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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.
That is what I would expect too, perhaps a more accurate description of events might be "paperwork documenting MH370 beacon battery replacement may have been misplaced", but that's not going to generate the same number of page views.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
All these parts are centrally tracked. Alarms would go off at Boeing.
Let's not discuss alarms going off.
It's 2015 and we use GPS to find our way back to our car in a fucking parking lot and let we lost an airliner because it seemingly can't be outfitted with the same tech...
...all while watching the infamous black box arrive to the scene, reliant upon a dead battery.
Warning alarms should have been going off for years now.
There isn't a backup battery. The second battery was in a completely different unit. There is more than one beacon. Nobody is excusing shitty maintenance. Was merely pointing out that expiration date doesn't mean the battery just dies on that date.
And the batteries aren't stamped with a date themselves usually. Just a P/N and S/N. It's the responsibility of their maintenance practices to catch the expiration. And of course the batteries aren't stamped with a minimum voltage level. Nobody said that either. But almost everything is connected to computers, especially in the big planes. Since I don't work with the 777 I can't say for sure, but it's likely that if the battery wasn't working it would have triggered an alert somewhere in the cockpit.
> It's 2015 and we use GPS to find our way back to our car in a fucking parking lot and let we lost an airliner because it seemingly can't be outfitted with the same tech...
The MH370 incident plane was actually equipped with such equipment, but Malaysia Airlines was not in the best financial shape, so they decided to save money by cancelling the satellite-based portion of in-flight reporting, so they did not need to pay Inmarsat Inc. per kilobyte for the transmissions. Because of this, the satellite beam equipment was running on empty and only sent null pings once every hour or power-cycle. (Entirely neutering the equipment would have included some re-wiring work and MA did not want to bear any costs.)
Apparently, whoever hijacked the MH370 (90% likely the captain, 9,99% likely the co-pilot) was aware of the unsubscribed satnav, but did not understand the technicality of the sat up-link still running on empty. That is why whe have some 7 pings as the only PUBLIC clue about the whereabouts of MH370.
(On the other hand there should be ample SECRET info on MH370's flight southern path, because the austrialians' cover story as to why the JORN / Jindalee over-horizontal radar system was not running at the time, is quite laughable. About as credible as Putin's explanation for why the Kremlin security cameras were all turned off precisely for the time of Nemtsov's assassination...)
The military won't track every authorised, flight-planned route over every foreign territory. It's just pointless and expensive and outside the scope of the military.
On their own soil and to a certain extent nearby international waters, they rely on air traffic control and their systems to spot UNAUTHORISED aircraft. That's all they care about.
A plane on a detour is a daily occurence. A scheduled plane outside a border and no visible threat, isn't their problem.
And then you get into "which" military? The world's militaries are not co-operative. Likely one countries military did watch the aircraft, but then once it's leaving and not posing a threat it's up to another country to spot it and worry about it. Flying out over international waters into the middle of nowhere, which military is going to care? Even the Malaysian probably doesn't, or they'd be chasing their tails all done long for the slightest things of a company redirecting a plane for maintenance, to cover a late departure, etc.
And then you have to actually choose it as a target, watch it (GPS and GLONASS *do not transmit* from the aircraft, the aircraft uses signals SENT from the satellites to triangulate its OWN position, not the other way around - this is such a common misconception that it drives me mad), percieve it to be a threat worth monitoring and store all the data, including potentially classified capabilities, to hand off for a hunt for a plane where we knew everyone on board was dead the first day it doesn't check in.
It's just nothing to do with the military.
It's certainly nothing to do with any particular military for more than a fleeting moment at all.
And also, they probably have certain capabilities but they aren't active all the time and to this level of detail for everything that ever happens.
Sorry, but really don't buy into this stuff. The UK recently didn't realise that a couple of Soviet bombers were circling around its airspace until they'd already got half-way round and then it took almost forever for them to scramble an aircraft to meet them and see them off. And that's a CREDIBLE threat.
Spotting a commercial airplane going off-flight-plan is for the local air-traffic control. And between countries that link is capable of being "lost" between ATC's. And over international waters there IS not ATC.
Maybe someone did spot them and see them, but they would have paid them no attention as they weren't reported missing, weren't giving out Mayday, were broadcasting their positions as expected, over international waters, and so it never gets recorded and wouldn't be any use if they did (we knew roughly where they were flying, we don't know where they went down).
Even then, the ocean in the area is HUGE, you'd have a task spotting anything that you weren't specifically targeting.
The standard procedure, as far as I know (not being an expert), is upon noticing the fire, the pilots would have shut down all the circuits on the plane in order to find out if one was responsible for the fire. That would make using the radio difficult, if not impossible. Pilots do three things in order: 1. Aviate. 2. Navigate. 3. Communicate. Not getting to 3 can be expected under stressful circumstances.