Whitey Grandad

Very clever. That means they must have a means of knowing the exact frequency of the replies from the aircraft. There is also the timing of the replies to look at. The satellite sends time slot references telling the object when to transmit and the position within this slot gives some indication of the distance the message has travelled. Unless there was more information involved as has been mentioned above.

Unless they were all asleep then it's always possible that somebody would have known where they were. The moon was first quarter that night and set at 01:29 so if I read that right it should still have been visible when they made their turn to the left. Then there are geeks like me who look at their compasses or GPS location just out of interest. I flew up through France next to a young boy who gleefully showed me everything we were passing on a map on his phone.

If it was VHF then anybody could have overheard it and the Americans and others almost certainly did. If Squidgy tapes and others can turn up from (cough) amateur radio enthusiasts then eventually these recordings would seep out.

Of course, but you don't want to make a habit of losing. What lessons did we learn from yesterday? “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”

So... the more you lose the better you'll be?

Losing can only be negative. If it weren't then every club would be doing it.

But that was to the old company, or was it the one before? Any payment would no longer be liable, and if it were it would surely be diluted to 5p in the pound (or whatever) and that would be diluted again...

I still would.

More importantly, will there ground meet the minimum requirements of the Conference? And if they are relegated, is it good enough for the Football League?

2-0 is always a dangerous lead. If the other side gets one back the momentum is all with them. Having said that, sloppy errors cost us yesterday. That's 2 sloppy games in a row.

You can't really complain about the referee, he could have given them a penalty but decided it wasn't a foul.

I sincerely hope we're not going to blame the referee for losing that today?

Actually we stopped playing a few weeks ago.

We stopped playing at half time.

Adam!

J-Rod!

Nayim's was better.

Yes indeed. I too have been misquoted in the press at a very local level, in fact they used a phrase that I hadn't uttered, so I now treat all press reports with a degree of scepticism. Reporters are always told to look for 'the story' and if they don't find one they are likely to invent one.

Ok, thanks.

Thanks for taking the time to post your comments, West Stand, any info is interesting. One more question that you professionals may be able to answer. I heard someone say that if there were a fire then the pilots would use special masks and that these had their own microphones. Is it possible that the crew could have 'forgotten' to plug these in if they were overcome by circumstances?

Oh yes please, pretty please with bells on. A few years in the Conference and I might actually start to think that they have served their time.

Sorry to hear that Gemmel. A pet is part of the family and even though you know that they don't live forever it's still a sad loss. We lost our Norfolk Terrier when I was in my late teens. We don't know what happened to him, he just got out of the garden and never came back. We think he was run over by a car but never had any proof. He was my best friend.

So , plane continues to fly for seven hours or so with no ACARS, IFF or more importantly, comms? Did anybody else see the programme on Channel 4 last night? Nothing much new except a comment that the turn to port and routing over the Malay peninsular took the aircraft along the borders between all the ATC areas of responsibility and at an altitude of 29,500 feet which they said was also on the boundary of control boxes so I'd appreciate one of our resident pilots commenting on this aspect. There are several aspects of this whole business that raise alarm bells with me. The pilot had a flight simulator at home, he had been practising landings on several runways to the west and north of where they started, he had deleted a lot of files just before leaving for this flight. The IFF is turned off and possibly the ACARS at the same time (it certainly doesn't report any more) just before the co-pilot signs off from Malaysian ATC with "ok, good night" which seems somewhat informal to some. They twice reported that they had reached 39,500 (I think) ft. Wouldn't they normally only do this once? My theory, for what it's worth, is that the pilot/crew wanted to make a political statement by taking the aircraft with its passengers somewhere to the north and keeping them hostage. Then something went wrong, maybe a fire, maybe decompression, and the aircraft continues in autopilot until the fuel runs out, or it's shot down.

I think you're right. I get the impression that it was only after checking the recordings that they found anything, and that was only after a couple of days because they hadn't found anything in the sea.

If he didn't see the handball then how could he see who to send off?