This missing airplane story just keeps getting more interesting heres five things about it. Some of my classes will be looking at this. Prepare yourself ! 1. Where is the plane? As evidence grows that the plane could have flown for hours after losing contact with air traffic control, the search area too has grown: It now includes the Gulf of Thailand, South China Sea, Strait of Malacca, the Andaman Sea and the Indian Ocean. That could be anywhere from India to Australia, a stretch of the globe so vast that only the luckiest of breaks would turn up the missing plane. This is an impossible task, said Peter Goelz, former National Transportation Safety Board managing director. Theyve got to narrow it down more. A classified analysis of electronic and satellite data suggests Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 likely crashed either in the Bay of Bengal or elsewhere in the Indian Ocean, CNN learned Friday. The analysis, conducted by the United States and Malaysian governments, used radar data and satellite pings to calculate that the plane diverted to the west, across the Malayan peninsula, and then either flew in a northwest direction toward the Bay of Bengal or southwest into another part of the Indian Ocean. 2. What happened to the plane? No one knows for sure. But Malaysian military radar did register dramatic changes for Flight 370 in altitude -- going up to 45,000 feet, before descending to 23,000 feet -- and an erratic path as it moved across Malaysia in what are some of the last known readings of the planes location, according to a senior US official. The same official, who is familiar with analysis of that radar data and declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the information, cautioned that this assessment is not definitive. The readings are not believed entirely accurate due to the distance the plane was operating from the radars that detected it, according to the official. 3. mechanical failure Its one of the stronger possibilities. The absence of a debris field could suggest that the pilot made an emergency landing on water and the plane then sank intact, but there is still the mystery of the distress signal. There wasnt one. However, aviation consultant Kit Darby has said that its possible there was a power failure, and during the hour of backup power the pilot was attempting to return to the airports and a region he knows. Theres also the possibility that the tail or a wing tore from the fuselage. This particular Boeing had suffered a clipped wingtip in the past, but Boeing repaired it. Another possibility is that a window or door failed, which would cause the temperature inside the plane to drop to 60 degrees below zero, creating a freezing fog and giving crew members only seconds to don oxygen masks before becoming disoriented and then incapacitated. 4. How does a plane the size of a Boeing 777-200ER just disappear? It doesnt. It -- or its pieces -- are somewhere. It doesnt help that Flight 370s flight path is unclear and that the search areas include vast waters and sparsely populated jungles and mountains. But its apparent disappearance is made even stranger by the fact that the jet was laden with massive amounts of technology, including a transponder, UHF and VHF radios, automatic beacons, GPS and computer communications systems, as well as the cell phones of the passengers and crew. 5. Could the plane have landed somewhere? One theory U.S. officials are considering, according to that Wall Street Journal report, is that someone might have taken the plane to be used for some other purpose later. So its theoretically possible that the plane could have landed at a remote airstrip where its being hidden.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 04:19:48 +0000
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