Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

(22-03-2014 16:48 )southlondonphil Wrote:  

(21-03-2014 20:19 )babelover48 Wrote:  has it ever been proven that lithium batteries are unstable at altitude?

Who knows? On Friday it was said in the daily press conference that the lithium batteries were highly flammable and even more so at altitude and the idea of the batteries causing a fire on the plane was a real possibility. Then today they backtracked on that, saying that the batteries were being carried in accordance with all safety regulations and they didn't believe the batteries would have caused a fire and they had closed that line of enquiry.

It wasn't unusual to see them backtrack on this.

(22-03-2014 15:13 )babelover48 Wrote:  so could we be looking at Sky pirates being on board?

If you wanted to carry out a heist of that nature the sensible way of doing it wouldn't be to hijack the plane. That's way too risky. The right way of doing it would be to steal the gold or valuables on the ground.

(22-03-2014 17:00 )babelover48 Wrote:  It wasn't unusual to see them backtrack on this.

It was a surprise to me because in the last 23 years there have been 141 air incidents involving batteries with most of them being lithium batteries. The last reported incident was as recently as January and the last time a plane had to make an emergency landing because batteries in the cargo hold had caught fire was only last September.

Aviation incidents involving batteries which caused smoke, fire, extreme heat or explosion:
http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/head..._chart.pdf

(22-03-2014 17:32 )marlowe Wrote:  The right way of doing it would be to steal the gold or valuables on the ground.

That would be mission impossible due to the level of security you would need to overcome, unless you had inside help of course. I suggest getting someone on the inside to switch the cargo for you and to make the crime hard to detect you could arrange for the plane to crash, as that way nobody would know that the genuine cargo was never aboard the plane.

(22-03-2014 11:47 )alien lifeform Wrote:  They may have been overcome by the fumes and the smoke before they could issue a mayday.

Pilots have oxygen masks which can be put on in about 2 seconds, so it's improbable that they would have been overcome by smoke.

I hope that they can confirm soon that the debris spotted today from the plane or is it possible they have seen the same debris that was spotted earlier?
I do think now it is time for the Americans now need to put out what information they do know even if the plane flew anywhere near Diego Garcia. I feel that their information could go a long way to getting one step closer to the true extent of the plane's disappearance.

We need to move on from this fire hypothesis. A fire that was big enough to speedily overcome the pilots would also speedily overwhelm and destroy the plane. Debris would have been found by now, somewhere close to the point where the plane's transponder signal was lost.

(22-03-2014 20:58 )space watson Wrote:  

(22-03-2014 17:32 )marlowe Wrote:  The right way of doing it would be to steal the gold or valuables on the ground.

That would be mission impossible due to the level of security you would need to overcome, unless you had inside help of course. I suggest getting someone on the inside to switch the cargo for you and to make the crime hard to detect you could arrange for the plane to crash, as that way nobody would know that the genuine cargo was never aboard the plane.

I would agree it would be pretty much mission impossible it would still have to be a sophisticated operation to even evade security and even then you have to ensure you could produce believable paperwork that would need to look authenticate your right to be in that area in the first place. but even so switching the cargo wouldn't be easy as you'd have to find sutiable replacement for the original cargo.

(22-03-2014 22:16 )babelover48 Wrote:  even if the plane flew anywhere near Diego Garcia.

If the area they are searching now is truly the area where the plane went down then it just had to have flown close to Diego Garcia. What I don't understand is how it can fly past a major military base without being seen? Surely it wasn't flying low enough to evade radar for all that distance?

(22-03-2014 22:25 )admiral decker Wrote:  A fire that was big enough to speedily overcome the pilots would also speedily overwhelm and destroy the plane.

Exactly right. It would need a major fire to prevent the pilots from issuing a mayday and yet the plane flew on for another 7 hours. Enough said.