Why would someone be filming? Do you film your flights? 4 Four hours into a 12 hour long-haul flight most people are either sleeping or watching films, or maybe in a meal service.

The effects of depressurisation are widely known. Partly as the result of extensive testing in pressure chambers, including those capable of explosive decompression (such as the BAE Faraday Centre at Rochester), and also testing at altitude, and partly due to past incidences such as Aloha Flight 243 and others. Remember though in the case of MH17 a missile had detonated and it's likely the aircraft came apart very quickly, if not instantly. Not enough time to select unlock, camera, video, record.

JC is correct, if it was a more gradual decompression the cabin would be filled with fog.

There are two types of 'black box' (actually they tend to be orange), which do exactly what they say: the flight data recorder (FDR) and the cockpit voice recorder (CVR). While the CVR will record the voices of anyone on the flight deck, you're unlikely to hear anything from the passengers.

I remember being played audio from a CVR many years ago. A fire had started in the rear of the cabin and as it spread the passengers swarmed to the front of the aircraft, and into the flight deck. Yes, you could hear their screams.

If OTOH you were belted into your surviving seat section in say the surviving back end of the fuselage, this would be rapidly descending and so air pressure rapidly increasing. It might take maybe 3 minutes to freefall out of the sky and in the relative protection of that environment I wouldn't be surprised if it was perfectly possible to be conscious when you hit the ground.

In this case I am doubtful as I believe the missile was likely to have been a "shrapnel" missile the projectiles of which would likely have ripped the fuselage and contents of the plane to pieces, and there would have been the blast wave itself. But I still don't think it's impossible.

And another one goes. A domestic Transasia flight in Taiwan has crashed after failing to land killing 'more than 40' of the 54 on board.

Whilst there have been a few recently, I'm regularly amazed at how few crashes there are when you consider how many flights there are every day.

Transasia has a top safety rating and this is their first major crash. Reports suggest trying to land in thunderstorm conditions, aborted landing but couldn't regain height.

Anyone see the video clip of that cargo plane crashing, think it was an afganistan one where a tank inside became loose and shifted to the back of the plane causing it to stall and crash in flames, horrifying

We were due to land at East Midlands on Saturday but thunderstorms were all around. Pilots tried but then circled for half an hour before diverting to Birmingham. It was so bumpy even above it all that I'm glad he didn't try to land. The tone of his voice suggested he didn't want to and we were all pretty relieved when we moved away. Worst conditions I've been in and we weren't actually inside the storm itself.

I hope this plane didn't try to land in similar conditions.

If it "failed to land", how come it's not still flying?

Same, I saw a program a year or two back think it was like "aircrash investigations" or something like that and they had an american aero-expert who compared the number of people who die on the roads in car crashes in just the US to a 747 jumbo crashing (think it was this paragraph, "In the US, each year there are about 40,000 deaths per year in automobile accidents vs. about 200 in air transport. To put this in perspective, the chance of dying in an automobile accident is about 1000 times more than winning a typical state lottery in a year." )

So for the number of flights that are around and I think its something like a flight every 2 mins comes in our goes out at Manchester alone, just one coming down is case for huge investigations shows how safe flying is, but on the flip side when one does crash its very unlikely anyone survives and it is also the best basis for terror or to attack if you want to get your message across, and the world to take note of your group/sect/cult/ bunch of knobs.

I have been on a fight that's had to make and emergency landing, was suppose to be flying to KOS last year, but the first plane we where due on had engine trouble then the second had nav trouble we did then take off but had to circle back and land at Manchester due to an electrical issue, we did get there the next day on the original plane that had engine issues from the day before.

Meanwhile Air Algerie - Algeria's national airline - says it has lost contact with AH5017 flying from Burkina Faso to Algiers.

It's an MD83 with 112 passengers on.