141–150 of 215 posts
Interesting hypothesis that would square with this: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/03/a-hypoth...
http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2014/03/13/Missing-MH3...
The Malaysian transport minister has just denied this article's accuracy at a press conference in KL. Which is interesting. The WSJ isn't just some random blog. I wonder where they got their information.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a code that can be used by the cabin crew to access the cockpit in this cases. It's cancelable from the inside, so if a hijacker tries to use it you can put it of once it starts ringing(it rings for 30 seconds and then opens the door). So this case of pilots unconscious is covered. Any way I agree that the spending after the 9/11 is insane and unecessary.
That seems like a good solution. Why did the crew of the Helios flight not do that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why ground? I'd do that as an L-band ORBCOMM type system, since it's going on planes operating over oceans. $0.01/character.
So why don't planes do that that? You need 24 bits for 3 meter GPS accuracy (times 2). Add some extra for altitude and airplane ID (or does a unique ID come built in?) So maybe 80 bits in total. This would be nothing for an airplane - $0.40 per hour? Why don't they do this already?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This would be nothing for an airplane - $0.40 per hour? Why don't they do this already? They would likely receive pushback from private jets that don't want all of their flight path transmitted back to RR.
I don't know what RR is, but you don't have to transmit to any central authority. Just to the plane owner. Make a law that the owner has to preserve the data for one week, but doesn't have to provide it to anyone. And doesn't the US military track every overland flight anyway?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a code that can be used by the cabin crew to access the cockpit in this cases. It's cancelable from the inside, so if a hijacker tries to use it you can put it of once it starts ringing(it rings for 30 seconds and then opens the door). So this case of pilots unconscious is covered. Any way I agree that the spending after the 9/11 is insane and unecessary.
That seems like a good solution. Why did the crew of the Helios flight not do that?
In a similar scenario, everybody onboard the Malaysia Air flight might have been dead or in a coma for the entire duration of the emergency, so it probably wouldn't have made any difference if the cockpit door could be opened from the cabin or not (which might turn out to be a misguided concern anyway since there's a cabin crew access code).
The Malaysian transport minister has just denied this article's accuracy at a press conference in KL. Which is interesting. The WSJ isn't just some random blog. I wonder where they got their information.
Can't find where I read, but I think it was Rolls Royce. Every thing seems to be speculation in this case.
This begs the question: why on earth is it even possible to turn off a transponder mid-flight on a commercial plane carrying hundreds of human beings? I also don't understand why, if we can send bursts of engine data every 30 minutes from the middle of the ocean, we can't send a GPS location every couple of minutes. Maybe even throw some GPS data in with the engine data - at least we would know where it was within a…
The simple answer is you have dozens of planes on the ground at airports, which you don't want to appear on all the radars. Yes, a technological fix would be trivial, but those systems were designed decades ago, when being a pilot was quite prestigious and well paid. The thought of a rogue pilot never occurred, I guess. Locaiton data is sent by the ACARS system, which was apparently turned off.
Radar operators have a hard job telling a plane from clouds or echos. A transponder makes that job a lot, lot easier.
However, if you have a good radar system, you can happily track the contact without a transponder. In fact this happens all the time, I had a very nice chap at Farnbourgh West LARS (Low Altitude Radar Service) do this for me, when the shed I was flying had a little bit of a failure. For newewer systems such as those used by NATS automatically keeps the data assigned with the trace, using their proprietary algos to filter the noise.
If this happened over the UK, the transponder went off, ATC couldn't reach them, then a couple of Typhoons would be sent up to go have a look, and if need be escort.
With this background understanding of how modern Radar services are used piratically, taking into account a bit of background of the Malaysian authorities (short version: no terrorist attacks have ever happened even with our extremist religious views, honest.) Then this article will make some more sense: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/13/mh370-satellite...
It is becoming clear they knew full well what was going on. They had the ACARS data. They had contacts on their radar, which they would have understood to be the plane, if not at the time, soon after. (But they really should have understood at the time!).
This stuff happens all the time in air safety investigations. See Egypt Air, or Air France!