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Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Experts Unable To Replicate Inmarsat Analysis
McGruber (1417641) writes "The lynchpin of the investigation of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been the pings from the plane to one of Inmarsat's satellites. The pings are the sole evidence of what happened to the plane after it slipped out of radar contact. Without them, investigators knew only that the plane had enough fuel to travel anywhere within 3,300 miles of the last radar contact—a seventh of the entire globe. Inmarsat concluded that the flight ended in the southern Indian Ocean, and its analysis has become the canonical text of the Flight 370 search. It's the bit of data from which all other judgments flow—from the conclusive announcement by Malaysia's prime minister that the plane has been lost with no survivors, to the black-box search area, to the high confidence in the acoustic signals, to the dismissal by Australian authorities of a survey company's new claim to have detected plane wreckage. But scientists and engineers outside of the investigation have been working to verify Inmarsat's analysis and many say that it just doesn't hold up."
"Analysis" would be my guess.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
If Inmarsat haven't released all of the data used in the analysis, why is anyone surprised that they can't recreate it?
TF Author is basically collating some information available on the web (we do that these days, you know). The original data that is attempting to refute INMARSAT's analysis is from two people (with blogs) which do have some expertise in the field:
So it should be straightforward to make sure that the math is right. That’s just what a group of analysts outside the investigation has been attempting to verify. The major players have been Michael Exner, founder of the American Mobile Satellite Corporation; Duncan Steel, a physicist and visiting scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center; and satellite technology consultant Tim Farrar. They’ve used flight and navigation software like STK, which allows you to chart and make precise calculations about flight scenarios like this one. On their blogs and in an ongoing email chain, they’ve been trying to piece together the clues about Flight 370 and make sense of Inmarsat’s analysis. What follows is an attempt to explain and assess their conclusions.
Yes, this is an appeal to authority, but this is also a popular, non scientific, non peer reviewed bit of journalism. I'm not expecting much more.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It's really not about the people on the plane. It never has been past the first few hours.
It's about a world wide industry that doesn't like expensive bits of it fall out of the sky for no reason. It's also not about the money. Hell, we could shut down an aircraft carrier battle group and feed the entire planet for a decade - don't look to humans to be rationale about that issue and don't try to conflate them.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
One thing to note, Georesoance did NOT find a plane. Further investigation into the company (though skipped over by the media outlets that got suckered by them) showed them to be just another shell company run by people with a long history of pseudoscience scams. They buy up defunct exploration companies in order to reuse the name, bilk some small investors that are eager to buy into the idea that a small pluky company has magic technology that 'the establishment' does not believe in.. usually ending up much poorer for the experience.
So basicly the media got fooled by some high tech psychics who normally would have been dismissed completely but somehow got just enough attention to be taken seriously.
Yes, you're partially right on that but in my opinion there are enough other incidents that can yield data - missing one is really not that major.
Not regarding the Boeing 777 there haven't. There's only been seven accidents, and only one prior to MH370 that involved any fatalities. And if the cause was a fault with the plane rather than human error/intervention, it's important to know because there's a whole bunch of other, more-or-less identical aircraft in use and it's entirely possible that one or more of them has the same problem.
In general, people seem to have a strong distaste, often backed by substantial investigative resources, for mysterious mysteries cropping up in the course what what is supposed to be a routine and mature process.
Commercial aviation (at least the large-aircraft stuff, stats for dinky little aircraft are less reassuring) is ordinarily so well hammered out that basically every air crash has a strong element of mystery to it and so the investigators come and try to figure out what went wrong.
Compare to cars, which kill plenty more people (and, unlike malnutrition and ghastly tropical parasites) people we usually care about; but still get minimal investigative attention because so many of the accidents are either 'operator was piss-drunk and/or exhausted', 'operator was flagrantly disregarding the rules for that area of the road', or 'vehicle maintenance was somewhere between horrendous and nonexistent'.
Wrong! The world produces more than enough food, and agricultural output grows four times for every three times the population grows. World hunger is a distribution problem, not a production problem. In fact, fully a third of the food produced in the world is wasted.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!