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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."
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.
Couldn't they have bought a whole new plane for that kind of money?
They would have to do that anyway. It isn't like anything that came off of this flight is likely to ever be useful again, unless it really was landed on a runway somewhere.
This is all about preventing future accidents, and providing closure.
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.
the only explanation that makes sense to me is okham's racer: plane was flying to beijing, a fire broke out or depressurization in the cabin or hold. pilot turned around to go back to the nearest airport, but they ran out of oxygen and it became a ghost ship on autopilot until it ran out of fuel in the indian ocean. the altitude changes is consistent with a fire because apparently one way to fight a fire on an airplane is to go really high where there is less oxygen.
I am a pilot, have had two non-trivial electrical fires. It's the simplest explanation, and explains shutting of or failing ACARS and the xpdr while the engines kept reporting data. Not saying "that's what happened" but "that's the most plausible explanation"
First, I don't imagine that Malaysia Air is paying that $50,000,000. Malaysia Air is out the cost of a Boeing 777 and probably some death benefits. But I'm sure those things are insured. On the other hand, Malaysia Air would have to pay for this tracking system.
Second, I'd point out that the last big "disappearance" (i.e., nobody immediately knew where it crashed) was in 2009--five years ago. And it's not like it's that common that airplanes crash and are not found within a few days. So you're spending money on the off chance that an airplane of yours crashes somewhere difficult to find. You'll probably spend that money for 50 years before you ever take advantage of the system. So, yeah, it's not really worth it to Malaysia Air.
Third, let's say you add the trackers. You spend the money year in and year out and, eventually, it comes in handy. So what? You can look and say, "Yup! The plane just crashed in the middle of the Indian Ocean!" Now what? You're still out the plane. You're probably not going to have much for survivors on a plane that crashes in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It's not going to make a difference in your insurance premiums. You're adding costs for basically no benefit.
the only explanation that makes sense to me is okham's racer
Congratulations you are the first person ever to have misspelt Occam's Razor Okham's racer.
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
laughing so hard... I thought you were exaggerating but i checked the link and in fact google only returns one hit for "okham's racer", which directs back to this page. That's a first for me, I should get like an internet trophy or something.
And yet, people stated that "it would be soooo expensive" to add proper tracking to planes.
It is. As a manufacturer you have to machete your way through a jungle of red tape, get all manner of safety assessments etc. to even be allowed to install the ADSC-B/C equipment on the aircraft. This is very time consuming and expensive, which is one reason why all aircraft avionics and generally anything that goes into an aircraft is by definition obscenely expensive to buy (right down to LCD screens and coffee makers) and why old airliner designs get reworked (it's a smaller bureaucratic workload to get a new variant of an existing design flying than a totally new design). If this seems like dumb bureaucracy keep in mind that aircraft have been lost to crappy installation of retrofitted electronics (a good example being Swissair Flight 111). To install the equipment your airline has to ground the aircraft for at least a week (installation costs and lost revenue). Depending on the type of aircraft you operate and its age there may not even have been provision for the ADSC-B/C equipment which means airframe modifications and more downtime (yet more lost revenue and expenses) followed by more certifications and inspections. On top of that different ATC areas sometimes require you to have different equipment. Even simple stuff like software upgrades only happen at a glacial pace so if you think that fixing a simple software bug on an airliner is as simple as downloading an install package from the support section of the Boeing/Airbus website, uploading it to your USB stick, plugging it into a USB socket in the dashboard of your Boeing 777 airliner and selecting "Update firmware" on the FMS screen you have another thing coming. Airliners are one of the safest modes of transportation but that comes at a cost in time and money.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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/
You know they react like this to every crashed plane? Normally they find it on a mountain within a day or two and the media loses interest. This one is only odd because the plane was lost at sea; which only happens every 5 years or so.
The "panic" is really only coming from the internet conspiracy machine and the media which, for some reason, takes idiotic internet conspiracy theories seriously when they have nothing to report (instead of, you know, stopping reporting until something actually happens.) The actual S&R is exactly the same as every other air crash S&R. [In the Air France crash, they didn't stop looking for the black boxes for two years.]
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I'm sure similar arguments were made when the original black boxes were made mandatory on aircraft.
A new Boeing 777-200ER is about $260M. A Canadian has developed an enhanced black box that constantly sends data back to the airline. The cost would be $100,000 which is only 0.04% of the cost of the aircraft and $85,000 more that the boxes they would replace. There would also be satellite data transfer charges which would be only a few thousand dollars for a flight like MH370 or about $20 per passenger on the flight. You could even limit the data transfer to trans oceanic flights to minimize the impact on low cost and domestic carriers.
Of course, all those costs would come down if every new aircraft was equipped like this. I'm sure the families of the MH370 would consider this minimal cost money well spent.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
You don't turn around, you vector for the nearest runway long enough to stop on and scream for help! There wasn't so much as a single SOS from this aircraft, yet it made several turns and altitude changes, which wouldn't happen with an aircraft that was flying uncontrolled. It just doesn't really add up. Its also VERY unlikely a 777 would continue to fly at all after electrical system damage so extensive that its ACARS, transponder, and all radio systems failed and the flight crew was either killed or completely unable to enter the cockpit. That would require quite a weird and selective type of damage.
How about a hack? Software could do all of that stuff and is a lot more believable than a fire...
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Personal foul, 15 yard penalty for Type I Error when attempting to correct spelling. Repeat the down.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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.
Your theory makes no sense. For it to land somewhere it would need to fly into the airspace of country. So which one would just let some unidentified aircraft enter it's airspace let alone land on a runway without saying anything? The only place you can fly for hours without being picked up by radar is over the ocean.
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!
If it's an electrical fire (or if the pilots think it might be), they would turn off all the electrical systems; so ACARS, transponder, and radio are gone. Meanwhile, they're trying to extinguish the fire - it's still under control, they're just unable to communicate for fear that the electrical systems are causing the fire. And before they can either restore partial electrical systems or land, they become incapacitated by smoke.
Screaming for help is not a top priority. The priority is Aviate, Navigate, Communicate; first, you fly the plane, because that gives you time to do everything else. Then, you figure out where you're going; if you fail at this, you might end up somewhere unexpected, but at least you're alive. Finally, you communicate; if you're alive, it would probably be useful to tell somebody where you are and what's going on. Telling ATC that your plane is on fire and you're about to die of smoke inhalation is useless - FIRST you get the smoke and fire under control, at least long enough for you to navigate to an airport or piece of flat ground. Once that is manageable, THEN you communicate your distress. Even if they had communicated their distress early on, there's nothing that could have been done; there's no way for firefighters to board the plane and extinguish the fire while in midair, obviously.
If you listen to the "Miracle on the Hudson" ATC recording, the pilot is very brief and succinct; he communicates that he lost both engines and is returning, then that he is unable to return, then asks what the airport is on his right side, and then that he can't make it to that airport either and is heading for the Hudson River. There's lots of dead air when ATC asks him a question and he doesn't have time to respond.
I think the fire scenario is a pretty reasonable explanation, but it's by no means the only possibility.
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.
I'm a former electronic warfare drone (Australian Navy) - I worked with radar and satellite primarily, though I also covered a myriad of other RF systems.
With your logic you also need to discount the southerly route not just because Malaysia and Thailand did nothing, but also because Indonesia never saw the aircraft. Further, Australian agencies have said they never saw anything even though the entire region is bathed in OTH radar. Not a peep from Keeling or Christmas island.
It seems more logical (from my background) that the aircraft went north, though until it is found it would be far more appropriate to assume nothing. The Inmarsat analysis is interesting, but it isn't boiler plate and the lack of intermediate ping data fuels suspicion.
I'm a former electronic warfare drone
The system goes on-line April 2nd, 2014. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 06:25 a.m. eastern time, April 5th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
But it's too late. It's already posted on Slashdot.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
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 !
I think the fire scenario is a pretty reasonable explanation, but it's by no means the only possibility.
The fire scenario has been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point. Radar shows that the plane made multiple turns and changes in altitude, meaning that it was being actively piloted. Here's what we currently do know: the ACARS transmitter was turned off, the plane made a sharp turn to the west and climbed to 45,000 feet. Radar then shows the plane descending to 23,000 feet. The plane turns again and climbs, heading out over the Indian Ocean. At this point, radar contact is lost; however the satellite pings indicate that the plane ended up in the southern Indian Ocean, which means it had to turn again. So after the transmitter is turned off, the plane made at least three turns and changed altitude three times. Someone was definitely at the controls until radar contact was lost.
It's estimated to be $200,000 per plane for live tracking. "Billons" would be a huge exaggeration.
That's 5000 planes per one billion. There are almost one thousand Boeing 777s in operation today. Add in all other comparable, i.e. long range aircraft (757, 747, 787 plus the Airbus equivalents) and you are quickly into the (very low admittedly) billions.
There's one thing I will agree with: to figure out the fate of the plane we have to get inside the pilot's head and try to figure out what he's doing. The trick here is that based on the available facts, we have to stop thinking in terms of someone who's trying desperately to save the plane and his passengers, and try to understand someone's whose goal is to do the opposite.
One thing to think about- where would you crash a plane if your goal was not simply to crash a plane, but to conceal its fate? Whoever took the plane seems to have wanted its resting place to remain a mystery. They must have known that the path of the plane would be tracked by military radar, so by heading northwest until they were off radar, and then turning southeast, they must have wanted to mislead searchers about the direction of the flight. And by sending the plane into the deeps of the Indian Ocean, they must have hoped that the wreckage would never be found. But one thing didn't make sense here. If you were going to go to this kind of length to lose a plane forever, where would you crash it? Not southwest of Australia; the sea there is deep but its a fairly broad and flat ocean floor. Yes the search area here is huge and the seas are rough, but if the wreckage ends up on a flat expanse of seafloor, it's going to be pretty easy to spot on sonar. It would take a long time to find, but eventually it would be found. No, you wouldn't want an abyssal plain. You'd go for the deepest, most rugged stretch you could find. You'd pilot the plain straight into an ocean trench.
Then a curious thing happened. The search area was changed, again, for something like the third time. The new data suggests the plane didn't fly as far, and instead of crashing southwest of Australia, it crashed almost due west of Australia. At first this seems to suggest the search will be easier. But if you look on the maps, you'll see that the new search area overlaps an ocean trench- the Diamantina Trench, the deepest point in the entire Indian Ocean. Its maximum depth is 8,000 meters/26,000 feet. Eight kilometers. Five miles. Its rugged terrain, which will conceal the plane and scatter any noise from the sonar beacon. Plus, the Navy's pinger locator can only go about 6,000 meters down, and the range of the black box ping signal is only about a mile, so if the plane is at the deepest part of the trench, it's may well be out of the range of sonar equipment. On top of everything, the terrain is going to be unstable; unlike a flat abyssal plain where the sediments accumulate slowly and don't shift, the mountainous terrain of the Diamantina Trench will be subject to slumps and debris flows, with avalanches of fine mud that could easily bury a plane.
Up until now, it seemed like a good bet that the plane would be found, eventually. After all the Titanic was sitting on the seafloor for the better part of a century before it was discovered. But if the pilot really did crash the plane into the Diamantina Trench, there's a real chance that it's lost for good.
Data charges would be much less than that, $20 extra per ticket would be unacceptably high. Some spokesman for Inmarsat (who obviously has a big interest in making permanent data connections mandatory) said that data costs for such a flight would be on the order of 1$/hour for the whole aircraft. Data rates should also be pretty low, 1 GPS coordinate per minute would have helped enormously for both the AirFrance and MalaysiaAirlines crashes, the detailed high-bandwidth data you can always get from the black box if you can find it.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
60 seconds from boom to PAN radio call
https://www.atsb.gov.au/public...
you are quickly into the (very low admittedly) billions.
You're into the high(er) billions once you add all the satellite bandwidth into the mix.
Without understanding what went wrong with the plane, we can't know whether the proposed enhanced black box would be effective. There were systems in the aircraft to report its position and status remotely - namely ACARS and its transponders. These failed or were disabled early on. It is quite possible that whatever took those systems out would have also disabled communications from an enhanced black box.
Until we know the cause of the crash, proposing a solution is premature.
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
The telling thing is the time frame. I'd buy the fire hypothesis if all of these maneuvers happened in a period of a few minutes and then the plane simply cruised off in some random direction and eventually crashed. That's not what happened though, the plane turned, changed altitude several times over a period of something like 40 minutes, AVOIDING RADAR, and then finally turned onto a course directly for the most remote part of the ocean. Fire simply doesn't explain that.
Fire also doesn't explain which things failed.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
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?
I assume the live-streaming solution you're talking about is the one proposed by FLYHT. Their proposed solution, however, would only send essential data at the moment an event is detected, and it wouldn't supersed a standard flight data recorder. It wouldn't carry cockpit voice recording, for example, which was essential in determining what happened in the case of AF447. With the Air France case as an example, the search for the black box would still have to be carried out to close the investigation. And while it may have narrowed the search area, we already had an idea of where it went down based on transponder and ACARS data. And the ACARS transmissions also provided a good idea of what the precipitating event was in that case. It is therefore unclear what the FLYHT system would have added in value to that event.
As to the MH370 case, as I mentioned it is quite likely that whatever took down ACARS and the transponder systems in the aircraft would have also affected live-streaming by any black box recorder. And even with some data streamed, you would still need to find the cockpit voice and flight data recorder to get a complete picture.
Exactly, they were having some weird issue that they were trying to understand. They really didn't have anything to communicate with HQ ABOUT, and they had no idea that their actions were liable to cause the aircraft to stall, until it happened, at which point there was no time (or point) to calling for help.
OTOH a long drawn out fire that selectively cripples portions of the aircraft seems quite unlikely to have prevented any possibility of communicating. While it may be true that pilots 'fly first and talk later' they also generally call for help pretty quickly when they can. Its human nature if nothing else to want someone to know what's happening so they can share their predicament. Its not exactly HARD for a pilot to make a radio call. In fact the process of making a distress call is deliberately VERY simple and straightforward. It involves generally pushing a button and talking.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
The issue with AF447 is that they disregarded *all* instrument readings, not just the ones they were trained to in the event of an air data mismatch. So they never even realised they were in danger, because they didn't think the rapidly declining numbers were true - remember that the descent was 1G, so they didn't even have any feeling of descent, which added to their mistrust of the data they had infront of them.
So as the other poster said, there was nothing to call someone about other than they didn't know what was going on, and they weren't about to admit that to everyone listening.
Or a fire and a divert to another airport that didn't make it.
What airport? They turned west towards nowhere, and then after a significant period of time heading out to sea they turned south towards an even bigger nowhere.
That is why everybody thinks it was deliberate. Autopilots don't do turns unless somebody tells them to (either by giving it a new heading to fly, or programming a course into the FMS).
Really, if you're listening to reasonable people it's not expensive at all to have satellite-based ACARS enabled on all planes and have it include some basic flight information. In fact we knew from the first day or two that this plane had flown on for hours after the incident, the Malaysians were just not listening to the satellite techs. And if Malaysian air had simply paid the several thousand dollar fees we would have hours data to work with. These "real time tracking" people are just ambulance chasers. The problem here is that the plane flew on for so long after losing ground contact and Malaysian air was not paying for satellite service. So make intermittent satellite relayed updates mandatory. The additional infrastructure costs... $0. It's already in place.