Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 166 posts

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

#61

Post by samstave »

cmurf wrote: post #60
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)

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 mod…

I wonder if the cost to Malaysia and Malaysia air at ~250 per month would have been more than all the monies they've had to pay for this two year long search :-/

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

#62

Post by jorgecurio »

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.

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

#63

Post by hueving »

0xffff2 wrote: post #33
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…

>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? Build…

>Why?

Gold lost on sunken ships!

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

#64

Post by Disruptive_Dave »

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 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.

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

#65

Post by imglorp »

TrevorJ wrote: post #40
imglorp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the business model. The longer you are on a web page the more ad cycles you see. I agree with you, its' not good writing, but I think that is where it comes from.

Good point. There's new requirements on writers now.

In the old days, they'd buy your paper if they could scan all the stories and get information easily. Now, the reader is only looking at one story referred by a search engine or blogpost or link farm.

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

#66

Post by JacobAldridge »

gaur wrote: post #22
cosmotron wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

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

Earth to be swallowed by as sun expands into red giant in a matter of weeks.

4 billion years = 208 billion weeks, right?

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

#67

Post by 0xffff2 »

creade wrote: post #59
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

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.

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

#68

Post by dnautics »

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…

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.

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

#69

Post by SeoxyS »

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)

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

#70

Post by melling »

0xffff2 wrote: post #34
melling wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Hyperbole in the news happens all the time. At any rate, the quote is also inaccurate because according the May 2014 article that I posted, we have been able to track a jet for free for almost 2 years. I wasn't trying to start a discussion about how easy or hard one of them is.
Post reply on HN