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French, Chinese Satellite Images May Show Malaysian Jet Debris

Posted by timothy on from the lot-of-ocean-out-there dept.

Bloomberg News reports that "French satellite scans provided fresh indications of objects adrift in part of the Indian Ocean that's being scoured for the missing Malaysian airliner, backing up Chinese evidence as more planes and ships join the hunt. ... The developments rekindled prospects for a breakthrough in the mystery of Malaysian Air (MAS) Flight 370 after radar and visual scans failed to find objects spotted in earlier images taken from space. Searchers, bolstered by a growing fleet of international vessels, also want to locate a wooden pallet seen from the air to check if it could have come from the jet's hold." And if you have your own database of recent photos to trawl through, the article says "The Chinese photo, taken March 18, is focused 90 degrees east and almost 45 degrees south, versus almost 91 degrees east and 44 degrees south for similar items on a March 16 satellite image, putting the object 120 kilometers southwest of that sighting."

67 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Great Headline by JMJimmy · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    If only it matched up to a great story. Anyone have any geek news?

    1. Re:Great Headline by iggymanz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      yes, with the state of the art in 2014, entire commercial jets can disappear without a trace and might never be found

    2. Re:Great Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      The NSA knows where it is.

      So do the aliens who abducted it.

      None of them are telling.

    3. Re:Great Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      At least we start to get some focus on all that garbage floating around in the sea

    4. Re:Great Headline by JMJimmy · · Score: 3, Informative

      In my world geek news sources it's information - "The Chinese photo" would be shown or linked to. GPS coordinates would be accurate not "almost" a vague coordinate. The linked article is a bad rehash of 3rd party information - it's generic mainstream "news" to sell ads to people who can't tell the difference between a well researched detailed story and a piece of abstracted reworded junk.

    5. Re:Great Headline by ColdWetDog · · Score: 1

      Feel free to contribute !

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    6. Re:Great Headline by Rich0 · · Score: 2

      yes, with the state of the art in 2014, entire commercial jets can disappear without a trace and might never be found

      Well, the ocean is a big place, and generally devoid of radar. The airliner almost certainly had ADS-B and that can be tracked by satellite (though I have no idea if there is coverage over the southern Indian Ocean). The problem is that when the crew deliberately turns it off or it fails, what are you going to do?

      A breakaway ELT would make a lot of sense. Heck, you can buy them for personal use these days - not that it would do the passengers much good if the pilot were determined to commit suicide.

    7. Re: Great Headline by JWW · · Score: 2

      Yep, the talking heads can yak all day long and never be proven wrong.

    8. Re:Great Headline by itsme1234 · · Score: 1

      What is the "breakaway" ELT? I know about modern PLBs, those are nice but won't reach far from inside the plane.

    9. Re:Great Headline by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      A PLB would be handy if you actually got out of the plane though, which is really the only time you as a still-living individual will care about being located anyway.

      By breakaway I mean an externally-located device designed to detach if the plane sinks and float on the surface.

      There are other options as well - like a device that detects deceleration, rapid descent, or other abnormal conditions and transmits the plane's location. With satellite monitoring you don't really need that to even survive long - if a single ping makes it to a satellite that is enough to alert rescuers. For commercial aircraft the odd false alarm wouldn't cause any problems - those monitoring the device would check in with the appropriate ATC who would make contact with the aircraft if they aren't already in contact and see if all is well.

      Of course, it would make just as much sense to have an always-on beacon. If they're really worried about electrical faults just give it a decent battery and isolate it, and put the access panel to replace the battery someplace convenient like right next to a door (on the outside of the plane).

    10. Re:Great Headline by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      To be fair someone may have taken steps to make sure it won't be found.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    11. Re:Great Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      This article has the picture released by China, coordinates are stamped on the picture: 90deg 13' 43" E / 44deg 57' 29" S. Those positions are now dated due to expected drift of any debris in the local currents and wind.

      Here's earlier satellite photos with coordinates from DigitalGlobe, as released by the Australian search team (Australian Maritime Safety Authority - AMSA).

      The AMSA is coordinating the search in the southern Indian Ocean and all their AMSA news updates are here, and images/maps are here, including the cumulative area searched as of March 23 [PDF].

      The information is out there if you go looking.

    12. Re:Great Headline by Alomex · · Score: 1

      Well it already happened twice in the last three years, (AF447, MH370) so we know the answer that one: yes it may very well happen.

      However you don't like a version of reality where one can lose planes in the middle of the ocean and reject the evidence, and other people bask in this self-comfort and give you a +4 insightful.

    13. Re:Great Headline by JMJimmy · · Score: 1

      ^this is infinitely better than the summary/article linked to.

    14. Re:Great Headline by the_other_chewey · · Score: 5, Informative

      In my world geek news sources it's information - "The Chinese photo" would be shown or linked to. GPS coordinates would be accurate not "almost" a vague coordinate.

      Jup. Pretty much all reporting on this is abysmal, from painfully simplified to just plain wrong and misleading.

      One thing I haven't seen correct in any non-aviation specific publication:
      The aircraft didn't send pings to the Inmarsat satellite, it replied
      to pings by the Inmarsat satellite. It's an important detail:
      That's why we know the roundtrip times.


      One of best sources - maybe even the best source - is The Aviation Herald:
      Malaysia B772 over Gulf of Thailand on Mar 8th 2014, aircraft missing, high degree of certainty: deliberate action

      All images (including the new one) are there, all known technical information (times, positions, etc.) is there.
      Updated information is highlighted with a light yellow background.

      The most amazing thing: As far as I know, avherald.com is a one-man operation.

    15. Re:Great Headline by flyingsquid · · Score: 2
      We're fixated on the technological fixes- emergency locator beacons, satellite tracking devices. So why are so few people talking about the obvious: the psychology of the crew? Whoever hijacked this airplane was familiar with piloting a 777 and familiar with the route, which points to the pilot or the copilot stealing their own plane, then deliberately crashing it in the Indian Ocean.

      This would not be the first pilot suicide, either; EgyptAir Flight 990 and SilkAir 185 are both believed to be pilot suicide. In the EgyptAir crash, the First Officer shut down the engines and the plane went into a dive. In the SilkAir crash, the plane went into a power dive and descended so steeply and rapidly it actually broke the sound barrier and disintegrated the plane on impact— they didn't even get a single complete body.

      Since 9/11 all the effort has been devoted to protecting the pilots from the passengers, but what about protecting passengers from the pilots? The SilkAir crash killed 114 people, the EgyptAir crash killed 217 people, and MH killed 239 people. That's 3 planes and 570 people taken out by pilots- versus 2 planes and 227 civilians taken out by terrorists in the same timespan. These numbers suggest that you're more likely to be killed by your pilot than your fellow passengers. The message seems to be clear: the most dangerous person on any flight isn't the dude with the turban, it's the guy with the captain's hat.

      Incidentally, there's a really disturbing parallel between the SilkAir murder-suicide and MH 370- safety systems designed to monitor the flight, in the case of the SilkAir flight, the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, were both manually shut down. That raises a disturbing possibility- unless they've changed things since the SilkAir crash, the person piloting MH 370 would have been able to shut down both the flight data recorder and voice recorder. That means that even if we find the black boxes, they may contain no useful information.

    16. Re:Great Headline by Black+Parrot · · Score: 1

      Mod up pleeze. This story has turned into the orgy that fuels the spree US media wants to be.

      They were hoping a little blonde girl would be kidnapped or murdered, but they had to settle for a missing airplane mostly full of foreigners.

      And with it missing at sea, they can't even pose a teddy bear in photos of the wreckage.

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    17. Re:Great Headline by Black+Parrot · · Score: 1

      The problem is that when the crew deliberately turns it off or it fails, what are you going to do?

      Why does the crew have the capability of turning essential equipment off?

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    18. Re: Great Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The transponders get shut off when the aircraft is on the ground. It reduces the clutter on the ATC radars. Pilots have always had a switch for it in the cockpit.

    19. Re: Great Headline by Martin+Blank · · Score: 1

      Wreckage of AF447 (including bodies) was found within the first couple of days, so they knew for certain there was a water impact and approximately where. It took time to find the main wreckage, but it was located, and in fact new analysis of sonar data collected by a French sub within the first week after the crash was critical in finding it. The sonar had heard the FDR pings, but it was below the equipment's identification threshold at the time.

      Here, a water impact is presumed but not certain. Aside from the engine pings, there's very little to go on, and even the satellite images and the civilian sighting of a pallet and belts the other day may be nothing more than shipping equipment that fell overboard.

      --
      You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
    20. Re:Great Headline by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      Pilot suicide has been a theory from the beginning of the investigation.

      They don't need to turn off the voice recorder either, just keep quiet for 2 hours until the tape rolls around.

    21. Re:Great Headline by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      Besides disabling it on-ground, the concern is that anything on the main bus needs to be able to be powered off in case of an electrical problem. If that transmitter develops a short it could take out the entire bus, start a fire, etc. That's the concept at least - certainly there are workarounds.

    22. Re:Great Headline by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      Aircraft safety is getting close to the point where pilots cause more problems than they resolve. If you made aircraft completely autonomous I'm not convinced that it would decrease the safety of flying at all. It would probably change the liability picture, however.

      It is only a matter of time before cars are in the same position.

      Oh, and it is ridiculous that the cockpit voice recorder only lasts two hours. They should make it illegal to access except by the NTSB/etc, and make it last the full flight duration. The only reason it is shorter is privacy concerns, which are legitimate, but those can be solved in better ways.

    23. Re:Great Headline by Talderas · · Score: 1

      Unfortunately there's not much of a reason to use them.

      In flight accidents and crashes have the lowest survival rates. That's just a simple fact due to the forces involved. Those that survive the impact are likely to have sustained fatal injuries that will kill them if they aren't in intensive care within hours.

      So the major reason is not the rescue effort but the recovery of the recording devices to check and see if the problem was mechanical or human error.

      --
      "Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
    24. Re: Great Headline by Alomex · · Score: 1

      This plane was lost in a much larger ocean and out of place to where it was supposed to be, so naturally it will take a bit longer to find the first remains. So I'm not sure what is your point.

    25. Re:Great Headline by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      quite possibly, but that becomes very easy over open sea far from land. over most land it becomes damn near impossible

  2. Headline writing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Is it common for the headline to have lists of things and be in the format like "French, Chinese" instead of "French and Chinese"? I'm from Finland and that writing style always confuses me when browsing through the headlines.

    1. Re:Headline writing by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'm from Finland and that writing style always confuses me when browsing through the headlines.

      Great comment.

      In English headline writing, using 'headlinese' it's traditional to take liberties with the language that wouldn't normally be allowed. This dates back to newspapers, when the number of characters available to you for a headline might have been reduced due to the large typefaces or the desire to create impact to sell a newspaper - So you would have seen headlines like this one, or oddities like:

      SATELLITES SIGHT DEBRIS: CHINESE

      The tradition continues today, even though it's largely an online world.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

    2. Re:Headline writing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Is it common for the headline to have lists of things and be in the format like "French, Chinese" instead of "French and Chinese"? I'm from Finland and that writing style always confuses me when browsing through the headlines.

      Using the comma gets the same information across with less words/space used.

      I suspect that similar things are done by newspapers all over the world as long as the language in use supports such "compression".

    3. Re:Headline writing by Oligonicella · · Score: 1

      Actually, it's the adoption of Klingon battle-speak.

    4. Re:Headline writing by Black+Parrot · · Score: 1

      It''s called "telegraphic speech", as if the writer didn't want to pay for the extra characters.

      Newspapers do it for space: the bigger the typeface, the less room for text.

      I suspect it carries over to internet articles because of cognitive side-effects: if every headline was a complete sentence they would take more effort on the readers' part. You want something that will instantly grab (or lose) a reader's attention without any mental effort on their part.

      (Look at how many people don't RTFA, or even RTFSummary. Full sentences would lead to people who don't even RTFHeadline.)

      However, telegraphic speech can cause problems for readers.

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    5. Re:Headline writing by jrumney · · Score: 1

      In English headline writing, using 'headlinese' it's traditional to take liberties with the language that wouldn't normally be allowed.

      Another reason this is done is to confuse you into taking an interest in the article's contents (so you can figure out what the headline actually means). Especially when it is a front page headline, where such confusion might involve buying a copy of the newspaper.

  3. Re:Evidence that media cycle is useless by manquer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    since when is news is about what impacts the most number of people ?

  4. Re:Evidence that media cycle is useless by iggymanz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    historically, the "without a trace" missing aircraft were much smaller, couple cases with 90 passenger the biggest I can find. so this is someone newsworthy just due to size of craft.

    but it is amusing to see how people think all aircraft everywhere are continually "tracked by radar" (see, this website does that!), and they wonder why it takes days to go to a place where satellites have spotted debris

    they've been trained by TV entertainment to think all problems can be resolved in one hour less commercials.

  5. The sad thing.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    is that it could take a couple of YEARS of searching, to actually locate this aircraft and get explanations for the families to what happened. It is unrealistic to expect it to be found next week or something. It took 2 years to locate the Air France Flight 447 fuselage underwater and they had a pretty reasonable idea where it was likely to be... they found significant debris about 5 days after it went down.

    1. Re:The sad thing.. by Rich0 · · Score: 2

      I'm not aware of any production military drones that have that kind of endurance/range. There are things like solar-powered prop drones that can stay aloft for a very long time, but they are slow, and I imagine that they go where the wind blows (winds aloft can be 50mph+, so a slow aircraft can't really maintain position).

      Google suggests that the range of a predator is only 1100 miles. That wouldn't even be a round-trip to the search area.

      Global hawk could do the job. However, I don't know how many of those are in the inventory and how busy they are elsewhere, or for that matter how operational they even are.

      But yes, this would be the perfect mission for drones if you had enough of them. At least, they'd be useful for looking on the surface. If you want to use any kind of sonar then you'd need ships/subs.

    2. Re:The sad thing.. by DerekLyons · · Score: 1

      It took 2 years to locate the Air France Flight 447 fuselage underwater

      No, not really. It took about eight weeks - scattered across two years because weather, the availability of the required equipment, and bureaucratic issues.

  6. Re:The only working complete theory by Jmc23 · · Score: 1
    Why o why didn't you just say it was your failed theory instead of trying to promote it as an AC?

    You know what's fun? Running textual analysis on slashdot to uncover ACs.

    --
    Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
  7. Re:Evidence that media cycle is useless by Jmc23 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hey, if the mothership that causes the bermuda triangle is on the move we ALL need to know!!

    --
    Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
  8. Re:Evidence that media cycle is useless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Jet is missing, not a regular occurrence but this is not a world-changing event that warrants such extensive coverage. This disappearance will not affect many lives or change the course of history. Enough already.

    What annoys me more is how every day that someone or some government sees a piece of trash in the ocean from satellite images, it's pushed as headliner news with absurd speculation lasting for hours that it could be a breakthrough in the search... Until inevitably it's confirmed to not be airplane wreckage. I'm not against news coverage, but at this point the media seems to be drumming up every little thing in an effort to keep the hysteria around the story alive. This article is just the latest in the cycle.

  9. Re:kilometers? by beelsebob · · Score: 1

    Oh get over it, they chose a unit. You're not going to complain that they didn't convert into lesser, middle and grate miles too are you? (yes, other archaic civilisations used 3 different miles).

  10. Normal situation by gerardrj · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Curious: If you were to point a bunch of satellites at any part of the open ocean and have dozens or hundreds of analysts pore over those images would they find exactly the type of "possible objects" that we are seeing in this situation? Is there any part of the ocean where it is not possible to actually locate human debris such as wood pallets scraps of metal and such.

    Remember: we still have tons (literally) of trash from the tsunami floating around out there.

    Beyond that, why do ALL the media outlets take government statements such as "possible object", meaning the analysts can't agree that there is an actual thing there and the spot isn't just a light glare, and instead report "it could be a wing". From 'not sure it exists' to 'it could be the plane'.

    This all seems like the Washington DC sniper investigation and the "white van" syndrome all over again.

    --
    Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
    1. Re:Normal situation by dbIII · · Score: 1

      Is there any part of the ocean where it is not possible to actually locate human debris such as wood pallets scraps of metal and such.

      One thing that astonished me on reading Shackleton's "South", about his expedition that ended in 1916, was that he found an assortment of rubbish such as broken planks of wood and portions of crates washed into an inlet on the South Coast of South Georgia. It mostly wasn't specific shipwreck rubbish but rubbish in general. The search area is almost as far south as South Georgia.

    2. Re:Normal situation by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      The most level headed news outlets have been saying that most of these objects are probably just containers. Tens of thousands get lost every year and some of them float rather nicely.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    3. Re:Normal situation by Cassini2 · · Score: 1

      Yes. Lot's of stuff is floating around the ocean. It seems particularly unlikely that large pieces of aircraft fuselage are floating in the ocean, over two weeks after the plane went down, and after heavy storms. The satellite is probably finding wales, bits of long cap-sized ships, sea weed, parts of shipping containers lost at sea, etc. This is the third or fourth time in this search that the satellites have found objects at sea that have not come from MH370.

      If they find smaller debris, like the parts of seats and life-preservers, then it is much more likely that they have found the aircraft crash site.

      Another issue is that satellite bandwidth is expensive. I don't think the satellite providers bother to download surface scans of the Indian Ocean on a continuous basis. Thus, even if a satellite was in position to capture the crash, it is unlikely that it bothered to down-link the data.

    4. Re:Normal situation by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      Curious: If you were to point a bunch of satellites at any part of the open ocean and have dozens or hundreds of analysts pore over those images would they find exactly the type of "possible objects" that we are seeing in this situation?

      Quite possible - I'm sure there is other junk on the water. The other issue is that there aren't exactly tons of satellites flying around, and when they're zoomed in sufficiently to actually see debris they can't image a very large area. Basically you can capture a long stripe of data which is only so wide but as long as you want it to be. If the image is only a half-mile wide, and the search area is 100 miles in every direction, then you need 200 passes to image it. Of course, nothing prevents debris from floating from an area you didn't check into an area you checked already, so you're basically just hoping to get lucky.

    5. Re:Normal situation by khchung · · Score: 1

      Beyond that, why do ALL the media outlets take government statements such as "possible object", meaning the analysts can't agree that there is an actual thing there and the spot isn't just a light glare, and instead report "it could be a wing". From 'not sure it exists' to 'it could be the plane'.

      Cuz that sell eyeballs? Which is more attract to Joe Public - "It could be a wing!" or "Meh, likely nothing found"?

      Do you still have that quaint idea that "news" is for informing people and reporters are supposed to be objective and level-headed, or even, (gasp!) competent in subject knowledge being reported? It hasn't been that way for at least decades already.

      --
      Oliver.
    6. Re:Normal situation by jrumney · · Score: 1

      The search area is almost as far south as South Georgia.

      In the same way that Portland, Oregon is almost as far north as Edmonton, Canada, or Barcelona, Spain is almost as far north as Newcastle-on-Tyne, UK. Funny how lack of land skews your perception, isn't it?

    7. Re:Normal situation by DerekLyons · · Score: 1

      Actually, there's no hard statistics about how many containers are lost each year... and several of the targets have been significantly larger than containers anyhow.

  11. ask people at... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Diego Garcia

  12. The word you're looking for is "and" by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

    French, Chinese...

    For the sake of three characters? It's not like you're paying for the ink.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    1. Re:The word you're looking for is "and" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That's a standard news-style headline. Not just for saving ink but for brevity (AFAIK).

    2. Re:The word you're looking for is "and" by zippthorne · · Score: 1

      Fewer characters means they can use a bigger more eye-catching font.

      --
      Can you be Even More Awesome?!
    3. Re:The word you're looking for is "and" by Kittenman · · Score: 1

      French, Chinese...

      For the sake of three characters? It's not like you're paying for the ink.

      Hey, them pixels aren't cheap, y'know!

      --
      "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
  13. Re:Evidence that media cycle is useless by Fishchip · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What annoys me more is how every day that someone or some government sees a piece of trash in the ocean from satellite images, it's pushed as headliner news with absurd speculation lasting for hours that it could be a breakthrough in the search... Until inevitably it's confirmed to not be airplane wreckage

    This. A wooden pallet? It's like people think the surface of the ocean is pristine and doesn't have any sort of other debris floating on it at all. I would wager one random wooden pallet has a 100% chance of not being from MH370.

  14. Re:Evidence that media cycle is useless by houghi · · Score: 2

    Why don't they look at the image and just let somebody say 'enhance'. Somebody has to say it, because nobody else thinks of doing that. That and just direct some satelites over that area.

    --
    Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
  15. pics for nerds by Connie_Lingus · · Score: 1

    "And if you have your own database of recent photos to trawl through, the article says "The Chinese photo, taken March 18, is focused 90 degrees east and almost 45 degrees south, versus almost 91 degrees east and 44 degrees south for similar items on a March 16 satellite image, putting the object 120 kilometers southwest of that sighting.""

    what?? a database??

    I'M BEHIND SEVEN DATABASES BIOTCHS!

    --
    never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
  16. Seems like drones would be great for this by SuperKendall · · Score: 1

    I agree that it seems like this is a perfect use for drones, and the image recognition algorithms they have developed...

    It seems a little far-fetched, but it's not too hard to imagine a future where we have drones monitoring large areas of the oceans all the time. We could then have constantly updating information about what was already in the ocean, so if something like this happened we would know what was new vs having to look at every bit of debris. It also would be useful in tacking down boats lost at sea, you could have more of a starting point about where they were before they went missing - and the drones could act as radio relays for mayday signals.

    Lots of people would freak out about having all boats monitored though, so perhaps it will never happen.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  17. Re:kilometers? by Goose+In+Orbit · · Score: 1

    Should have used furlongs... you'd getter bigger numbers that way - and we all know bigger is better ;^D

  18. Irony by nurb432 · · Score: 1

    Heading over to the Bloomberg link to see the video, and what is the ad they have ? One for Delta Airlines.

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  19. Re:Evidence that media cycle is useless by gtall · · Score: 1

    While the mere disappearance isn't a big deal, why it disappeared could be. In particular, we'd rather like to prevent it happening again.

  20. Re:Evidence that media cycle is useless by umghhh · · Score: 1

    It is possible but there is not that much of wooden pallets that go around where it was 'seen'. I dare say it was the only one around that was spotted so maybe there is something to it.

  21. Re:Evidence that media cycle is useless by flyingsquid · · Score: 1
    We're talking about a vast search area, maybe the size of Texas or larger, depending on how generous you want to be in drawing the boundaries. What are the odds that you cover an area that large with satellites and don't find *something* floating? Whether it's from the plane seems less likely. What are the odds that over two weeks after the plane crashes into the ocean, wreckage is still afloat? In rough water, it will tend to break up, fill with water, and sink. There's also the possibility that the pilot put the plane into a power dive like in the SilkAir murder-suicide. In that case the plane would be broken up into thousands of fragments. Some of the pieces would probably float, but they'd be so small you'd never be able to spot them.

    There are plenty of likely scenarios where we never find a scrap of the flight, or maybe an isolated scrap drifts up months or years later and two thousand miles away. And every day without recovery of wreckage, those scenarios become more likely.

  22. Great Headline: Just not if you're Ukrainian by rmdingler · · Score: 1
    CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News are all covering it to the exclusion of most everything else... notably the Russian takeover of Crimea.

    Ironically, there's a great deal of focus on Al-Jazeera cable news about the Ukrainian's plight.

    Sorry about that living Ukrainians, a missing planeload of likely deceased people is stealing the limelight.

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

    1. Re:Great Headline: Just not if you're Ukrainian by Talderas · · Score: 1

      The Crimean story isn't sexy.

      But beyond that there's really nothing to it. It is what it is one the face. People can speculate but the truth is that the disarmament treaty that Ukraine signed had no teeth to ensure sovereignty was protected. Outside of any implications this might have regarding nuclear proliferation there's not much more of interest to it.

      --
      "Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
  23. Re:kilometers? by techno-vampire · · Score: 1

    Not always. Aviation uses nautical miles, and 120 kilometers = 64.79+ nautical miles.

    --
    Good, inexpensive web hosting
  24. Re:Evidence that media cycle is useless by iggymanz · · Score: 1

    you're confused

    the maintenance system only sent brief messages not designed to be tracked every 30 minutes.

    there is no continuous tracking of most commercial jet aircraft

    As for your nonsense about "missile across planet to target cell phone", no, hellfire missiles with range of all of 8 km were used....local assets necessary, not applicable in any way shape or form to problem of plane missing over open sea.