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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.
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
All these parts are centrally tracked. Alarms would go off at Boeing.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
pretty shitty considering that you're supposed to be buying parts that have a known history only.
not worth the trouble. kidnapping would be more profitable. dropped at a chopshop? where?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Perhaps it flew to the Ukraine and rammed the other one?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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.
dropped at a chopshop? where?
Imagine the look on the guys face. Walk up to a shady car dealers shop. Ask of they can handle an "needs to go missing" vehicle. And then you turn up in your Boeing 777. No problem right?
1) Let a 777 go missing ...
2) Drive it to a chopshop
3)
4) Profit.
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.
And yet counterfeit parts are still a big problem in Asia-Africa airlines and maintenance facilities...
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...)
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...
If you think they're bad, you should talk to the neckbeards flying single engine planes. You'd think that the ECU in your 1975 Chevy was invented by the devil himself:
http://macsblog.com/2014/08/pi...
I don't get why we even need to find black boxes and such. 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?
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.
East Hoboken, anything can be lost there for a price.
Strange how Boeing were able to supply engine data to help in the original search then...
And I thought Alex Jones was a nutjob.
Please cite a source other than Coast to Coast AM/ Prison Planet for your Palestinians being used for involuntary organ donation.
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.
While there are no doubt many shady maintenance people in GA the pool of 777 operators & maintainers is much more restricted & now under even higher surveillance. Claims that that anyone could make money off of parts from the 777 do not pass the sniff test.
The USN has accurate MAD maps of certain parts of the oceans like the norwegian sea & the GIUK gap but not of the entire globe & in particular not of the middle of the Indian Ocean.
You're beyond reaching in both your claims.
I don't get why we even need to find black boxes and such. 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?
because the regulations were passed decades ago
you are 100% correct, they should abolish black boxes and stream to satellites
we just need some sort of dramatic event that makes people notice and catalyzes them to act
in a sane world, MH370 is that event
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The familes of the dead/missing?
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
I shoud have added - you insensitive clod!
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
Did you hear that Alanis?
damaged by dogma
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?/quote?
Quite a bit for a satellite based system, actually. Audio is going to be the biggest bandwidth hog, let's say 50kb/sec for reasonably quality. Add another 10kb/sec for telemetry, things like control states, sensor readings etc. Multiply by say 8,000 commercial airlines in the air at any one time (low estimate). Satellite bandwidth is quite limited due to physics, and has to be shared in a somewhat inefficient way due to the hidden transmitter problem. We could put more satellites up, but the cost would be extremely high for the sake of a few incidents per decade where the black box is impossible to find.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Bullshit: Alarms would not go off at Boeing. You have no idea what you are talking about. The OPERATORS of the aircraft maintain the aircraft and its records, not the manufacturer. This would be 100% on the carrier and its maintenance personnel.
FTFY.
For the record: The data was sent to the engine manufacturer, Rolls-Royce, since that was the only monitoring Malaysia Airlines paid for.
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.
"in both November and Golf registered aircraft]"
Is a Golf registered aircraft what Harrison Ford flies?
I think they could get away with no streaming the audio -- that is what the blackbox is for, just telemetry data (and doesn't need to be every second, hell maybe once a minute) saying "I {plane_id} am right here (lat, lng, altitude)"
"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.
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.
I had a similar idea at the time. Rather than a chopshop, though, I figured somebody, somewhere, had need for a passenger jet for something nefarious. Or for that matter, something legitimate, but that the authorities would find nefarious. Basically, a need for a large jet, that for some reason could not be obtained through normal channels.
The longer it is that no unexplained jet shows up doing something no major airline expects, though, increases the probability that I've been watching too many spy movies.....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
The vast majority of airplanes crash in an obvious place. Very very few black boxes have never been found (10? 12?). People want cleap flights, and the cost benefit of real time satellite is dubious. It is more to satisfy the curious in the tiny tiny set of edge cases like this.
Wrong plane, right point. Expired or not it seems extremely unlikely that the battery "just happened" to be dead on a flight where all other communication and tracking was lost, and the pilot apparently went to great lengths to obfuscate their flight path. The disappearance *might* be explainable by a lightning strike or other sudden electronics-shorting disaster, combined with extreme incompetence of the pilot, but it seems MUCH more likely that the plane has been found because someone went to great lengths to ensure that it wouldn't be.
At best this raises the suspicion that somebody in the chain of responsibility for maintenance and/or flight assignment may have been involved. (How do they decide which plane flies which route?)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Actually, no.
I'm in aviation and, like most disciplines where safety is crucial, (applies to computer systems, as well), when things go bad, they go really bad in multiple ways.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
It appears that someone on the aircraft tried to disable all telemetry in this case. There would need to be an off switch for any such system to allow for maintenance. I suppose you could make it so that the switch could not be operated in flight, but if for example it failed and started causing interference you would want the crew to be able to disable it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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?
IIRC someone mentioned that they could add satellite communications and the ability for the plane to upload its telemetry every so often and it would add about $100000 to the cost of the plane. Of that, I'd guesstimate that the hardware and software costs about $1000, the FAA certification costs $49000 and the CEO's bonus costs $50000.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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?
you really think streaming to satellite is more expensive than black box maintenance?
It is more to satisfy the curious in the tiny tiny set of edge cases like this.
*accidents* are tiny edge cases. which is exactly what this kind of system is for. yes: you want to satisfy all curiosities, absolutely
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Or, it's to show exactly what happened, when and where, so that the appropriate response can be provided instead of searching hundreds of thousands of square miles that may or may not be anywhere close to where the plane actually crashed.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I figured somebody, somewhere, had need for a passenger jet for something nefarious. Or for that matter, something legitimate, but that the authorities would find nefarious. Basically, a need for a large jet, that for some reason could not be obtained through normal channels.
I expect someone needed to move a bunch of henchmen in polo neck jumpers to their underground lair beneath a volcano. Or something.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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 think they could get away with no streaming the audio -- that is what the blackbox is for, just telemetry data (and doesn't need to be every second, hell maybe once a minute) saying "I {plane_id} am right here (lat, lng, altitude)"
There were for a long time two "black boxes," with one, the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), specifically for cockpit audio (which is frequently essential in crash investigations). Now-a-days, they are likely to be combined into one solid state Flight Data Recorder (FDR) unit, but the CVR capability is still there.
These units are generally mounted in the tail of the airplane, and are of course sealed while in use. I think it is highly unlikely that the pilot messed with the FDR before flight, and impossible that he did it during flight.
Did you hear that Alanis?
It's still not as ironic as a song about irony where none of the fucking examples are ironic at all.
Or was she being ironic?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Thousands separators in numbers are your friend.
> 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
Everything up until that last statement is great. We have no proof that the aircraft was hijacked, only theories. My guess is that whatever happened to MH370 involved an inflight fire and possibly decompression. The flight crew entered two waypoints into the nav computer (exactly the two you'd use to land at the nearest 777 capable airport given the wind direction at the time) and set the autopilot, then set out to fight the fire. They didn't survive the fire and/or decompression. The aircraft then continued on it's way, going into heading hold mode after the last waypoint was passed and flew on until the fuel supply was exhausted.
Your theory says that somebody committed suicide and decided to take 200+ people with them, but left no note, didn't make a radio call, nothing. Suicide is usually a cry for help and usually people who try it, leave notes or some kind of communication. They usually don't take others with them, or if they do, they make sure to leave some kind of statement where it will be found and their grievances will be heard. I don't think the pilot or co-pilot did this on purpose.
Well, for satellites, not a lot - even though modern flight data recorders can record over a thousand parameters at a time (satellite bandwidth is huge), even full high-res cockpit voice is but a drop.
The problem is more political than anything - why do you think we have 30 minute CVRs, despite the technology existing to record days worth of multichannel, high resolution digital audio? Just as a point of comparison, 30 minutes of CD quality audio is around 325MB or so. We can stuff 128GB+ in an SD card, and you could in theory have terabytes of that in the tiny space allocated for the memory (the rest is all survivability stuff, which can record an inordinate amount fo audio.
Then there's the whole storage/transmission thing - which country gets the right to store it? You want the US to do it? China? Find one that everyone trusts with that information - Switzerland probably comes close.
Hell, why not ask why don't we have externally-accessible data recorders? They exist today, are mature technology, auto-eject (and float!) on landing in water (with GPS beacons), can be propelled away from an accident on land (it's simple springs) to help get it away from fires and other stuff. Instead of the recorder sinking to the bottom of the ocean or inside the fuselage, an externally accessible one seems to be able to solve the problem using what we have today.
The battery was probably working, but it no longer had the same capacity it should have. If so, then when the drain increased due to additional activity, like having to ping or something, it died far quicker than it should have.
Did a battery issue in the black box cause the crash? No way.
Does a maintenance error of something basic like that indicate the possibility that there could be other far more serious issues? Emphatically yes.
Add streaming data to satellites, wonderful.
However, getting rid of the black boxes would be really dumb.
In case you hadn't noticed, there are plenty of things that can disrupt satellite communications, including solar flares, and just plain normal storms. To have a recorded record of when shit really hits the fan is of a value beyond reasonable measurements for finding out what happened so you can take steps to prevent it occurring again.
After all, it's not one or the other, you actually an have both.
Nitpick, but GM didn't use ECUs until the 1980s.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
At best this raises the suspicion that somebody in the chain of responsibility for maintenance and/or flight assignment may have been involved. (How do they decide which plane flies which route?)
If someone from the maintenance team was involved in a conspiracy to take down the plane I really doubt they would've recorded the evidence in the maintenance logs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
They're in there. Have you adjusted your slashdot localization settings?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Well, sending the data to the aircraft owner is probably the simplest solution. Regulators can demand that data from them when it is needed. That is basically how all the other logging/monitoring/etc works. If you land a plane in the USA the FAA can ask to look at your maintenance records. If you don't fly in the US, then the FAA won't bother you, though some other country likely will.
I agree that politics still plays a part. A big issue is pilot privacy concerns. They're basically stuck in the cockpit 12 hours at a stretch and they want to be able to chat during downtime about whatever and not have the boss playing it back. I think that is a legitimate concern - we definitely don't want them trying to circumvent the recording equipment or trying to avoid being in the cockpit.
Perhaps give legal protection to the voice data, maybe even having it escrowed, but record EVERYTHING. In the event of a crash the private conversations of the pilots are of secondary concern to the public interest. In the event of a normal flight, then those concerns should be respected to keep out the nosy. The thing is that we have cameras all over the place in society and spooks recording all our phone calls as it stands - at some point we have to just manage it and not try to avoid it.
I don't see the point of making a plane disappear, particularly if no one took any credit for it. It would be a lot of work for no understandable payoff. A terrorist group, for instance, would trumpet about how they crashed the plane. Even if it didn't go exactly according to their plan, they just successfully killed a couple hundred people. Mission accomplished, right? Even if it was a lone wolf, where is the YouTube manifesto?
In this case, the only understandable motive to me for a plot is making Malaysian Airlines look like a bad carrier. As terrorists could care less about that, it implies some sort of business sabotage. Then having a plane go erratic and disappear without a trace would be effective.
And then having a team of "Russian rebels" shoot down a plane of the same airline just a bit later makes more sense. But that would be one hell of a plot if they can infiltrate into a war zone, and get someone to shoot down a plane with a missile. I'd hate to piss off the guy who was able to make both happen. That's state actor/super-villain territory.
Of course, what is possible isn't the same as what is probable. What is most probable is actually a massive system failure causing a loss of communications and navigation and then simply the pilots getting lost while flying without navigation systems. That is consistent with a wrong turn leading out into open ocean and flight until fuel runs out.
Yeah, but bad enough that the pilot would fly out to sea, not just once but *three times*? And nobody on the plane had a working cell phone that could be used to update air control and/or request assistance any of the times they were over land?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Study up on cell phone architect and topology and you will discover the answer to part of your question.
Cells beam out and down and are not located over water.
And, unfortunately, sometimes when things go wrong, a cascade of fail-safe systems domino down the line, leaving no safety net.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.