselage stayed rather intact or maybe like QZ8501, which came down without flaps and little debris.

I am pretty shure that they will not find the plane in the the proposed search area. It`s further out. A good bet would be on the flight sim path they found, at maximum glide distance from the 7th arc, using best glide ratio, flaps up all the way to impact. The Azore glider made 120km and still had altitude left for 360`s. So 130-140km south from the 7th arc would be my guess.

If they don`t find it, it looks like this:
- Nobody knows what happened.
- Insurance money paid out
- The captain vanished in the greatest airliner mystery ever

If they find it, it may look like this:
- Everybody, including other fedex705-type of suicide guys know that no matter what you do, they find out. They may choose another way to die.
- The murderer will be known for killing 238 innocent mothers, childs and fathers
- The mystery is solved

Or they find out, that it was a freak technical problem after all and nobody is at fault and all those suspicions where baseless.

So it makes a huge difference if it is found or not, probably most for future passengers of fedex 705 type of guys.

I heard that the CVR/FDR loops over every 2 hours. Even if they found this plane on day 1, we still wouldn't know what happened on the flight deck when he first changed course...

sovietjet wrote:

I heard that the CVR/FDR loops over every 2 hours. Even if they found this plane on day 1, we still wouldn't know what happened on the flight deck when he first changed course...

CVR loop varies, 2 hours maximum I believe.

FDR would have covered that flight and several previous flights.

7BOEING7 wrote:

sovietjet wrote:

I heard that the CVR/FDR loops over every 2 hours. Even if they found this plane on day 1, we still wouldn't know what happened on the flight deck when he first changed course...

CVR loop varies, 2 hours maximum I believe.

FDR would have covered that flight and several previous flights.

The airline I worked out the CVR was 25 hours. Non Union tho.

32andBelow wrote:

7BOEING7 wrote:

sovietjet wrote:

I heard that the CVR/FDR loops over every 2 hours. Even if they found this plane on day 1, we still wouldn't know what happened on the flight deck when he first changed course...

CVR loop varies, 2 hours maximum I believe.

FDR would have covered that flight and several previous flights.

The airline I worked out the CVR was 25 hours. Non Union tho.

You mean FDR? I don't remember ever seeing a CVR more than 2 hours.

o0OOO0oChris wrote:

buzzard302 wrote:

The captain of MH370 was in process of divorce. He lived with his family in a expensive guarded priviledged neighbourhood. There is little known of how his career was going. But somewhere I read that this was his first flight since three month. I don`t know if this is normal for pilots and if this is a bad sign. He had some political agendas with the malaysian government too.

Pretty much all of this is incorrect. The Daily Mails claims re. divorce were discredited by the source of the story. The guy appeared to be stable. The captains previous flight was 4 days earlier, to Denpasar, per the factual information. He did evidently have political leanings, though.

The flight sim data, as details have emerged, does seem incriminating (although there are alternative explanations for this). However, should the Captain be responsible, the lack of behavioural clues, even in hindsight, would stand this and stark contrast to every other incident of pilot murder-suicide.

And it still doesn't explain why, if suicide, the aircraft didn't just make a more "natural" disappearance into the South China Sea or "accidental" CFIT into one of the more remote mountains in China...

All that flying backwards and forwards seems like far too much bother and is far too weird and noteworthy. If you want to make it look like an accident then that wasn't how to do it.

The search ship is currently returning to port (Fremantle) to resupply. The second of 4 searches has now been completed with no promising sonar returns identifying the aircraft

https://www.airlineratings.com/news/mh3 ... -resupply/

buzzard302 wrote:

The baffling thing is that if it were done on purpose, no reasoning was left behind to explain the motivation. If it was political, suicide, hijack, etc. Usually the perpetrator would make some statement to show their motivation. Why make a plane disappear so that no one knows why?

SomebodyInTLS wrote:

And it still doesn't explain why, if suicide, the aircraft didn't just make a more "natural" disappearance into the South China Sea or "accidental" CFIT into one of the more remote mountains in China...

All that flying backwards and forwards seems like far too much bother and is far too weird and noteworthy. If you want to make it look like an accident then that wasn't how to do it.

Some have suggested maybe the pilot would want tp damage the reputation pf authority by making it hard for them to find out what happened and where did they go

Just for the sake of debate and with all respect to all persons involved:
Let's say the pilot wanted to kill himself for some reason but wanted to still get the insurance payments to his family? Wouldn't this be a reason to let the plane dissapear instead of making it possible to prove that it was crashed intentional?

c933103 wrote:

Some have suggested maybe the pilot would want tp damage the reputation pf authority by making it hard for them to find out what happened and where did they go

"I'm going to kill myself and hundreds of others in about the most complicated and difficult way I can think up, just so some people might think 'tut tut tut, that Malaysian government isn't doing a very good job finding that missing aircraft'"...

Really!?

Noshow wrote:

Just for the sake of debate and with all respect to all persons involved:
Let's say the pilot wanted to kill himself for some reason but wanted to still get the insurance payments to his family? Wouldn't this be a reason to let the plane dissapear instead of making it possible to prove that it was crashed intentional?

Okay, but again; I expect a more everyday disappearance would have been easier to plan and far more convincing. The fact we are still debating this years later proves that it was a complete failure in that respect.

c933103 wrote:

Some have suggested maybe the pilot would want tp damage the reputation pf authority by making it hard for them to find out what happened and where did they go

He was on the KUL-MEL a couple of flights earlier (and flew that sector regularly). No need to re-cross the Malay peninsular. The deed is done at the intersection of 4 FIR's - Brisbane, Melbourne and the two Indonesian FIRs, WIIF and WIIZ.

buzzard302 wrote:

The baffling thing is that if it were done on purpose, no reasoning was left behind to explain the motivation. If it was political, suicide, hijack, etc. Usually the perpetrator would make some statement to show their motivation. Why make a plane disappear so that no one knows why?

Maybe he has left reasoning behind, and it's with him on the flight deck. Ultimately you can look at it as he wanted to make it very hard to find/retrieve the plane, to gather maximum exposure the longer it draws on. And, you could expect that the Captain (if it is so) might not have even expected it to take this long to find the plane and therefore the "reasoning" in the first place. I'd say he likely knew it would be found, but tried his damned hardest to delay so.

When Andreas Lubitz flew the Germanwings plane into the alps, he didn't offer any reasoning as far as I can remember. Subsequently it was pieced together and i'm sure if and when it is confirmed who did MH370, the pieces will made available and better to understand.

Until we know exactly what happened, or by whom, everything is speculative.

Folks, sadly, this plane will not be found. It would be a true miracle to find it at this point. The ocean is vast and quite frankly, no one knows where it went down. The only thing we really know is that it went down in the Indian Ocean, but beyond that, there is very little to substantiate where it is.

A while back, a large piece of the starboard wing flap washed up on a beach in Reunion. Why isn't the search focused on that half of the Indian Ocean?

FriscoHeavy wrote:

Folks, sadly, this plane will not be found. It would be a true miracle to find it at this point. The ocean is vast and quite frankly, no one knows where it went down. The only thing we really know is that it went down in the Indian Ocean, but beyond that, there is very little to substantiate where it is.

I agree, and i wish they'd let it rest. The oceans are filled with thousands of plane and shipwrecks and we let those rest as well.
So consider it a burial at sea, and be at peace.
The money spend on this could be used in better ways.

You believe that the plane will be found. So,you must be thinking that it only lost a flapperon upon ditching and that the rest is intact? Can't you see from the nature of the twenty or so pieces found so far only in Madagascar and Reunion (and nowhere else) that it disintegrated totally?

aerlingusa330 wrote:

A while back, a large piece of the starboard wing flap washed up on a beach in Reunion. Why isn't the search focused on that half of the Indian Ocean?

Read the reports of the complex drift simulations and that will show you why.

TLDR: Where and when things have washed up matches currents from the location being searched. (If it landed near Africa then the debris would not have washed up in the same places at the same times.)

I know I keep banging on against the endless "pilot did it" statements, but I can't help wondering why everyone jumps to that conclusion. Look at the number of missing aircraft over the last decades (dozens) then look at the number of incidents caused by suicidal pilots (can count on one hand).

1) there is no historical precedent for suicide to be a common cause of incidents
2) there is no evidence the pilot was suicidal
2a) the pilot had a comfortable life, no financial or family issues (despite claims to the contrary)
2b) the pilot had no extremist tendencies (despite claims to the contrary)
3) the flight absolutely does NOT match any previous (alleged) suicides where the pilot simply flew straight into the ground / the sea
3a) likewise for political / terrorist causes, where you want to make a grand statement - not disappear!
4) complete lack of motive
5) complete lack of revelation (terrorist statement, suicide note, etc.)

The thing is, I'm not ruling it out - but why does everyone want to *START* from that assumption and then try to make the facts fit - however unlikely?

Bavd wrote:

FriscoHeavy wrote:

Folks, sadly, this plane will not be found. It would be a true miracle to find it at this point. The ocean is vast and quite frankly, no one knows where it went down. The only thing we really know is that it went down in the Indian Ocean, but beyond that, there is very little to substantiate where it is.

I agree, and i wish they'd let it rest. The oceans are filled with thousands of plane and shipwrecks and we let those rest as well.
So consider it a burial at sea, and be at peace.
The money spend on this could be used in better ways.

I question what "better ways" this money could be spent. Also, as has been pointed out numerous times, no money will be spent here except by the search company unless they find the plane. And the search company isn't going to spend their money any better way; this is a case where you can literally say to someone, "you have one job". This is what they do. They're not going to take that money and instead put it into cancer research.

Second, no, we don't have any outstanding planes or ships missing that would have a direct impact on the safety of other planes and ships still in service. That is the obvious difference here. Even so, we still found the Titanic 70 years after it went down. There really aren't very many ship or plane disappearances in the last 50 years that remain unfound. You could probably count them on one hand. And I guarantee that somebody is still searching for all of them.

SomebodyInTLS wrote:

The thing is, I'm not ruling it out - but why does everyone want to *START* from that assumption and then try to make the facts fit - however unlikely?

Nobody started from that assumption. We spent about 100 pages debating other possible causes before both those with direct knowledge of the airplane *and* the authorities decided there was no other plausible cause. There's no point re-debating it now - go back and look at the many reasons why no other cause fits. It's all spelled out in the original thread.

Also, just a general thing - any time any sort of mass murder happens, people try to figure out "why". That's the wrong question. As someone who's had to take care of someone suffering from mental illness, I can tell you firsthand that people are imperfect beings and often there is no reason for them to have a sudden detachment from reality. It's termed a psychotic break. My mother went through that after her brother died. But the trigger could be anything; usually it's something so small that it's easily overlooked, because it's not something that would affect most people in that way. Even when a relative dies, most people mourn for a while and then get on with their lives. But my mother, for whatever reason, became absolutely convinced that the government was going to come and arrest her for murdering her brother. And she believed that she actually had. She never had exhibited thoughts like these before. We ended up having to commit her against her will, and she never recovered. She took medication to control these thoughts for the rest of her life, which was short and ended in an assisted living facility at an age when most people are still working and living productively.

In many cases, there is no "why" when it comes to human behavior. We are imperfect and unpredictable. We do not have anything but the most basic understanding of how the brain works. Asking "why" is to ask an impossible question - it's kind of like asking a doctor from the middle ages how tuberculosis works.

*Sometimes* there is an obvious trail of depression and woe. In those cases, that person really wanted help and didn't get it, or at least didn't get any that was actually effective - the trail they left behind was that call for help.

In other cases, there's nothing. That person just broke with reality and nobody knows why, and likely never will in our lifetimes. Not until we have vastly better medical knowledge about the human brain.

Note that I am not saying this was definitively a mass murder. I'm saying there's no other cause that fits the facts as we currently know them. And that's why it's so important to find the plane. If it was some other cause, we'd better find that out so we can prevent a recurrence. The only way it would be acceptable to leave this plane alone and stop the search would be if we *did* know for sure it was mass murder. Then you can sew things up and close the case.

spacecadet wrote:

SomebodyInTLS wrote:

The thing is, I'm not ruling it out - but why does everyone want to *START* from that assumption and then try to make the facts fit - however unlikely?

Nobody started from that assumption. We spent about 100 pages debating other possible causes

I really don't recall it like that. People were saying it practically from the beginning. I mean literally the first couple of pages (if I wasn't writing from a phone I might try digging it up). Not helped by the media hinting at it and various Malaysian officials not denying it if not actually encouraging it.

both those with direct knowledge of the airplane *and* the authorities decided there was no other plausible cause.

That is simply not the case! Neither experts nor authorities have said any such thing!

If the current search does not turn up anything; will there be another search in the near future?

SomebodyInTLS wrote:

aerlingusa330 wrote:

A while back, a large piece of the starboard wing flap washed up on a beach in Reunion. Why isn't the search focused on that half of the Indian Ocean?

Read the reports of the complex drift simulations and that will show you why.

TLDR: Where and when things have washed up matches currents from the location being searched. (If it landed near Africa then the debris would not have washed up in the same places at the same times.)

Makes complete sense, thanks for the brief recap. Cheers.

Even if they found the black box, would any of it be readable after 4 years in the ocean?

STLflyer wrote:

Even if they found the black box, would any of it be readable after 4 years in the ocean?

The FDR and the CVR from AF447 were completely readable after 2 years in the ocean. We can assume the data would hold six or even eight years, but we can't be sure - of course.


David

I've never posted in any of the MH370 threads before, but I've always been very interested in the event as an av-geek and because I happened to have flown MH1 from LHR to KUL later on the day that MH370 disappeared. What's spurring my post now is an article in today's Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ ... -the-plane) that surprised me.

The article states that the current official Malaysian and Australian government theory of the event is hypoxia. I've always believed the rogue/suicidal pilot theory for two reasons -
1. the plane's beacon stopped working at precisely the point when it was crossing from KUL to SGN ATC, and
2. I thought the plane subsequently turned to follow a path across the Malaysian peninsula and then up the Malacca Straight, precisely vectoring from waypoint to waypoint, directly over the Malaysian and the Thai border, before turning over the Indian Ocean.

To me, those two things are much too coincidental to indicate anything other than a flight very much under the control of an experienced pilot. And honestly, I'm not concerned about our inability to understand the pilot's motive as I don't think many of us living can understand suicide.

With all that said, I REALLY do not want to start another conversation about what happened to MH370. We all have our individual beliefs and maybe someday some of us will be proved right and others will be proved wrong. What I am hoping is that others here can help me understand whether I'm remembering the two events stated above correctly. Did the plane's beacon stop as it was handed off from one ATC center to another? Did it subsequently follow a flight path with several precise waypoint to waypoint maneuvers along the Malaysian and Thai border?

Thanks for helping me to remember the facts.