Malaysia Airlines flight MH370-Updates and Discussion

SpaceTime

It is a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack, with some idea of where the needle was thrown.

We tend to overestimate how big a plane is relative to the size of a major ocean and how much of the ocean a few search aircraft can cover.

If it was significantly off route, it could be quite hard to find.

brennarr

I flew to Australia with MAS on a 777 last November. Is there a way to check if that was the same 777 I flew on?

brandon_flowers

Just for info.

http://www.flightradar24.com/MAS370/2db7bdb

Tonight's MH370 is just about to pass over the Malaysian east coast and with conditions almost the same as Friday night's flight it should follow almost the same path.

SpaceTime

billie1b wrote: »

Yeah, same as with any story, the media will print whatever it can just to get the views and sales, although saying that CNN have been pretty spot on since the story broke. Sky News are being very quiet, which is unusual as they'd usually have full stories with hours og coverage on it. Also agree with the Guardian, its their updates and CNN's that i'm mostly going by.

CNN International are very focuses on aviation because they target an international business person's audience. They do a lot of coverage of developments in the industry all the time. They're quite on the ball with anything aviation, banking or oil and also golf and sailing... Or super expensive shopping / fashion ... You can see what audience they are focused on !

Calina

fits wrote: »

there have been a lot of technological developments since 2009. I can go out for a run and have my route mapped to the metre through my phone. GPS units are commonplace and cheap. Lots of hikers and sailors have satellite phones. And yet a massive airliner can disappear without a trace?

No excuse for it.

Fits, being honest, it's not actually that simple. If you collapse on dry land, short of a tornado, you're likely to stay collapsed there until someone finds you.

Stuff that lands on or in water moves both horizontally and vertically. The longer it's not found, the further it's likely to have moved particularly if it's in very small pieces.

homerjay2005

brandon_flowers wrote: »

Just for info.

http://www.flightradar24.com/MAS370/2db7bdb

Tonight's MH370 is just about to pass over the Malaysian east coast and with conditions almost the same as Friday night's flight it should follow almost the same path.

must be very weird and freeky for the crew and passengers, knowing that that people who got on this flight are still missing.

im still thinking this accident is related to the "crash" the plane had a while back, something wasnt done right and eventually the repairs were stressed and came lose, causing a mid air explosion.

L1011

fits wrote: »

there have been a lot of technological developments since 2009. I can go out for a run and have my route mapped to the metre through my phone. GPS units are commonplace and cheap. Lots of hikers and sailors have satellite phones. And yet a massive airliner can disappear without a trace?

No excuse for it.

You could do all that in 2009 too.

Fred Swanson

This post has been deleted.

sopretty

I wonder about stolen passport reports though. Mine was stolen about 10 years ago (well, my handbag was stolen, with my passport in it). I went to Pearse St. garda station to report it. I filled in a form, but I wouldn't have known the passport number, so I just gave my name. I got the impression from the guard, that he would call me if he ever found a passport with that name lol, but I didn't get the impression that he was going to enter the number on any sort of central database or anything.
I wonder how lax we are internationally with stolen passport reports?

L1011

Fred Swanson wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

Not always, and not always instantly even if they do.

sopretty wrote: »

I wonder about stolen passport reports though. Mine was stolen about 10 years ago (well, my handbag was stolen, with my passport in it). I went to Pearse St. garda station to report it. I filled in a form, but I wouldn't have known the passport number, so I just gave my name. I got the impression from the guard, that he would call me if he ever found a passport with that name lol, but I didn't get the impression that he was going to enter the number on any sort of central database or anything.
I wonder how lax we are internationally with stolen passport reports?

The Passport Office would have known the number and reported it onwards internationally when you asked for a new one.

fits

Calina wrote: »

Fits, being honest, it's not actually that simple. If you collapse on dry land, short of a tornado, you're likely to stay collapsed there until someone finds you.

Stuff that lands on or in water moves both horizontally and vertically. The longer it's not found, the further it's likely to have moved particularly if it's in very small pieces.

I am well aware of the complications and the massive area involved.

But it seems search and rescue have Nothing to go on. That seems incredible to me in this day and age. They're not looking for a primitive thing. They are looking for a high tech aircraft! I seriously doubt its that difficult to design a properly functioning GPS beacon.

eatmyshorts

fits wrote: »

No excuse for it.

One word... cost. And today's passenger is so cost sensitive, they will refuse to pay for it.

fits

MYOB wrote: »

You could do all that in 2009 too.

IPhone 1 was released in 2009 so while you could do those things, they have become much more mainstream since.

brandon_flowers

Bang on 41 minutes it changed heading slightly, I am guessing there is a waypoint at that spot.

Flight number will only be retired once they can work it out of their system, that is if they retire it.

L1011

fits wrote: »

IPhone 1 was released in 2009 so while you could do those things, they have become much more mainstream since.

The iPhone 1 was a limited, useless heap of crap compared to what Nokia had on offer at the time, and what Nokia had on offer at the time could do everything you mentioned. Apple invented nothing in this sector.

Nokia SportsTracker came out in either 2007 or 2008 and was the first successful software product in that sector but it wasn't the first either.

Surinam

I thought the first iPhone came out in the summer of 2007? I could be wrong on that. Plenty of devices have had GPS since the mid 00's

fits

MYOB wrote: »

The iPhone 1 was a limited, useless heap of crap compared to what Nokia had on offer at the time, and what Nokia had on offer at the time could do everything you mentioned. Apple invented nothing in this sector.

I am a Nokia owner living in Finland, you don't have to tell me...

so while you could do those things, they have become much more mainstream since.

SpaceTime

At this stage, you'd really think that every commercial plane would be reporting its GPS location back to a satellite link every few seconds, even if only for emergency purposes.

Relying exclusively on radar seems a little bit like clinging to mid-20th century technology.
Both should be used together.

The most obvious thing would be a satellite connected emergency beacon that would broadcast a powerful signal with just the last known geographical location information.

Maybe triggered by not being disarmed if the aircraft is below some pre-set height or linked to cabin pressure or something. So, a dramatic change in pressure would immediately cause it to switch on.

Just surprising that they've such unsophisticated beacons.

L1011

Surinam wrote: »

I thought the first iPhone came out in the summer of 2007? I could be wrong on that. Plenty of devices have had GPS since the mid 00's

Think you're right there. Fundamentally, GPS technology reached a low price point nearly a decade ago and nothing has changed wildly since 2009 - there is no magic bullet for this situation. And what's consumer mainstream is pretty much irrelevant in the commercial sector anyway.

LuckyLloyd

Eventually the full story will come out or, at the very least, we will be left with a limited number of 'known unknowns'. People need to understand though that this will take many months at the very least. We need:

- wreckage / bodies to be located;
- above to be fully retrieved;
- black box devices to be located and retrieved;
- technical reconstruction of wreckage to take place;
- black box content to be analysed;
- preliminary report to be released;

and then we'll really know. There will be indications along the way but the reality is that it will take that long for whatever happened to be understood. It took years for the full extent of pilot error to be unveiled in the AF447 incident. It may take years again for whatever happened here to be fully unwound by investigators.

Surinam

SpaceTime wrote: »

At this stage, you'd really think that every commercial plane would be reporting its GPS location back to a satellite link every few seconds, even if only for emergency purposes.

This.

You can buy a 99euro smartphone with gps on it these days. Why on earth is a Boeing 777 (having a list price of over $260million) with 230 passengers not equipped with it?

L1011

Surinam wrote: »

This.

You can buy a 99euro smartphone with gps on it these days. Why on earth is a Boeing 777 (having a list price of over $260million) with 230 passengers not equipped with it?

It is equipped with it though. Reporting the last known location in the air of something isn't much use when its ended up in water in an unknown number of pieces

MayoSalmon

Surinam wrote: »

This.

You can buy a 99euro smartphone with gps on it these days. Why on earth is a Boeing 777 (having a list price of over $260million) with 230 passengers not equipped with it?

Apprently the NSA know and hear everything...not a Boeing 777 over the sea though

SpaceTime

MYOB wrote: »

It is equipped with it though. Reporting the last known location in the air of something isn't much use when its ended up in water in an unknown number of pieces

Well it would tell you within a reasonable degree of accuracy where the last known flying location was.

I would prefer something like a beacon that just sends a very powerful signal with a data burst that's receivable by satellites / ground stations and that just transmits simply something like reg number + longitude + latitude and that is triggered automatically if there's a sudden dramatic altitude loss and/or loss of cabin pressure.

It would need to pull the position from the aircraft systems obviously, but it could even have its own independent GPS location systems too. They're not that big/heavy.

I'm sure something like that could be designed and built into most aircraft.

You're talking 1 line of information needing to be transmitted. That could be done using very robust, simple encoding and transmitted as a pretty powerful data burst every X mins for a good few hours.

Surinam

MYOB wrote: »

It is equipped with it though. Reporting the last known location in the air of something isn't much use when its ended up in water in an unknown number of pieces

Oh I though the 'last known location' they were going on was just conventional radar? In any case, if they can invent a black box recorder that can survive most accidents, can they not invent a gps beacon that can equally survive explosions?

Kavs8

Lads I'm sorry but yere talking as if you're experts, ye are posting on a public forum of yere interpretations of SAR searches? Boeing will be as interested in the SAR so please allow it to run its course. There are many signals that should emit from the plane;

FDR
ELT
Black Box

So far none of them have been picked up which is not uncommon.

cml387

Although widely used in avaiation, GPS is a bit of a problem for the aviation industry because it is not controlled by the ICAO.

Since it's a US (military) system, the US could degrade or encode the system at any time.Then you'd be in trouble.

Calina

Surinam wrote: »

This.

You can buy a 99euro smartphone with gps on it these days. Why on earth is a Boeing 777 (having a list price of over $260million) with 230 passengers not equipped with it?

777 has two GPS receivers on it and a transponder which reports its positional information.

Additionally, both its data recorderss should be pinging their position, even under water.

keith16

Tigerandahalf wrote: »

I don't understand what people's problem is with the Mirror live feed.

I'll tell you. The mirror is a tabloid rag. It's constant appearance in this thread is not needed and is watering down actual quality input from the knowledgable posters here. Not that I've seen much from them. They've obviously seen what the thread has been reduced to.

Highflyer13 wrote: »

zero communication from flight, busy shipping area, realitively small search area of shallow dept, lack of information from the government, huge airliner, clear weather, fake passports, im not a conspiracy theorist but i am totally baffled. Just not adding up for me. The longer the search drags on the stranger it gets.

1. There was plenty of communication from the flight. It stopped abrubtly.
2. Busy area? Looks fairly empty to me


3.What exactly do you want from the gov. They've said the aircraft is missing, what more can they do?

4. Huge airliner? So what?

L1011

Surinam wrote: »

Oh I though the 'last known location' they were going on was just conventional radar? In any case, if they can invent a black box recorder that can survive most accidents, can they not invent a gps beacon that can equally survive explosions?

Flightradar24 doesn't use radar despite the name, it uses its own private ADS-B receiver network. ADS-B gets its location from GPS.

How do you propose a GPS unit both works underwater and sends a signal to a satellite from underwater, for a prolonged enough period to be of use? Remember for starters that GPS is one-way. The satellites do not know where you are, despite the massive misconceptions that they do - your receiver calculates that itself.