How Satellite Company Inmarsat Tracked Down MH370

mdsolar (1045926) writes "Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has announced that, based on satellite data analysis from UK company Inmarsat, Malayian Airlines flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean, and no one on board survived. 'Effectually we looked at the doppler effect, which is the change in frequency, due to the movement of a satellite in its orbit. What that then gave us was a predicted path for the northerly route and a predicted path the southerly route,' explained Chris McLaughlin, senior vice president of external affairs at Inmarsat. 'What we discovered was a correlation with the southerly route and not with the northern route after the final turn that the aircraft made, so we could be as close to certain as anybody could be in that situation that it went south. Where we then went was to work out where the last ping was, knowing that the aircraft still had some fuel, but that it would have run out before the next automated ping. We don't know what speed the aircraft was flying at, but we assumed about 450 knots.' Inmarsat passed the relevant analysis to the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) yesterday. The cause of the crash remains a mystery."

Comments

Flight recorder

[Arancaytar]

Presumably, now they have narrowed down the crash site, they can start looking for the black box and the wreck to figure out the cause.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

narrowed down to a few hundred square miles....

Re:Flight recorder

[ColdWetDog]

They have narrowed down the presumed crash site. TFA states that the Malaysian government takes this data as proof that the plane crashed near Australia. While important evidence, it's hardly proof - we will need actual debris.

The Malaysian government has been widely criticized about it's handling of this affair. They would like to wash their hands of it and go on to doing whatever it was they were doing out of the world's spotlight.

Re:Flight recorder

[Zocalo]

Still vastly better than what it was only a day ago, and there seems to be a lot more possible debris sightings in the search area which I take as a sign they might be in the right area and will hopefully pin it down some more. The race now is to find it before the black box transmitters go silent, a task for which the US is dispatching some specialist search gear apparently, because that's probably the only hope of giving the bereaved a chance at some closure left now.

Re:Flight recorder

[afidel]

They're probably worthless, the cockpit voice recorders are only required to have 30 minutes capacity with a recommendation for 2 hours, since we know it was at least 4 hours between the critical event (the plane turning south) and the crash the CVR's won't have any information about the events that matter (I'm assuming 777 uses digital recorders so they won't be able to pull phantom prior recordings like they sometimes were able to on analog recorders)

Re:Flight recorder

[afidel]

Both Chinese and French satellites detected large debris in the same vicinity (optical for the Chinese and radar for the French) and spotter planes from China and Australia also report spotting debris in that area. It will probably be some days before they can get enough ships in the area to coordinate a search grid, but at this point it's an almost certainty that they know the rough location of the crash.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, but the flight data recorder (FDR, not the CVR) records like 15 hours, so your claim that they are "probably worthless" is nonsense.

Re:Flight recorder

[SydShamino]

If there are voices on it, it might indicate who was in the cockpit. It would be even more telling if there's shouting, such as from a locked-out copilot begging the pilot to turn around, or from the pilot yelling at terrorists that they don't have enough fuel to reach Antarctica and that they're going down into the ocean.

It's only completely worthless if its silent.

Re:Flight recorder

[ackthpt]

Few hundred? Probably a bit more than that, but at least they have the vicinity. Which is significantly different from other places they were looking.

The Chinese government has been very impatient and hot under the collar about the whole search and lack of answers, yet they also have been coming forward with satellite photos of potential debris hundreds of miles apart from each other. "Hey! Look here!" "Hey! Look there!" "Hey, look way over here, now!" What's taking you people so long finding it?!? We demand answers!

Meanwhile, some data has been very slow in coming, because defense and spy satellites are veeeerrrrryy good at tracking and seeing, but various countries have been slow to tip their hands and show just how much the see and can track, lest they give away some very closely guarded secrets.

Hopefully the remains of the craft will be found soon, so the Chinese government can move from frustration to anger directed at whomever or whatever is responsible. Also, so families can have a sense of closure.

Re:Flight recorder

[Charliemopps]

But if they find a pallet full of burst lithium batteries and bodies that died from smoke inhalation as well as no control from the cockpit for whatever length of time they do have on the flight recorder I think we'd have a pretty good idea.

I basically rooting, at this point, for the pilot to be cleared. Because the unwarranted animosity the press showed towards him based on just about 0 evidence deserves to be punished. Lastly, someone has to shut down CNN at this point. I mean, I dislike Fox and MSNBC as much as anyone but for Christs sake at least they have some shred of integrity left. CNN is to news what the Discovery channel is to science.

Re:Flight recorder

[David_Hart]

Still vastly better than what it was only a day ago, and there seems to be a lot more possible debris sightings in the search area which I take as a sign they might be in the right area and will hopefully pin it down some more. The race now is to find it before the black box transmitters go silent, a task for which the US is dispatching some specialist search gear apparently, because that's probably the only hope of giving the bereaved a chance at some closure left now.

They may be a lot closer to the area where the plane went down, but they are still far from finding it. After all, the debris, assuming it's from the plane, has likely drifted a long way from the original crash site. Even if they are able to track back the debris by modeling the ocean currents in the area and cross referencing that with the flight path, the remaining search area is still going to be huge. Unless the search teams pick up the blackbox signal before the battery runs out, we may never know what happened.

Re:Flight recorder

[ackthpt]

They have narrowed down the presumed crash site. TFA states that the Malaysian government takes this data as proof that the plane crashed near Australia. While important evidence, it's hardly proof - we will need actual debris.

The Malaysian government has been widely criticized about it's handling of this affair. They would like to wash their hands of it and go on to doing whatever it was they were doing out of the world's spotlight.

To be fair, the Malaysian government is a small body with mean resources, compared to China, USA, Russia, France, Great Britain, Japan, India, etc. The world community has come together admirably (if a little grudging regarding some satellite intel) and thrown enormous resources at this recovery project.

I am somewhat curious why the Chinese are so bent on a quick resolution here. Is it because they really do look after their people? Or was someone or something on the jet they really want know where is or have some finality on? I don't think any country has ever been this anxious over a lost jet before.

Re:Flight recorder

[DarkOx]

While important evidence, it's hardly proof - we will need actual debris.

Why do we need the debris? If the evidence is good enough that governments are willing to issue death certificates to the families, the book on this thing could be closed. Sure its not satisfying especially to the families that might really want the remains found but as a practical matter actually finding the plane won't change much.

Re:Flight recorder

[geogob]

It's only completely worthless if its silent.

On the contrary. A completely silent CVR tells you a lot; it tells you that the airplane kept on flying with every one on board either unconscious or dead for at least 2 hours before the crash. That's a critical information for the investigation.

Furthermore, through data/media forensic, you might be able to recover the previous data that was overrecorded, although I wouldn't count on it after 3 to 4 record cycles.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Cockpit Voice Recorder
A standard CVR is capable of recording 4 channels of audio data for a period of 2 hours. The original requirement was for a CVR to record for 30 minutes, but this has been found to be insufficient in many cases, significant parts of the audio data needed for a subsequent investigation having occurred more than 30 minutes before the end of the recording.

Flight Data Recorder
Modern day FDRs receive inputs via specific data frames from the Flight Data Acquisition Units (FDAU). They record significant flight parameters, including the control and actuator positions, engine information and time of day. There are 88 parameters required as a minimum under current U.S. federal regulations (only 29 were required until 2002), but some systems monitor many more variables. Generally each parameter is recorded a few times per second, though some units store "bursts" of data at a much higher frequency if the data begins to change quickly. Most FDRs record approximately 17–25 hours worth of data in a continuous loop.[citation needed] It is required by regulations that an FDR verification check (readout) is performed annually in order to verify that all mandatory parameters are recorded.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

They've been claiming the same thing for the past week and yet they have not found a damn bit of evidence. How many countries have claimed to have found pieces of the aircraft via their own satellite imagery? This is the twenty-first century yet ATC and surveillance satellites cannot track a commercial aircraft but they can track you and me to within 50 metres? By the time the aircraft is found, assuming it is located, the black box will contain nothing of relevance; oh we might be told it was an on-board fire, an electrical failure, terrorism, hijacking, or a rogue pilot. However, it won't matter one iota because of the colossal clusterfsck the Malaysian Government and various other governments have created in the aftermath.

Re:Flight recorder

[BitZtream]

zero evidence? There were three people on the aircraft that know how to hide the aircraft like this ... and ALL of them were sitting in the cockpit. If someone else on the aircraft knew how, no one has figured that out yet.

So instead of this being something done by one or two people, you'd much rather it be a systemic problem with aircraft that tens of thousands of people fly in everyday?

You'd much rather the press look bad ... and other people be at risk of death as well?

Thats pretty fucking short sighted, don'tcha think?

Re:Flight recorder

[gstoddart]

but at this point it's an almost certainty that they know the rough location of the crash

Until they can confirm the nature of the debris and identify that it's from the plane, I should think it's only "almost certain" that someone saw some form of debris, no?

Unidentified debris is just that.

Re:Flight recorder

[ScentCone]

as a practical matter actually finding the plane won't change much

Really? You don't think there's much of a difference between knowing it was a mechanical failure (or fire, etc) and knowing it was a deliberate criminal act? If the problem was related to payload or the aircraft's infrastructure or maintenance, you don't think it's vital for all of the other people flying on that same equipment to know what went wrong? If this was done by the pilot(s) at the behest of some organization or state, or otherwise in the service of some agenda, you don't think that's meaningful, in the context of trying to prevent it from happening again? Glad you're so relaxed about it. You probably don't do much business overseas, or ship expensive things that are central to your mission, or have relatives that fly on that equipment or in that part of the world, so that's probably why the death of hundreds and the loss of a huge, expensive aircraft is a yawner to you.

Re:Flight recorder

[ackthpt]

as a practical matter actually finding the plane won't change much

Really? You don't think there's much of a difference between knowing it was a mechanical failure (or fire, etc) and knowing it was a deliberate criminal act? If the problem was related to payload or the aircraft's infrastructure or maintenance, you don't think it's vital for all of the other people flying on that same equipment to know what went wrong? If this was done by the pilot(s) at the behest of some organization or state, or otherwise in the service of some agenda, you don't think that's meaningful, in the context of trying to prevent it from happening again? Glad you're so relaxed about it. You probably don't do much business overseas, or ship expensive things that are central to your mission, or have relatives that fly on that equipment or in that part of the world, so that's probably why the death of hundreds and the loss of a huge, expensive aircraft is a yawner to you.

Turning off the transponders seems pretty deliberate.

Re:Flight recorder

[ColdWetDog]

You aren't going to get the the mechanism of the crash by staring at satellite photos ...

Re:Flight recorder

[BitZtream]

CVRs on those aircraft are 2 hours, not 30 minutes.

What I want to know, is why my phone (the smallest model made) can hold 1100 hours of compressed audio ... but these aircraft using NAND don't hold more than 2 hours of uncompressed audio (you don't want any quality sacrifices or artifacts from compression to screw up your analysis later) in a redundant array ...

Someones going to tell me that for the 30-40k those black boxes cost ... they can't put some actual storage space in the fucking things?

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

You're putting way too much faith in governments. Governments will very readily sweep something like this under the rug because they're tired of spending time and money looking for the plane, especially a small government like Malaysia's. You can't truly close the book until you find the plane. It may never be found, and I don't expect the Malaysian (et al..) government to search forever, but making a statement as definitive as "it crashed in the ocean. case closed." is hogwash at this point..

Re:Flight recorder

[Lumpy]

And the only hope to prove it was not a software glitch that took offline all the communication systems and locked out the pilots.

There are no manual overrides for a fly by wire system, and you cant reboot it mid flight.

Re:Flight recorder

[Lumpy]

Contrary to movies, spy satellites do not watch every inch of the planet. Nor can you easily steer them into another orbit for live James Bond style feeds.

ZERO spy satellites point at the open ocean, nothing interesting going on out there.

Re:Flight recorder

[ColdWetDog]

I'd rather get to the truth of the matter. Yes, we should not be going hog wild speculation until we have some real answers but that could take months or years and our current news cycle can't handle that scale of time. They can't even imagine it.

Re:Flight recorder

[BitZtream]

but various countries have been slow to tip their hands and show just how much the see and can track, lest they give away some very closely guarded secrets.

I would LIKE to think ... that even the NSA would pick up the phone and say 'look, I can't tell you anything other than go to these coordinates: blah blah, we think you might want to see this' and nothing of value would be divulged. We already are aware of what Google has in the area for photos, which is plenty good enough to make a statement like that, so its not like it tells us how much better they see than something like Google Maps.

There are ways to deal with that situation. I'd like to think we'd use them.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it because they really do look after their people?

No, it's more likely the result of them feeling full of themselves. Maintaining control of your people frequently requires making scapegoats of others. This is nothing new, nor is it unique to them.

Re:Flight recorder

[pixelpusher220]

Which is why they waited literally days before asking the international community for help? Seriously, significant progress didn't begin until the other countries were allowed to start helping.

You can be a small country with limited resources, but you don't get to excuse for not calling for help when you are clearly in over your head.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

As a supervillian I prefer locations such as this, such as my base deep on the ocean floor. Hopefully they don't find it when they look for the damn plane.

Re:Flight recorder

[Wootery]

I dislike Fox and MSNBC as much as anyone but for Christs sake at least they have some shred of integrity left

No, no, no.

Re:Flight recorder

[Radres]

Or now with in-flight WiFi an option, why isn't the black box configured to upload its audio to a server somewhere?

Re:Flight recorder

[Lumpy]

They already know about your Skull Volcano island... they dont care because the US government hopes to contract out your services for the "protection" of the American People...

BTW: you have those genetically altered badgers ready yet?

Re:Flight recorder

[bemenaker]

You are making a PRESUMPTION that the transponders were turned off by hand. There is still the possibility of a fire or some other case. This is why recovery of the FDR's is so important. The pilots may not have been on the radio, but the FDR's record everything they say. The conversations between flight crew is crucial, along with all the airplane data.

Re:Flight recorder

[Radres]

Calm down, dude. He didn't say it had to be a systemic problem with the aircraft, just that it wasn't the pilot purposefully crashing the plane. There's still a wide range of things that could have gone wrong before considering it a systemic issue.

Re:Flight recorder

[Talderas]

Just bring in Robert Ballard.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

burst lithium batteries

But that is what Republicans want to find. They hate technology, and they have been attacking Boeing for decades for attempting to make better planes. For those of us that are technical and on /., we sometimes forget how hard those people are working to try to bring us back to the dark ages. They want to find the plane and blame laptop batteries. Just look at how hard they fought with their TSA army to try to beat people that attempted to bring lithium ion batteries onto a plane. For a while there, they were successful. I know my battery that they smashed was a victim in the Republican war against technology.

Re: Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but every cell transmission is stored and can be played back at any time, but a satellite that keeps tabs on all things airborne? Totally impossible!!!!

Re:Flight recorder

[Zorpheus]

The Indian ocean is very deep, it is a remote location and two weeks have passed already. This black box will be harder to find than that of the Air France flight which got lost over the Atlantic. Back then they said that the sender of the black box will run for a month. I don't believe that they will find it this time.

Re:Flight recorder

[X0563511]

That's not all that much. 10x10 would be 100...

Re:Flight recorder

[MugenEJ8]

Contrary to movies, spy satellites do not watch every inch of the planet. Nor can you easily steer them into another orbit for live James Bond style feeds.

ZERO spy satellites point at the open ocean, nothing interesting going on out there.

Meet SBIRS - From the page "SBIRS, considered one of the nation’s highest priority space programs, is designed to provide global, persistent, infrared surveillance capabilities to meet 21st century demands..."

I would find it illogical for the United States to only be monitoring continental lands, it would be akin to taking a picture and cropping out everything but the subject.

My bet is no government wants to out their level of sophistication in the surveillance world... It's a massive tactical advantage.

Re:Flight recorder

[DrGamez]

I've gone off the (assumption) that it's just a combination of money & effort.

It costs money to upgrade the black boxes, might cost money to change how we can "read' this information (if they are all some standard device that is) and even more money (and/or effort) to get all planes to use these new black boxes.

Every time a plane goes missing or down there is a huge outcry for better plane tracking technology. But then time goes on, planes aren't constantly being lost, and the amount of money it would take to upgrade everyone ends up looking like more effort than it's worth. Kind of a sad situation.

Re:Flight recorder

[pixelpusher220]

So instead of this being something done by one or two people, you'd much rather it be a systemic problem with aircraft that tens of thousands of people fly in everyday?

Actually yes. The last time a 'few' people in cockpit tried nefarious stuff, the world changed and the US (my country) invaded Iraq and started headlong down the road to totalitarianism. A perfect storm really. An already corrupt 2 party system that doesn't do any serious check and balance, only raise money for re-election, now gets a perfect 'for the children' defense for *anything* proposed no matter how stupid or pointless it is.

Or we have a mechanical failure that can be fixed...

I'll take the latter every single time. The above sounds like a rabid libertarian point of view, but I assure you it isn't. I'm as left wing liberal as just about anybody. I believe in government and it having a purpose; but with the NSA and everything else we've seen in the last 15 years...it is truly broken to the core and it's up to us to fix it.

Re:Flight recorder

[Talderas]

Whether or not there are survivors was pretty much a moot point by March 15. If it was a violent crash into the water, no more than three dozen probably survived impact. Of those three dozen, probably 50% or more sustained fatal injuries that would kill them within 16-24hrs without immediate medical attention. The remainder would have perished within 3-7 days due to dehydration and lack of nuitrition. That's ignoring any exposure related issues, predatory marine life, or drowning. Dehydration, starvation, and miscellaneous death causes would have happened over 3-7 days if it was a soft landing.

Had they, on a slim chance, crashed on land rather than the sea there might still be some chance that survivors lived but that is going to be a hard landing and those that did survivor it may not have been mobile, conscious, or otherwise in a state where they might be able to find potable water or food wherever they landed.

The purpose of finding the plane is not to be able to declare the passengers and crew dead the fact that they waited this long was cruel because it unnecessarily kept hope alive. The purpose is to recovered the recorders so that it can be can be determined what might have happened and if there was any mechanical or electrical issues that would warrant attention for other 777s.

Re:Flight recorder

[udippel]

I basically rooting, at this point, for the pilot to be cleared. Because the unwarranted animosity the press showed towards him based on just about 0 evidence

Without wanting to speculate (or flame more speculation) about what actually happened, I hope we can discuss some of your reasoning.
I am open to your arguments, since I can mostly see arguments for the involvement of a trained hand into what happened. Nothing up until now has turned up for a passenger to have undergone the training to navigate the plane nicely around waypoints, make it climb, sink, turn by 180; and at the same time the pilot saying "OK. Good Night." on radio. Electric communications gear being switched off one by one; my god, who would know how to do that; and if, why? Maximum a so-called terrorist. But then, what for? No detour to some Islamic country; seemingly nobody with suspected involvement into ethnic or religious brawls.
Which terrorist would silently and unnoticed and unclaimed, redirect a plane with some 200 people on board over a vast ocean, simply to make it crush in the waves?

I think we can agree that technical failure can be ruled out. A fire on board would not have the pilot say "OK. Good night.". A fire would have the pilot turn towards the next landing strip, and inform the ground to have equipment ready. And if the pilot was incapacitated to trying to bring the plane down safely, there is no reason why this same captain would re-route and detour the same plane around waypoints, make it climb, fall, turn, etc. with a fire burning on his backside.

Let us assume that all communication broke down. This is far-fetched, but why not. Then there was no chance for a Mayday, but since the machine was very navigable, the good captain would have straightforward made it touch down on some airstrip even without permission; flying in on a wide curve. And all traffic control would have cleared the way. On top, it was outside peak hours, in the middle of the night, after 01:00.

And on that fire: the whole thing was flying on nicely, at about the expected speed, for another 4 hours after the turn-around. Couldn't have been much of a fire, after all, can it! I do agree, we can not say anything about the maneuverability during the last hours of MH 370. But at least for some 45 minutes, it was great. It went off flying path NNE over the South China Sea, turning about 90, across the Malaysian peninsula, out to the Andaman Sea, and seemingly another angle very much down south from there.

Anything beyond, any assumption on the plane having been taken over completely in its navigational and communication abilities by some yet unknown force or forces, is too much of a conspiratorial theory to me. Into which I refuse to engage at this moment in time.
And then, sorry to say, almost everything except of a clear motive, point to some deliberate action of the crew or parts thereof.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Contrary to movies, spy satellites do not watch every inch of the planet. Nor can you easily steer them into another orbit for live James Bond style feeds.

ZERO spy satellites point at the open ocean, nothing interesting going on out there.

Can you please share with us how you know this? Do you have access to the classified capabilities of all the spy satellites of every country in the world? Are you just talking out of your ass?

Re:Flight recorder

[GameMaster]

Yes, this. Searching hundred's of square miles with a fleet of 18-25 planes, traveling at hundreds of miles per hour each, was such a slow process with a poor statistical chance of success. I'm sure things will speed up when you trade in all those aircraft for a single submersible covering the ocean floor at single digit miles per hour...

Re:Flight recorder

[BobMcD]

I could be mistaken, but I believe FDR is here:

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-...

Re:Flight recorder

[JeffAtl]

Isn't there supposed to be several salt-water activated beacons that are automatically released upon a crash?

Re:Flight recorder

[InvalidError]

While you can technically call that narrowed, this narrower area is still the broadest search area ever. The Inmarsat pings are only accurate within something like 500km since they are only once per hour events. There is an additional ~10km uncertainty from altitude, probably a few more km due to signal noise since I doubt the Inmarsat satellites recorded the raw RF signal for a real Doppler analysis. They probably deduced the Doppler effect from the carrier lock frequency of individual handshake packets. After that, you have all the unknowns from winds, surface/depth currents and who knows what else.

Once they find something on the surface, they will have 17+ days of ocean currents and storms to back-track and those can displace stuff by 100+km/day.

They knew where the Air France plane crashed yet it took them five days to find the wreck itself and two more years to find the recorders. Here, we're at 17 days and we have no confirmed debris yet; only sightings of potential candidates by satellites and planes that they are having trouble finding again by sea to pick them up for analysis.

Unless they get incredibly lucky, this could take a very long time.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you not been following the details of MH370? Communications were turned off / not working for whatever reason. Uploading to a server somewhere would not have worked...

Re: Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

In the event of a fire on board, a pilot may have turned off all electronics. It's a sensible thing to do if the cause of the fire turns out to be electrical.

Re:Flight recorder

[mean pun]

Which is why they waited literally days before asking the international community for help? Seriously, significant progress didn't begin until the other countries were allowed to start helping.

The first few days the obvious extrapolations from the normal flight path was searched, and that search was not only conducted by Malaysia, so other countries were involved from the beginning. When they realised things were not as simple as that they asked for more international help. I fail to see what they did wrong, even in hindsight.

Re:Flight recorder

[Joce640k]

Any floating debris could be a looooong way from the crash site by now.

Re:Flight recorder

[DrGamez]

You: have a phone on that is constantly pinging both cell and wifi towers/hotspots - all which help you be identified. You also probably travel around the same places every day, even further narrowing down where exactly you'll be at any given hour.

MH370: has had all of it's communications turned off, turned around, then flew in a pretty much unknown heading for 7+ HOURS, in a FREAKING PLANE.

So no, they cannot track down a plane over the middle of an ocean nobody watches because it's the middle of a god damned ocean and nobody watches it.

Re:Flight recorder

[blackicye]

You are making a PRESUMPTION that the transponders were turned off by hand. There is still the possibility of a fire or some other case. This is why recovery of the FDR's is so important. The pilots may not have been on the radio, but the FDR's record everything they say. The conversations between flight crew is crucial, along with all the airplane data.

It is a reasonable assumption that the transponders were intentionally switched off, given the chain of events following the transponders being turned off and the cessation of radio communication, especially the flight path after those events occurred.

This is a good graphical summary of the events leading up to the crash.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Re:Flight recorder

[dj245]

Still vastly better than what it was only a day ago, and there seems to be a lot more possible debris sightings in the search area which I take as a sign they might be in the right area and will hopefully pin it down some more. The race now is to find it before the black box transmitters go silent, a task for which the US is dispatching some specialist search gear apparently, because that's probably the only hope of giving the bereaved a chance at some closure left now.

Forget the bereaved, how on earth will the media ever get closure if the plane isn't found?

Re:Flight recorder

[Alomex]

While important evidence, it's hardly proof

Actually if this was a scientific paper it would be consider proven. Outside of high-school lab experiments most "scientific proof" is rather indirect and makes ample use of Occam razor's. Also indirect evidence is common place and readily used.

Re:Flight recorder

[amorsen]

Pulling the breakers on everything non-vital is a fairly standard procedure when dealing with electric fires on planes.

We cannot yet be certain that the pilots are to blame for this horrible outcome.

Re:Flight recorder

[quonsar]

Cockpit voice recorder (CVR) records in a 2 hour loop. It's quite likely to contain 2 hours of silence. Flight data recorder (FDR) is more likely to contain useful information.

Re:Flight recorder

[Joce640k]

He's correct about the live video feeds of specific locations. You'd need a geostationary satellite every few degrees for that.

Spy satellites orbit. They have to pass over the ocean sometime. Most of the earth is covered a few times per day. I've worked with military satellites and the resolution is surprisingly low. No way they can recognize faces or anything like that, they're happy if they can see individual vehicles.

If they need better images than that they have to send in the spy 'planes. This can only be done over countries where they have permission or the countries can't stop them. No way is the USA doing it over China (or China over the USA), etc.

Re:Flight recorder

[dgatwood]

The ones with the skunk glands?

Badgers? We don't need no steeeking badgers.

Re:Flight recorder

[dgatwood]

Err... steeenking.

Re:Flight recorder

[blackicye]

Anything beyond, any assumption on the plane having been taken over completely in its navigational and communication abilities by some yet unknown force or forces, is too much of a conspiratorial theory to me. Into which I refuse to engage at this moment in time.
And then, sorry to say, almost everything except of a clear motive, point to some deliberate action of the crew or parts thereof.

I wholeheartedly agree, judging by the series of events leading up to radio silence and switching transponders off and the path and flight time time beyond those events, this was very likely an intentional crash by some party with flight experience and access to the cockpit.

We can only guess at the motive until we have more data, but all the current evidence strongly suggests that this was not an accident.

Re:Flight recorder

[Joce640k]

There are ways to deal with that situation. I'd like to think we'd use them.

Yep. They'd just make a phone call and say "we had a radio message from a ship in the area" or something like that.

Anything else is conspiracy theory.

Re:Flight recorder

[spitzak]

The real bummer would have been if the plane had hit your base's self-destruct mechanism.

Re:Flight recorder

[blackicye]

There are no manual overrides for a fly by wire system, and you cant reboot it mid flight.

That is what multiple redundancies are for. Unless this "glitch" not only shut down the radio and transponder, but took the aircraft on a new flightpath by itself, what you're suggesting is not at all likely.

Re:Flight recorder

[Yahooti]

Wow, I'm sure in agreement with you on this. I'm very conservative and don't usually agree with liberal folks, but you are absolutely correct here, in my view.

Re:Flight recorder

[Albanach]

Well, if you're looking for something that measures perhaps a couple of meters at best, and you're in a plane, high up and traveling at a cruising speed of 400 knots, it's pretty easy to miss something.

If you're in a submarine or a surface ship traveling at about 20 knots, with listening gear that requires you only have to be within 10 miles of the black box to hear its pings, I'd imagine that location process is comparatively straightforward and pretty quick if you can start close enough

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh realy? Tell me more captain obvious...

Re:Flight recorder

[flyingsquid]

The Indian ocean is very deep, it is a remote location and two weeks have passed already. This black box will be harder to find than that of the Air France flight which got lost over the Atlantic. Back then they said that the sender of the black box will run for a month. I don't believe that they will find it this time.

There's no doubt that they'll find it, the question is when. As we speak, the remains of MH 370 are sitting on the bottom of the ocean, under 5,000 meters of water, and they're not going anywhere. Nothing is disturbing the wreckage, so it will just sit there for months, years, or decades until someone comes along. The Titanic sat on the seafloor for 73 years until new technologies made it possible to locate the wreckage, and yet it was remarkably well-preserved given how long it had been underwater. I doubt it will take 73 years- technology has advanced a lot, and continues to advance- but even if it does, the plane will be waiting.

Whether anything useful comes out of the flight data recorders or not is another issue. After 2 years, the data recorders from the Air France flight still worked, I don't know if anyone really knows how long the data would still be good. Solid state memory is pretty indestructible, so if the chips can survive being immersed in saltwater, maybe a long time. The bigger issue is whether the pilot shut down the recorders as well. In the SilkAir crash, the pilot or copilot shut down the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder before deliberately putting the plane into a dive. Whoever hijacked this plane seems to have wanted its fate to be a mystery, so there is a real possibility that he shut off the recorders as well. If so, we may find the crashed plane, but if so, we'll never know anything more than what we know now.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

its* handling of this affair

Re:Flight recorder

[Joce640k]

Turning off the transponders seems pretty deliberate.

Yes, but it doesn't make much sense to turn it off then continue to fly for several hours until you run out of fuel.

Seems much more likely that they went offline because of some massive hardware failure (or bomb). Either the pilots were killed by it or they were unable to regain control of the aircraft afterwards.

Re:Flight recorder

[squiggleslash]

If it really is 30 minutes to two hours of silence - no talking, sneezing, snorting, footsteps, door knocking sighs, humming tunes, praying, singing, or breathing - then it certainly tells you something. At the very least that would strongly rule against "suicidal pilot" and "terrorist diversion" scenarios.

Re:Flight recorder

[amicusNYCL]

It is a reasonable assumption that the transponders were intentionally switched off, given the chain of events following the transponders being turned off and the cessation of radio communication

Like that Washington Post graphic shows, the last communication happened 2 minutes before the transponder stopped transmitting, not after. The flight path, both heading and altitude, was erratic. The plane made several turns in different directions, as if they didn't know where they were. The initial heading after communication was lost was roughly in the direction of one of the nearest airports that would have accepted a plane that size. There's no real reason to assume that this was deliberate versus a massive failure on board the plane that caused loss of most communications and navigation. It might have been the case that they were basically flying dark, without many instruments to show them where they were or where they were going. There's been no indication that anyone onboard the plane would have had a motive to crash it.

Re:Flight recorder

[umafuckit]

They've narrowed it down a fair bit, but there's a still a huge area of ocean to search and time is ticking. They only have another 15 to 45 days (IIRC) until the black boxes stop transmitting their sonar signal. When the Air France plane crashed into the Atlantic the location of the black boxes was eventually (it took about a year) pinned down to a 3 mile by 3 mile area, but it took yet another year before they were found. So even in that tiny 3x3 mile area it can be very hard to locate something. The current search area must still be thousands of square miles, since it was 2.25 million sq miles before these new satellite results. It's even conceivable the black boxes will never be found.

Re:Flight recorder

[Joce640k]

You'd think FDRs would float and be mounted in a section of the aircraft that detaches on impact (accelerometer+explosive bolts).

I wonder why they don't do that...

Re:Flight recorder

[amorsen]

Of course they can. But the pilots like a bit of privacy too. Up to now, 2 hours have been enough for every crash.

Re:Flight recorder

[TheCarp]

> I fail to see what they did wrong, even in hindsight.

That is because you are not applying the right standard. You see, anytime any effort fails, they, by definition did the wrong thing. Let me explain. Lets say, you have Ace Queen and the flop comes out Ace Ace King, then the a queen and a duece drop.

Now you have a full house, so if you bet and win, you did the right thing, However, if someone else had the king, and wins, you did the wrong thing, because you lost. Even though you had the same information available either way, and the negative outcome was extremely unlikely, by applying this standard retroactively, you made the wrong choice.

I know this may not make much sense, but that is because you are clearly stuck in antiqueted pre-9/11 world thinking where we could take the chance of allowing nuanced arguments that require deeper understanding than could be intuitively understood by a 4 year old.

Re: Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Or that exhaust vent about the size of a womp rat that nobody's supposed to know about

Re: Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

The most cohesive theory I read suggested that after the pilot signed off, a fire broke out, they pulled the breakers, and immediately changed course to head for the closest / largest airport (which wasn't the one they'd left from), but were incapacitated by smoke before reaching the intended landing site and the autopilot kept it flying on the same heading until it ran out of fuel.

The only question that remains is why they would not have fired off a quick mayday before cutting the power to all the non-essentials, including their communications equipment. Unless they specifically believed that the communications equipment was where the fire originated...

Re:Flight recorder

[Joce640k]

ZERO spy satellites point at the open ocean, nothing interesting going on out there.

Rubbish.

Spy satellites aren't in geostationary orbit so they have to pass over ocean sometime.

Re:Flight recorder

[harl]

The cause of the crash is fuel starvation of the engines. What killed the crew I think we will never know for sure since the black box only records a 2 hour loop. If they recover it it's going to show 2 hours of autopilot flight in a mostly straight line until the fuel ran out and the engines shut down.

Re:Flight recorder

[blackicye]

My bet is no government wants to out their level of sophistication in the surveillance world... It's a massive tactical advantage.

This is likely the reason that it took Thailand so long to share it's radar data. And why no other SE Asian nations have stepped forward with their input, it's a potential breach of OpSec.

Re:Flight recorder

[DoctorFuji]

As for former P3 tacco, I give the following input: Only better and slower airborne asset is a helicopter. Given the remote location, the only way to get them to the search area would be by ship (destroyer (only a few helos, or aircraft carrier (many helos, but might not be available) So, what other choices do you have? Multi engine fixed wing search aircraft are the only way you could get coverage in this area. So the balance becomes how much area you can cover with radar and visual search patterns. You could search closer with surface ships, but you are talking alot of craft to cover a similar area, plus the lag time to gather them and get them to the location.

Re:Flight recorder

[HornWumpus]

Sounds like you're half way to sanity regarding government. Good luck with your future progress.

Don't tell your left liberal friends. They hate it when anybody breaks up the circle jerk.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

> might cost money to change how we can "read' this information

That is completely irrelevant, ignoring the need for testing, when you have to read the information you already lost millions due to the broken plane.
The cost to upgrade is not a reason to not at least require all new ones to provide storage for tens of hours.

Re:Flight recorder

[DoctorFuji]

P3 tacco again. P3s carry sonobuoys, which can listen underwater. You can drop enough to cover the "listening" area.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

no

Re:Flight recorder

[interkin3tic]

Has there ever been a plane crash where the government WASN'T widely criticized? Not to say the Malaysian government doesn't deserve blame, I don't know, just that they were going to be criticized no matter what. The airline too. I've heard the Chinese government is also somehow taking some criticism. I believe other countries were also criticized for not committing more to the search effort sooner.

I think everyone would like to find the plane as soon as possible to move on. I doubt Malaysia thinks that saying "Oh yeah, it's probably over here" is going to pacify many people until they actually find the plane.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

> MH370: has had all of it's communications turned off

And why in all the world didn't they have a couple of military jets in the air right after that?
WTF do they have those things for if they let a plane fly around for hours without doing a thing about it?
Conclusion: For anyone who wants to got to war with Vietnam or Malaysia or any other country around there: just switch to radio silence, they'll let you fly anywhere and ignore all radar beacons so you can stroll around at your leisure.

Re:Flight recorder

[blackicye]

Pulling the breakers on everything non-vital is a fairly standard procedure when dealing with electric fires on planes.

We cannot yet be certain that the pilots are to blame for this horrible outcome.

Except that when you do this, you make a beeline for the nearest runway and enter the holding pattern.

Re: Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at the specs on the flight recorder, the 'crush force' is 5000lbs. Can anybody translate this to a depth? Given the depth of the apparent location, even if they find the black box, is it likely to have sustained the crush pressure and still be functional?

Re:Flight recorder

[maird]

RTFA. The latest claim is not that the apparent debris indicates anything at all. Instead, Inmarsat computed what they believe must be the rough final location from radio data regardless of the apparent debris and it predicts an inevitable crash in a location that would leave the apparent debris being observed now as a hardly surprising status.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time a plane goes missing or down there is a huge outcry for better plane tracking technology. But then time goes on, planes aren't constantly being lost, and the amount of money it would take to upgrade everyone ends up looking like more effort than it's worth. Kind of a sad situation.

Would you rather we constantly lost planes?

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

I was thinking the same thing. What use is a box that sinks to the bottom of the ocean? These things should float, and broadcast satellite-receivable data.

Re:Flight recorder

[JeffAtl]

Pretty sure there are. Could you cite your source?

Re:Flight recorder

[maird]

As far as I understand it, no. As I understand it there is a similar mechanism for activating very low signal strength ultrasound devices on the recorders that are for precision location within a rough location of a final site. IOW, you need the rough location before you stand a chance of finding them. They are also limited life (approximately 30 days if I remember it).

Re: Flight recorder

[Plunky]

Looking at the specs on the flight recorder, the 'crush force' is 5000lbs. Can anybody translate this to a depth?

Sure. 1 bar pressure is 14psi, so this is 5000/14 = 357bar. One bar is equivalent to about 10m depth of water, so the stated crush depth would be 3.5km give or take..

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, the Malaysian government is a small body with mean resources,

The Malaysian government is fundamentally Islamist, corrupt and guilty of gross mismanagement of national resources.

Re:Flight recorder

[aaarrrgggh]

The CVR only records for an hour or two of audio. In all probability, nobody in the cockpit was making noise the last two hours. The FDR would have the whole flight, and will likely show the cause of the crash being fuel exhaustion.

As best I can tell, there is nearly zero chance that there was a fire that turned off ACARS message transmission, then caused corruption in the flight management computer to add several waypoints off the programmed course, then slowly proceeded to short out the transponder 5 minutes later, then caused the VHF radio to stop working immediately after handoff from Malaysian ATC, all the while not impacting the ability for controlled flight of the plane.

Unfortunately, the bat-shit scary truth of the matter appears to be that the pilot decided to kill himself and everybody else on the plane, and there really isn't much that passengers or other flight crew can do to prevent the outcome.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Finding the black boxes will be useless. The plane flew for about 7 hours after the interesting events and all you'll have recorded is the last 30 minutes. The last 30 minutes will be no voices on the cockpit voice recorder and nominal engine and performance data until the plane ran out of fuel and crashed.

Re:Flight recorder

[aaarrrgggh]

Unions and privacy concerns.

Re:Flight recorder

[mdsolar]

An alternative to crashing on land is landing on land. Unfortunately, this would most likely be something arranged by the Taliban linked East Turkestan Islamic Movement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... which kills Chinese people for fun.

Re:Flight recorder

[amorsen]

The first turn was apparently to just such a course. If there is a fire on board, you do not care about holding patterns, you have less than 15 minutes to get on the ground unless you get the fire put out.

Re:Flight recorder

[Minwee]

And if you're really serious, you can drop enough so that a man could walk from Greenland to Iceland to Scotland without getting his feet wet.

Re:Flight recorder

[camperdave]

How far back do the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder keep their data. I have heard that the CVR only records the last two hours of cockpit audio. If so, all the CVR will reveal is the silence of a zombie cockpit.

Re:Flight recorder

[DarkOx]

No i don't think it matters from a practical standpoint. I think the preponderance of evidence we do have suggests it's very very likely the transponders were deliberately shut off, so crime. Even if it was mechanical so many 777s fly every day and the plane has a long and exemplary safety record, so it was either a freak accident that probably will never happen again, or it was the battery cargo, which many countries civil aviation authorities alread forbid transporting on aircrafts with passengers. Other airlines and authorities should probably just adopt that policy, there are already good reasons for it.

So no I don't think it's all that import to anyone who did not have a loved one on that plane that we find it. The rest of us can only be expected to invest so much in serivce of making a few folks feel better

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

What's a 'flop'? Any relation to Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail? What's a 'duece'?

Re:Flight recorder

[NatasRevol]

Don't forget the ocean is ~20,000 feet deep here.

The surface might not even be able to get the signal.

Send in the subs!

Re: Flight recorder

[NatasRevol]

Unfortunately, the ocean depth there is deeper than 3.5km. Closer to 7 km.

In other words, the black box won't be found.

Re:Flight recorder

[Radres]

Yes for this particular flight, uploading audio data to a server might not have worked. But if we're talking about upgrading black box tech for all planes, then let's go for both more capacity and internet capability.

Re:Flight recorder

[ackthpt]

Contrary to movies, spy satellites do not watch every inch of the planet. Nor can you easily steer them into another orbit for live James Bond style feeds.

ZERO spy satellites point at the open ocean, nothing interesting going on out there.

Meet SBIRS - From the page "SBIRS, considered one of the nation’s highest priority space programs, is designed to provide global, persistent, infrared surveillance capabilities to meet 21st century demands..."

I would find it illogical for the United States to only be monitoring continental lands, it would be akin to taking a picture and cropping out everything but the subject.

My bet is no government wants to out their level of sophistication in the surveillance world... It's a massive tactical advantage.

This is what has been bantered about in the news this morning. Many countries have been slow in revealing what they know, but have adopted a "we can confirm that" approach - much to the criticism of others. Never mind the satellites wouldn't be up there "confirming" things were it not for hefty spy budgets. No doubt some can detect nuclear submarines which think they are all unknown in the murky depths of the oceans. We can probably detect an ant fart in the middle of the Amazon rain forest.

More information has been forthcoming in recent days, because a little tipping of hands has been regarded in some quarters as a better policy than playing it entirely dumb.

Re:Flight recorder

[camperdave]

I don't believe that they will find it this time.

The Titanic was found. It won't take 73 years in this case, but the plane will be found*. I doubt it will be before the black box sonar pingers are exhausted, though. * assuming the situation in Ukraine doesn't trigger WW3.

Re:Flight recorder

[Collective 0-0009]

While this has captured much attention, quite honestly it is a yawner. Did you know that approximately 150,000 other people died that day? I'm willing to bet more than 2500 were preventable in some manner, making that 10x more important than MH370.

When you step back and actually review numbers, many things seem insignificant, if you have no personal feelings or emotions tying you to the event. Like this post, discussion, and website.

Re:Flight recorder

[ackthpt]

Flop - anything big-budget by Disney, it appears.

Duece[sic] - 1932 Ford 2-door hardtop, preferred for hot-rodding in the 1940s and 50s.

The analogy is pretty good, though about placing bets upon known variables and hindsight.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what the ACARS system does, via a satellite link. It provided ample information related to the Air France crash in the Atlantic a few years ago, including GPS positions and all sorts of flight data, albeit at fairly wide sample intervals/low bandwidth.

ACARS is also the system that was turned off, apparently by a conscious decision on the part of whoever had control of the cockpit of the aircraft, which is why we're working with such meagre data at this point. Whoever it was did not want the plane to be found/tracked. They were apparently unaware that the system would still "ping" the satellite for a connection every hour, or were unable to disable that feature, which is the only reason we have any (vague) information about location at all.

Re: Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

No, AC. Impossible. That's not what an autopilot does.
Why was there a difference of 20 minutes between the shutdown of communication equipment? Your scenario has none of that.
Why fiddling forth and back; up and down, and navigate waypoints properly when the only thing you want and need as an airport? Why Andaman Sea and not Kota Bharu or Penang? Why would you try hitting an airport, and NOT announce that a plane with a tail on fire is coming in? And they were NOT flying south when they crossed the peninsula. Back at stage one: that's not what an autopilot does.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

The pilots may not have been on the radio, but the FDR's record everything they say.

For two hours; overwriting the previous two hours; on a flight which lasted at least five more hours. This may end up as a fairly serious fuckup. I hope for their sake that the pilots were unconcious at the end. I hope for the sake of the rest of us and the relatives that they weren't and gave some commentry. The other flight data recorder might, or might not, have enough information to work out what happened. It will be much more difficult to be sure.

The crucial thing is that the Malays claimed that the transponder was turned off before the final Goodbye message; something that would be very unlikely to happen without pilot knowledge. If this turns out to be misinformation then serious amounts of wreckage are going to have to be found before anyone is sure what happened.

Re:Flight recorder

[Lodlaiden]

This is the most insightful bit out of the whole conversation.

Re:Flight recorder

[Platinumrat]

And if you're really serious, you can drop enough so that a man could walk from Greenland to Iceland to Scotland without getting his feet wet.

wish I had mod points for "Red October" reference.

Re:Flight recorder

[geoskd]

What I want to know, is why my phone (the smallest model made) can hold 1100 hours of compressed audio ... but these aircraft using NAND don't hold more than 2 hours of uncompressed audio (you don't want any quality sacrifices or artifacts from compression to screw up your analysis later) in a redundant array ...

Most of the newest versions do hold far more than 2 hours, but the average age of the worlwide air fleet is around 15-20 years. That menas equipment that was commisioned in 2000 (and the designs having been finalized many years before that). replacing existing FDRs and CVRs is just not cost effective, and will not be done unless mandated by a government agency. Newer plnaes all have significantly more advanced equipment, largely because the newer equipment is actually cheaper than the old tape style, but the units have to be self powered, and handle uncompressed recording for many hours across at least 4 channels. That menas significant space, and more importantly, significant compute power which eats watts. Modern processors like the RPi and Beaglebone can handle the load, but, again, were talking about equipment that came off an assembly line decades ago.

Re:Flight recorder

[drainbramage]

Don't you think it isn't the cost of the recording tech, it's the airlines way of maintaining privacy/secrecy at the expense of information following an incident.
I don't know that there are things that flight crews have done knowing the recording will be gone before they land, but it looks like I am implying it.

Re:Flight recorder

[jbwolfe]

The CVR only records radio, interphone and cockpit conversation. It provides context to data recorded on the FDR which holds 30 hours or so of a minimum of 88 flight parameters. Either or both would likely answer the majority of investigators questions.

Re:Flight recorder

[radarskiy]

"I am somewhat curious why the Chinese are so bent on a quick resolution here."

They've seen how willing Russia is to help Russian-speakers in Crimea, and feel they ought to be at least as helpful to Chinese-speakers in Malaysia.

Re:Flight recorder

[riverat1]

That's ignoring any exposure related issues, predatory marine life, or drowning. Dehydration, starvation, and miscellaneous death causes would have happened over 3-7 days if it was a soft landing.

In the Southern Indian Ocean like that I imagine the water is cold enough that hypothermia would kill anyone within a few hours.

Re:Flight recorder

[FireFury03]

Or now with in-flight WiFi an option, why isn't the black box configured to upload its audio to a server somewhere?

ISTR that the idea of cockpit voice recorders was originally rejected because it was seen as an invasion of pilots' privacy. CVRs were eventually accepted after they were equipped with an erase button that the pilot would press at the end of a successful flight (although I assume modern CVRs don't have an erase button, and as it is non-trivial to play them back I guess the pilots aren't too worried these days). I imagine some people would have privacy concerns with being constantly recorded and that recording automatically transmitted to their employer. (But I will agree that it seems completely nuts for a modern digital CVR to be able to record for less time than the plane can fly on a tank of fuel)

Re:Flight recorder

[GunSheep]

What kind of detection radius for a 'pinging' object? Tens of miles? Hundreds of miles?

Re:Flight recorder

[riverat1]

Sheesh! The stereotyping is strong with you. I'm right there with pixelpusher on everything including being a left wing liberal. I don't want government just for the sake of government, I just want it to take care of the things that can't be handled well outside of a government framework.

Re:Flight recorder

[Joce640k]

Unfortunately, the bat-shit scary truth of the matter appears to be that the pilot decided to kill himself and everybody else on the plane, and there really isn't much that passengers or other flight crew can do to prevent the outcome.

Yep.

Nothing else explains the radio silence, transponder shut-down, etc. Those things are designed to keep basic electrical and comms functions working no matter what.

If it flew for a few hours after the 'failure' then it should have communicated with ground. The only conclusion is that it was deliberately done by somebody with cockpit access.

Re:Flight recorder

[styrotech]

I appreciated the joke, but on a more serious note...

The media don't get closure, they get amnesia.

Re:Flight recorder

[kasperd]

The last 30 minutes will be no voices on the cockpit voice recorder and nominal engine and performance data until the plane ran out of fuel and crashed.

That is speculation for now. The recordings from the black box can either confirm that hypothesis or potentially reveal new information. Either way the recording would be useful for the investigation.

Re:Flight recorder

[styrotech]

Hehe well done.

Unless of course you're both Lumpy and dgatwood. Then it's just cheating :)

Re:Flight recorder

[tsqr]

Don't forget the ocean is ~20,000 feet deep here.

So, a little less than 4 miles, then. If the ping is detectable at 10 miles and the source is 4 miles down, you have a circle with a radius of 9 miles in which the ping is detectable at the surface. That's an area of 250 square miles.

Send in the subs!

The maximum operating depth of a Los Angeles class nuclear submarine might be as deep as 950 ft. That's not going to put much of a dent in that 20,000 ft number. Maybe you meant, "Send in the bathyscaphes!"

Re:Flight recorder

[Incadenza]

I fail to see what they did wrong, even in hindsight.

Firstly, they did not notice a 777 flying over their territory on their radar systems.

Secondly, when they found out that a plane had crashed and scrutinized their air defense systems, it took them days (and many re-re-re-statements) before they acknowledged that a 777 had crossed their country without anybody noticing.

Finally, it took them at least two days to take the data from Inmarsat seriously, that stated that the plane had flown for another 5 hours at least.

All this meant delays in the search operation, which means wasted resources, and above all: TIME. The chances of finding anything in an ocean full of currents and winds don't get any better when you wait (waste) a couple of days.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Unidentified debris is just that.

Indeed. Saying that there is debris in the ocean on that kind of scale is like saying that somewhere in North America, I saw some tumbleweed.

Re:Flight recorder

[NatasRevol]

See the comment below about crush depth. It's about 10,000 feet.

The black box is gone.

Re:Flight recorder

[TapeCutter]

True Malaysia has a large population of ethic Chinese, but let's not forget that 250 of the passengers were Chinese nationals.

Re: Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

So, they only way to get there is by a Chopper. And the only way to get a chopper that far north is to strip it down and turn it into a flying gas can.... Jack ryan could do it...

Re:Flight recorder

[maird]

NPR and the BBC in the first week following the disappearance but here's some BBC magazining of it: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-... Besides, plainly if you were correct they would have to have completely failed for the search to have taken three weeks. Also, if they were "released" on a salt-water crash then if they floated they would not remain at the location of the crash even though the recorders would unless the beacons didn't float and if they didn't float they would be exactly what I described anyway.

Re:Flight recorder

[JeffAtl]

They're called ELTs and 777s have them.

Re:Flight recorder

[Alastor187]

CVRs on those aircraft are 2 hours, not 30 minutes.

What I want to know, is why my phone (the smallest model made) can hold 1100 hours of compressed audio ... but these aircraft using NAND don't hold more than 2 hours of uncompressed audio (you don't want any quality sacrifices or artifacts from compression to screw up your analysis later) in a redundant array ...

Someones going to tell me that for the 30-40k those black boxes cost ... they can't put some actual storage space in the fucking things?

Probably because your phone isn’t reliable when exposed to 3,400g impact loads, or burning jet fuel, or a corrosive high pressure deep sea environment? Then again maybe you have one of those 'rugged' phones.

Re:Flight recorder

[RealGene]

Only on the rafts, if properly deployed. EPIRB transmitters.

Re:Flight recorder

[TapeCutter]

Flying on an passenger jet is statistically very safe because of the enormous effort the international community puts into investigating the cause the crashes that do occur then enforcing strict procedural regimes to avoid the same thing occurring again. It makes perfect sense to throw everything available at the search until the batteries run out on the acoustic pinger, not only for the bereaved but for the millions of passengers boarding a jet five years from now.

Re:Flight recorder

[Lumpy]

You are 100% sure of that? because I am not. drive by wire cars are having this problem, Prius software glitch was causing the brake to fail and accelerator to stick. I know that all the systems in the 777 all talk to and control each other, Power failure on a main bus can take out all transponders and a glitched autopilot not releasing control will keep it on a heading.

Fly by wire if designed properly should have a physical switch that the crew can throw to completely disable all control systems except for an emergency manual control system. IT does not have such a thing. if the flight control computer dies, you are on a ballistic trajectory.

a Lithium battery fire can take out both Main power busses, as well as the crew. autopilot will still continue as long as it can, if it was given a brown out it can even change course.

Re:Flight recorder

[DJ Jones]

You realize that up until roughly two years ago (in the US at least) the majority of people who identified themselves as "libertarians" were left-wing hippies from Vermont who embraced social contracts but wanted the government out of their personal affairs, pot gardens and gun racks? It wasn't until the "Tea Party" under right-wing funding and Carl Rove style propaganda was the term "libertarian" bastardized to enable right-wing nut jobs to hide under the guise of a small government agenda. I am a libertarian and I vote Democrat; not because they are equal but because if you go by historical facts and numbers, the Democrats have consistently been the party of fiscal responsibility since the 1960's.

You're not crazy, the two groups are far more agreeable than you think.

Is it off topic? I blame Microsoft.

Re:Flight recorder

[DJ Jones]

You realize that up until roughly two years ago (in the US at least) the majority of people who identified themselves as "libertarians" were left-wing hippies from Vermont who embraced social contracts but wanted the government out of their personal affairs, pot gardens and gun racks? It wasn't until the "Tea Party" under right-wing funding and Carl Rove style propaganda was the term "libertarian" bastardized to enable right-wing nut jobs to hide under the guise of a small government agenda. I am a libertarian and I vote Democrat; not because they are equal but because if you go by historical facts and numbers, the Democrats have consistently been the party of fiscal responsibility since the 1960's. You're not crazy, the two groups are far more agreeable than you think. Is it off topic? I blame Microsoft.

Re:Flight recorder

[ackthpt]

Fight in the cockpit? Pilot trying to take control and fly it to somewhere? It's certainly an erratic course, none of which seems consistent with trying to fight a fire.

Re: Flight recorder

[Entropius]

Pressure and force are different. That's 14 pounds per square inch, but we need to know how many square inches that 5000 pounds is spread over.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Which, of course, is why historic data is remarkably different in quality to scientific proof.

Re:Flight recorder

[tsqr]

See the comment below about crush depth. It's about 10,000 feet.

According to whom? Random Slashdot Poster, right? According to Wikipedia: "They [modern flight data recorders] are designed to emit an underwater locator beacon for up to 30 days and can operate immersed to a depth of up to 6,000 meters (20,000 ft)." I have seen estimates between 5000 meters (about 16,000 ft) and 20,000 ft. for the depth of the ocean in the presumed crash area. There's a pretty good chance that the recorder survived.

Re:Flight recorder

[LWATCDR]

In Flight wifi? ??? The Iridium system or even the Intersat system used by the plane makes more sense that in flight wifi.

Re:Flight recorder

[scarboni888]

Yup. Works the same everywhere, don't it?

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

"Reasonable assumption" != "what actually happened".
Further, if the transponders *were* intentionally switched off, that leaves all sorts of other questions, such as why someone would do that then turn around and fly back past their origin to someplace out in the ocean - presumably "intentionally" just like the transponder deactivation.

Perhaps in the several hours it took the pilots to make this flight, they uttered a word which could explain why.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because of the effort and cost of getting it done - designed, rated, approved, fitted. There'd be hell to pay if a plane got broken because of an accelerometer failure or detachment mistake, so it would have to be utterly perfect.

There was an aviation expert on the radio the other day saying (summarizing) "yes, more could be done, but it's hard to make happen, it's very expensive, and benefits are unconvincing. Most of the time we find the FDR. We can't anticipate everything, so no point putting effort into dealing with every eventuality. Consequently we put the effort in after an event, rather than in advance".

And ... has there ever been an occasion when swift location would have made any actual practical difference? - other than saving expensive searching?

The thing that AMAZES me is how many people talk about putting GPS on board "so we'd know where they are". People think GPS on its own is a two way system.

Re: Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't matter if the box is found or not. It records on a 2 hour loop, so it is probably recorded dead air. If anyone was alive/conscious, the plane wouldn't have flown into the Indian Ocean.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh. Planes are expensive. A plane has a substantial dollar-value attached to it.

And - being a bit less movie quote-ish - all those other people didn't die in a major component of the airline industry. The last thing they want is for people to think that you can get on a plane and just ... vanish .... At least if a root cause can be found then they can take visible steps to avert it in future, thus making us all happy again.

Re:Flight recorder

[mdsolar]

But, it won't have a lot of seaweed or barnacles so it should be easy to recognize. If it is found at all, it can support the analysis of the satellite data which may still get more precise.

Re:Flight recorder

[mjwx]

You'd think FDRs would float and be mounted in a section of the aircraft that detaches on impact (accelerometer+explosive bolts).

I wonder why they don't do that...

So when you have a rough landing, a black box (which is actually bright orange) isn't ejected into some passengers unsuspecting jacksie.

Re:Flight recorder

[mjwx]

You are making a PRESUMPTION that the transponders were turned off by hand. There is still the possibility of a fire or some other case. This is why recovery of the FDR's is so important. The pilots may not have been on the radio, but the FDR's record everything they say. The conversations between flight crew is crucial, along with all the airplane data.

This.

Until we have the flight recorder and the data is analysed no-one knows what is going on. Fire or equipment failure combined with a lack of oxygen (despite the atmosphere being fed by bleed air, if there was a plane wide electrical failure the air-conditioner pump/compressors would still fail) in light plane crashes, it's not uncommon for the cause to be oxygen starvation, the pilot passes out and the plane continues on auto until it runs out of fuel.

Re:Flight recorder

[mjwx]

Or now with in-flight WiFi an option, why isn't the black box configured to upload its audio to a server somewhere?

1. MH doesn't have inflight WiFi.
2. MH doesn't have inflight WiFi... I know that's only one point but it's big enough to be worth mentioning twice.
3. Have you ever used inflight WiFi. I have and couldn't even get /. loaded.

Re:Flight recorder

[eharvill]

It just seems odd that someone would wait for the fuel to (presumably) run out. Why not just immediately dump the plane into the ground/ocean/etc whenever said parties took control of the craft?

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Having successfully turned back, unless the entire Malaysian Peninsula was overcast with poor or zero visibility at the time, the lack of navigation or communication wouldn't have prevented a landing. They could see the land eventually and probably eyeball their way to a landing at an airport. It would be dangerous due to other air traffic, but what choice would they have? They had been back and forth on that route before, and for most pilots their visual navigation isn't bad in an area of familiar geography and it is the standard fallback if all else fails. Everything I've read suggests the day of the flight was "good weather", although I'm not sure of the exact visibility in the relevant areas.

Thus, unless the pilots were mentally incapacitated but not unconscious (fumes?), there's no logic in the route that was taken past the crossing of the Malaysian Peninsula unless it was deliberate in some way. You can't miss both the Malaysian Peninsula and Indonesia beyond that, and fly on for hours over ocean, without the light bulb eventually going on that you aren't going in the right direction to save yourself and your passengers.

Someone was steering the plane intentionally along that path unless both the plane *and* whoever was at the controls were incapacitated somehow, because what they were doing was STUPID if you were trying to save the plane after some kind of catastrophic failure. I suppose the whole thing could have been programmed along a crazy path and they were locked out of the controls somehow, but that doesn't make sense either given the options for progressively disabling various systems.

It's a lot more logical that there was intent behind the path taken.

Re:Flight recorder

[JeffAtl]

No, I'm referring to the 406 megahertz Emergency Locator Transmitter, a unit that separates from aircraft wreckage and activates when it hits water. The 777s have at least one of these and some have as many as four.

You're referring to another beacon.

Re:Flight recorder

[mean pun]

I think you are underestimating how remarkable and unusual this accident has been.

This is certainly not the first plane to have disappeared from the radar, but usually it becomes clear pretty quickly what happened to it, especially nowadays. Debris is found, there was some radio communication about the problem, or there are other obvious hints. In this case the hints have been so sparse and weak that I can well understand that they had to be evaluated carefully before anyone dared to act upon them. Moreover, gathering and interpreting the Inmarsat data also took time.

Considering that anything a crisis team says or does has a great impact on many people, in particular the family and friends of the missing, but also the searchers, personally I wouldn't dare to second-guess decisions of the crisis team. And doubly so in this baffling case.

Re:Flight recorder

[garyebickford]

You're such a sentimentalist. :)

Re:Flight recorder

[RubberDogBone]

When you get right down to it, life is 100% fatal. Everybody who is alive is going to die. Everybody who was alive and is not any more, has died. Everybody born tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the day after that, is going to die.

All of them tragic and sad and with loved ones left behind, but nothing can stop death. Nothing.

Re:Flight recorder

[RubberDogBone]

Finding the recorders had been shut off will provide immense support for the idea a deliberate act was taking place.

Re:Flight recorder

[garyebickford]

Most of the electronics in the cockpit - radios especially - are decades-old technology. This is in part because of the overlapping and 'rigorous' FAA and FCC standards. If a single component - a resistor, whatever - is changed, the entire unit has to go through certification all over again, by both agencies. This costs perhaps $10 million, and the total sales of that model radio may be 10,000 units, which means the amortized cost of certification is on the order of $1000 per radio. That is direct cost in advance of manufacturing. Back when I was flying, CB radios that cost under $100 had better reception and better voice quality than $3000 aircraft radios.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this may not make much sense

You're right, it doesn't make sense. The Right Thing To Do (tm) is based on the information you have, not the ultimate outcome. There is no connection between doing the right thing and success or failure - you can do the right thing and still fail, or do the wrong thing and still succeed.

Your poker example ignores the fact that in the scenario (there is only one scenario, with two outcomes) you are aware that you COULD be beaten, and should therefore bet accordingly.

Re:Flight recorder

[garyebickford]

To add to that, that area of ocean has about the worst conditions for ships, planes or helos. The "Roaring Forties" is not named that for nothing. A typical 'nice' day there will have 30 to 60 knot winds and 20 foot seas, plus a lot of fog, clouds and rain, air temps in the 0C to 10C range, and sea temps of 0C. Of course, if that's too balmy, there's always the Furious Fifties and Screaming Sixties. The Indian Ocean gradually becomes the Southern Ocean, which is the only ocean that has no barriers to its west-to-east current to slow it down, and the air above it is the same. The speeds are also multiplied because this is the air current that is balancing the east-to-west flow at the Equator, and also the rising air over the Equator sinks back down around the 30th parallel. But the circumeferential of the Earth at that latitude is about 1/2 that at the Equator, so the air travels twice as fast.

Think of Jupiter, and the tremendous winds generated there and the different bands going different ways - if there were no land masses the winds on Earth would look similar.

Then there's the depth and underwater terrain - the depth ranges from 3000 to 23000 feet (Mt. Everest is 29000) and is reportedly very rugged with canyons etc. It's one of the least explored parts of the global ocean, because of the conditions.

Re: Flight recorder

[Kittenman]

Pressure and force are different. That's 14 pounds per square inch, but we need to know how many square inches that 5000 pounds is spread over.

Damn! If only the blackbox was in metric!

And seriously, can we talk in SI units here? Newtons, I think.

Re:Flight recorder

[garyebickford]

A British airliner that disappeared a few miles from the airport back in 1951 was recently discovered. Its next-to-last messages (via Morse Code) were that it was close to landing. Its fate was unknown until 1998. And that was on land. The area to be searched, given the best possible scenario with present data, is IIRC 22,000 square miles, about the size of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire combined - about 1/3 of New England or about the same as Latvia or Lithuania, or 2/3 of Scotland. This is a much harder problem than the Air France jet of a few years ago, where they knew within a small range where the plane was likely to be.

I don't think it's possible for the pilot to shut off the flight recorders, at least without climbing all over the airplane. They are independently powered and situated at the back of the plane. They may only be accessible from outside the plane - I don't know this for sure.

Re:Flight recorder

[garyebickford]

So THAT's what happened. Your minions hijacked the plane and flew it to your secret submarine airbase, which rises to the surface when needed!

Re:Flight recorder

[garyebickford]

A friend of mine used to work for a company that built satellite receiving antennas, working on the software for the mounts. One of the things they would do is peruse the published satellite ephemera - I think each satellite's data was 80 points - and look for places where no satellites officially existed. Then they'd point their antenna there, and bingo! They found several military satellites that way.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Pilot's unions don't want longer recordings. 2 hours is a negotiated limit.

Re:Flight recorder

[camperdave]

You aren't going to get the the mechanism of the crash by staring at satellite photos ...

True, but you might find the crash of the mechanism.

Re:Flight recorder

[maird]

Well, I stand by the fact that the ones you refer to didn't work in the MH370 case and a new generation of doppler science on Inmarsat data was required instead to reach an accepted location of the crash as being a more likely indicator that ELTs of that kind are not deployed on the MH370 airframe rather than a very good reason for passenger/crew families to sue Boeing and/or Honeywell. I never said such devices don't exist, the answer to your question "Isn't there supposed to be several salt-water activated beacons that are automatically released upon a crash?" is no. Quoting wikipedia for example:

"Most general aviation aircraft in the U.S. are required to carry an ELT, depending upon the type or location of operation, while scheduled flights by scheduled air carriers are not. However, in commercial aircraft, a cockpit voice recorder or flight data recorder must contain an Underwater locator beacon."

As far as I know from two respected broadcast news sources' stories (quoting government search organizations among sources) that automatic water activated ultrasound locators were being sought with urgency in the days following the MH370 crash due to their limited power life but that the problem was it was not worth searching other than in the region of the locator due to the low output power of the locator. A functioning floating VHF/UHF or even HF ELT would have been located with precision by satellite within no more than hours of the crash with half the world's ham radio operators contributing references from ground as well. It would not have been at the location of the crash when discovered if it was floating and would not have stayed where it was when located anyway. An underwater RF transmitter of the same type at the depth of ocean floor in this case would not have moved but would not be receivable other than in a small region around the crash, which is the reason ultrasonic ones are used underwater and why submarine external communications systems are not HF, VHF or UHF. I'm listening to a BBC World Service story right now where they are saying the new "rough" crash site is the size of Portugal and there's no knowledge of whether the "ultrasound" locator being sought is on a flat surface or down a sea-floor canyon.

I also heard a magazine style story using the Air France 447 crash as a frequent example and quoting US government aviation safety sources describing an intended design goal of ultrasound locators and the recorders themselves being to not leave the scene of the crash and that anything of interest leaving that location would be sought after based on best available knowledge of forces capable of moving them (tides for example). The reverse being intended if the debris is found away from the crash site. A floating radio ELT could not serve the same purpose and any on-board that did float could not be expected to go in the same direction as all survivors anyway so would have a lower than 100% effectiveness anyway. The only news discussion I've heard of ELT type locators is of the form where the reporter makes scathing comments about how outdated the system being sought is and how we must be able to do better with satellites and GPS for example and the interviewee points out that's not the problem, deploying such systems on all the world's existing civil aircraft makes it prohibitive to be considered an official safety system. In that case, I assume the Honeywell ELT system used by Boeing, for example, is a commercial locator that no airlines are required to deploy but can choose to buy.

The answer to your question was "no" with regard to MH370 and you've done nothing to show otherwise and quoted no sources of your own in response to several of mine. There were no RF ELT's on-board or required to be on-board MH370 and they would only be partially effective anyway. It contains one or two ultrasonic locators designed to have stayed at the crash site with the flight recorders and they cannot be discovered outside of a limited distance from them hence the need to know the crash site.

Re: Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you explain that using a car analogy?

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

so, a fire then.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck beta

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Strawman / logic fail.

It simply isn't a case of taking a picture and cropping *out* undesired areas. It is a case of getting the picture in the first place.

A manufacturer's PR copy mentioning 'global' isn't the same as reality, and certainly not implying total geographical and visual coverage. Getting that, all the time, everywhere, requires resource, therefore cost.

  ither way, feel free to sell the budget proposal for 24/7/global(geographic and visually complete) satellite coverage to your local constituency.

Re:Flight recorder

[wvmarle]

Was it that erratic? Shortly after this overland flight path was made public, aviations experts said they were following a common navigation route. Which is not necessarily a straight line. And which means that whoever was operating the plane, knew perfectly well where they were.

Re:Flight recorder

[JeffAtl]

The answer to your question was "no" with regard to MH370 and you've done nothing to show otherwise and quoted no sources of your own in response to several of mine.

Quoting "broadcast news stories" isn't much of a source.

If you want news stories, here is a link to one that discusses ELTs in regard to MH370.

You can google more if you'd like. In any event, don't rely on "broadcast news stories" for your information - especially with fast moving news stories where there is very little information.

Re:Flight recorder

[wvmarle]

The acceleration of a controlled landing on water (or simply the end of a controlled glide path) may be not that much higher than the acceleration of a rough controlled landing on a poorly maintained runway during a typhoon. You may want the bolts to go off in the first situation, but not in the second. It's not that easy.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

How many people were flying that day, or the day before or the day after? THAT'S why a lot of people are interested. I'm not likely to be killed by a tiger in India, or gored by an elephant in Africa, or run over by a bus in Islamabad, but I've actually flown on Malaysian Airlines.

Re:Flight recorder

[wvmarle]

Then he took awfully long to actually do that, and went to great lengths not to be detected. Someone that wants to kill themselves does so in the spur of the moment, which is why they can be talked out of it with relative ease by just stopping them from making the jump. If they don't change their mind themselves.

A pilot, knowing that he has many more people on board, would just ditch the plane headfirst in the water or in the ground if he really wants to kill himself and wants it so desperately that he wants to take the other 270-something people with him. This doesn't make sense, for suicide.

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Designing something that can withstand a very rough impact (aircraft crash on land too, you know) and floats is very difficult. And any transmission requires an antenna on the outside. How do you make that withstand the impacr? The next generation of black boxes, some of which are already installed in military aircraft, jettison from the rear and fall down with parachutes. The difficulty is of course designing a system which triggers the black box launch mechanism when an anomaly has been detected and "enough" data to determine the cause has been recorded. The crew's actions afterwards are analyzed by investigators but obviously the accident cause is much more important for future safety improvements than the crew's actions after the fact.

Re:Flight recorder

[pixelpusher220]

I'll agree that most people who identify as libertarians..ala Ron/Rand Paul...simply aren't. I can respect a Libertarian point of view. It has concrete and arguable points. I fundamentally think it simply can't work in reality, but it's a nice ideal to strive for.

The Tea Party? It would be absolutely entertaining if it weren't such a viciously soul sucking pit of despair to anyone who appreciates logic.

The Dems a party of fiscal responsibility? Heh, whenever I've brought up the concept, my point to the Tea Party is 'tax and spend liberals' yep that's fiscal responsibility...PAYING for what you spend. Of course having the Tea Party understand that the vast majority of the debt has been rung up by Republicans is a wee bit too much to ask :) I'll even absolve Reagan of his increases as he (and a Dem Congress) bankrupted the Soviet Union making the world (hopefully) a better place.

As opposed to the GOP's quite literal flop of 'Tax and cut' yeah that'll work

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

You can always tell the humanities majors/PHBs from the engineers and scientists...

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

True Malaysia

True Scotsmen...

has a large population of ethic Chinese

That's great, we need more people like that.

but let's not forget that 250 of the passengers were Chinese nationals.

I think you just impugned 1.36 billion people (about 19% of the world's population). (Yes I know it's a typo...)

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

When you get right down to it, life is 100% fatal.

In the short run, that's not true. One estimate figures there have been approximately 108 billion humans born. There are 7.13 billion people alive, according to Wolfram Alpha. That means that only about 93% of all human lives have been shown to end in death. So, you've got a 7% chance. (It's better odds than winning the big jackpot in the lottery.)

Re:Flight recorder

[Bonobo_Unknown]

Even if they pick up the black box we still may never know what happened. If the events that caused the aircraft to crash happened more than 2 hours before the plane crashed, and it looks like those events happened probably 5 hours before, then the black box will not reveal much, as it only records the last two hours of data.

Re:Flight recorder

[Bonobo_Unknown]

>the FDR's record everything they say. The FDR's record the last two hours of everything they say. After two hours the last two hours is written over. So depending on when it all happened we might not learn a whole lot from the FDR.

Re:Flight recorder

[Bonobo_Unknown]

The pilot could have locked himself in the cockpit and killed himself. The plane would have flown on under the law of the fly by wire system until it ran out of fuel and crashed.

Re:Flight recorder

[Bonobo_Unknown]

Certification.

Re:Flight recorder

[antifoidulus]

If everyone was either unconscious or dead the plane would have continued going to China. It would not have turned off it's transponders. I don't know why people keep on assuming these things since we already know what happens when the flight crew becomes incapacitated in flight. Hint, the autopilot doesn't think "I'm free, I'm free at last, time to go to Australia!" It will continue on it's flight path till it reaches the designated airport, then will go into a holding pattern.

Re: Flight recorder

[thegarbz]

Or you could look up wikipedia which says can operate at depths of up to 6000m of water.

Re: Flight recorder

[TheCarp]

hmmmm that is a challenge. Driving a car really doesn't directly involve making decisions based on hidden information. Generally a driver has eyes open and pointed in their direction of motion. If he is going faster than he can see past corners; most people would say he shouldn't be going so fast rather than simply second guess his attempt to swerve.

Re:Flight recorder

[bingoUV]

Probably afraid of being killed in fire, but ok with being killed by an impact. The religions that don't practice cremation or other kinds of fiery activities with dead bodies presumably have some belief about burning dead bodies causing soul deprivation from heaven.

Re:Flight recorder

[mdsolar]

Not that may died because they had paid money to be conveyed safely from one place to another. Seems like there are some special circumstances here that your position ignores.

Re:Flight recorder

[painandgreed]

There's no real reason to assume that this was deliberate versus a massive failure on board the plane that caused loss of most communications and navigation.

Most of the analysis I've read has pretty much stated that anything that massive that would have kept the pilots from reporting in via the various means of independent communication on the plane for the hours they were still in control, would have been so massive, the plane would not have still been airworthy. A single turn and cruise till it runs out of fuel, and there might be an argument for fire, loss of cabin pressure, or something overcoming the crew and passengers. There were at least three turns and altitude corrections in over an hours time that would have required manual control. If things were so bad that they couldn't tell where they were going and couldn't radio, they probably would have ditched and hoped for rescue with the liferaft transponders rather than fly blindly into the Indian ocean.

Re:Flight recorder

[amicusNYCL]

I have a hard time buying the fire argument. It doesn't seem likely that a fire would start and spread to the point that it knocks out communications only 2 minutes after the last voice message, without anyone sending another message. It would seem like that would have to be a very fast-moving fire, like by the time they realized there was a fire the communications were already gone.

Loss of cabin pressure sounds reasonable, and at 45,000 feet people only have about 15 seconds before losing consciousness, but then the question becomes why did they turn and climb to 45,000 feet?

It seems that some catastrophic failure (not necessarily catastrophic to the plane, just the systems) knocked out communications, and maybe navigation, and in their panic the pilots could have flown too high and ended up with a depressurization event that kills everyone on board, while the plane keeps going on the plotted course.

Anyway, I hope the wreckage gets recovered so that these questions can get answered.

Re:Flight recorder

[TheCarp]

> There is no connection between doing the right thing and success or failure

I hope you realize that was, in fact, the entire point; which I thought was pretty clear from saying it didn't make sense.

> Your poker example ignores the fact that in the scenario (there is only one scenario, with two
> outcomes) you are aware that you COULD be beaten, and should therefore bet accordingly.

Well sure but, it is rare that you actually have the nuts in any given situation. Honestly, losing a big stack in that situation is exactly what you would expect to happen even to the best of players.

That said, if the particular opponent was raised or even re-raised pre-flop, you SHOULD strongly suspect you are dominated and bow out. However, if he slow played pre-flop and limped in? No reason to suspect.

Also, aside from "could be beat", Ace-rag would have trip aces, so you have to expect anyone raising and reraising could have that, but they also could have KK or KQ or even AJ/AT - all of which would have trips and be feeling really good about it. (KQ or KJ might feel good too, but they shouldn't)... never mind the bluffers who put you on a nervous mid-hand.

In any case, the only hand that beats you is AK, and there is only 1A and 3K unaccounted for, and 47 cards you haven't seen..... so for a random hole, the chances that those two cards he has are AK, before you take any betting into account...is about a 1% chance.

If you don't lose money in that situation, you played it wrong. if you lose your life savings on that, you also played it wrong, but for different reasons.

Re:Flight recorder

[stoatwblr]

"As we speak, the remains of MH 370 are sitting on the bottom of the ocean, under 5,000 meters of water,"

Unlike the Air France crash (which was stalled and hit the water at something less than 100mph) MH370 probably hit the water, gliding nose down, in cruise configuration, at near-cruise speeds. It will have been ripped to pieces by the impact - which handily explains why the EPIRB didn't go off - and the black box will have taken a lot of damage.

Add in the southern circumpolar current, and the most likely scenario is that the remains of the plane will be scattered over a wide area of seabed and anything on the surface is now hundreds of miles from the impact point.

The FDR and CVR are both on loops. Cockpit loop is normally 30 minutes, so likely to be utterly useless. I'm not sure about the loop on 777 FDRs but it's also possible there won't be much usable data recovered about what started the whole chain of evenmts.

If the whole mess started with a nosewheel fire - which fits the most likely scenario and matches the ground report of an aircraft on fire - then it's entirely possible the FDR and CVR were shut down as part of firefighting procedure before the pilots were overcome by smoke. In that case the start of the event would be recovered but nothing more.

The real tragedy is the treatment of the relatives, how various governments have reluctantly come forward with information because they don't really want to reveal their capabilities and the sheer ineptitude of the airline and Malaysian government's handling of the affair.

Re: Flight recorder

[stoatwblr]

The crush force is that of the case in an impact. The case isn't hermetically sealed, so the device will reach the bottom in whatever state it was after a 300+mph surface impact.

Re:Flight recorder

[stoatwblr]

"I am somewhat curious why the Chinese are so bent on a quick resolution here. "

China is a regional power. In this instance they're as powerless as everyone else and they don't like it.

The noise is toys being thrown out of cots.

Re:Flight recorder

[stoatwblr]

"In the Southern Indian Ocean like that I imagine the water is cold enough that hypothermia would kill anyone within a few hours."

Try "minutes".

The vast majority of Titanic victims didn't drown (they had lifejackets) They were dead of hypothermia inside 15 minutes - and that far south the water temperature is comparable.

As for the crash point being "near" Australia let's put that in perspective:
At possible closest point to Australia it's "near" in the same way that:

London is "near" Moscow,
OK City or Portland OR is "near" LAX,
Orlando FL is "near" NYC.

It's a huge area of ocean with wild weather (the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties don't have those names by whimsy) and strong currents.

Re:Flight recorder

[uninformedLuddite]

If I was on the plane CNN would be pointing the finger of blame at me. I have a nice flight sim and was once harassed because I had a pocketknife found on me just prior to boarding.

Re:Flight recorder

[uninformedLuddite]

Or fly into a landmark? Hijacking just to crash hours later in the ocean with no claim of responsibility doesn't pass the smell test.

Re:Flight recorder

[riverat1]

Yes of course, I was just being generous when I said "hours". I don't have a good feel for how cold those waters are but that far south they can't be much above 50F (10C).

Re:Flight recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a theory no one has thought of. Anyone heard of DB COOPER. he hijacked a plane, stole $200,000 and parachuted out. It was a Boeing 727 jet airliner...

So Hijack the plane, get what you want or who you want, parachute off and leave the plane on auto pilot after disabling the pilots. Everything adds up including the low altitude slow flying and the bizarre shift to the Indian Ocean which simply doesn't make sense. If they set the plane to climb before jumping out it would be going slower and the hope would be an eventual stall but obviously the auto pilot kicked in and took over and brought the plane back to designated altitude. They need to dig a lot deeper into the passengers. Some person or persons are not what they appear to be. Of course this caper is perfect. It can never be proven or disproven which is clearly the object of the exercise. I wonder if the Chinese are debating whether they need to spend millions changing their IT security systems?

They never caught DB Cooper. They still don't even know who he was.

Re:Flight recorder

[RockDoctor]

Well, if your lost item is sitting on an unobstructed seabed abyssal plain, with a direct line of sight between transmitter and receiver, then you may have just tens of miles.

But ... the search areas include the "90-East ridge", an undersea mountain range with foot hills (and "foot canyons") stretching a thousand or so kilometres to either side. So you can't be sure of a direct line of sight. Every reflection is going to drop your signal power by a factor of (optimistically) 50%, so it'll reduce your detection range by 30-odd % (1-sq.rt2)

The seabed is 3 to 6km below surface. That's going to reduce the detection radius of the surface vessels, but only by a small amount.

There are combinations of temperature and pressure of the water which can result in bounded reflection "corridors" in depth which can conduct a part of the signal and channel it for considerable distances. Which could be tens of kilometres, or if you're listening to whale farts, hundreds or thousands of kilometres.

There is a reason that it took several years to find the plane that disappeared from Brazil to France a few years ago - it's not an easy task.

I've spent the last couple of months working on a vessel in 3km of water ; we dropped an 80-ton SWL shackle from one of the cranes while an ROV was on bottom. We still haven't found it, and have been looking for weeks (when not using the ROV for it's routine operations at depth). Finding things in the depths is not easy.

Re:Flight recorder

[geogob]

Obviously, the crew became incapacitated after they - or someone else - maneuvered the aircraft to its last course. I haven't seen anyone suggest it could have been the other way around.

Re:Flight recorder

[antifoidulus]

But why would they change their course if it was an accident? If the crew became incapacitated, it was after someone deliberately steered them off course, not due to an accident, since if there was an accident they surely would have radioed for help.

Some questions

[Anonymous Coward]

How come the frequency information of the signal received by the satellite was saved? What is the purpose of saving all that data in normal operations?

And why did it take three weeks to do that analysis?

Re:Some questions

[Dthief]

i think they saved it BECAUSE the plane was lost, and probably they keep things for like 24 hrs in case there is some issue with the flight.

since its a method they dont normally use maybe they didnt think to use it until 2 weeks past? and also I saw some mention of them passing the info on March 12th, but maybe that was less exact.

Re:Some questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be daft. That information was *public* within a few days. There is nothing uncommon about retaining communication logs. For radios, this includes the *frequency* at which the communication occurs. From the frequency you can get lots of things, including Doppler shifts. Circular paths like that are even more deterministic if you know the latency, but I don't know if that happened in this case.

It doesn't take weeks to do analysis. It takes weeks to come to terms with the conclusion of the analysis.

CAPTCHA: deduce

Re:Some questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Because RF sucks big phat donkey balls. So you log everything you can from the radio, so you can tell why your signal quality is shittier than usual. The signal is probably so narrow that you need to account for doppler effects, low data rate means you don't have a flood of packets, so yes you can save everything, forever.

Re:Some questions

[fatboy]

I suspect, and I have zero knowledge of this system, that the satellite used has linear transponders that re-transmit the exact signal it receives. This means that both amplitude and frequency domain are relayed and received at the ground station. I imagine that the ground station is a software defined radio that digitizes and records everything that is passed though the IF.

Again, I know nothing of this system, but if I was going to build one, that's how I would do it.

Re:Some questions

[Strider-]

How come the frequency information of the signal received by the satellite was saved? What is the purpose of saving all that data in normal operations?

The communications system in question is likely based on TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access). While I have not worked with Inmarsat systems, all the other satcom systems I have worked with log each connection, and various pieces of information regarding the connection. One of these parameters that is logged is the frequency offset (ie the difference between the expected and actual frequency). This is useful from a troubleshooting perspective as it allows you to spot transmitter and receiver components that are drifting out of specification. Some of the more advanced satellite systems (iDirect) will actually log the geographic coordinates of the uplink site, as this plays into the timing requirements for the network. Unfortunately, Inmarsat isn't this aggressive with their timing, so time of flight isn't an issue).

And why did it take three weeks to do that analysis?

This is pure speculation on my part, but I would wager they had to go back through significant amounts of logs in order to characterize the transmitter and receiver components on that particular aircraft. The doppler effect is going to be subtle compared to the thermal drift of the transmitter, so they need to factor that out before they can get at the thermal drift. Also every oscillator and transmitter is different, so they would need to characterize the transmitter that is on that specific aircraft (which is now of course missing).

Re:Some questions

[icebike]

How come the frequency information of the signal received by the satellite was saved? What is the purpose of saving all that data in normal operations?

And why did it take three weeks to do that analysis?

I thought the same thing.

With digital tuners, what radio system even captures exact frequency these days? Its either in-band our out of band and not heard.

Perhaps these satellite radios are wider band, and therefore they record the exact frequency any transmission arrived, but it just seems unusual to have this information at all, let alone to be able to dig it up out of several days old data.

Re:Some questions

[FaxeTheCat]

And why did it take three weeks to do that analysis?

Actually, it is in the interview that the post is based on... You should check it, It is quite informative.

Re:Some questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting A/C because of modding)

It didn't take three weeks. Malaysia took it's time in releasing the information. But the technique used had not been done before; they took their time making sure it worked.

Re:Some questions

[eclectro]

It should also be noted that much, if not all, signal generation on the satellite is going to be traceable to an atomic clock.

Re:Some questions

[Strider-]

It should also be noted that much, if not all, signal generation on the satellite is going to be traceable to an atomic clock.

There's often very little signal generation being done on the spacecraft itself. Putting complex electronics in the radiation environment of space, where it can't be repaired, and electrical power is at a premium, is generally a bad idea. With certain exceptions (Iridium et al), all the intelligence is done on the ground, where it can be maintained and repaired. Most satellites are just dumb bent pipes.

Years ago, I assisted a major satellite operator with geo-locating an interfering uplink. Based on the doppler shift caused by the motion of the satellite, and about 72 hours of repeated sensing and passes, they were able to narrow down the offending dish to within a 1 mile by 5 mile ellipse. That's small enough that they can go and "mow the lawn" with equipment on a helicopter or other aircraft to find the offender. As I recall, in the end the offender was a failed credit card clearing system on a gas station west of Detroit.

Re:Some questions

[Anonymous Coward]

That makes no sense. Digital or analog has little to do with it except being the state of the art.

Precisely because these are (quasi) digital tuners, characteristics of the signal can be more easily captured and studied. You describe the experience out of the payload (data/stream/user) context (heard or not heard) where there is no noise to deal with - which is great. But we don't care about the data. The insight was gained in the engineering context, dealing with the signal (carrying data).

In summary: you car radio may not have a /stderrr, but if it did...

Re:Some questions

[unitron]

So they should like RTFA?

Man, standards here at Slashdot sure have gone down.

Next thing you know someone will suggest that no one should post about hot grits unless they're actually relevant because the the article is actually about Al Green.

Re:Some questions

[FaxeTheCat]

So they should like RTFA?

Preferably. But we have to accept that some people may just come here for something like this... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

I've figured out the cause of the crash

[Anonymous Coward]

Impact with water

Feel free to give me a call if you need help with any other pressing questions.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[Anonymous Coward]

and gravity. Guess they let Sandra bullock drive.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[ze_jua]

This credible source of information made a complete analysis of another crash.

It's always the same story: The plane stops flying and touch the ground/ocean

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[jones_supa]

What happens when an airplane crashes into the ocean? Do the passengers die immediately from the impact?

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they are completely unharmed by near-instantaneous deceleration from hundreds of miles per hour down to zero, and they can surely withstand crushing and impaction by the deformation of the wreckage around them. No sir, it's the sharks that kill them in the end.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[jones_supa]

Thank you, Mr. Nasty McSnarkenstein.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[icebike]

Ask Captain Sullenberger. Oh, and stop being an idiot.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[bluefoxlucid]

At high speeds, wouldn't an air plane potentially skip across the surface without completely wrecking? Also, couldn't the plane slow down enough to lose altitude before losing altitude, hitting the water not quite as hard, at an angle that perhaps didn't immediately decelerate to zero or shred the plane? That's happened most of the time planes ditched in the water.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[deadweight]

Airplanes landing on water range for "can be used again after drying out" to complete death and destruction. We can assume this instance was toward the death end of the scale because no one removed the emergency beacons from the airplane and turned them on - i.e no one left alive :(

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[DrGamez]

This is a bit of "no duh" but I think that completely depends on the angle of entry and how choppy the waters are, would be hard to say just how "smooth" a plane could land in the middle of an ocean.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[fnj]

No.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[amorsen]

I think the best assumption so far is that there were no one alive on the plane at that point, due to loss of cabin pressure. That is not completely guaranteed, but it would certainly be my guess.

It is also the thing to hope for. It would have either been quite gentle and slow drifting asleep if the pressure fell gradually, or over within seconds if pressure loss was rapid.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[bluefoxlucid]

Yes but the implication was that a plane landing in the water would disintegrate, i.e. that we know what happened to the plane. The two ways to know what happened are A) to find it, and B) to know what happens to pretty much all planes when they hit water.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[FaxeTheCat]

At high speeds, wouldn't an air plane potentially skip across the surface without completely wrecking?

In a word: No.

First: Due to its weight, it would definitely not "skip across the water". Its structure would simply not withstand the shock.
Also, the plane would need to land on water at a very specific angle and with as low speed as possible to "land" and not "crash".
As the plane crashed due to being out of fuel, it is totally unthinkable that it landed at that exact angle, and in perfect balance.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[bluefoxlucid]

A plane running out of fuel doesn't drop like a rock. Some of them can glide. Some have had full engine failure and landed safely in the Hudson River.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[drainbramage]

No.
No it hasn't happened most of the time, ditching is bad, your plane will be bent.
By the way, they were not landing on Lake Placid.
You can not expect any aircraft to survive a landing in that area.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[riverat1]

With those two big engines hanging down from the wings I doubt a 777 would skip very well. Something like a 727 with then engines in the back up on the fuselage would have a better chance.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[FaxeTheCat]

A plane running out of fuel doesn't drop like a rock. Some of them can glide. Some have had full engine failure and landed safely in the Hudson River.

The plane which landed in Hudson River had lost the engines, but was under control by an experienced and fully alert pilot.
If a plane flies over the ocean for several hours, it is highly likely that it is flying on autopilot with no pilot controlling it. If there was a pilot controlling it, why would he not try to reach land? Without a competent pilot, landing on water will destroy the plane.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[Anonymous Coward]

It may have been snarky (and not necesarily true) but it was funny

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[garyebickford]

It is _possible_ to land reasonably safely in the ocean. It requires a lot of skill and luck. Basically the plan has to orient in the same direction as the swells, slow down to just above stall speed (still about 150 knots IIRC), take a nose high attitude to prevent cartwheeling, and basically 'land' as slowly as possible, preferably picking the moment of contact on a wave peak. This of course works much better when the water is flat, which it rarely is in the southern Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean - read up on the "Roaring Forties". Even once you have 'landed', the high waves have enough force to start stressing the plane to the breaking point, and as soon as the doors open the waves are going to play hell with rafts and people trying to get out on them. It's not quite like boarding a raft in a hurricane, but it's close.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[Anonymous Coward]

In a word: no, to all points.

Wishful thinking. Don't know where to begin. Start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM7zMW8WVYU

"most of the time planes ditched in water" - that exactly is not reflected in historical record. Aside from the famous Hudson landing, most of the time, terrain landings are spectacularly unsuccessful, with water being the worst of the worst.

"At high speeds, wouldn't an air plane potentially skip across the surface without completely wrecking?" This is water, not subject to non-Newtonian liquid shenanigans. High speed (=more energy) is also worse since loading on that aluminum vessel would be catastrophic.

Then there is configuration / topology; wings at more or less centerline height above the water, engines as great big surfaces to catch the wave.

This is not a oval stone cast from the beach. Ever put your hand out the window when in the car? Imagine doing that traveling in water, and your arm being 4 longer than the car.

Low horizontal speeds on the other hand, would be perfect. But wings need horizontal speed to generate lift. So, we're asking the pilot/system to manage the a 100+ ton mass with a wide and flat (relative to ground) cross-section across the air/water density barrier in the best way possible.

Hudson was a conscious veteran pilot, suffering power loss but all other systems and control surfaces were intact, waters were calm/protected, it was daylight, in urban terrain and plenty of visual references.

MH370 is an unknown air-frame, system and control surface unkonwn, open waters with waves, it was pitch black, in the middle of nowhere, and the pilot may or may not have been active.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[bluefoxlucid]

My point is it was a valid question. Most of the answers haven't said anything specifically about this plane: yours talked about how it's heavy and would need to be in balance and whatnot, which doesn't indicate if this is a property of the plane or all planes. A lot of them are simply ridiculing the question as a dumb question--which I don't think it is, since commercial airliners have a history of occasionally hitting the water and coming away fine (a dead plane and living passengers is coming away just fine--runway skids do this a LOT) after losing power.

More information is useful. But now you're conjecturing that the pilot was AFK, and hadn't come back before the plane crashed, which isn't really a strong statement for why this plane specifically can't hit the water without instantly killing everyone. I mean, they'll all get flotation devices and die of hypothermia in the ocean anyway, but I'm more interested in why the plane necessarily hits the water and immediately shreds or compresses and kills everyone upon impact.

Re:I've figured out the cause of the crash

[FaxeTheCat]

but I'm more interested in why the plane necessarily hits the water and immediately shreds or compresses and kills everyone upon impact.

We have some pretty good assumptions and some knowledge which will give an inevitable result:
The weight of the plane is about 150 to 200 tonnes without fuel.
The plane most likely lost thrust at pretty close to cruising altitude.
We can assume cruising altitude of approx 20000ft (6000m) give or take a few thousand feet
The plane was flying for hours over the open ocean without any attempt at correcting the direction to land. Australia is easy to find and would only need a small correction. Based on this, we can assume that there were nobody piloting it.

So it is safe to assume that it lost power around cruising altitude, and after that descended uncontrolled to the ocean. Without power, it would lose forward speed. Gravity kicks in. Vertical speed increases. There are nobody in the plane who can convert vertical speed to horizontal speed to enable a soft landing. Water is hard. Very hard. The result is inevitable.

Executive summary...

[Last_Available_Usern]

We still have no idea exactly where the aircraft is, how it went down, or what to do now.

Re:Executive summary...

[Anonymous Coward]

We have a pretty good idea of what the last thing that went through the pilot's mind upon impact was. His asshole.

Re:Executive summary...

[Anonymous Coward]

I certainly know what to do now.

Re:Executive summary...

[Anonymous Coward]

Naa, he was knobbing the copilot so probably a dick.

Re:Executive summary...

[BitZtream]

uhm, unlikely, unless the plane pancaked/bellyflopped in with no forward velocity ... which is pretty much impossible since it was flying and is an aerodynamically stable object (it wants to point the noise into the wind, even without a pilot).

Its more likely the last thing that went through his mind was his face or glass/instruments from the cockpit, but probably a lot of ocean too.

Re:Executive summary...

[fnj]

and is an aerodynamically stable object (it wants to point the noise into the wind, even without a pilot)

Where did you get that bizarre idea from?

Re:Executive summary...

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone hear any mention of Payne Stewart's jet that lost decompression suddenly, and then roller-coasted accross the US until it ran out of fuel and crashed? This flight seemed similar in all accounts.

Re:Executive summary...

[Anonymous Coward]

"... or what to do now."

Hm, what about we move the fuck on with our daily lives?
I dont know, maybe you have something else in mind...

Re:Executive summary...

[jfdavis668]

Or Helios Airways Flight 522, which lost cabin pressure, and flew on until it ran out of fuel.

Re:Executive summary...

[riverat1]

Possible but that seems unlikely in this case since the cockpit on a 777 has its own independent oxygen supplies for just that situation.

Re:Executive summary...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is starting to look like (to me anyway) that something happened in the cockpit (be it hijacking, or the pilot/copilot going rogue, fire, or something dubious) that resulted in control of the aircraft being lost, so it kept going by whatever was programmed in (remember the avionics in a fly-by-wire plane is not in the front) until it ran out of fuel. Based on the transponder being turned off, it looks like it may have started as a hijacking or the pilot going rogue, but the rest of the story suggests nobody was in control of the plane when it started going towards the Indian ocean.

Re:Executive summary...

[Occams]

That is what the tail is for - wind vane effect keeps the nose into the apparent wind.

Re:Executive summary...

[Steve_Ussler]

right...but at least this is a start.

Little disturbing

[kid_wonder]

Did the Malaysian government just make a statement to the families based on a statistical probability?

Or did they make that statement based on debris found that was positively identified to the aircraft.

Re:Little disturbing

[mdsolar]

Based on the analysis of the satellite data.

Re:Little disturbing

[asmkm22]

The Malaysian government has mishandled communication from the start. I think they just want this whole thing over and done with. The ones in power over there aren't exactly used to being criticized like this.

Re:Little disturbing

[Anonymous Coward]

Statistical probability.
You're starting to get in the realm of winning the NCAA men's basketball bracket 1 billion dollar challenge if the plane is not at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
Hence, why they're already making the statement that everyone aboard is no longer alive.

Re:Little disturbing

[idji]

The Malaysian government made the statement based on Inmarsat calculations, not on debris.

Re:Little disturbing

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, if you ignore this section (or disbelieve it) with words like "definitively" and "undoubtedly", then it was only some statistical probability: //From the article: // Meanwhile, Inmarsat's engineers carried out further analysis of the pings and came up with a much more detailed Doppler effect model for the northern and southern paths. By comparing these models with the trajectory of other aircraft on similar routes, they were able to establish an "extraordinary matching" between Inmarsat's predicted path to the south and the readings from other planes on that route.

"By yesterday they were able to definitively say that the plane had undoubtedly taken the southern route," said McLaughlin.

Re:Little disturbing

[khb]

The published text of the PM's speech makes it clear its based on the analysis (what you are calling "statistical probability") not debris or black box.

I don't know why anyone would find that disturbing.

Even if he had debris, for any given family there would still be some "statistical probability" that their loved one survived (infinitely close to zero) involving some sort of miracle, a hidden parachute or a missed connection, etc. Just as we'd discard such false hope, pretending that there is some other place folks ought to be looking or that there is any realistic chance that their family members are safe as hostages in some terrorist base.

It is exceedingly unfortunate that the data analysis was relatively slow (and the data itself was never open sourced); the delay resulted in much lost time and resources by many naval and air groups, and lots of needless gnashing of international teeth.

If there's any lesson here, the satellite data feed(s) should become a bit more formalized, and their release in the event of an accident be as standardized as the black box information. As for the $10/flight for the data, even if the airline doesn't pay for it up front, the data collectors should collect it, and save it until after the flight has landed. If it doesn't land, the airline can pay some much larger fee to get the data ahead of it going public ;>

Re:Little disturbing

[Zocalo]

Inmarsat managed to eliminate the northen arc based on differences in expected doppler differences of the signal pings, when the last ping was received, and assuming a conservative fuel consumption to that point, there would have been insufficient fuel left for the plane to make land, hence it went down in the ocean. It's important to note that Inmarsat is unable to say where exactly, only that it is within a given range of the location where last known ping was now known to have been sent from, which is where the search for wreckage is now centred. I gather this is the result of a highly unorthodox set of data analysis that is well outside normal procedures for determining location, hence the reason it's taken so long - some of the techniques they used probably haven't ever been done before.

Re:Little disturbing

[ziggystarsky]

The nice thing about (bayesian) statistics is that you can combine information from different sources and form a coherent statistical estimate based on everything you have. So given they have a model about debris occurance in this part of the ocean, they can very well increase the probabilities based on the sighting of debris.
The BBC had a nice article about bayesian search methods some days ago: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...

Re:Little disturbing

[bluefoxlucid]

I don't know why anyone would find that disturbing.

In Tres Roeder's "A Sixth Sense for Project Management," he shows a diagram of communications. This diagram shows information versus time.

In the beginning, information is unknown; then the information changes, back and forth. For example: a dollar estimate may be $3,000 for a project, then $85,000 when we realize we need to excavate cabling tunnels for a line, then $6,000 when we realize we can run this across our existing tunnel and have a new fiber optic pulled for $3,000, then $7,000 when we realize we're going to also need a new transceiver, then $4000 when we find out some of the other equipment is unnecessary, then $14,000 when we realize the scope of labor required is twice as big.

Finally, once we have enough information, that figure stays. Perhaps at $14,000. We also realize we've got the correct figure because we have a full analysis of scope and work required--or at least, the figure won't change until we've done a bunch of work and realized, deep into the project, that we missed something. In any case, it is now not likely to change simply because our information base is hot.

During the initial planning phase, communication should reflect this: the understanding of the situation--the lack of precision--and what is being done to pin that down is to be communicated; conclusive statements should not be communicated because the current understanding of the situation is inconclusive. Once the situation has reached a point of conclusion, then you communicate these conclusions.

What is disturbing about the Malaysian government here is they have been repeatedly saying, "We have no idea what's happening and there's a ton of information out there we're missing; but this is what happened." Then, five hours later, "Oh we found more debris, we think this happened instead." Then the next day, "Oh there was some satellite telemetry information we weren't done analyzing, but it's provided additional information, so we think the plane may have gone this way..."

In other words: They have piles of information they know they're missing, piles of information they have a plan for finding (i.e. "ongoing investigation"), and huge and visible gaps they know exist and expect to fill. They should not be communicating any conclusions at this time.

Re:Little disturbing

[JeffAtl]

There are supposed to be several salt-water activated beacons that should have been activated. You don't find it disturbing that every one of those failed?

Re:Little disturbing

[InvalidError]

It is not even the satellite data. Merely the variation in carrier frequency between hourly "pings" caused by doppler effect: at first the plane was flying south from the north side of the equator, bringing it closer to geostationary satellites causing a doppler shift to slightly higher observed frequency, then another ping near the equator with no apparent doppler shift followed by lower carrier frequencies as the plane started moving away from the equator.

They could have gotten the same doppler pattern if the plane turned around at the equator and started going north after the equator ping. That's why the Inmarsat staff cannot rule out the northern route with absolute certainty.

If they had logs from two satellites, they would have been able to make 100% certain.

Re:Little disturbing

[RabidReindeer]

The published text of the PM's speech makes it clear its based on the analysis (what you are calling "statistical probability") not debris or black box.

I don't know why anyone would find that disturbing.

Even if he had debris, for any given family there would still be some "statistical probability" that their loved one survived (infinitely close to zero) involving some sort of miracle, a hidden parachute or a missed connection, etc. Just as we'd discard such false hope, pretending that there is some other place folks ought to be looking or that there is any realistic chance that their family members are safe as hostages in some terrorist base.

It is exceedingly unfortunate that the data analysis was relatively slow (and the data itself was never open sourced); the delay resulted in much lost time and resources by many naval and air groups, and lots of needless gnashing of international teeth.

If there's any lesson here, the satellite data feed(s) should become a bit more formalized, and their release in the event of an accident be as standardized as the black box information. As for the $10/flight for the data, even if the airline doesn't pay for it up front, the data collectors should collect it, and save it until after the flight has landed. If it doesn't land, the airline can pay some much larger fee to get the data ahead of it going public ;>

Actually, what I don't understand is why apparently there are not better SAR support mechanisms.

It seems like it would be reasonable to have a set of EPIRB transmitters mounted on the upper surface of the fuselage that would be automatically be ejected by the shock of a sudden (crash) impact. There are EPIRB units on life rafts and similar marine equipment that automatically trigger, after all.

It could have saved several days of confusion.

As far as that goes, the state of the art in micro-electronics means that a similar floating unit containing backup flight recorder information would also be worth ejecting. They needn't be as durable as the main units, but it seems like cheap insurance in the event that the primary equipment ends up 5 miles down in the ocean.

Re:Little disturbing

[mdsolar]

Actually the delays got progressively longer. http://science.slashdot.org/st... So, this equator effect did not happen.

Re:Little disturbing

[amicusNYCL]

There are supposed to be several salt-water activated beacons that should have been activated. You don't find it disturbing that every one of those failed?

It's not really any more disturbing then the fact that it took 2 years to find the wreckage of Air France 447 in an ocean that sees a fair amount of both water and air traffic, as opposed to the southern Indian Ocean between Australia and Antarctica.

Re:Little disturbing

[tlhIngan]

It's not really any more disturbing then the fact that it took 2 years to find the wreckage of Air France 447 in an ocean that sees a fair amount of both water and air traffic, as opposed to the southern Indian Ocean between Australia and Antarctica.

No, it took 5 days to locate Air France 447 from the debris. It took a further two years to get as much wreckage as we could get off the oceans and to find the black boxes.

The thing is, within hours of Air France's demise, we knew approximately where to look and found wreckage nearby.

In this case, we not only haven't found the wreckage in over two weeks (with a LOT of resources being poured into searching for what happened), we also don't know anything about where it was headed and so forth.

Even worse, we have radar data. Air France was well out of radar range, and yet we had concrete information on where they were probably located.

Here, it appears a UFO appears on radar and no one investigates. In fact, no one even bothers about the plane until it's way long overdue. In Air France, the controllers suspected something might be up when they couldn't establish contact at the expected time (about two hours before arrival). At arrival time, they were calling SAR and trying to get as much information as possible to locate the wreckage.

We're still being dribbled out information. It took a week of searching the South China Sea before they released radar tracking showing a UFO heading east into the Indian Ocean.

The sheer problem is the incompetency of Malaysian Airlines and the Malaysian government. One day someone says something, it's immediately rebutted by a government statement, then later it's shown that it really was the truth.

They lost control of the message and is practically a case on showing you the sin of pride. So badly have they screwed it up that much of the search and recovery efforts have been taken over by China and the US. Plus, way too much is being put on stuff like flight simulators and "all right, good night",

Re:Little disturbing

[Anonymous Coward]

All the transmitters that might float are not waterproof. All the ones that are waterproof will have sunk. There were articles around about how they are thinking of adding floating waterproof transmitters, but haven't done so yet. After Air France that is a bit disturbing, yes, but not in the way you think.

Re:Little disturbing

[camperdave]

I wonder about that. They talk about Emergency Locator Transponders in relation to the life rafts/ inflatable exit slides. If this is the case, do the life rafts have to be deployed before the ELTs hit the water? Do these rafts deploy automatically, or do they have to be deployed manually? If we have a zombie plane situation (which seems likely for the latter portion of the flight), then there will be nobody to manually deploy the rafts, and the ELTs would sink to the bottom along with the fuselage.

Re:Little disturbing

[kid_wonder]

I hear ya. But let me ask you this - are the insurance companies going to pay life insurance claims based on the evidence being used to make this announcement?

I'm not saying they need to find bodies, but appearing to simply rely on this new data analysis just feels wrong. The way I read this was that, based on this new analysis the plane was in the southern corridor and based on that "ping arc" they were not near land. Therefore everyone is dead.

I mean, that is my point. I am not saying the analysis is wrong, just that it felt weird to me that they announced all were lost due to that piece of information. Do you really tell family members that everyone is dead without having found wreckage? That just struck me as, at the very least, poor PR timing and at worst trying to sweep all of this away.

asmkm22 makes a good point, the Malaysian government is probably not used to the pressure of criticism and they just want this over with. Which, if true, makes this deplorable conduct.

Re:Little disturbing

[Anonymous Coward]

1. We dont know, still looking
2. North or south, still looking
3. based on data, must be south still looking (but nowhere to land south so the plane must have crashed)
Dont know where you have been getting your information but it wasn't Malaysia, or any press conference iv'e seen.

Re:Little disturbing

[hcs_$reboot]

Did the Malaysian government just make a statement to the families based on a statistical probability?

Maybe based on the families + China exasperation. The debris were not found, let alone the plane, and families kept (desperate) hope. Malaysia could have made a similar announcement earlier.

Re:Little disturbing

[Anonymous Coward]

It's almost as if the situation on the 2 planes was completely different. Even with all the extra data from the flight systems it still took 5 days. Seems much closer to land, closer to shipping lanes and other aircraft. Take a guess which one was heading in the correct direction also.
You may as well be complaining that bogfoot caught the plane and ate it with all the nonsense in your post.

Re:Little disturbing

[Anonymous Coward]

How would we know if they've failed? What's to say the ULBs aren't sitting at the bottom of the southern Indian Ocean pinging away quite happily right now. Raft beacons you ask. How many radio systems in use in commercial aviation that operate in the MHz range operate as advertised from the bottom of the ocean?

Re:Little disturbing

[Anonymous Coward]

They exist already. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_position_indicator (although I'm not sure they record extra flight data).

Someone may be confirm for me, but aren't they still fitted (on the side of the vertical stab) to maritime surveillance aircraft, like say, the P3 Orion. The very aircraft conducting the search at the moment.

Re:Little disturbing

[SuperTechnoNerd]

On satellite data. No debris found yet.
And whats more disturbing, to me at least, is that they texted family members about this - I'm sorry but that's just un-cool and callous.

Re:Little disturbing

[JeffAtl]

777s are supposed to have 2 to 4 ELTs. Upon a crash they're supposed to activate and detach from the plane.

Something in this chain failed.

Re:Little disturbing

[curtwelch]

Actually the delays got progressively longer. http://science.slashdot.org/st... So, this equator effect did not happen.

At any point in time, not just at the equator, the plane could have made a turn, to create a perfect mirror image path reflected around the line between the plane and the satellite, and it would produce the exact same satellite data, as if they kept going straight. So there's no way to rule out that such a turn happened. However, since it's highly unlikely the person controlling the plane would have been aware of this satellite or it's location, they would not have done such a move on purpose. So then we are looking at what the odds are, of a course change made for other reasons, would produce a perfect mirror image turn. The odds of a course change randomly fitting a mirror image of this straight line path are very low. The odds could be calculated. But it's likely in the range of 1 out of 100 I would guess. As such, the satellite data could be fitted to a most likely straight-line constant speed path and that would give them two possible routes. The northern route however, I assume, would have taken the plane into multiple airspaces were it would have been spotted on multiple radar systems, including military systems. And likewise, into areas, where evidence of a crash would likely have been found as well. No such data from any of the northern route stations were found, leaving the southern, straight-route path as the statistically most likely by a strong margin. Combine that with debris that are consistent with a plan crash, and we have a very high probability that the plane flew a straight line path likely on auto-pilot, to the southern indian ocean and then ran out of fuel and crashed. But, this announcement is clearly just an attempt by the Malaysian government to resolve the pressure they are getting, instead of the needed careful and wise continued search for answers.

Re:Little disturbing

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. If the technique has never been used before how do they know it works? This MH370 story stinks to high heaven. Every indication is the plane was stolen and two weeks later out of the blue we get the "Doppler effect". I have a basic understanding of Doppler and simply cannot see how they came to their conclusions without some serious guessing and using probability theory. I cannot see how some intermittent burst transmissions to a satellite can you tell you where anything is. The Doppler effect is based at it's core on a changing frequency hence it's application in radar. With satellite comms the frequency doesn't change. If it did you wouldn't be able to communicate. Unfortunately probability is not fact and heavily biased and dependent on the variables you set. Personally I think this plane has landed somewhere.

Re:Little disturbing

[Steve_Ussler]

You need to understand Malaysia, the culture, etc....then it all makes sense.

fuel?

[Anonymous Coward]

kinda off topic but: the first report i heard was that the plane had four hours of fuel on board. now it is seven? huh?

Re:fuel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you probably heard wrong. I've been hearing 7 hours since the start.

Re:fuel?

[jones_supa]

kinda off topic but: the first report i heard was that the plane had four hours of fuel on board. now it is seven? huh?

Where did you hear that? I suggest you try to search for a citation for it and post it here. If there are discrepancies in the story, it's always good to bring them to daylight.

ACARS

[kriston]

The article does not make it clear that the satellite signals in question are those of ARINC's ACARS data system, developed in 1978.

ACARS

Re:ACARS

[BitZtream]

No it isn't, its not using data from a system that WAS TURNED OFF within MINUTES of the last radio contact.

How the fuck did this get marked as insightful? Its make a wrong statement that everyone has know has been wrong since the second day.

Re:ACARS

[Cyberdyne]

The article does not make it clear that the satellite signals in question are those of ARINC's ACARS data system, developed in 1978.

Probably because ACARS was turned off hours earlier in the flight, back before the aircraft flew back over Malaysia! Had it been active, ACARS would have reported the aircraft's location, altitude, speed and other useful data, making finding it much easier; it was switched off with the other cockpit systems, though, leaving just the Inmarsat terminal's hourly "ping" active, so until the Doppler analysis, all they knew was the distance between the satellite and aircraft.

Re:ACARS

[icebike]

No it isn't, its not using data from a system that WAS TURNED OFF within MINUTES of the last radio contact.

How the fuck did this get marked as insightful? Its make a wrong statement that everyone has know has been wrong since the second day.

You should try to keep up with the actual events instead of lashing out on Slashdot.

The DATA transmissions ceased on the ACARS, but the radio system still pings the satellite.
The radio system keeps its link with the satellite as long as the actual transmitter has power.

Just because you stop tweeting on your phone doesn't mean the phone stops talking to towers.

Re:ACARS

[aaarrrgggh]

SATCOM is not ACARS. SATCOM is used for more than ACARS, and ACARS doesn't just use SATCOM for uplink.

Re:ACARS

[kriston]

ACARS may have been turned off, but the radio interface used by the ACARS system was still pinging.

This story is so strange

[GodfatherofSoul]

It just seems like they have information that still doesn't make sense for what we're told are the available resources. The public info just seems so selective as if each government is trying to hold their surveillance cards as tightly as possible. And, intel from an old satellite seems like a cover story. This is all just so...off.

Re:This story is so strange

[SydShamino]

I thought that maybe a bunch of spy satellites picked up and stored the broadcasts, and that they can use timestamps from the various receptions to triangulate the position. That's sort of a reverse-active GPS.

Of course they'll never say "we got this from U.S. and British spy satellites" so they make up something about doppler shift data from a single satellite and hope they find the debris soon to corroborate the story.

Or maybe they did do it all from the doppler shift data they happened to store. It's at least plausible, and there's no need to create conspiracy theories when they aren't particularly shocking.

Re:This story is so strange

[taiwanjohn]

This is the most credible explanation I've seen thus far. (It was mentioned here a few days ago, but I'm too lazy to track down the link right now.)

Re:This story is so strange

[ThatAblaze]

Yes.. this whole incident is going to make great fodder for conspiracy theories for years to come at this rate.

I would like to coin the theory right now that there was a second plane that extracted all the passengers mid flight and carried them the rest of the way. After everyone was taken off the plane it was allowed to fly on until it ran out of fuel.

Re:This story is so strange

[efti]

I agree that the explanation is pretty vague. They must have based it on the change of doppler shift in multiple consecutive transmissions (as the plane was flying further south it was flying away from the satellite rather than parallel). It would be a bit more credible if they also showed their estimates for the other transmissions, not just the last one. Bottom line is that they must have better information and be reasonably confident about it otherwise they wouldn't be concentrating on a single area. Kind of how it didn't make sense to me why they were searching on the wrong side of the Malaysian peninsula until they disclosed the primary radar data.

Re:This story is so strange

[MozeeToby]

To summarize:

Fire on board the plane.
Pilot diverts to the nearest safe airport (which is approximately line with the sudden course change to the west).
Flight crew runs through the fire checklist, which includes pulling all the breakers in case it's an electrical fire (Transponder and communications lost).
Fire causes decompression, pilots bring the plane down to 12,000 ft to remain conscious and keep the passengers alive.
Crew is overcome by smoke and/or decompression, plane flies on under auto-pilot until it runs out of gas.

Incredibly simple explanation for everything that is known at this point, even some of the sketchier details that are 100% for sure at this point.

Re:This story is so strange

[icebike]

There is very little reason to have spy satellites in the south Indian ocean.
Inmarsat is one of the few companies needing coverage down there because they have the contract for ACARS data an occasional sat phone calls. This area is not even on normal shipping routes.

Re:This story is so strange

[Splab]

Well the problem with that story is it ruins perfectly good conspiracy theories, an airplane going down due to a fire is horrible, but it just isn't sexy enough to keep us news zombies interested.

(Also, one thing I don't like about his deduction is how the airplane managed to stay airborne for 6 more hours; as he himself writes, a fire onboard an aircraft is a major problem, one does wonder how a fire managed to kill everyone on board but in the process also managed to put itself out before anything important for continued flight went dead).

Re:This story is so strange

[Anonymous Coward]

Usually fire doesn't kill people, smoke kills people.

Re:This story is so strange

[Arancaytar]

That story might have explained the first course change to the west, but it doesn't explain the plane turning south over than an hour later. This theory is basically dead.

Here's a map of the possible flight paths (which they've now narrowed down to the southern one).

Re:This story is so strange

[Arancaytar]

Fortunately, the author included a perfectly sensible and falsifiable prediction along with that theory:

What I think happened is the flight crew was overcome by smoke and the plane continued on the heading, probably on George (autopilot), until it ran out of fuel or the fire destroyed the control surfaces and it crashed. You will find it along that route–looking elsewhere is pointless.

Unfortunately, that prediction got falsified almost immediately. The plane changed course at least twice according to radar (the second time an hour later), and this latest development implies at least a third course change southward. It's nowhere near the route that Mr. Goodfellow predicted.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Re:This story is so strange

[GodfatherofSoul]

Do you have a choice? Spy satellites aren't geosynchronous so they're going to eventually pass over that area.

Re:This story is so strange

[Anonymous Coward]

The big problem with that particular theory is that it was before information about several controlled turns after the ascent and descent was made public. The fire theory makes perfect sense if the vectoring aims towards land or an airport, or if it stops shortly after the incident. It seems less possible given the number of controlled course changes and their directions after the transmissions from the plane stopped. What little we do know about the flight is not consistent with the fire scenario as described.

That said, if the plane did crash into the Indian Ocean (which, although not confirmed, seems highly likely given what the public has been told), it's probably some series of catastrophic mechanical events that involved compromised control of the aircraft and ultimately a depressurization and sustained flight on autopilot until the plane ran out of fuel.

The idea that it's a criminal act seems ludicrous. Terrorists claim responsibility and leave screeds behind; suicidal people leave notes to loved ones, attend to certain things that, in retrospect, show that they had been planning to end their lives. None of those things apply.

Re:This story is so strange

[FaxeTheCat]

I thought that maybe a bunch of spy satellites picked up and stored the broadcasts,

Why would a spy satellite pick up and store information that is pretty much publicly available?

Re:This story is so strange

[jbwolfe]

Plausible except for one thing. Fule range at 12000' is not adequate to transit as far as they did- would have needed to be at cruise flight levels.

Re:This story is so strange

[kasperd]

plane flies on under auto-pilot until it runs out of gas.

That sounds like a suboptimal algorithm. Wouldn't it almost always make more sense for the auto pilot to attempt a landing in that case? The odds for survival may not be good in that case, but it seems like attempting to land would still give better odds than attempting to keep flying.

Re:This story is so strange

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the most credible explanation I've seen thus far. (It was mentioned here a few days ago, but I'm too lazy to track down the link right now.)

So it's now somewhere on the coast of somalia?

Re:This story is so strange

[garyebickford]

There was a sci fi story that went like that - but I think it was people from the future, who needed the bodies for some reason. So just before everyone died they pulled the real bodies and substituted fake 'meat' bodies that, after the plane burned etc., would be easily assumed to be real.

Re:This story is so strange

[VikingNation]

There has been a lot of hate against the U.S. and British governments because they have technical capabilities to "spy." Many people have argued that the fact that they can do something implies that they are doing things illegally. Could it be that they there is good that can come from having satellites that can take pictures from space?
Several global powers have provided technical support, radar, and images from space to help with this search. Without information the global community would be out searching every square mile of the ocean with no hope in a million years to ever finding this plan. Consider.

Re:This story is so strange

[Anonymous Coward]

That movie was called Millennium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_(film)

It's a time travel film that had some good thought put into time travel consequences.

Re:This story is so strange

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA: "There is no point speculating further until more evidence surfaces"

Except I'll speculate there was an electrical fire, I'll speculate about the rationale and thoughts of the captain, the situational awareness on the flight deck, why the aircraft climbed to 45000', opinions about their SOPs, fuel loads and usage, where the pilot has flown in the past... basically everything. With no transcripts, no flight data, no anything. But there is no point in speculating.

Re:This story is so strange

[Steve_Ussler]

:::This story is so strange WELCOME TO MALAYSIA!!!!

Re:This story is so strange

[Steve_Ussler]

As I said...welcome to Malaysia. A very different culture, no transparency...you get where this is going.

Re:This story is so strange

[Steve_Ussler]

Over 200 people on board, and not a single one of them emails, texts, phones...etc... incredulous.

Re:This story is so strange

[SydShamino]

Because if enough of them do it you can triangulate where it came from?

I generally assume spy satellites pick up and record anything and everything they can. There's no laws that protect data being broadcast into space from being captured by spy satellites, so why not grab anything you can and sort through it later?

Re:This story is so strange

[SydShamino]

Yeah, I don't even think the idea of spy satellites doing this is particularly shocking. I'd be more shocked to learn that we don't have any satellites able to pick up the broadcasts from commercial planes over the Indian Ocean at 3 AM. If you or your airplane broadcasts something into space, you should expect it to be heard by anyone up there who's listening.

Re:This story is so strange

[FaxeTheCat]

Because all information collection in space is expensive.
Additional detectors, data storage and transmission capacity has a cost. Not only in monetary terms, but more weight on the satelite add cost and reduce lifespan. Satelite to ground bandwidth is limited, so collecting useless information takes capacity from useful information.
Why use valuable resources on collecting information that is already collected and available from commercial sources?

Mystery?

[alta]

The cause of the crash isn't a mystery. It most likely ran out of fuel.

The cause of why the whole damn plane went AWOL IS a mystery.

Re:Mystery?

[savuporo]

If it simply ran out of fuel, it should have made controlled water landing and likely floated, with plenty of people exiting the plane with life vests on.

Re:Mystery?

[quipalicious]

you assume there was a pilot awake to make such a landing auto pilots don't typically perform water landings, automated landing systems exist, but use gps and/radar. The most likely cause is a tire fire in the front landing gear. The fire spread slowly, but once outside the wheel well, smoke would overcome the pilots as well as the passengers. oxegen use would fuel the fire, and smoke hoods only work for 2 minutes. They were trying to make for the closest runway.

May they rest in peace.

I doubt the black box will be found, it's 2 miles under the just about the coldest nastiest ocean in the world. I hope we are able to invent a little floating black box/data streaming for emergency situations. It is so sad to see lives lost, and sadder still if we can't point definitive fingers at the cause.

Re:Mystery?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it simply ran out of fuel, it should have made controlled water landing and likely floated, with plenty of people exiting the plane with life vests on.

I can tell you're a Republican because you are a fucking idiot. Just because one Republican was able to safely crash a plane into a calm river doesn't mean it is likely to happen again. Just because it happened once doesn't mean it can happen every time in much worse conditions. You fucks just don't comprehend statistics. The FAA said that that Republican landing was a 1:1000 shot, and that was on a calm river! How can you people just ignore science, and piss on every one of us with a technical degree, and claim that it is easy to land a plane on the ocean. Seriously, you Republicans are ruining /. with your nonstop rants, and your attempts to make everything about politics. Please I just wish your kind would shut-up.

Re:Mystery?

[jcgam69]

Flight 447 was found deeper than 2 miles.

Re:Mystery?

[RabidReindeer]

If it simply ran out of fuel, it should have made controlled water landing and likely floated, with plenty of people exiting the plane with life vests on.

Considering that it wasn't flying even remotely near its proper heading, there's every reason to believe that whoever was guiding the plane simply ran it as far away from land as possible and let gravity take over.

You can also "simply run out of fuel" if the pilot is dead. There was an incident in the USA several years back where something like that happened on a private jet and it flew across half the country on auto-pilot before it ran out of fuel and crashed.

Re:Mystery?

[InvalidError]

Landing a large plane on water is nearly impossible even under the best circumstances: the moment wings hit the water, they usually get ripped apart, sending the rest of the plane in a tumble that rips the rest of it apart. Hitting water at 200+km/h is like hitting a concrete block.

AFAIK, the only such successful landing in history is the Hudson miracle and that was only possible because the river waters were almost perfectly still and the pilots managed perfect execution - the impact still ripped one of the engines off. It would not be possible in oceanic waters with crosswinds, bad weather, waves and unknown water currents.

Re:Mystery?

[Anonymous Coward]

More likely in my opinion is an emergency onboard, e.g. a fire possibly from litium batteries in cargo bay, burned of wiring to transponder, later to comms radio, crew detects fire, turns around, plots course back to base, turn on autopilot, tries to fight fire, all passengers and crew dies from o2 depletion and/or smoke, aircraft flies and glides on last programmed course, runs outr of fuel and ......

Re:Mystery?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the crew was capable of making a controlled water landing they would also have been able to make a controlled turn toward a runway somewhere. The crew was probably disabled while fighting a fire in the cockpit, or a loss of cabin pressure, or something like that. That first turn they made off of their course aimed them toward a decent runway. After that they seem to have all died. Now, the morbidly curious just want to know if the passengers were all dead too, or if they were all alive on a pilotless airplane with a locked cockpit and no way to get back under control.

Re:Mystery?

[BoRegardless]

Mystery yes, but the cargo hold with a large quantity of lithium ion batteries in a 3rd world environment, where the rules routinely get bent with 'baksheesh' means we are likely to see a ban on these in passenger jets in the near future.

Re:Mystery?

[aaarrrgggh]

You still have to flair on touchdown; gliding level into the ocean (slight nose-down attitude) is messy. The tail needs to touch first.

Re:Mystery?

[savuporo]

"only such successful landing" is completely BS - do even a brief google search on water landings.

Most recent one : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Every breathlessly hyped media "miracle" story isn't quite always.

Re:Mystery?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. A controlled water landing might be possible on relatively still water, but in the ocean, it would be far more difficult. An uncontrolled landing (out of fuel) is far less likely to be successful. If the pilot was incapacitated (which one would presume, since a plane where the autopilot can control the flight surfaces is generally still pilotable, and the pilot would have sought a place to land at the first sign of trouble), then the uncontrolled plunge into the ocean would probably mean the plane would break up.

Re:Mystery?

[InvalidError]

Your definition of SUCCESSFUL landing includes planes breaking apart?

The Hudson plane landed in one piece and floated long enough for everyone to safely evacuate and rescuers to get on-site with only five serious injuries out of 150+ people aboard while the Lion flight's fuselage broke into two pieces with four serious injuries out of ~110 people aboard and could have easily been much worse.

BTW, does landing in water so shallow it barely reaches wings-high (bottom of fuselage, presumably with collapsed landing gears from the photos I have seen) really qualify as a water landing? The plane crashed into pretty solid stuff just below the surface and obviously won't sink if it is already resting on the bottom; the Lion 904 looks more like a beached whale than a plane that landed in water. Things would have likely been much nastier if 904 had been a true water landing without land just below the surface preventing it from nose-diving in the water, sending the plane in a cartwheel or whatever other random direction it may have taken without ground to constrain it.

Now, the message I was originally replying to was about MH370 landing on water intact enough to remain afloat. The Hudson plane had perfect water landing conditions but still lost one engine, damaged a cargo door and ripped a bit of fuselage on impact, which is all relatively minor damage but significant for how quickly the plane is going to take on water. The southern Indian ocean has 30-50km/h winds and 1-2m waves even on a good day; nowhere near ideal for replicating the Hudson miracle... and in MH370's case, we are talking about a 777 which would be even more difficult to land in one piece on water since stresses across the airframe would be considerably higher.

The Hudson miracle is not a miracle only because everyone survived. It is a miracle because the plane itself was also nearly intact.

Re:Mystery?

[wvmarle]

Step 1: hijacking, hijackers incapacitate (maybe kill) pilots, take over the plane, switch off communications.

Step 2: passengers find out the plane has been hijacked.

Step 3: passengers kill hijackers.

Step 4: no-one on board that can operate the plane, switch on communications and take control of the autopilot, and all that's left for the passengers is wait for fuel to run out and the plane to crash in the sea, killing all on board.

Re:Mystery?

[antifoidulus]

You can also "simply run out of fuel" if the pilot is dead. There was an incident in the USA several years back where something like that happened on a private jet and it flew across half the country on auto-pilot before it ran out of fuel and crashed.

Yeah, but assuming that is what happened(and there were no other mechanical issues with the plane) the plane would have continued on it's pre-programmed heading and would have either circled the Beijing airport waiting for the (now deceased) pilots to tell it to land, or more likely would have been intercepted by Chinese air force jets when ATC was unable to contact the plane. See Helios Air for an example of where this happened. You'll note that despite the pilots being out of commission for most of the flight the airplane reached Athens then circled, totally on autopilot.

Re:Mystery?

[RabidReindeer]

Yeah, but assuming that is what happened(and there were no other mechanical issues with the plane) the plane would have continued on it's pre-programmed heading and would have either circled the Beijing airport waiting for the (now deceased) pilots to tell it to land, or more likely would have been intercepted by Chinese air force jets when ATC was unable to contact the plane. See Helios Air for an example of where this happened. You'll note that despite the pilots being out of commission for most of the flight the airplane reached Athens then circled, totally on autopilot.

Could you elaborate? My Flight Simulator is admittedly dated, but none of the planes in it had an autopilot smart enough to fly in anything other than straight lines. No way to make it circle anything.

Circling a major airport on automated control sounds dicey anyway. Last time I flew through Atlanta, I swear they were looping all the way out to Savannah and back.

Then again, all evidence was that the Malaysia airliner wasn't aimed at ANY airport. Not even close.

Re:Mystery?

[antifoidulus]

Google Helios flight 522. The plane continued on autopilot almost 2 hours after the pilots became incapacitated(and in that case jets were scrambled because the Greeks became alarmed when the plane entered their airspace but didn't respond to radio requests. The autopilot was able to continue on the pre-programmed course and go into holding over Athens. If the pilots of the Malaysian Airlines flight were indeed incapacitated without anyone else taking controls they almost certainly would have entered Chinese airspace and been noticed by Chinese military radar. The fact that this never happened argues against an accident causing the pilots to become incapacitated. If they were killed/incapacitated, it almost certainly was the work of another individual on the plane.

Re:Mystery?

[Steve_Ussler]

Spoken like an expert. Malaysia and baksheesh go together. for those that need to know, that means bribe.

How can they be certain no one survived?

[dtjohnson]

The calculations show the southern flight path and consequently a water landing. But...how can they be so certain that no one survived? Isn't it possible that the airplane made a controlled glide into a non-powered water landing and that the life rafts deployed and allowed some of the passengers to survive? That has happened before. Admittedly this is very unlikely but can anyone at this point say it is impossible as the Malaysian government is doing?

Re:How can they be certain no one survived?

[Anonymous Coward]

Two weeks without fresh water is not survivable.

Re:How can they be certain no one survived?

[dtjohnson]

Might there be emergency water supplies on the rafts? Perhaps they have small solar-powered desalinators on the raft as emergency equipment (many do)? Perhaps it rained and the passengers collected rainwater?

Re:How can they be certain no one survived?

[Gavin Scott]

Yes, that could be. But it seems clear that the plane was not being controlled by anyone who wanted the plane or its passengers to be rescued, so "oh, I've just flown the plane as far away from civilization as possible and I've just run out of fuel, yet I think I'll try at the last moment to make a successful water landing so as many people as possible can be saved" just does not seem likely. Either the plane was not under control, or those in control were not trying to save anyone.

And more specifically I strongly suspect the life-rafts were equipped with EPIRB satellite transmitters, none of which were activated. So that sort of suggests there aren't a bunch of people floating in a raft somewhere (which likely would have shown up during the satellite debris search I suspect).

Even having a rough idea of where it went down might still mean that the wreckage is not found for a long time. There's a lotta damn ocean out there, and I don't think the range of the "pingers" on the data recorders is that huge.

One thing I've been curious about is the cockpit voice recorder on the 777, specifically what the recording duration is (is it just a 30m circular buffer) and can the pilots disable it and/or the flight data recorder by pulling circuit breakers?

G.

Re:How can they be certain no one survived?

[Admiral_Grinder]

Would't there be a beacon of some sort from the plane or the escape equipment? A controlled landing in the ocean could possibly reduce the amount of debris, but the plane will sink at some point. Either way you are going to have a debris field of some size be it plane parts or people with life vests.

Re:How can they be certain no one survived?

[udippel]

Yes and no.
The Malaysian government has been embarrassing itself for the last 14+ days. It really, really, wants the thingie being closed. So they are surely premature, with statistics on their side. There is really little chance to survive in raft for 14+ days. Drinking water, anyone?
But mostly, the sea was known to be rough in that area. And without fuel, what a heck of landing would the best pilot be able to achieve in heavy waves? Guaranteed no coordinated exit, no coordinated inflation of life rafts, if at all.
We cannot exclude that one or another person might have actually made it, but chances are slim. And then, sorry to say, it is only fair to finally put an end to all the hopes of the waiting family members and friends, and better say that no survivors can be expected.

Re:How can they be certain no one survived?

[RabidReindeer]

The calculations show the southern flight path and consequently a water landing. But...how can they be so certain that no one survived? Isn't it possible that the airplane made a controlled glide into a non-powered water landing and that the life rafts deployed and allowed some of the passengers to survive? That has happened before. Admittedly this is very unlikely but can anyone at this point say it is impossible as the Malaysian government is doing?

Because, if what I heard was correct, the life rafts had satellite beacons that would have automatically switched on when the rafts were deployed.

Also, this wasn't the Hudson river, it was the high seas, so a survivable water landing might have involved running headlong into some pretty massive waves.

Re:How can they be certain no one survived?

[kaiser423]

The point is that life rafts have emergency satellite beacons on them that active once deployed. These have been thoroughly tested and work. The plane has many liferafts that would potentially be deployed. It is very, very unlikely that if liferafts were deployed that any or all of them also had faulty beacons. It is even more unlikely that the beacons would fail but that the water and other supplies would be intact. If liferaft had been deployed we would have known the location of the crash within minutes.

Re:How can they be certain no one survived?

[dj245]

The calculations show the southern flight path and consequently a water landing. But...how can they be so certain that no one survived? Isn't it possible that the airplane made a controlled glide into a non-powered water landing and that the life rafts deployed and allowed some of the passengers to survive? That has happened before. Admittedly this is very unlikely but can anyone at this point say it is impossible as the Malaysian government is doing?

Each life raft has an EPIRB which is marine rated, and can be picked up by sattelites basically anywhere on the planet. At least one EPIRB would be of the automatic type which starts transmitting when it hits water. The EPIRB is wrapped up deeply inside the packed life rafts, so disabling them would be impossible while the plane was in the air. Unfortunately this means that if the life raft doesn't deploy and instead sinks, the EPIRB will not go off. The fact that no EPIRB signals were transmitted indicates to me that if anyone survived the crash, they are long dead. Even if they were hanging on to floating wreckage, with no potable water and no shelter from the elements they would not last much more than a week.

No EPIRB signals also implies that the plane either broke up in the air, broke up when it hit the water at high speed, or nobody was alive to open a cabin door. In any of those cases the chance for survivors would be very low.

Re:How can they be certain no one survived?

[harl]

Stipulates that the plane crashed into the ocean at night in such a manner than people could evacuate. Water is worse for landing than land. It moves and doesn't compress.

Re:How can they be certain no one survived?

[afidel]

Wouldn't the liferafts deploying generate an EPIRB signal?

Re:How can they be certain no one survived?

[camperdave]

These life rafts are meant for keeping people afloat for a short time while the rescue teams. I doubt they'd have much more than a good first aid kit aboard.

Re:How can they be certain no one survived?

[daniel23]

In the circumpolar sea, close to antarctica, high waves, awfull weather, 16 days after the last confirmed communication between aircraft and satellites. The passengers dressed for tropical conditions, preparing for moderate conditions.
Successfully watering a jet is a very rare event, the most famous was done in NY on the Hudson. No real waves and the first ship to reach them arrived 4 min. later.
The most critical part of it is with the engines below the wings even the slightest imbalance of the plane may drive the plane into chaotic movement.
Let's assume the pilot managed to avoid this and everything else worked as perfect as it did on the Hudson. But how could the passengers survive > 2 weeks without drinking water?

Re:How can they be certain no one survived?

[umafuckit]

The calculations show the southern flight path and consequently a water landing. But...how can they be so certain that no one survived? Isn't it possible that the airplane made a controlled glide into a non-powered water landing and that the life rafts deployed and allowed some of the passengers to survive? That has happened before. Admittedly this is very unlikely but can anyone at this point say it is impossible as the Malaysian government is doing?

You can look through this list, but I do not believe there is a single incident of a large aircraft performing a survivable mid-ocean water landing. It looks like they've always gone in with no survivors.

Re:How can they be certain no one survived?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to your own list, there were 7 mid-ocean water landings by commercial airliners since 1960 and there were survivors in every one of them. There were several more landings on inland waters (such as Capt Sully on the Hudson river in 2009) and there were also survivors on all of those.

Re:How can they be certain no one survived?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no EPIRB on life rafts carried by 777 aircraft. The aircraft does have an ELT but that can be (and apparently was) turned off.

Re:How can they be certain no one survived?

[Steve_Ussler]

that stuff is on military, but not a standard civil aircraft.

They haven't tracked it down

[BitZtream]

They have a theory, nothing more. Still no actual debris has been confirmed. They don't have the full picture so its REALLY easy for their theory to be wrong.

God you suck ass at actually posting facts slashdot.

Re:They haven't tracked it down

[Anonymous Coward]

Gravity is a theory, nothing more. Perhaps the theories collided.

Re:They haven't tracked it down

[Anonymous Coward]

They have a theory, nothing more. Still no actual debris has been confirmed. They don't have the full picture so its REALLY easy for their theory to be wrong.

God you suck ass at actually posting facts slashdot.

You do realise Dice Holdings is behind /. these days, right? I mean their job listing website is so useless and their discussion forums continually pointed out the failure of Dice Holdings to post legitimate positions for at least 10 years so Dice Holdings shut-down those forums and redirect you to /. for career and industry insight. What a joke! More of India's "best and brightest" at work. Would someone kindly put a bullet in Obama's skull before the US descends into a full-on police state?

Re:They haven't tracked it down

[icebike]

They have tracked it to a place from which It didn't have enough fuel to return.
Unless you are hanging your hat on aliens beaming them up, or a long undiscovered island in the south indian ocean which just happened to have a 5000 foot runway, some times you have to go by the numbers and state that they crashed.

Re:They haven't tracked it down

[BitZtream]

No, they have not tracked it there. Thats my point. They THINK it went there, and if you read the reports by the actual people writing them, not the edited new releases by the airlines ... the only one who is 'sure' is the airline ... who wants this to be over with, Immersat is even extremely cautious in their statements.

There are LOTS of things that can make these calculations wrong. They would be odd things to have happened, but you tell me how odd a plane randomly flying to the middle of the indian ocean for no readily apparent reason is in the first place ... kind of odd, isn't it? A bad atomic clock (pretty much impossible to happen, but not 100% impossible) on the aircrafts device can completely fuck some of these calculations beyond usefulness. This is one of the reasons Immersat took so long to get just to this point.

I'm not saying the plane didn't go down there, I'm saying its still a theory, and nothing wrong with it so far, but its a THEORY, not fact. Only theory there is, so they go with it, so goes life. Doesn't magically make it any more true than when they were searching the south china sea though .... not until they get proof.

When they pull debris from the water that they can confirm came from the aircraft, then it gets a lot closer to fact.

Re:They haven't tracked it down

[Oligonicella]

Uh, no. What happened to the plane is a theory. Gravity is a Theory. But yes, they definitely collided.

Coming in for a landing

[workdot]

I am waiting for this plan to land at LAX 2 weeks later with all passengers in good health wondering why they landed in LAX instead of China and have no recollection of anything weird happening like something out of a Stephen King novel.

Re:Coming in for a landing

[Anonymous Coward]

Want to see something REALLY scary?

Re:Coming in for a landing

[BitZtream]

Read the Langoliers. They remembered what happened though, didn't they?

a bit less specific

[slashmydots]

While that explanation is detailed and great and accurate, the real answer is they found out they'd get free advertising through all the press coverage and spent a ton of time and money finding it. That's the short version at least.

Reciprocal course?

[Archtech]

I may be wrong, but looking at the map it seems the plane was on exactly the opposite course from where it should have been going. Strange problems are not unknown with computer-controlled navigation systems going haywire when crossing the Equator, and oddly enough MH370 went AWOL quite close to the Equator...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

Re:Reciprocal course?

[Archtech]

Sorry, the story I linked to related to the International Date Line not the Equator. I was thinking of the much older stories about an F-14 or F-16 that flipped upside down when it crossed the Equator due to some software bug. Here is a reputable source for that (but only as a rumour): http://www.yourdonreport.com/i...

US Intel Said this on Day 1

[rockmuelle]

What's most interesting is that the anonymous reports from the US intelligence community the day after the plane disappeared said that the plane was on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. These claims seemed a little odd at the time since there was no supporting evidence at all and rescuers were still looking for debris on the original flight path. But, it's looking like they were spot on.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the only real conspiracy in this whole affair is the US govt's cover up of the initial leak. The plane itself likely just suffered a catastrophic failure and lumbered on until it ran out of fuel. But, the US govt also likely tracked it the entire time. That's why someone was able to make a confident pronouncement so quickly. They knew exactly where the plane was, if not exactly what happened. But, this intelligence capability (tracking all flying objects all the time) is probably highly classified. Rather than give it up for a civilian SAR effort, they decided to keep it under wraps, knowing that eventually the plane would be found and the capability is far more useful if no one knows it exists.

Re:US Intel Said this on Day 1

[BitZtream]

We already know the level of detail Google gets with their own personal satellite from Google Earth, and its resolution is already lowered for security purposes before it hits Google maps/earth. Its plenty good enough that they could spot debris ... just telling someone that they spotted debris in the ocean would not require actually giving up ANY information about capabilities as the capability to spot it is ALREADY PUBLIC ... you know ... those pictures of debris you've been seeing ... they didn't come from super secret US sats ... did they?

Re:US Intel Said this on Day 1

[ahabswhale]

I'm sure there will be a Snowden leak coming out about it in the near future.

Re:US Intel Said this on Day 1

[bluegutang]

What's most interesting is that the anonymous reports from the US intelligence community the day after the plane disappeared said that the plane was on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

Which reports?
Citation needed.

Re:US Intel Said this on Day 1

[Smerta]

Not doubting you, but could you provide a link or two to these early reports? I've been trying to follow this pretty closely, but I don't recall hearing anything like this.

Re: US Intel Said this on Day 1

[Anonymous Coward]

If they knew the plane slammed into the Ocean, finding it one day or a month later wouldn't change the fact that everyone on it died. So, the U.S hiding its knowledge probably wasn't that big of deal.

Re:US Intel Said this on Day 1

[0xG]

You see, boys and girls?

Continuous surveillance of the planet with high-resolution satellites is good!

Re:US Intel Said this on Day 1

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Why would Google lower the resolution of satellite imagery only to go and purchase even-higher-resolution aerial imagery?

Re:US Intel Said this on Day 1

[hackertourist]

It's entirely possible the plane wasn't tracked the entire time, but the crash was heard by a US submarine operating in the area. Loud noises would have made it clear that survivors weren't likely. I can see why they decided not to reveal sensitive information in those circumstances.

Re:US Intel Said this on Day 1

[Anonymous Coward]

The information from Inmarsat already suggested two broad arcs for the last known position within the first few days. The northern segment increasingly made no sense given the lack of any radar detection by the many countries along that arc. It's *possible* that the US had additional signal intelligence satellites that could pick up the same signal, and thereby triangulate a position more precisely, but I think it's more likely that they just made the logical deduction: that if it wasn't likely to get to the northern segment without somebody noticing, it was more likely on the southern segment, almost all of which is over the Indian Ocean, and virtually none of it within range of an airport (Christmas Island and Keeling Island are just about the only ones, and as Australian territory those would be noticed).

i.e. it wasn't much of a leap that required any special information.

Re:US Intel Said this on Day 1

[Rich0]

So, I'm not convinced that US Intel knew anything on day 1, but if they did it certainly would be an interesting revelation.

Being able to see wreckage with a satellite isn't fancy. However, having it on day 1 suggests that they can routinely scan large areas of the Earth and spot things in near-realtime. That isn't something anybody can do as far as anybody knows.

If the US did track the flight it would be more likely to be using electronic means. Visual imagery of the ocean isn't easy. Spotting the pings is much easier, and it is also possible that there is some kind of radar-like technology involved. There is no reason you couldn't track an aircraft with radar from a satellite, though it would be challenging due to surface reflections (the plane is a lot closer to the earth than the earth is to the satellite, and has near-zero velocity in the direction of the radar beam). Also, a conventional radar on a satellite would be obvious to everybody since it requires emissions.

However, there is another way to obtain aircraft locations - passively look for signals reflecting off of the aircraft from other sources - military or civilian. That would include radar returns, but it could include any other RF source. Depending on sensitivity that might allow for coverage in areas that don't have traditional radar coverage. This sort of technology would be especially useful for tracking stealth aircraft, so it would make sense that the US would research it.

Re:US Intel Said this on Day 1

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the US knew the Indian Ocean because that's where they shot it down.

Re:US Intel Said this on Day 1

[Anonymous Coward]

If I were the USA, I'd keep quiet too (especially if I knew the plane has crashed and likely no one survived), just to see what the other countries especially China can do.

China already has showed some of its cards, why not see if they'll show even more cards.

FWIW, I think some in the US military know the plane's full path. I'd hope that after spending all those billions they'd have satellites regularly taking hi-res pics of much of the "interesting parts" of the Earth's surface. You know the starting point of the plane, so if you have pictures of the various areas every 90 minutes or so, it can't be that difficult to track it in the pics.

And if I were in charge of the bunch involved, I'd have them track and find the plane ASAP as an internal exercise.

Re:US Intel Said this on Day 1

[Steve_Ussler]

cnn will print any 'anonymous' untrusted source. dont beleive it.

chances of controlled water landing are slim

[SuperBanana]

It's virtually impossible to land a large plane in the water "safely"; if either wing or engine touches the water before the other, that side digs in and the plane cartwheels, ripping itself to shreds.

The hudson plane landing wasn't a miracle because of skill on the part of the pilot - it was a miracle because it was astronomically slim odds that the plane would continue in a straight line and remain intact.

Re:chances of controlled water landing are slim

[Anonymous Coward]

The 777 is designed to hold together in a water landing - provided you do it right. It's built to float. It has fuse rafts - that's a good indication they planned for water landings.

A quick search turned up this:

According to Boeing, if the Boeing 777 ditching is properly handled with an optimum center of gravity and normal gross weight, the airplane should come to a rest slightly nose high on the water. The forward doors should be about four and a half feet and the aft doors be about two and a half feet above the water. At high gross weight, the aft doors may be less that two feet.

The Hudson landing was a miracle for a lot of reasons - holding together in a proper water landing wasn't one of them.

Re:chances of controlled water landing are slim

[fnj]

The Flight 1549 Hudson Miracle was helped considerably by the fact that (1) there are no massive ocean waves in a river, and (2) people knew very precisely in real time where the event occured and were extremely close by to respond.

Re:chances of controlled water landing are slim

[Anonymous Coward]

Astronomically slim? I don't think so

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

Re:chances of controlled water landing are slim

[savuporo]

Wow, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

Most of these are largely survivable, you'll note.

Re:chances of controlled water landing are slim

[savuporo]

Not just 777, ever passenger airliner in service is built to float and make water landing mostly survivable. The life vest song that they sing before every takeoff and everyone sleeps through, is actually there for a good reason.
Historically proven to work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

Re:chances of controlled water landing are slim

[Anonymous Coward]

The hudson plane landing wasn't a miracle because of skill on the part of the pilot - it was a miracle because it was astronomically slim odds that the plane would continue in a straight line and remain intact.

That was the skill of the pilot; a) finding a flat enough bit of water b) keeping both wings high enough long enough that he had a chance of keeping the plane intact. Luck also helps, but in cases like this you have to make your own luck.

Re:chances of controlled water landing are slim

[Anonymous Coward]

And the Hudson River is a relatively calm and sheltered patch of water.

Compare that with the southern Indian Ocean, close to the equinox (stormiest time of the year) - chances of landing on that, even in daylight, even if the pilots were still conscious and had full control of the plane, even with navigation and other instrumentation working perfectly, are slim. Remove one or two of those conditions, and the chance rapidly approaches zero.

Re:chances of controlled water landing are slim

[garyebickford]

Especially in the Southern Ocean. That is not flat water.

Re:chances of controlled water landing are slim

[angryfeet]

The engines are designed to break off cleanly. It's actually somewhat common for engines to fall off in stressful conditions.

Doppler seems wierd

[Anonymous Coward]

The amount the time delay changes gives you the average velocity between pings from the satellite.
The doppler gives you the momentary velocity at the ping.

Not sure what adding the doppler give them.
      Or especially why it would discriminate between a N/S flight path.

Re:Doppler seems wierd

[BitZtream]

In one particular path the doppler effect and time delay in the ping did not line up. Doppler says they're doing 450kts, but ping time says 350kts (based on distance calculated by difference in ping times between current and previous pings), which is caused by a different flight path. Preception of the doppler effect is different based on your angle in relation to the moving object. Perfectly parallel alignment would make doppler 'speed' calculations 100% accurate. Doing the same thing from perfectly perpendicular, and the speed will always be 0, regardless of actual object speed. Since they know some information about where it was, they know to some extent what flight path it had to take to get those ping times, and then then you throw out the ones where all the variables don't match up.

It didn't give them additional information on where it was per say, it helped them rule out possible solutions based on previous information. It told them where it wasn't.

Re:Doppler seems wierd

[mdsolar]

Right, but it is degenerate. Both estimates are projected speeds towards or away from the satellite.

Re:Doppler seems wierd

[Crispy Critters]

It doesn't seem that anyone has an answer to this question. There is some other source of information or another assumption that is not being shared with the public. The claim is that all the data is from the single Inmarsat, so there is no other data to add in to triangulate. The satellite is in geosync, so we can ignore relative motions. Unless somehow the wobble of the orbit is large enough to have some effect over 8 hours. There could be some assumption about the route--for example like assuming the plane will fly flat and level at a constant relative air speed and then adding in prevailing air currents. Or some other reason to believe the plane would not be flying straight relative to the ground.

Re:Doppler seems wierd

[mdsolar]

They are saying that they get a good fit with a straight path and constant speed, and you can sort of do that in the South without moving towards the satellite. The last seven pings are moving away. But, a path with a turn in it to the North might fit as well if the speed is adjusted, as it might be to deal with altitude in those high mountains. One likes to fix parameters to reduce degrees of freedom to get a satisfyingly tight reduced chi^2. But, there is agency here. Someone made at least three turns. So, there should be little cost to making more turns if it is part of some clever radar evading plan, even if a reduced chi^2 scheme would make that expensive in a formal sense. So, models that respond to the radar holes that both India and China have conceded may be present need to be considered against the data as well for consistency. And, Indonesia's strong claims of radar capability together with the inescapable over water approach to their installations still need to be considered as problems for the Southern route. Perhaps they have done a thorough job of this already. But, so far, we've only heard about the analysis of the Southern route with respect to the satellite data.

Re:Doppler seems wierd

[sumakor]

I'll give you two hints to how they probably did this: 1. Nothing's perfect. 2. Re-read the quote, at face value "Effectually we looked at the doppler effect, which is the change in frequency, due to the movement of a satellite in its orbit." ;)

Re:Doppler seems wierd

[mdsolar]

Turns out the relative motions are key, or rather the satellite motions are key. http://news.slashdot.org/comme... Here is simple example. You are living in Flatland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... and some square has turned on a teakettle and filled the whole plane with steam. You can't see anything and you want to turn it off and make some tea to clear both your head and your vision. One way to find out which way to slide to get to the teakettle would be to move around in a circle. On one part of the circle, the whistle would have a high annoying pitch, on another, a low pleasing hum, and on a couple other parts in between, the usual alerting sound. Which way do you go? Tangent to the part of the circle that was annoying you. After a cup of tea and contemplation of the design aspects of kettles and their whistles, you realize that this method could be applied in any number of dimensions so long as your velocity had changing components along each. Another cup of tea latter, it becomes clear that if you can assume something about the trajectory and velocity of a flying teakettle (say that they are constant), you could model its flight and figure out where to intercept it at teatime. Back in Flatland, (assuming the teakettle is stationary) by calculating the intercept of the most annoying tangent and the most pleasing tangent you will also know how far to slide. I'd leave the rest as an exercise, but in Flatland, exercise does not make you any thinner... but that intercept in 3D is worth considering.

Re:Doppler seems wierd

[mdsolar]

Yes, the satellite motion turns out to be key.

Re:Doppler seems wierd

[Crispy Critters]

I don't follow your comment.

The question is what if anything breaks the symmetry between north and south. The answer appears to be (from the comment you linked to) that the satellite has a significant motion with respect to the Earth's surface, even though it is in geosynchronous orbit.

There are still two possible paths, a north and south one. But because of the motion of the satellite, one path will be straight at a reasonable speed, and the other will be curved and too fast or too slow to be realistic.

Re:Doppler seems wierd

[mdsolar]

Well, if a plane were stationary and emitting constantly, you'd agree that the signal would blueshift as the satellite moves South if the plane were in the South but redshift if the plane were in the North? That is what breaks the symmetry, except there have to be some assumptions about how the plane moves. Assume the plane is flying South in the South, then when the satellite moves South, that cuts the redshift of the departing plane, while if the plane is in the North going North the redshift of the plane's motion away from the satellite is increased. If you know (somehow) that the ground speed would be the same in either case, then you know which hemisphere. But, if you slow the plane down in the North, but not in the South, then the North will look like the South again. You could also turn the plane in the North without reducing speed, but reducing the projected velocity component along the line of sight to the satellite and get a similar effect. Now, when the satellite moves North, the redshift for the South going plane increases and for the North going plane it decreases. Now, to make the North look like the South, you need to speed up the North going plane. So, that would look squirrelly if the South is looking like it fits nicely with a constant speed and heading over a number of samples. So, in the North, the plane would have to be speeding up and slowing down or turning in a manner that makes it look like it knows how the satellite is moving. So, you prefer the South in that case, unless there are other reasons for the plane to be speeding up and slowing down and turning, like trying to avoid radar or to climb the Himalayas. Then you need to see if the terrain makes sense for that kind of behavior. Are we on the same page?

its still guessing

[Anonymous Coward]

this kind of analysis has never been done before, and there could easily be unknown flaws in the calculations and assumptions. Also they appear to be choosing the southern arc because it correlates to the report that the aircraft changed direction. IMO this initial assumption that the aircraft changed directions, is itself potentially wrong. there was a gap in time from the time the transponder was no longer received by malaysian, and the military radar track, this was a very active air corridor, there is a shadow flight theory floating around on the internet, because users have matched a commercial flight (not the missing malaysian one) with the radar track provided by the malaysian military, my belief is it was not shadowing the other flight, but the military radar track is in fact the other flight. The only secret the Malaysian government is keeping is its own incompetence, and some mistakes made with this initial radar analysis.

I know the solution to this...

[ndtechnologies]

We call Ben Stiller, and he can end the Malaysian Prime Minister's meddling once and for all!

Why it differs from military radar?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone knows why this prediction (7 on the picture) differs from military radar info (6 on the picture) ?

Re:Why it differs from military radar?

[jfdavis668]

Number 7 is not the path the plane followed. It is the possible location of the plane when it made its last ping to the Immarsat satellite. The radar info was its last known position. It could have flown to India, turned around, and flew back to Thailand to make its last ping. It could have then flew on to Laos. That is not a probable pass, some other country would have noticed the plane, but it is an explanation of the picture.

Why?

[GameMaster]

* We've had flight recorders on all major airliners for decades now.

* We've had satellite phone technology for decades now. (since 1979 for Inmarsat)

Remind me again why "black box" style cellular data transmitters aren't required to be transmitting cockpit voice data and full telemetry from every major airliner at all times yet? With a system like that, installed in a way that can't be tampered with by the people in t he plane and runs independently of the rest of the electronics in the aircraft, there's no reason we would know the exact location the plane went down and, most likely, why. Hell, even if they decided to be cheap and only have it transmit the telemetry in once-a-minute updates we'd still would have know where the plane was to withing a handful of miles from the first day it went missing...

Re:Why?

[GameMaster]

Ugh, sorry, typos all over the place.

Re:Why?

[kaiser423]

They have these installed on most, but not all aircraft. Malaysians obviously had some but not all installed. That said, nearly everything is controllable by the pilot. If a fire starts you don't want to continue providing electricity to the area burning. Sometimes the actual safety systems can smoke/light on fire (very, very rare but less rare than hijackings). So the pilot needs to be able to turn these systems off for safety's sake. Some breakers are in locations that you have to climb to to turn off, making it very unlikely that that would happen except by skilled operators in very rare circumstances.

Re:Why?

[TubeSteak]

Remind me again why "black box" style cellular data transmitters aren't required to be transmitting cockpit voice data and full telemetry from every major airliner at all times yet?

Because in the middle of the ocean, there are no cellular towers.
You could do it with satellites, but that becomes cost prohibitive extremely quickly.

Not to mention that there just isn't enough bandwidth to do what you're proposing for every plane.

As a compromise, there's a company looking to put ADS-B receivers on satellites.
That way, the existing line-of-sight radio broadcasts from planes can be tracked without an extensive ground based network.

Re:Why?

[0xG]

According to NASA at http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap08... there were about 19,000 planes in the air over the USA (daily maximum, 2008 statistic).

Worldwide, make that (guesstimate) 60,000 planes.
That's a lot of telemetry.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess as to why such systems aren't common is cost....cell networks are non-existent in the ocean, perhaps something could be done with advanced/powerful equipment, but keep in mind that the nearest "tower" is going to be hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Existing satellite communications aren't cheap...we're talking several $ per minute for using Inmarsat and similar networks (up to $15 per minute based on a google search). So even assuming a few seconds every minute is enough (and satcom providers would bill in such increments) we're talking $100s per hour.

Now: How often would such a system be helpful, and what is the cost-per-recovered-aircraft of implementing such a system on all commercial flights?

Re:Why?

[loom_weaver]

Probably, because until now, a plane's transponder hasn't been deliberately turned off, followed by no mayday communication, and then likely deliberately flown off-course to one of the most remote and inhospitable locations on the planet.

Re:Why?

[aaarrrgggh]

Money, privacy, and efficacy. An Inmarsat message apparently costs $2-3 for the equivalent of a tweet. Recording every word said will likely prevent much from being said, which could reduce CRM. Sending all this data to the cloud for what purpose exactly? So that one CVR every 10-20 years that isn't recovered can be addressed?

More can be done, but it isn't as easy as just "putting it in the cloud."

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is "real-time" data. It's called ACARS. The recording timestep is coarse, the bandwidth narrow, the flight data information condensed, but it's there. It's how Air France 447 was initially found out in the Atlantic.

The ACARS data transmission was turned off. Thus, all they have left is the hourly connection attempt "pings" to the satellite.

Re:Why?

[Rich0]

Remind me again why "black box" style cellular data transmitters aren't required to be transmitting cockpit voice data and full telemetry from every major airliner at all times yet?

Well, full telemetry is just being cheap. Voice would not only cost money, but would anger the pilots union. That is why cockpit voice recorders just have a short loop of memory - nobody wants the boss going back and listening to their water-cooler talk for the whole flight.

Seems to me that a better solution would be to just make it illegal to access except in a disaster, or even encrypt it with the NTSB (or other 3rd party) holding the keys.

Re:Why?

[GameMaster]

From my post you responded to: "We've had satellite phone technology for decades now"

Inmarsat (the company in the summary and original story is a satellite telephone/data company with coverage covering everywhere on the planet with the exception of only the poles.

Re:Why?

[GameMaster]

True, but we've had plenty of cases of either not being able to find the "black box" or having it take a very long time to do so. Heck, we've had plenty of cases of almost not being able to find the plane as a whole. My suggestion that such a system be designed so that the passengers and crew couldn't tamper with it was more of a side-note to the idea as a whole.

Re:Why?

[GameMaster]

* Money: I can believe this as a reason. If the government didn't require the existing "black box", I'm sure the airlines wouldn't bother with it either. That's why you make it a government mandate and don't give the airlines a say in the matter.

* Privacy: This is a non-issue. The existing "black box" systems already record all the audio from the airplane's cabin.

* Efficacy: I don't see a reason why this wouldn't be extremely effective. Assuming the airlines were mandated to keep the equipment in running order at all times (as I certainly hope they are already required to do with the existing "black box" technology) I see no reason this wouldn't function, especially at the altitudes above weather that these planes almost always fly (this wouldn't have been this case with this particular flight, but would have dealt with plenty of other flights that have been lost in the past).

Re:Why?

[GameMaster]

"Seems to me that a better solution would be to just make it illegal to access except in a disaster, or even encrypt it with the NTSB (or other 3rd party) holding the keys."

Either of those would be an option, as would having the recording automatically deleted after a certain time period.

Re:Why?

[aaarrrgggh]

Regarding privacy... I was downmodded on another thread for stating the obvious, but it is the Pilot's union that does not want longer cockpit voice recordings. The logic is reasonable enough; two hours before an accident should be sufficient to give adequate information for crash investigators. The issue here is that it isn't an accident, it really should be a criminal investigation into the activity in the cockpit.

An airline pilot is a professional, and they don't want to work in an environment where every conversation can be analyzed later, independent of the outcomes.

Efficacy... "it's just metadata." The same reasons we dislike the NSA dragnet is the reason why it is a bad idea for every detail to be recorded and stored indefinitely.

Air transportation is traditionally extremely safe. A very substantial amount of money is put into it to get this outcome. The issue with trying to make marginal improvements is that the return on investment is extremely low.

And back to cost, at $2/message, a message broadcast every 60 seconds on a 6-hour flight with 300 passengers is a premium of $24 per passenger. That would roughly cover position, heading, altitude, and any alarms only. If you wanted to add voice data you are likely looking at something in the range of $60 more per passenger for the flight.

What was needed here was a detachable ELT that activates on impact/submersion and floats on the surface. The logistics of making this sufficiently robust are non trivial, but it would be substantially cheaper than 10 flights with real-time voice streaming from the cockpit, and provide substantially more useful information.

Re:Why?

[camperdave]

Ultimately, laziness. They simply haven't been needed until now, so why put in the effort and cost?

Re:Why?

[thegarbz]

Because there are several other systems which are designed to transmit this information. Interestingly most of these were incapacitated in some form whether by fire, or the more common theory, human intervention. What makes you think another system is the answer?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

...which is not cellular.

Re:Why?

[Steve_Ussler]

it all comes down to.......MONEY!

Model dependance

[mdsolar]

This analysis seems to depend of a "last turn" and constant speed for reconstruction. That could turn out to be a bit circular since a Northern track would likely have some turns in it to avoid radar and some speed changes dealing with altitude changes. But, the speed estimate along the line of sight between the plane and the satellite might mimic the straight line assumption in the South if Bhutan were a way point before turning towards the China/Kyrgyzstan border area. You'd get the same small-followed-by-growing Doppler shift pattern. It would be good to know it they modeled paths of that sort in their analysis.

I'm waiting for Courtney Love to confirm...

[ThatsDrDangerToYou]

She is, after all, the leading researcher in this effort.

Re:I'm waiting for Courtney Love to confirm...

[Smerta]

Or how about Mary Schiavo? After all, she was spot-on when she stated that "even a small black hole would swallow the entire universe". Ugh. (I'll also fault CNN's Don Lemon for even entertaining the question of black holes in some way causing this...)

I can tolerate ignorance, mostly... what I can't tolerate is talking-head "experts" spouting off utter nonsense as if it was fact.

Re:I'm waiting for Courtney Love to confirm...

[ThatsDrDangerToYou]

Or how about Mary Schiavo? After all, she was spot-on when she stated that "even a small black hole would swallow the entire universe". Ugh. (I'll also fault CNN's Don Lemon for even entertaining the question of black holes in some way causing this...)

I can tolerate ignorance, mostly... what I can't tolerate is talking-head "experts" spouting off utter nonsense as if it was fact.

Well, maybe it's a very very tiny black hole? And wait, work with me here... the atoms used in the creation and/or destruction of the plane may at some time have been involved with a black hole. Wow, that was a workout. I may be on the way to journalism stardom..

A very plausible scenario from March 18

[shoor]

I found this article in the Christian Science Monitor to be very plausible. That was on March 18, when they were still looking all over the place for the plane, and it's a scenario that still holds up. Basically, something went wrong, the pilots started to head for the nearest airport, but then passed out. http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2014/0318/Malaysia-Airlines-Flight-370-Why-some-pilots-point-to-mechanical-error-video

Re:A very plausible scenario from March 18

[jbwolfe]

It was also said that the aircraft underwent several course changes as well as altitude changes (climbs and descents), though admittedly information has been unreliable thus far. This theory doesn't explain these changes and they can't be ignored. The aircraft had to remain at cruise altitude to transit the distance involved as fuel consumption would be too great at low altitudes. If they did experience an emergency and lost navigational ability over time, they still could have used the wet compass to determine that they were headed on a southerly course for hours.

Re:A very plausible scenario from March 18

[DerekLyons]

That was on March 18, when they were still looking all over the place for the plane, and it's a scenario that still holds up.

That scenario stopped holding up once we found that the aircraft had maneuvered both vertically (changed altitude) *and* had undergone multiple changes to it's course. It also fails the sniff test as it fails to explain why the pilots didn't follow SOP and don their oxygen masks - which have microphones built into them. The reliance on "aviate, navigate, communicate" is also questionable because the pilots would have known that they needed to notify air traffic controllers both the clear the air lanes ahead of them and to get the destination airport ready to receive them.

Not to mention the idea of a fire that did so little damage, didn't spread (allowing the aircraft to continue to fly for hours), and still almost immediately filled the cockpit and cabin with sufficient noxious gasses to incapacitate the crew and passengers... strains credulity to the breaking point.

Re:A very plausible scenario from March 18

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on the thread on pprune (where, you know, real pilots discuss this) oxygen mask deployment is hardly foolproof. It's a matter of seconds so if you're just a little bit clumsy (due to e.g. a food tray in your lap) when a depressurization surprises you, you might not get yours on. Of course, the probability that both pilots failed to get theirs on is much lower. Arguably, even if that happened, it leaves a lot unexplained. A broken altimeter feeding data to the autopilot would explain the altitude changes but not the rest of what happened. Is barratry by this crew more likely than a very unusual chain of systems failures? Dunno.

Re:A very plausible scenario from March 18

[wvmarle]

Except for the part where the communications equipment was switched off. As I understand it, this must have been done manually. A pilot trying to recover from a mechanical error will probably not do this, instead they'd press the emergency button to call for help.

Re:A very plausible scenario from March 18

[MozeeToby]

Donning O2 masks in the event of an unknown fire is what would widely be considered a "bad idea", that is why pilots have smoke hoods in the cockpit but those are only effective for 10-15 minutes or so. Pulling all non-essential breakers is step #2 (after turning to the nearest safe airport) in the event of a possible electrical fire, meaning no transponder, no ACARS, no radio. Nothing is important until the fire is contained, not "clearing the air lanes" when you're in the middle of the ocean (it's a big sky after all), not radioing the destination airport, and certainly not sending out a mayday that will do absolutely nothing to help the situation. It simply doesn't take that much. Finally, keep in mind that an airplane is an enclosed tube that doesn't actually let much air into and out of the cabin; it simply doesn't take much smoke or much fire to full the cabin and flight deck with incapacitating amounts of smoke.

Altitude changes are pretty trivial to justify in such a situation. The fire could have caused a decompression forcing the plane lower, the 12,000 ft level is pretty much the textbook height for such a maneuver. Even a climb to 42,000 could have been a desperate, last ditch effort to extinguish the fire. Also, keep in mind that those altitude readings were on the outer edges of the radar tracking the plane, without the transponders altitude readings simply aren't guaranteed to be accurate at 220 miles. If the altitude changes were less extreme they, and the bearing changes, can be explained by the 777 flying trimmed for cruise speed with autopilot off and a dead stick. As fuel is consumed the weight of the plane decreases causing it to enter a climb to maintain the speed set by the flight crew. Small instabilities lead to heading changes before the fly by wire system levels out the banks automatically.

Re:A very plausible scenario from March 18

[DerekLyons]

Donning O2 masks in the event of an unknown fire is what would widely be considered a "bad idea"

Right - that's exactly why every civilized firefighting force in the world send their firefighters into fires wearing air masks if not oxygen masks. You have no fucking clue what you're talking about.
 

Pulling all non-essential breakers is step #2 (after turning to the nearest safe airport) in the event of a possible electrical fire, meaning no transponder, no ACARS, no radio.

Yet, the transponders were 'pinging' INMARSAT for hours after the last communication. So you're full of shit.
 

Nothing is important until the fire is contained, not "clearing the air lanes" when you're in the middle of the ocean (it's a big sky after all), not radioing the destination airport, and certainly not sending out a mayday that will do absolutely nothing to help the situation.

Yet they had time to enter an alternate course into the autopilot which the plane subsequently followed for hours. Again, you're full of shit.
 

Finally, keep in mind that an airplane is an enclosed tube that doesn't actually let much air into and out of the cabin; it simply doesn't take much smoke or much fire to full the cabin and flight deck with incapacitating amounts of smoke.

Child, I served on submarines. I know how much of a fire it takes to crap up the air to incapacitating levels in a compartment (it's more than you think) - and we didn't exchange *any* air. (Not to mention the 777 is a big aircraft.) You can't have both a fire small enough that it knocks out practically none of the systems and allows the aircraft to fly for hours *and* which is also large enough to knock out the crew. Look at what happened to ValueJet flight 592 if you want to know what happens when an aircraft catches fire.
 

Altitude changes are pretty trivial to justify in such a situation.

The justify them rather than pulling things out of your ass.

440 pounds of lithium batteries on flight

[goombah99]

There were 440 pounds of batteries on one of the cargo items. Fire seems plausible and might explain the alleged radar track to 40k feet. Alternatively other 777 have reported a fuselage cracking problem around the satellite antenna. Decompression from that could explain the dive to below 12000 feet , the loss of some communication ( if the Ping channel a different antenna?) and perhaps incapacitation of the pilots. But this seems less likely.

The most interesting thing about the Inmarsat anaylisis is that it relies on the dubious and odd radar track of the Malaysians that showed turns at VAMPI GIVAL AND IGREX. My theory was that these were mistaken reads miss attributed from SIA 86 another 777 at the same place and time. The Inmarsat people seem to say that the north south symmetry is broken by using that flight path. Yet this path makes no logical sense for an accident. It would have to be volition and shows control .

I'm inclined to go with accident still and thus don't believe that flight path. I thus don't believe the Inmarsat analysis that relies on that. But I do believe their conclusion that it went south.

The perfect correlation with similar flights they report is however a large fly in my ointment. It a remarkable coincidence this flight was so perfectly aligned with the satellites orbital track that it created this north south Doppler symmetry!

Re:440 pounds of lithium batteries on flight

[stoatwblr]

"Alternatively other 777 have reported a fuselage cracking problem around the satellite antenna"

A satellite antenna that THIS 777 didn't have.

Highly Flammable Cargo on Passenger Jets?

[BoRegardless]

Something tells me that this will be banned quickly, worldwide.

Re:Highly Flammable Cargo on Passenger Jets?

[VikingNation]

I heard that certain batteries, Lithium-Ion, have been banned for overseas shipment for certain carriers. Any truth to this?

The cause of the crash remains a mystery?

[DarthVain]

"...knowing that the aircraft still had some fuel, but that it would have run out before the next automated ping."

Seems pretty straight forward to me... Ran out of fuel over the Ocean.

As to How/Why?
1) Navigational Error: Instruments on wrong course, path that cannot complete given fuel.
2) Pilot Error: Asleep at the wheel so to speak.
3) Terrorists: Remember hearing about another flight that was hijacked, ordered to go someplace, pilots said we don't have the fuel, Terrorists don't believe them."

Ultimately without some evidence, a mystery.

Also "no survivors"? Why because you didn't find any? Did you look? No? Found wreckage? Anyway at this point given how long it has been it is pretty unlikely but still.

Re:The cause of the crash remains a mystery?

[Kittenman]

There was a 'Air Crash Investigation' show about a crash on a Greek plane (Helios?) where the whole plane wasn't getting oxygen, as someone hadn't flipped the correct switch last maintenance slot. Everyone passed out, last man alive was someone who had some experience of low-pressure work (a diver).

Be interesting to know when the plane was last maintained, what for, what was done, etc.

And my heart goes out to the families, of course. To us, this is academic. To them, it is very real.

More stupid questions

[WaffleMonster]

I don't get it. If you are going away from satellite the signal is red shifted. If you are going toward the signal is blue shifted.

Why would there be any change in observed shift if you are going away from geo stationary satellite to the north v away to the south? What explains preferential outcome?

I could understand subtle timing differences due to ionospheric delay or polarization measurements. Ideas?

Re:More stupid questions

[mdsolar]

I think you are right, it is degenerate. The thing they have been saying is they get a match with other southbound flights. So, I think basically they are seeing a pattern consistent with constant speed and heading with the speed consistent with what Boeing expects for autopilot performance. So, there is more being put into this.

Ominous

[loom_weaver]

As another poster stated on the original article:

It would appear that someone on board deliberately, covertly and professionally flew it away, to the remotest spot within fuel range.

Trying to cover his tracks meanwhile, probably to avoid the stigma of being found out.

Pretty sinister, looks like the plane was pretty much flying to the South Pole.

Advice for the next small country

[Ardipithecus]

with a strange problem:

Pick up the phone, say clearly:
"Ok, NSA"
Wait for tone
"Help!"

Undetected second turn

[ITEM-3]

I hope the analysis by Inmarsat is correct, but there are still so many unanswered questions. Military radar has conclusively detected the plane's turn to the west shortly after losing contact with air traffic controllers, but in order for the plane to end up in the southern Indian Ocean, it would have had to make another turn to the south. Why wasn't the plane picked up by radar after the second turn? Is it that the plane went so far to the west that by the time it turned south it was far enough out in the ocean to avoid military radar?

I have no experience in aviation, but could the plane's second turn be explained by an attempt to orient the plane with a nearby airport's runway? Is the magnitude of the turn too great for that to be the case? If scenarios involving a fire or sudden depressurization are true, then perhaps the initial turn and drop in altitude were an attempt by the pilots to protect themselves and the passengers, and the second turn was meant to set an approach to a runway for an emergency landing. It could be that the pilots lost consciousness before reaching the runway, and the plane just continued on. Of course, that would mean the plane had flown back over land, over an airport even, and in that case it would have certainly been detected by radar. But perhaps an instrumentation failure caused them to be far off the mark.

I'm just thinking aloud at this point. But the question stands: why would the plane make a second turn?

Re:Undetected second turn

[sk999]

It seems likely that the turn to the South was far enough West that it was out of range of any radar. In fact, the entire flight path has the curious property that it avoids passing over the territory of any country except Malaysia itself. Everyone want to imagine some onboard disaster cause the aircraft to turn back, but when you look at the path actually taken by the plane, it sure looks like it was calculated and premeditated.

Doppler data?

[ai4px]

Am I the only one who wants to know more about how they ruled out the northern arc with doppler data? If the satellite is sitting over the equator, it would seem each arc would have the same phasing between two antennas... .or are there three to make a spot beam?

Re:Doppler data?

[drainbramage]

Perhaps they used responses from other aircraft to refine their frequency drift.
The original positions of MH370 were very close to the equator.
The sooner they could resolve a direction away from the satellite without closing again.....
Hell, I don't know.
How about the NSA knows and they are just making up evidence to cover the extent of their spying?
Now, where's my tin foil hat and who is that at my door?
Like Colin Hay say's "Who can it be now?"

Re:Doppler data?

[Strider-]

"Stationary" satellites aren't really. They drift around within an approximately 30km x 30km x 30km box, and these movements are very well known. This isn't much, but is enough that you can locate an earth station to within a few miles if you have enough time. IN this case, they only have a few pieces of data, hence the larger solution.

What if it turned??

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two possible conclusions (while unlikely) could still exist -- assuming that the Inmarsat data shows that the distances travelled at each ping point were constant (since they said they assumed it travelled at constant speed)

1) The plane flew at a constant speed lower than 450 knots at a different angle then they showed -- so heading toward Perth or Christmas Island or Cocos Islands, rather than toward middle of nowhere Indian Ocean

2) The plane flew toward Perth, then zigzagged back (luckily) toward Indonesia or Christmas Island or Cocos Islands at exactly the angle perpendicular to the satellite view field -- remember the Inmarsat can only tell distance, it can't tell if its going left or right, only if its getting closer or further away.

So I wish the Inmarsat guys would just publish the exact data they have an various people could do their own analysis rather than us just trusting clueless guests on CNN to interpret crappy looking graphs...

My theory is that the pilot and one person on board had a plan -- maybe blow open a window midflight, the pilot asks the co-pilot to go back and investigate, then the pilot goes up to 43k feet, everybody passes out, then he flies the plane toward someplace (don't know where), but somehow he ends up passing out himself before he can crash the plane where he wants and the plane flies all the way south going nowhere. Maybe his oxygen mask in the cockpit failed after some period of time. If they find that its a fire, the only thing that would make sense would be if the pilot regularly programmed in backup routes in case they had an issue and that is why the system had the extra planned route.

Won't somebody think of the CNN news readers!

[sizzzzlerz8429]

They've been on this 24/7, lack of any new information be damned.

Beta Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

"it just seems unusual to have this information at all, let alone to be able to dig it up out of several days old data."

The systems I've worked with typically store a lot of signal information and keep it for weeks, so when someone calls asking why their data wasn't getting through two weeks ago, the operator can say 'you were transmitting 10dB below nominal', or 'you were transmitting 1.5kHz off nominal', or whatever other problems they might have. Since much of the intelligence in the system is in a device that's not owned by the satellite operator (sat phone, data terminal, etc), and probably not even manufactured by them, they can't tell whether it's working correctly otherwise.

PR Guys

[GumphMaster]

Effectually we looked at the doppler effect, which is the change in frequency, due to the movement of a satellite in its orbit.

You can tell this is the PR guy and not the tech guy. Firstly, "Effectually"?

Secondly. The Inmarsat-3 F1 satellite is geostationary, it moves little and slowly relative to the Earth's surface. There is effectively no doppler shift due to motion of the satellite relative to the Earth. The doppler shift here would be that of the aircraft relative to the Earth/satellite. The absence of doppler shifts is the reason that Copas-Sarsat geostationary satellites cannot determine surface position of a emergency locator transmitter unless the transmitter sends that information. For beacons that do not transmit location the low-Earth orbit Copas-Sarsat satellites, which have motion relative to the surface, are used to determine location by multiple doppler readings (but it takes up to 90 minutes vs. seconds).

Re:PR Guys

[mdsolar]

He is the senior vice president of external affairs, so yes, public relations.

Re:PR Guys

[sumakor]

The Inmarsat-3 F1 satellite is geostationary, it moves little and slowly relative to the Earth's surface. There is effectively no doppler shift due to motion of the satellite relative to the Earth.

I think 'geostationary' satellites wobble more than you think. This one is inclined 1.7 degrees to the equator, and whether that Doppler shift is detectable... it depends on your detector. Maybe it's really that good.

Re:PR Guys

[GumphMaster]

Ok, so more geosynchronous than geostationary. It moves over a range of 3.336 degrees (0.058 radians) from north to south in ~12 hours. At 42164 km from the centre of the Earth that is a distance of 2454 km in twelve hours: a crude average of 204 km/hour or 110 knots. A jet aircraft typically does 450knots, so that satellite movement is significant in comparison to the aircraft. There will also be a slight east-west motion, and rise/fall in altitude. Looking at the irregular shape of the combined motions ( see http://www.satellite-calculati... ) the combined aircraft-satellite motions at each handshake event could provide the north-south differentiation claimed. I learned something today.

Re:PR Guys

[mdsolar]

So, you are performing a parallax in velocity on a model flight trajectory. Yes, that does give you a direction. Nice insight.

Re:PR Guys

[mdsolar]

The company is saying that the precision of their work is limited by the precision of their knowledge of the satellite position and velocity. The satellite does not have GPS aboard. It seems to me that planes which are transmitting their GPS positions, headings and speed could be used to refine that knowledge by inverting the process they have used.

Re:PR Guys

[kokuacat]

Does anyone know (it's not been clear to me from what I've read) how they established a range to the satellite exactly? I get how the doppler measurement, along with an assumption of airplane speed can give you a heading. But I can't see that the doppler alone actually tells you anything about where the plane is. It's possible that the "hand-shake" between the plane and satellite is time tagged and if one knew pretty precisely how long it would take the plane to respond then one could calculate a two-way travel time and convert this to range. We do this in underwater acoustics all the time. But I've not heard anyone say explicitly that this is how it was done. Any thoughts?

Re:PR Guys

[sumakor]

Washington Post now has a link to Inmarsat's analysis documents: http://apps.washingtonpost.com... http://s3.documentcloud.org/do... I've no idea what variable D1 is. Maybe some inherent frequency offset in the system that has to be subtracted. Maybe that's the minimum 85 Hz offset in the data. The difference between northbound and southbound flightpaths is almost 100Hz at times (e.g. 19:40 UTC). That's pretty big ; 100Hz from a 131 MHz signal (the higher 137MHz bands are North America only, I think) I get 100Hz / (131E6 Hz) ~ 7.63E-7, and (7.63E-7 x c = 229 m/s = 445 knots. That's a difference of 445 knots in plane-satellite line-of-sight closing speeds between north and south tracks. The 270 Hz peak at 18:20 UTC is an additional 100Hz, or 445 knots directly towards the satellite. The satellite is west, but also really high up. How could an airplane following the surface of the Earth achieve 445 knots closing speed towards a satellite? I still don't see all the details here.

Re:PR Guys

[GumphMaster]

Thanks for the links. I don't think D1 is a variable, they describe D2 as the Aircraft-Satellite Doppler shift, and you need two objects to measure a shift.

As the southbound aircraft passed the equator (satellite) you would indeed expect the aircraft's radial velocity component to drop to a minimum (something the north path would not see I expect). At the edge of the satellite coverage the aircraft will be close to the edge of the planet as seen from the satellite, so much of its velocity would be in the plane tangential to the Earth passing through aircraft and satellite (though not, one would expect, directly toward the satellite). The satellite has time variable velocity components that may be as high as 100 knots rel. to ground that also come into play. Its a continuum in between and a very interesting geometrical puzzle. Certainly the aircraft airspeed limits and norms would put a maximum limit on the Doppler shift due to aircraft motion.

Excuse Me

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone bothered to check the Maintenance hanger at the Malaysia Airport ?

Achilles's heel

[Anonymous Coward]

Because when you put on that invulnerable coat of protection on something, you still have to hold it somewhere...

black box

[p51d007]

The transponder in the black box (which is not suppose to be able to be disabled) will transmit a signal for 30 days. So, they've got a few days left before it fails, if it survived intact.

Best theory: pilots disabled; flew by autopilot

[viking80]

Given all the information, here is the best explanation of what happened:
1. The airplane hits meteorite or some other foreign object causing immediate decompression and damage in the cockpit.
2. The pilots have a few minutes to dive down to thicker atmosphere before the die due to lack of oxygen.
3. They dive the airplane down to be able to breathe.
4. At the same time, able to set the autopilot to fly back to land at a low altitude.
5. They both expire, and the airplane continues to fly on autopilot.
6. As they fly the wrong way, passengers and crew try to get into the cockpit to take over and land the plane.
7. Nobody can break into the cockpit, and after 7 hours the fuel is used up, and the plane dives into the drink.

How hard is it to fake debris

[Snotnose]

Lets put on our paranoia hats for a minute. How hard would it be to hijack the plane, land it somewhere, lose everyone on board, make some debris from the plane, fly the debris to the Indian Ocean, and drop it off? I mean, if they've gone through the trouble of getting the plane and losing the people on it, how much harder is it to fake debris?

Re:How hard is it to fake debris

[Bonobo_Unknown]

Very hard. Even the SAR aircraft operating out of the nearest airport at Perth only have fuel for a couple of hours loiter time. If you are planning a return leg of a trip to that region of the world it pretty much has to come from Australia.

Re:How hard is it to fake debris

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. One thing I've picked up from all this. It's easier to steal a $100 Million plane than rob a bank!

China Demands to Know

[mdsolar]

http://news.xinhuanet.com/engl...

Tin Foil Hat Time

[Anonymous Coward]

What if we're not supposed to find the plane at all ? China is all in a tizzy because supposedly a bunch of micro-chip designers were on that flight.

Entertain the thought the plane covertly landed somewhere, dropped off those who wanted out of China and then flew out to sea.

You just don't misplace an aircraft that size in this day and age unless you want to :)

End of crazy theory lol

Re: Best theory: pilots disabled; flew by autopilo

[Anonymous Coward]

Not possible

The cabin crew has a procedure to enter the flight deck IF and ONLY IF the flight deck does not actively prevent entry.

twat

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any idea what an orbit is?

need more details of the Dobbler effect analysis.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know much about satelites, but how is it possible to determine the flying path based on one sequence of pings with Dobbler effect? from the sequence the pings were received they already knew the plane was flying away and not towards the sattelite centerpoint, what new info did the dobbler effect give. They concluded that it was flying "away" using dobbler effect analysis, but that is true among all points in the ping circles, incl. both north and south.

Imagine you are blind and deaf on one ear. You hear an ambulance siren, the sound of the siren is decreasing so you know its driving away from you, the sound of the siren also tells you that it is driving away (dobbler effect). You compare what you just heard with the other times you heard ambulance sirenses and tries to determine the direction the ambulence went.

As you can see we need more details of the analysis.

Age and quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Aircraft recorders were designed long ago. Remember when a 40MB cf card was "big"? Remember when a 40MB disk (not 40GB!) was impressive? Aircraft recording is older than that. Today we can do better, but they almost never change existing equipment. Doing so still cost some money - designing certifying a new device usually costs a lot. You can't spread that cost over millions of devices like they do with phones, maybe a few thousand.

Then there is quality. Your phone can hold 1100 hours of audio - will it be able to do so over the 40-year lifetime of a plane? Or could there be a glitch after 15 years of continous operation? You can't even find smartphones that old. Look up the specs of a consumer SD card, will it survive that many write operations?

Will your phone still provide useful data when some submarine recovers it after a few years at 250 meters depth? Or when firefighters recover it from a smoking impact crater?

Moving Satellite

[sumakor]

The satellite we're talking about, Inmarsat-3 F1, is not perfectly geostationary. Nothing's perfect. This one's orbit is inclined 1.7 degrees with respect to the equator, which means it oscillates North-South and crosses the equator twice a day. If you know the motion of the satellite at the time of the flight (say it was moving south), then the Doppler shift between north and south tracks would be a little different (the south track would have a smaller shift). Of course, with a 130MHz signal you're talking about a shift of 1Hz or less. How much resolution do their tuners have? Maybe enough.

Re:Moving Satellite

[mdsolar]

They like the South because they can get a constant speed and heading that fits well and is also consistent with Boeing autopilot behavior. This good fit in the South means that in the North, a path would need variable speed and/or turns to get a fit. But, you might expect that kind of behavior (though not necessarily what would work to get a fit) if there is some plan to avoid radar being carried out in the North.

A look at the data

[mdsolar]

The data are available here: http://www.airtrafficmanagemen...

And the pilot cheerfully crashed the plane?

[doccus]

"All right.. Good night" We're going to crash the plane now. Awfully calm behavior for a plane in trouble, wouldn't you say?

It never flew to the Indian Ocean

[Anonymous Coward]

As retired airline pilot in easy communication with several current 777 drivers, I wonder what the chance is that the handshakes were just random noise having nothing to do with 370. We think the airplane suffered an explosive decompression caused by a windshield blowout during climb. This would convert the flight deck from a calm environment into a hurricane at many degrees below zero making finding and donning oxygen masks problematic. Soon the flight crew was dead, having disengaged the autopilot during the circus. The airplane had a climb power setting and was trimmed to climb. It continued to do so through its assigned altitude, above its maximum altitude for its weight with fuel for Beijing, and far above its maximum service ceiling for any weight, anytime. It stalled, pointed its nose at the Gulf Of Thailand, and went into the water at above the speed of sound. Wreckage will eventually be found in tiny pieces on beaches in the Gulf. It is impossible to explain the airplane leveling off and flying unattended for several hours after it suffered whatever failure caused it to dive 40,000 feet, from 45,000 feet, in one minute as was first reported.