Lighthouse

Must have a big microwave.

The flight will probably appear on radar and land 'on time' exactly a week later. Nobody on board will have any idea that anything is wrong.

He had his moments, like the goals against City and Chelsea but there were as many, if not more, games where he went completely missing. Will do a decent enough job for Palace and deserves to be in the (bottom half of the) Premier League but we need to be aiming higher IMO.

That scenario would require a lot of highly unlikely events to all occur within the time this flight took place. For the flight to have reached cruising altitude, one would have to assume the pressurisation, both VHF transmitters and the transponder were all working correctly. If their was a pressurisation fault, a loud warning horn would have sounded in the cockpit once the cabin altitude rose above 10,000ft and the flight would have turned back and descended. If their had been a communications failure whilst in contact with Malaysian ATC we would know about it by now, likewise with a transponder failure. You would need 2 separate compromises to the fuselage within less than an hour, on an aircraft which has been flying for years. Which would have to occur at the exact points on the fuselage of the 2 VHF antenna. The aircraft is purposely designed with these in separate locations as they do occasionally get damaged by birds or lightning. Add to that a transponder failure AND a failure of the cabin altitude warning system, which are all completely separate from each other. It's like buying winning lottery tickets in 4 different lotteries in the same week. I don't want to put it on here but it is a well known European airline.

Boeing redesigned the skins of its aircraft after a Hawaiian Airlines 737 was literally ripped apart in mid air by structural fatigue. Amazingly, it went on to land safely, although a flight attendant was sucked out and lost in the accident. Basically the skin is designed to be weaker in a grid like pattern around the fuselage. If a tear occurs, it should in theory travel to the edge of the grid square and along it's edges. If the tear goes undetected, eventually the square will blow out leaving a roughly foot square hole in the fuselage but maintaining the structural integrity of the aircraft. Again, I would be surprised if this was a factor at all. 777s generally operate long haul and are low cycle aircraft, usually only going through 1 or 2 pressurisation cycles (i.e. flights) in a day. Compare that to a low cost short haul aircraft which will usually do around 6 or possibly 8. The Hawaiian accident occurred on a very old aircraft (about 23 years I think) doing high cycles, hopping around the Haiwaiian islands. As such, I would expect the stress fatigue on the skin to be relatively low on the Malaysian aircraft. Plus the effects of pressurisation are well documented, especially after the comet crashes of the 1950s. Designers learned a lot of lessons (mostly from the window edges) from that.

That would rely on a failure of the pressurisation system AND either the flight crew oxygen supply or the cabin altitude warning horn. It would take a highly unlikely coincidence for that to happen. Boeing issue bulletins to operators of their aircraft all the time, I doubt this has anything to do with the accident. If that was the case, the aircraft would follow its flight planned route, commencing it's approach as close as possible to it's expected approach time. At the same time the crew would set the transponder code to 7600 to alert ATC that they had a loss of communications. The aircraft wouldn't be unidentified as it would be following it's flight plan and still transmitting it's call sign (MAS370). In short, even the Chinese wouldn't have shot this one down.

Did Bob ever service your plumbing, or is this fantasy now doomed to a life unfulfilled?

Not all of them although the 777 does. It's called a ram air turbine, or RAT for short. I doubt gliding came into this. The only things which could knock out both engines on a 777 are fuel starvation, birds, severe icing or volcanic ash. It would take a substantial fuel leak which the crew didn't notice for this flight to have ran out of fuel so early. In any case, the pilots would have broadcast a mayday on HF radio if they were attempting to glide.

There is no 'mayday signal' as such. The two ways of doing it are: 1 - Declaring a mayday on the radio. It will be heard by any aircraft or ground station within radio range. There is an emergency frequency of 121.5 MHz which most pilots will listen to during the cruise. It gets used daily around the world when aircraft lose contact with ATC on their primary frequency. 2 - Setting the transponder to 7700, 7600 or 7500, which are the codes for an emergency, radio failure and hijacking respectively. You do have to be within SSR range of a ground radar station for anyone to actually see this. There is also a ELT (emergency location transmitter) which should activate in the event of a crash or ditching automatically.

Depending on how far out to sea they were, the aircraft probably wasn't under radar contact. When you start doing flights beyond radar coverage, the rules change. Crews have to be specially trained and equipped with HF radios. The aircraft follow a pre determined course with compulsory reporting points along the way. If this accident had happened over land, ATC would probably be able to give the crash location to within a couple of miles. The primary radar returns would also give an indication as to whether the aircraft was intact as it went down or there was an inflight break up.

Just Googled it, it was Egypt Air 990 if anyone is interested. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990 It also reminded me of this photo of the aircraft involved. It's spooky because the Concorde in the foreground is the one which crashed in Paris less than a year later.

The location (politically) and the fact that it disappeared suddenly with no distress calls. The airline and aircraft involved would pretty much rule out most other causes. I know a lot of people who fly the 777 for Emirates and it is a fantastic piece of machinery. It would take a monumental failure to bring down a 777 in the cruise (the safest part of flight) with little or no warning to the pilots. A major structural failure is possible but the amount of safety built into the design, manufacture and maintenance of a modern Boeing aircraft is incredible. Operated by a fairly reputable airline in a developed industrial country like Malaysia, I just can't see it. Pilots would probably be eating breakfast by then. In the cruise there is very little to do other than check fuel and answer ATC messages. The autopilot is flying the plane and if that gets disconnected there is a very loud audible siren which is impossible to miss. It's not impossible one of them brought down the plane deliberately, it happened with an Egypt Air 767 off the coast of New York in the 90s. When they recovered the black box one of the pilots was heard praying loudly to Allah whilst the other was out taking a wizz IIRC. If it was a collision with a military jet, I think the media would know by now and the authorities would know pretty much exactly where the incident took place. It could be an accidental shoot down and cover up I guess but there's no evidence of that.

Getting back to the o.p. Is the highly anticipated luge run finally being built?

Any repair carried out would have to be approved by Boeing and inspected by their specialists. I'm fully aware of the effects of airline cost cutting on maintenance but a broken wing just isn't something you would f**k with. Airliners have crashed in the past after bodged repairs. A Jumbo went down in Japan once after a repaired bulkhead blew out mid flight and took the tail off. Since then though, maintenance has been massively improved. Sadly, my money is on bomb, although the idea of one getting through an modern 1st world airport like KUL sends a shiver down my spine.

Correct, it hit the tail of an A340 a while back. Any repairs would have been rigorously inspected though, I'd be highly surprised if that proved to be the cause.

I think it's pretty much a given that Leicester are going up and Fulham are going down but who do you want to join them? Half my family is from Burnley, so they are very much a second team for me. For the third team I'd quite like Forest, although they have hit bad form just at the wrong time. As much as I like Adkins I don't really like Reading fans suddenly deciding they are out big local rivals whenever they get near us in the League. Not a massive Derby fan after the whole Davies affair, kicking us off the pitch in the playoffs. I'd rather any of them go up that Bagpuss though. Going down, I don't like Tan and I've already been to Cardiff away. As a team they have added very little to the Premier League. I think I'd quite like Sunderland to join them. Very long away day that anyone who wants to has done 4 times recently. Plus Poyet and we can't beat them for love nor money.

It's possible but I don't think we're quite good enough. We still don't really look like scoring, JRod's goal coming from some pretty poor Palace defending today. Worth a go though.

Good point. I guess we can't really accuse this team of beating the top sides and f**king up the easy games any more. We have now played all our matches against the current bottom 5. Won 8 and drawn 2. We've only lost twice against the teams in the bottom half.

Also we have now done the double over Palace, Fulham and Hull, with Cardiff and Swansea still to play. Have we ever done a double over 4 or 5 teams in a season before?

Professional job. Good defending against an improving Palace team with everything to play for. Only negatives are the injury to Cork and Lambert looking hopeless at the minute. Well done Saints.

We are Southampton! We play the long ball!

Come on Saints.

The average human body acclimatises to jet lag at roughly 1.5 hours a day, so assuming he got back yesterday he is only 1.5 hours out today. That shouldn't affect a player really. Traveling to Khartoum would have probably made it worse, I don't know what their travel itinerary was like. All immaterial now, he's there and on the bench.

Yeah, fair enough. It is highly unlikely but countries test missiles all the time, even in peace time, so it's possible. Another possibility is poorly packaged cargo causing a fire or explosion, similar to an accident involving a South African 747 which crashed into the Indian Ocean. A fire would probably have given the crew some time to declare a mayday and attempt an emergency landing, so that's less likely.

I'm not sure about the NK missile incident but it wont have been them involved this time, even if it is a missile. The aircraft was nowhere near Korea, it would be like the Finns shooting down an aircraft over Portugal.