Lighthouse

Highly unlikely she saw a plane on the water. I often fly right over Heathrow at cruising altitudes and even looking directly down on the airport it is hard to see individual aircraft clearly and that's despite knowing exactly I am looking. The likelihood of an aircraft landing intact on the ocean and this woman seeing it from 37000ft is almost impossible. I'd say it is much more likely she saw another aircraft cruising at a lower altitude, or is completely making it up.

Wouldn't be too sure on that. Utd will now be faced with one of the biggest wage bills in Europe and no Champions League football. I can't see their board chucking silly wages at players like Lovren to get them back into the top 4. Besides, we are hardly in the business of paying our players peanuts these days. Our top players will be earning a fairly healthy wage. I don't know Lovren's wages but I doubt Utd will be blowing them out the water. I'm not saying he wouldn't go but without CL football it wont be the no-brainer you think.

Some people were worried. I don't remember him getting any particular stick from the crowd, although there is always the occasional knobber shooting his mouth off. My overriding memory of that season is of 14,000 people sitting in silence.

I remember this time five years ago, people were 'worried' about losing David McGoldrick in summer.

I've met Eric a few times and I was surprised to see ATC are actually humans. I was expecting to meet a small hairy goblin.

[video=youtube;Vh8l0x9uF-Y] I laughed a little bit more than I probably should have.

It's between Lambert and Carroll. I don't think JR will go if he scores another 10 goals, Roy sees him as back up to Welbeck unfortunately. Got a horrible feeling another 4 or 5 goals this season will get Carroll in the squad.

Here's a full list to get your grey matter warmed up.

Three logicians walk into a bar. The barman asks, "would all of you like a drink?" The first one says, "I don't know." The second one says, "I don't know." The third one says, "yes."

Whilst it is possible, the idea of a mid air intercept like that is highly unfeasible. To meet up with another aircraft perfectly like that, in hundreds of square miles of sky would take perfectly planning in timing to within a couple of seconds. You can't know exactly where another flight will be at a certain time and if you did you wouldn't be able to get there at exactly the same time. To put it into perspective, to appear as a single blip on primary radar, you would have to get within literally feet of another aircraft. A 777 in the cruise can travel a mile in about 8 seconds. A delay for a late passenger, missing back, ATC restriction, delay taxiing etc. could add any number you like to the delay in taking off.

There hasn't been a draw between Saints and Spuds, in any competition, since January 2001. 0-0 at WHL.

Will never happen. It would take a 'foreign' player of phenomenal talent for the FA to pick them for the England team. They aren't brave enough and usually go with the 'safe' options when picking players. Even then they would face stiff opposition from a large number of fans I would probably be one of them. Morgan is French. If, he had moved here aged 5 and been brought up in the UK then fair enough but not when you move here as an adult.

Savage would take Carroll. P*ss off.

The only decent original show on there is on tonight, Bluestone 42. Anyone else a fan?

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.