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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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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!
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.
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
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.
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No it isn't, its not using data from a system that WAS TURNED OFF within MINUTES of the last radio contact.
How the fuck did this get marked as insightful? Its make a wrong statement that everyone has know has been wrong since the second day.
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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.
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...
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.
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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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.
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.
No it isn't, its not using data from a system that WAS TURNED OFF within MINUTES of the last radio contact.
How the fuck did this get marked as insightful? Its make a wrong statement that everyone has know has been wrong since the second day.
You should try to keep up with the actual events instead of lashing out on Slashdot.
The DATA transmissions ceased on the ACARS, but the radio system still pings the satellite.
The radio system keeps its link with the satellite as long as the actual transmitter has power.
Just because you stop tweeting on your phone doesn't mean the phone stops talking to towers.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The ones with the skunk glands?
Badgers? We don't need no steeeking badgers.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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)
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.
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.
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.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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...
No sig today...
> 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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
I finally updated my sig, but now it's lame.
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
I appreciated the joke, but on a more serious note...
The media don't get closure, they get amnesia.
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?
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.