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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."
We still have no idea exactly where the aircraft is, how it went down, or what to do now.
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.
"Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everyone, they meet at the bar."
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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
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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
Kriston
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)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
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.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
What happens when an airplane crashes into the ocean? Do the passengers die immediately from the impact?
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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.
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?
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.
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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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.
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.
--fatboy
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.
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.
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.
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).
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
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?
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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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
You aren't going to get the the mechanism of the crash by staring at satellite photos ...
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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?
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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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Ask Captain Sullenberger. Oh, and stop being an idiot.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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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.
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.
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.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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.
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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.
Please help metamoderate.
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.
Or now with in-flight WiFi an option, why isn't the black box configured to upload its audio to a server somewhere?
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?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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.
Just bring in Robert Ballard.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
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.
That's not all that much. 10x10 would be 100...
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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.
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.
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.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
We call Ben Stiller, and he can end the Malaysian Prime Minister's meddling once and for all!
I have nothing clever to put here...
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.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
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.
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.
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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...
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
I could be mistaken, but I believe FDR is here:
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-...
Isn't there supposed to be several salt-water activated beacons that are automatically released upon a crash?
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.
* 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...
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
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.
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 :(
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.
Any floating debris could be a looooong way from the crash site by now.
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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.
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/...
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?
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
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.
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The ones with the skunk glands?
Badgers? We don't need no steeeking badgers.
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Right, but it is degenerate. Both estimates are projected speeds towards or away from the satellite.
Err... steeenking.
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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.
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.
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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
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
The real bummer would have been if the plane had hit your base's self-destruct mechanism.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
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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.
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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...
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Of course they can. But the pilots like a bit of privacy too. Up to now, 2 hours have been enough for every crash.
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> 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.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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.
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.
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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.
I find being offended by me offensive.
No.
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.
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..
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.
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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!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
Something tells me that this will be banned quickly, worldwide.
P3 tacco again. P3s carry sonobuoys, which can listen underwater. You can drop enough to cover the "listening" area.
"...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.
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.
> 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.
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?
Except that when you do this, you make a beeline for the nearest runway and enter the holding pattern.
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.
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.
with a strange problem:
Pick up the phone, say clearly:
"Ok, NSA"
Wait for tone
"Help!"
Pretty sure there are. Could you cite your source?
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).
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..
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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
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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?
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!
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Unfortunately, the ocean depth there is deeper than 3.5km. Closer to 7 km.
In other words, the black box won't be found.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
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.
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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.
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It should also be noted that much, if not all, signal generation on the satellite is going to be traceable to an atomic clock.
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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.
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The analogy is pretty good, though about placing bets upon known variables and hindsight.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
They've been on this 24/7, lack of any new information be damned.
This is the most insightful bit out of the whole conversation.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
No brain, no pain.
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.
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
"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.
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.
No brain, no pain.
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.
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)
http://blog.nexusuk.org
What kind of detection radius for a 'pinging' object? Tens of miles? Hundreds of miles?
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.
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).
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
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.
No sig today...
I appreciated the joke, but on a more serious note...
The media don't get closure, they get amnesia.
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.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Hehe well done.
Unless of course you're both Lumpy and dgatwood. Then it's just cheating :)
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!"
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.
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.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
See the comment below about crush depth. It's about 10,000 feet.
The black box is gone.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
True Malaysia has a large population of ethic Chinese, but let's not forget that 250 of the passengers were Chinese nationals.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
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.
They're called ELTs and 777s have them.
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.
Only on the rafts, if properly deployed. EPIRB transmitters.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
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.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
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?
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.
In Flight wifi? ??? The Iridium system or even the Intersat system used by the plane makes more sense that in flight wifi.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
Yup. Works the same everywhere, don't it?
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.
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.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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. /. loaded.
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
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/engl...
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?
At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me
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.
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.
You're such a sentimentalist. :)
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
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.
Sig for hire.
Finding the recorders had been shut off will provide immense support for the idea a deliberate act was taking place.
Sig for hire.
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.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
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.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
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.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
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.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
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!
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
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.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
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.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
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.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
:) 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.
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
As opposed to the GOP's quite literal flop of 'Tax and cut' yeah that'll work
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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." ;)
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.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
>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.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
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.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
Certification.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
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.
Monstar L
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.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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...
Or you could look up wikipedia which says can operate at depths of up to 6000m of water.
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.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
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.
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.
Yes, the satellite motion turns out to be key.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
> 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.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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.
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?
"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.
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.
"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.
"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.
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.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
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.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
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).
The data are available here: http://www.airtrafficmanagemen...
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.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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.
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.
Monstar L
"All right.. Good night" We're going to crash the plane now. Awfully calm behavior for a plane in trouble, wouldn't you say?