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Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

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Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#51

Post by willvarfar »

samstave wrote: post #39
willvarfar wrote: post #4

"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 c…

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)

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.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#52

Post by baddox »

imglorp wrote: post #21
cddotdotslash wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

It's called "long-form journalism." It's apparently extremely popular, but I consider it to be the worst medium ever invented.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#53

Post by samstave »

willvarfar wrote: post #51
samstave wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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.

I want my cut for independently inventing this, then :-)

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#54

Post by jonshariat »

mariuolo wrote: post #48

"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.

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

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#55

Post by rwhitman »

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

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#56

Post by jsprogrammer »

hluska wrote: post #44
0xffff2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I know what quotation marks mean... My point is that the quote makes it seem much easier to track an airplane than it actually is. It's great that Inmarsat is providing the service for free now, but the quote makes it seem like the service is trivial to provide when it really isn't.

Your comment would be better if you weren't so aggressive.

Curious, what language did the poster uses that implies aggression? I see none.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#58

Post by maxerickson »

rwhitman wrote: post #55

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 hu…

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

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#59

Post by creade »

intrasight wrote: post #28

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 int…

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

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#60

Post by cmurf »

samstave wrote: post #39
willvarfar wrote: post #4

"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 c…

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)

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.

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