Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Experts Unable To Replicate Inmarsat Analysis 245
McGruber (1417641) writes "The lynchpin of the investigation of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been the pings from the plane to one of Inmarsat's satellites. The pings are the sole evidence of what happened to the plane after it slipped out of radar contact. Without them, investigators knew only that the plane had enough fuel to travel anywhere within 3,300 miles of the last radar contact—a seventh of the entire globe. Inmarsat concluded that the flight ended in the southern Indian Ocean, and its analysis has become the canonical text of the Flight 370 search. It's the bit of data from which all other judgments flow—from the conclusive announcement by Malaysia's prime minister that the plane has been lost with no survivors, to the black-box search area, to the high confidence in the acoustic signals, to the dismissal by Australian authorities of a survey company's new claim to have detected plane wreckage. But scientists and engineers outside of the investigation have been working to verify Inmarsat's analysis and many say that it just doesn't hold up."
An what? (Score:2, Insightful)
really?
Re:An what? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:An what? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Analysis" would be my guess.
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"Analysis" would be my guess.
It would have been hilarious if the slashdot allowed two more characters in the title.
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It's a common first name in the Netherlands. I assume she's a spokesperson or something.
The explanation is simple (Score:5, Funny)
The aircraft did not crash; it was hijacked by the US Government, and flown to Diego Garcia under remote control after all the passengers were killed by asphyxiation at 45,000 feet. After landing the plane was refuelled, its logos painted over/covered up, and its valuable cargo (next generation radios with SDR technology) removed. It then took off again and flew on to its final destination--probably Kandahar, Afghanistan--where it will be outfitted with a large bomb (read: nuke). It will then be flown into an American city to cause a 'false flag' attack which will be blamed on Iran, North Korea, etc, as a casus belli for World War 3.
I would tell you more but som....hang on, there's a knock at the door.
Re:The explanation is simple (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, that knock on your door is your mother.
Time for your meds.
Re:The explanation is simple (Score:5, Funny)
Also, don't forget to tell her "Happy Mother's Day!" ;)
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but, but, but fire cannot melt metal! This is how we know blacksmiths use their amazing psychic powers to soften metal, and the whole "forge" thing was just part of the cover-up!
Sheesh. You know, I love a good conspiracy theory but the Truthers couldn't even tell an entertaining story, even if you excuse their lack of understanding of middle-school science.
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You know, I love a good conspiracy theory but the Truthers couldn't even tell an entertaining story, even if you excuse their lack of understanding of middle-school science.
On one hand I want to agree with you, but on the other hand I'll point out their views were pretty popular on Slashdot about 10 years ago.
Of course your point about blacksmiths being part of the cover up means nobody has dug deep enough to uncover the true depths of the conspiracy. Were medieval guilds in on the plot? And what about the role of the Templars?
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Now you're talking! Any good conspiracy theory ties back to the Templars! What was in that mysterious haywain?
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It is clear that the conspiracy is wide ranging indeed, both geographically and temporally, but the role of the Templars may be a diversion from the true miscreants. Do you think my post illumes I'm right, or does it illume I'm naughty?
He who would solve the mystery must remember
Everywhere lies and deceit await to ensnare
Listen to the inspiration of wisdom and always seek
Perfect knowledge where it may be found
Mark my words or you may find
Eternal frustration is your portion
!
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but, but, but fire cannot melt metal! This is how we know blacksmiths use their amazing psychic powers to soften metal, and the whole "forge" thing was just part of the cover-up!
Sheesh. You know, I love a good conspiracy theory but the Truthers couldn't even tell an entertaining story, even if you excuse their lack of understanding of middle-school science.
Have you ever smelted metals? I have... aluminum will melt (fully, to molten) in the coals of a good wood fire if you stack the logs around it (or embed the crucible in a bed of hot coals). Copper you can do in an electric kiln (1900+F), same for brass. Steel, including structural steel, requires 2900+F - not temperatures you could ever get in an office furniture/paper/etc fire, it requires either an induction furnace or a gas/fuel/forced-air fired furnace to get anywhere near the temperatures needed.
Eve
Re:The explanation is simple (Score:5, Informative)
But that's the point, of course. Blacksmiths don't (usually) melt the metals they work with, just soften them a bit. And the construction of the various WTC buildings of course depended on the rigidity of the steel they were built with (in different ways in the different buildings).
Did you know there's a technical term for materials that, rather than melting with an abrupt state change, go through a long transition becoming gradually more plastic and malleable? We call those "metals".
play Jenga to find out, or turn on your stove (Score:5, Informative)
More specifically, it collapsed as though the FIRST floor could no longer support the weight of the entire building on top of it. You can see that in the videos.
You can see the exact same thing in your kitchen if you have a gas stove. I know it's more fun to read spy stories than to actually try an experiment, but just know that I'm going to ignore any replies from you until you try the experiment yourself.
Go get a few wire coat hangers or similar metal wire, and some pans. In your kitchen, set up some wire supports to hold a pan four inches above the flame. Try to make the supports symmetrical, like the way a professional building would be designed. Pretend that the wire costs a million dollars per inch, so you'll use the minimum amount of wire necessary to hold the pan up. A bundt cake pan or something with a central opening would be the best simulation, simulating the center elevator columns.
Also keep in mind WTC 7 was tricky to design because the first couple of floors were built around / over an existing power station, so it was designed to use fewer, stronger supports than most buildings would. (You can't put a 40' wide support column right through a part of the power station).
Once the first pan is in place, add three more "floors" (pans), so you have four or more floors, each a few inches apart.
Now tturn the fire on high and wait 5-15 minutes. What Wil happen is that the heat will soften the metal supports just a bit at first, then more so as they heat up. At some point (as high as 500-600 degrees), they'll get soft enough that they collapse under the weight of all those pans. The stack will drop, just like WTC 7.
I KNOW yyou want to argue with me right now. That's cool, you can do that. But first, go in your kitchen and give it a try. Then you can argue from actual knowledge as opposed to repeating silly ghost stories about topics you're unfamiliar with.
the two sources that said molten (Score:3)
The "molten" stories trace back to two original sources. One is describing what they saw, the other is describing a photo. Both refer to red hot beams in the days after. An exact quote is "lifting a molten steel beam". Obviously if it were truly molten, it wouldn't be a beam anymore and noone would be lifting it.
This makes sense, because there's nothing that would maintain molten steel for weeks. About the only things that could do that would be certain types of fault lines or an underground coal seam.
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WTC7 burned uncontrolled for hours, as the surviving first responders had higher priorities. It eventually failed as any building would (but few do in peacetime, as the fire department can generally put them out within the considerable time the thermal insulation sprayed on the steel beams usually provides).
WTC7 had a cantilevered design IIRC, with the weight of the front half of the building mostly supported by beams the length of the building above the lobby (to give the lobby a large open space with no
Re:The explanation is simple (Score:5, Informative)
Just replying so that anyone else reading this isn't suckered in by your mistakes or ignorance:
1. Steel gets 'soft' enough between 500 and 700 DeC to lose most of its structural properties.
2. A typical fire - like something that could start in an office - can easily get to 700+ DegC. This includes the gas coming off the fire.
3. A bit of jet fuel could easily set most things inside an office building alight.
Source - I design buildings not to fall over in a fire.
Who? (Score:3, Interesting)
The author of the article claiming that experts cannot replicate the data appears to be the editor of a social science / STS journal, not by training an engineer. Although I don't myself know enough about the subject to be able to refute either the Inmarsat claims or this article's refutation, I think it's notable that the people supporting the claim are engineers who specialize in satellite stuff, while the person refuting the claim is what appears to be a philosopher; I'd also add that the author portrays himself as an "investigator working on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370", but this appears to be a self-assigned title rather than his position as part of any formal or professional investigation. Looking at the scholarship of the journal he edits, it appears to have some level of rigour--IE it does not appear to be a vanity publication, so I'm not trying to cast out the guy as a crank, just to caution that I think the strength and balance of the headline and the post here place an awful lot of confidence in the article's credibility.
Re:Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
TF Author is basically collating some information available on the web (we do that these days, you know). The original data that is attempting to refute INMARSAT's analysis is from two people (with blogs) which do have some expertise in the field:
So it should be straightforward to make sure that the math is right. That’s just what a group of analysts outside the investigation has been attempting to verify. The major players have been Michael Exner, founder of the American Mobile Satellite Corporation; Duncan Steel, a physicist and visiting scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center; and satellite technology consultant Tim Farrar. They’ve used flight and navigation software like STK, which allows you to chart and make precise calculations about flight scenarios like this one. On their blogs and in an ongoing email chain, they’ve been trying to piece together the clues about Flight 370 and make sense of Inmarsat’s analysis. What follows is an attempt to explain and assess their conclusions.
Yes, this is an appeal to authority, but this is also a popular, non scientific, non peer reviewed bit of journalism. I'm not expecting much more.
Why is this a surprise? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not so.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not so. These critics may or may not be correct when they raise several issues, including the plane seeming to be moving at a good clip before it was taking off. But on the most critical of factors, they're totally wrong:
"Recall that the Marco-Polo math alone doesn’t allow you to tell which direction pings are coming from. So how could Inmarsat claim to distinguish between a northern and southern path at all? The reason is that the satellite itself wasn’t stationary."
No, the slow drift of the satellite wasn't a factor. I've yet to hear Immarsat formal statement of their rationale, but their graph shows quite clearly what it was. Their reasoning hinges on the fact that the plane began its deviant flight above the latitude of the satellite. That is quite important.
If the plane flies northward along a relatively fixed course, the doppler shift will aways show it moving away (down doppler). However, it the plane flies southward on a steady course, there'll be a short time (one ping it turns out) when it is approaching the latitude of the satellite and thus giving a more up (or less down) doppler. That's what you see in the Immarsat chart. Once the aircraft has crossed the satellite's latitude, then its southward path will have it traveling away from the satellite just like the northern route. It's that notch DOWN at between 18:30 and 19:30 followed by a rise upward that says southbound.
That said the critics do raise some relevant issues and they do point out the Immarsat needs to release a detailed report with all their reasoning, so it can be more intelligently critiqued.
Re:Not so.... (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with this analysis is that the Doppler "spike" would not have come from a due South trajectory. It is most likely to have come from a change of trajectory almost directly towards teh satellite. The implication is that this was a "ping" that just happened to have occurred during a turning manouevre; given that the SATCOM terminal on the aircraft uses a high-gain steerable antenna, it is not surprising that an "unscheduled" ping took place during a turn, as the beam-steering unit reacquired the satellite.
The other massive confounder with this analysis is that the SATCOM terminal necessarily pre-compensates its transmissions for Doppler shift. The channel bandwidth in the Inmarsat Classic Aero system is sufficiently narrow that when received at the Satellite, the center frequency must be +/-250 Hz of nominal. As Doppler shift due to the expect motion of an aircraft is in the region of +/- 800 Hz, this can only be done by active pre-compensation.
You'll notice from the Inmarsat Data that the uncorrected Doppler shift is within 250 Hz of expected, indicating that some pre-compensation is present.
Without details of how the compensation works, analysis is very difficult, if not impossible. A scan of the patent literature suggests that both measured-Doppler compensation (i.e. the aircraft terminal measures Doppler shift on a satellite broadcast channel, and applies an equivalent compensation on its transmissions) and estimated Doppler compensation (i.e. the satellite terminal communicates with the aircraft's navigation reference unit to obtain heading, and velocity information, and then computes an expected Doppler shift which is applied to transmissions) may be in use.
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Further, the Jindalee Operational Radar Network in Australia is an over the horizon radar capable of sensing a four seater airplane like a cessna from 2600km away. Why didn't they see a plane 6-8 times larger and several hundred kilometers closer?
Re:Not so.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Couple of possibilities:
1) They did and they are not saying. Seems unlikely as the fact that Jindalee can, for example, track commercial airliners all the way from Singapore, is pretty much common knowledge.
2) They didn't track it because they couldn't. Sadly, despite the money spent on it, Jindalee is great when it works, but unfortunately it doesn't work all the time. This partly explains why Australia has had to buy expensive AWACS aircraft as well as spending big money on Jindalee.
Somebody was up to something. (Score:2, Interesting)
I've yet to see a reasonable explanation for the loss of telemetry and apparent maneuvers to avoid radar.
So far the implicit assumption is that whoever was at the controls failed in their plan and the plane crashed.
Considering the Indonesian 'navy' is a bunch of pirates, I would start by looking there.
We still don't know what was in the cargo hold or if there was a billionaire on board. Did that plane have a richer suite?
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All manner of assumptions tied into interpreting the pings. Airspeed/altitude and straight line course are all assumed to get 'the place'. Flying low and slow and landing somewhere in Java also fits the data. As I said up-thread a large number of piracy incidents every year involve the Indonesian navy. Air piracy is not out of their reach, and they own hangers big enough to hide a 777. But they wouldn't do it just for the plane. There had to be something or someone special on board.
Initially I assumed th
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I've yet to see a reasonable explanation for the loss of telemetry and apparent maneuvers to avoid radar.
There are reasonable explanations, just not innocent ones.
Re:Somebody was up to something. (Score:4, Interesting)
We still don't know what was in the cargo hold or if there was a billionaire on board. Did that plane have a richer suite?
We do know that Freescale Semiconductor, a US technology company having ties to both the Bush family and the Bin Laden family, had 20 senior staff on board Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. They had just launched a new electronic warfare device for military radar systems in the days before the Boeing 777 went missing, which caused it's stock prices to nearly double in the month prior to the crash; stock prices which have been steadily declining towards their previous levels since the bluefin failed to find wreckage.
Does that count?
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> blah blah stupid blah blah nearly double tinfoil aliens
Going from $20 to $23 is not "double". Google "Freescale Semiconductor chart" to see the stick price. Everything else you said is equally as accurate.
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The actual conspiracy theory is that it's five people at Freescale who are authors on a particular patent, and it's not true anyway, but it's funny to see how this one has mutated.
http://www.snopes.com/politics... [snopes.com]
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No mayday, hours more flight based on satellite pings.
Re:Simpler: Electrical Fire (Score:5, Interesting)
The rest of the explanation is that the crew were overcome by smoke/fumes. (They're supposed to have independent (bottled) oxygen supply, but it's happened before.) The aircraft flew on autopilot on the last entered heading until it ran out of fuel. (Which has also happened before.)
Why didn't they call a mayday earlier? The rule of thumb for pilots is: Aviation/Navigation/Communication. First you get control of the aircraft, understand what is happening. Then you work out your position/course and heading (actual and intended). Then, and only then, do you worry about telling anyone about it. If they were caught between "Navigation" and "Communication", that would explain their actions and their silence.
You are probably scoffing and going "Bah, what are the odds of that!" But your alternative scenarios are "Plane was hijacked by... conspiracy... secret landing... passengers killed/being held.... etc..."
So the contrast is, "Thing which has happened to aircraft several times before", versus "Bizarre conspiracy by shadowy forces". I prefer the odds of the former until there's actual evidence of the latter.
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You are probably scoffing and going "Bah, what are the odds of that!"
Indeed. You haven't even got to the part where the plane apparently flew around Indonesian radar.
But your alternative scenarios are "Plane was hijacked by... conspiracy... secret landing... passengers killed/being held.... etc..."
No, the alternative scenarios simply involves a suicidal pilot, which has happened before [wikipedia.org]. This one may be holding a grudge against the Malaysian gov, and trying to inflict maximum political damage by crashing the plane and making it as hard to find as possible.
Re:Simpler: Electrical Fire (Score:4, Interesting)
You need a pretty magic fire to knock out most of the electronics
That's not what was said. Learn to read.
First step when the pilots identify an electrical fire is to pull the breakers. (If it works, you reintroduce them one at a time until you isolate the fault.)
Second step is to turn towards a suitable landing site. The closest runway had an approach over mountains, so the pilots seem to have turned to an airport with a more open approach, then changed course again a little later (suggesting the issue had become more serious), they may also have increased altitude to try to starve the fire. That seems to be their last intentional manoeuvre.
There may have been a depressurisation during the climb (caused by the fire), pilot error, or some other screw up. Most accidents have a primary cause, but a bunch of other stuff going wrong. AF-447 was initially caused by a faulty air-speed sensor, but ultimately a series of mistakes by the pilots killed the plane.
there's no question that a small fire could burn for hours
MH-370 had only just taken off. Pilots who've discussed this are thinking nose wheel-well fire filling the cabin with toxic smoke. The question is why the pilots didn't use their own oxygen supply. (They might have delayed turning on the main cabin oxygen, fearing feeding the fire (a la SAA 295), but why delay using their own supply?) Bad decision by the pilots, or flaw in the 777?
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The electronics started going off some time before the last communication with the plane. If you believe the crew were disabling them due to a fire, then you also have believe they would then just say 'goodnight' to ATC in their last communication rather than 'help, we've got a freaking fire on board'.
If you believe a short burst of toxic smoke filled the cabin and killed the crew without the same fire causing enough damage to kill everyone else and bring the plane down, you also have to believe that no-one
Re:Simpler: Electrical Fire (Score:4, Informative)
None of the electronics went off before their last communication. Where is your source for that? There were alot of blogs that assumed that since the last Acars signal was at 1:07 am and the last communication, "Good night Malaysian three seven zero", was at 1:19am it was turned off. However that means nothing since Acars works in 30 min increments so it's next message wouldn't have been till 1:37 am. The system could have failed anytime between 1:19am and 1:37am.
Cell phones would not [slate.com] have been able to work at that distance and speed.
The flight's satellite phones wont work if eletronics are off.
I DON'T CARE! (Score:4, Interesting)
40K people die every day of hunger and the while the USD 60M or more that were spent so far on this stupid search couldn't have prevented that, it would have helped a lot of people have another chance.
Either you say you care about the lives of people and then you just shake your head about this pointless waste of money or you don't care and then you wouldn't care about ML370 either. But you unless you're related or friends of anyone onboard that flight, you're just a for caring about the lives lost there and not about the people that die every day of hunger, war, and such...
Peter.
Re:I DON'T CARE! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really not about the people on the plane. It never has been past the first few hours.
It's about a world wide industry that doesn't like expensive bits of it fall out of the sky for no reason. It's also not about the money. Hell, we could shut down an aircraft carrier battle group and feed the entire planet for a decade - don't look to humans to be rationale about that issue and don't try to conflate them.
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Yes, you're partially right on that but in my opinion there are enough other incidents that can yield data - missing one is really not that major.
Also, if you listen to the news casters and articles written, they all at least pretend its about the human factor, not about analyzing the wreckage to see what caused the issue so we can prevent it in the future...
Peter.
Re:I DON'T CARE! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, you're partially right on that but in my opinion there are enough other incidents that can yield data - missing one is really not that major.
Not regarding the Boeing 777 there haven't. There's only been seven accidents, and only one prior to MH370 that involved any fatalities. And if the cause was a fault with the plane rather than human error/intervention, it's important to know because there's a whole bunch of other, more-or-less identical aircraft in use and it's entirely possible that one or more of them has the same problem.
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To the original poster's point though even if we lose a 777 every 20 years due to a design flaw, the money is better spent feeding the 20,000 people who die every day of starvation.
But to be the rebuttal to that:
If it costs $350m to find the fault with this plane then it'll still be a net win for the starving people. If the plane also costs $350m and this saves 2 planes over the next 30 years of service then you've netted an extra $350m in savings that could be put towards saving starving people. And i
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Re:I DON'T CARE! (Score:5, Insightful)
Commercial aviation (at least the large-aircraft stuff, stats for dinky little aircraft are less reassuring) is ordinarily so well hammered out that basically every air crash has a strong element of mystery to it and so the investigators come and try to figure out what went wrong.
Compare to cars, which kill plenty more people (and, unlike malnutrition and ghastly tropical parasites) people we usually care about; but still get minimal investigative attention because so many of the accidents are either 'operator was piss-drunk and/or exhausted', 'operator was flagrantly disregarding the rules for that area of the road', or 'vehicle maintenance was somewhere between horrendous and nonexistent'.
Re:I DON'T CARE! (Score:5, Insightful)
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40K people died of laws and organizations preventing them from getting food. There is enough food for everyone, there is enough will for people to provide for themselves and those that can't. This isn't 400BC anymore, people die of starvation because of bad policy, not because natural limitations. I'm not saying we shouldn't voluntarily feed them, but feeding them fixes nothing and by itself can actually make the problem worse. It's like giving someone painkillers instead of medicine.
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Hunger and poverty on the other hand are highly complex issues with no clear force behind them and contain many elements that loop right back to our own lives and priorities. S
Re:I DON'T CARE! (Score:4, Insightful)
For every $6 cup of coffee you buy, you're KILLING a person. For every $300 TV you buy, you're killing dozens. Every month you pay for cable TV, you're killing a handful. Is that about right? Because lack of monetary handouts are the ONLY cause of all those deaths? Political instability doesn't have anything to do with it, and/or could be fixed with a small influx of cash?
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If this was a different airline let's say Aeromexico or Turkish Airways and the plane left NYC mostly full of Americans I bet you'd care a lot more.
In addition to the lost lives and the price of the airplane there are considerable political ramifications as well.
What were the pings then? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it's pretty interesting that a number of devices detected pings, but there is apparently (as per the article) nothing was found in the area where they heard the pings.
So what did they hear? How can you get a false positive on a listening device looking for a specific frequency?
I wonder if instead of just sending out pings, a black box when hitting water should send out a burst of broad spectrum very high powered radio waves that satellites around the globe could detect...
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The devices were not looking for "a specific frequency", and, in fact, the detections were not at the frequency the FDR/CDR were supposed to send. They were "close", and part of the reason they had confidence in the finding is that after AF447 was found, they tried out the transmitter and noted that the frequency was off by a little.
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I think you're conflating the satellite pings sent by the plane's maintenance system to satellites and the ultrasonic "pings" that the submerged flight data recorder is supposed to generate. Right now there's nothing particularly mysterious about the fact that we can't locate the wreckage of the plane in the middle of millions of square miles of featureless ocean.
In any case, the simplest answer is to have planes transmit a GPS fix a couple times per hour to a satellite communication network. The cost would
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I think you're conflating the satellite pings [...] and the ultrasonic "pings" that the submerged flight data recorder
Chinese and Australian searchers picked up possible sonar pings from the FDR beacon. But were unable to confirm the findings enough before the beacon died.
In any case, the simplest answer is to have planes transmit a GPS fix a couple times per hour to a satellite communication network. The cost would be negligible compared to the overall operation cost of the airplane.
Yeah. It stuns me that they don't have position pings once every fifteen minutes (plus twice more on heading, speed and altitude changes.) It would revolutionise aircraft S&R.
Hell, why don't large aircraft transmit position, heading, airspeed, altitude, etc continuously to their home organisations? The bandwidth required is trivial, a few kb/s would b
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On a re-reading I can see how you might think I was confused, but Fat Monkey there mentioned the pings I was thinking of, which were sonar pings detected (and from which they have found nothing from a 150 mile search area the pings were supposed to come from).
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The point would be to have it sent along with the maintenance data, outside the crew's control. It should not be possible to turn it off from inside the plane.
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By that argument they ought to be able to turn off the flight data recorder too.
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What nobody seemed to be asking is why they never got even two consecutive pings, plus the locations where they heard the pings seemed to be literally all over the map.
Uh, what?
They heard pings in one area approximately every second for about two hours, and in other areas for shorter periods. So that's over seven thousand consecutive pings. And the ares they heard the pings were within a few kilometres of each other.
There's no question that they received signals consistent with the aircraft black box underwater beacon, only whether it was the aircraft black box underwater beacon or something else.
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I thought the Australians claimed to hear a short series of pings.
It wasn't just one ping though (Score:2)
One ping I could easily see being some aberration. But I remember reading one of the detectors, I think it was the Australians, hearing a series of pings.
As the other poster said, the ping can't really be that far from you as the water dampens the signal (ha!) quite a bit.
data retention (Score:4, Interesting)
Spy games (Score:4, Insightful)
In a world where spy satellites have 1m resolution, the fact that no country says they found anything within a few days, speaks loudest.
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Why would any country dedicate valuable spy satellite time and resources to searching for an airliner?
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Why would any country dedicate valuable spy satellite time and resources to searching for an airliner?
Why wouldn't they? I can think of nothing that says "We can see everything you do" better than finding aircraft debris in a case like this.
Re:Spy games (Score:5, Informative)
The why not is an easy one - spy satellites are put into orbits which cover the likely hotspots for their use, and changing those orbits lessens the useful life of the satellite fairly significantly.
Oh, and no one really wants to give away the true capabilities of their spy satellites...
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The why not is an easy one - spy satellites are put into orbits which cover the likely hotspots for their use, and changing those orbits lessens the useful life of the satellite fairly significantly.
Oh, and no one really wants to give away the true capabilities of their spy satellites...
Not true at all. Reconnaissance satellites are usually on very low near-polar orbits, completing an orbit in 60-90 minutes. As the Earth spins below, they cover the whole thing. However, the sensors onboard collect more data than the available bandwidth, so they do not transmit the data about uninteresting areas, such as over the open ocean where nothing of interest is expected to be.
You could make a point for storing a 48 hour buffer of all untransmitted data for later transmission if it is deemed necessar
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There could be other factors.. (Score:3)
Like the signal reflecting off the ocean below instead of coming directly from the aircraft.
The only sure way to is to duplicate the flight path with a similar size aircraft using the same Engines and monitoring stations, using similar SAT positions. Only this time use a plane with extended range 777-200LR(verses missing 777-200ER) with minimal payload&maximum fuel and/or safely replicate the flight path in sections.
Use the resulting SAT/GPS data to help calibrate mh377 final resting spot.
More Data for Conspiracy Theorists (Score:3)
They are already writing their books, guaranteed
Data anomaly (Score:2)
No, they're still searching the ocean floor (Score:3)
The article is irrelevant since the ocean floor around the pings is still being searched.
Since the article can't even get a basic fact correct, I don't even trust their analysis.
FTA:
But now the search of 154 square miles of ocean floor around the signals has concluded with no trace of wreckage found. Pessimism is growing as to whether those signals actually had anything to do with Flight 370. If they didn’t, the search area would return to a size of tens of thousands of square miles.
The link the article uses to "prove" that says something different:
The hunt for a missing Malaysian passenger jet entered a new phase as an international team abandoned its aerial search and said efforts to find wreckage on the ocean floor may take as long as eight months.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... [bloomberg.com]
It looks like slashdot just linked to another conspiracy theory. Please quit doing that.
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Wasn't the main evidence against northern path... (Score:3)
Until officials provide more information, the claim that Flight 370 went south rests not on the weight of mathematics but on faith in authority
Wasn't the main evidence against a northern path the fact that the plane would have to have flown over some (unlike Malaysia) heavily monitored airspace?
Supposedly confirmed from other flights (Score:4, Informative)
The company claimed that they have confirmed their methodology using data from other airplanes flying in similar area.
Re:Strange, indeed (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds like the next time we'll hear about mh370, the plane will be on its way to a building near you...
There is a claim that would seem to open the door for that.
BREAKING: Lt. Gen. McInerney Says #MH370 Is In Pakistan – ‘I Got A Source That Confirmed It Yesterday’ [thegatewaypundit.com]
Hopefully it is just another conspiracy theory.
Given all the spy satelites pointed at hotspots, (Score:2)
is it really possible that the plane landed anywhere but the ocean?
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I would have to think so, yes. Spy satellites relying on cameras have limited coverage at any one time. The plane only has to land and move to a hanger to be hidden. That doesn't take very long.
Re:Given all the spy satelites pointed at hotspots (Score:4, Informative)
The number of suitable hangars with suitable runways to land on nearby is pretty limited. Maybe all of them should simply be checked.
That's been considered, and I assume the checks would already have been completed.
You can see all the known runways on this map: http://i.imgur.com/Iwa6Ali.jpg [imgur.com]
The rest of the discussion here is interesting as well. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum... [flyertalk.com]
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That theory is dumb on so many levels. First of all, "stealing" an aircraft is a ridiculous idea since to take off again with it requires too much cooperation from too many international parties for it to be feasible at all (there's a reason why aircraft don't have locks on the doors...). Second, if you wanted to use an aicraft for nefarious purposes a stolen widebody would be the worst choice ever. A small corporate jet would be the easiest to file an unusual flight plan for since the uber rich are reclusi
Re:Strange, indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
So basicly the media got fooled by some high tech psychics who normally would have been dismissed completely but somehow got just enough attention to be taken seriously.
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Does anyone have the actual origin of that quote? My recollection is that it came from a UK tabloid, based on a translation of a Chinese news story of a briefing given to family members without press present. Later it was repeated by Malaysian politicians, but not by the Prime Minister or Minister of Transport AFAICT.
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Transponders were left on during 9/11.
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Because next time there's a fire in the transponder circuits, the victim's families will be demanding it be put back in at great expense.
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Any aircraft not on the ground should be in direct contact wit the ground traffic controllers – no switch – no exceptions!
You're answering your own question. Transponders are turned off when the plane is on the ground. No need for a transponder signal when the plane is in a hangar, or when it is in maintenance, or at the gate planing and deplaning passengers.
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Which is why pilots are able to turn off the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.
Exactly.
Oh, wait... you think they're not. Maybe you should learn something about the subjects you're posting about.
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In a Boeing 777 there are circuit breakers for the cockpit voice recorder & the flight data recorder however they do not stop them from working. Once the breaker is tripped they switch to their internal battery supplies. Both boxes contain batteries to power themselves since they each have sonar beacons used to locate the boxes in an underwater crash.
Far 25 25.1459 states that "Any single electrical failure external to the recorder does not disable both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data
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There actually is a device, already, that can't be turned off by the crew in flight - a black box.
Is this another Anonymous Coward who knows nothing about ariliner electronics, or the same one? Why do people keep posting this crap when a few minutes' searching the web will immediately show it's untrue?
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Or any of the millions of shipping containers roaming around the world every day, for a few grand.
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The search area for the wreckage is south west of Perth? - completely in the opposite direction to Beijing.
There's nothing in that region of ocean aside from a few far-flung uninhabited islands towards the south pole. So unless hijackers were planning on making a sharp turn towards, say, Mauritius, it's difficult to understand what the plane might have been doing there.