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Slightly off topic, but here's my favorite conspiracy theory about MH370: It landed Kazakhstan. Interestingly enough, this conspiracy theory was informative on how satellite pings actually work (whether or not you believe the theory is a different matter) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2967157/Vladimir-Put... It'll be interesting to see what what comes of this effort.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also there's not really much "mystery of MH370." It was almost certainly suicide/murder by the pilot. Though I guess there's no harm confirming that.
No, it was with the same 'almost certainty' an overheating of a battery back in the load.
They could come up to the surface to recharge their solar batteries or maybe charge them using turbines rotated by the water movements.
They could remotely relay images and data to a publicly accessible services where they could be crowdsourced for interesting findings.
I think something like this could be useful for more than just the search for MH370 (oceanography, marine biology, etc.)
This is what a HUGIN submarine drone looks like (from the manufacturer's site): https://www.km.kongsberg.com/ks/web/nokbg0240.nsf/AllWeb/B3F...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In prior cruises in the Atlantic, the firm has, according to Josh Broussard, its technical director, managed to scan 890 square kilometres a day using six autonomous submarines. With eight, Mr Broussard thinks that the new mission will be able to manage 1,200 a day—enough to have covered the original search area in just 100 days. Seems up to the job, and while 8 may not be a swarm of bees, I think for deep sea subs i…
Surely it should be a school?
Working in this field, I can say that applying common terminology is not as superficial an act as it may seem. There are similarities in the rulesets governing the dynamics of animal collectives irrespective of the working environment, so usong common terms accross disciplines of study helps avoid confusion and also helps identify points of leverage. For example, engineers building biomimetic swarms of seagliders may benefit from studying V-formations of geese, even though you don't often see sealife swimming in a V-formation.
A swarm requires more than one entity whose behavior is directly affected by the behavior of another entity. One of the most fascinating interdisciplinary aspects of swarms, IMO, is the fact that all swarms can be described by Radial Distribution Functions (2), which is also how states of matter can be characterized - in terms of density and lattice structure (and even polarity in extended versions). More amazingly is that, similar to the way matter in different states yields different physical behavior (e.g. between gas, liquid, solid), it's looking more and more like swarms do the same. They may even have predictable state transition points.
1.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_behaviour (See bilogical swarming) 2.) The use of radial distribution and pair‐correlation functions to analyze and describe biological aggregations: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...
It would be super cool if these submarines could be made completely autonomous. They could come up to the surface to recharge their solar batteries or maybe charge them using turbines rotated by the water movements. They could remotely relay images and data to a publicly accessible services where they could be crowdsourced for interesting findings. I think something like this could be useful for more than just the se…
- Submarines aren't great because solar is your best source for power, and you don't want to divide each day to "work" and "rest" because you need to recharge on the surface.
- Electric propulsion will also require some rather substantial solar setup.
For these reasons, I think either "passive" sensors just following the currents, or sailing vessels, are better candidates at first.
There's also the "glider" concept, where you fill/empty a ballast tank and achieve forward momentum by changing depth while having an aerodynamically-shaped hull. I'm wondering if these could also drag a turbine for electric power, but I fear that idea is coming dangerously close to breaking the laws of thermodynamics.
- Satellite internet is, unfortunately, too expensive for anything beyond short status codes / coordinates / commands. It's something like 10 cents for every 80bytes. You'd need to navigate to coastal waters and pick up cellular/wifi signals to transmit the payloads.
How credible are the conspiracy theories on this? I recall reading about more than one instance where authorities did not cooperate or even misled or otherwise actively impeded investigations.
Mostly, they highlighted instances of authorities either correcting previous mistakes, or withholding information slightly longer than necessary.
Yet it's quite obvious how these two errors are related: If you're eagerly accused of the former, you'll tend to indulge in the latter.
It's also important to consider that the Indonesian authorities were simply overburdened by such an investigation, were likely to make all sorts of mistakes under stress, and had to content with competing interests that were impossible to satisfy.
Then, this investigation happened to involve dozens of authorities and companies from different countries, making errors in communications, distrust, and cultural clashes much more likely than, say, a US-made aircraft crashing in Colorado.
The debris that was discovered in Australia and Africa seems to, roughly, validate the initial search efforts. While there may be competing theories pointing to slightly different areas of the Indian Ocean to be searched, there's nothing supporting the "real" conspiracy theories that the plane was diverted to Riad and will be used to start WW III.
Its crazy the amount of money spent on MH370... does anyone know how much it compares to the payout of the victim's families?
A big reason for it is the opportunity it might provide to discover or better understand a failure mode for jet transportation over the ocean. For example, consider another flight that disappeared mysteriously over the ocean: Air France 447. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 It took nearly 2 years to find and recover the flight recorders. Once they were analyzed, the results were shocking: the pilot…
MH370 is orders of magnitude harder to find, and AF447 was a huge effort.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it was with the same 'almost certainty' an overheating of a battery back in the load.
Ok maybe almost certain is a bit strong but the aircraft maneuvered after losing contact along a path towards the open ocean pretty similar to one the captain had practiced on his flight simulator less than a month before. Not sure how an overheating battery pack would do that. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/07/mh370-pilot-fle...
How credible are the conspiracy theories on this? I recall reading about more than one instance where authorities did not cooperate or even misled or otherwise actively impeded investigations.
I wasn't following the investigation too closely, but the conspiracy theories I saw weren't too convincing: Mostly, they highlighted instances of authorities either correcting previous mistakes, or withholding information slightly longer than necessary. Yet it's quite obvious how these two errors are related: If you're eagerly accused of the former, you'll tend to indulge in the latter. It's also important to conside…
By contradictions I meant the stuff like this [1]. Malaysia got slammed internationally by governments all over the world for their misleading and contradictory statements. It was hard for everyone to explain the particulars away as the being overburdened and stressed. If it had been, I imagine other governments would have been more understanding of that and not slammed them so hard.
One particular incident that left me flabbergasted -- but which perhaps could be explained (though not excused) by miscommunication -- was this one, where I seem to recall (though I can't find the exact article) that they confirmed the flaperon found belonged to the plane before even the French -- who were the ones doing the analysis -- came to such a conclusion [2]:
> On Wednesday, Najib Razak, the Malaysian prime minister, said the flaperon that washed up on the French territory in the Indian Ocean, since transported to France for analysis, was from the doomed flight. But his assertion has not been backed up by the other authorities involved in the investigation, and the dissonant stances have infuriated many relatives of those on board the plane, who have waited more than 500 days for concrete clues into the fates of their loved ones.
> Transport minister Liow Tiong Lai says more possible MH370 debris has been sent to France for analysis. “Why the hell do you have one confirm and one not?” Sara Weeks, the sister of New Zealander Paul Weeks, who was on board, told Associated Press. “Why not wait and get everybody on the same page so the families don’t need to go through this turmoil?”
> The claims and counter-claims continued on Thursday when Liow said a team on the French territory of Réunion had collected more apparent plane debris. The claim was contradicted by French officials, who said no new material in the search for MH370 had been turned over to French authorities.
How in the world they could jump to conclusions before the people actually doing the investigations certainly beats me. I could see it as being a miscommunication, but this was not a one-off incident, and that got harder and harder for the international community swallow the more times it occurred. I recall getting pretty convinced that they were covering up something, though I couldn't go farther and speculate on what exactly that might have been. (When I heard about the misdetected pings I thought perhaps they should have been looking into the Asia possibility too, but only because they had already poured so much effort into other dead end that this seemed worth a shot, not because it seemed otherwise particularly plausible. I dismissed that idea pretty quickly after they found parts from the plane.)
[1] http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/china-slams-malaysi...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/06/mh370-search-p...