New Details Emerge About the MH370 Crash and Earn Points for Lyft Rides

News and notes from around the interweb:

Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer is offering a 30% discount on economy and premium economy saver awards for travel on Singapore and SilkAir for travel booked by November 16 for travel between February 6 and May 31, 2017. Many destinations available. (Here are 18 tricks you should know about the Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer program.)
Congratulations to Dan of Dan’s Deals who won a Starwood auction to throw out the first pitch at last night’s game 7 of the World Series for over a million Starpoints! And then he wound up in TMZ…
The cost to Chase of opening new Sapphire Reserve cards could hurt their fourth quarter revenue by as much as $200 million (HT: Doctor of Credit) Renegotiated co-brand agreements have also raised consumer card costs.
Major advances in the understanding of how MH370 crashed into the sea
Review of the best current business class between the US and Australia. And you can book it with Delta miles! Although usually only within a couple of weeks of departure.
The Uber app has stopped working for foreign visitors in China
Lyft now offers 30 JetBlue points for airport rides Better than a hole in the head, as my grandfather used to say, and not nearly as valuable as Starwood’s partnership with Uber.

Aren’t we spending too much money and time trying to “find” the cause of the crash of MH370? Even if we find a CVR (with only 120 minutes of conversation) or the FDR, will it tell us any better what happened? (That a human for reasons undiscoverable commanded the plane to fly a suicide course into the ocean.)

This latest evidence is relevant to the search area (but again, even if we find the plane debris and recover it from the seafloor, do we really think we’ll get an explanation?). It might indicate that the plane was descending out of control at the end, as the latest satellite analysis suggests (to no surprise).

This is all just confirmation of what we must suspect. That the plane likely hit the ocean at high speeds. That perhaps it was commanded (or degraded due to fuel exhaustion leading to uncontrolled flight while on autopilot) into a flight parameter that caused it to either lose control or break up in the air.

There is no realistic way that a plane flying from Malaysia to Beijing would find itself heading southtowards Antarctica outside of human factors. And no realistic belief that the pilot flying would be trying to gently ease the plane into the South Indian Ocean.

Congrats this with the money spent on the search for AF 447 (Brazil to France), which in the end was worth every penny. It exposed limits in pilot training, experience, response to unexpected equipment failure, and even crazy factors like that when the inexperienced copilot in the right seat was pulling up on the nose, and the pilot in the left seat was pushing down, that Airbus’s fly-by-wire system basically split the difference (and the more experienced pilots in the cockpit never realized in time the copilot was panicked and trying to gain altitude while in a stall throughout). That crash reinforced valuable lessons about a need for time spent hand flying at high altitudes, lessons for recovery then, awareness of failure modes of highly automated (Airbus) aircraft, etc.

We’ll never learn anything as important from MH370, other than sadness for the people killed by someone.

Comments

CT Dub says:

November 4, 2016 at 5:02 pm

Aren’t we spending too much money and time trying to “find” the cause of the crash of MH370? Even if we find a CVR (with only 120 minutes of conversation) or the FDR, will it tell us any better what happened? (That a human for reasons undiscoverable commanded the plane to fly a suicide course into the ocean.)

This latest evidence is relevant to the search area (but again, even if we find the plane debris and recover it from the seafloor, do we really think we’ll get an explanation?). It might indicate that the plane was descending out of control at the end, as the latest satellite analysis suggests (to no surprise).

This is all just confirmation of what we must suspect. That the plane likely hit the ocean at high speeds. That perhaps it was commanded (or degraded due to fuel exhaustion leading to uncontrolled flight while on autopilot) into a flight parameter that caused it to either lose control or break up in the air.

There is no realistic way that a plane flying from Malaysia to Beijing would find itself heading southtowards Antarctica outside of human factors. And no realistic belief that the pilot flying would be trying to gently ease the plane into the South Indian Ocean.

Congrats this with the money spent on the search for AF 447 (Brazil to France), which in the end was worth every penny. It exposed limits in pilot training, experience, response to unexpected equipment failure, and even crazy factors like that when the inexperienced copilot in the right seat was pulling up on the nose, and the pilot in the left seat was pushing down, that Airbus’s fly-by-wire system basically split the difference (and the more experienced pilots in the cockpit never realized in time the copilot was panicked and trying to gain altitude while in a stall throughout). That crash reinforced valuable lessons about a need for time spent hand flying at high altitudes, lessons for recovery then, awareness of failure modes of highly automated (Airbus) aircraft, etc.

We’ll never learn anything as important from MH370, other than sadness for the people killed by someone.