Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-02-15/missing-malaysia-jet-mh370-weeks-away-from-keeping-secrets-forever

by acdanger • 10 years ago

243 147 10 years ago

bloomberg.com

melling3• 10 years ago

"In a world where a $100 smartphone can be tracked for free, the $250 million jet vanished."

It sounds like Inmarsat is now making basic ping location available for free:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182223-inmarsat-now-givin...

lostlogin• 10 years ago

That quote had me thinking too. Could I not be tracked please? What would that cost?

mystic001• 10 years ago

:-) It is already being done.

windsurfer• 10 years ago

Don't cell towers need to know your position to transfer you from tower to tower?

0xffff24• 10 years ago

That quote is disingenuous in the extreme. You absolutely can not track a $100 smartphone in the middle of the Indian ocean, for any price.

melling3• 10 years ago

That's Bloomberg's comment not mine. Not sure where the sudden need to downvote is coming from. My point is that it's now a free service to track planes. It was possible to track MH370, for example, but it required a fee.

tim333• 10 years ago

Well, they didn't say in the ocean. You need a $250 gizmo for that http://www.amazon.com/Delorme-AG-009871-201-DeLorme-inReach-...

alien3d2• 10 years ago

no tower.. you need a satellite and they have been checking even since and no information. The most weird was, nobody in penang tower or langkawi tower detect the oddness. And also army radar. Next time, tower must be on 24 hour

freddref• 10 years ago

weeks away from forever?

willvarfar3• 10 years ago

"The company already offers a similar service for ships and boats, which use Inmarsat’s network free of charge for distress signalling."

Interestingly, back when I was an intern, BT used to charge an exorbitant rate for those distress calls. I once wrote-up the whole internship thing http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/17282439831/an-ei...

"I was pretty uncomfortable when I found that mayday calls were being charged at the highest rate - £8 per minute if I recall correctly - even though Inmarsat itself explicitly carried those calls for free. I remember the manager I asked about that, when I found those calls in real logs, not meeting my eyes as he talked distantly about why that was."

samstave3• 10 years ago

Why don't we have an additional distress beacon on all planes that says their gps coords to Inmarsat continuously no matter what?

Basically why can't we use the Inmarsat network for more than distress but any and all planes report to some tamper proof system every minute?

(Yes I know how many flights there are, but you don't need to store the data once a plane has reached its destination successfully)

mikestew3• 10 years ago

I was thinking about this on a motorcycle trip to Alaska. For $250 one can buy a consumer device that updates my location via satellite every few minutes to display on a web page. $35/month, and they have cheaper plans. Were I to have been eaten by a bear, or splattered by a semi on the Dalton Highway, my wife would have at least known where to recover the body.

Any yahoo with $250 and a shipping address can have one of these, yet two years later we still don't know where this Malaysian flight went to?

willvarfar3• 10 years ago

This is exactly what Immersat are now offering. Almost all wide-bodied jets already have the senders, and Immersat will stop charging for it, so everyone will hopefully start enabling it.

cmurf• 10 years ago

It's complicated. One of the complications is requiring anything. Most trade agreements now in place defer major standards compliance in aviation to ICAO, and ICAO ends up being lowest common denominator when it comes to rules. Simply, less rich countries don't want to pay for every possible feature.

Another complication is there's almost no such thing as a "backport" in aviation. The equipment a particular plane model is certified for is the equipment it has for life, save for some software updates. And this isn't in the category of a software update, it's new physical equipment. The easiest part is a new weight and balance for every airplane getting the new equipment. Harder is wiring the thing in, and getting it space in the cockpit - that's often quite difficult. If it requires integration of any sort, very difficult. There's extremely low willingness to substantially alter certified aircraft. There are individual systems that make up a whole, change any one part, you change the whole. The liability is too high for the return, these kinds of lost plane events are rare.

SeoxyS2• 10 years ago

Yes I know how many flights there are

Actually, not that many. There are less than 20,000 commercial flights in the air at any given a time.

dnautics• 10 years ago

Isn't that a good thing? £8 is not that much if you are really in distress, and it is enough to keep spurious distress signals from clogging the channel.

jleader• 10 years ago

It's not £8 per call, it's £8 per minute. I don't know the protocol for satellite calls, but I'd been taught that for both 911 calls and VHF-Marine distress calls, you're supposed to stay in contact with the dispatcher, to update them as the situation changes and to help guide the responders to your location. E.g: "The fire truck is at Smith Street, they can't find you." "No, I'm on Smith Lane, not Smith Street". Or "I can hear the helicopter, it sounds like they just flew by south of me, can you have them fly back 1000 yards further north?" For satellite distress calls, I would imagine this could take a while, though I imagine they'd set up a schedule where you'd only call back periodically.

gaur2• 10 years ago

Another case of a rambling article burying the lede.

I skimmed the article and still can't figure out why we're weeks away from a point of no return. Is the search going to be called off? Is there a transponder that's going to give out? Why can't the journalist just put the important information up front, instead of a bunch of irrelevant crap about someone's sleep deprivation?

cosmotron• 10 years ago

I believe the "weeks" figure is related to this quote: "Without fresh clues, the hunt should end about June, when four ships are due to finish combing the seas off western Australia, Dolan said."

gaur2• 10 years ago

I saw that part. I guess to this journalist, "weeks" really means "four months".

cddotdotslash• 10 years ago

In the fifth paragraph, it says "Without fresh clues, the hunt should end about June, when four ships are due to finish combing the seas off western Australia." I imagine that the news would be quite boring if every article were written as a bullet-point list of points. Sometimes people enjoy reading a story, not just a two minute summary.

Johnie• 10 years ago

I thought there was some technological reason (ie battery dead), but it seems like it's just a funding thing. The batteries only had 30 days of life anyway.

imglorp2• 10 years ago

That's just bad journalism. The first few lines should be who-what-when-where-why. Then you fill in the details and backstory at length.

Nicholas_C• 10 years ago

Isn't there an add on or an app or something that summarizes articles via NLP? It would be nice to have an interstitial pop up with the article summarized and the ability to click out and read the full thing for more color.

grahamburger• 10 years ago

I imagine that the news would be quite boring if every article were written as a bullet-point list of points. Sometimes people enjoy reading a story, not just a two minute summary.

This is exactly what I've wanted but never known how to express it ... is there such a thing? I would love to browse a list of news stories distilled to factual bullet points. Sigh. One can dream :)

draw_down• 10 years ago

But it's strange to call June "weeks away", June is months away.

peter303• 10 years ago

Malaysia, Australia and China funded about two years worth of search. Second anniversary is March 8.

underwater• 10 years ago

Is it really important information? Knowing the answer doesn't change anything about your life.

I consider it to be interesting information. And the author has chosen to tell you an interesting story instead of just a fact fact.

If the goal was to show you something that would satiate the need to be interested then I think the story does a much better job.

stephengillie• 10 years ago

When someone offers one thing but provides another, it's called bait-and-switch.

When someone says they'll do one thing but do something else, that's lying.

chc• 10 years ago

You don't think the story could have done just as good a job with an actual lede and the rest all the same?

intrasight3• 10 years ago

Rest assured that this mystery will be solved. Petabytes of data? Please give it to Google so they can add it to Google Maps. The fact that we can't successfully crowd-source this search is indicative of our having very incomplete maps of the ocean floor.

Eventually (could be a hundred years but I expect less) there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans. They will find all kinds of interesting things - including MH370.

0xffff24• 10 years ago

Please give it to Google so they can add it to Google Maps.

What do you think "add[ing] it to Google Maps" would accomplish? What makes you think the data analysis is easily crowd-sourced? I.e, what makes you think that analyzing the data requires no special experience or expertise?

there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans

Why? What would be the economic case for doing this? Building machines that work at the extreme depths of the sea floor is incredibly hard. The search for a single lost airplane (and it really is just the one, not a single other commercial airliner is unaccounted for) certainly isn't going to fund this pipe dream.

hueving• 10 years ago

Why?

Gold lost on sunken ships!

gherkin02• 10 years ago

What do you think "add[ing] it to Google Maps" would accomplish?

Give us better publicly-accessible seafloor maps for that bit of ocean?

> there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans
Why? What would be the economic case for doing this?

Immediately? Who knows. He did qualify his statement with an "eventually/100 years," though. I can imagine such robots would be useful for environmental monitoring, mineral prospecting, and defense reasons. Especially if the cost decreases.

IIRC, there already are automated scientific buoys that drift with the currents, do programmed dives, and transmit their measurements by satellite.

Edit: here is a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_glider

Edit2: here is a paper about installing mapping sonar in such a vehicle: http://www.physics.mun.ca/~bdeyoung/Zhou_Icebergs_2014.pdf

outworlder• 10 years ago

In a hundred years I expect the wreckage to be found, even by accident. That's a moot point though, as in a hundred years, the relatives will be no longer alive and noone will care too much.

intrasight3• 10 years ago

I disagree. Historians, scientists, engineers, prospectors, etc. will be thinking about this for a LONG time.

creade• 10 years ago

Tomnod has been trying this since I think right after the plane went missing: http://www.tomnod.com/campaign/mh370_indian_ocean

0xffff24• 10 years ago

The obvious difference being that Tomnod is focused on actual imagery of the surface of the Earth, something that most people are already familiar with thanks to Google Maps et al., and even so AFAIK the project produced many false positives and no actual hits.

I have no idea what format the sonar data is in, but I highly suspect that it is not in the form of familiar imagery in which parts of a commercial airliner would be readily identified by untrained observers.

kazinator• 10 years ago

“There’s always this question: Have we missed something?”

The question persists simply because its answer continues to be "yes". The plane is somewhere, and you didn't look there.

jordache2• 10 years ago

That H3 font style looks soo bad. Just horrible, horrible topolsky

thrillgore• 10 years ago

Topolsky hasn't been with Bloomberg for nearly a year.

jordache2• 10 years ago

it was his baby

mariuolo2• 10 years ago

"Forever" is a long time.

It could be found in a few years or in a few decades. Although reading the flight recorders by then could be problematic.

It's not the first time anyway, a British plane disappeared on the Andes in 1947 (after sending a cryptic Morse message BTW) and was found 50 years later, so I wouldn't despair.

jonshariat• 10 years ago

Mountains and deep oceans are a big difference though. I really hope we do find it and get the families some answers.

mariuolo2• 10 years ago

Indeed, but technical means also improve with time.

pm246012• 10 years ago

Andes are dry and cold and will preserve things. People hike the Andes. People can see things from above in the Andes.

The ocean is deep. Sediment drifting down from above layers the debris. Ocean currents disperse the light aluminum fragments that remain from the ocean impact.

An undersea landslide covers the fuselage or it slides down into an underwater canyon, separating and breaking apart.

I vote "forever".

caf• 10 years ago

On the other hand, this search itself has found I believe two previously-unknown shipwrecks from the 19th century.

Macsenour• 10 years ago

I vote "Titanic"

rwhitman• 10 years ago

The MH370 tracking problem is unfortunate but what I'm most fascinated by in all of this is the continuing reminder of how powerless we are as a civilization when it comes to the oceans.

A plane crashes in an area with no landmass and we lose it. We've overfished many species to near-extinction because we completely failed to understand exactly how many fish there actually are. The sea acts as a natural eraser for human habitation, sometimes wiping out all evidence of entire communities within hours. We lose all kinds of cargo into the ocean and haven't the faintest clue where it goes. We're only beginning to figure out how to convert seawater into potable form effectively. The majority of our planet is covered in something we can't even figure out how to build habitats on top of without piling up dirt underneath.

The belief that we have any mastery over this planet seems to humbly disintegrate when looking at our relationship to our oceans

maxerickson2• 10 years ago

The logistics of a cruise ship probably don't compare all that badly to a town of similar size.

kijin• 10 years ago

Except you probably won't die if you accidentally step outside of the town.

Disruptive_Dave• 10 years ago

The belief that we have any mastery over this planet seems to humbly disintegrate when looking at our relationship to our oceans

And let's be thankful for that. We need it.

fapjacks• 10 years ago

I grew up in Kansas but lived on Oahu for six years. I will never forget the first time my squad leader took me body surfing at Sandy's. That is the interface of the most powerful force on our planet.

wcummings• 10 years ago

That, or it was stolen by an intelligence agency.

mahmud• 10 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

pm246012• 10 years ago

You don't need to understand something to destroy it.

You don't need to master something to wreak it.

Sadly, our ignorance is doing both.

7952• 10 years ago

the continuing reminder of how powerless we are as a civilization when it comes to the oceans.

That is symptomatic of our child like relationship with the environment. We are deeply dependant but have little understanding or agency.

It is obvious that high fish stocks will allow more catches than near extinction levels. Catching 1% of 1 billion is better than 40% of 1 million. Yet we continue to treat fish as a short term commodity to be exploited.

We may lack mastery of the planet, but that is no excuse for burying our head in the sand. We have a huge impact and we cannot just opt-out of that.

WalterBright2• 10 years ago

That's a classic tragedy of the commons. For comparison, nobody is predicting running out of chickens, hogs, or cattle.

monk_e_boy3• 10 years ago

No one can police the sea. We have big issues with illegal fishing. What can we do about it?

Aelinsaar2• 10 years ago

On the other hand, when you actually spend a night awake, with that electric terror running through you at these thoughts you can at least understand why most people do NOT accept what you're saying. I wish that I were one of those people sometimes.

monk_e_boy3• 10 years ago

I live by the Atlantic, people go missing every so often. It seems tragic but normal to the locals. The sea is the sea. It'll slurp you out and kill you.

Tourists seems quite shocked that there isn't more that could be done. Everything in a city is very safe, it's pretty hard to accidentally kill yourself. It stands to reason that we should put up some more signs, or have someone stop them from doing something silly.

We had storms last week. A car was found in a car park next to a beach. The guy was working somewhere near the beach. He was never seen again. No one knows what happened. The search and rescue do a days search, but where do you look?

tomphoolery• 10 years ago

Sounds like the perfect retirement community for a serial killer.

mmmBacon• 10 years ago

Same thing happens here along the Northern California coast. With El Nino this year, the waves are bigger and more powerful than a typical winter and catch people unaware. There are occasional "sneaker" waves that break on the beach and knock people down.

Recently: http://www.mercurynews.com/central-coast/ci_29405514/san-jos...

http://abc7news.com/news/pacifica-man-drowns-trying-to-save-...

pjmlp• 10 years ago

I also come from a coast city on the Atlantic and can fully relate to that.

jahnu• 10 years ago

Everyone unfamiliar with the sea should watch some videos like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSgSMZsMh4A

They all were rescued later, btw. But it was clearly a close thing.

jorgecurio• 10 years ago

hard to believe they have all this satellite pointing back at us and they can track anyone anywhere seemingly but they can't find a giant several hundred ton airplane? Either that or we underestimate just how large the body of oceans are.

And likely more scary is the fact that once a nuclear submarine submerges, nobody knows where it is. We can't even find this plane. A moving submarine beneath the vast body of ocean even more so.

I wonder if it's possible to develop xray vision that sees through the earth's ocean.

SeoxyS2• 10 years ago

I find it hard to understand how we can be justified spending so much money and effort trying to find the wreck. What is there to gain? The only benefits I see are:

- Giving family members (maybe a few thousand people) closure.

- Understanding what happened, and potentially making a few improvements to plane safety as a result.

Given the very slim chance of them even finding the plane and learning anything useful out of it… I don't see how the search justifies a 9-figure price tag. (I don't mean to be insensitive)

payne92• 10 years ago

If they can find the wreck, they have a decent chance of debugging the cause, and implementing corrections to prevent it from happening again. Depending on the cause, that can be worth a lot.

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

Zikes• 10 years ago

And when it happens a second time, you will be asking why we never bothered to find out what happened the first time.

Honestly, $130m is not a lot of money to an industry such as that. I'll bet the majority of it was covered by insurance anyways.

WalterBright2• 10 years ago

The insured always winds up paying the cost of the claims, and then some, eventually. The premiums are based on the expected claims.

netinstructions• 10 years ago

Understanding what happened, and potentially making a few improvements to plane safety as a result.

Well Wikipedia says a Boeing 777-200ER costs $261.5 million[1]. That's about double the cost for the search. If it's possible to prevent even one future mishap as a result of learning anything the cost is justified.

Besides closure is important for the families and friends of the passengers. Especially with crazy articles saying the plane could have landed in Kazakhstan[2]. Imagine the suffering people must be going through thinking their loved ones are 95% dead but 5% possibly maybe caught up in a crazy conspiracy. Even if it's 1% or 0.001% likely it could be enough to keep one awake at night.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777 [2] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/jeff-wise-mh370...

fnordfnordfnord• 10 years ago

I don't care about the cost of the tin can. It's worth far more than that to find out why the accident happened, and if it was an equipment failure, do something to the rest of the tin cans so that it doesn't happen again.

Aelinsaar2• 10 years ago

When you add the lost money from lawsuits, lost value, etc... I'm sure it's much, MUCH more.

acqq• 10 years ago

The simple answer to the "mystery" is a scenario about a "lone wolf" with the determination and the capability to direct the plane to the middle of the ocean and die with the plane.

We saw a confirmed example of such a guy almost exactly one year later (8 March 2014, 24 March 2015):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

The rest are just the details.

exabrial• 10 years ago

Did they ever look into that crazy conspiracy theory where it went north instead of South and landed in Russia?

orionblastar• 10 years ago

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/missing-malaysia-air...

They looked into the North Corridor to see if the plane flew there. I don't think they found anything.

DarkContinent• 10 years ago

Is it possible to track passengers' smartphone data to get a better grip on where the plane would have entered the ocean?

Ycros• 10 years ago

There's nothing there for any phones to connect to...

linuxkerneldev• 10 years ago

I would hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but Malaysia's politics are quite a spectacular bowl of spaghetti. You have Saudi "donations" of billions, a Prime Minister who stands accused of using the country's Speciall Forces team for blowing up a Mongolian woman involved with a billion dollar French defense company purchase of Scorpene submarines. The accused murderer now resides in Australia. You literally have the financier of the Wolf of Wall Street movie, parties with Paris Hilton, squandering of billions of Malaysia's taxpayer funds. You have bankers being murdered in broad daylight. You have attorney generals being fired and prosecutors being found dead inside barrels of cement. You have Deputy Prime Ministers being kicked out. You have ex-Prime Ministers raising a 5 alarm fire demanding that the Prime Minister be arrested. You have apartheid policies being increased in the country. You have sudden import of millions of foreign workers, who have been accused of being used as false vote banks. So.... when they write "keeping secrets forever", that almost seems like what was intended for this flight.

[1] http://www.sarawakreport.org/2016/01/court-case-opens-agains...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Shaariibuugiin_Altan...

[3] http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/7/28/malaysias-na...

[4] http://www.sarawakreport.org/2015/11/kevin-morais-drew-up-th...

[5] http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/kevin-mo...

[6] http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/mala...

[7] http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/malaysia-...

[8] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/01/27...

[9] http://www.asiasentinel.com/politics/banker-murder-connectio...

[10] http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/zahid-de...

[11] http://www.theantdaily.com/Main/Lindsay-Lohan-Paris-Hilton-a...

[12] http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/12/29/fbi-probes-wolf-of...

helpfulanon• 10 years ago

The evidence that the pilots were deliberately masking their flight path shortly before the flight's disappearance, was pretty compelling. I've always felt that the plane was intentionally maneuvered somewhere, but clearly the destination was not dry land.

So we assume for a moment that some organized group deliberately did something to this aircraft. Who has the motivation to execute such a scheme?

Government agencies I rule out - because of lack of a cover story. It does a government no good to leave a massive mystery open to the court of press speculation, especially for so long. It grows distrust in the populace and gives the perception of incompetence, which undermines power. Plus the political risks of being uncovered are too great. There needs to be a cover.

I'd rule out corporations or business moguls for the same reason - leaving mysterious loose ends is not in their best interest. Too much risk to reputation.

Terrorists I rule out as well - they are motivated by public gestures that further the cause. They'd have claimed it immediately and even if the plot was steal the plane and use it later, they'd have done it already.

So what nefarious organization is left? What group would be OK with leaving a mysterious unsolved disappearance out in the open? Criminal syndicates.

Professional criminals are in the business of doing bad things and getting away with it without a trace. To a career criminal, an unsolved mystery is a point of pride.

If there was someone or something of extremely high value aboard the plane, perhaps being smuggled, organized criminals would have the motivation to extract it, far away from law enforcement or even satellites, and bury the evidence without a trace.

But they would have a difficult time landing an aircraft of that size anywhere on land without detection. Eventually it would turn up.

So how about on water? Ditch the plane gently on the ocean, Captain Sully style, extract whatever is in the cabin and then let it sink slowly. Disappears without a trace. Do it far enough away from civilization and nobody will find it.

Pretty elaborate heist, and absurdly risky. But criminals aren't known for being overly risk averse. And even if they botched the job, we'd never know about it.

So that's my theory over who would be responsible. Definitely backed up by what you're saying about the level of organized crime in the Malaysian political world.

That plane was carrying some person or thing that a highly corrupt, well financed individual or group wanted very badly - either to take for themselves or destroy. And so far, they've gotten away with it.

Twirrim• 10 years ago

"forever". What hyperbolic drivel. Ultimately we will find the plane, be it by deliberate searching action, or accidental discovery as we further map the oceans or whatever else draws us below the waves.

racecar789• 10 years ago

How will Bloomberg manage the content of these animation/graphic heavy articles?

Talking say 10 years from now.

These articles go way beyond standard text/image content.

tcannon• 10 years ago

Last year I sailed my 30' boat from Oakland to Hawaii. I went three weeks with no sign of life aside from Albatross and flying fish. None. I couldn't even get my sat phone to work 90% of the time. I covered, roughly, the distance from Oakland to about Massachusetts. My boat was much smaller, and had very little as far as safety equipment on a passenger jet. While both might be exceptionally hard to spot -- even a 1000' vehicle with 1000' span would be hard to find on solid ground somewhere between CA and MA, add deep water, and that piece of wing was not attached to the plane when it hit the water. I know this as it still was shaped like a wing. I'm also a pilot and can only guess as well as other pilots, but when you over-stress the airframe from a loss of control, you can fold a wing. No life jackets floating as they're still in the plane which likely hit well before that chunk of wing fluttered down into the water. I doubt we'll ever really know. Seems unlikely to have been a bomb, as shit would be washing up.

rm-rfU• 10 years ago

It will be found eventually, perhaps by a film crew in 50 years.

solidsnack9000• 10 years ago

Later generations will discover our airplanes, lost at sea.

alien3d2• 10 years ago

I'm live in Malaysia . There's a lot of weird information in few years. Some even not logical.The airline strike hard twice in a year and now changing hand to new company. Anybody here can downvote me here but we need agent Mulder And Scully to solve this issue. Eistien and new agent can help also :)

water_badger• 10 years ago

What do you think it means if the pilot of the plane reappears?

http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/taiwan-mh370-pilot-mysteriou...

Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

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