Malaysia Airlines Flight Goes Missing En Route to China

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/tech_ops/read.main/62671/ Conversation about flying above 45,000 ft. Is long, but there it is:
On another site it talks about that it is hard to draw the air into the lungs from the mask at that altitude before you pass out...

Kevi747

"I believe I've been to 45,000 ft in a 767. Is that possible?"

Not legally / safely. See below for the max alts.

"When airplanes are heavy (fuel for very long trip) they are far from able to reach high levels... With my 747, we can barely reach 29,000 feet when we are fully loaded for a trip from Argentina to Europe, yet, at the end of the cruise flights, we occasionally are at 39,000 feet... I hardly ever fly at the maximum certificated of 45,000 feet..."

B747skipper sums this topic up nicely. On the 757-200 we can go to 42,000ft (in practice FL410) and on the 767-300 we can go to 43,100ft (in practice FL430).

I have never seen these levels in passenger service on either aircraft. We fly our 757s with 235 passengers and our 767-300s with 315-328 passengers. Our flights are nearly always full.

On transatlantic trips with the B763 FL290 - FL320 is about the highest we can go initially, with the optimum level hanging around the FL305 mark. Getting a NAT track at FL320 is about right as the optimum level will be rising as our gross weight reduces along the track and we can "bracket" the optimum level. Remember that at the other end the optimum will likely be above us in the FL345 mark off the top of my head.

Then we can step to FL350 and stay there for the rest of the trip. FL390 sometimes, FL410 only if weather dictates as this is never optimum in our operations due to high ZFW.

On the 757-200 we can usually go straight to FL360/FL370 for a European hop (2-4 hours). Stepping to FL380/FL390 is not really ever worth it unless weather dictates, as the optimum weights to climb to these levels are in the 80,000kg range and often that is less than our ZFW!

Short, empty positioning flights are the exception to these rules - we can go
pretty much straight to FL410 in both aircraft in these cases.

Brons2

"Coffin corner is the reason, you get to a point at higher altitudes that the margin between a stall (as IAS decreases) and overspeed (mach too high) becomes very, very small."

Close but not close enough!! The margin actually becomes zero, so the speed at which high speed buffet and low speed stall occurs becomes the same.

THAT is "Coffin Corner".

It is the reason attempting to out-climb thunderstorm cells is normally a futile exercise since these things can grow to over 60,000ft and you'd hit Coffin Corner long before that.

Very interesting. Do you by any chance have the link that discusses drawing air from the masks at 45,000 feet?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Unfortunately the black box only records the last 2 hours of a flight so we'll most likely never find out what happened even if the black box is found.

Is this true? This is the most depressing point made today. Partly because if they were all unconcious/dead and it was on autopilot for over 2 hours, we'll never know if the pilot was in on it or trying to protect everyone.

Yes, it's a 2 hour loop. We'll never know.

WhY do you people lie so much? WTF is wrong with you???


A flight data recorder is required to store a minimum of 25 hours of flight information. A cockpit voice recorder is required to record a minimum of 2 hours of audio information

You are wrong. This just came up on CNN last night. The expert they interviewed specifically stated that only the last 2 hours of cockpit conversations would be recorded. I have no idea how much info is contained in the flight data recorder but the voice recorder is only 2 hours.

No, the poster is correct. 2 hours CVR, 25 hours FDR. The FDR will have a lot of useful information.

[Anonymous]

So could this plane have really landed in Pakistan?

[Anonymous]

PP here. I was just checking on the depth of the Indian Ocean and some parts are deeper than 20,000 feet which is the deepest the FDR and CVRs are able to keep pinging. I wonder if this jackass was trying to go down in the deepest part of the Indian Ocean so the boxes wouldn't be located and how possible it would be to plan that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So could this plane have really landed in Pakistan?

Pakistan said they'd turn over their radar data if Malaysia would request it, so maybe they haven't requested it? But someone's radar would have sensed it, and Americans have radar not far away. So seems unlikely.

[Anonymous]

My expert understanding of the situation that no one on the site knows what they're talking about.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So could this plane have really landed in Pakistan?

Pakistan said they'd turn over their radar data if Malaysia would request it, so maybe they haven't requested it? But someone's radar would have sensed it, and Americans have radar not far away. So seems unlikely.

You say this like Pakistani is a friendly nation. Their intelligence service is highly anti-American and they have supported our efforts in the past and they may have aided our enemies numerous times over. No one trusts Pakistan.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:PP here. I was just checking on the depth of the Indian Ocean and some parts are deeper than 20,000 feet which is the deepest the FDR and CVRs are able to keep pinging. I wonder if this jackass was trying to go down in the deepest part of the Indian Ocean so the boxes wouldn't be located and how possible it would be to plan that.

What's the motive? Why would someone try to blow up a jet and then hide the work that they died for?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So could this plane have really landed in Pakistan?

Pakistan said they'd turn over their radar data if Malaysia would request it, so maybe they haven't requested it? But someone's radar would have sensed it, and Americans have radar not far away. So seems unlikely.

You say this like Pakistani is a friendly nation. Their intelligence service is highly anti-American and they have supported our efforts in the past and they may have aided our enemies numerous times over. No one trusts Pakistan.

Uh no I never implied they were friendly to the US.

[Anonymous]

Where are they? Debris from the Air France plane was found two days later. It's been a week! I want to believe the passengers and crew are alive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Where are they? Debris from the Air France plane was found two days later. It's been a week! I want to believe the passengers and crew are alive.

It's possible the passengers are being held somewhere alive, but very very very unlikely. The passengers probably died when the plane went up to 45,000 feet, as pps pointed out. If not, then when the plane eventually ran out of fuel and went down. It's a big planet, and God knows where the plane is now. I hope we find it, and find out what happened.

[Anonymous]

With the US military in Afghanistan, Iraq, and monitoring some parts of Pakistan I have doubts about a plane landing in Pakistan without detection.

I was thinking maybe North Korea, but China would know.

I'm just shocked that planes don't have LoJack. It's a 100 million investment and there is no non-disabled, secured manner to locate it?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:With the US military in Afghanistan, Iraq, and monitoring some parts of Pakistan I have doubts about a plane landing in Pakistan without detection.

I was thinking maybe North Korea, but China would know.

I'm just shocked that planes don't have LoJack. It's a 100 million investment and there is no non-disabled, secured manner to locate it?

Lol. It's not that easy to steal an airplane. But maybe from now on the airlines will add that feature to their fleets.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:With the US military in Afghanistan, Iraq, and monitoring some parts of Pakistan I have doubts about a plane landing in Pakistan without detection.

I was thinking maybe North Korea, but China would know.

I'm just shocked that planes don't have LoJack. It's a 100 million investment and there is no non-disabled, secured manner to locate it?

I assume we would know if a plane landed in any country hostile to us. If not, I would be really shocked.

[Anonymous]

Ooh, if another country is helping to hide the plane, they will be in big trouble with China. China could take them down.