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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."
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/cnns-don-lemon-is-it-preposterous-to-think-a-black-hole-caused-flight-370-to-go-missing/
Don Lemmon: " “is it preposterous” to consider a black hole as a possibility?"
' Mary Schiavo, a former Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Transportation, said, “A small black hole would suck in our entire universe, so we know it’s not that.” '
Our brightest minds are working on this...
Because the extra weight may have caused the island to capsize:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
I'm no aviation expert but if I were to design a black box , I'd put a radio beacon on it (activated on impact) and a sonar beacon (activated on being submerged) . Someone on /. had pointed out that they already have such beacons which ping for 30 days after activation. Why are they not picking any of that? Have they used submarines in the search?
Here is a very detailed account of the trajectory data now available from Reuters. Maybe someone on this board knows air routes in South East Asia and can provide analysis or pointers to useful maps?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Yes they do. (Or very nearly -- the index of refraction of air to RF pulses is very nearly 1)
If any trace is found in Australian waters, it will either be detained or culled.
Radio transmissions do not occur at the speed of light.
Radio waves and light waves are both electromagnetic radiation, just at different wavelengths. In vacuum, electromagnetic radiation travels at speed c for all wavelengths. In non-vacuum media, there may be some dispersive effects that cause the speed to change with wavelength, but those effects are very small in air.
In short, radio waves travel at the speed of light because, in a very real sense, radio waves are light, just not light at a wavelength our eyes can see.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
Skyvector is your friend.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2014/03/mh370-electrical-fire/
I believe something like that happened. Occam's razor and so on...
The fact that the pilot had built his own simulator also has a mundane reason that somebody on pprune had tracked down: He assisted with giving a real pilot's feedback to a third-party developer of aircraft for flight simulators (X-Plane IIRC).
The best current thought is that they went south. The fact that Indonesia didn't see them pass right through the monitored airspace is fact enough.
Learn to love Alaska
They use a shared TDMA return to best allocate bandwidth. The timing is measured in microseconds (and no, not millions of them). The time to the GEO satellite can be learned and used to deduce distance, thus an arc. It's pretty accurate.
Learn to love Alaska
Primary radars are short range devices. Its pretty easy to evade them, by design or by accident. Having said that the aircraft would have to have been steered south after it crossed the Malay peninsula to the west, and there is no explanation for that at the moment. My hope is that the southern ocean search is being run to give the illusion of action while the US and China prepare to extract hostages from one of the [a-z]stans.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
So what you are saying is there isn't actually a missing plane, they just made it up?
You have to admit, that would be a pretty good explanation for why they can't find it.... ;)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Small boats regularly depart illegally from Indonesian beaches,
It 's not illegal to leave Indonesia by boat.
heading for other countries and when told about it, the Indonesians show zero interest in arresting and charging the crews and passengers or even taking them back.
People travel by boat between countries all the time. In my country (also Australia) 30,541 boats arrived here in the 2011/2012 FY. That's just the commercial vessels, not including pleasure craft, navy visits etc.
Of course the Indonesians aren't interested in stopping something that is not illegal or immoral, or damaging to their economy, or ours.
Here's a map of the pings:
http://theaviationist.com/wp-c...
It's Indonesia. They don't have to worry much about "intruders".
Why pay millions for a system that can track a U2 then configure it so that it can not detect a U2? All the military systems available would track a commercial plane, and you'd be asserting that they bought a commercial system, then disabled it. Or built their own, costing more than the commercial systems, and built it "worse" than the commercial systems.
Much more likely, they have expensive systems that they don't know how to work, and they spend most of their time off or broken, and they feel too embarrassed about it to explain why they didn't have coverage.
Sort of like why Saddam had a "chemical weapons" program. If everyone knew he didn't have it, then he expected a revolt or invasion. So he pretends to have one (apparently so well that he fools the President who can't be fooled again). Indonesia may be doing the same with their military capability.
Learn to love Alaska
They use donated ex-US systems apparently, so don't run it down too much, you'd be critisizing your own country :)
They have a bit of a military nuclear program (mostly stalled since the 1960s) and your taxes probably paid for most of it since most parts are US made.
ping timing would be too small to measure
High precision timers are everywhere these days, for example the raw windows performance counters are expressed in units of 100 nanoseconds (10^-7 seconds). Coincidently GPS uses a 50 nanosecond clock tick, which is only twice as fast as what your PC is doing right now. In case you are wondering, light travels about 15 meters in 50 nanoseconds, the accuracy of GPS is improved to better than 15 meters by using multiple satellites and a bit more math.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
There isn't anywhere on Diego Garcia to hide MH 370 if it did land there. The only hangar at the airbase is 40 metres front to back and a 777-200ER is over 60 metres nose to tail so it would have to be parked in plain (so to speak) sight of everyone from janitors through pilots and aircrew working there.
Have a look at the island sometime on Google Earth, search for the Diego Garcia postcode which is BBND 1ZZ. The current image has a number of B-52s and (I think) KC-135 tankers parked on hardsstands; I've seen a B-1B there too in previous images. A 777 is significantly larger than a B-52.
"it's interesting that the aircraft appears to have a heading of 180 (due South), almost exactly on 90 E longitude, and very possibly passing through 90E 0N on it's way heading towards 180S (which was beyond it's range). "
Theres no such thing as 180 degrees South.
Latitude goes from 0 (equator) to 90 degrees South (south pole) whereas the north pole is 90 north
Unfortunately, this map has non-factual locations for the circles other than 8:11. The angle information for the earlier pings has not been released, but artwork was drawn up that estimated these earlier pings from the reported estimated tracks attributed to the NTSB. This artwork, drawn by Scott Henderson, was likely the source for the map on theaviationist.com's site. See http://willyloman.wordpress.co... for details.
Inmarsat has been coy about the exact value of the ping angles. They issued a press release that said that the information had been given to the Malaysian government, and that anyone who wanted details should contact Malaysia. See http://www.inmarsat.com/news/i... IMHO, they have been doing this because the earlier ping data may make clearer that the aircraft track takes it over Malaysia, where the lack of detection may be a source of official embarrassment.
The earlier ping data may also indicate whether MH370 overflew Indonesia, or whether it flew west to avoid Indonesia, and that has an effect on the plane's remaining range and the estimate of the flight's bearing when it presumably turned southward toward the 90E/45S region where the SAR operations have been focused lately. It would appear that this data was factored into the NTSB track estimates, but the lack of an official release of the angle data has hampered the armchair/amateur speculation about the location. IMHO, if MH370 avoided overflying Indonesia, it may have been a deliberate attempt to lay a false track in a west or northwest direction.
Gentlemen! We have found the state sponsor responsible for the terrorist attack on MH370. We start bombing in five minutes.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
If the LiIon cargo caught fire and burned out the communications wiring
Then the whole plane in out of the air in under an hour. You CANNOT have a fire bad enough to take out all kinds of wiring and have a craft that will still be flying for very long at all, much less seven hours.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I agree totally, but I think it is dubious to put the families and public through this much disinformation.
There is really no reason to think it crashed. That was a good first guess when it was just "missing," but since we know it was taken by the crew, that would seem to reset the whole idea. What new information is consistent with a crash? None.
They just keep parading this absurd "2500 nautical mile" BS. That is the range if they had loaded fuel for a flight to Beijing. But the plane has a range of over 7000 miles fully loaded. Nobody has produced anything that even claims to verify or offer proof that the aircraft was fueled the way the paperwork says. And you would need an airport free of corruption to even have a chance of proving it; if lots of fuel is regularly being stolen or otherwise misappropriated, there is simply no possible way to verify the fuel that was loaded.
And the whole idea, "well gee, they stole a vehicle, and it was supposed to only had a half tank of gas... it must have crashed because it didn't get to the destination!" That is a real Keystone Kops sort of scenario to be saying that. It is pretty obviously BS. The most likely reason to hijack it is to take hostages. The next most likely is to use the plane as a missile in the future. The next most likely is to sell it off. The whole "pilot suicide" thing seems pretty silly. You'd need a suicide pact between multiple crew members to pull that off, and the co-pilot was new. Much more likely is a religious, political, or criminal association between them. And in that scenario, a suicide pact would involve crashing into something, not just flying off over the ocean until the fuel runs out.
The whole misinformation scheme is dangerous; if they rescue the passengers, fine. Then they'll be beyond most criticism. But that is a long-shot. If the terrorists suddenly show up on TV killing hostages, all the misinformation will look really bad, and they'll get a huge propaganda coup. In other words... they better know where the plane is and have special forces on the ground, or they're just being idiots.
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.
Here is a list of the current ten theories on the disappearance of flight MH370.
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