Free Flight, Free Speech

EgyptAir flight MS804 disappears from radar between Paris and Cairo – live updates

http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2 ... ve-updates

Well, ten miles into Egyptian airspace, 15 minutes before landing, over a sea and a freaking desert ahead where there is nothing higher then 500ft ... and he was still at FL370?

Okay, the discrepancies start to clear up:

- the plane was 45 before the scheduled arrivel
- and thus, not 10 miles into Egyptian air space but rather about 160 off the coast
- and it was the Greek radar who lost them and they informed their colleagues in Egypt.

Which basically only proves, I am not entirely senile and remember my maps of the mediterranean, but nothing about the plane.

Latest news: 4:26 the signal of an emergency beacon or device was received, two hours after the last radar contact. Which, given the time, means, it was probably one of the planes (the Greek Hercules, the Greek Air warning system or one of the Egyptians) who received it because ships couldn't have been around there already.

Just as I was getting comfortable about air travel..

Looks like the Greek found something, ab. 130 miles off of Karpathos. Unconfirmed yet, but an AFP reporter refers to a Greek aviation source. Of cpourse, we have already the first "experts" talking about it "was almost certainly an attack"(Daily Mirror) ... I wonder, where they get those people always, is there a hole somewhere where they dwell?

Another sad aviation incident....

Egyptair flight 804 was supposed to be a routine overnight flight from Paris CDG to Cairo CAI. It departed at 11:09 PM local time (CEST, I think), and was scheduled to land at 3:15 AM (Egypt time). At roughly 2:30 AM, 173 miles off the Egyptian coast, radar contact was lost with the aircraft, which was flying at 37,000 ft. The aircraft is a 13-year old A320-200 (Reg: SU-GCC). It was the fifth flight of the day for the plane, which had logged 48,000 hours, and was being flown by a pilot of 6,000 hours.

At 4:30 AM, the Egyptian Military detected the signals from the black boxes. A multinational rescue effort is still ensuing, but all 66 passengers are presumed dead. No wreckage has been located at this point.

EDIT: sorry for the poor quality of this report I wrote it quickly as I was rushing out the door

EDIT: Wiki with more
"Flight 804 veered from course shortly after entering the Egyptian Flight Information Region (FIR). At an altitude of 37,000 feet, the aircraft made a 90-degree left turn, followed by a 360-degree right turn and began to descend. Radar signal was lost at an altitude of about 10,000 feet"

The detailed radar data should be interesting for the experts. I followed this last night while I was doing some other work and a lot more details came up, we have them in "Historically missing planes"

Well, some things caught my eye:

- The Greek ATC was talking to the pilot about three or four minutes before the plane vanished from the radar. We know, the radar follwied the plane down through some swerves to 10,000ft (coming from 37,000). Even in free fall, that had to be (according to the splat calculator) a time of about 40s (in free fall, only neither planes nor parts of them usually fall with full gravitational acceleration because they have so much air resistance compared to their weight). So actually what happened must have happened that fast, the crew didn't know anything about two minutes before it happened and then had no time for a distress call.

- The plane veered 90 degrees left, then 360 degrees right spin. If the plane was breaking up, the 90 degree could be caused by an initial impulse, then as the plane broke to more parts, the aerodynamic attributes of the biggest part pulled it in the right spin (assuming, the radar saw no complete plane but the biggest piece).

So, we don't know what exactly happened and more important, what started it (technical defect, explosives), but on a speculative level, this actually looks like a bomb to me.