New MH370 Analysis Again Suggests Plane Came Down Outside Search Area (theregister.co.uk)

An anonymous reader shares a report: New analysis of images thought to depict wreckage from missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370 suggest the Boeing 777 came down to the north of the area searched during efforts to find the plane. A new document [PDF] released yesterday by Geoscience Australia (GA) detailed analysis of four images captured by the PLEIADES 1A Earth-imaging satellite on March 23rd, 2014, not long after the March 8th disappearance of the plane. The images were provided to GA by the French Ministry of Defence. The images depict an area to the north and east of the area searched by underwater survey, and in-between areas where search and rescue operations were conducted in the wake of the plane's disappearance. The image displays the areas covered by underwater survey in yellow and the search and rescue zones in red. Extensive manual analysis of the images -- there was not enough data to use machine learning -- yielded a dozen objects that researchers were happy to classify as "probably not natural." Several of those objects were clustered in the northern parts of the areas depicted in the photos. The document is at pains to point out that it is not possible to identify the objects as airplane debris. The new analysis referred back to drift pattern analysis made on debris known to have come from MH370 and released in December 2016. That analysis suggested the search area be extended by 25,000km2. More detailed drift analysis released in April 2017 also called for a new search to the north, as did a July talk by scientists from Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

Comments

Black Box satellite Links

[MikeDataLink]

I find it very surprising that the black boxes in airplanes don't communicate with a satellite in this day and age. The technology has been around for 30 years at this point.

Re:Black Box satellite Links

[pz]

We know as much as we do about the flight path and probable whereabouts of the airframe because various parts of the plane were indeed communicating via satellite.

A secondary, and perhaps surprising (at least it was to me) issue is that satellite coverage isn't universal. There are large parts of the world, including the Indian Ocean, that have very poor coverage. It's not unlike cell phone towers which are only deployed where they are most needed.

Re:Black Box satellite Links

[FaxeTheCat]

Satelite communication use very high frequencies, which are attenuated by pretty much everything.
Considering that the black box most likely is not in the open air with clear path to a satelite, the chance of its signals reaching the satelite are pretty slim.
In the case of MH370, the black box is under water, so the signal would most likely not even reach the surface.

Historically, there are very few cases where the black boxes have not been found, so there is little reason to change how it is tracked.

Re:Black Box satellite Links

[MikeDataLink]

Considering that the black box most likely is not in the open air with clear path to a satelite, the chance of its signals reaching the satelite are pretty slim.

Agreed, but if the plane was transmitting GPS coordinates up until the box went under water, we'd know exactly where it was and where to look for it.

Re:Black Box satellite Links

[jandrese]

The service is available, but operating satellites costs money so the service costs money and cheapskate airlines don't like paying for a service they'll use only once in a blue moon. If planes were being regularly lost in the ocean this would probably be an easier case to make, but modern aircraft are so damn reliable that the expense is "wasted" most years.

I'd definitely advocate for this system for bush pilots and other such people who operate small aircraft over rugged terrain regularly, but they tend to be even more cost conscious than big airlines.

Re:Black Box satellite Links

[jandrese]

It depends on the satellite system in question. The Inmarsat service MH370 was using has good coverage on the Indian ocean. Other services do have spotty coverage, but it's not some big dead zone. It's a shame Iridium is so damn expensive, because this would be a great use case for it. You could easily cram a position report into a SMS message and send it via Iridium every few minutes, and the Iridium antennas are small and low power so they don't impact the aircraft much.

Re:Black Box satellite Links

[Anubis IV]

And a backup to that could be to gradually leak micro-beads with a distinct chemical signature that would float to the top to leave a trail. That way if the broadcasting electronics are damaged, there is a secondary way to find sunken planes.

Modern black boxes are already designed to emit an ultrasonic pulse that can be picked up via acoustic locating equipment. It starts once the black box hits the water, occurs once per second for the next 30-40 days, and should be able to be picked up from 2000-3000m away under typical conditions, or even further if the conditions are good. Even so, most regulatory agencies are already bumping the battery life up, just because 30 days was viewed as too few after MH370.

Really, when you get down to it, our society's record for locating black boxes is remarkably good. Since the 1960s when they were introduced, we've had thousands of crashes, many of which would have involved recovering the black box, yet we've only failed to do so—or took a long time to do so—in a few dozen of those cases (here's an incomplete list). As such, there hasn't been much pressure to rely on a satellite uplink or similar system, given that they're significantly more expensive to produce, much more complex (more parts that can fail), and most of them would require ongoing support and maintenance costs (e.g. something on the ground that collects the data).

Even so, the UN's regulatory agency that covers this stuff (the ICAO) has already mandated that by 2020, all new planes are required to have some method to ensure that the black box data is recoverable in case of a crash, whether by ejecting the box before the crash (like military craft) or through continuous transmission to the ground over the course of the flight, so these sorts of issues will hopefully be things of the past in a few more years.

Re:Black Box satellite Links

[bobbied]

Considering that the black box most likely is not in the open air with clear path to a satelite, the chance of its signals reaching the satelite are pretty slim.

Agreed, but if the plane was transmitting GPS coordinates up until the box went under water, we'd know exactly where it was and where to look for it.

They actually have this ability now, it's part of the maintenance system, where failures and exception logs get forwarded to the airline/manufacturer while the aircraft is in flight so the mechanics can be ready to repair the systems at it's destination. The airline though, hadn't paid the subscription fees to get the maintenance data forwarded via satellite so we don't have this data.

Re:Black Box satellite Links

[Anonymous Coward]

Go back to grammar school. You don't advocate "for" something. That is illiterate. You just advocate something. Same as "recommend".

Well someone better tell the Harvard Business Review then: How Not to Advocate for a Woman at Work.

Or, you know, language... fluid... evolve....

Begone! Back to Charlottesville, you nazi!

Misleading title

[the_skywise]

The problem isn't that they searched in the wrong place. (They searched in the areas that were most likely where the plane came down with the info they had at the time.)
The article is about how computer analysis shows the wreckage to be potentially elsewhere but the government won't fund another search
Aside from the cost it will still be difficult to find the wreckage as the black box beacons are long dead and even if they do find the wreckage after all this time there won't be much to salvage or to reconstruct what possibly happened aside from the data recorders.
It's up to private salvage teams at this point.

Re:Misleading title

[jandrese]

The reason to do the search is to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening in the future.

Probably not natural

[93 Escort Wagon]

Given how long we've been sailing the seven seas, and given it hasn't exactly been historically uncommon for ships to sink - or, nowadays, for containers to fall off ships - identifying objects as "probably not natural" may very well not be the big red flag the authors try to imply it is.

Re:Simulations are guesses without data

[raburton]

What has always been missing in the search for MH370 is MH370.

Fixed that for ya ;-)

They couldn't find a sunk cruiser

[jfdavis668]

The cruiser HMS Sydney was sunk in that same area during WWII with the loss of all hands. They didn't find it until 2008. If it took them that long to find a massive warship, it's going to take a while to find bits of a crashed plane.

Ships use them...

[thegreatbob]

Why are aircraft not fitted with multiple impact-resistant EPIRB-like devices designed to separate from the aircraft and float to the surface? That and/or some sort of massive dye pack. Of course, a high speed impact with the water might destroy them (blackboxes can and have been destroyed by impact too), but having multiple locators on board seems like a reasonable idea. These things obviously do nothing for those who perish in an incident, but doing everything we can to obtain data on failures allows us to be better prepared in the future.