MH370 Beacon Battery May Have Been Expired 178
New submitter Limekiller42 writes Malaysia's transport ministry released its preliminary report on the disappearance of MH370 that disappeared almost a year ago during flight and has yet to be located. The report states that the maintenance records for the solid state flight data recorder underwater locater beacon [indicate that its battery] expired in December of 2012 and there is no evidence it was replaced prior to aircraft going missing.
And that's half the story (Score:5, Informative)
They were also carrying a load of lithium batteries, which other passenger airlines refuse to carry due to past accidents
"It confirms that a large consignment of lithium-ion batteries was aboard the Boeing 777 and outlined in a red box was the warning: “The package must be handled with care and that a flammability hazard exists if the package is damaged. Special procedures must be followed in the event the package is damaged, to include inspection and repacking if necessary.”"
http://www.thedailybeast.com/a... [thedailybeast.com]
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Yep because speculation and conjecture will really help at this point.
Large consignments of lithium-ion batteries get carried all the time without issue.
Re:And that's half the story (Score:4, Informative)
Yep because speculation and conjecture will really help at this point.
Large consignments of lithium-ion batteries get carried all the time without issue.
It's not just "speculation and conjecture" As the Daily Beast's companion article [thedailybeast.com] states (emphasis mine),
One item in particular jumps out from the cargo manifest: a consignment weighing 5,400 pounds that included a large number of lithium-ion batteries, radio accessories and chargers.
Tests conducted on a similar consignment of batteries in a cargo hold by the Federal Aviation Administration have shown that they are vulnerable to a “thermal runaway” when one battery overheats and a chain reaction occurs. In several of the tests, smoke and fumes reached the airplane’s cockpit in less than 10 minutes. Another test caused an explosion that blew open the cockpit door. This week United Airlines joined Delta in deciding to no longer carry shipments of the batteries in the cargo holds of passenger flights.
This issue was also brought up quite recently in a related discussion right here on Slashdot [slashdot.org].
Re:And that's half the story (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just "speculation and conjecture" As the Daily Beast's companion article [thedailybeast.com] states (emphasis mine),
One item in particular jumps out from the cargo manifest: a consignment weighing 5,400 pounds that included a large number of lithium-ion batteries, radio accessories and chargers.
Tests conducted on a similar consignment of batteries in a cargo hold by the Federal Aviation Administration have shown that they are vulnerable to a “thermal runaway” when one battery overheats and a chain reaction occurs. In several of the tests, smoke and fumes reached the airplane’s cockpit in less than 10 minutes. Another test caused an explosion that blew open the cockpit door. This week United Airlines joined Delta in deciding to no longer carry shipments of the batteries in the cargo holds of passenger flights.
Yes, and that is a perfectly rational risk assessment. It is not possible to say how big the risk is exactly, but it is easy to avoid for a moderate additional cost, and therefore I would expect any airline to come to the same conclusion - unless maximising profit is the only significant consideration.
However, that does not really explain what happened, because it seems that the aircraft did not blow up, but it just followed a rather strange and irregular flight path.
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Yes, but "smoke and fumes reaching the airplane's cockpit" is not the same as "blow up". It is possible that fumes from overheating batteries incapacitated the flight crew resulting in the plane flying on autopilot until it ran out of fuel.
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Yes, but "smoke and fumes reaching the airplane's cockpit" is not the same as "blow up". It is possible that fumes from overheating batteries incapacitated the flight crew resulting in the plane flying on autopilot until it ran out of fuel.
Then why did the pilots not declare an emergency (or at the least radio someone/anyone) upon seeing the smoke/smelling the fumes? It's not like smoke and fumes make you unconscious immediately.
Re:And that's half the story (Score:5, Informative)
They were also carrying a load of lithium batteries, which other passenger airlines refuse to carry due to past accidents
You make it sound like Malaysian Airlines is the odd one out in allowing shipments, when infact the norm at the time of MH370 was to allow lithium battery shipments - sure, some airlines had bans in place already (Cathay, BA) but others such as United Airlines put their restriction in place just this month, while Delta put theirs in during February.
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It only sounds that way if you misread it as "all other passenger airlines". Malaysian Airlines was not the odd one out, and I don't think it sounded that way. It only sounded like there were at least one other airline which had refused to carry lithium-ion batteries.
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How would a cargo of lithium batteries cause a plane to drastically alter course (towards the pilot's home island, no less)?
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So why no contact with the outside world via any of the numerous systems available to the pilots?
Re:And that's half the story (Score:4, Informative)
The priorities of a pilot are Aviate, Navigate, Communicate
https://www.faasafety.gov/gsla... [faasafety.gov]
Aviate
It does seem that they kept the plane in the air, even climbing to a higher elevation for some time, pure speculation here, but they may have thought to use the high altitude to help extinguish the burning batteries
Navigate
There has been mention of them following waypoints to another airport, whether this navigation consisted of punching the numbers inot the autopilot or a pilot guiding the plane is unknown
Communicate
This did not happen, but there are plenty of things that could have occurred in the prior two steps; pilots incapacitated by smoke, pilots incapacitated by low oxygen, communications system affected by fire on board..., which would have prevented communication
All of these things have been points of discussion for the past year, what was not included in the discussion until this month was the potential source for the sudden fire
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In practice, communication is top of the list and bottom of the list, but they leave it off the
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I totally agree with you, and in a modern aircraft with GPS and satellite communications, I would expect the discussion of communications should be in the range of, 'Should we sent aircraft updates in one second or one minute intervals?", not "Should we disable automated communications in order to save money on our maintenance contract with Boeing and Rolls Royce?"
I suspect that there were also cultural issues with communications and the desire of the pilots not to announce information over air traffic cont
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I think it was hours off flight-plan when the engine data stopped being returned to the Boeing systems, wasn't it?
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Possibly to head to the closest runway available ....... Note the Fex Ex Dubai crash, the smoke was so bad the pilots could not see the instruments, and in the end, the fire burned the oxygen lines. The pilot left the cockpit to seek an oxygen bottle but never returned, presumably overwhelmed by fumes. The co-piot crashed alone in the cockpit. Fire indicates getting down to the nearest runway ......
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But the first step would have been to radio ATC and request emergency clearance at the nearest runway, as without that the pilots would have no way to know the status of nearby runways and whether it would be possible to land.
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It lends a little weight to the "suicidal pilot" theory. Some pilots have suggested the tight turns it undertook before it disappeared were to provide a view of the island.
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A fire is highly unlikely; Inmarsat continued to pick up ACARS pings/handshakes once every 70-90 minutes until roughly 8am, some seven hours after radar/transponder contact was lost with the plane. The ACARS functionality was turned off, but the SATCOM low-level communications layer was still alive. The transponder and ACARS were also disabled at roughly the same time and no radio calls were made, which seems unlikely for a progressive fire.
There are really only three possibilities left, and all of them
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Maybe they caught fire.
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Maybe they caught fire.
I'm not an aviation expert, but if that were the case wouldn't you expect either A) the crew notice and radio in the emergency, which didn't happen, or B) the fire leads to a sudden explosion and crash, leading to fragments of the plane all over the sea where radar last placed it, debris all over the ocean and an oil slick, none of which have been noticed?
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Re:And that's half the story (Score:4, Informative)
The standard procedure, as far as I know (not being an expert), is upon noticing the fire, the pilots would have shut down all the circuits on the plane in order to find out if one was responsible for the fire.
They don't turn off all circuits, only non-essential ones. For example as in this crash caused by an in-flight fire [wikipedia.org] the standard procedure is to switch off power to the cabin but not the cockpit, as without power to the cockpit you'll barely be able to fly. The radio was also kept on at all times as you're less likely to be able to make a successful emergency landing without being able to talk to ATC to make sure the runway is clear and prepared.
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Being an expert on the subject of electronics, I can assure you that turning off the electricity that started an electrical fire will not extinguish said fire or provide any useful feedback unless someone is actually watching the "sparking and arcing" and notes when it stops.
(also, "shut down all the
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Those rules
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I could imagine some electrical problems from a large number of cells catching fire or 'gassing' the whole airplane within seconds.
But of course that would either quickly cause the aircraft to crash, or to just stick to its original autopilot headings if only the crew were incapacitated. Military radar caught it making precise manoeuvres around several waypoints well away from it's original flight plan...
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But the thing is there's enough evidence that the plane remained flying to discount a sudden catastrophic failure; Military radar picked it up making several precise waypoint manoeuvres well away from it's planned flight path and the satellite comms gear kept responding for 7+ hours after the plane went missing.
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I might not call myself an electronic expert, but turning down all systems in case of fire doesn't sound like a good idea. Their is a ton of stuff keeping a plane airborne and able to ask for help. I don't think flipping a switch will make fire 'magically' go away, so turning everything off does not sound very logical to me.
Some electrical fires are purely electrical. No non-electrical material is involved. The "fire" is sparks and smoking insulation. If you shut down the power to the circuit, the "fire" is gone, and a small amount of smoulder will continue, but not as strongly as before.
If the electrical fire sparked the curtains in your house to catch fire, shutting down the circuit will have no effect on the fire. But flushing the area with halon (or equivalent) will not put out the fire if the electricity isn't cut.
Re: And that's half the story (Score:4, Funny)
Your post is much better if I substitute "lions" for "Li-ions".
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"This is the captain. We have an emergency situation, please don the running shoes dangling in front of your faces."
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I hate squirrels.
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I asked my squirrel if he likes you and he ignored me.
What about military satellites (Score:4, Insightful)
One thing I wondered about is whether some country's military has a better fix on where the plane went down (the last partial handshake). Iridium only have a very sparse satellite array and hence could only generate very rough ranging information. But it seems inconceivable to me that many of the military constellations (e.g. GPS, GLONASS) do not have the capability to triangulate a well defined Iridium signal. I would have thought doing this would be bread and butter for them.
I wouldn't expect anyone to step up and talk about this 'capability', but I would have thought someone could have quietly nudged things towards a set of coordinates earlier on. I guess there is a lot of game playing when it comes to acknowledging any sort of military capability but it intrigues me to think that somewhere there could be people who have an accurate plot of that aircraft's journey.
Having said that, one of the revelations of the whole event is that you can fly an unidentified jumbo jet across the Malaysian peninsula, have it detected by expensive military radar, and then have the military do precisely nothing about it.
Re:What about military satellites (Score:5, Informative)
The satellites in question would have to be looking for the signal - GPS and GLONAS are passive systems, they send signals out in a broadcast sense, not a 1:1 client communication sense, so there is nothing for them to track.
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I bet there was some radio traffic picked up my military spy satellites though. The same data that the engine monitor system satellites were picking up, only with better positioning capability.
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The SIGINT satellites with the sensitivity to pick up the sort of transmissions from the plane's transponders have steerable antennas that must be pointed in the vicinity of the target to get a usable signal. Unless you come up with an elaborate conspiracy theory where the US planned this whole thing, that couldn't have happened.
Re:What about military satellites (Score:5, Interesting)
The military won't track every authorised, flight-planned route over every foreign territory. It's just pointless and expensive and outside the scope of the military.
On their own soil and to a certain extent nearby international waters, they rely on air traffic control and their systems to spot UNAUTHORISED aircraft. That's all they care about.
A plane on a detour is a daily occurence. A scheduled plane outside a border and no visible threat, isn't their problem.
And then you get into "which" military? The world's militaries are not co-operative. Likely one countries military did watch the aircraft, but then once it's leaving and not posing a threat it's up to another country to spot it and worry about it. Flying out over international waters into the middle of nowhere, which military is going to care? Even the Malaysian probably doesn't, or they'd be chasing their tails all done long for the slightest things of a company redirecting a plane for maintenance, to cover a late departure, etc.
And then you have to actually choose it as a target, watch it (GPS and GLONASS *do not transmit* from the aircraft, the aircraft uses signals SENT from the satellites to triangulate its OWN position, not the other way around - this is such a common misconception that it drives me mad), percieve it to be a threat worth monitoring and store all the data, including potentially classified capabilities, to hand off for a hunt for a plane where we knew everyone on board was dead the first day it doesn't check in.
It's just nothing to do with the military.
It's certainly nothing to do with any particular military for more than a fleeting moment at all.
And also, they probably have certain capabilities but they aren't active all the time and to this level of detail for everything that ever happens.
Sorry, but really don't buy into this stuff. The UK recently didn't realise that a couple of Soviet bombers were circling around its airspace until they'd already got half-way round and then it took almost forever for them to scramble an aircraft to meet them and see them off. And that's a CREDIBLE threat.
Spotting a commercial airplane going off-flight-plan is for the local air-traffic control. And between countries that link is capable of being "lost" between ATC's. And over international waters there IS not ATC.
Maybe someone did spot them and see them, but they would have paid them no attention as they weren't reported missing, weren't giving out Mayday, were broadcasting their positions as expected, over international waters, and so it never gets recorded and wouldn't be any use if they did (we knew roughly where they were flying, we don't know where they went down).
Even then, the ocean in the area is HUGE, you'd have a task spotting anything that you weren't specifically targeting.
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The military won't track every authorised, flight-planned route over every foreign territory. It's just pointless and expensive and outside the scope of the military.
How's the weather back in August, 2000?
Half of what the US military does is "pointless and expensive and outside the scope of the military".
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they probably do have records of it while it was between vietnam and sumatra
but as soon as it started heading toward the south indian ocean, it wouldn't surprise me if no one was looking
there is just nothing, absolutely nothing, to look at there
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but as soon as it started heading toward the south indian ocean, it wouldn't surprise me if no one was looking
there is just nothing, absolutely nothing, to look at there
In other words, the perfect location for a super villain's secret volcano lair.
Tell us who you work for!
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the development office of the cocos islands
http://www.caro.cc/cocos.htm [www.caro.cc]
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Because existing beacons use signals not designed for time of arrival detection, location would still rely on Doppler processing techniques, but location to within 1 mile or so should be achievable with this system. There are plans to change the modulation of emergency locator beacons to permit time-of-arrival localisation with 10 meter precis
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Data has been sent via Iridium as a matter of course for years. I know from experience with floats [webbresearch.com] and autonomous underwater vehicles [webbresearch.com] that modems are commercially available and used every day. We got usable throughput on the order of a couple of hundred bits per second with a very unfavorable antenna location inches above the sea s
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You can complain about the political shitheads that give them their orders all you want, but the US military personnel all signed up to protect Americans.
Dissing them is like badmouthing the older older brother that's keeping the high school bullies from kicking your ass at grade school.
Besides, you are off-topic.
As to the military satellites, you know the military isn't going to give away their capabilities, even i
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So the one hand it's inconceivable that Western powers can't tell an iridium signal from anywhere on earth. But on the other hand you admit Malaysia couldn't track widebody airliner flying across the country.
While I wouldn't equivocate the professionalism of american and Malaysian militaries, I think it shouldn't be surprising that neither is well equipped to succesfully deal with random, unpredictable scenarios that they've never encountered before.
It doesn't seem that unreasonable to me, If the transponder is off (somehow) air traffic control can't see the airplane. Military radar can, but until an emergency is declared or until the plane does something really weird any military is unlikely to do anything (re: Pearl Harbor, 9/11, Mathias Rust, &c). By the time they figured out the plane was missing the plane was long gone.
Having said that, this whole thing stinks.
A 100-ton airplane doesn't crash, even in the ocean, without leaving a lot of de
Expired? (Score:3)
The battery was not dead. It was just pining for the fjords.
Should they search the original areas again? (Score:3)
When the Indian Ocean search began, the first areas searched were the places judged to be where the plane was most likely to have come down. And those areas were searched with a pinger locator. After 30 days, the searchers moved on to other areas and used different equipment to map the sea floor.
What if the plane actually is in one of the first places they looked, though - but because it wasn't pinging, and they weren't scanning the sea floor, they missed it? Should the searchers return to those areas and look on the sea floor, or have they already?
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Several thousand square kilometres. If you are able to search a square kilometre or so a day, I'll be impressed.
Several thousand days. Years. At enormous cost. To find an aircraft we know has been downed.
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They search using side scanning sonar and look for anomolies. Many square km's can be scanned per day.
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Let's say it's ten a day.
That's still hundreds of days. Maybe still thousands.
And that's if it even shows up on side-scanning sonar at all, in any way, whatsoever now.
Just finding a cable that you KNOW is exactly down THERE to within a good error margin can take weeks.
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Aviation parts have huge margins on them. My guess is that even an expired battery was only down less than 10% in capacity compared to spec. Achieving the amazing safety record that planes have requires that all parts be designed to have a high safety margin, and be replaced long before their are significantly degraded.
And (Score:2)
there is no evidence it was replaced prior to aircraft going missing
And it seems even less likely that they were replaced after the aircraft went missing. Unless someone was able to get ahold of one of those liion batteries in the cargo hold and replace it.
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All these parts are centrally tracked. Alarms would go off at Boeing.
Re:What really happened: (Score:4, Interesting)
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All these parts are centrally tracked. Alarms would go off at Boeing.
Let's not discuss alarms going off.
It's 2015 and we use GPS to find our way back to our car in a fucking parking lot and let we lost an airliner because it seemingly can't be outfitted with the same tech...
...all while watching the infamous black box arrive to the scene, reliant upon a dead battery.
Warning alarms should have been going off for years now.
Re:What really happened: (Score:4, Interesting)
> It's 2015 and we use GPS to find our way back to our car in a fucking parking lot and let we lost an airliner because it seemingly can't be outfitted with the same tech...
The MH370 incident plane was actually equipped with such equipment, but Malaysia Airlines was not in the best financial shape, so they decided to save money by cancelling the satellite-based portion of in-flight reporting, so they did not need to pay Inmarsat Inc. per kilobyte for the transmissions. Because of this, the satellite beam equipment was running on empty and only sent null pings once every hour or power-cycle. (Entirely neutering the equipment would have included some re-wiring work and MA did not want to bear any costs.)
Apparently, whoever hijacked the MH370 (90% likely the captain, 9,99% likely the co-pilot) was aware of the unsubscribed satnav, but did not understand the technicality of the sat up-link still running on empty. That is why whe have some 7 pings as the only PUBLIC clue about the whereabouts of MH370.
(On the other hand there should be ample SECRET info on MH370's flight southern path, because the austrialians' cover story as to why the JORN / Jindalee over-horizontal radar system was not running at the time, is quite laughable. About as credible as Putin's explanation for why the Kremlin security cameras were all turned off precisely for the time of Nemtsov's assassination...)
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Let's not discuss alarms going off.
It's 2015 and we use GPS to find our way back to our car in a fucking parking lot and let we lost an airliner because it seemingly can't be outfitted with the same tech...
If you think they're bad, you should talk to the neckbeards flying single engine planes. You'd think that the ECU in your 1975 Chevy was invented by the devil himself:
http://macsblog.com/2014/08/pi... [macsblog.com]
I don't get why we even need to find black boxes and such. How much bandwidth would it really take to just stream that data in realtime over satellite, and how much would that cost compared to the tons of fuel in the tanks?
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I don't get why we even need to find black boxes and such. How much bandwidth would it really take to just stream that data in realtime over satellite, and how much would that cost compared to the tons of fuel in the tanks?
because the regulations were passed decades ago
you are 100% correct, they should abolish black boxes and stream to satellites
we just need some sort of dramatic event that makes people notice and catalyzes them to act
in a sane world, MH370 is that event
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The vast majority of airplanes crash in an obvious place. Very very few black boxes have never been found (10? 12?). People want cleap flights, and the cost benefit of real time satellite is dubious. It is more to satisfy the curious in the tiny tiny set of edge cases like this.
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you really think streaming to satellite is more expensive than black box maintenance?
It is more to satisfy the curious in the tiny tiny set of edge cases like this.
*accidents* are tiny edge cases. which is exactly what this kind of system is for. yes: you want to satisfy all curiosities, absolutely
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Or, it's to show exactly what happened, when and where, so that the appropriate response can be provided instead of searching hundreds of thousands of square miles that may or may not be anywhere close to where the plane actually crashed.
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However, getting rid of the black boxes would be really dumb.
In case you hadn't noticed, there are plenty of things that can disrupt satellite communications, including solar flares, and just plain normal storms. To have a recorded record of when shit really hits the fan is of a value beyond reasonable measurements for finding out what happened so you can take steps to prevent it occurring again.
After all, it's not one or the other, you actually an have both.
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How much bandwidth would it really take to just stream that data in realtime over satellite, and how much would that cost compared to the tons of fuel in the tanks?/quote?
Quite a bit for a satellite based system, actually. Audio is going to be the biggest bandwidth hog, let's say 50kb/sec for reasonably quality. Add another 10kb/sec for telemetry, things like control states, sensor readings etc. Multiply by say 8,000 commercial airlines in the air at any one time (low estimate). Satellite bandwidth is quite limited due to physics, and has to be shared in a somewhat inefficient way due to the hidden transmitter problem. We could put more satellites up, but the cost would be extremely high for the sake of a few incidents per decade where the black box is impossible to find.
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I think they could get away with no streaming the audio -- that is what the blackbox is for, just telemetry data (and doesn't need to be every second, hell maybe once a minute) saying "I {plane_id} am right here (lat, lng, altitude)"
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It appears that someone on the aircraft tried to disable all telemetry in this case. There would need to be an off switch for any such system to allow for maintenance. I suppose you could make it so that the switch could not be operated in flight, but if for example it failed and started causing interference you would want the crew to be able to disable it.
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I think they could get away with no streaming the audio -- that is what the blackbox is for, just telemetry data (and doesn't need to be every second, hell maybe once a minute) saying "I {plane_id} am right here (lat, lng, altitude)"
There were for a long time two "black boxes," with one, the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), specifically for cockpit audio (which is frequently essential in crash investigations). Now-a-days, they are likely to be combined into one solid state Flight Data Recorder (FDR) unit, but the CVR capability is still there.
These units are generally mounted in the tail of the airplane, and are of course sealed while in use. I think it is highly unlikely that the pilot messed with the FDR before flight, and impossible th
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Re:What really happened: (Score:4, Insightful)
Thousands separators in numbers are your friend.
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Streaming telemetry (Score:2)
I don't get why we even need to find black boxes and such.
Because they work. They are exceptionally reliable and are almost always recovered. They are already installed on pretty much every large aircraft out there. And they provide invaluable information in helping to determine the cause of accidents. Furthermore no practical amount of telemetry is going to tell you everything about a crash so we still would want to find the wreckage anyway so why not have on board telemetry?
How much bandwidth would it really take to just stream that data in realtime over satellite, and how much would that cost compared to the tons of fuel in the tanks?
Ok, which global satellite system are you going to stream to? What is the protocol s
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Recording data on black boxes requires a whole bunch of standards/etc. All it takes is somebody saying "do it!"
And I'm fine with having one bitrate of telemetry going out over satellite (including position, of course), and a higher bitrate of data being captured in a black box. Plus, if the satellite link goes down the black box is still useful.
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Well, for satellites, not a lot - even though modern flight data recorders can record over a thousand parameters at a time (satellite bandwidth is huge), even full high-res cockpit voice is but a drop.
The problem is more political than anything - why do you think we have 30 minute CVRs, d
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Well, sending the data to the aircraft owner is probably the simplest solution. Regulators can demand that data from them when it is needed. That is basically how all the other logging/monitoring/etc works. If you land a plane in the USA the FAA can ask to look at your maintenance records. If you don't fly in the US, then the FAA won't bother you, though some other country likely will.
I agree that politics still plays a part. A big issue is pilot privacy concerns. They're basically stuck in the cockpi
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Did a battery issue in the black box cause the crash? No way.
Does a maintenance error of something basic like that indicate the possibility that there could be other far more serious issues? Emphatically yes.
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And yet counterfeit parts are still a big problem in Asia-Africa airlines and maintenance facilities...
Re:What really happened: (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet counterfeit parts are still a big problem in Asia-Africa airlines and maintenance facilities...
All the fancy computer systems in the world won't make a difference when there is money to be saved by working around them and somebody with the ethics to make it happen.
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I had a similar idea at the time. Rather than a chopshop, though, I figured somebody, somewhere, had need for a passenger jet for something nefarious. Or for that matter, something legitimate, but that the authorities would find nefarious. Basically, a need for a large jet, that for some reason could not be obtained through normal channels.
The longer it is that no unexplained jet shows up doing something no major airline expects, though, increases the probability that I've been watching too many spy movi
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I figured somebody, somewhere, had need for a passenger jet for something nefarious. Or for that matter, something legitimate, but that the authorities would find nefarious. Basically, a need for a large jet, that for some reason could not be obtained through normal channels.
I expect someone needed to move a bunch of henchmen in polo neck jumpers to their underground lair beneath a volcano. Or something.
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Strange how Boeing were able to supply engine data to help in the original search then...
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pretty shitty considering that you're supposed to be buying parts that have a known history only.
not worth the trouble. kidnapping would be more profitable. dropped at a chopshop? where?
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dropped at a chopshop? where?
Imagine the look on the guys face. Walk up to a shady car dealers shop. Ask of they can handle an "needs to go missing" vehicle. And then you turn up in your Boeing 777. No problem right?
1) Let a 777 go missing ...
2) Drive it to a chopshop
3)
4) Profit.
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East Hoboken, anything can be lost there for a price.
Solo flight (Score:3)
"in both November and Golf registered aircraft]"
Is a Golf registered aircraft what Harrison Ford flies?
What really happened .. to your brain? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, MH370 was brought down buy a crack team of internal scrap metal terrorists. Carefully planned for years with infitration of the crew just so they can sell the used parts to unscrupulous airlines who are rich enough to own 777s!
Riiiight.
What fucking planet you are on? Tin foil hat? You've got an entire suit made out of it.
As for now finding wreckage - 100,000 ton freighter ships have gone missing at sea without a trace, never mind a piddly little airliner.
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We just found several CITIES in, was it Honduras? Cities. In plain sight. Where people have been walking around. Where someone who told us they were there got lost over 100 years ago and we've not seen the cities, nor been back there, since because he died before he could tell people where they were. People were LOOKING for them.
People just don't get the scope of the problem at all.
When the flight recorder does get found and it's shown to be a simple terrorist act, or crash, I'm going to find the above
Re:What really happened: (Score:4, Insightful)
What is the scrap value for a 777-200ER, what is its used parts value?
The untraceable used parts value for a 777-200ER is... ZERO. Used and reconditioned parts can be installed on other airplanes, but not without Certificate of Conformity / Form1 and so on. There is a lot of paperwork involved in getting a spare from one airplane onto another one. This includes full traceability. Without this paper trail, the part is useless. And faking a paper trail is possible, but doing so for all parts of a 777-200ER is beyond what's possible without raising red flags.
If it were a old 737, a DC-8 or a Cessna, It could be plausible. The people exploiting some old aircraft in some region of the world live under a, let say, different regulatory oversight. But I doubt any 777-200ER operate under conditions where you could use bootlegged market parts. You may as well sell the raw materials.
I believe that a much better reason to make an airplane AND its passenger disappear, is its payload.
Units (Score:4, Funny)
"and the tail stand as tall as four giraffes."
Is giraffes the new standard unit of height? I though they used elephants in asia.
Anyway four giraffes aren't any higher than one giraffe - its not like they can stand on each others head.
Re: (Score:2)
The batteries must be replaced or recharged:
1) When the transmitter has been in use for more than 1 cumulative hour; or
2) When 50 percent of their useful life (or for rechargeable batteries, 50 percent of their useful life or charge) has expired, as established by the transmitter manufacturer under its approval.
Re:How often are the batteries supposed to be chan (Score:5, Insightful)
If this a 10 year battery with a 5 year precautionary change then who gives a flying rats....
I think that attitude leads to abuse of engineering recommendations.
Physical reality is more complicated than "this battery will work for ten years and then stop". Some batteries lose 50% of their capacity in about three years, but they'll continue to work and be perfectly adequate for some users after five or six years when they've lost 75% of their capacity. Other users might find them unacceptable after two years, even though the manufacturer calls it a "three year battery".
When a battery is marketed as a "ten year battery" what that means is that the vendor thinks that most users will still be satisfied with the degraded performance of the battery after ten years. But the application engineer's judgment trumps the component designer's, because the application engineer knows exactly what he is demanding of the battery. If he says a ten year battery should be changed after five years, that battery is really a five year battery in that specific application.
But suppose the application engineer says, "this battery *should* be good for ten years, but we'd better change it at five," he's making a judgment call based on the likelihood that some people involved with this system might not have done what they are supposed to. Which is why everyone ought to do what they're supposed to. When you say "the maintenance schedule calls for swap-out at five years, but I'll stretch it to seven and it'll be good," you're making the implicit assumption you're the only lazy, greedy, irresponsible person involved in this business, which might not be true.
When everybody does what they're supposed to then the system performs *better* than it has to. That actually turns out to be a valuable property because sometimes you need a system to perform better than you'd anticipated. Like when you can't locate a lost plane's location more precisely than "somewhere in the South China Sea, or possibly in the Andaman Sea".
So not replacing a "ten year battery" at five years when a designer calls for it *is* a big deal. That's overriding the engineer's carefully considered judgment with the seat of your pants and hoping for the best.
Re:The Irony (Score:4, Funny)
Did you hear that Alanis?
Re: (Score:2)
Did you hear that Alanis?
It's still not as ironic as a song about irony where none of the fucking examples are ironic at all.
Or was she being ironic?
Re: (Score:2)
Wrong plane, right point. Expired or not it seems extremely unlikely that the battery "just happened" to be dead on a flight where all other communication and tracking was lost, and the pilot apparently went to great lengths to obfuscate their flight path. The disappearance *might* be explainable by a lightning strike or other sudden electronics-shorting disaster, combined with extreme incompetence of the pilot, but it seems MUCH more likely that the plane has been found because someone went to great leng
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, no.
I'm in aviation and, like most disciplines where safety is crucial, (applies to computer systems, as well), when things go bad, they go really bad in multiple ways.
Re: (Score:2)
At best this raises the suspicion that somebody in the chain of responsibility for maintenance and/or flight assignment may have been involved. (How do they decide which plane flies which route?)
If someone from the maintenance team was involved in a conspiracy to take down the plane I really doubt they would've recorded the evidence in the maintenance logs.