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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."

7 of 103 comments (clear)

  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: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...

  3. 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.

  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.

  6. 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.
  7. 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.