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China Deploys Satellites In Search For Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight
EwanPalmer writes "China has begun using its orbiting satellites in a bid to find the missing Malaysian Airlines flight. The Xi'an Satellite Monitor and Control Center is said to have launched an emergency response to search for Flight MH370 after it went off radar over the South China Sea in the early hours of Saturday. The center is reported to have adjusted up to 10 of its high-res satellites to help search for the plane."
Sometimes big airliners can get lost at those.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Sounds like there was a very important person of Chinese descent on it.
So - these are Chinese spy satellites? Given the region, hasen't the US got similar facilities in zone?
Another thought. How low does a plane need to fly to "drop off the radar"? I appreciate that civil radars might have a lower limit (but how many thousand feet?) but how low can the regional military powers see, and would they be telling anyway?
Notorious number usually signifying a feel good answer without counting.
There's an auto-playing video embedded in the linked article's page - just in case you hate that sort of thing.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I think you have misunderstood what the word "deploy" means.
I'm pretty sure the satellites were already in orbit.
1) China has successfully tested the ability of their stealth interceptor to take down a plane.
2) China demonstrates near-instantaneous ICBM launch capability.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Unless it happens to flash into this time period. All the passengers are there now, running from polar bears, avoiding smoke monsters - that sort of thing.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
have they found him or the Boeing 727-223 that he was last on and has not be found.
I am not talking RADAR, but rather satellite-linked transponders relaying (at least) once per minute the plane "vitals" (coordinates, velocity, altitude, attitude, cabin pressure and temperature, fuel levels, any error codes or warnings). I mean, this may not be cheap, but it is meaningless cost-wise compared to the operational cost of a plane.
The plane was hijacked by the pilots and flewn to burma under the radar and is being parted out.
So it disappeared from Radar ! So we thing the plane is "lost".
Planes have a distress locator beacon that goes off when it detects that something is not right. They are shielded (against explosion/water etc) and have their own independent power supply. Satellites tend to be able to pick these up.
So what do we not know where the beacon is....because it's not transmitting, or at a depth that can not be detected (think plane crash off Brazil a few years back).
Perhaps the plane turned of its transponder, and dropped below radar and has landed someplace. Given the interesting passenger manifest issues there is likely more to this then a plane crashing.
Tin hats please...
It hasn't been activated for Malaysia Airlines Flight 307, nor was it activated for Air France Flight 447 in 2009 --one would think that they'd be all over this sort of thing like a cheap suit. Does anyone know why not? A computer search for a debris field that wasn't there during the previous pass would seem like a no-brainer.
http://www.disasterscharter.or...
It hasn't been activated for Malaysia Airlines Flight 307, nor was it activated for Air France Flight 447 in 2009 --one would think that they'd be all over this sort of thing like a cheap suit. Does anyone know why not? A computer search for a debris field that wasn't there during the previous pass would seem like a no-brainer.
http://www.disasterscharter.or...
One plane going down is a tragedy.
100 planes all going down at once is a major disaster.
their non-orbiting satellites?
Simple. This doesn't meet the criteria required to activate a giant global collaboration of space agencies. There needs to be more than 200 people lost to invoke the charter.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Muslim terrorists using stolen passports smuggled a bomb on the plane. The tickets were purchased with cash by an Iranian for the users of the stolen passports. Smells fishy.
This is absolutely mind-boggling. I'm fairly certain that the US knows were every plane in the air is at any given millisecond. It is IMPOSSIBLE to simply lose a gigantic plane. What the hell does Asia do differently?
Rulebook is try to land on water intact.
That plane, at last tracked, by radar, had achieved the altitude of 35,000 ft.
The time it takes the plane to plunge down 35,000 ft (let's say it nosedived) still will take couple of minutes - enough time for the pilot (and/or the first officer) to issue at least one distress call.
But there was no distress call, no nothing. The plane just vanished, just like that.
But I shouldn't be surprised either. Both the pilot and the first officers were Malays and both of them were graduates of that infamous diploma mill - MARA college, of Malaysia.
The Malays are "famous" of being negligent in their line of duty - and it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody if it turns out that when that plane started to drop out from the sky, there was no one inside the cockpit as both would have gone out for a "coffee break".
Ask anyone in Malaysia and they can tell you about the "work ethics" of the Malays.
Given the description of the plane's flight path, if it was being tracked by radar from Kuala Lumpur, then "dropped off the radar" would have been closer to 10km altitude than to 5km.
The KL radar station can not track the plane flying on the South China Sea.
Looking at the map of the Peninsular Malaya, KL is at the West side of a mountain range, and the plane was flying on the airspace on the South China Sea, which is on right side of the same mountain range.
Assuming the plane has crashed, and has crashed into the South China Sea on the east coast of Peninsular Malaya, they do have other radar stations - based in Kuantan.
In fact, in Kuantan they have several radar stations. Some civilians (for aviation, for example), some military, as they have an air force base there as well.
To find this plane.
China has sent at least 4 navy ships (is the Chinese navy showing off or just to show that "this is their area" and that they can do whatever the US can do?)
China is deploying satellites.
The USA has deployed two destroyers with helicopters to the search
Australia has offered up two P-3C Orions.
Seems a bit disproportionate.
So, did this plane have in-flight WiF - if so, when did it go offline, and also why weren't there any tweets from passengers?
If there was working WiFi, we can probably assume the passengers became suddenly incapacitated. Even a catastrophic decompression would get a "Whoa, my seat totally got blown out of the plane. LOL. OMFG!" before going out of range.
Ignore the gods, ignore the cultures; consider their screaming cries, on the wrong frequency.
You don't need global collaboration. There are privately owned imaging satellites with enough resolution 1m to detect anomalous debris floating around.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
So the US isn't repositioning its satellites? It seems to me that China these days are doing the things that America used to at the drop of a hat without a whim...
The pilot that you're talking about was an awesome guy that frequently posted on flight sim forums, posted youtube videos about how to save you money on your air conditioner and had a daughter, a family. He was a better human being then you'll ever be.
A loss of hydraulic pressure or power does not do this for a 777. It has a RAT (ram air turbine) which pops out in such cases. Basically a big propeller which gets turned by the wind as the plane glides at 500 mph and generates enough power rudimentary electronics (including radio) and hydraulic pressure. That's what happened with the Gimli Glider - a 767 mistakenly loaded with insufficient fuel (the original boneheaded imperial vs metric conversion foul-up before the Mars Climate Orbiter). which basically turned into a 100 ton glider when it ran out of fuel mid-flight. The RAT popped out and allowed the crew to control the plane to a safe landing. (Which of course means if this did happen on MH370, the search area needs to be much larger than where they're currently looking).
IF what happened to the Gimli Glider happened to the MH370 flight, the crews ought to have plenty of time to make the distress call.
Why then there was no distress call from that plane?
Could it be that when emergency strike the crews panicked and started praying on their knees to their Allah and forgot to call for help ??
... posted youtube videos about how to save you money on your air conditioner ...
Save money on air conditioner ?
WTF ??
Want to save REAL MONEY ? Forget that fucking air conditioner and take in REAL AIR, instead.
Yep, that pilot is awesome, alright, and he makes as much sense as any of his *MALAY* "super human".
Is EPIRB unreasonable to have in an airplane? Possibly in the black box and triggered at a certain shock level.
The vast majority of passports are stolen for mundane criminal purposes not terrorism.
http://www.independent.co.uk/v...
Yes, just in case you haven't been following all the coverage from the last three or four days, the United States has been providing a large amount of satellite data, even leveraging their missile launch detection system to search for possible explosions. The more interesting question is why it took the Chinese this long to provide satellite imagery to search for a plane full of primarily their own citizenry in its own region.
Could it be that when emergency strike the crews panicked and started praying on their knees to their Allah and forgot to call for help ??
No. As my flight instructor told me, fly the plane first and if you have time, talk on the radio. If they where busy with multiple system failures the first task is to get control of the aircraft. If you don't have the aircraft under control, talking on the radio is the absolute WRONG thing to be doing unless there is time. ATC is required to ask you all sorts of useless questions and if you are struggling to control your aircraft the last thing you want or need is another distraction. "Nature of your emergency?" "Number of souls on board?" "What are your intentions?" Now if they can help you by suggesting the nearest airport, clearing the runway, getting the fire trucks rolling or getting search and rescue started by all means, get on the radio, but the first thing you do is FLY THE AIRPLANE.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Much more data being hidden by the govs. It's unlikely by govs to declare publicly the source of data if they reveal it as of now!! All these so called high level officials are just waiting to get a breakthough from the publically known sources!!!............. funny they won,t care for a bird or humans all the same
Their officials only start working when the angry relatives of the missing passengers start to throw things at them :(
Except that the comment I replied to was specifically in the context of "Why hasn't the Disasters Charter been activated to find this plane?" and the answer is, "because this isn't a disaster of great enough magnitude".
Though we're now learning that more than a couple of spy agencies are turning their surveillance resources onto the task (finally! The NSA might be good for something!)
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
X-posted on Wired.com and elsewhere. -- Hey, I think we can solve this thing. Start with this model of what went wrong: After the plane got to cruising speed and altitude, some malfunction (in the altimeter, or autopilot, or gyro) caused it to enter a very shallow dive - like about 1/20 a degree shy of perfect horizontal flight. Flying over the ocean on a moonless night would not have offered anyone on the plane any information about altitude, so if the instruments were lying, the flight crew would not have known. The transponder is squawking ident and position but not altitude. After a while, the antenna receiving transponder squawks (back in Malaysia) goes under the horizon (from the plane's perspective), so at this point, the transponder squawks stop. Everybody is saying it was "switched off". It wasn't, it was too low to be heard in Malaysia. This happens at about the point that they would hand the plane off to Vietnam, which has not picked up any squawks or transmissions, perhaps for the same reason. In any case, the Vietnamese ATC folks are not yet tracking the plane. Nobody on or off the plane knows it, but the plane is flying too low, say ~15000 feet instead of 35000. The plane continues several hundred kilometers past the point of last contact and pancakes, either into the ocean south of Vietnam, or in the swampy southern reaches of Vietnam itself. At the moment of the crash, nobody on board suspects any trouble. The plane is not found because it is a long way from the point of last contact, and the searchers (who in that area are Vietnamese) overlook the debris .. or whatever. It's a big globe, after all. The plane would have skipped across the ocean at 700 nautical miles per hour, so who knows what was left of it?
Anyway, this boils down to a math problem. The location and height of the transponder tower should be find-able. The presumptive cruise altitude of the plane is known(call it cA = 35000), and we will assume that at the point it entered cruising altitude(call it pC, point Cruise), was correct. The location of the plane at the point when the transponder went dark is known (incidentally, the plane went dark "too soon" for a plane at 35000 - which fits) (call this point pD, for Darkness). Location and height of the tower are known(tL and tH). Use tH, cA, pC, pD and Earth's curvature to solve for the rate of descent (rD). Use pC and rD and azimuth to solve point X. Done.
Anyone want to take a stab at it?
If this is still around in the morning I might try myself. Been years since I took any math classes though ...
RDeW
PS. If the plane hit water at a shallow angle at 700 knots, it would shred. Fuel tanks, which trap air and float, would be confetti in Davey Jones' locker. Seat back cushions would be torn to bits by all that metal. There would be nothing big enough for a searcher to see from the air, far less from space.