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French, Chinese Satellite Images May Show Malaysian Jet Debris
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."
yes, with the state of the art in 2014, entire commercial jets can disappear without a trace and might never be found
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...
The NSA knows where it is.
So do the aliens who abducted it.
None of them are telling.
since when is news is about what impacts the most number of people ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Yep, the talking heads can yak all day long and never be proven wrong.
That's a standard news-style headline. Not just for saving ink but for brevity (AFAIK).
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.
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.
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.
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.