I'm not Buying a Car this Week

I'm in the market for a new car, and I've spoken to various car salespeople.  Mostly as a normal person, thinking they'd 'get' me what I needed.  Hasn't worked.

So, I changed approach with them, and spelled out exactly what my buying criteria were, down to the options I was looking for, colour choices and the like.  I spelled out timing and so on.  Still didn't help.

As an aside, I teach people (teach is an ugly word to me, as I don't actually teach them, I share best practices and as grown-ups they elect what to take onboard, and what to throw away from the interaction we have, and each individual is different.) how to sell.  In a B2B sense - business to business.  I don't dabble in retail sales, and don't claim to be an expert in that area in any sense.... but it galls me terribly when I have such amateur idiots pushing their junk on me and urging me act fast without ever asking me what it is I'm trying to do.

So, I'm protesting in my own way, and I've elected that they'll all starve a few days.  I'm not buying anything.  I know this will have no effect, and won't affect the behaviours I despise.  But I'm feeling quite mean-spirited about it all actually, so there.

Beware the pissed-off buyer.

How to Really Screw Up Aviation, Emergency Situation Management and Search & Rescue

See: "Malaysia".  (ⁱ/məˈleɪʒə/ mə-lay-zhə or ⁱ/məˈleɪsiə/ mə-lay-see-ə)

The Mystery Continues

Let me begin by saying it's not possible to keep a secret in this world.  That's becoming evident with the Malaysian government's seemingly lame attempts to dribble information out over the course of a week. I guess the fact that they have very little and/or poor military radar capabilities isn't something to be broadcast, but still ...where they really thinking this would remain confidential ?

The improbable answers to what has happened to MH370 that I wrote about last week are starting to look very credible. (See post below this one).  The fact the aircraft hasn't been found suggests a few other things however, notwithstanding it's 6-7 hours in the air.  A 777-200 is 209 feet long, and 200 feet wide. It's almost 61 feet tall.  Hiding this thing, from the prying silent eyes of spy satellites if it's on land after touching down somewhere, would be REALLY HARD.  Firstly, you need a runway at least 3500-4000 feet long, and that assumes a perfect landing, very little remaining fuel, dry conditions and no tailwind.  Landing is a tricky business and in the normal commercial aviation world, the rule is the aircraft's stopping distance must be no more than 60% of the runway length, which translates to close to a 7000 foot runway (1.5miles / almost 2kms).  How many of these are there within the flight range of MH370...not too high a number.  Then you'd need a serious big hanger to hide the aircraft. The list whittles down again.  The reason for the interest ?  Those counties that own spy satellites notoriously distrust this region of the world, and will be keen to look for state involvement in this little caper.

What's more likely..?  It splashed down somewhere where no one is looking today, on purpose, out of gas, or maybe as a result of a struggle for control.

Big conspiracy theories are always fun to discuss, but we do run into that core thing once more - no one can really keep a secret.

The Mystery of MH370

This is starting to seem like something from the twilight zone. As I write this, there is no conclusion at all about the loss of the Boeing 777-200 that was owned by Malaysian Airlines and operated the overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing this past Friday night.

The lack of information here is startling in this day and age, and the mystery is starting to out-weigh the tragedy.

Here's what is known:

• the aircraft took off at 12:30am local time and tracked as normal towards Beijing, a 6.5 hour flight.  All weather is reported as fine en-route, and the crew and aircraft had no flags or issues around them - everything was supposed to be 'normal'
• at 01:30, about an hour into the flight when over the South China Sea having cleared peninsular Malaysia, the airplane cruising at and altitude of 35,000 feet, vanishes from radar
• there is no radio communication indicating an issue from the crew, there is no further communications from the aircraft systems, and the emergency beacons in various varieties do not go off. 

What could have happened ?

Well, let's look for the most obvious answer first - the airplane crashed.  When that happens, it falls from the sky and that takes about 2 minutes at that altitude. Lots of time for the crew to radio for help, lots of time for the telemetry interactions with ground stations to get info from the aircraft systems.  So unless something cataclysmic happened, it didn't just fall.  Add to that the lack of debris found.  So - it didn't crash in a traditional sense.

If something cataclysmic happened, that would explain the sudden lack of communication, but not the lack of debris on the ocean.  This is a chaotic event, and some larger pieces of the aircraft (those farthest from the explosion) would be sizeable enough to have survived the descent and would have been spotted.  This remains the most likely of scenarios, but there are still issues with this explanation as the evidence isn't consistent with this outcome.  As you think about other possible causes of an explosion, this one gets a little interesting again.

Let's begin looking at non-obvious answers too.

The airplane was abducted; hijacked (successfully or not) and or was the result of a suicide attempt.   Each of these has at it's core human interaction which would have invoked unexpected actions to silence the still-flying aircraft.  An abduction that took the aircraft silent, then below radar to some landing site isn't impossible to fathom, though a commercial 777 isn't easy to hide.  A hijack may explain this.  Alternatively, an unsuccessful hijack that results in a debris field far from where it was expected may be the case - we're looking in the wrong area.  A crew member suicide could be possible here, but no personal profile information highlights this possibility.  The other interesting non obvious answer could be the cause of the crash and an implicit cover-up - what if the Vietnamese government shot the aircraft down and now is charged with search  & recovery and is sanitizing found debris to allow for a cover up..?  That certainly explains the variables, but not motive. It would also be a hugely intricate task and many mouths to silence.  So, highly unlikely.

This is an interesting mystery, and growing more-so with each passing day.