Malaysia Airlines MH370

_Howard wrote:

Just for humor.

Do you like watching men get struck in the testicles as well?

NoCoPilot wrote:

Of course that could change -- but the last known heading would not end up where they're now looking, would it?

It might. Depends on the bank and course of the plane shortly after it was left to its own devices. The course could have been a slow curve toward where it ended up.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Granted, this map was prepared BEFORE they concluded it flew south-southeast rather than north-northwest after reaching the Strait of Malacca -- but either way, there were apparently turns involved.

Of course that could change -- but the last known heading would not end up where they're now looking, would it?

I've seen graphs on the internet that show many different flight paths for 370. The only constant seems to be that first turn, which may have been an attempt to return to Kuala Lumpur or a nearby landing strip.

Yes, the Lear missed their turn. They had been in the air about six or seven minutes, and apparently everyone onboard was already unconscious or dead before time for the turn.

NoCoPilot wrote:

_Howard wrote:

Just for humor.

Do you like watching men get struck in the testicles as well?

Only certain men.   

SAI2 wrote:

The course could have been a slow curve toward where it ended up.

Plot this on a globe for me. I'm sceptical.

A few things Ive learned following this story. ..

Black boxes need increased power supplies to increase the duration of their ping signals. One month is obviously, absurdly inadequate.

All aircraft need to be tracked continuously. Noone on board any aircraft should have the power to render that aircraft undetectable.

I think that better than using larger batteries for the black boxes would be replacing them with streaming data. The technology has been developed, but the airlines say it's too expensive. Maybe if the airline industry had to pay all the costs associated with looking for downed craft, they might change their minds. I read that the search for an downed Air France airliner cost over $100 million. The search for flight 370 may exceed that.

SAI2 wrote:

All aircraft need to be tracked continuously. No one on board any aircraft should have the power to render that aircraft undetectable.

Abso-fuckin-lutely!

Was watching a piece on streaming tech versus 50 year old BB tech yesterday. Even the inventor of the BB says his own technology is outdated and has been pushing for modern up to date tech. Yes, the streaming tech is out there and some airlines do have it already, but it is apparently prohibitively expensive according to this news program I was watching. Still, as you suggest, I can't see it being as or more expensive than the loss of an aircraft, all its passengers, the inevitable lawsuits, insurance claims, etc, the rescue or search operations, etc...

And they could still have BB tech as backup - with longer lasting batteries.

Totalled, the cost of what is happening now in the southern Indian ocean I would have thought would far exceed the cost of having outfitted an airlines fleet with the required tech to stream each airplane's data in real time.

I suspect big changes will occur because of this tragedy - but then the same was predicted after the last time a plane was lost in the ocean.

There's no real economic benefit to knowing WHERE an aircraft crashed.

New streaming technology only makes economic sense if it prevents crashes.

So, to that point, why is it that the Microsoft Help Desk can take over the controls on your computer, NASA can remotely pilot a rover on Mars and the military can fly drones remotely, but Air Traffic Control can't commandeer a wayward airplane?

NoCoPilot wrote:

So, to that point, why is it that the Microsoft Help Desk can take over the controls on your computer, NASA can remotely pilot a rover on Mars and the military can fly drones remotely, but Air Traffic Control can't commandeer a wayward airplane?

Because then terrorists wouldn't even need to be on a plane to hijack it.

Two words: password protect.

Just reading an article which claims the reason most airlines won't pay for streaming is because of both fuel costs and government fees.... which would eat into their average profit of 4 dollars per passenger.

Government fees?

NoCoPilot wrote:

There's no real economic benefit to knowing WHERE an aircraft crashed.

New streaming technology only makes economic sense if it prevents crashes.

Well, the black boxes don't prevent crashes, nor do they provide a real economic benefit. Why not get rid of them and save a few bucks for the airlines.

A simple GPS device on the airplane would allow ground personnel to track the location of any craft that appears to be in trouble. It would also provide the final resting place of the airplane without spending tens of millions of dollars and sometimes years of searching, often resulting in no definitive cause for the crash. If they can put a simple GPS device in your phone, they can certainly afford to put one in an airplane.

And why must everything be evaluated solely on economics? There are other considerations.

I'm not really sure how I feel about ground personnel having the ability to take over control of an airplane. Need to ponder that one for a while.

Hmmm... the chinese have found a ping or three...

Now that is interesting to me. Certain experts in these matters are saying in response to this news that the odds of this being THEE ping of MH370's black box is astronomical. That if this is the one they are looking for, it would be akin to winning the lottery.

... which makes me suspicious of the chinese government (as if anyone needed more reasons to be suspicious of them).

Now why do I jump to 'conspiracy' theory? That is so irrational. And yet, finding the correct ping so quickly would seem just a little too fortunate and convenient. It's almost as if they had a pretty good idea where it went down to begin with, and thus where to look.

...to say nothing of the fact that the water's pretty deep at the consensus crash site -- much deeper than a black box ping could escape.

I suspect, like all the other leads provided thus far, this one will turn out to be empty.

The water is around 10,000 feet deep, which is just under the typical black box range of two miles underwater. Or so I heard on a news report this morning.

Well maybe I'm wrong then. Two miles underwater, wow that's an impressive ping. I have dived to 180 feet and that was oppressive enough. No sunlight, dark, cold.

Can't imagine two miles.

This article has some pretty good info on the black boxes and the way the search is conducted.

The thought just occurred to me. .. if someone or some government really wanted to mess with the investigation,
dropping a black box somewhere in the ocean could really delay, or distract from a successful search and recovery..

Why would anyone want to do that?

Reading that last statement I heard an evil muhwhohahahaHaHaHAAA!!

MH370 might hold clues or evidence which might implicate a foreign government's involvement in its hijacking and/or demise. I think it unlikely, but. .. stranger, diabolical things have been known to happen.

Quote :

The likelihood is extremely high that most of the bodies will be recovered. A large portion of the wreckage will be recovered," Marks said. "And most certainly the flight data in the cockpit voice recorder will be recovered intact. In Air France it took many, many months — more than a year — to locate it, and the navy was able to pull it out. And after all that time, the information was pristine.

On the contrary it's looking increasingly likely that the black box batteries have died, the plane vanished without a trace, and the bodies will never be found. After a month of searching, millions of dollars expended, hundreds of thousands of hours flying and towing a submersible across 85% of the suspected target crash area, absolutely zip has been found. Not even a seat cushion.

At what point do we call it a day?

It's a tough question. In the case of Air France 447, the debris field was located straight away and was relatively compact, so the challenge was the depth. In this case, we don't even know where the debris field is, so it's not just looking for a needle in a haystack, we haven't even found the haystack yet.

This is a ridiculous remark: "And most certainly the flight data in the cockpit voice recorder will be recovered intact." The flight data recorder (FDR) and the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) are two separate instruments. The CVR only holds two hours of recording, so if the crew was dead during the last hours of the flight and the CVR was operational at that time, there will be nothing on the CVR.

Sometimes they never really know what happened. TWA 880 crashed 12 minutes out of New York and they could only guess at the cause of the crash (a short in a fuel gauge wire. Maybe.).

As far as finding the hay stack -- hell, it's not even known whether they have found the hay field!

Amelia Earhart and the Bermuda Triangle are antipodal to MH370, just sayin'.