Search on after Malaysia Airlines flight vanishes

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26492748

by bauc • 12 years ago

80 82 12 years ago

bbc.co.uk

level092• 12 years ago

The last time I read a news title like this (where they use words like Flight Vanishes) was in 2009 about the Air France Flight 447 from Brazil to France.

I still find this story extremely puzzling for many reasons:

1-Boeing 777 is one of the most technologically advanced and safe planes.

2- Malaysian Airlines are one of the best airline companies in the world.

3- The weather seemed to be clear with no storms or strong wind (unlike the case with the French flight)

4- communication was lost completely with the aircraft. I'm not an airline expert, but shouldn't be there at least a fallback for the communication protocol being used e.g: radio/satellite/GSM etc .. ?

nemothekid• 12 years ago

Shit happens. The probability of an event like this isn't 0. I hope the best for the rescue teams.

naterator• 12 years ago

Terrorism is also a non-0 probability possibility, which must also be considered.

userbinator3• 12 years ago

I don't know about avionics much either, but I'm wondering why, even at the time of AF447 if the planes do broadcast information about their current position (including altitude and speed), there seems to be no obvious "Your plane is dropping from the sky!" warning generated by any systems and remotely sent. Even if it's not a continuous stream of data, planes don't fall infinitely fast; it took a few minutes for AF447 to reach sea level.

ewoodrich2• 12 years ago

I wouldn't rule out local adverse weather or environmental conditions that would contribute both to downing a plane and rapid loss of communication...

laurencei• 12 years ago

The A380 does this. If you watch the Air Crash Investigations episode (also known as "Mayday) Season 13 Episode 10 - it talks about the Qantas A380 that had an engine explosion.

All the data from the plane was being relayed back to Qantas HQ - and the engineers at Qantas HQ were able to see in realtime all the issues facing the plane.

Ironically there were so many issues, they actually initally thought the system was faulty (i.e. there were too many faults, so the fault must be the alert system).

tjohns• 12 years ago

Many modern planes do have satellite uplinks, but they're mostly used for sending short text messages. Primary voice communications are still over VHF or HF radio. If you're having a mechanical problem, the pilot is going to be more focused on not crashing than composing an email.

(There are some automated logs that are sent too -- and these were actually used as part of the Air France investigation -- but this is primarily for maintenance rather than real-time tracking.)

Even ignoring fancy telemetry systems, planes are normally equipped with an emergency transponder (ELT) which activates if there's a sudden impact.

That signal would normally be detected by a Cospas-Sarsat satellite within 1-2 hours. In this case, it's possible that the transponder didn't activate, or the signal is too weak to be detected due to being underwater.

einhverfr11• 12 years ago

On #4, that's one thing I noticed too. No mayday. No emergency declared. No contact. The flight just failed to show up.

I can think of three cases where this could be. The first is where the pilots tried to communicate that something was wrong and were unsuccessful, but I would expect that someone might have heard something.

But the other two are more catastrophic. The plane could have disintegrated in the air, giving no time for communications. Midflight breakups are uncommon but they do happen.

Finally it is possible that the pilots for some reason didn't know they were descending and could have crashed into the ocean without ever knowing they weren't at altitude. This apparently happened with AF447 to some extent. It has happened before as well (static ports get clogged, pilots get disoriented at night, etc). In this case the first sign that anything was wrong could have been impact.

lbsnake7• 12 years ago

They were talking to a retired pilot on the news and they asked him how it was possible that no distress call was made from the plane. The pilot said that pilots are trained to keep the plane in the air, if something starts to go wrong they start troubleshooting and focus all their energy on fixing the problem. If they then have time to send out a call, they do, but their main priority is to try and keep the plane in the air.

So it's possible that if the problem they experienced was complicated or happened too quickly, they never got a chance to send out a distress signal.

bananas• 12 years ago

Re: #1 - so far...

Software updates, component changes and supplier cost cutting don't necessarily maintain safety records.

gchokov2• 12 years ago

Can't really imagine how are the relatives of all these innocent people feeling.

And also can't imagine that in 2014 we are not really sure where an airplane is..

JonnieCache2• 12 years ago

I thought with radar we could track every plane on earth at all times? By bouncing it off the ionosphere or something?

level092• 12 years ago

I had the same impression as well :

http://www.flightradar24.com/

seeken• 12 years ago

I think generally tracking is done with radar transponders which can be disabled from the cockpit.

joeconway• 12 years ago

I appreciate that radar only works above a certain altitude, but can someone explain to me why a vehicle worth > $200m doesn't have a GPS unit broadcasting over longwave radio,satellite connection or some other remote communication means. I feel like I'm missing something fundamental.

phreeza• 12 years ago

Doesn't longwave require a longish antenna? Plus it wouldn't work when submerged.

aw3c22• 12 years ago

Yes but planes are pretty long. It would work underwater, in fact it would be nothing ordinary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines

Gigablah• 12 years ago

It probably does, but if all means of communication are somehow disabled, that could be an indication that something catastrophic happened =/

_pferreir_4• 12 years ago

All modern aircraft are equipped with Mode-S transponders [1] which broadcast several parameters such as altitude, lat/longitude and aicraft ID info. There are also specific messages that signal "emergency status"[2].

You can 'listen' to these messages yourself with very basic radio equipment tuned to 1090 MHz[3].

Even though these signals can reach long distances (I remember getting ~300 Km with my home made antenna) it's possible that the plane was going through an area where no base stations exist.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_transponder_interrogat...

[2] http://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim/aim04...

[3] http://www.rtl-sdr.com/adsb-aircraft-radar-with-rtl-sdr/

aw3c22• 12 years ago

Those signals are very much dependant on direct line-of-sight. Transmitted from the ground or on the ocean the range would be very low.

7952• 12 years ago

All those kind of systems can fail or give inconclusive data. What you need to know is the crash site, not the last GPS trace. It would be better to include substances in aircraft that would be released in the event of breakup and be easily visible to remote sensing and radar satellites.

cabbeer2• 12 years ago

Navy confirms plane crashes into the sea: http://sg.news.yahoo.com/mas-aircraft-goes-missing--says-air...

mkl• 12 years ago

Not really, no. Immediately after that statement it says "When contacted, Malaysia Airlines declined to confirm or deny the reports", and nor has it been confirmed in the six hours of updates to that story since.

cabbeer2• 12 years ago

You're right: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/03/08/malaysia-airlines-c...

userbinator3• 12 years ago

Governments have developed so much surveillance technology that they can easily invade the privacy of many citizens, yet tracking the exact whereabouts of planes flying in the sky - something that for scheduled, commercial flights whose routes should very much be publicly known information - still seems out of reach? I find that fact a little unsettling.

sidcool• 12 years ago

Dude, not cool.

swombat• 12 years ago

I don't see how that's not cool.

enscr• 12 years ago

You can't be practically tracking every co-ordinate at every second, not yet. Once you know what to track, you can do it effectively. For airplanes, it's already late. Maybe, if they are lucky, based on satellite imagery, they can gather traces.

femto• 12 years ago

Alternatively, such information is available, but the system that produces it is classified so the data is not released. The surface area of the Earth is 1.7e14 square metres, so it would be feasible to cover the earth with pixels to a resolution of a square metre. Each uncompressed whole earth image would be less than a Petabyte at 32 bits per pixel. Add compression and deep pockets and it would be possible to create and store whole Earth movies.

_pferreir_4• 12 years ago

Here is the flight path of MH370, before it ceased responding to tracking stations:

http://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/mh370/#2d81a27

35kft altitude.

DanBC• 12 years ago

How many aircraft are in the air at any one time? Or over a span of 24 hours?

How much bandwidth and storage would it take to collect information about where an airplane is at any point in time?

gchokov2• 12 years ago

How many cats pictures are currently posted online? How much clouds are being deployed right now?

RossM• 12 years ago

Check out http://flightradar24.com - they do exactly that.

cstross• 12 years ago

Would it have hurt too much to have linked to a real civil aviation news site like the Aviation Herald for your running realtime summary of developments, rather than a generic mass media news site run by non-specialists?

(It's about as useful as linking to the BBC for news of a new OS vulnerability, rather than CERT, or even The Register.)

The (detailed) AvHerald coverage is here: http://avherald.com/h?article=4710c69b&opt=0

Personal observation: I flew through KUL on Malaysian last year, and was very unimpressed by security: it was cursory in the extreme and if I remember correctly out passports weren't electronically captured on entry or departure. Reports of someone using a stolen Italian passport being among the passenger manifest are a bit worrying (although some sort of mechanical failure is far more likely than terrorism).

einhverfr11• 12 years ago

the threat models vary. I haven't flown on MAS from KUL, but I have flown Lion and Air Asia from there. The security is a bit odd from American perspective but I didn't think (at least on the Lion terminal) that it was any different than what I have seen in Singapore or Taipei.

Touche• 12 years ago

There's a submit button up top, use it. Downvoted for unconstructive comment.

tptacek• 12 years ago

I thought it was an interesting comment, so, cancelled that out for you. :)

jpdus• 12 years ago

Apparently an Italian passenger on the passenger list was in fact not on the plane[1] (and did not buy a ticket, passport was stolen), could be another sign for a terrorist background.

For more information/speculation the airliners thread[2] is also a good source.

[1]http://www.corriere.it/esteri/14_marzo_08/scomparso-aereo-di...

[2]http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re...

lolo_• 12 years ago

Don't bags that belong to passengers who don't embark get taken off the plane as a standard security measure?

einhverfr11• 12 years ago

What we know is that two apparent passengers were on board with stolen or forged passports. Obviously they meant mischief, since you don't travel internationally on a stolen passport if everything is above board.

But when you think about it the sorts of mischief that could be involved are quite many and varied. One can't rule out terrorism, but it's one possibility among sufficiently many that this is not where I personally would start. Far more likely you are dealing with organized criminals doing more typical organized criminal things (like smuggling stuff).

Additionally usually if the plane is intentionally downed, someone will want to take credit/responsibility. That this hasn't happened is an indication, particularly absent patterns of attacks here in the past, that this is just criminal business as usual and not related to the accident.

Finally there are early unconfirmed reports that the Vietnamese navy may have spotted smoke columns yesterday. if that turns out to be the case, it would be a strong indication that the plane exploded on impact with the water, not in the air.

At present I am so far from being able to endorse the T-word explanation that it doesn't seem worth looking further into at this point.

ajcarpy2005• 12 years ago

Oil slicks have been spotted in the ocean. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/china-bound-malaysian-jet-van...

pavelrub3• 12 years ago

How difficult is it to scan the entire area using satellites? There are civilian satellites that offer resolutions better than 30cm today, surely enough to spot wreckage in the middle of the sea. DigitalGlobe alone has over 3 active satellites that can scan an area of over 10,000 km^2 in a single pass, and the combined revisit times should be good enough. This should also be possible using SAR with a good enough resolution, as the sea would appear mostly black and anything non-smooth on top of it should stand out.

Edit: made a mistake concerning the area. Fixed now.

maxerickson2• 12 years ago

The area of sea involved quickly works out to tens of thousands of square kilometers.

pavelrub3• 12 years ago

The whole area between Malaysia and Ca Mau is bounded within a square of less than 500 km^2, and even that is a vast exaggeration of where the plane is most likely to be.

sciguy77• 12 years ago

I remember when this happened to Oceanic flight 815.

Search on after Malaysia Airlines flight vanishes

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