But if it was something sudden, there should be something to find in the area that the transponder ceased functioning.

A simple automated (and non-tamper-able) spot tracker mounted in the tail or a cabin top pod would resolve all of these questions with about 10 minutes of work. I still can't believe we don't have this ability.

Cell phones wouldn't work out over the open ocean so even if there was time to get a call or text out, they would have had to use the plane's data systems to get it out...clearly those either weren't working or stopped working rather quickly. But, that does bring up another point...if there were a runway large enough to put that thing down, there would probably be a cell phone tower in reach and someone would get some sort of signal out. It's unlikely that plane is hidden somewhere.

Jake, obviously the technology exists for the gps trackers, but like everything else, it costs money. Nobody wants to pay for it, and with 40,000 flights around the globe per day, nobody wants to monitor them all.

We have two transponders, and then there is the 'skin paint' of large metal objects flying through the air, from ground based radar, ie. old school stuff that they say shows the flight turned around and headed back towards Malaysia.

The case could be made that there should be a third transponder which only operates once airborne, from an independent power source (internal battery) which cannot be turned off by the crew or anyone else, that may indeed be the result of this investigation.

why isn't anyone investigating David Copperfield?

This is far from a David Copperfield operation.

Now this: hey, look! Both photos have the same legs?


Seriously, you are scanning these photos for worldwide distribution to try and identify these guys and you don't take the time to scan each one cleanly or (gasp) extract a digital screen grab? Facepalm.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...rlines-and-the-case-of-the-missing-legs/

How much would that cost compare to the search effort that has everything from satellites to submarines trying to find it? It could be as simple as a something that transmits a constant and simple stream of data by a radio signal. A bottom of the line 777 costs $261M so if it adds .5% to the cost? If you also start to consider the fact that there ~could be~ a (granted, slight) chance for survivors, finding them quickly could make a difference too.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/09/malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-black-box

This right here:

Air traffic controllers today must orchestrate the most congested airspace using primarily voice commands. You can send and receive text messages from most aircraft, surf the web and even stream House of Cards. The system that powers the plane is limited to pre-dial-up internet connection speeds.

There is simply no datalink onboard an aircraft with the bandwidth to continuously stream the volumes of data collected and stored during every second of a flight by the flight data recorder and the **** voice recorder.

I can't prove it, but I'm about positive this is George Bush's fault.

The least exotic explanation is probably what happened. They went down in the jungle somewhere and we will never know where/why. If they went down in the ocean, that is a big piece of water and it can take a lot of time before debris is found.

I suppose they are now searching for the onboard flight data recorder and **** recorder.. 15 mile range for those beacons Timbo?

There are two Emergency Locator Transmitters on the 777's I fly, one in the **** and one in the tail. I'm not sure what the Malaysians use, or if they use any at all. The ELT's are supposed to self activate if they get wet, or if they are jarred loose from their mounts by an impact such as a crash landing.

BUT...if they went down in the water, the ELT signal is going to be very weak, depending on how deep it is. If they went down in the jungle, it should be able to be picked up by any aircraft flying over within about 50-100 miles.

ELT's are in most commercial airplanes in the USA, even in a small 2 seater like a Cessna 150. We often pick up ELT signals when flying around the in the USA, because student pilots will hit the test switch and then forget to turn it off, or someone will bump one and set it off unknowingly.

As far as radio coverage, down there in Malaysia, not so much as here in the US of A. I've flown down there from Tokyo to Singapore many times and we are out of both radar and voice communication a good bit of time between the islands. So even if there were a distress radio call made from the plane, it may have been out of range of any receiver when they made it.


There's a lot of water out there, and a lot of jungle too. It will turn up someday, no doubt. They found the Titanic didn't they? It took a while, but they found it.
BUT...the ELT's are powered by an internal battery and it will only last so long, maybe a week, if it was in tip top shape to begin with, maybe less if it was an old battery.

i wonder if anyone checked the hydrophone network. If they can hear whales fart, they might have heard something they could triangulate.

Or maybe a submarine caught a weird sound.

The jungle scenario makes sense, too. Remember the AirTran that splatted into the Everglades that took forever to find... I mean the WHOLE plane disappeared.

So someone thinks they might have seen it on radar? How would you identify MH370 from any other flight if all the electronics are out?

And they knew exactly where to look for that one too, they had great radar coverage, just outside of Miami.

The more I think about this, the more I think it was....

Snakes! Time to open some windows!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofRB63SM-vE

Tim,

Do you know of any device that signals just prior to a hard impact? I got this blurb from CNN that assumes the plane would have had to touch down in a controlled fashion in order to not fire off this beacon.

I think they messed up the translation. There is nothing that emits a signal if you are 'about to impact the ocean', other than the pilots screaming.

I believe they must be talking about the ELT's I mentioned above. The ELT's are independent units, not tied to any of the aircraft systems, and they are both portable, you are supposed to take them with you into the life rafts, if you ditch in the ocean.

The **** Voice Recorder (CVR) and Flight Data Recorder (FDR) are both tied to the airplane's electrical systems, and other systems. Those are the "Black Boxes" (actually painted bright orange, so they can be easier found) the media talks about.

But they are not the ELT's, which do emit an emergency signal once activated, on a VHF radio freq. which is 121.50.

If you own a VHF handheld, you might be able to hear the woo-woo-woo signal it puts out if you are near an airport when somebody tests one.

But not a marine VHF - those are on 156.0 MHz (channel 0, UK coast guard) to 162.025 MHz (channel 88B, AIS)

CNN is now saying it may have flown for an additional 4 hours...into the Indian Ocean.

This tells me either the crew was incapacitated, or it was hijacked, or one of the pilots took it for a joy ride.

I still think that they had some type of electrical short in the E/E bay and turned back to return to Malaysia. Then they descended due to smoke in the **** and/or cabin, then the crew was incapacitated and the airplane flew on autopilot at what ever altitude they had set (10,000' is what we usually use for a decompression/smoke event) until it ran out of gas (4 more hours?) and then the engines flamed out and it went into the Indian Ocean.

It that's where it is, they will have a very hard time finding it. Needle in a much bigger hay stack...and a week late to the party.

Timbo,

Don't they have oceanic radio that uses HF frequencies to communicate longer distances? I remember being in South Florida and I could hear airline flights reporting over Gander.

Yes, we still use HF as a #3 back up to;

#1 VHF and

#2 Sat com.

That's how we pass our position reports to the controllers when we are out of radar range, which is quite a bit of the time, over water or in the third world. We have to give them our time over a waypoint, the estimated time to the next waypoint, and the following waypoint, our altitude, fuel, winds, etc.

I prefer Sat com, but not every place on the planet has Sat Com installed in their Air Traffic Control centers. Most of the third world does not have it, that's where we typically use HF, because we are out of VHF range once out over the water more than about 150-200 miles from a VHF tower.

Here's the thing about HF though, it is TERRIBLE. The quality of the reception is very bad, most of the time. And it is affected by solar storms, even thunder storms will wash out the transmissions sometimes.

Then you have the language barriers, when you are trying to hear the Chinese or Russians or Africans, who are trying to speak English but do it very poorly.

We have been bitching about still using HF, a WW2 technology, in this century for many years, when Satellite Com is available and it is much clearer.

We also have a thing called CPDLC (Controller/Pilot Data Link Com) which also uses satellites, that we use over Canada, Iceland and parts of Western Europe and parts of Africa and Asia. With CPDLC, we don't even have to talk on the radio, we just type a message to the controller (we call it E Mail) and they can message us back, no radio calls needed.

BUT...as I said a long while back, it's a Money thing. A lot of the third world doesn't have Sat Com or CPDLC because they can't (or won't) pay for it. It's also a "Jobs" thing. As with Gander, Iceland and Ireland, we still use HF to back up the VHF and CPDLC.

Why? Because if they got rid of HF, they'd have to lay off a lot of HF operators.

I don't want to age myself but it was a while ago before SAT comms became as prolific.