Boffins working on debris float models to track MH370 wreckage Scientists from Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) have lent their talents to the search for missing airliner MH370, by developing models to predict where wreckage may have drifted. Objects held to be “credible” candidates for pieces of the plane were spotted by satellite on March …
The back of my envelope says floating debris (if indeed the plane even went thataway) could have moved 350km from point of impact by now. Wow, that's not an insignificant distance.
The guy we have to call Prime Minister (for now at least) sounded very confident when he proclaimed that "if there is anything down there, we will find it", but I'm not convinced I share his confidence.
"Wow, that's not an insignificant distance."
It's not, but -hopefully- it might get the search teams close enough to pick up the black box pings on sonar and find out what the feck happened.
I hate to be anything approaching correct in this case, but the southern route was always the one that shouted loud 'elaborate pilot suicide fantasy', and so we really need the data and voice recordings to find out what really happened.
Looking at a bunch of news articles, there seemed to be a couple of ongoing themes: the French said it was not an image, it was a reflection; and two, positions were not given for where this non-image came from.
I guess another search day has just started (hour or so ago). In one of the reports, something related to a location was let go, this non-image was from 850 km North of the Chinese and American image locations. Is the eastward drift of water that much further north about the same as the first two sites? Which are more or less on top of the Southeast Indian Ocean Ridge. To me, it looks like they are just south of that ridge. Fancy trying to find a plane in an underwater mountain range?
In any event, if the French location is that much further north, maybe it is one of the doors from the 777? Passengers or crew opened the door, and bailed out?
The write up in the news seem to suggest the search aircraft only have a couple of hours of loiter time on site, unless they are carrying internal fuel bladders (and nothing is ending up in the news about that). But, that Canadair aircraft, just on a full load of fuel should have about 8 hours of loiter at the search site. The Grumman 5 (?) might have 4 hours of loiter time. I have no idea how that Airbus 319 is contributing.
I think it would be better if the countries with spy satellites taking pictures of that area, would just dump them somewhere public and let the crowd look. Having a handful of experts take 4 days to find one or two images is not being useful. Having a few thousand people look at pictures has got to generate more hits.
"I think it would be better if the countries with spy satellites taking pictures of that area, would just dump them somewhere public"
Be realistic. Nobody will be showing the opposition the finest resolution images they can do, because that becomes actionable intelligence. That's despite the fact that all the major powers operate satellites, know the physics, and can work out what the resolution would be of their opponents kit.
Crowd sourcing to the untrained is unlikely to be quick or effective, and the real problem is not the false positives (although such an approach would have many) but the risk of inexpert viewers missing stuff. I'd suggest that computerised scanning of images for anomalous shapes and colours would be the way to handle raw satellite data, and I'd be surprised if somebody somewhere wasn't doing that already.
"I think it would be better if the countries with spy satellites taking pictures of that area, would just dump them somewhere public and let the crowd look."
That's not going to happen, because nations are not willing to publicly tell each other just what imaging capacity they have, or even what assets they can bring to bear. The only way that government imaging satellites are sharing data is via back-channel co-operation (which is all well and good). Commercial bird operators are probably being hell of a lot more open and co-operative because...sadly, money: It's free advertising and finding the wreck would be great publicity.
Additionally, a lot of the imagery won't be photographic (photos are a bit passe these days), but will be from a variety of other sensors (Synthetic Aperture Radar et al), which take more skill to interpret.
"Having a handful of experts take 4 days to find one or two images is not being useful. Having a few thousand people look at pictures has got to generate more hits."
Yes, and then the handful of experts will be tied up for days with amateurish false-positives; which will be replete, because psychologically, every one of those thousands of amateurs wants to find something.
Image analysis is a highly skilled job*, and those handful of experts do kinda know what they're doing.
I mean: You wouldn't kick the engineers off a bridge building job and replace them with a few thousand people off the street, would you? Crowdsourcing isn't always the best plan.
*Also: Tedious.
I'm still doubtful there is any debris to find... I'm increasingly convinced one of the pilot's murdered the other one, then asphyxiated the passengers and ditched the plane intact. Maybe the sunken plane will finally break up under the pressure, though I also think he would have cracked some doors to make sure it flooded and sank properly...
If my theory is even approximately correct, I gladly admit that I cannot understand the insanity that motivated the pilot who did it. However, what I absolutely cannot understand is the crazy lack of continuous and uninterruptable remote telemetry from such planes. Even if the only bits of data they were transmitting was the current location of the black box, that would be a vast improvement. Can anyone count how many times they have had these desperate (and expensive) searches for the black boxes?
>what I absolutely cannot understand is the crazy lack of continuous and uninterruptable remote telemetry from such planes.
Plane crashes are rare, fleets of satelites to continually relay data for perfectly normal flights are expensive. Adding redundant transmitters, batteries, antennae so that planes keep transmitting when in difficulties is even more expensive.
Remember that 7E7 that burst into flames at Heathrow - due to faulty wiring in a emergency beacon? There isn't just a cash cost in cutting holes in 1000s of planes and adding lots of extra batteries.
>Can anyone count how many times they have had these desperate (and expensive) searches for the black boxes?
About 2 - the Air France one and this, and even if they had the crash position of the Air France flight it was till a bit of search to find a black box in miles deep ocean.
"Even if the only bits of data they were transmitting was the current location of the black box, that would be a vast improvement. Can anyone count how many times they have had these desperate (and expensive) searches for the black boxes?"
The black box does contain a radio beacon.
On land this works great (unless they ditch into a narrow valley that blocks the signal, but generally they don't).
Under even a couple of hundred feet of water (much less than the thousands it could have sunk to by now), radio does not work terribly well. Sonar transponders do exist but are bulky compared to the size of the black box itself and you still need to be within a few kilometres to pick them up unless you attach a hefty power source, in which case you're into such a large device that it likely won't survive impact (or if you've reinforced it sufficiently it'll weigh so much as to eat into the cargo allowance which airlines will only accept up to a point).
The idea of carrying a 3 or 6 cheap EPIRBS on the basis one of them would make it out is not a bad one, and would give the point of impact for sunken wreckage, as well as drifting with floating wreckage until it's battery died. Looking at the Wikipedia page for Emergency Distress Beacons, a water-activated class of aircraft transponder does exist, but perhaps isn't a standard fit for civil aircraft - more for naval SAR usage, recovering ditched fighter and helicopter crews or something?
Uninterruptable telemetry is nearly impossible for a reason not mentioned so far - the system needs power. All the power drawn for the planes systems comes through the main power buses, and unless you do something insane (like hard wiring it into the planes power buses with no breakers), then there will be a way of stopping the transmission as all they need to do is pull the breaker.
Even if there is a small battery in the device to provide some power after power loss, e.g. both engines flaming out so the main buses go dead, this plane flew for *hours* afterwards, so the last "burst" saying "HELP! I'm over here!" would be thousands of miles out.
Not *quite* enough fuel to make that trip.
But, it's better than CNN's headline news has been suggesting. Wonderful notions, such as "Maybe it was hit by a black hole", "Maybe God took the airplane" and "Maybe a UFO abducted the airplane". Such is the mindless drivel served to we Americans.
Also potentially likely is that the radio went on the fritz, an emergency occurred (such as a cabin decompression), which necessitated an emergency descent and a triangular course to alert ATC to the malfunctioning radio. The misprogrammed autopilot then resumed a random course that ended up out to sea before the pilots could regain consciousness and control of the aircraft and at altitude, were unable to do so again.
It's as likely as every other guess and it's quite likely that all of those guesses and this guess are all equally wrong.
What is known is, the aircraft went wildly off course, made some bizarre course and altitude changes and is missing. What is certain is that it is on Earth. Somewhere. Quite likely on the bottom of the ocean.
@Wzrd1
There are too many things against the emergency and pilots lost consciousness theory. The fact that the emergency happened between the handoff between Malaysian and Vietnamese ATC could be co-incidence. The plane then allegedly flew just under 30,000 feet along the northern border of Malaysia, which puts it in another zone which straddles ATC control zones - above 30k feet the rules are different (to pack more planes into the corridors), and by flying the border whomever was in control made sure that which ever controller saw the blip, they would likely assume the other side was handling it.
If the data above are proven true, then the emergency theory doesn't hold up - it looks way too much like whomever was in control didn't want to be found
Also, you missed one point - if there *was* a decompression event, the crew immediately get down to 10k feet or lower so they (and everyone else) can breathe. That didn't happen. If they couldn't descend, then they also couldn't reprogram the autopilot to take them back. An event that knocks out ACARS, the transponder, the voice radio, *and* all flight controls is unheard of and extremely unlikely. Even if the radios aren't redundant (which they are to a degree - there are at least two voice radio systems on a modern jet), the flight control systems *are* redundant
IMHO, the hijack theory is the one that makes sense given the currently available data. The questions that remain:
- who hijacked the plane - the flight crew or someone else?
- their motives
- why apparently leave a RADAR track going north from the Malacca Straits, and then apparently turn south towards Australia?
"who hijacked the plane - the flight crew or someone else?"
For me, the knowledge of standard procedure (and when to break it without it mattering, such as the final radio call), navigation points, handover points, flight lanes where the plane is likely to be un-noticed... all point to flight crew. I also think that a hijacker's demand to turn off transponders and radio would result in just that: the flight crew would likely keep ACARS on.
"- their motives"
The south path -to me- points to an elaborate suicide. There's a lot of mystique in planning and 'disappearing' an entire plane. Whoever did it didn't know about the 'pings' and so had every reason to believe that the plane would never be found. Taking a plane out past a point of no return over an ocean, with complete power over life and death of the passengers (assuming they weren't asphyxiated) is a powerful motive. Not strictly a sane one, but certainly rational from some angles.
"- why apparently leave a RADAR track going north from the Malacca Straits, and then apparently turn south towards Australia?"
My guess would be the whole 'making a plane disappear' thing. I don't know what the airspace is like around there, but I suspect that whoever did it (supposing that they did go south), did so because they knew that was the best way to get away with it. Perhaps turning straight south would have taken the plane through more closely watched airspace?
The south path -to me- points to an elaborate suicide.
I'm trying to prove you wrong because that would be such an utter waste of time, effort, and humanity. But I keep coming back to agreement with you. Unless there are things going on that we don't know about (and we do know that there is *some* of that).
Whoever did it didn't know about the 'pings' and so had every reason to believe that the plane would never be found
I think that bit shows even more detailed knowledge - the page that someone used to turn off the ACARS VHF transmissions only really has two entries on it - a tick-box for VHF and a tick-box for SATCOM. That someone turned off VHF and not SATCOM implies he thought SATCOM wasn't important - and that implies that he knew Malaysia Airlines wasn't using SATCOM...
Vic.
@Vic
I think SATCOM ACARS was disabled, but the transceiver assembly remained powered. As best I understand it, Inmarsat sends the ping request and the assembly on the aircraft, independent of any other systems, answers. Unless they thought to pull the breaker for that subsystem it would always answer. It was probably not well known by anyone outside of Inmarsat before this incident.
Maybe planes should carry some EPIRBs. If there were three of them distributed about the cabin then chances are that one would escape the wreck and float to the surface.
Not very expensive to buy and cheap to maintain. Airlines could advertise the fact that they're carried to boost passenger confidence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPIRB
> Maybe planes should carry some EPIRBs
They carry fuselage-mounted ELTs which can be triggered by the pilot, or trigger themselves automatically in the event of a rapid deceleration.
A detachable unit doesn't serve much purpose - for it to be secure enough to cope with flight, it would need a locking arrangement that will likely be problematical in a crash situation.
Vic.
Anyone else watch the Channel 5 program on MH370?
I found it rather lacking in credibility for two points
- The plane in the AF447 crash was a "Boeing Airbus"?
- apparently you can take control of a plane by plugging into the USB port on the IFE. Which is impossible as there is an air gap between the IFE and the cockpit systems. Boeing tried to share a transmitter between the IFE and the cockpit systems on the 787 and got thoroughly spanked by the regulators and they had to separate the systems.
A general question.
If you set up a route on an AP, what happens when you get to the end point, assuming it does not auto-land?
Do you fly in a circle or just keep going in the same direction until you run out of fuel?
On my cay SatNav, once you get to where you are going, it basically stops giving directions even if you keep driving onwards. So in an aircraft, if the AP thinks you have 'arrived' would it stop controlling the aircraft?
Bob
There was an European flight (Helios Airways Flight 522) where the maintenance people on the ground left the pressurisation system on manual, and the co-pilot didn't notice during pre-flight checks so everyone on board asphyxiated.
The autopilot continued to climb until it reached the pre-programmed altitude, and then continued until it reached the destination beacon and circled waiting for new instructions
That was a Boeing 737. It's possible the 777 autopilot behaves differently, however I would suspect not
The way the autopilot works, in general, is that it only stops controlling the aircraft:
- if manually disconnected / turned off
- if it detects flight envelope information it considers unreliable and therefore it is unable to continue. In that case it tends to trip the master caution alarm so that people know what's happened, and that is a fairly major alarm. In the AF447 case, it couldn't reconcile the flight speed/altitude information from the sensors so it turned itself off.
Any other behaviour would lead to the possibility of the plane entering uncontrolled flight (where no-one is positively controlling the aircraft), which is to be avoided.
Clearly some kind of Hadooping. Behold the chestbeatingz:
UK firm behind Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 breakthrough
Inmarsat senior vice-president Chris McLaughlin said the firm had studied electronic "pings" - or bursts of data - which the plane had sent to one of its satellites.
He told the BBC: "We have been dealing with a totally new area. We've been trying to help an investigation based on a single signal once an hour from an aircraft that didn't include any GPS data, any time and distance information.
"So this really was a bit of a shot in the dark and it's to the credit of our scientific team that they came up and managed to model this."
Mr McLaughlin continued: "They managed to find a way in which to say just a single ping can be used to say the plane was both powered up and travelling, and then by a process of elimination - comparing it to other known flights - establish that it went south."
Oceanographer Dr Simon Boxall, from the University of Southampton, told the BBC: "The algorithms and the techniques [Inmarsat] have applied to try and locate - to within a certain area - where the last transmission was made is really quite phenomenal - but also quite tragic because it does show this plane was heading to an open area of ocean."
He continued: "They've probably crammed almost a year's worth of research into maybe a couple of weeks, so it's not a routine calculation they would ever, ever make.
"They've been looking at all the signals they have, all the recordings they have, and processing that many times over to try and pinpoint where the plane's signal came from. Technologically it's really quite astounding."
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