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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.
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.
Maybe they caught fire.
I'm not an aviation expert, but if that were the case wouldn't you expect either A) the crew notice and radio in the emergency, which didn't happen, or B) the fire leads to a sudden explosion and crash, leading to fragments of the plane all over the sea where radar last placed it, debris all over the ocean and an oil slick, none of which have been noticed?
It's not just "speculation and conjecture" As the Daily Beast's companion article states (emphasis mine),
One item in particular jumps out from the cargo manifest: a consignment weighing 5,400 pounds that included a large number of lithium-ion batteries, radio accessories and chargers.
Tests conducted on a similar consignment of batteries in a cargo hold by the Federal Aviation Administration have shown that they are vulnerable to a “thermal runaway” when one battery overheats and a chain reaction occurs. In several of the tests, smoke and fumes reached the airplane’s cockpit in less than 10 minutes. Another test caused an explosion that blew open the cockpit door. This week United Airlines joined Delta in deciding to no longer carry shipments of the batteries in the cargo holds of passenger flights.
Yes, and that is a perfectly rational risk assessment. It is not possible to say how big the risk is exactly, but it is easy to avoid for a moderate additional cost, and therefore I would expect any airline to come to the same conclusion - unless maximising profit is the only significant consideration.
However, that does not really explain what happened, because it seems that the aircraft did not blow up, but it just followed a rather strange and irregular flight path.
And yet counterfeit parts are still a big problem in Asia-Africa airlines and maintenance facilities...
All the fancy computer systems in the world won't make a difference when there is money to be saved by working around them and somebody with the ethics to make it happen.
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.
What is the scrap value for a 777-200ER, what is its used parts value?
The untraceable used parts value for a 777-200ER is... ZERO. Used and reconditioned parts can be installed on other airplanes, but not without Certificate of Conformity / Form1 and so on. There is a lot of paperwork involved in getting a spare from one airplane onto another one. This includes full traceability. Without this paper trail, the part is useless. And faking a paper trail is possible, but doing so for all parts of a 777-200ER is beyond what's possible without raising red flags.
If it were a old 737, a DC-8 or a Cessna, It could be plausible. The people exploiting some old aircraft in some region of the world live under a, let say, different regulatory oversight. But I doubt any 777-200ER operate under conditions where you could use bootlegged market parts. You may as well sell the raw materials.
I believe that a much better reason to make an airplane AND its passenger disappear, is its payload.
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.
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