Australia Elaborates On a New Drift Model To Find MH370 154
hcs_$reboot writes Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared on Saturday, 8 March 2014, while flying from Malaysia to Beijing with 239 people on board. And 8 months later, after millions of dollars invested in a gigantic search operation, there is still no sign of the aircraft. Now, Australia is developing a new model to predict where the debris of the missing MH370 could wash up. Authorities had initially predicted that the plane's wreckage could drift and come ashore on Indonesia's West Sumatra island after about 4 months of Flight MH370's disappearance. "We are currently working... to see if we can get an updated drift model for a much wider area where there might be possibilities of debris washing ashore," search co-ordinator Peter Foley told reporters in Perth.
Weaksauce (Score:3, Interesting)
A story about a model under development which may or may not lead ... to something? You call this news?
Here's an idea: next time something this "newsworthy" comes up, don't post it!
Re: Weaksauce (Score:3)
Given huge numbers of mothballed aircraft sitting in the desert in AZ why do you need a grand conspiracy to use a commercial airliner full of people?
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I'll let you think that through, I think you can come up with a better answer than "use mothballed aircraft" that are no longer flying.
The "official" story they have passed out is just as high bullshit as the official story of 9/11, it troubles me anyone would believe anything our (or any) government tells them.
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Who needs a conspiracy. Just see how close you can fly to Diego Garcia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... [wikipedia.org] in what the US government now considers a flying bomb, it's not like they don't have a history of shooting down passenger jets, sometimes admitting it, sometimes denying it and sometimes pretending it never happened if they can clean it up fast enough whilst people are conveniently looking elsewhere. It's not like that particular pilot had an anti-US history and had been practising landing at Diego Garc
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Ferguson.
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Re:Obsession (Score:5, Informative)
One crashed within our search and rescue zone, the other had 27 of our citizens on board. But hey, believe what you want, shame its clearly wrong.
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the other had 27 of our citizens on board.
Which one? Surely not the MH17 which merely had one US expat with dual American-Dutch citizenship on board. Is Ukraine in your search-and-rescue zone?
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However, this is an opportunity to do some basic research that will pay dividends the next time there is a need to find a winged needle in a soupy haystack.
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What makes these two planes so special that they get money while the government cuts funding to our health system?
Total cost of the MH370 crash, including compensation and the loss of the aircraft, is likely to hit a billion dollars. Finding out what happened is well worth a few hundred million, if it could prevent the same thing happening again.
Locating it will take a certain amount of luck, as the wreckage could be in a spot that's hard to see on sonar, but it's almost certainly somewhere in the current search area.
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Finding out what happened is well worth a few hundred million,
How do you expect that to happen?
Even if they managed to find the wreckage and black boxes, they will yield little or no data. The is very different from the Air France crash.
Re:Obsession (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if they managed to find the wreckage and black boxes, they will yield little or no data. The is very different from the Air France crash.
We don't know that.
Even if there's nothing in the black boxes, the positions of circuit breakers may tell us how the electronics was turned off and then turned back on. A big hole in the fuselage near the cockpit would tell us that there was a fire on board, similar to the previous 777 fire. The positions of passengers and crew would tell us whether someone hijacked the plane, and whether anyone knew about it. Personal phones and tablets may contain messages from people on board.
If we can find it from a few satellite pings, we can probably figure out what happened from whatever we recover.
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Which part do you disagree with?
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It's also a useful training exercise for the navy. It lets them practice a near-impossible salvage operation that isn't contrived.
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But you wouldn't know anything about numbers, because you're a fucking bogan moron. You are too stupid to be here, fuck off.
Nice argument. Never has the schoolyard retort "takes one to know one" been more apt :)
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Wow. Just wow.
How dare the Australian government search for a plane thought to have crashed in our territorial waters.
How dare the Australian government take "extra care" when a plane carrying 25 of our citizens gets shot out of the sky with a missile.
Whatever balance it is you think you're aiming for, go fuck yourself with it.
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Territorial waters? Just how many miles out is Australia claiming?
Your bases are the closest.
Re:Obsession (Score:5, Insightful)
They want closure. They're not likely to get it soon though.
They may not even be looking for floating debris. If the pilot was still in control, he may have made a controlled landing. Like the landing on the Hudson. So it may be a intact aircraft at the bottom of the ocean.
It's doubtful that they'd make a landing like that in open seas, but it's (remotely) possible.
But they are really looking for a really small needle in a fucking huge wet moving haystack.
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They want closure.
And I want a pony.
But I think the pony would be much cheaper. People disappear. But we're spending a hugely disproportionate amount of money in the interest of figuring out what happened to 239 people. On average around 400 people die in Australia every day. Why are those 239 people worth so much more?
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So only investigate someone's death/disappearance if it doesn't take away any funds that could instead go to your favorite social program.
Is that your stance?
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No. Don't sign blank checks is my stance.
Spending an disproportionate amount on the investigation of a single accident that claimed a few hundred lives, when that money could better be invested in saving countless more is asinine. If we find out what happened to MH370 and implement a fix then airtravel will go from the safest form of transportation to ... the safest form of transportation. In the mean time people die every day on other preventable accidents.
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Don't misunderstand me, I agree. There should be continued search efforts, funded by the airline that lost it. No government is responsible for the loss of those lives. They aren't responsible for notifying the families of the passengers. It is totally up to Malaysia airlines to fund the continued search. Some financial backing can come from governments that represent the passengers, but it shouldn't be a continuing national effort.
As someone else mentioned, Australia is looking for 239 people, whil
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Are you being inconsistent and making an exception because this plane has disappeared or do you seriously advocate that whenever a crash happens, the airline should fund the investigation? That would be fucking terrifying to let airlines decide how much to spend on a crash investigation - or should I say "investigation". It is already the case that because both the airline and the manufacturer always want the problem to be "just one bad pilot" there's a huge bias in all their involvement in the investigatio
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No, I was just trying to say that they've been searching for months. The chances of finding it are growing slimmer constantly. They should stop now, until further tangible evidence shows up. Like part of the plane washes up on a beach.
Airlines have insurance, which should be enough to carry out reasonable search and rescue (well, recovery at this point) efforts. The reasonable period has long since passed.
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No, I was just trying to say that they've been searching for months. The chances of finding it are growing slimmer constantly.
No, the chances are improving, as they search more of the seabed. If it's in the search area, with some luck, they'll find it. Even if something does turn up on a beach, they'll still have to conduct a similar search, though possibly of a smaller area.
Airlines have insurance, which should be enough to carry out reasonable search and rescue (well, recovery at this point) efforts. The reasonable period has long since passed.
The insurer is probably on the hook for the best part of a billion dollars of compensation payouts if this turns out to be the airline's fault. If it was a hijacking, they're probably not. I would imagine they have a very strong incentive to keep the search go
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Sorry who has incentive to keep searching?
The one private enterprise, or the other private enterprise you mentioned?
Funny how neither of those enterprises are currently footing the bill for the search.
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No government is responsible for the loss of those lives.
And you know that no government incompetence, overreach, underreach, or malfeasance led to those deaths because you've recovered the wreckage and studied the cause?
I don't have a dog in this fight, mostly because I don't have a dog. But let's not make assumptions in any direction without evidence of some kind.
Australia is looking for 239 people, while more than that die domestically every day.
There are reasons to find that airliner that have nothing to do with those particular human lives. As time passes, of course, the apparent likelihood of reward does decrease.
I believe it's to the point where it's "lost", and until further evidence shows up (washes ashore), it can safely be left marked as in the "lost at sea".
Mmmmm, safely.
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I have a far more important question. What do you propose we will find in the wreckage of MH370 that will be worth the $100million we have spent looking for it?
Is it worth spending $100m to make the safest form of transportation even safer? While we're at it why not dedicate another $1trillion to anti-terrorism, ... you know just in case. We can find that money by de-funding health and transportation.
I see this as no different to the above example. It is a colossally stupid waste of money finding out what h
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I have a far more important question. What do you propose we will find in the wreckage of MH370 that will be worth the $100million we have spent looking for it?
The reason it disappeared.
Is it worth spending $100m to make the safest form of transportation even safer?
Again, this crash will probably end up costing around a billion dollars once all the compensation is paid out. Spending $100m to avoid something that would cost a billion is definitely worthwhile, if there's a significant chance of it happening again.
Let's say the Malaysian and Australian governments said 'sorry, we're stopping now', and another airliner vanished next year. What do you think they'd be saying then?
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The reason it disappeared.
That is no more a reason for a blank check than the reason a person disappeared. When an industry has cemented itself as the safest in the world then spending an extortionate amount of money investigating a single incident is way beyond the point of diminishing returns.
Again, this crash will probably end up costing around a billion dollars once all the compensation is paid out. Spending $100m to avoid something that would cost a billion is definitely worthwhile, if there's a significant chance of it happening again.
Let's say the Malaysian and Australian governments said 'sorry, we're stopping now', and another airliner vanished next year. What do you think they'd be saying then?
Well saying it again doesn't change my previous reply. Is the Australian Government on the hook for $1bn? No? Then why are they spending $100m on the investigation? You're talking about payouts and contracts that exist between private enterpr
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Personally I believe the government funded search efforts are less than altruistic. This first occurred to me as I was standing in a park in Perth one night high on LSD when a massive Lockheed AP-3C Orion flew overhead at low altitude. I recognized the craft immediately though I'd never seen one in person, a truly massive american behemoth.
That experience, compounded by news in the local papers that a Chinese destroyer had joined our own Australian naval vessels off shore to assist in the search cemented in
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So 264 days later, and still no answer. If your cost estimate is right, that's $132 million to find nothing. It is ok to just say "we couldn't find it". They did their due diligence and then some.
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When would it be ok for them to stop looking? A year and $182.5M later? 10 years and $1,825M later? An infinitely ongoing mission, searching every square foot of the bottom of the Indian Ocean, Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, and Pacific Ocean? MH370's maximum range [airsafenews.com] covers an awful lot of area, including a lot of land.
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How much is a disappeared citizen worth, exactly? I'm bad at math so please humor me.
More money is spent each DAY on beauty products worldwide than on the entire cost of looking for '370 up to date. Wasted food in the USA costs 40B a year for households alone (Jones, Timothy. Corner on Food Loss. Biocycle, July 2005. p25). Compared to those numbers, looking for 239 missing people is pocket change.
From a different perspective (that is, excluding money from the equation), I agree with you, and that perspectiv
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How much is a disappeared citizen worth, exactly? I'm bad at math so please humor me.
Less than the cost of saving another citizen from a preventable fatality. Even less when you consider the disappearance happened while using the statistically safest form of transportation.
More money is spent each DAY on beauty products worldwide than on the entire cost of looking for '370 up to date. Wasted food in the USA costs 40B a year for households alone (Jones, Timothy. Corner on Food Loss. Biocycle, July 2005. p25). Compared to those numbers, looking for 239 missing people is pocket change.
From a different perspective
You're right, there is something different, and it's not just the perspective. The government doesn't spend tax payers money on investigating an accident caused by a private entity. If Malaysia airlines wants to spend $100m then more power to them. If the Miss World contests want to dedicate their money then go for it. It
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"In this case there is no benefit to the people at all making your comparison to waste in the private sector chalk and cheese"
Tell that to the grieving families looking for closure.
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Tell that to the grieving families looking for closure.
I'm going to call that one "Think of the Children MkII"
Ok I would be more than happy to do it. Please bring me the grieving families looking for closure. Oh you can't? Well let me write an open letter:
Dear Grieving families of the flight MH370 disaster,
I am dreadfully sorry for your loss. Your family members died in unfortunate circumstances beyond their control. It is unfortunate that the circumstances of their disappearance will likely mean we never find out what truly happened. We have made every effort to find out initial causes and search likely crash sites, however the nature of the crash makes it prohibitively expensive to continue the search.
We are truly sorry
Sincerely
Garbz.
Bam. I should be a speech writer. Now please tell me who else I can tell that their "closure" isn't worth $100m of taxpayer funds while things like medical research get a $1bn budget cut. Common, line them up. I will happily tell it to them all.
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Yup, easy to write such a letter when you have a dry soul. I guess banks and the IRS would have an open position for your kind.
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A dry soul? Let's test that then. I wrote my letter, now it's your turn to tell the grieving families of the 20000 people who died of heart disease last year that the budget for medical research was cut while the government blew $100m on looking for a plane.
See the problem with your "dry soul" theory is that it's easy to accuse someone of something when you have absolutely no skin in the game. I don't have a dry soul at all. My letter was extremely sincere, and finding the plane is not going to bring people
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Your comparison is retarded for many reasons I can't even start to explain because I'm sure you won't get it.
So I'll just say: 'tis okay, you win.
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Thanks. Good comeback by the way, I have no idea what to say to your wonderfully logical and thoroughly prepared prose.
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Oh no. He shags the sober sheep too.
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I presented it as a not-so-plausible scenario. It could be possible to have landed in one piece, so no debris was found. Consider this aircraft [wikipedia.org] which landed itself after the pilot ejected. It's a very doubtful scenario, but not totally impossible.
As others have said, there was likely an electrical fire. It's possible everyone onboard were incapacitated or dead when it hit the water. So they'd be looking for a crash with no loose debris, so nothing to float ashore.
Still, the ocean is a really big p
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Re:Obsession (Score:5, Insightful)
We want to know what happened so that we can prevent it happening again.
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You may well want to know but it is not feasible, the plane is lost and these articles do not tell you what happened to the plane anyway.
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The plane is gone, it's past time to get over it - I don't mean the relatives, I mean the officials and media who are feeding this thing.
Gone? You mean it was... *fluffs up hair, sticks out hands* ALIENS?
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I understand you're not the same person who complained about a story no longer being in the news [slashdot.org], but I guess that just goes to show that for some people there can never be enough coverage, and for others there can never be too little.
If you want to talk media obsession, though... at least MH370 was still this year and was a whole plane lost under weird circumstances - and not a child abducted while her well-off parents were out partying 7 years ago [wikipedia.org] that still has stories running every other week, or a pres [wikipedia.org]
Re:Obsession (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's put it this way--a full-size jet airliner carrying passengers has *never* been lost without a trace. Not ever. Every one that went down was eventually found.
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I don't know about you, but whenever one of the types of aircraft in which I fly regularly goes down, I make efforts to keep track of the investigation of root causes as well as airworthiness directives etc that come out because of it. Then again, I get thrown in to a sinking mockup of an
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1 plane is not "regularly goes down"
"so I might pay a slightly higher attention to keeping my arse alive than you do."
How in hells name does obsessing about a lost plane equate to this?
Nothing you said negates what I said or relates to the fact that people are obsessing about a lost plane that is extremely unlikely to be found and the only part of the plane likely to be of use is the flight-recorder and not random bits of flotsam.
Do you really think they can find the black box?
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In the last year I've seen 15 passive acoustic transponders dropped onto the seabed in kilometer+ water depths, and all recovered. OK ; that's in better conditions than this, but IF they can find the strewn field of debris (a definite IF, but that's the object of the exercise) then the location and retrieval of the FDR and CVR is a better than evens chance.
Putting a flotilla of sonar search boats and a relevant ROV support vessel out is going to run at around
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It's pretty clear now that she died stranded on Nikumaroro island after her plane crashed in the area...that's about as found as you can get at this late stage of the game.
Looking for Answers in the Debris (Score:1)
Maybe they shouldn't assume that it is debris. Its in one piece perhaps.
Also its a government gig.
This means they can spend forever using resources and personnel on this task without having to be accountable for the worthless results. In fact, their incentive is not to find it, else they'll have to go back to work doing the really important stuff: floating around in circles, looking at nothing, and taking orders all day. Furthermore, If they really wanted to find it they'd be looking near Bermuda, no
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You idiots (Score:1)
The flight was kidnapped by extraterrestrials via a small black hole. CNN even said so!
Search expanding oceanographic knowledge (Score:5, Insightful)
While they may never find what happened to MH370, the search for it is leading to detailed mapping of an area of the ocean floor that was little explored. And now we're getting better mathematical models of the ocean currents. So while I know there's been a lot of criticism of continuing what seems like a fruitless search, the money isn't being wasted.
We may never find what happened to that aircraft, but we will have expanded our oceanographic knowledge of that area immensely.
Hmm (Score:1)
Still looking in the wrong area.
Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad.[18] He said: "Clearly Boeing and certain agencies have the capacity to take over uninterruptible control of commercial airliners of which MH370 B777 is one". In this statement he was referring to off-board hijackers with access to MH370's Flight Management System via the 2003 patented Uninterruptible Autopilot.
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Autopilot can always be over-ridden by the humans on-board. Otherwise what's the point of having a pilot?
Satellite images (Score:2)
In the weeks after the plane went missing I've spent hours looking at satellite images at tomnod.com, but later found out they were supplying images of the wrong areas. They were based on unreliable eye witness accounts of people who had claimed to have seen the plane.
I was annoyed that they kept wasting my time, even after it became clear that those witnesses couldn't have seen MH370 at all. But I would still invest time if they would supply significant images, of the area and during the time where it's mo
Re:beyond the realm of plausibility (Score:4, Informative)
It's not hard to disappear if you turn off your transponder and then fly out of primary radar range.
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It's not hard to disappear if you turn off your transponder and then fly out of primary radar range.
That's dumb. What year is it? I realize it's not a non-trivial problem to track bits of metal from space or wherever you've got to be in order to have a good view of airliners, but seriously. What year is it? If we can't have flying cars, we should at least know where our jets are.
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We do know where our jets are. So long as they tell us.
In this case, it wasn't telling us. You can't ensure it tells us unless you build in hardware that can't be turned off, and then you find the next airliner loss is caused by an electrical fire in the thing you just added that can't be turned off.
MH370 had numerous ways to tell us where it went. But none of them were working, either because someone turned them off, or some electrical failure shut them down.
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We do know where our jets are. So long as they tell us.
We had a program which located jets via afterburner IR signatures in the 1970s, I realize commercial jets aren't using afterburners but you'd think we'd have this problem licked by now.
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We had a program which located jets via afterburner IR signatures in the 1970s, I realize commercial jets aren't using afterburners but you'd think we'd have this problem licked by now.
So you're going to launch satellites which can find every airliner in the sky with IR over the entire world? Just in case one disappears again?
And note that underwing engines are probably going to make IR detection particularly hard as it will block a direct view of the exhaust.
Re:beyond the realm of plausibility (Score:4, Interesting)
So you're going to launch satellites which can find every airliner in the sky with IR over the entire world? Just in case one disappears again?
Since we started launching satellites whose intent was to find military jets in the sky with IR over the entire world in the 1970s, I should think that it is not too much to ask that by 2014 we should have advanced the technology and built out the hardware to the point where we could in fact do that.
And note that underwing engines are probably going to make IR detection particularly hard as it will block a direct view of the exhaust.
No doubt. Perhaps there is a superior means which could be used today, although IR is still pretty good for this sort of job and the planes are still big IR sources. Our sensing and data processing technology have both advanced dramatically since then.
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So you're going to launch satellites which can find every airliner in the sky with IR over the entire world?
I would think a few countries must be monitoring for heat signatures all over the world, just to detect ICBM launches. Couldn't those satellites be used to figure out where MH370 went? I think it's just USA playing dumb, and not being helpful just because they just can't be bothered over the lives of other countries' people. They could have tracked the fucking jet in realtime if they wanted to. Or maybe the US government was somehow involved in the disappearance. But that does not make much sense, from the
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I would think a few countries must be monitoring for heat signatures all over the world, just to detect ICBM launches. Couldn't those satellites be used to figure out where MH370 went?
ICBMs produce a heck of a lot more IR than airliners. I would presume they also use software on the satellite to look for launches, rather than downlinking all the data to the ground, so there'd be no way to go back and look at the old data to try to spot MH370.
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Have a look at this visualization of 24 hours of flights over Europe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Now, as you watch that, think about what would happen if just one of those dots went dark.
It's a very, very hard problem if the planes stop telling us where they are.
Re:beyond the realm of plausibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody spotted several passenger jets veering off course and crashing / smashing into towers until it was too late. And they weren't even trying to hide. And that was over heavily-monitored US airspace.
The world is bigger than you think and the kind of idiots that go into the Australian outback with no water, or onto the high seas because they've cruised around the Med on a jetksi are exactly the kind of people that don't realise the scale of the problem.
You're looking for a needle that had zero communication and was over international waters for hours before anyone noticed, that moves at several hundred miles per hour, through international airspace where it's not tracked until it comes in range of a nation state, in a haystack that's basically bottomless without the latest technology, which is still mostly unexplored, which moves and shifts and covering areas more vast than some entire continents. It's quite possible we've actually scanned right over the top of the crash site and not even known.
Conspiracy theories are fun, but sadly usually destroyed by reality. The "every nation is watching everything everywhere" mantra is precisely what you're led to believe so you feel "safe" - strangely conspiracy theorists are the first ones to jump on and believe such things (along with the "acres of datacentres listening to every call" junk) and then want to claim the government is incompetent and left gaping holes in their plans in the next breath.
Fact is, once a plane leaves airspace and the immediate neighbourhood, nobody cares. Military systems are looking for entirely different things to air traffic control. And planes crash and change course all the time. We lose ships all the time too - especially if they've been hijacked by pirates.
The only thing mysterious is the exact details of why it went, not why it veered off course or can't be found now.
Re:beyond the realm of plausibility (Score:5, Funny)
strangely conspiracy theorists are the first ones to jump on and believe such things (along with the "acres of datacentres listening to every call" junk)
Hey, welcome back to civilization, how did your 2 years without the internet go? While you were away, you missed some news (it was everywhere): turns out the US government was actually recording every voice call in a datacenter somewhere, and a lot more too! I know; crazy, huh? The truth was actually more extreme than the conspiracy theorists feared.
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You keep thinking that justifies McCarthy's witch hunt. I wonder how you'd feel if you were a victim of it.
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So you're say that methods matter and the ends don't automatically justify the means? What's your opinion on Obama's amnesty declaration vs the Constitution?
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It's legally highly questionable at best, but nobody's lives will be spontaneously ruined by it. A few people's lives will get a lot better and competition will be stiffer for the crappiest legal jobs. There will be less competition for bottom-of-the-barrel jobs that are not exactly legal, involving child labor, sub-minimum-wage pay, hazardous and unhealthy work conditions and all that good stuff. Maybe they'll have to improve job conditions to fill those vacancies.
Just a disaster, huh?
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You immediately dismissed the Constitution-defying means and talked about the ends. Without a government that respects the Constitution, America is nothing.
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Well bad news, respect for the Constitution barely lasted a century, so that ship has sailed. And more bad news, being as legally unfounded as McCarthyism will never make Obama's amnesty declaration anywhere near as bad.
The fact that McCarthyism was unconstitutional is a tiny footnote of a problem compared to the fact that it was just a victim-drowning short of a modern-day witch hunt, and the fact that there were a couple of real witches in the town this time doesn't excuse it in any way
If Obama were to un
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McCarthyism came and went with no long-term effect on the nation. Eroding the Constitution is permanent - or at least I assume it will be as the GOP inevitably surrenders, rather than the House amending every bill the pass for the next 2 years with the sentence "Not withstanding any other provisions of law, no money shall be appropriated or otherwise spent on ...". That's not a government shutdown, just an insistence on proper separation of powers.
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no, dumbledork. There's not that much tape production. They're recording the metadata from every call. That's very different, both in plausibility (phone companies did this for billing) and is what they said they did.
It's reputed by the usual conspiracy theorists that every call goes to one of those shiny new government data centers they built not so very long ago, and gets analyzed for contents. Then the transcripts are stored, and the contents of any interesting calls as well. This would consume substantially less data.
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Turns out the conspiracy theorists underestimated the NSA. Check the links in my reply to AC. Storing all US phone calls for a month is just a handful of PB, assuming reasonable compression.
Seriously, just scroll through this list of programs detailed on Bruce's page. Just the scope of programs is astonishing. [duckduckgo.com]
Re:beyond the realm of plausibility (Score:4, Insightful)
no, dumbledork. There's not that much tape production.
Citation fucking [schneier.com] provided [washingtonpost.com]
"This is voice, not metadata." "In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording "every single" conversation nationwide."
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The story is that the plane flew for hours and hours without being seen or tracked, or leaving any data trail. In this post-9/11 world, I find that to be FAR beyond the realm of plausibility. "Fact is, once a plane leaves airspace and the immediate neighbourhood, nobody cares. Military systems are looking for entirely different things to air traffic control." REALLY? I would think that military systems are watching EVERYTHING, and that the moment the transponder was turned off, every radar would be look
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"I would think that military systems are watching EVERYTHING".
No. They are not. Your average commuter airport needs dozens of people just to understands the situation for day to day stuff, let alone secretly watching from afar and trying to get a grasp on why one plane moved. There's a reason that air traffic control also control military aircraft manoeuvres to some extent too.
This is the point - if there were so many people watching, from so many countries, so perfectly, with equipment that performs you
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How can you hope to write a drift model that with any accuracy when you have no clue where the plane crashed?
We do have 'clues where the plane crashed': that's why they're now searching a relatively small area of ocean, which is the most likely place for it to have crashed.
Doesn't mean that is where it crashed, but if they follow the currents from that area and find debris on a beach, it would certainly help to confirm they're looking in the right place.
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Why wait until debris hits the beach? Some aerial reconnaissance would provide positive proof of the assumed impact site by spotting stuff floating.
Its also possible that the plane 'crashed' in a manner so as to produce a very small amount of debris. Pretty much the same way Flight 1549 [wikipedia.org] went down on the Hudson River.
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Asking people to keep an eye on the beach is cheaper than flying planes around the ocean for days.
Also, I have a hard time believing there was a controlled ditching. The southern Indian Ocean has some of the worst weather in the world, and you're comparing a river to an area that may have had thirty foot waves at the time (I'm not sure what the weather actually was, but I very much doubt it was flat and calm). Besides which, it seems likely that the aircraft was out of fuel when it crashed, and why would yo
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the Spratly Islands, where it went to zero elevation. Likely shot down by China.
Unlikely. Too many people with territorial claims on this area are watching it intently. And most of them would be motivated to point the public finger of blame at an adversary should a shootdown be detected.
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Sorry, the limit is 1 conspiracy theory per post.
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at the end of the year, surely? More morons may come.
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We should check ebay, and see if any used 777s show up cheap.
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Looking for an APU. For a hybrid car project, so no FAA#s needed.
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The problem is that parts all have serial numbers, no first world airline is going to touch parts of questionable origin, and third world airlines generally don't have 777's yet, so you'd be better off stealing something like a 727 [wikipedia.org].
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That would be pretty hard to hide from an accounting perspective, and the fact that nearly every part on an aircraft has a well-documented serial number can't help.
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However, I believe the airlines currently operating 777s are mostly in countries which frown upon them using spare parts from ebay with dodgy serial numbers.