1 The Hobo Queen made its UK landfall at St Mawgan, Cornwall, UK

2 I doubt the story about it flying over France

3 Summer 1945 is after the end of WWII in Europe….Is the sub-pen bombing correct? I thought the next B-29 in Europe was 1946 (correction it was October 1945, see below)

Good set of photos, though

I often read discussions in German speaking forums about WW2 and have come across a discussion alleging that a WWII veteran sighted a B-29 overflying Austria in 1944 about the time Hobo Queen was in England.

I did not bookmark the conversation therefore can’t give you a link to it sorry.

It is a problem when you either don’t know what Occam’s Razor is or how to apply it in this case.

You mean like all the assumptions you’ve just made? Is there any data or evidence to suggest a fire? Is it any more or less likely to assume it was a human factor at play? Why should we assume a fire is more likely to have occurred than human intervention? If you’re applying Occam’s Razor and come to the most likely conclusion being a fire, doesn’t it also imply that an SOS call of some form would also be the most likely event to follow?

Keep up with the program:

IN what could be the last chilling sighting of missing Flight MH370, an oil rig worker believes he spotted the Malaysia Airlines jetliner burst into flames on Saturday morning.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11218622

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11218622

The oil rig worker also noted he saw the flames go out and the aircraft continued to fly.

In answer to your question first priority is to fly the plane. I already answered your question when i noted:

….a sudden and dramatic event overtaking the crew, or one in which actually flying the aircraft took precedence over making a distress call.

….in which case either crew were incapacitated quite suddenly or were incapacitated more gradually whilst struggling simply to control a flight control issue.

And yet the data also suggests the aircraft flew for a significant amount of time after this catastrophic event taking place, which managed to incapacitate both pilots, knock out multiple electronic systems, but yet at the same time wasn’t too catastrophic enough that led to the cockpit and the rest of the aircraft disintegrating? Really?! Occam’s Razor at work?!

Occam’s Razor is applied like this:

If the aircraft did not issue a distress call then there was some reason why not. You make an unwarranted assumtion that because pilots were required to issue a distress call therefore they should have been able to… there is no evidence they were able to and it is a mute point because they didn’t and would have if they could have.

A fire that occurred while the aircraft was on the ground. Really?! More of Occam’s Razor at work?!

I normally only have to explain this slowly for babies and the impaired…

Egyptair Flight 667 was almost finished loading and was about to be pushed back. It is an example of how fast a fire can spread and destroy the cockpit in particular rupture the pressure hull.

Had this aircraft become airborne the evidence would not have been preserved.

Here’s a thought, how many instances have there been of a cockpit fire which disabled both pilots, comms and other equipment, and then resulted in the aircraft flying for over 6 hours? I mean applying Occam’s Razor, you would expect there to be loads of examples right, given that this is the most likely explanation, right?!

The existence of identical previous examples, or not is not proof that it could not happen that way … Occam’s Razor

Applying Occam’s Razor, there is no evidence of a fire, so why should we accept there was a fire?

There is evidence of an aircraft sighted on fire high in the sky in the same area at the same time and no other aircraft was lost to explosion and fire at that time, ergo that aircraft was MH370.

Also Occam’s razor inverts the burden of proof to require you to disprove this.

Even if we did accept there was a fire, why then should we accept that this fire was severe enough to disable both pilots and vital equipment, without causing complete breakup of the aircraft….for over 6 hours?!

Because as you point out there was no distress call… duh

The problem with the cockpit fire scenario is that it must have been a very very sudden flash over type of ignition for it to have given absolutely no chance for the pilots to issue some form of distress call, and I’m talking seconds here. If the crew were struggling to contain a fire, then they should have been able to issue a distress call, of some form, at least. Unless it was some form of mild explosion that immediately incapacitated the pilots, but kept the aircraft flying. However, that wouldn’t account for the change in heading would it?

It is not a problem unless you make it a problem by over complicating your objections with superfluous unnecessary qualifications. Occam’s Razor is a direct result of basic applied probability theory. Occam’s Razor is a process of stripping away superfluous arguments.

Occam’s razor theory: one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything

Or, as we would put it today, don’t make any more assumptions than you have to.

There was no distress call… ipso factor… there must have been a sudden and dramatic event overtaking the crew, or one in which actually flying the aircraft took precedence over making a distress call.

An electrical arcing flashover, or explosion is not unknown in aircraft. Indeed I just published photos of a fire in a Boeing 777 at the gate in Jedah in 2011.

A Tupelov Tu-154 at Surgut on 1st January 2011 was totally destroyed by arcing caused by overloaded generator bus relays.

En-route, Northern Sudan, 24 August 2010, an Airbus A321-200 operated by British Midland, suffered loss of cockpit displays and un-commanded turns which vanished with de-selection of No.1 generator.

An Airbus A319-100 at London Heathrow, 15 March 2009, on pushback lost all cockpit displays and developed smoke causing evacuation.

The fifth prototype Boeing 787 test aircraft suffered a generator fire on approach to land 10 November 10, 2010 10:01am, knocked out cockpit displays and disabled autothrottle.

Furthermore applying Occams Razor yet again none of us know how or why the heading course change occurred. There is no evidence it was programmed into the autopilot. There is no evidence the autopilot was even functional. Indeed if we accept that there was an electrical fire under the cockpit or in the cockpit, then there is strong likelihood none of the systems including autopilot were functioning at all.

There is no logical explanation why the aircraft climbed to 45,000ft however there is a logical assumption that at some point cruise speed ceased to overcome stall speed and the plane would have dropped quite violently from 45,000ft therefore it is a rational assumption that a course change may have resulted from nothing more than the violent process of tumbling in a stall from 45,000ft.

Post Script:

I understand from Malaysian press that the 45,000ft altitude (or the claim of that) was established by radar trigonomentry from RMAF Butterworth.

If what the media is reporting true…. then it just gets better and better!

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/malaysia-airlines-missing-jet-thailand-gives-radar-data-10-days-after-plane-lost-20140319-hvk7i.html

Bangkok: Thailand’s military said on Tuesday that its radar detected a plane that may have been Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 just minutes after the jetliner’s communications went down, and that it didn’t share the information with Malaysia earlier because it wasn’t specifically asked for it.

A twisting flight path described on Tuesday by Thai air force spokesman Air Vice Marshal Montol Suchookorn took the plane to the Strait of Malacca, which is where Malaysian radar tracked Flight 370 early March 8. But Montol said the Thai military doesn’t know whether it detected the same plane.

Thailand’s failure to quickly share possible information regarding the fate of the plane, and the 239 people aboard it, may not substantially change what Malaysian officials know, but it raises questions about the degree to which some countries are sharing their defence information, even in the name of an urgent and mind-bending aviation mystery.

With only its own radar to go on, it took Malaysia a week to confirm that Flight 370 had entered the strait, an important detail that led it to change its search strategy.

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When asked why it took so long to release the information, Montol said, “Because we did not pay any attention to it. The Royal Thai Air Force only looks after any threats against our country, so anything that did not look like a threat to us, we simply look at it without taking actions.”

He said the plane never entered Thai airspace and that Malaysia’s initial request for information in the early days of the search was not specific.

“When they asked again and there was new information and assumptions from (Malaysian) Prime Minister Najib Razak, we took a look at our information again,” Montol said. “It didn’t take long for us to figure out, although it did take some experts to find out about it.”

Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur at 12.40am Malaysian time and its transponder, which allows air traffic controllers to identify and track the airplane, ceased communicating at 1.20am.

Montol said that at 1.28am, Thai military radar “was able to detect a signal, which was not a normal signal, of a plane flying in the direction opposite from the MH370 plane,” back toward Kuala Lumpur. The plane later turned right, toward Butterworth, a Malaysian city along the Strait of Malacca. The radar signal was infrequent and did not include any data such as the flight number.

He said he didn’t know exactly when Thai radar last detected the plane. Malaysian officials have said Flight 370 was last detected by their own military radar at 2.14am.

The search area for the plane initially focused on the South China Sea, where ships and planes spent a week searching. Pings that a satellite detected from the plane hours after its communications went down have led authorities to concentrate instead on two vast arcs — one into central Asia and the other into the Indian Ocean — that together cover an expanse as big as Australia.

Thai officials said radar equipment in southern Thailand detected the plane. Malaysian officials have said the plane might ultimately have passed through northern Thailand, but Thai Air Chief Marshal Prajin Juntong told reporters on Tuesday that the country’s northern radar did not detect it.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/malaysia-airlines-missing-jet-thailand-gives-radar-data-10-days-after-plane-lost-20140319-hvk7i.html#ixzz2wLe81cPS

Somebody really needs to construct a reliable timeline because malaysian newspapers until now have also mentioned that RMAF butterworth first detected the unidentified aircraft at 2:40am.

Not a dig at you Slipperysam, but all this information is contradictory and unreliable.

As first reported the aircraft was seen from Butterworth at 45,000ft then dropped to 23,000ft, though how you can assert this with primary radar is itself baffling. For primary radar returns to indicate an aircraft at 45,000ft it has to be seen on radar at a range of 500nm (ie above radar horizon).

We were told it crossed Malaysia at 23,000ft then meandered around the northern straits and departed West climbing at 29,500ft. Now based on fishermen hearing it in the dark we are told it was just 5,000ft AGL?

‘Scuse my mistake but anyway what became of the wings and tail empennage because that would be a good donor for a wellington rebuild?

They rebuilt a static display Halifax from a hunk of fuselage used as a chicken coop weighted down by concrete ballast didn’t they?

(by the way there is a Sunderland chicken coop hulk on the Chatham Islands of New Zealand)

With a bunch of Hercules engined Bristol freighters lying around the problem is there are no propellers left with flying time on them. I was told by a Noratlas enthusiast that there are plenty of early Hercules engines suitable for a Wellington laying around. What became of that Vickers Varsity involved in a UK arson attack back in the 1990s?

That would be a place to start if any of that airframe can still be recovered and then why not look at 3D printing for a geodesic airframe?

Tomcat I am not an avionics expert. I did however trawl aviation engineering websites looking for likely causes and reconstructed my theory from what I have been reading. I don’t know enough to discount or include static discharge. One thing however and that anything which increases voltage differential across a diode by 10-15 volts pushes the diode towards failure.

I don’t believe pilots were conscious after the aircraft descended from 45,000ft

If you think about how RMAF could tell from primary radar returns that an aircraft was at 45,000ft they must have watched it climb until 500nm away from Butterworth. That is because with radar horizon near sea level if you can see a blip 500 nautical miles away it must be at that altitude.

This implies the Malaysian Authorities knew it was over Vietnamese airspace before turning back but fed a false story that it turned back before reaching Vietnam.

It reappeared east of Malaysia at 23,000ft at 2:40am (200nm dist) meandering about the sky into the northern straits of Malacca where it was last seen from Butterworth climbing at 29,500ft about 226nm away towards the Andaman Islands.