The Mystery of Missing Malaysia Airlines 370

[The Brain]

Are we going to have a news story every time the Chinese see a some junk floating in the water?  Cause there's lots of junk floating in the ocean.

[alfred russel]

I think it is ridiculous in the age of satellites, GPS, internet etc that we still have to look for a missing plane using search planes and telescopes.  I refuse to believe that it is technologically impossible to track a large civilian plane even if it crashes into the ocean.  They just don't bother putting those systems into the planes.

it would be technologically possible, but very expensive (since you would have to do this with sonar, not radio).  "They just don't bother" raising ticket prices by $200/seat/flight (or whatever) to pay for "putting those systems into the planes."

I don't understand why you need sonar. If the plane goes underwater, you don't need to continue to track the plane: you just need to know where it crashed. I think you could accomplish a lot for less than $50k per flight (extrapolating your cost of $200/seat/flight). GPS would seem to be more cost effective.

[Razgovory]

I think it is ridiculous in the age of satellites, GPS, internet etc that we still have to look for a missing plane using search planes and telescopes.  I refuse to believe that it is technologically impossible to track a large civilian plane even if it crashes into the ocean.  They just don't bother putting those systems into the planes.

it would be technologically possible, but very expensive (since you would have to do this with sonar, not radio).  "They just don't bother" raising ticket prices by $200/seat/flight (or whatever) to pay for "putting those systems into the planes."

I don't understand why you need sonar. If the plane goes underwater, you don't need to continue to track the plane: you just need to know where it crashed. I think you could accomplish a lot for less than $50k per flight (extrapolating your cost of $200/seat/flight). GPS would seem to be more cost effective.

That's what the Transponder does.

[sbr]

I think it is ridiculous in the age of satellites, GPS, internet etc that we still have to look for a missing plane using search planes and telescopes.  I refuse to believe that it is technologically impossible to track a large civilian plane even if it crashes into the ocean.  They just don't bother putting those systems into the planes.

it would be technologically possible, but very expensive (since you would have to do this with sonar, not radio).  "They just don't bother" raising ticket prices by $200/seat/flight (or whatever) to pay for "putting those systems into the planes."

Is there any way they can make the transmitter float?

That is probably pretty easy.

The problem is getting the 300 ton aircraft it is inside to float along with it.

[Caliga]

I don't think you'd want it to float, because then it would drift away from the wreckage and typically there's a strong desire to recover that, because it can aid the investigation and also people want their loved ones' bodies back if possible.

[CountDeMoney]

Are we going to have a news story every time the Chinese see a some junk floating in the water?  Cause there's lots of junk floating in the ocean.

[grumbler]

I don't understand why you need sonar. If the plane goes underwater, you don't need to continue to track the plane: you just need to know where it crashed. I think you could accomplish a lot for less than $50k per flight (extrapolating your cost of $200/seat/flight). GPS would seem to be more cost effective.

GPS is one-way.  It would tell the plane where it is crashing, but the pilots already know that, because they already have GPS.

If all you are interested in doing is tracking aircraft from satellites, you could have the aircraft transmit its GPS coordinates via Iridium every few minutes.  That would cost (probably) some small thousands of dollars per flight (Iridium calls are expensive, but not that expensive, and you'd need somewhere to receive and record the calls).  But, the fact of the matter is, that we pretty much know where commercial airliners are all the time from their IFF beacons, unless they suffer some catastrophe like MH 370, in which case the new system would fail as well. 

There are a few flights that get outside of everyone's radar coverage for a while and so are not tracked via beacon, like that Air France jet that went down in 2009, but even then searchers knew pretty much were it went down, because it hadn't been out of radar contact long and would have been picked up by Azores flight control if it had gone much further.

[grumbler]

Is there any way they can make the transmitter float?

It would have to survive the crash intact in order to still be in shape to float.  And even then, you'd need to tether it to the plane or it would just float away, and you'd be talking a lot of weight (and thus reduced payload) to have a tether strong enough to hold and long enough to reach the bottom of the ocean.

[CountDeMoney]

Is there any way they can make the transmitter float?

Sure, just add root beer and two scoops of ice cream.

[alfred russel]

I don't understand why you need sonar. If the plane goes underwater, you don't need to continue to track the plane: you just need to know where it crashed. I think you could accomplish a lot for less than $50k per flight (extrapolating your cost of $200/seat/flight). GPS would seem to be more cost effective.

GPS is one-way.  It would tell the plane where it is crashing, but the pilots already know that, because they already have GPS.

If all you are interested in doing is tracking aircraft from satellites, you could have the aircraft transmit its GPS coordinates via Iridium every few minutes.  That would cost (probably) some small thousands of dollars per flight (Iridium calls are expensive, but not that expensive, and you'd need somewhere to receive and record the calls).  But, the fact of the matter is, that we pretty much know where commercial airliners are all the time from their IFF beacons, unless they suffer some catastrophe like MH 370, in which case the new system would fail as well. 

I'm not sure why it couldn't be done for a cost in the low hundreds. Say a quick ping to a data center every 5 minutes--if each ping costs $5, that is still just ~$60 an hour (and that pricing seems high unless I'm missing something).

That new system wouldn't fail in the event of a catastrophe. We would know where the plane was within at most 5 minutes of its demise.

[grumbler]

I'm not sure why it couldn't be done for a cost in the low hundreds. Say a quick ping to a data center every 5 minutes--if each ping costs $5, that is still just ~$60 an hour (and that pricing seems high unless I'm missing something).

That new system wouldn't fail in the event of a catastrophe. We would know where the plane was within at most 5 minutes of its demise.

We already know where the plane is within 5 minutes of its demise, because its IFF goes blank.  Except, you know, when we don't.  This system would do exactly what the IFF transponder does, except at a higher cost and over the few regions of the world where there isn't radar coverage (but, where there aren't commair flights, either, by and large).

The cost would have to include the people monitoring all these flights, and the facilities for them to use.

And how many times a year do we lose commercial airliners, anyway?  Is this really the problem we should be devoting new resources to?

[alfred russel]

We already know where the plane is within 5 minutes of its demise, because its IFF goes blank.  Except, you know, when we don't.  This system would do exactly what the IFF transponder does, except at a higher cost and over the few regions of the world where there isn't radar coverage (but, where there aren't commair flights, either, by and large).

The cost would have to include the people monitoring all these flights, and the facilities for them to use.

And how many times a year do we lose commercial airliners, anyway?  Is this really the problem we should be devoting new resources to?

I think it is. The current system apparently is unable to reliably identify where a plane is within five minutes of its demise. I'm not sure why that is, but if it is possible to fix that, it should be explored. There are a lot of tangible costs in this situation: significant search and rescue costs, loss of airline revenue as some people lose confidence in aviation safety, and costs associated with legal uncertainty. Not to mention that lives may be lost while searching for a downed plane, or accidents may reoccur because we were never able to pinpoint what went wrong in a crash.

[Siege]

There is an App for that.

[Monoriu]

(CNN) -- Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went down over the southern Indian Ocean, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Monday, citing a new analysis of satellite data by a British satellite company and accident investigators, and apparently ending hopes that anyone survived.

A relative of a missing passenger briefed by the airline in Beijing said, "They have told us all lives are lost."

Razak based his announcement on what he described as unprecedented analysis of satellite data sent by the plane by British satellite provider Inmarsat and the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch. He didn't describe the nature of the analysis.

But he said it made it clear that the plane's last position was in the middle of the remote southern Indian Ocean, "far from any possible landing sites."

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, center, delivers a statement Monday, March 24, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Razak announced that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went down over the southern Indian Ocean, according to a new analysis of satellite data. The plane has been missing since March 8.

Members of the Chinese navy continue search operations on Thursday, March 13. The search area for Flight 370 has grown wider. After starting in the sea between Malaysia and Vietnam, the plane's last confirmed location, efforts are expanding west into the Indian Ocean.

Malaysia Airlines Group CEO Ahmad Juahari Yahya, front, speaks during a news conference on March 8 at a hotel in Sepang. "We deeply regret that we have lost all contacts" with the jet, he said.

He begged reporters to respect the privacy of relatives.

"For them, the past few weeks have been heartbreaking," he said. "I know this news must be harder still."

A Facebook page dedicated to the only American aboard the flight, Philip Wood, said of relatives that "our collective hearts are hurting now."

"Please lift all the loved ones of MH370 with your good thoughts and prayers," a post on the page said.

Debris spotted in Indian Ocean

The announcement came the same day as Australian officials said they had spotted two objects in the southern Indian Ocean that could be related to the flight, which has been missing since March 8 with 239 people aboard.

One object is "a grey or green circular object," and the other is "an orange rectangular object," the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said.

The objects are the latest in a series of sightings, including "suspicious objects" reported earlier Monday by a Chinese military plane that was involved in search efforts in the same region, authorities said.

So far, nothing has been definitively linked to Flight 370.

Earlier, Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia's acting transportation minister, said only that "at the moment, there are new leads but nothing conclusive."

A reporter on board the Chinese plane for China's official Xinhua news agency said the search team saw "two relatively big floating objects with many white smaller ones scattered within a radius of several kilometers," the agency reported Monday.

The Chinese plane was flying at 33,000 feet on its way back to Australia's west coast when it made the sighting, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said.

Two objects located in ocean

But a U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon aircraft, one of the military's most sophisticated reconnaissance planes, that was tasked to investigate the objects was unable to find them, the authority said.

With the search in its third week, authorities have so far been unable to establish where exactly the missing plane is or why it flew off course from its planned journey from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

China has a particularly large stake in the search: Its citizens made up about two-thirds of the 227 passengers on the missing Boeing 777. Beijing has repeatedly called on Malaysian authorities, who are in charge of the overall search, to step up efforts to find the plane.

Malaysian and Australian authorities appeared to be more interested Monday in the two objects spotted by a Royal Australian Air Force P-3 Orion aircraft.

The Australian's navy's HMAS Success "is on scene and is attempting to locate the objects," the Australian maritime authority said.

Hishammuddin said Australian authorities had said the objects could be retrieved "within the next few hours, or by tomorrow morning at the latest."

Recent information from satellites identifying objects in the water that could be related to the plane has focused search efforts on an area roughly 1,500 miles southwest of the Australian city of Perth.

A total of 10 aircraft -- from Australia, China the United States and Japan -- were tasked with combing the search area Monday.

The aerial searches have been trained on the isolated part of ocean since last week, when Australia first announced that satellite imagery had detected possible objects that could be connected to the search.

Since then, China and France have said they also have satellite information pointing to floating debris in a similar area. The Chinese information came from images, and the French data came from satellite radar.

But Australian officials have repeatedly warned that the objects detected in satellite images may not turn out to be from the missing plane -- they could be containers that have fallen off cargo ships, for example.

On Saturday, searchers found a wooden pallet as well as strapping belts, Australian authorities said. The use of wooden pallets is common in the airline industry, but also in the shipping industry.

Hishammuddin said Monday that Flight 370 was carrying wooden pallets, but that there was so far no evidence they are related to the ones sighted in the search area.

The investigation into the passenger jet's disappearance has already produced a wealth of false leads and speculative theories. Previously, when the hunt was focused on the South China Sea near where the plane dropped off civilian radar, a number of sightings of debris proved to be unrelated to the search.

The sighting of the objects of interest by the Chinese plane came after a weekend during which other nuggets of information emerged about the movements of the errant jetliner on the night it vanished.

Military radar tracking shows that after making a sharp turn over the South China Sea, the plane changed altitude as it headed toward the Strait of Malacca, an official close to the investigation into the missing flight told CNN.

The plane flew as low as 12,000 feet at some point before it disappeared from radar, according to the official. It had reportedly been flying at a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet when contact was lost with air traffic control.

The sharp turn seemed to be intentional, the official said, because executing it would have taken the Boeing 777 two minutes -- a time period during which the pilot or co-pilot could have sent an emergency signal if there had been a fire or other emergency on board.

Authorities say the plane didn't send any emergency signals, though some analysts say it's still unclear whether the pilots tried but weren't able to communicate because of a catastrophic failure of the aircraft's systems.

The official, who is not authorized to speak to the media, told CNN that the area the plane flew in after the turn is a heavily trafficked air corridor and that flying at 12,000 feet would have kept the jet well out of the way of that traffic.

Malaysia disputes reprogramming

Also over the weekend, Malaysian authorities said the last transmission from the missing aircraft's reporting system showed it heading to Beijing -- a revelation that appears to undercut the theory that someone reprogrammed the plane's flight path before the co-pilot signed off with air traffic controllers for the last time.

That reduces, but doesn't rule out, suspicions about foul play in the cockpit.

Last week, CNN and other news organizations, citing unnamed sources, reported that authorities believed someone had reprogrammed the aircraft's flight computer before the sign-off.

CNN cited sources who believed the plane's flight computer must have been reprogrammed because it flew directly over navigational way points. A plane controlled by a human probably would not have been so precise, the sources said.

Malaysian authorities never confirmed that account, saying last week that the plane's "documented flight path" had not been altered.

On Sunday, they clarified that statement further, saying the plane's automated data reporting system included no route changes in its last burst, sent at 1:07 a.m. -- 12 minutes before the last voice communication with flight controllers.

Analysts are divided about what the latest information could mean. Some argue it's a sign that mechanical failure sent the plane suddenly off course. Others say there are still too many unknowns to eliminate any possibilities.

CNN aviation analyst Miles O'Brien called the fresh details about the flight a "game changer."

"Now we have no evidence the crew did anything wrong," he said. "And in fact, now, we should be operating with the primary assumption being that something bad happened to that plane shortly after they said good night."

If a crisis on board caused the plane to lose pressure, he said, pilots could have chosen to deliberately fly lower to save passengers.

"You want to get down to 10,000 feet, because that is when you don't have to worry about pressurization. You have enough air in the atmosphere naturally to keep everybody alive," he said. "So part of the procedure for a rapid decompression ... it's called a high dive, and you go as quickly as you can down that to that altitude."

Authorities have said pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah was highly experienced. On Monday, Malaysian authorities said Flight 370 was co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid's sixth flight in a Boeing 777, and the first time when he was not traveling with an instructor pilot shadowing him.

"We do not see any problem with him," said Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya.

[CountDeMoney]

I tuned out the Malaysian government about 2 weeks ago.