New MH370 analysis again says we looked in the wrong places

Re: Easy, once we drain the ocean

Simples - just send the water to Mars the New Netherlands.

Re: Here we go again

It's called science.

New experimental evidence changes the model.

MH370 isn't a unique tragedy unfortunately. Aircraft used to vanish without a trace quite often in the early days of commercial flight.

Re: Here we go again

When aircraft parts start washing ashore and give indications of what they were set to when they became detached from what they were attached to, it helps the analysis (given that you'll have a general idea of the ocean current flows). Also given that several parts had part and serial numbers visible, which in turn were confirmed by the manufacturer as having been fitted to the aircraft in question, science recalculates things and thus, things change.

It's not like the Aussies just held up their finger in the air and went "alright, we're going to search here, here and here" based on the way the wind felt on said finger. They went with the best info they had. That the recommendation was ignored is... unfortunate, especially given the subsequent scientific proof corroborates the recommendation.

Re: Here we go again

If you read the article, you would understand they actually state the plane went down in same location they previously advised it did, but were ignored. This research adds more likelihood that their original assesment was correct.

Re: It is a waste of time

We had a FAR better idea of where the Titanic went down and it still took nearly a century to find - and the Titanic is a lot bigger than a plane and went down in only two pieces instead of thousands that would be spread across a very wide area.

Yes, but we have better tech now. For instance, an Autosub 6000 can run off autonomously for 3 days at a time and run a multi-beam sonar survey to 1m resolution or better (depending on how fast you want to survey - resolution-vs-coverage).

But it's still a major undertaking - back of a napkin maths suggests you'd need ~200 such missions to cover 25,000sq.km. That's 600 survey days, which probably accounts for ~800 days at sea including turnaround, battery replacement and returning to port for provisioning/crew change. Of course if you were able to deploy 3 such subs from a single ship with minimal overlap (and tow a fish behind the mothership as a 4th instrument), then you could get the total mission time down to about a year. So that's quite quick by comparison, but tying up an entire vessel for 12 months is costly, though you'd hopefully be able to pad it out with some unrelated science whilst cruising between RV points.

Or you could do the inverse which is to dedicate 2-3 autosubs to the job and place them on vessels of opportunity - doing a cruise into the target area? Could you take this, throw it in the water near sector #137 and pick it up three days later? Ta.

It's certainly possible to continue the search fairly cheaply by piggy-backing off existing cruises and research. The deep ocean is fairly poorly mapped (to less than 1km resolution anyway), so hi-res sonar surveys have a scientific value in and of themselves.

Re: It is a waste of time

You probably haven't seen the sonar imagery that came from the search (the actual search sonar not the pre-mapping work that was done to reconnoiter the area). Have a look at the Mh370 ATSB page, they have some samples on there. If they had searched the right area, the plane (or its debris field) would be quite clearly visible on sonar. They weren't using fish finders for the search, they wouldn't have even bothered if "the odds of recognising it via sonar at such depths are quite small".

Re: It is a waste of time

...The batteries on the black box have run down, so they could have a ship right on top of it and never find it. The odds of recognizing it via sonar at such depths are quite small...

I wonder how they found the Air France 447 crash using sonar after two years then?

I know! Perhaps they use autonomous vehicles to go down to the ocean floor and conduct a search only a few hundred feet up...?

Aliens! Lizards!

They'll never find that plane, because it was never meant to be found they've given up looking.

OK, they've "suspended" the search but given they way they seem to have reacted to studies that say they were wrong all along it looks like it's suspended sine die.

> searching in the wrong place on the grounds they haven't found it.

Well yes, that's how they know it was the wrong place. With careful reading it does seem as if new "most likely places" indeed have the subtext "bearing in mind it wasn't where we looked. The drift analysis is very interesting, but I don't know that I'd want to devote many hundreds of thousands of my taxpayers dollars to a search based solely on that evidence. There are just too many variables.

The marker idea works OK over short distances and short timescales, but this involves neither. Markers that are almost completely submerged or floating flat on the surface drift in one direction driven by currents, markers that have a significant part of the structure in the air are blown by the wind in quite different directions, those that are betwixt and between do something between, its all horrendously complicated.

Most probably what will be needed for a new search is evidence that is really compelling as to location. Drift studies and the like add data, but aren't that compelling. A whole load of quite different studies all pointing towards the same small area might be. It hasn't been abandoned, after all the Aus government was prepared to pay for this new experiment using a genuine flaperon not a model as in earlier experiments.

"I wonder if it would have been possible to seed the ocean in the suspected crash zone with markers."

Well, you'd need to make sure the markers behaved like bits of plane, and the best way to do that, would be to use actual planes.

There's plenty of old passenger haulers around the world, rig them up with an autopilot and crash them into the sea in a grid formation, then sit back and track where the left-overs end up.

Simples!

Re: I want it found ... just to stop all the conspiracy theories

Someone knew where the plane came down within hours to days of the incident . The whole pretence of searching for the plane is just to keep the public / dumb adversaries ignorant. These seaborne searches illustrate how much money they are willing to spend to keep us ignorant.

If you have satellites constantly scanning the Earth's surface down to sub-meter detail, you will have computers which retain imagery of all non-cloudy areas. They will also continually compare old frames with new frames looking for differences. The differences will be further categorised and anything unexpected will be highlighted to human operators. Any large nation operating spy satellites will have this ability but they all choose to remain silent. Control over citizenry (by a wealthy global elite exploiting illusory misplaced loyalties) is the name of the game.

Any moving object > 1m^2 on the surface of any ocean will be tracked, including floating plane wreckage.

Hell, maybe they even stage accidents to test whether anyone attempts to retrieve the wreckage.

Re: Still no changes

The main issue there is the four miles of tether required to stop the buoy drifting away from the aircraft before the world finds it.

Re: Why continue to ignore that the aircraft landed safely?

It was the rolls royce engines sending telemetry data which was the source of the pings. They happened because Rolls Royce was paying for them, not MAS (who wouldn't pay for the Boeing telemetry)

Re: Why continue to ignore that the aircraft landed safely?

"unless someone has proof that it didn't happen."

unless someone can prove a mutually exclusive scenario FTFY

Perhaps the pilot performed a controlled landing on water, simulating closely a real landing, deceiving the RR telemetry.

Point is, other scenarios are not unthinkble.