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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
All these parts are centrally tracked. Alarms would go off at Boeing.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
Did you hear that Alanis?
damaged by dogma
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?
"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......
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?
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
Thousands separators in numbers are your friend.