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MH370 Beacon Battery May Have Been Expired
New submitter Limekiller42 writes Malaysia's transport ministry released its preliminary report on the disappearance of MH370 that disappeared almost a year ago during flight and has yet to be located. The report states that the maintenance records for the solid state flight data recorder underwater locater beacon [indicate that its battery] expired in December of 2012 and there is no evidence it was replaced prior to aircraft going missing.
Did it turn into a groud-to-air missile and blew the whole plane into bits and pieces?
They were also carrying a load of lithium batteries, which other passenger airlines refuse to carry due to past accidents
"It confirms that a large consignment of lithium-ion batteries was aboard the Boeing 777 and outlined in a red box was the warning: “The package must be handled with care and that a flammability hazard exists if the package is damaged. Special procedures must be followed in the event the package is damaged, to include inspection and repacking if necessary.”"
http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...
Wherever You Go, There You Are
mmm
I have postulated this before, but I strongly suspect we will see parts with MH370's serial numbers appear in other crashes/ maintenance records. I think the plane was the aircraft equivalent of hijacked/absconded with and dropped at a chopshop, likely by the crew.
Had it exploded mid air, some debris would have been spotted, if it went into the water intact, the aircraft would have been found. Thus I think it was landed and stripped, the passengers likely killed. What is the scrap value for a 777-200ER, what is its used parts value?
The one thing missing from all the reports is - just how bad is being over due really.
If this a 10 year battery with a 5 year precautionary change then who gives a flying rats....
On the other hand, a 1 year life and a 6 month precautionary change is a huge deal.
I have a suspicion that it is more likely to be the former and everything else is just hype and BS to make the story drag on (and on and on)
It was a random non linear event, all of our guesses will turn out to be wrong!
The only way this plane will show up in the ocean is if someone has the gps coordinates of where they dumped it.
One thing I wondered about is whether some country's military has a better fix on where the plane went down (the last partial handshake). Iridium only have a very sparse satellite array and hence could only generate very rough ranging information. But it seems inconceivable to me that many of the military constellations (e.g. GPS, GLONASS) do not have the capability to triangulate a well defined Iridium signal. I would have thought doing this would be bread and butter for them.
I wouldn't expect anyone to step up and talk about this 'capability', but I would have thought someone could have quietly nudged things towards a set of coordinates earlier on. I guess there is a lot of game playing when it comes to acknowledging any sort of military capability but it intrigues me to think that somewhere there could be people who have an accurate plot of that aircraft's journey.
Having said that, one of the revelations of the whole event is that you can fly an unidentified jumbo jet across the Malaysian peninsula, have it detected by expensive military radar, and then have the military do precisely nothing about it.
The batteries must be replaced or recharged:
1) When the transmitter has been in use for more than 1 cumulative hour; or
2) When 50 percent of their useful life (or for rechargeable batteries, 50 percent of their useful life or charge) has expired, as established by the transmitter manufacturer under its approval.
A cargo bay full of batteries but flat batteries in the flight recorder.
Mmm, fried Li-ion, meeeeooowwww, rrrroooaaaarrrr
I mean really, who cares at this point?
Sure, MH370 was brought down buy a crack team of internal scrap metal terrorists. Carefully planned for years with infitration of the crew just so they can sell the used parts to unscrupulous airlines who are rich enough to own 777s!
Riiiight.
What fucking planet you are on? Tin foil hat? You've got an entire suit made out of it.
As for now finding wreckage - 100,000 ton freighter ships have gone missing at sea without a trace, never mind a piddly little airliner.
"in both November and Golf registered aircraft]"
Is a Golf registered aircraft what Harrison Ford flies?
"and the tail stand as tall as four giraffes."
Is giraffes the new standard unit of height? I though they used elephants in asia.
Anyway four giraffes aren't any higher than one giraffe - its not like they can stand on each others head.
Yep, and the question still stands - what is the 'useful' life of the battery?
50% is a pretty big margin that makes for no difference if useful life is measured in years!
it's a bit like use before vs best before argument on food. A month after it expired does not always mean poison - unless it's milk.
If this a 10 year battery with a 5 year precautionary change then who gives a flying rats....
I think that attitude leads to abuse of engineering recommendations.
Physical reality is more complicated than "this battery will work for ten years and then stop". Some batteries lose 50% of their capacity in about three years, but they'll continue to work and be perfectly adequate for some users after five or six years when they've lost 75% of their capacity. Other users might find them unacceptable after two years, even though the manufacturer calls it a "three year battery".
When a battery is marketed as a "ten year battery" what that means is that the vendor thinks that most users will still be satisfied with the degraded performance of the battery after ten years. But the application engineer's judgment trumps the component designer's, because the application engineer knows exactly what he is demanding of the battery. If he says a ten year battery should be changed after five years, that battery is really a five year battery in that specific application.
But suppose the application engineer says, "this battery *should* be good for ten years, but we'd better change it at five," he's making a judgment call based on the likelihood that some people involved with this system might not have done what they are supposed to. Which is why everyone ought to do what they're supposed to. When you say "the maintenance schedule calls for swap-out at five years, but I'll stretch it to seven and it'll be good," you're making the implicit assumption you're the only lazy, greedy, irresponsible person involved in this business, which might not be true.
When everybody does what they're supposed to then the system performs *better* than it has to. That actually turns out to be a valuable property because sometimes you need a system to perform better than you'd anticipated. Like when you can't locate a lost plane's location more precisely than "somewhere in the South China Sea, or possibly in the Andaman Sea".
So not replacing a "ten year battery" at five years when a designer calls for it *is* a big deal. That's overriding the engineer's carefully considered judgment with the seat of your pants and hoping for the best.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The battery was not dead. It was just pining for the fjords.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
When the Indian Ocean search began, the first areas searched were the places judged to be where the plane was most likely to have come down. And those areas were searched with a pinger locator. After 30 days, the searchers moved on to other areas and used different equipment to map the sea floor.
What if the plane actually is in one of the first places they looked, though - but because it wasn't pinging, and they weren't scanning the sea floor, they missed it? Should the searchers return to those areas and look on the sea floor, or have they already?
there is no evidence it was replaced prior to aircraft going missing
And it seems even less likely that they were replaced after the aircraft went missing. Unless someone was able to get ahold of one of those liion batteries in the cargo hold and replace it.
Do you have ESP?
I don't get why we even need to find black boxes and such.
Because they work. They are exceptionally reliable and are almost always recovered. They are already installed on pretty much every large aircraft out there. And they provide invaluable information in helping to determine the cause of accidents. Furthermore no practical amount of telemetry is going to tell you everything about a crash so we still would want to find the wreckage anyway so why not have on board telemetry?
How much bandwidth would it really take to just stream that data in realtime over satellite, and how much would that cost compared to the tons of fuel in the tanks?
Ok, which global satellite system are you going to stream to? What is the protocol standard you intend to use? What are your plans to retrofit such equipment to every existing plane out there and how do you plan to pay for it? How do you plan to ensure the system is as reliable as the black boxes which have proven VERY reliable and are almost always recovered? These are solvable but not trivial problems that need to be addressed first.
It's not that streaming telemetry data is a bad idea but there are a LOT of technical details to work out, not the least of which are the standards involved and the economics of doing so.
I'm confused. Is this the same plane where they were still getting signals from the black box long after they had expected the battery to run dry?
The US military is about saving lives by being ready to fight anyone trying to take US lives.
If the past 200 years of history (the past 100 years in particular) are of any evidence, then the U.S. military is actually a bunch of war criminals who go around bombing people and blowing shit up because it's fun and profitable.
You can complain about the political shitheads that give them their orders all you want, but the US military personnel all signed up to protect Americans./quote>
No, dumb ass, they didn't. They signed up to get "free" college in exchange for their arms, legs, eyes, soul, etc.
Dissing them is like badmouthing the older older brother that's keeping the high school bullies from kicking your ass at grade school.
Actually, defending them is exactly like defending the Nazis. You fucking imbecile.
As to the military satellites, you know the military isn't going to give away their capabilities, even if it does mean a crashed plane won't be found.
MH370 won't be found because the CIA (the ones who hijacked it) don't want it to be found. Get a clue, dumb fuck.