Missing boeing 777

i flew to new York just days after the twin towers collapsed;
having sat in front of tv paralyzed by the tragedy !!
my flight to Kennedy airport had been booked months before; it was overwhelming -with military carrying riffles (for want of right word) everywhere, queues miles long, oh and sniffer dogs too!
my cousin I was visiting, wanted to see the remains--but I didn't want a up close memory; so they left me in a café --its windows black with soot and dust, every nearby building was covered in this same thick dust !
even when I returned to Kennedy airport, to fly home a month later, it was still full of military with riffles; though frightening - it was also comforting too: god be with those poor souls and families.

It is now being thought that the co pilot was trying to send some sort of distress signal in his last message, as it was an 'odd' message to send. Maybe, maybe not! It does all seem to point to the Captain, but of course none of us knows that, and as for the the reason? that is quite baffling.

Of course it disappeared early in the flight with plenty of fuel and could have gone quite a long way in any direction before having to land. It is seeming more likely that this was an attempt to steal the plane rather than an accident.

A US radio station apparently located hundreds of landing strips it could have landed.....

Unlikely though.

Oh I see Brenda, well of course the transponder would have to be able to be disengaged, Perhaps something in the future can be devised that can't be tampered with, so that a plane can be tracked at all times - The whole thing is just such a frightening mystery. Those poor people, what they've gone through just doesn't bear thinking about. None of it makes a grain of sense.

Anything run by electricity has to be able to be turned off in the cockpit in case that part is on fire according to my retired pilot husband.

Allegedly the plane fell to 5000 feet to escape being detected by radar, this is one of the most riveting pieces of news for a long time. I do so hope there is chance that the passengers will come out of this alive. Unbelievably mysterious.

It seems to me, as a lay person, quite weird that the transponder in ALL aircraft can be turned off by the pilot/co pilot at any time during a flight! I would have thought that there would be a system whereby this simply couldn't happen. After all, no pilot would want to turn this off unless they're up to no good. Maybe after this awful event there will be some security changes including this.

This whole thing is getting more and more chaotic and mysterious

They are reporting this morning that one of the users of one of the dud passports is a nineteen year old Iranian asylum seeker, trying to get to Germany to start a new life with his mum, who is already there. No links at all to terrorism.

One poignant story amongst many no doubt.

I'm sure it's very deep but, according to himself, those bleeps carry better through water.

How deep is the sea in that area?

Then there's the black box which gives out a bleep for a number of days after a plane has come down. Why has n't that been located? It's all so very strange.

What I have been thinking about is that if the plane had been blown apart by a massive explosion high in the air it would be likely to scatter smaller pieces of debris across a wide area.

I would have thought that an accident like this would be more likely to provide a lot of floating debris which would be relatively easy to spot by Radar etc, than if an intact plane just dropped straight into the sea and sank under the massive weight.

Any tame aeronautical engineers on GN?

System not servers.

Thanks, jings. Forwarded the link to DH who read it and explained it to me. About 3% of his explanation stuck. Suffice it to say that it's about protecting domain name servers and the world wide web, which is not the whole internet. He also seemed to be saying that it isn't all in place yet but they've started a process.... And there was something about using humans to do stuff cos computers can't do random. He thinks email would not work without this DNS protection.

In short, dead complicated and dead awesome.

Apologies for the garbage comment, djen.

I seem to remember a journalist saying that he had travelled using his wife's passport with no problems at all; so obviously no one looks very closely at the photos.

I recall the Mossad hit squad who travelled to Dubai on stolen/forged passports and assassinated the ex PLO? guy in his hotel room.

I believe the passports were those of British and Irish citizens.

article here

That sounds like garbage, djen. Internet security is not in any one place and not governed by any one group of people. Have you a link to the original article, please?

There was an interesting article in last week's Guardian about internet security. There's a group of people who meet every three months to make sure that internet security is still working. They each have a key that has to be put with other ones to make the system work.
Anyway, they have to enter a locked room and go into a cage, using iris recognition. It did not work the time that the reporter was there to observe, and they then were locked in the cage and had to set off an alarm to get out of it.
Security does not always work, even when it's as tight as possible.

Different countries have different rules. Data isn't always kept up to date and any system is only as good as the people using it. Perhaps iris scans and facial recognition technology are the only ways forward. But then, it's always been that whatever security technology is invented, sooner or later someone will find a way round it.

Nonnie , you are right, according to my DH, who is in the " business " of dealing with aircraft crashes, not all countries have the link up to Interpol, who hold stolen passport data.

Lessons will be learned. They scan passports everywhere we have been recently and I would have expected that to flag up a stolen passport. Perhaps not everywhere has the technology.

Stansgran. Try not to worry. It is a fact that it's the safest time to fly. Security is ultra tight after any tragedy where there are security issues.