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I have attended three long-form talks by Dr Neil Gordon, and some others involved. He is always the most compelling speaker. I have followed up in one-on-one discussions, at least twice. This effort has been a hugely consuming effort for most, and there is an 'answer' to where MH370 is: It is MOST likely to be in the next-most-probable statistical area, currently to the north-east of the last-most-likely area. Read the 'Full' report and get the picture. https://www.atsb.gov.au/public...

It is not the first drone-aircraft collision and it will not be the last. There a five identified in this report (one fatal): https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/...

There has since been one reported potential collision in Australia http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...

In any case, it does not require a collision for an unmanned aircraft to be a safety threat that needs to be mitigated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Nobody wants to wait until irresponsible use of unregulated aircraft brings down a high capacity aircraft on final before investigating options.

The actual Australian Transport Safety Bureau report

The main take-away:

When manually entering the coordinates of the aircraft's position using a data entry technique that was not recommended by the aircraft manufacturer, the longitude was incorrectly entered as 01519.8 east instead of 15109.8 east. This resulted in a positional error in excess of 11,000 km, which adversely affected the aircraft's navigation systems and some alerting systems.

In 2012, there were 0.55 deaths per 100 million road vehicle kilometres travelled. For business and private flying in GA aircraft, (which is mostly A to B, but does include a few riskier activities such as cattle mustering) the death rate is about 40 deaths per million flying hours, and if you assume that the average speed is something like 200 km/h, that comes out to 20 deaths per 100 million aircraft kilometres travelled.

GA aviation is much riskier than driving a car, and comparable to riding a motorcycle.

Of course you can have more mass. Just not lithium batteries (the kids might swallow them). Take lead acid batteries instead.

Now I know what to do with all those old 2V storage batteries I was planning on sending to scrap - just hook up eight in series so I can continue to use my laptop the next time I fly.
Sure there'll be some inconveniences, like getting them on and off the plane - but if I weld a bigger base onto a fork trolley I can just wheel them on and off, and park them in the aisle. I know there'll be some complaints about exceeding the carry-on size but it's only fair after all those years of only taking a down jacket and a laptop bag. The bonuses will more than make up for those minor inconveniences - no more trying to get a battery charge in-flight, no more carting around that stupid little plane power adaptor cable, and they should give me more than enough charge to get me between here and the USA, maybe even a return flight.

Of course if they really want to reduce the risk of fires on planes they should stop making them out of aluminium and magnesium, and having all that NaClO (with powdered Fe) about the place - those cylinders of oxygen underneath could also be a problem.

Actually, the engine case is designed to withstand blade failures, including fan blades, compressor blades and turbine blades, but not disc failures. Usually, discs fail when the engine is overspeed, when the centrifugal forces are higher than what the disc was designed to withstand. This is why the ECU/FADEC/EEC will shut the engine down immediately when it detects an overspeed condition on any of the shafts.

The case of QF32 you cite was indeed a disc failure. You can see a section of the failed disc here. The turbine blades were mounted in the notches you can see on the outer diameter of the disc. The disc punctured through the wing (including the fuel tank), as you can see here and here.

A jet engine that fails by disintegration has a high chance of slicing other airplane parts with ripped off fan blades.

It's actually exceedingly rare for there to be an uncontained failure.

That engine shroud is intended to handle catastrophic failures at full throttle.
This video is a test of the Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine that went into the Airbus A380. The test starts ~3:25 in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j973645y5AA

Then again, this is the same engine after an oil leak led to an internal engine fire
https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/2891294/vh-oqa-fig7.jpg
https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/4173628/ao-2010-089_vh-oqa.jpg

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) found that a number of oil feed stub pipes within the High Pressure / Intermediate pressure (HP/IP) hub assembly were manufactured with thin wall sections that did not conform to the design specifications. These non-conforming pipes were fitted to Trent 900 engines, including the No. 2 engine on VH-OQA. The thin wall section significantly reduced the life of the oil feed stub pipe on the No. 2 engine so that a fatigue crack developed, ultimately releasing oil during the flight that resulted in an internal oil fire. That fire led to the separation of the intermediate pressure turbine disc from the drive shaft. The disc accelerated and burst with sufficient force that the engine structure could not contain it, releasing high-energy debris.

Most of the shroud's strength is focused around the main fan blades instead of the turbine blades that are much deeper in the engine.

A jet engine that fails by disintegration has a high chance of slicing other airplane parts with ripped off fan blades.

It's actually exceedingly rare for there to be an uncontained failure.

That engine shroud is intended to handle catastrophic failures at full throttle.
This video is a test of the Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine that went into the Airbus A380. The test starts ~3:25 in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j973645y5AA

Then again, this is the same engine after an oil leak led to an internal engine fire
https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/2891294/vh-oqa-fig7.jpg
https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/4173628/ao-2010-089_vh-oqa.jpg

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) found that a number of oil feed stub pipes within the High Pressure / Intermediate pressure (HP/IP) hub assembly were manufactured with thin wall sections that did not conform to the design specifications. These non-conforming pipes were fitted to Trent 900 engines, including the No. 2 engine on VH-OQA. The thin wall section significantly reduced the life of the oil feed stub pipe on the No. 2 engine so that a fatigue crack developed, ultimately releasing oil during the flight that resulted in an internal oil fire. That fire led to the separation of the intermediate pressure turbine disc from the drive shaft. The disc accelerated and burst with sufficient force that the engine structure could not contain it, releasing high-energy debris.

Most of the shroud's strength is focused around the main fan blades instead of the turbine blades that are much deeper in the engine.

If you are referring to MH370, no, it didn't. There were roughly hourly handshakes initiated by the ground station and a final handshake initiated by the aircraft (likely when it ran out of fuel).

Here is a report on flight MH370 done by the Australian Transportation Safety Board that describes how the search area was established - ATSB Search Area report. The analysis of the satellite communications starts on page 17.

60 seconds from boom to PAN radio call

https://www.atsb.gov.au/public...

No video, but some nice photos at page 189-190 of http://www.atsb.gov.au/media/3532398/ao2008070.pdf (5.6MB)

How about reading the darned final report.

I highly recommend that. It's a good read. This was not a sensor problem. The problem actually occurred in the message output queue of one of the CPUs, and resulted in sending data with the label for one data item with the data from another. The same hardware unit had demonstrated similar symptoms two years earlier, but the problem could not be replicated. This time, they tried really hard to induce the problem, with everything from power noise to neutron bombardment, and were unable to do so.

There are several thousand identical hardware units in use, and one of the others demonstrated a similar problem, once. No other unit has ever demonstrated this problem. The The investigators are still puzzled. They unit which produced the errors has been tested extensively and the problem cannot be reproduced. They considered 24 different failure causes and eliminated all of them. It wasn't a stuck bit. It wasn't program memory corruption. (The code gets a CRC check every few seconds.) The code in ROM was what it was supposed to be. Thousands of other units run exactly the same software. It wasn't a single flipped bit. It wasn't a memory timing error. It wasn't a software fault. It looked like half of one 32-bit word was combined with half of another 32-bit word during queue assembly on at least some occasions. But there are errors not explained by that.

Very frustrating.

Although the FCPC algorithm for processing AOA data was generally very effective, it could not manage a scenario where there were multiple spikes in AOA from one ADIRU that were 1.2 seconds apart. The occurrence was the only known example where this design limitation led to a pitch-down command in over 28 million flight hours on A330/A340 aircraft, and the aircraft manufacturer subsequently redesigned the AOA algorithm to prevent the same type of accident from occurring again.

ADIRU = Air Data Inertial Reference Unit

In this case I was amazed that the train could take off with such a small grade. Its pretty funny to imagine that train controllers could actually have redirected the train "back up the hill" into the Melbourne suburbs and it would have gone most of the way to the end of the line.

Even when such software is scrutinized, it doesn't always work properly.

As you said, this same part is used on several makes of aircraft. In fact the only similar occurrence I know of actually happened on a Boeing 777. You can read the details here.

It is concerning that a single failed sensor can cause this sort of upset, but it doesn't (at first glance) seem like either Boeing or Airbus are any better where this particular failure mode is concerned. And both the A330 and the B777 have excellent safety records, considerably better than the previous generation of planes. Without playing down the seriousness for the passengers who were hurt, at least the rest of the flight control system seems to have prevented the plane pulling its wings off in both cases.

A better article link would have been the official ATSB media release document

"I've read that Qantas outsourced the maintenance of their planes to a Malaysian subsidiary of Malaysian Airlines, so chances are both planes were serviced by the same group of people"

Not necessarily:

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24152399-5017323,00.html

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/8/15/nation/20080815171659&sec=nation

As for the 777, the Malaysian pilots were lucky or did a better job of handling the incident - no injuries:

http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2005/AAIR/aair200503722.aspx

P.S. Qantas never claimed it was passenger electronics. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) http://www.atsb.gov.au/newsroom/2008/release/2008_43.aspx said that laptops could have interfered with the plane's on-board computer system... but the bureau also said in the same breath that it's too early to make that judgment. From that bland boring statement you arrive at Slashdots and dozens of other sensationlist news headlines: "Qantas Blames Wireless For Aircraft Incidents" http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/09/1427232&tid=270
WTF? Even five at the source http://www.atsb.gov.au/newsroom/media.aspx would have determined that.
I come here for NEWS not fucking Fox-News...

P.S. Qantas never claimed it was passenger electronics. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) http://www.atsb.gov.au/newsroom/2008/release/2008_43.aspx said that laptops could have interfered with the plane's on-board computer system... but the bureau also said in the same breath that it's too early to make that judgment. From that bland boring statement you arrive at Slashdots and dozens of other sensationlist news headlines: "Qantas Blames Wireless For Aircraft Incidents" http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/09/1427232&tid=270
WTF? Even five at the source http://www.atsb.gov.au/newsroom/media.aspx would have determined that.
I come here for NEWS not fucking Fox-News...

Seems to be this one:
http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/2008/pdf/aws250708.pdf

"During the cruise, the aircraft commenced to bank with about three degrees angle of bank. A passenger was using a wireless mouse and this is suspected to have caused the oscillations. "

This was on a Boeing 747 over the Southern Indian Ocean (if my use of Google is to be trusted).

Unfortunately the one line in a PDF doesn't say much, beyond "ATSB investigation: No".

The NZ Herald is quoting the Courier Mail (a Brisbane Australia paper) quoting an unnamed "ATSB spokesman". Oh please! The level of technical filtering ability displayed by the Courier Mail barely registers, even in their tech section.

I'll defer to professional investigators who, not surprisingly, have officially said nothing about electronic devices on-board. I'm sure they'll ask as a matter of routine about transmitters, phones etc. and get a series of vague hand-wavey answers. You can be _very_ sure they'll be looking harder for a concrete elevator system failure and/or control system glitch, or atmospheric condition. Heck, they might even use "evidence".

http://www.atsb.gov.au/newsroom/2008/release/2008_40b.aspx

I call bullshit

It is impossible for a malfunctioning altitude indicator to cause this problem.

According to the ATSB's investigation the plane dropped at 2000 ft/min leveled then dropped at 1600 ft/min. If if the altitude were too suddenly go to 0 the autopilot has a limit on the maximum rate of descent. And in most cases rate of descent is determined by an accelerometer not altimeter. In any event if the altitude suddenly change it would feel like a normal change in altitude and not a sudden drop. And for some reason the supposed incident happens to be missing from the ATSB's list of investigations.

My guess is that there is a more significant problem with the aircraft's avionics.

I follow several aviation forums regularly and this has obviously been the number one topic since it happened and thought I should share some interesting findings:

A report of an earlier software problem with the 777.

The interesting part:

"a second accelerometer then failing and the latent software anomaly allowing
the ADIRU to once more utilise the previously failed accelerometer
information with its high output values in its computations, resulting in
erroneous acceleration outputs into the flight control outputs but not the
navigation (ground speed, velocity, position, etc.) outputs."

Of the two current theories - i.e. a sotfware issue or contaminated fuel - I'm more inclined to believe a software issue since as a precaution during landing both engines use separate fuel tanks and pumps without crossfeeding and it would be quite a coincidence if two such independent systems failed at the same time. An analysis of the fuel filters will probably reveal a lot. If it indeed turns out to be the computer that failed, it will be somewhat ironic that the first* such accident involves a Boeing even though many have considered the higher degree of automation Airbus scary.

*) Neither the official investigation nor the conspiracy theory blames the computer for the A320 crash in Mulhouse-Habsheim but those who aren't familiar with the conspiracy theory immediately assume that the theory blames the computer since it was the first civilian fly-by-wire.

You forgot to mention that Victoria has the lowest road toll in all the sates in Australia. And the Australian road toll http://www.atsb.gov.au/road/stats/pdf/rfa2004.pdf is significantly lower than the US toll. http://www.driveandstayalive.com/media%20section/0 40129_press-release_safety-on-american-roads.htm

The USA had an annual rate of 14.8 road deaths per 100,000 people in 2004 compared to 7.99 in Australia.

Having driven all over the world (30 countries+) I find Australia is a lot stricter on enforcement but also has very safe roads. Chandi

This is a bit out of context. It is not because no-one wants to use them, but a clash of availability versus American culture and lifestyle. For the past 50 years, automobiles have been the core of transportation for Americans, from teenagers on up. But that does not speak the same for the rest of the world.

In my time in Australia, I was WELL introduced to their mass transit systems, in both Sydney and Melbourne. For both cities, Trains, as well as Trams and buses, are their main modes (yes, MAIN) modes of transportation. Yes, people have cars there, but more than 100 million kilometers were travelled by train in 2002 alone; the bulk of it being in New South Wales, and Victoria (44 million and 32 million, respectively) alone.

Trains are very much alive, and will be for a very long time. It is just the United States, which has lacked in picking up on a trend that transports hundreds of thousands of people, in favour of polluting the air with carbon monoxide gases from car exhaust.

I am not sure on statistics in the rest of the world, but I know that in Australia we have a population of cyclists which is defined as males aged 18-25, on an 800cc or larger motorbike.

Of this population, annually 1/3 dies in motorbike related accidents. Can't find a ref. but I couldn't believe it when I read....

Q.