back to article MH370 final report: Aussies still don’t know where it crashed or why

Australian air authorities have published their final report into the MH370 mystery, concluding that they’re no wiser about what happened or why than when the Malaysian Airlines flight vanished three years ago. Australia’s Transportation Safety Board (ATSB) took a leading role in the investigation at the invitation of …

  1. nuked
    Black Helicopters

    There is, without any question, more to this story than is being told...

    The guy was doing some strange stuff in simulators prior to the disappearance, and despite us being able to view a pimple on the nose of anyone on the planet via satellites, nobody knows what happened or where it is? Come on.

    The idea that since 9/11 we're not tracking the precise location of every aircraft everywhere, is just not credible.

    1. David Knapman

      Since our primary means of tracking aircraft is via radar, the idea that we'd massively scale out our radar infrastructure across the oceans despite them containing 0 military or civilian targets is far more preposterous.

      I won't get into the actual likely capabilities of spy satellites vs Hollywood depictions, but even in Hollywood they realise that you have to maneuverer satellites to have sight of targets of interest and this takes time.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      The idea that since 9/11 we're not tracking the precise location of every aircraft everywhere, is just not credible.

      Ground based radar tracking over built up areas and conflict zones is quite precise, but out in the vast featureless wilderness of the oceans, nope, there's no coverage. Normally the tracking outside of radar cover is via the aircraft's satellite comms systems, but AFAIK that's not continuous, and in the case of MH370 those systems appear to have been switched off or failed for reasons unknown. For these incredibly remote, unpopulated areas, before MH370 why would you bother precision tracking (and even after, in all honesty)?

      I suspect in future we'll see near-continuous tracking via the satcomms, whether that will be fault resilient and tamper proof who knows.

      1. Chris Miller

        @Ledswinger

        I suspect in future we'll see near-continuous tracking via the satcomms, whether that will be fault resilient and tamper proof who knows.

        Whatever systems we build (or retrofit) into aircraft, there will always need to be a simple means of switching them off - you need circuit breakers that can swiftly be pulled in case a fault develops that could turn into a fire and threaten the aircraft. So someone who knows what they're doing will always be able to disable them.

        1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

          Re: @Ledswinger

          There was actually a fire a couple of years ago (fortunately on the ground) in the water-activated emergency beacon on the roof of a plane at Stansted or Gatwick. So even these need to be shut down sometimes.

          I don't know what the failure rates on components on modern aircraft are, but I wouldn't be surprised if every 2 or 3 flights globally take off with some system powered down until they can get the plane to overnight maintenance. I know that all the manufacturers provide a list of components that are either non-essential, or have so many back-ups, that you can fly with them not working.

          1. Richard 12 Silver badge

            Re: @Ledswinger

            There was actually a fire a couple of years ago (fortunately on the ground) in the water-activated emergency beacon on the roof of a plane at Stansted or Gatwick. So even these need to be shut down sometimes.

            The one you're thinking of was a 787 parked at Heathrow airport.

            The AAIB report is here.

      2. Faux Science Slayer

        Non Interuptable Autopilot on AirBus since 1989, Boeing since 1996

        Rolls Royce engines send regular GPS and status reports to HQ, last report was normal shut down at Diego Garcia. We have total planet satellite coverage of every plane, drone and surface ship and hydrophone for every submarine. Secret cargo manifest insured for $400 million, likely fraud. Five of six software patent holders for FreeScale were onboard, heir get total patent. Guess who that FreeScale executive is. Visit AbelDanger.org for more details.

    3. ilmari

      The spy satellites are more concerned with photographing military targets. Even so, had they been tasked with photographing the ocean, you would've needed quite some luck to have taken a picture of the right area before the debris got scattered out blending in with all the other debris floating around.. Not to mention the manpower needed to sift through all those photos. There was a crowd sources effort to look through satellite photos, which turned up empty.

    4. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      "despite us being able to view a pimple on the nose of anyone on the planet via satellites"

      Once your initial assumption is wrong even the most impeccable logic won't help you.

      1. Stu Mac

        Exactly. People confuse drone imaging with what is available from a satellite. I'm fairly sure satellites are not flouting some basic physical rules.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      The X Files came up as an answer on Pointless last night. Co-incidence? I don't think so ...

    6. Stu Mac

      The big roll of turkey foil is over there >>

    7. Wayland

      Electric Monk

      Nuked, modern day people have the ability to believe multiple contradictory ideas at the same time, like the Electric Monk of Douglas Adams.

      That there is no hiding anything and that you can lose a plane full of people.

      The readers of The Register being smarter than most are able to construct complex thought processes allowing them to simultaneously justify multiple contradictory ideas at the same time as rejecting clearly obvious ideas like a conspiracy to hide the plane.

      "Oh no, it could not be that bad people took the aircraft and lied about it. That would mean a conspiracy and those things never happen."

    8. Mi Tasol

      SMART operators like the one I work for use a real time satellite based aircraft locator system like Spidertracks - http://www.spidertracks.com/. There are several other similar real time systems, Spider is what we use.

      Radar as tracking is actually extremely limited as radar is line of sight only - so any hills or mountains between the radar and the aircraft makes the aircraft invisible. Also almost any aircraft not transmitting on its transponder is invisible to radar unless close to the radar.

      Spider adds as little as US$2 an hour to the operating costs of each aircraft but sends multiple emails and text messages the moment an aircraft ceases to transmit to the satellite at the programmed interval. The emails and text messages contain the aircraft location, speed, altitude and heading at the time of the last transmission. In an emergency the priorities are Aviate first (keep the aircraft flying), Navigate second (head for an airport) and Communicate third. Operators can reduce the ping interval if they wish though that does increase the cost. Many operators in hostile search environments, such as mountainous terrain with tall timber, significantly reduce the ping time as that massively increases the chances of reaching the scene while injured people are alive.

      Zero time and money wasted in searching large areas as, at worst, the crash location is within a small radius of the last transmission. At best it is a short distance in a straight line from last transmission. Spider can also transmit several pre-programmed messages just by pushing one button on its control panel. The pilots cannot afford to take time to make radio calls during an emergency but they can take the time to push a button.

      The big airlines do not want this because it adds two dollars an hour to the operating cost and all search costs are borne by countries, not the operators.

      Instead they prefer the existing ELTs that do not operate under water and which fail in 40% of all land accidents due to broken antennas or wiring and airlines strongly lobby governments to oppose ICAO mandating real time tracking.

      Because Spider costs far less than fitting an ELT, fitting Spider or similar to new aircraft instead of the pre-GPS (and pre-satellite communications technology) ELTs would give operators about 15,000 hours of free tracking.

  2. earl grey
    Mushroom

    planet is surrounded by spy satellites

    And you darn well know someone has an idea where it is; but then that would be telling now, wouldn't it?

    1. Korev Silver badge

      Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

      I can't imagine that any of the governments running spy satellites would be very interested in a featureless bit of ocean. They'd much rather monitor the Barents Sea or the GIUK Gap etc.

    2. Dan Wilkie

      Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

      Not that straightforward - satellites don't just hover over one spot staring at featureless ocean... And changing their trajectory is not trivial as they only have a finite amount of fuel.

      Also worth bearing in mind that a passenger aircraft is small and fast moving, under a satellite that's travelling around 8km/s....

      I'm not saying that nobodies satellites would have seen it, maybe someone did have something staring at an empty spot of ocean for some reason, but the liklihood seems slim, and the liklihood that anyone was paying attention to it seems even slimmer!

      1. GrumpenKraut

        Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

        > ...the likelihood that anyone was paying attention to it seems even slimmer!

        Add to that that for the satellite everything looks normal until the second of impact, which would be over pretty darn quick, rendering chances even slimmerer.

        And there may have been clouds, hence zilch to see.

      2. Steve the Cynic

        Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

        May I draw your attention to XKCD's What If on looking at objects from space?

        https://what-if.xkcd.com/32/

        1. Dabooka

          Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

          On that link to what if, I'm sure the tablet on the desk is viewing The Register....

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

        "Not that straightforward - satellites don't just hover over one spot staring at featureless ocean."

        Some do. Meteosat and GOES, for example.

        1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

          Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

          Bahboh,

          OK. Quickly searched for your example of Meteosat.

          It's a weather satellite, not a spy sat, so wasn't designed for looking for small things on the surface, so much as weather patterns.

          According to the info here:

          The Meteosat-8 satellite belongs to the second generation of Meteosats and is much more capable than the first generation Meteosat-7 — delivering imagery from 12 instead of 3 spectral channels, with higher spatial resolution and with an increased frequency, every 15 instead of every 30 minutes. Of the 12 spectral channels, 11 provide measurements with a resolution of 3 km at the subsatellite point. The twelfth, so-called HRV (High Resolution Visible) channel of SEVIRI (Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager), provides measurements with a resolution of 1 km

          So the High Resolution camera has a resolution of 1km, and records an image every 15 minutes. You might be able to see the flying saucer from Independence Day, but you've got bugger-all chance of seeing any planes.

          1. Cynic_999

            Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

            I do however hope that weather satellite imagery taken at the time in question has been examined. Granted it does not have he resolution to resolve an aircraft, but it does have enough resolution to resolve a contrail if conditions were such that the aircraft left one.

            1. Jonathan Richards 1

              Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

              >it does have enough resolution to resolve a contrail

              I don't know that you're right. The contrail might be more than a kilometre long, but it's only about 70 metres wide. The difference in the reflectivity of the ocean and the ocean viewed through the contrail might not be enough when blended across 1 km pixels to be able to 'join the dots'.

              OT: Oi, El Reg! The wavy red line of disapproval appears beneath the word when I write kilometre, but disappears if I swap the last two letters. Please load a proper English dictionary! (Or in this particular case, a French one, I guess).

              1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

                Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

                "OT: Oi, El Reg! The wavy red line of disapproval appears beneath the word when I write kilometer, but disappears if I swap the last two letters. Please load a proper English dictionary! (Or in this particular case, a French one, I guess)."

                Assuming you're not actually joking:

                (a) The dictionary is supplied by you via your browser. In my case, using Seamonkey which is the same program for both browser and mail, I get exactly the same underlining in both the browser and the mail composing windows.

                (b) Kilometre is the original French spelling and hence is correct unless you live in a country that also thinks that colour and theatre are also incorrect.

                If you wish to persist in using the spellings currently in vogue in the colonies load the en_us dictionary or right-click on the word and add your misspelling to your dictionary.

                1. Mi Tasol

                  Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

                  Dr Syntax

                  It is only one EX colony that cannot spell and cannot tell if a meter is a measuring device or a measurement.

                  Most other EX colonies can spell correctly though in Aus the correct spelling of labour is used by everyone except a union based political party who consider spelling irrelevant.

            2. d3vy

              Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

              "I do however hope that weather satellite imagery taken at the time in question has been examined. Granted it does not have he resolution to resolve an aircraft, but it does have enough resolution to resolve a contrail if conditions were such that the aircraft left one."

              Why would they be spreading their chemikilz over the ocean? Turning the frigging fish gay?

              :)

            3. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

              "but it does have enough resolution to resolve a contrail if conditions were such that the aircraft left one."

              But when the pilot turned off the transponders, shirley he also turned off the Chemtrail emitters, right?

              https://xkcd.com/966/

    3. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

      Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

      The planet is surrounded by spy satellites, pointing their cameras at interesting places. Not the very, very empty Southern Indian Ocean. Which is empty.

      Did I mention there's bugger-all there?

    4. Lee D Silver badge

      Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

      Do you know how big the planet is?

      And do you know how small the resolution required to see a plane is?

      Hint: No, you can't see the Great Wall of China from space.

      Sure, if you want to peak at a building in the Middle East, you can move the sat to look at it and take hi-res pictures, etc. But over 25,000km of empty ocean, not a chance that you'll see more than a dot, and that'll be hours stale, so you'll still have no idea where it went or what happened or even what direction is was actually flying in by the time you get the image back.

      People forget that, tiny though the planet is, the world is HUGE and there are all kinds of humongous things that just aren't visible unless you're specifically looking for them, and that even when you're looking for them aren't easy to track - because we HAVEN'T turned thousands of miles of empty ocean into 1984-style surveilled territory for one-in-a-million plane flight that we had no idea was going awry until it was far too late anyway.

      Seriously, go find a whale on Google Earth. I guarantee you that in the vast trackless ocean mapping there, there's a whale surfacing somewhere, because there are hundreds of thousands of the damn things and they're huge. Don't cheat. Start in the middle of the ocean, max-zoom, and go find one, just by looking and scrolling around.

      Now guess what? Google Earth is updated once-in-a-blue-moon for most locations like that, and even if you saw the whale, could you tell where that whale was now? Absolutely not. That's pretty much the best spy-satellite you'll ever get to play with, and it's damn useless for that kind of task.

      An MH370 plane has precisely 60.9m wingspan. Let's call that 60m. Let's pretend it's square and obvious, to make the maths easy, so call it a 60m x 60m sheet of metal. That's 3,600 square metres. The search area is 25,000 square kilometres. Which is 2.5 x 10^10 square metres. That means you could fit, in the search area alone, 6,944,444 planes. 7 million planes. You'd have to search 7 million plane-sized images to find it. If each image took 1 second to photograph and transmit, it would take 84 DAYS before the amazing-mega-spy-sat-2000 went back and took the next image at the first spot. If the plane WAS in the search area, and you stabbed at a point at random, you stand more chance of being struck by lightning than hitting the plane. And that's if it's fully visible and not submerged, broken up, confused with anything else (e.g. whales!), etc. AND that it's in the area you're looking at.

      Add in the 3D of water and ocean and junk settling on something on the ocean floor and you stand slim chance of finding it even if you have a rough idea where it went down.

      Despite what the movies might show you, satellites aren't that good (limited by the same stuff as telescopes on Earth spotting those satellites), nobody sits watching thousands of miles of empty ocean, and a plane going down is a tiny speck in the world.

      1. MyffyW Silver badge

        Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

        Good lord - have an upvote just for the sheer length of that post, which did at least hold my attention.

      2. ilmari

        Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

        I once found a submarine on Google Earth. It was just outside Tokyo bay. Always takes me awhile to find it again though.

        1. Bob.

          Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

          Are you sure it wasn't a whale?

    5. a_yank_lurker

      Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

      Since the crash almost certainly occurred in a remote part of the Indian Ocean which has almost nothing of military significance to monitor, it would dumb luck a spy satellite would be monitoring at the right time and place. If there was satellite that actually picked the plane up I would think it is more likely to be weather satellite. This assumes the resolution is fine enough to detect a plane and again the satellite would have to be in the right place at the right time.

    6. Wayland

      Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

      I suspect the plane flew somewhere that can't exist on a globe planet, so they never looked there.

  3. AndyS

    Conspiracy theories

    This is an absolute tragedy, but also an illustration of the limitations of the technology we have available.

    Sadly, the publication of this report will pull all the conspiracy theorists out of the woodwork (as already in this thread). The truth is probably much more boring. It had all coms turned off and lost presurisation, (probably related, perhaps malicious), and flew on until fuel exhaustion.

    Since nobody is monitoring the centre of the oceans, and the satellite coms were mostly turned off or disabled from the aircraft (except the hourly handshake direct from the engines), we don't really know where it is.

    The reality, sadly, is that this could easily happen again, since nobody is magically going to start actively monitoring remote oceans, and systems can always be disabled from onboard the aircraft. Remember, it's not that we COULDN'T know where the aircraft was, it's that the system for locating it was turned off (or broken).

    1. Steven 1

      Re: Conspiracy theories

      Ultimately if the guys (or girls) sitting in the pointy end decide to do something nefarious there is nothing anyone can realistically do, the opportunities to bin an aircraft from the flight deck are endless.

    2. Mi Tasol

      Re: Conspiracy theories

      AndyS

      Fitting real time tracking that cannot be disabled will eliminate the inability to locate the wreckage and the ability of crew to disable the tracking. Both will save millions of dollars in search costs and more importantly, if there are survivors locate them before they die of exposure or injury

      See the item on Spidertracks above

      1. AndyS

        Re: Conspiracy theories @ Mi Tasol

        It is possible to have systems which cannot be disabled from the flight deck, but not always desirable. In fact it was such a system which led to the search area - the engines had an independent coms system which performed a satellite handshake once an hour. Although it exchanged no data, the time it took for the signal exchange allowed a rough calculation of how far away it was from the satellite at each hour.

        A much more complex system, exchanging GPS location and flight parameters etc, would almost certainly need to be designed such that it could be disabled from the cockpit. It's impossible to say if the systems were actively turned off or failed through some catastrophic event, and even if they were deliberately turned off it's impossible to establish malicious intent, but it seems likely that, in the case of MH370, a more complex sat-com system would also have been disabled at the same time as the other systems.

  4. Lars Silver badge
    Happy

    Why should the Aussies know, why not write that we still don't know.

    1. AnthonyP69

      Why should the Aussies know?

      It wasn't our plane, it also wasn't lost over Australian air space, it supposedly crashed somewhere west of Australia. For all we really do know it could be in India's backyard. (they are west of Australia also)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Little Jim

    It's fallen in the water!

    1. Commswonk

      Re: Little Jim

      Not sure that's appropriate here, but on the plus side it means I'm not the only El Reg habitué who remembers the Goon Show.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If you found the plane it wouldn't bring the people back.

    Thousands of people go missing every year. Shit happens I'm afraid.

    That's why people invented religion to explain the shit, didn't work then, doesn't work now, but easier to understand than science.

    1. ArrZarr Silver badge

      Re: If you found the plane it wouldn't bring the people back.

      If the plane were to be found, the failure point would be isolated and hardened. It won't bring those who died back. It will prevent this ever happening again.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: If you found the plane it wouldn't bring the people back.

        We are pretty sure we know the failure point, which was a person, and we can hope that systems have been hardened to reduce the likelihood of this happening again.

        But I still think it is a disgrace that the airline and governments concerned will not continue to fund the search for the wreckage, to allay all doubt.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: If you found the plane it wouldn't bring the people back.

          But I still think it is a disgrace that the airline and governments concerned will not continue to fund the search for the wreckage, to allay all doubt.

          Well, a quick look indicates that total search costs to date must now be in the region of $100m. Since there's not really a better idea of where to look than "somewhere else", it would seem that a further $100m would not be an unreasonable ballpark for another search of many thousands of square km. And then there's the slight issue of salvaging anything useful from 15,000 feet or so - the AF447 salvage operation cost $42m.

          Is a further $150m a reasonable expenditure, with no certainty that the data recorder will found, or be able to tell anything useful?

          1. Daniel Bower

            Re: If you found the plane it wouldn't bring the people back.

            We've spent £11m on a search for a single missing girl so far. $300m for a plane load of missing passengers seems good value by comparison.

            Note I don't agree on either amount being spent...

        2. Lysenko

          Re: If you found the plane it wouldn't bring the people back.

          But I still think it is a disgrace that the airline and governments concerned will not continue to fund the search for the wreckage, to allay all doubt.

          Doubt about what? That they're all dead? There is no doubt about that. You can lose an aircraft in the middle of an ocean but you can't smuggle one into an air defence perimiter and on to an airport undetected and you're not going to be able to determine the cause of the crash even if you locate wreckage because it will be disintegrated and mostly irrecoverable. So, what doubt are you trying to resolve? The possibility that the plane was teleported out of the air by space aliens?

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: If you found the plane it wouldn't bring the people back.

            "So, what doubt are you trying to resolve?"

            The doubt as to the cause and, not knowing that, we thus don't know if it was something which could be corrected on other aircraft to make them a little safer.

            1. Lysenko

              Re: If you found the plane it wouldn't bring the people back.

              I return to my second point: the wreckage would have disintegrated on impact and isn't going to be substantially recoverable even if the approximate point of impact is isolated. There also isn't the slightest chance of flight recorder beacons still being operational.

              Finding ships is difficult enough and those are designed to maintain structural integrity in water and create significant magnetometer readings. A strewn field of shattered fragments, much of which which has some degree of buoyancy is a completely different proposition. You are essentially looking for the engines rather than the fuselage which are both much smaller and unlikely to tell you anything useful even if found.

            2. Sssss

              Re: If you found the plane it wouldn't bring the people back.

              Well, if you find areas in the Indian ocean blacked out in satelite images, or reduced in resolution compared to others.

        3. Cynic_999

          Re: If you found the plane it wouldn't bring the people back.

          "

          We are pretty sure we know the failure point, which was a person

          "

          Rubbish. That's just speculation based on pretty weak evidence. I'm quite sure that some sort of motive could be found in anyone's life with a bit of imagination. As for the "suspicious" simulations ... I hardly think it would have been necessary for an airline pilot to practice such a flight on a simulator any more than you would need a driving simulator to practice driving into a brick wall at 80MPH.

          Far more likely IMO that the crew was incapacitated. It would not be the first time that toxic smoke overcame the flight crew before they put on their oxygen masks. If the smoke originated from a fire in the avionics bay it would also explain the lack of communications.

          It would also not be the fist time an aircraft flew on autopilot with an incapacitated crew until running out of fuel (in this case due to loss of cabin pressure) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522

          There is perhaps a case to be made for fitting a very tough buoyant locator transmitter to the exterior of aircraft in such a way that it will break away in the event of a crash. You have to be pretty much on top of a wreck to detect the sonar pings from its "black box", but a radio beacon will be detected and located within hours by polar orbiting satellites designed for exactly that purpose.

          1. Mi Tasol

            Re: If you found the plane it wouldn't bring the people back.

            Cynic 999

            "There is perhaps a case to be made for fitting a very tough buoyant locator transmitter to the exterior of aircraft in such a way that it will break away in the event of a crash."

            No, there is no viable case for an external breakaway ELT and the currents would move it off site very quickly. The maintenance costs and reliability issues would eliminate that.

            Only active satellite tracking like Spidertracks and its competitors can be made foolproof. It has been working for over ten years and, unlike ELTs has a zero false negative failure rate due to its design.

            The ELT works by being activated by an inertia switch then transmitting a signal on two frequencies. It will not work under water, if the inertia switch fails or if the antenna or cabling is damaged. Search aircraft then need to home in on the signal, if there is one, or search a massive area if there is no signal.

            Spidertracks sends a signal to a satellite every two minutes (it can be set shorter). The signal includes location, altitude, speed and heading. It can be set so it can only be turned off by shutting down all the engines.

            If a signal fails to reach the satellite the system automatically generates emails and text messages that contain all the relevant data so search aircraft can be sent to the very small search area as soon as crewed and fueled.

        4. Kernel

          Re: If you found the plane it wouldn't bring the people back.

          "But I still think it is a disgrace that the airline and governments concerned will not continue to fund the search for the wreckage, to allay all doubt."

          You do realise that airlines and governments don't have access to a magic money tree, don't you?

          The searching that has been done has been paid for by us working stiffs through taxes and, to a lesser extent (I suspect most of the search costs have been borne by the unfortunate Australian taxpayer) those who purchase tickets from Malaysia Airlines.

          While it would be nice to see the matter resolved one way or another, I am, as a taxpayer, grateful to $deity that this didn't happen in New Zealand's extensive search area.

    2. Stu Mac

      Re: If you found the plane it wouldn't bring the people back.

      Oh there are 8 t w a t s here to downvote you!

  7. Jeffrey Nonken

    This is what Lost looks like to the rest of the world. They've simply gotten stuck in a TV series.

  8. pleb

    Flat earth, obviously

    The earth is flat. It flew off the edge.Did nobody think of that?

  9. Mike Shepherd
    Meh

    Man up

    "...societally unacceptable...for a large commercial aircraft to be missing and for the world not to know with certainty what became of..."

    As a kid, I would wander from home, maybe climb a tree or two. I recall once for a thrill making my way across a railway bridge (on the outside). If I'd never made it home I doubt that the world would be much different now. I quite like the notion that there are still places you could disappear and never be found, somewhere still neglected by Amber Rudd, GCHQ and the CIA. If you step outside your home or fly across an ocean, there's a risk. It would be useful to know what happened, but that's a long way from insisting that we monitor every inch of the planet (unless you're a company looking to sell numerous radar and other systems to satisfy those who can't handle uncertainty).

  10. DuchessofDukeStreet

    If we can't find a single body in a rubbish dump (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Corrie_McKeague for non-UK readers) why is anyone surprised that we can't find a plane of wreckage in the ocean?

  11. RareToy

    ALIENS!!! Or perhaps we could train some dolphins? hahahahaha

    Ok Seriously now, we will find it eventually. There will be someone looking for something else or on some other task and will stumble across it. My question is, how much time can pass with pressure and sea water before the data recorders are totally useless if not already?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      The data recorders batteries have already run out. We will never find it, unless a ship sinks or a cable breaks right next to it, in the next couple decades before it gets covered up and becomes unrecognizable on the ocean floor.

      1. Hugh McIntyre

        The batteries that ran out were for the locator beacon.

        If the actual data storage for the recorders is in Flash memory then it should last a few years, at least assuming no damage to the IC packages letting in water or from mechanical stress. The AF447 recorder was recovered after nearly 2 years, for example, and cold water would tend to slow down leakage of data from the flash cells.

        I do agree about the remote chance of finding it though. Someone may stumble onto the wreckage later, but as you say it's also possible it will be covered by a layer of silt and therefore eventually invisible. And it's suspected that the voice recorder wouldn't tell us the original cause anyway since it would not include the start of the flight when the unexplained maneuvers started. Similarly the data recorder may also just include running out of fuel at the end followed by descent :(

        Hence the decision not to spend another $100M on an uncertain search seems understandable.

  12. VulcanV5
    Unhappy

    "Societally unacceptable"

    The authors of the report are correct: it is societally unacceptable that an a/c and all those aboard can vanish without trace. But unacceptability has always been intrinsic to human life. Earlier generations of my family had to contend with the unacceptable reality of polio and diptheria; still earlier, the unacceptable reality of cholera and contaminated water. And before that: etc, etc, etc. Yet that very unacceptability was the stimulus for change, whether over decades or centuries.

    What change, one wonders, is going to arise from the societally unacceptable MH370?

    Is it really the case that in the 21st Century we're as much reliant on blind faith as people were in the 11th Century? That we have to go along with a lethal reality today in hope that somehow and in some way it might be neutralised tomorrow? Or is it the case that within today's technology there already exists the potential to deal with this?

    As things are, I've no idea what happened to that flight. Have no speculation to voice, and wouldn't for a moment pay the slightest attention to repellent conspiracy theorists and the fantasies they invent.

    The only invention in which I'm interested, here in my pax seat aboard a civil a/c cruising at 35000 ft through the midnight hour above a vast ocean, is the invention that will mean that whatever fate befalls this flight and I don't make it home, at least my wife and kids will know what happened, and in their grieving will be able to understand the reason why.

    My curiosity then is not about MH370 because, very obviously, there are no answers at this time. What's passed from sight is past. It's today and all the tomorrows that are my concern, and the question as to how near -- or far -- is the day when nothing like the societally unacceptable MH370 can happen again.

  13. rtb61

    We Know it is now where they Looked

    One thing for sure and certain is the plane definitely did not crash where they looked for it, then why did they look there, to draw attention away from some where else, still most popular rumour Diego Garcia and shot down by the US as a threat and then cleaned up.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I know its a massive over simplification, but could the black box not be ejected from the plane shortly before/after impact, a small CO2 Canister to inflate an some kind of flotation device would see it bobbing about at least CLOSE to the crash site... It doesnt even need to be the black box.. maybe just a load of small botany transponders released on impact with water?

    There must be ways that this could be mitigated in future...

    1. patrickstar

      This is basically how ELTs work, albeit via a different mechanism.

      See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_position-indicating_radiobeacon_station#Automatic_hydrostatic_release_unit

      They are widely used at sea - I have no idea whether they are standard for aircrafts but some definitely have them. (Like the 787 whose ELT caught fire on Heathrow - oh, the irony!)

      I think I have seen proposals to include a data recorder in them as well.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Remote Coverage

    I think the plane had remote control capability namely the Boeing Honeywell ‘Uninterruptible’ Autopilot System. Does that only work over radar covered areas?

    I did hear (wrongly?) that once enabled it kills the flight transponder so a plane that has been remotely taken over no longer appears on (transponder) flight traking systems.

    Who was onboard again? Oh no don't bother, it's naive to think we need reasons.

  16. Duffaboy

    Not the full story

    Pilot had some issue with his employer so then took the plane off course and crashed it into the ocean. His probable thinking is "that will show you, and cost you"

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Let a have a look.

    A friend of mine, in circles that would know, after some discussion with somebody else who I don't know, thought that if the plane had been transporting illegal banned radiotive, biological or chemical weapon, and something went wrong, the pilot had military training and would have ditched the plane where it did. That is his theory, but it is important to find it to prove what "actually happened".

    Now reality, they claim a position based on some servicing signal sent to satelites. At first they claimed not to know if the path was over the indian ocean or towards Eurasia. Then they claimed to have determined it was to the Indian ocean. How do we know any of this is true, or not in some way mistaken. If the above scenario of something being covered up where true, it could have been turned towards a destination going towards Eurasia, with all aligned nations misreporting it. If terrorist related and a mistake made, it could be sent the same path, with everybody dead from lack of oxygen. In all these cases independent verification, and in this case, verifications that these are actual recordings of the aircraft at the time, can yeild some answers.

    Now, let's get towards some much less controversial options, which I'm pretty much hoping might be it. Signals are such little things and anylsis with only so much resolution. So, mistakes can move the zone to where the plane is not. Altitude winds and local winds, can affect the length of flight, making it fall short, left, right or long. The pilot can choose a undesirable altitude or heading, and do so after the last ping, even fly in circles, go straight up or down, turn engines off at anytime, or dump fuel and end up way short. We don't know.

    Now, I pretty much have said this all along, that a detailed micro analysis of current, wave and wind movements against the shape of items washed up on African beaches in 3D simulations, can back track to likely point of origin of the crash zone (if we have the data and processing power). But, then again, how do we know that the items are actually from the plane, and also not just dumped in the ocean.

    Now, the earth is being photographed by satelites. Some are amazingly detailed, some are not. It is possible to see the effect of a much smaller item than the satelite's pixels, especially over time. Discolorisation, or odd brightness level, of a pixel indicates something might be there. It is possible to track items from crash to where they wash up, and in reverse, over subsequent pictures. The size and shape of items will have an average effect over adjacent pixels depending on its orientation and placement relative to pixel boundaries, wave action, sun angle and weather. But basically a computer program could be made to detect and track the more visible items back to the crash site. Volunteers could scan the Indian ocean for crash debris from shoots on the day or week. If it can't be found, then it probably didn't happen at that location.

    The sea floor. The cheapest way to scan existing and new areas are by drone. Using suitable wavelengths of light to penetrate water and pickup reflections, in a photographic or lidar like fashion, you can pickup images. Far, far cheaper than what was done, when you apply cost over future crash scenes. There is a scientific drone that works on little energy that glides up and down the water column, using the pressure differences to reduce energy consumption (plus put a solar cell on it). Combined with a suitable energy source it could glide along the bottom for short stretches come up transmit data recharge (though certain nuclear options available to US and Chinese navies are an option) would eventually get through a search area. The issue is that over a certain period of time things can get covered, moved and/or float down a trench or other feature and be covered. So time is of the essence.

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