Slashdot Mirror


Australia Elaborates On a New Drift Model To Find MH370

hcs_$reboot writes Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared on Saturday, 8 March 2014, while flying from Malaysia to Beijing with 239 people on board. And 8 months later, after millions of dollars invested in a gigantic search operation, there is still no sign of the aircraft. Now, Australia is developing a new model to predict where the debris of the missing MH370 could wash up. Authorities had initially predicted that the plane's wreckage could drift and come ashore on Indonesia's West Sumatra island after about 4 months of Flight MH370's disappearance. "We are currently working... to see if we can get an updated drift model for a much wider area where there might be possibilities of debris washing ashore," search co-ordinator Peter Foley told reporters in Perth.

4 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Weaksauce by korbulon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A story about a model under development which may or may not lead ... to something? You call this news?

    Here's an idea: next time something this "newsworthy" comes up, don't post it!

  2. Re:Obsession by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    > The plane is gone

    And since we don't know why its gone, the event could repeat. If there was an evil genius behind the disappearance of MH370 and is not dead (the mastermind person was not onboard or it was a work of a whole shadowy organization) then the culprit is free to repeat the coup, as soon as the world looks the other way. And you can't be sure if the next plane going off the radar will be an anglo-saxon plane or a russian one or a japanese trans-oceanic flight. Sure, Malaysians are 3rd world people, let's forget about them, but the plane was a B777, America's finest produce and next time the same fate could befell your waifu and kids. (Malaysia does have her long sortiment of enemies and haters, but still much less than "world police" USA...)

    Anyhow, the lack of any confirmed floating debris in MH370 case is highly incredulous and there is a non-zero chance the plane landed intact somewhere and the pax got portioned into organs for transplant, Kosovo alban mafia yellow house style (with Diego Garcia military base being the main suspicion in such landing strip theories or maybe the plane continued from then on to Antartica, to land at a US research base ice strip or even a or "Reich-Reptoid" base in the wildest claims.)

    The factuality of the sat-pings is questioned by many, some say those never happened as sparks of electromagnetic transmissions in space, but some INMARSAT engineer created them out of thin air on his PC workstation, because some great power that be ordered him to come up with a fascinating cover story to woo the public's mind.

  3. Re:beyond the realm of plausibility by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So you're going to launch satellites which can find every airliner in the sky with IR over the entire world? Just in case one disappears again?

    Since we started launching satellites whose intent was to find military jets in the sky with IR over the entire world in the 1970s, I should think that it is not too much to ask that by 2014 we should have advanced the technology and built out the hardware to the point where we could in fact do that.

    And note that underwing engines are probably going to make IR detection particularly hard as it will block a direct view of the exhaust.

    No doubt. Perhaps there is a superior means which could be used today, although IR is still pretty good for this sort of job and the planes are still big IR sources. Our sensing and data processing technology have both advanced dramatically since then.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  4. Re:Obsession by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Let's put it this way--a full-size jet airliner carrying passengers has *never* been lost without a trace. Not ever. Every one that went down was eventually found.