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New Information May Narrow Down Malaysian Jet's Path
mdsolar (1045926) writes with this excerpt from Slate on the still-missing Malaysian Airline flight "In a case that is swirling with uncertainties, a few pieces of evidence have stood apart for seeming reliability. Among them was the revelation last Saturday by Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak that his country's investigators, in collaboration with U.S. authorities, had analyzed an electronic ping that MH370 had broadcast to the Inmarsat satellite at 8:11 a.m. on the morning of the disappearance. Based on this data, the investigators had determined that at that moment MH370 must have been somewhere along one of two broad arcs: one which passed through Central Asia, and the other of which covered a swath of largely empty Indian Ocean, far to the south. The revelation left a burning question unresolved: what about the six earlier pings, which had been exchanged between the aircraft and the satellite about once per hour? Could any position data be deduced from them? Today, Inmarsat revealed some crucial information. 'The ping timings got longer,' Inmarsat spokesman Chris McLaughlin stated via email. That is to say, at each stage of its journey, the aircraft got progressively farther away from the geostationary satellite's position, located over a spot on the equator south of Pakistan, and never changed its heading in a direction that took it closer—at least for very long."
Even if they are competent they do not have complete coverage, don't give a shit about obvious non-military aircraft at high altitude, and even it they are logging stuff why would they log stuff of that sort that's just passing over?
Having different goals does not mean stupid or incompetent. They do not have some huge chain of radar stations designed to identify incoming ICBMs - they never had a need for such a thing.
Ummmm....... Not necessarily so. Sound under water can be ducted through sound channels and convergence zones. Depending on the depth/pressure, the salinity, and the temperature, faint noises can by heard by a hydrophone hundreds of miles away - but NOT detectable on a hydrophone a half-mile away that isn't at the sound channel depth. (Source: I was an airborne acoustic sensor operator for several years in P-3 Orion ASW aircraft, long long ago). I'm guessing that every US submarine that transits the IO for the next ten years will have secondary tasking to search for MH370.
Of course, if the airplane is on the bottom, in the mud, or in an abyssal trench, the sound could be muffled and not audible even a dozen yards away. Since we have essentially no clue where the airplane is (except that we can be pretty sure it isn't in the "black hole" between Don Lemon's ears) the whole search effort is, essentially, a crap shoot.
We actually had better data on the Air France jet that went down in the Atlantic a few years ago. They eventually recovered the flight data recorders, although it took almost 2 years. But we had a pretty good idea of the track of the aircraft, even though we didn't know WHEN it had gone down.
Here, we can't even be certain that it went down. There are only three good chances for what happened to it. 1) It went down at sea. 2) It crashed into the jungle. Or 3), it landed someplace and is being hidden. The only thing we can be certain of is that it's not flying any longer.
I think that we are going to be in for a very, very long wait before we find out what happened— we're not talking about weeks or months, but many years. When Air France 447 went down, debris and an oil slick was spotted within 24 hours of the plane's loss. Even with that lead, it took almost two years, including the use of towed sonar arrays, nuclear and robotic submarines, and autonomous robotic underwater vehicles, to finally located the wreckage and salvage the plane and black boxes.
Here, the situation is vastly more challenging. Locating the wreckage of Air France 447 quickly, before it had time to drift far, meant that it was possible to narrow down the search area considerably; the initial search area was around 2400 square miles- a 50 mile by 50 mile area. Here, the search area is almost a hundred times that- the area the Australians have been searching is something like 230,000 square miles. That's roughly the size of Texas. It's also in the middle of nowhere- between Australia and the Kerguelen islands, putting it about 1500 miles away from land. That's making it difficult to do aerial searches- the planes burn most of their fuel getting there and back, so there's little time for searches. It sounds like the weather isn't fantastic either, so visibility is limited, and satellite photos of the suspected wreckage show a lot of white, which I assume is whitecaps from heavy seas. That's going to make it difficult or impossible to spot wreckage on radar- the waves are going to be reflecting back a lot of signal, creating a lot of noise- or visually. The heavy wave action could also cause floating sections of wing or tail to fill up with water more quickly and sink. Finally, the plane went down two weeks ago, so if any wreckage is recovered, it could be hundreds of miles from the crash site.
At this point, I'm going to guess that no wreckage will be found, or it will be found too late to provide any useful information about the location of the plane beyond confirming that it's in the southern Indian Ocean. Given that, we are talking about an underwater search using sonar that is going to cover hundreds of thousands of square miles, in waters up to 16,000 feet deep. That would require either years of effort, or a small fleet of underwater vehicles scanning the seafloor. This assumes that the deductions made from the satellite data are even correct. It's not impossible, but it is very, very difficult. My guess is that new technologies- making it possible for robotic vehicles to scan larger areas of seafloor, in higher resolution than ever before- may be necessary.
The fire theory is wrong, and it is not the simplest explanation in any shape or form. Not only was transponder switched off, but ACARS was too. Here's the thing - ACARS kept transmitting for 7 hours!! That system was fully functional - it had power, it was still transmitting to the stations. That is how we know the plane did not crash immediately. It was manually switched to a mode in which it no longer actively sent data.
If there was a fire on board, then it magically: Took out all radios instantly, switched ACARS operating mode (plus ACARS can also be used to send messages, and the system was still working, yet it wasn't utilized to report an emergency either), killed the transponder, shut down the preprogrammed autopilot course, flew the plane for 7 hours with multiple heading changes and many "abnormal" altitude changes (flying above flight ceiling for the aircraft, flying lower than normal over Malaysia, etc), instantly killed every passenger (because no cell phones were switched on or even passively connected while flying lower than normal over Malaysia), allowed the pilot to manually fly the plane for hours (multiple altitude and course changes that were very strange) but without trying any other methods of communication (cell phones, ACARS messages, etc), and it all started IMMEDIATELY after Malaysia air traffic controllers turned over control of the aircraft as it was leaving their airspace. That is not the simplest explanation by any stretch of the imagination. The simplest explanation is: Someone with a technical knowledge of the aircraft decided to do whatever the hell they wanted with it at the very first opportunity when the plane was not longer being monitored by Malaysian flight controllers.
Personally, I believe one of two things had to have happened immediately after the "event" began (when the plane was released by Malaysia air traffic control) - 1) the pilot managed to kill all the passengers extremely fast - for example by flying at a very high elevation (above the service ceiling even) and depressurizing the plane (at that elevation people lose consciousness in under 8 seconds), or 2) none of the passengers suspected anything was wrong until far out into the Indian ocean and out the range of all land-based cell towers.
Better known as 318230.