MH370 - India joins the search too, Malaysia claims it went near the Andaman and Nicobar Islands

The sheer absurdity of the MH370 disappearance continues to reach new heights. As if having a Boeing 777 with 239 passengers on board just vanish into nothingness - an modern airliner 63 meters (200 feet) long and weighing close to 300 tons fully loaded, not a piddly little single-engined aircraft - wasn't absurd enough, the behavior of the Malaysian authorities has been mind-boggling. Now they claim to have traced the aircraft all the way to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands! Couldn't they have told the Indian authorities about this sooner?

http://zeenews.india.com/news/world/live-indian-air-force-aircraft-ready-to-hunt-missing-malaysia-airlines-jet_917414.html

http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/03/12/malaysia-airlines-idINDEEA2900B20140312

Just like I predicted in the previous post, the Indian Air Force, Navy and Coastguard have gotten involved in their search for the missing airliner, making India the 12th country to join the search for the plane.

http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/03/12/malaysia-airlines-coastguard-idINDEEA2B08D20140312

Given the sheer ridiculousness of the plane's off-radar whereabouts, it's doubtful that they will find anything at all. The plane may be thousands of kilometers away from Indian territory, and the search might be a wild goose chase. In other circumstances, the search and the resources thrown into it would be completely justified, but the contradictory and sometimes meaningless information about the aircraft's whereabouts aren't helping. What the hell is going on here?

Anyway, assuming that the plane has a five-hour flight time after going away from the Straits of Malacca, and assuming that it took another hour longer to reach the Andaman Sea and go "poof", the plane would still have another four hours of fuel left. Even if this is a generous estimate - cut it down to three hours of flight time near the Andamans - that means that the plane could be anywhere between 2100 to 2700 kilometers away from its last known location. MH370 had enough fuel to reach Beijing and stay up for another 60 to 90 minutes in the air - that's enough to cross the Bay of Bengal and visit India, Sri Lanka or Bangladesh. The search area, if it keeps ballooning like this, is going to extend to the whole of the Bay of Bengal, or even head further south into the Indian Ocean, an area as large as India itself. Nobody's going to find the plane if the search area keeps growing like this!

The "Twilight Zone" scenario is going to continue for a while. Apart from scouring images for signs of aircraft wreckage, the only thing left to do is to wish the searchers "good luck", because they're really going to need it.

EDIT: One expert admits that the plane must have landed, and it seems that a phone could possibly ring out on water. (which I find extremely unlikely). And yes, it is amazing.
 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-26544710

INS Sindhurakshak - what is going on with the investigation?

Something peculiar is going on here. From Business Standard newspaper -Russian experts denied access to the sunken INS Sindhurakshak

Why the Russians should be denied access doesn't make much sense. The Russians have as much of an interest in finding the cause of the disaster as the Indian Navy, since they're the one building and operating the submarines in question. The Kursk accident taught the Russians to put aside pride accept help when offered - why repeat the mistake the Russians made thirteen years ago?

Also valid is the point about Russian and Indian operating procedures being different. What in the operating procedures might have caused the accident?

And to ask an old question - was it a 53-65 torpedo?

Anyway, this entire "international tender" business is going to take its own time. The families of those killed will just have to wait.

The new INS Vikrant is launched and Chinese newspapers get nervous

INS Vikrant has been launched, and India is able to claim being able to build Aircraft Carriers (power projection assets) in addition to nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (strategic nuclear assets). This is a step up for the Indian Navy. Of course, India has had carriers for a long time, just that it never built one on its own.

The Chinese newspapers were highly suspicious of JMSDF Izumo, the carrier-like helicopter destroyer that Japan just built. Izumo is pretty heavy for a helicopter destroyer, although the design seems unable to carry anything other than helicopters. Even if someone installed a ski-jump on Izumo, it's hard to say whether Izumo would be able to operate fully loaded harriers given the position of the forward elevator. It's large enough to operate STOVL aircraft, but its design really doesn't seem to be capable of doing that. It could operate something like the F-35B, but that would require the installation of heat-resistant tiles all over the deck. The F-35B's huge main engine dumps heat onto flight decks like there's no tomorrow, and even the USMC's V-22 Osprey tends to dump an excess of heat onto flight decks. Izumo, even for all her carrier-like features, is really a helicopter carrier and nothing further.

Here's a fine image that shows the Izumo, the older Hyuga, and the size of the hangar areas. Izumo's aft elevator has been moved to the side, possibly due to hangar space considerations. Placing the elevators on the centerline necessarily restricts hangar space. A centerline elevator would make sense if the hangard were broad enough to move multiple aircraft to the elevator from different spots around the elevator - but that's not the case. The elevator just leaves a hole in the deck when it's down the way it is.

http://www.freewebs.com/jeffhead/worldwideaircraftcarriers/22DDH-0011.jpg

Vikrant is, plainly, a fully capable STOBAR carrier by design. It was meant to extract the maximum possible takeoff and landing run lengths by design, its elevators are both deck-edge (meaning that they don't leave huge holes in the deck when they're down and don't waste internal space), and it has a proper ski-ramp to catapult aircraft into the skies. It's a proper carrier, and much closer to China's Liaoning. Liaoning has an unquestionable advantage in terms of size - it's a larger, heavier, warship than Vikrant, and it won't be matched by the Indian Navy until INS Vishal comes in. Of course, the Vishal will be matched against far more potent rivals when it comes into existence - the Chinese have plans for their own indigenous nuclear-powered, catapult-equipped carriers, and are using Liaoning as the basis to learn as much as they can about carrier air operations before those carriers come in. They really know how to hit the deck running.

To throw in a different perspective, the entire carrier arms race that has begun here looks pretty for a military fan. But apart from the economic and industrial benefits of militarized Keynesianism, there's a certain pointlessness to all of this. India and China have nuclear warheads and missiles. Japan has been under the United States' nuclear umbrella since the Cold War. Apart from relief and emergency operations, it is quite hard to imagine how these new carriers will come to use in a conflict without nuclear weapons. The United States has put its carrier strike aircraft to good use in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there's no way any other country would get away with waging war so far from home even in the wake of the most monstrous terrorist attack imaginable. How much are all these countries really going to achieve in the end? What war are they waiting to use their carriers for, now that they have the ultimate shield against aggression (nuclear weaponry)?