Very plausible, though I believe they said it was supposed to be a 6ish hr flight and the plane had enough fuel for 7.5 hrs. So I dot think it would have run out of fuel...

that info from Rolls Royce engine monitoring data sure is crazy

I found this statement from the link particularly interesting..
"At one briefing, according to this person, officials were told investigators are actively pursuing the notion that the plane was diverted "with the intention of using it later for another purpose.""

"Ghost plane" sounds like a phantom plane or some kinda horror movie thing, I think people got confused by the term (I know I did).

It had the fuel, but what would the autopilot be doing? IIRC there are scenarios that kick the plane back into manual control as well, but if the plane was up for ~5hrs as alleged wouldn't that be roughly the amount of the flight that the plane would be in AP for? After that, what does the system do? Any of our helpful pilots care to chime in?

i prefer the upper deck business and if im ever in sight of the flight deck the captain/co-captain gives me the :suspicious: look when im watching them speak on the intercom :lol

with security concerns you'd think they'd be able to do that with the door closed

flew for around 4 more hours? gaddamn..what's going?

This is just get more and more mysterious. I hope they find out what happened soon so that the families can get closure. I can't imagine what they are going through right now.

So if the engines are sending back data ever 30 minutes why can't they also send GPS coordinates well.

If the people that were on the plane still alive, i hope they know how to make a sos signal out of fire

NO....i pissed myself drunk & passed out on the way to tokyo

ummm......

note: I don't know if these all apply to the 777, I'm not rated on that aircraft, but on a similar type. Also, I speak with experience from my own experience, each airline has different operating procedures.

Most Medium/Long Haul flights will take off without the arrival procedures (ILS and STAR if you want terms) programmed into the computer, as doing so is practically useless as conditions at the destination airport can change in 6-12 hours. That being said, if the aircraft arrives at a point of which is has nothing to follow anymore, it will simply maintain the heading and altitude or hold (Goes into HDG HOLD and ALT HOLD as opposed to LNAV and VNAV if you're keen), and keep going until someone does something to it - though not too sure, as it's not something I've personally done before; but it will definitely not "GIVE UP" so to say.

In Boeing aircraft (at least on mine), the Autopilot will not be "kicked out" unless the following occurs:
- You turn it off (duh)
- Autothrottle will turn off with an engine failure in certain engines (RR engines do this)
- Kicking of the rudder pedals
- Flight Director kicks out at Low airspeed (approaching stall)
- Over speed
- AP Failures (but there's 3? I think, on a 777)
and some others, but depressurization - no matter how quick or how slow, will not cause it to disengage

However, no matter what you do with the autopilot on, once it enters an area of radar coverage it will be picked up, and assuming that nobody has touched the transponder ident code (commonly referred to as squack code), it will remain as MH370 on the radar scope.

Fun note: everything on airplanes nowadays are fail "safe". meaning if a component fails for whatever reason it will fail in the position that favours the situation rather than make it worse.

^ thanks, that's kind of what I figured. It gives some possibility to the "depressurization knocking out the pilots" theories, but if it did then somebody would have picked it up on radar. I've been doing some reading on a pilots forum as well, and apparently the gap in between the contact with ground crews would be very small, so small that if it was highjacked the person(s) doing it were either really, really goo, or the pilots had to have been involved to know when thy were in that gap. edit: According to a National Post article, the plane disappeared only 3 minutes after Malaysian ATC told the pilots they were being handed over to the Vietnamese ATC.

Also after reading that forum, I learned that it's possible someone could have disabled the systems without accessing the cockpit, if they were familiar with that airplane and able to get into the circuit breaker maintenance panels. Of course I have no idea where those are in this type of plane and how easily someone could get to them, but supposedly this happened on SilkAir Flight 185 which crashed in 1997 (only the data recorder were shut off though).

I just read the whole thing, from the sounds of it they've gone to the home of at least one of the pilots, the engines may have been running for another 4 hours (or possibly up to 2200nm), and they're now downplaying the whole "picked up by military radar" bit. As well they're considering the possibility that someone stole the plane and is basically hiding it somewhere for future use.

And to think, some of you were brushing off the "landed at a secret airstrip" theory.

Though this doesn't mean it couldn't have continued.
Posted via RS Mobile

jesus christ! with all this what seems to be legit news and then denial, we almost need a list of what is 'officially confirmed' and what is just rubbish.

now there's talk about those chinese images from yesterday being nothing... the word that sums up this whole situation is definitely 'unprecedented' - but i would also like to say, i think someone somewhere is fucking up big time, either something related to the plane or with the search effort - it just seems so poorly organized. well, given it's unprecedented, i'll allow some leeway, but still, how have we not found the craft yet?

^ the problem is the officials seem to be BSing everything, they won't confirm or deny things at all.

Allegedly the pilot had a very elaborate flight simulator set up in his house, how elaborate I don't know but I'd be curious to know what kind of flying he had been doing with it.

I really don't know what to believe now

There's also rumors started from a Australian media outlet that the younger co-pilot had invited women into the cockpit a couple years ago during a flight from Phuket but so far there's been to one to collaborate the story or any incident report.

And sounds like the pilot had a home cockpit, there pretty common amongst the flight simming community. Good examples over at avsim.

I agree, don't know what to believe anymore. There's so many theories floating around, the RR engine data one was struck down by Malaysian officials but supposedly US officials say it's valid info and they're looking into it. There's also radar experts that flew in with US officials and they're going to use radar plots to see if they can track the plane.

And personally I don't trust the Malaysian officials, something seems to be off about this entire crash. Feels like someone is covering up information, whether it be a hijacking or shoddy maintenance on the plane that went down there's information that isn't been forthcoming. Just remember that Malaysia airlines is owned by the Malaysian government and the airline has been going through a financial crisis.

The RR info is interesting. I've heard airlines do have this information, but I really have no information about it.

The home cockpit thing I find a little strange. The guy has enough experience to be a captain of a 777. No small feat. Yet he has one at home to practice on as well? Either, incompetent, or just plane crazy. Ok, this comment was probably not needed.

Wait and see, but there is no doubt, this shit is getting crazy.

Incompetent is probably one of the last word you would use to describe this particular pilot. Have some respect.

I don't see why it has anything to do...

The BF of a friend is a pilot for our air force... and he has a very crazy flight sim setup at home, in which he always jokes about he prepares the job he would do once retiring from the air force (becoming a commercial pilot)

they showed it on tv the other day it looked like it was just a joystick and his computer monitor similar to this

http://s2.hubimg.com/u/270967_f260.jpg

nothing fancy from the looks of it

I know several pilots of varying skill (1 airliner pilot, 1 military jet fighter, 3 small aircraft pilots) almost all of them have a simulator at home and all of them play with remote controlled planes/choppers
I think they're just passionate about flying is all and its seemingly a trait they all have

While I don't think it necessarily tells us much...

http://resources3.news.com.au/images...e6a43f024e.jpg

I would hardly call that a plain old joystick and computer monitor.

ur right, it's a plain old joystick and 5 monitors!

Gotta love free alcohol during overseas flights. :thumbsup: