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Most Expensive Aviation Search: $53 Million To Find Flight MH370
mdsolar (1045926) writes "The search and investigation into missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is already the most expensive in aviation history, figures released to Fairfax Media suggest. The snippets of costings provide only a small snapshot but the $US50 million ($54 million) spent on the two-year probe into Air France Flight 447 — the previous record — appears to have been easily surpassed after just four weeks.... The biggest expense in the search has involved ships, satellites, planes and submarines deployed first in the South China Sea and the Malacca Straits, and then in the remote reaches of the southern Indian Ocean."
Seriously: a major airplane "disappears" despite evidence that it wasn't really crashed. Everybody's wondering who dunnit and how, and whether or not it will become another impromptu bomb.
There's a *lot* you can carry on a 777. $50 mil is a lot, but the amount of damage such a plane could do with a little direction makes $50 mil look like peanuts. And it's pretty clear that anybody with the skills to make it disappear as completely as it did is capable of more than just a little direction.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Couldn't they have bought a whole new plane for that kind of money?
I am now walking to my local bank and trying to explain how my $5000 USD is actually $5400! I printed a copy of this article as proof!!!!
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
And yet, people stated that "it would be soooo expensive" to add proper tracking to planes.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Article is from .com.au... k.
And it's pretty clear that anybody with the skills to make it disappear as completely as it did is capable of more than just a little direction.
Houdini ?
That line was talking about how much 50 million USD was in Australian dollars. Way to fail, brah.
Understanding what happened could be worth a lot more than $50m, or twice that.
Major issue with the airframe, or propulsion? Very important to understand that. There are a lot more of them flying around.
A third party's influence and/or an attempt to steal the plane? Whether that ended in a crash or a successful theft, we need to know everything we can about who, what, why, to what end. If it was stolen and landed (extremely, very unlikely), gotta know where and why. If it went in the drink during an attempt, still have to understand what the game plan was.
Suicide? Hiding in regular traffic, then flying low and into the most remote, deepest water possible in the interests of never finding the plane - the better to make sure family collects on insurance money? Would be good to know, and will remind airlines to get harder about knowing their pilots and the pilots' current circumstances.
Regardless, the navy assets out looking are using the whole thing as an excellent training exercise. Lots of smart people have had to whip up new ways to think about what happened, using only traces of satellite/comms data.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Way to fail, brah.
There is no context in which that phrase can be used - earnestly, ironically, sarcastically, ignorantly, juvenilely, ham-fistedly, or otherwise - in which the person saying it can ever, ever tell someone else they've failed.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
no really the ubers above are pissed and want there alien back....
Let's say you could take over a Boeing 777
http://www.aviationweek.com/Ar...
Or . . . since 911 all aircraft can be sent a special code that renders them inoperable by the crew so the plane can't be used as a weapon . . .
And let's ask ourselves why would anyone choose to direct an aircraft far far out over a deep ocean away from and population areas . . .
Or maybe I read one to many Tom Clancy novels.
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
Look, yes. But why are 'they' spending more money for one downed airplane than the airplane costs originally? Why the fortune in searching? Why the massive ongoing search? Why is every government in a panic?
I suspect that aurhorities fear a nefarious actor, and they want to find out exactly who did what so we can make sure it doesn't happen again. What if the air transport regulators never find out what brought the MH370 down, but Al-qaeda knows already?
Is that $50 million that would otherwise have not been spent? I mean, when they talk about, say, that ships had to be deployed to some area, is the implication that, had this plane not vanished, those ships would have stayed put somewhere, doing nothing, and that the people operating them would have stayed at home collecting no wages? How is this figure computed?
Fire is a really, really REALLY answer to this mystery. It requires a fire powerful enough to disable communications minutes after they finished speaking for the last time, while at the same time avoid detection by a multitude of fire/smoke detectos around the plane.
Then after the fire finishes off every single person on the plane, it decides to chill out for seven hours while the plane flays without issue, despite that having happened with no serious airplane fire ever.
It's nice that you have an active enough imagination to believe in this mystical all-powerful sky fire, but to me it's vastly more convoluted to have fire be responsible do to the seriously amazing number of things to have to go right (or wrong) for that to work. Either suicide or terrorists taking the plane is FAR more likely if you are going to apply a test of simplicity.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sorry, but any reasonable person knows they are all dead. It's not worth $53M to find out what we already know - that the pilot and/or co-pilot went on a suicide mission to kill everyone on board.
Has ANYONE looked in the maintenance hanger at Kuala Lumpur International Airport !
Do I have to book a "first class" flight to Kuala Lumpur International Airport and bribe the
Airport attendants and "Guards" to let me in the maintenance hanger to video Malaysian
Airlines Boing 777-200 9M-MRO serial number 28420 sitting in the hanger !
OH YEA ! Question part A) where are the passengers ? and part B) why did the 'Prime
Minister' jump the Shark to "reveal" that terrorists downed MH 370 ?
Answer: Insurance fraud scheme !
On a different and very related note: "What happened to GPS" ? Hells Bells its 30 years
since President Ronald Reagan issued an executive order to declassify GPS for airline
transportation safety !
WTF
Tough Tittle Indeed
Planes with depressurization have flown for hours until exhausting their fuel, but fire?
You can make some more informed guesses about the plan by looking at the succession of ranging from the Inmarsat satellite here: http://www.duncansteel.com/arc...
Didn't they confiscate it on check in? Or is it only in the USA (TSA)
That's only half what the George Washington Library is going to cost US taxpayers.
There's actually a term for this. It's called a Googlewhack.
I think you can get a trophy, or at least your name on a website. http://googlewhack.com/
So, flip off a few switches, set the autopilot for a new course, and go read a book until you run out of fuel.
What happened to the OTHER pilot who would notice you doing one or more of those things, certainly within an hour noticing on a map they were headed the wrong way even if they missed everything else you did. And how would a co-pilot miss the turn you performed even if he was not in the cabin?
Also you would have to turn off the entertainment system for every passenger because that ALSO lets them see a map of where they are going. Which means every stewardess is going to be beating on your door for seven hours straight to get you to turn back on the entertainment system.
It's not at all simple to just head a plane elsewhere and not have a lot of people notice. It takes a lot of work to pull that off for any length of time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
OK, lets say it. Bullshit. We all know it didn't crash.
It takes a series of catastrophic failures for a 777 to crash. Sure, it happens, but it is very rare. It is an extremely unlikely event.
Now, we also know that the various telemetry devices on the plane were manually disabled by the flight crew.
We also know from the telemetry they didn't know about (or could shut of, the engine pings) that the engines ran for about 5 hours after other telemetry was turned off.
We know the plane turned "off course" after the last radio contact.
Given all these facts, do you really think it crashed? Of course not. It landed somewhere.
The cruising speed of the plane is about 560 miles/hour. It was in the air for 5 hours after it's last known location, that's a 2800 mile radius. This gives us a 24 million square mile area to search. If we have 1000 crews searching the area, 80 hours a week. If it takes 1 hour to search a square mile, it will take almost 6 years to find it.
Someone or something was on that plane that someone wanted. The plane was stolen, BY THE PILOTS, and landed somewhere. We will not find the black box, well, maybe on ebay.
So, flip off a few switches, set the autopilot for a new course, and go read a book until you run out of fuel.
What happened to the OTHER pilot who would notice you doing one or more of those things, certainly within an hour noticing on a map they were headed the wrong way even if they missed everything else you did. And how would a co-pilot miss the turn you performed even if he was not in the cabin?
Perhaps he was complicit. Perhaps he was clunked over the head.
Also you would have to turn off the entertainment system for every passenger because that ALSO lets them see a map of where they are going. Which means every stewardess is going to be beating on your door for seven hours straight to get you to turn back on the entertainment system.
Just tell them it is broken, and it will be serviced when you land. I can't imagine an Asian airline tolerates stewardesses who talk back.
It's not at all simple to just head a plane elsewhere and not have a lot of people notice. It takes a lot of work to pull that off for any length of time.
What are the passengers going to do about it? Stage a revolt? Breaking down the door would be pretty hard, and the captain could always just depressurize the cabin - just takes two switches to do it. The captain might just do that anyway if his goal is suicide.
How many of those millions being spent on the search are costs that would not otherwise be incurred in the normal course of business? If Johnny Rescue is flying his plane or sitting around shooting pool and watching TV while waiting for a call, his salary is still being paid. Same for things like fuel: if it's not used in an actual situation, would it otherwise still be used in a training exercise?
I suspect that a large portion of the cost of this search isn't an actual additional cost; this is just a convenient place to park the budget.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
And the fail is you misspelled "misspelt" attempting to do a spelling correction.
....
...
The real truth is that Occam didn't have a razor, those didn't get invented until several centuries later, and that a correct translation is "Occam's Lathe" but the Greek translation to German got mistranslated into English, as I'm sure you heard, and so we go
And so goes history
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
There are many governments involved. Most don't trust China, and don't want to give away their radar capabilities. So they obfuscate. Ground based radar systems are good for about 230 miles (exact distance depends on the altitude of the aircraft). Satellite based systems are able to track almost half the earth at a time. Then there is ADS-B. ADS-B is short for Automatic Dependant Surveillance Broadcast System. It gives planes a 'map' of their surroundings including all aircraft with ADS-B, weather conditions and other information. An example of what they see is here. Note that all the aircraft in red are in real time, and the aircraft in orange are up to an 8 minute delay. A better explanation of ADS-B is here. If the pilot/co-pilot are attacked by terrorists, and there is no control over turning ADS-B on or off, then the aircraft can be tracked by ground control and other aircraft whether the aircraft wants to be tracked or not. It would have solved the problem for this aircraft, the French Air plane that crashed in the South Atlantic several years ago (problems with air speed indicator due to ice buildup in the pitot head).
The perpetrator (pilot or co-pilot) simply waits for his opposite to go take a leak. Evidence is the event happened right after the sign-off with Malaysian ATC, a good time to imagine someone got up and left the cockpit. The perp then locks the cabin door and can do anything they want from then on, everyone else is just along for the ride. So he cuts cabin air, puts on his mask, climbs to 45,000 ft for a few minutes (not really necessary but maybe he's just being thorough, or maybe he doesn't even do that). Anyway, he's now got a 777 to himself and proceeds to lay in a course for the most god-forsaken part of the southern ocean.
Honestly, how hard is this? Its not like people expect this kind of thing. Its even possible a passenger could have done it. The cockpit door would be closed, but again someone may have come out into the cabin, a sudden unexpected rush by someone strong and quick with some training, they could quite plausibly seize the cockpit and then the same scenario plays out.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Another thing I forgot to mention - the fire left intact for seven hours the circuitry that responds to the satellite pings but nothing else?
That being said I would be curious to know why more experts aren't talking about a fire.
It's pretty obvious they know how unlikely this was.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why about 100 foam plastic balls of orange color with a plastic orange flag and LED light (blinking for 3-4 months after contact with water) cannot be placed inside the fuselage on an aircraft which costs hundreds of millions?
The size could be of a tennis ball, an additional weight and cost almost zero.
It's showing that we are merely human and can lose track of a large aircraft despite modern technology.
That's $53 Million to TRY to find MH370.
What would the Amelia Earhart' search cost in today's dollars when you factor in all of the historic effort?
20 years from now, if a jet goes missing, it'll be the most expensive search in history.
The same as if another massive Hurricane hits in a populated area 20 years from now It will be the most expensive in history.
Heck, if inflation keeps up, 70 years from now if a factory burns down, the cost will dwarf the famous chicago fire simply because the reporters will be intellectually dishonest and just make sure that the cost will lack any simple comparison of monetary value and effort over a period of time.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
"Screaming for help" is the last thing on my mind. I'm a professional pilot and there is nothing anyone on the other end of the radio can do to help me. I'll take care of the situation before I call anyone.
During a cockpit fire, the pilots may have intentionally disabled one or more of the aircraft's systems. Presumably, they would have attempted to reactivate some of those systems (at least communications, or at the very least the flight transponder). Incidentally, the codes "7500", "7600" and "7700" are all well known to any qualified pilot - even a private pilot with no additional qualifications. I would expect the flight crew to at least attempt to set a transponder code of "7600" or "7700" (radios down / general emergency). I would not expect the flight crew to leave the transponder off - especially when flying through potentially hostile airspace. Nothing like a North Korean SSAM deployed at your unidentified jumbo jet to ruin your day. In any event, a cockpit fire severe enough to knock out comms and navs would almost certainly have downed the aircraft immediately, as I doubt seriously that damage would be confined to those two sets of systems.
An electronic failure sufficient to completely eliminate all communications and navigational systems would similarly have downed the aircraft almost immediately. If a failure were widespread enough to eliminate all comms, the likelihood of aircraft control is practically nil (those things are fly-by-wire; no electronics, no flight control). Incidentally, I don't even want to calculate the odds of such a failure - it's possible, but so is a thousand pounds of gold spontaneously appearing in my living room. I don't even want to do math with powers of ten that high. There are multiple independent systems which would have to fail simultaneously.
Any hacker capable (by hardware or software means) of downing a jumbo jet this way wouldn't keep quiet - like a terrorist, I can only imagine such an individual immediately telling the world how brilliant he/she is, probably while attempting to maintain anonymity.
I'm left with this: perhaps ( perhaps ) one of the pilots suffered some form of mental disability or illness and took advantage of an opportunity to comandeer the aircraft. The evidence seems to indicate positive aircraft control throughout its ill-fated flight, implying that both the aircraft and the pilot flying her were operational.
There are other scenarios which might explain all of the currently available evidence; however, I believe 'agnogenic systems failure' is the only appropriate conclusion that can be reached based on the current evidence.
To me, "brah" just looks like the person who wrote it is a complete bloody idiot.
The NY times has an article about how aircraft have lots of communication technologies on board but no airlines have opted to put trackers on their planes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03...
It would be relatively easy to install systems that send basic location, speed direction and basic airplane health data at reasonable intervals with a reasonable cost.
Its too bad that likely legislation will be needed to get airlines to do something. I have an issue with the fact that they don't have to pay fines or help pay for the search when a disaster occurs. It means that a crash could be a profitable event for them (for example if the plane was more than adequately insured, and they had over capacity in the industry, aka liquidation).
If as a person I can buy a Personal Locator Beacon for $200 to broadcast my location to satellite in an emergency for rescue, the technology is clearly there and affordable.
----- "Profanity is the one language that all programmers understand."
Would probably have helped to specify in the summary. My first four thoughts on seeing that were:
1. Someone meant to use the Euro symbol. But I'm pretty sure 1 Euro > 1 USD currently. So that's not it.
2. Inflation adjusted dollars.
3. Canadian dollars?.
4. Look through the comments and see who else wondered the same thing.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Even if the money dedicated to this search has reached that sum it is not wasted money, in some cases this involves services with a continuous running cost that would have been 'idle' at standby anyway.
The value of this is an exercise in cooperation, refining search methods and when the wreck finally is found it may be possible to find out what really happened. Unlikely at it seems it may even end up being caused by a meteorite - as was caught on camera by a Norwegian skydiver.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
"The biggest expense in the search has involved ships, satellites, planes and submarines deployed first in the South China Sea and the Malacca Straits, and then in the remote reaches of the southern Indian Ocean."
Pretty darn sure they just listed the items that ARE the search, and without them you'd HAVE no search.. so it's pretty damn obvious the most expensive part would BE them. Well, that is unless they expected some corrupt guy to be taking in more money than it costs to run the *whole damn search*
So much to search usa's military base on a small island of Diego Garcia?
There are way too many fishy things that happened to flight MH370
1. There was an "airspace territory gap" of 3 to 4 minutes in between the airspace of Malaysia and that of Vietnam, over South China Sea.
The last communication from that plane was from the co-pilot, not the pilot. And his message was "Goodbye Malaysia, Goodbye MH370" and that message was uttered just before the transponder and all comm channels were shut.
Once the transponder and all the comm channels were severed the aircraft remained silent for another 7 to 8 hours
2. After the transponder been switched off and all the comm channels cut, the plane took a turn to the West, purposely flying just south of the border of Southern Thailand the Northern Malaysia.
And during that trip from the South China Sea to the northern tip of the Malaccan Strait the aircraft was flown up to 45,000 feet, way over the limit of the safety limit for Boeing 777, and the aircraft flew at that altitude for a full 23 minutes.
At that height, passengers in the fuselage will experience a lack of oxygen.
Even if the emergency oxygen respiration devices dropped down and the passengers put them on, that oxygen supply would only last for 10 minutes - Which meant, all people inside the fuselage would have extreme difficulties getting oxygen for 13 long minutes
Many of them would die. Those didn't would have passed out.
3. When the plane reached the northern tip of the Malaccan Strait it dropped down to 25,000 feet, and then turned north to the Andaman Sea.
At that place, the plane "hug" the Northern Sumatran coastline and flew from the North East side of the Sumatran Island to the North West.
And from that juncture, the plane could have go Northward, or South.
4. Now they are saying the plane went South, based on the "Ping" signals that they received.
Since that "Ping" signal is not a complicated signal, it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to "clone" that signal - and if there was someone behind the hijacking of that plane, they could have done so.
5. Why ? Well ... to lead the investigators into a false trail, a wild goose chase.
There was a comment embedded in the following link allude to such a plot - http://www.themalaysianinsider...
Let me quote part of that comment:
One more possibility is that those people might have "cloned" the "ping signals" using another device that broadcast that "ping signal", and then, when that Boeing 777 had landed safely on that undisclosed location, they immediately flew that "clone ping device" and, did what I have outlined above.
They did that to divert attention, and to create a false lead to the world which will come looking for that plane.
What happened to this Boeing 777 has so many gaping holes yet to be answered - like
* Why it flew for 7 to 8 hours without anyone actively looking for it ?
* Why they purposely switched off the transponder and the comm channels but left that "ping device" kept on broadcasting the "ping signals" ? Is it part of the plan to mislead the investigator ?
* Where is that plane right now ? Where could it possibly had landed ? Thailand ? Laos ? The Philippines ? Malaysia ? Indonesia ? Myanmar ? Bangladesh ? Cambodia ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The flight deck crew have keys to open the door
After the 9/11 incident in NYC the cockpit of most commercial aircrafts have had their doors upgraded.
No one but the people inside the cockpit can open the door, and the door is thick enough to withstand normal bang and kick and whatnot.
Cabin crews won't have the keys, or else terrorists (they are on board) could have gotten the keys from the crews and open the security door to the cockpit.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Were the disappearance of MH370 the result of a terrorist plot, it is a near certainty that some terrorist group would have claimed credit for the disappearance. After all, what good is committing a terrorist act if nobody is left alive to be terrorized?
This wouldn't be the terrorist act, this would just be getting the delivery vehicle for the terrorist act.
Come on /. $M? Really? How old are you? $Bs and $Ts and we're talking real money.
Malay culture blowback
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
Insurance never covers your whole costs - its an extremely important principle that insurance should never make the insured event as desirable as it not happening. Besides, crashes are not good for your passenger numbers.
[FUCK BETA]
Stealing the plane is not the act of terrorism. The act of terrorism is yet to come...
Just about the most sophisticated, most mobile passive underwater sound detection systems in existence are the spherical arrays mounted in modern nuclear attack subs. In addition to being an important task - locating the missing flight data recorder that bears on U.S. national security (international terrorism being, well, international) - it looks like a good exercise to sharpen the crews passive sonar search skills.
There has now been plenty of time for an attack sub to reach the area from anywhere in the world.
Sub operations are routinely highly classified, so I would not expect to hear about this if it were happening. If they find something we might hear about it, or instead "laundered" cueing information might get passed to the official search teams.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Were the disappearance of MH370 the result of a terrorist plot, it is a near certainty that some terrorist group would have claimed credit for the disappearance....
By "near certainty", do you mean a 14% chance? That is the actual fraction of terrorist incidents that have credible claimaints for responsibility.
If the pilot/co-pilot had secretly become radicalized, and acted on their own - there would be no one to claim responsibility.
Also, is not the unexplained disappearance of large airliner with hundreds of people, very unsettling? Maybe, even a little bit terrifying? Mission accomplished.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
wish people would volunteer and donate resources (food, fuel, ships, supplies) instead of spending money. but we live in such a monetary and capitalistic world. didn't realize how much a search costs. mabey i just want to live in a perfect world where i don't need to spend or make money.
as the Australian defence forces has pointed out on numerous occasions to both the press and politicians when it's been involved in search and rescue operations:
most these are costs that would have been incurred anyway doing training, routine patrols,etc.
I'm guessing a lot of the expenses incurred by other search parties will like wise be absorbed.
its also the most wasteful considering its a blatant cover up.
That's why the repair invoices always show the price doubled. I went to a garage to fix a dent. The guy told me $450. I asked for a formal quote for the insurance company: $950.
The insurance company just pass the cost to the insured, so at the end, as everything, the final consumer pays all the fancy "lifestyle".
then the summary should have said 54M AUD (50M USD)
way to fail, jackaroo
Most of the costs listed in the article are for aircraft and ships of the military and coast guard of several countries. It does cost a lot to build and man these ships but these costs are already budgeted and incurred. Much better to have these assets doing something useful like respond to an actual emergency than sit around idle or go on training missions or "good will tours" to show the flag.
I imagine the only extra cost attributable to this search is a bit more fuel.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
ohgodsomeoneusedacoloquialismiamnotfamiliarwithandthismakesmeangry
for Evi Nemeth and the other passengers of the ship she was on.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
I'm familiar with it, but that doesn't make the user thereof sound any less un-educated...
The mere disappearance of a jumbo jet is not especially terrifying to me. As to the other assertion, that a member of the flight crew may have become radicalized - okay. Once more, I assume there's evidence of this? If not, it seems unlikely at best. Possible, but unlikely (especially given the close scrutiny the flight crew have received since the disappearance). I still find a transitory mental aberration to be more likely than an intentional premeditated act.
And I still stand by my conclusion - there is simply not enough evidence yet to make even an educated guess as to the cause of the disappearance of MH370. Speculation is less than worthless here; it's actually an impediment to proper investigation and analysis of the situation.
...just how was this accomplished? Really, I'd like to know. I might want to try it myself some day - not that I want to blow up a building, but I'll bet I could make a pretty penny selling a jumbo jet (slightly used, ignore the smell of death throughout the passenger cabin, we'll clean that up for you).
Dozens of A/C comments all insisting that this must be part of a terrorist plot. So tell me - shall we invade Afghanistan again? Or Iraq? They may not have had WMD's, but I'll be they have jumbo jets there.
Poor form by the writers of TFA, sure. But now you can appreciate how the rest of world feels reading US articles, especially with respect to currency and timezones. Your lot are no better.
Come on, this is Slash dot.
The 777 is totally fly by wire. Control the computers and you control the plane. Like most other SCADA systems the security is rough. They probably do not actually connect the plane to the internet, but it does download flight info, software patches etc. over a radio link to the airline's computer, which is connected to computers that connect to the internet. Remember that Iran had an air gap that did not protect them from Stuxnet. And these days it probably downloads software patches directly from Boeing.
There are two parts to such an attack. First is to get control of the plane, second is to do something with it. The first would have been developed to do something very benign, or nothing at all. They could then just see if it worked on real planes knowing that it could do no harm. Might even use some Boeing installed back doors.
The second would be some semi-intelligent software that had rules to take over at international borders, fly along standard corridors until out of radar range then dump the plane in one of a number of pre determined locations. This would never be run out of a simulation environment.
Then some manager accidentally picked up the wrong files.
The only other plausible explanation was pilot suicide, and yet both pilots appear to be perfectly normal, balanced, individuals. So it must be the NSA. Stands to reason.
Most of the large trucking companies track their rigs 24/7 using a system similar to On-Star. There is at least one world-wide cellular phone system (Iridium) operating and there may be more. In any case, an aircraft as expensive as a Boeing 777 rates a tracking system. I would suggest a simple periodic reporter that would activate anytime an engine was in operation. They would all use the same channel was a common format [Aircraft ID, GPS Location, Altitude in Flight Level format]. The transmission length would be about one second and sent once every fifteen minutes. The system could be common access meaning anyone could see the moving spread sheet and, because a lot of people could use it, losing the data would not be a problem. Obviously, it would show up on the Internet. So, for example, you are in San Francisco and wondering where Flight 11 is? Visit the site and enter AA-11. You would see a list of the locations and altitudes starting with the latest and going back at fifteen minute intervals all the back to Boston Logan Airport. Where is the plane now? Draw a 125 mile circle around the last position and start looking.
A little mental device to remember the 7xxx codes
7500 - taken alive (rhymes with 5, used when hijacked)
7600 - radio needs fix (rhymes with 6, means comms are out)
7700 - going to heaven ( rhymes with 7 emergency - on fire, etc)
Or even shorter, Hi Jack! Can't talk now! I'm on fire!