Thursday, April 24, 2014

Crowd Sourcing Malaysian Flight 370

I was listening to Rep. Eric Swalwell on the Commttee on Homeland Security talking about the need to Crowd Source Flight 370 from Malaysia. I agree.

I will begin here with this premise and idea. Since this blog site first took off in readership in a quantum way when I advocated crowd sourcing to protect people from the radiation from Fukushima in 2011 by everyone buying geiger counters and posting radiation readings of air, land and water and food which helped reassure (sometimes not) people everywhere from Japan across the Pacific towards Hawaii and the North, South and Central American Continent because of prevailing winds and currents in the Pacific Ocean.

Now is the time to crowd source what we know about Malaysian Air Lines Flight 370. Governments and companies might have their sacred cows and worries with liabilities but the flying public needs to share the facts along with logical speculation of what actually happened here.

What do we know?

We know that Flight 370 originated from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and was headed for Beijing China. We know it did not reach that destination.
So, where did it go.

Information has come in that at some point it turned back towards Malaysia about 1 hour into the trip. Why is that? We don't know for sure.

However, what we do know is that the plane flew up as high as 45,000 feet or more. No sane pilot would do that because of explosive decompression at that altitude is very likely. No plane (passenger plane) is designed to fly at that altitude EVER without decompressing explosively or otherwise.

Since no sane pilot would do this what would? The most likely thing that happened is that it was on automatic pilot and did this in error because of bad software in the Autopilot and killed the passengers or just the pilot or pilots in the cockpit at the time.

As the pilot was passing out he turned off the power to the transponder in a desperate attempt to get control of the plane away from the autopilot which wouldn't turn off otherwise.

Once he got control of the plane he knew he would soon pass out from decompression. So, he turned the autopilot back on and headed the plane back towards Malaysia hoping someone (who wasn't passing out) might save them.

Whether it was just the cockpit that decompressed or the whole plane I'm not sure. But, I would say this is the most likely scenario because:

Another Autopilot on another Malaysian Boeing 777 malfunctioned recently and almost killed everyone on board that plane too. However, at the last moment they were able to disengage the autopilot before they all died.

A software patch for this problem was developed at Boeing and a directive from Boeing told everyone with a 777 on earth to add this software patch to prevent malfunctions in their Computer driven Autopilots.

The Asiana Airlines Crash in San Francisco the pilots blamed on a bad altitude and airspeed reading from their Autopilot too which killed 3 people also.

So, I'm thinking that there is a problem with the Computer software and hardware on the 777 that is malfunctioning some of the time in 777s around the world. Or:

Pilots are not being trained to trouble shoot the automatic pilots in a way to prevent crashes.

also, Passenger planes are flown more and more autonomously to burn less fuel because computers can do that more efficiently than humans.

So, pilots tend to be more computer operators than pilots these days on passenger planes.

This started when fighter jets had computers that kept pilots from accidentally ripping off the wings of fighter jets likely in the 1980s. So, if a pilot moved the stick in a way that would rip wings off or control surfaces off the computer wouldn't allow those movements at supersonic speeds.

Eventually this technology migrated to passenger jets along with many of these fighter pilots once they left the military. So, the potential positives and negatives of less fuel consumption but sometimes bad air speed or altitude information also moved from jet fighters to passenger planes.

The Air France flight from Brazil to Paris a few years ago was found to have crashed because of a frozen outside airspeed  pitot affecting the onboard computer in the autopilot. So, since it didn't have the right air speed information it slowed down on autopilot and because they were flying through a storm the pilots didn't recognize that they were slowing down below normal flying speed. Eventually, the planes wings slowly stalled to the point where it crashed into the ocean before the pilots understood what was happening because they were still in level flight.

So, this is the third crash possibly related to problems regarding computers malfunctioning on larger passenger planes.

The Air France plane was made by Air Bus. The two crashes were made by Boeing and were 777s. The near crash was also a malfunction in the automatic pilot of another Malaysian 777.

So, my thought is the way automatic pilots of Air Bus and Boeing 777s are unsafe under some conditions.

However, this problem likely is about 1 in 1000 or less. One could say it is a fluke but Malaysian Air Lines and Malaysia has said nothing about installing the new software patch on the autopilot to correct that autopilot problem on MH370 before it took off and then disappeared from public sight.

Also, my thought now is that either Malaysia flight 370 crashed by running out of fuel likely with everyone on board unconscious on autopilot OR it was shot down before it could crash in a populated area of Australia with the agreement of the governments of all Pacific nations.

However, this can't be told to the general public.

Please help crowd source the Malaysian flight worldwide. Everyone's logic and technical expertise will overcome governments and companies hiding things from worldwide jet travelers, pilots, stewards and stewardesses and the general public.

Crowd sourcing will make jet travel safer worldwide both now and into the future by revealing facts to governments and airlines and airplane manufacturers.

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