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Malaysian Airline Flight MH370

Every expert I've heard has said there must have been catastrophic damage midair for the data/communication to just stop when it did. So why are there reports that maybe it had turned around and started to return? Wouldn't that have shown up with the data they were referring to? And wouldn't there be some radio contact if they ran into problems which caused them to turn?
 
RacerDeac said:
The instrument data is small potatoes...but the bandwidth killer would be the multiple sources of the live audio from each plane, which has no research purposes. Satellite technology could certainly support it in theory, but it would likely require putting a lot more satellites in the air (for world-wide coverage and to deal streaming audio from 60K+ flights per day) and the cost for all of that bandwidth would be immense.

Edit: Seems the industry has looked into it and come to the same conclusion:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlin...-black-boxes-dont-transmit-data-in-real-time/
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I saw a guy discussing this the other day and his suggestion was to only have sat. comms. engaged in planes making a transoceanic flight.
 
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ONW said:
I saw a guy discussing this the other day and his suggestion was to only have sat. comms. engaged in planes making a transoceanic flight.
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There would still need to be a lot of money spent to build up the infrastructure required and to support the bandwidth. Where does the data go? To the country from which the flight originated? Who owns it? Some sort of international group setup for the purpose?

In the end, it's an answer to a problem that really doesn't exist. Out of 20+ million flights a year (50-70K per day), there are only a few incidents, even fewer resulting in death, and almost none that occur over water.
In the last five years, the death risk for passengers in the United States has been one in 45 million flights, according to Arnold Barnett, a professor of statistics at M.I.T. In other words, flying has become so reliable that a traveler could fly every day for an average of 123,000 years before being in a fatal crash, he said.
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With those kinds of stats, what problem are we solving? How many unsolved crashes over the ocean do we expect to have over the next 10 years? 100 years? Besides, statistics indicate the black box will more than likely be found here and the reason for the crash will be determined. It's only been a few days.
 
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HuskyDeac said:
Every expert I've heard has said there must have been catastrophic damage midair for the data/communication to just stop when it did. So why are there reports that maybe it had turned around and started to return? Wouldn't that have shown up with the data they were referring to? And wouldn't there be some radio contact if they ran into problems which caused them to turn?
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The reports of the plane turning around are fueling the conspiracy theorists. What it probably means is that the plane wasn't really on any commercial radar when it disappeared, and the report is vague and the military radar source won't give any more info.

It almost certainly wasn't engine failure - plenty of time to radio that in. Terrorists could have disabled the transponders and put the plane into a dive to keep it under radar. It could have exploded and disintegrated at 35,000 feet and simply can't be found. There are some scenarios where cabin pressure loss could knock the entire plane out in a couple seconds apparently.

Just an unbelievable event. Clear skies, routine flight, safest aircraft on the planet, safest leg of the flight.
 
RacerDeac said:
The instrument data is small potatoes. The bandwidth killer would be the multiple sources of the live audio from each plane, which has no research purposes. Satellite technology could certainly support it in theory, but it would likely require putting a lot more satellites in orbit (for world-wide coverage and to deal streaming audio from 60K+ flights per day) or inventing a new technology all together, and the cost for all of that bandwidth would be immense.

Edit: Seems the industry has looked into it and come to the same conclusion:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlin...-black-boxes-dont-transmit-data-in-real-time/
Click to expand...

so the US government can monitor all electronic data for meta purposes, but logging black box data is overwhelming, got it
 
I'm surprised we don't have like satellite playback that would have been able to track this ish by now. Actually I take that back. Ten bucks says the US govt knows what happened but can't say they know.
 
palmab03 said:
I'm surprised we don't have like satellite playback that would have been able to track this ish by now. Actually I take that back. Ten bucks says the US govt and/or Google knows what happened but can't say they know.
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FIFY
 
palmab03 said:
I'm surprised we don't have like satellite playback that would have been able to track this ish by now. Actually I take that back. Ten bucks says the US govt knows what happened but can't say they know.
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Of course that is the case. The people who need to know have known for days. This is like the Boston Marathon incident. Just because internet jockeys behind their dual screens who think they are important don't know, doesn't mean nobody knows.
 
inspectah said:
People miss flights all the time. Happens a lot.

ITK is correct - major pieces of wreckage from the Air France plane were found very soon after it crashed. The majority of the wreckage and the black box/FDR were found over the next two years. I've been watching a lot of coverage of this and don't remember CNN saying it took two years to find the wreck.

This seems truly unprecedented in modern aviation. It is amazing to me that no trace of the plane or its contents has been found yet. It seems impossible that it didn't go down in the ocean. They must just not be looking in the right place.
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I've been listening all weekend during my daily travels (hours each day). That was the line they kept giving on CNN Headline and BBC (BBC was quoting AP and CNN at times). I was driving around 11am this morning and they were interviewing a former NTSB head and he was clarifying definitions. Basically their definition of wreckage would have been different from what Wikipedia was using. He also said this is unprecedented. You normally at least find remnants but they haven't found any.

He also explained the turning around theory. Basically he said something such as the window suddenly cracking could cause the pilots to turn around because they would realize that they couldn't make it to Beijing. In their turning around, the whole thing could have shattered causing a catastrophic event and immediately bringing the plane down.

I also learned that there are times when you are flying internationally over seas that the flights are not on radar. They mentioned that it is possible that the flight could have gone down in one of these areas where they do not have radar. I think it was Ashleigh Banfield who commented that she was shocked that there are parts of flight paths that are regularly not monitored by radar.
 
WakeGal said:
I've been listening all weekend during my daily travels (hours each day). That was the line they kept giving on CNN Headline and BBC (BBC was quoting AP and CNN at times). I was driving around 11am this morning and they were interviewing the former NTSB head and he was clarifying definitions. Basically their definition of wreckage would have been different from what Wikipedia was using. He also said this is unprecedented. You normally at least find remnants but they haven't found any.

He also explained the turning around theory. Basically he said something such as the window suddenly cracking could cause the pilots to turn around because they would realize that they couldn't make it to Beijing. In their turning around, the whole thing could have shattered causing a catastrophic event and immediately bringing the plane down.

I also learned that there are times when you are flying internationally over seas that the flights are not on radar. They mentioned that it is possible that the flight could have gone down in one of these areas where they do not have radar. I think it was Ashleigh Banfield who commented that she was shocked that there are parts of flight paths that are regularly not monitored by radar.
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uh, like the windshield cracking/shattering? The loss of a cabin window would not destroy the plane.
 
ImTheCaptain said:
uh, like the windshield cracking/shattering? The loss of a cabin window would not destroy the plane.
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He referred to the cockpit window. He went into more detail about how if it cracked or shattered, the pilots could have quickly lost oxygen and been unable to get their oxygen masks on. He went through about 5 scenarios of catastrophic events that could happen from a simple window crack.
 
There were mumbled communications with another plane though I thought
 
WakeGal said:
I've been listening all weekend during my daily travels (hours each day). That was the line they kept giving on CNN Headline and BBC (BBC was quoting AP and CNN at times). I was driving around 11am this morning and they were interviewing a former NTSB head and he was clarifying definitions. Basically their definition of wreckage would have been different from what Wikipedia was using. He also said this is unprecedented. You normally at least find remnants but they haven't found any.

He also explained the turning around theory. Basically he said something such as the window suddenly cracking could cause the pilots to turn around because they would realize that they couldn't make it to Beijing. In their turning around, the whole thing could have shattered causing a catastrophic event and immediately bringing the plane down.

I also learned that there are times when you are flying internationally over seas that the flights are not on radar. They mentioned that it is possible that the flight could have gone down in one of these areas where they do not have radar. I think it was Ashleigh Banfield who commented that she was shocked that there are parts of flight paths that are regularly not monitored by radar.
Click to expand...

Has she ever looked at a map of the Pacific?
 
palmab03 said:
There were mumbled communications with another plane though I thought
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What they were reporting at one time was that another plane did attempt to make contact and supposedly got through but got nothing. I found that part very confusing. How they managed to make contact but not hear anything didn't make sense to me.

It was definitely interesting to hear the former NTSB leader's take on the whole situation.

Disclaimer: I haven't been in the car since noon, so things may have changed since then. I just spent from 5am until 8:30am and then from 10:30 to 12:15 in the car and primarily only listened to CNN during that time today.
 
ImTheCaptain said:
so the US government can monitor all electronic data for meta purposes, but logging black box data is overwhelming, got it
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I'm sorry you don't get that capturing meta data about existing communications over existing mobile and wired infrastructure is almost nothing like streaming and storing terrabytes of high quality audio from 60K+ flights moving at hundreds of miles per hour at most any point around the globe via satellite connections. Never mind that no one has said it can't be done...only that it would require massive expenditures on infrastructure that make no sense given that, well, there's no actual problem it would solve. Besides, if that's the example you want to use, you do understand that monitoring and storing all of that data costs billions upon billions of dollars, right?
 
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Pretty sure there was overlapping radar coverage for the entire route for this flight. The Air France flight crashed while out of Brazil's coverage area and before it was picked up by Senegal, which would have passed it on to Spain/France. Passing out of radar coverage is common for long flights over the ocean.

This flight was never so far from land that it would have passed out of coverage. Malaysian radar lost it and Vietnamese radar never picked it up.

Agree with those who say there's probably a few folks who know the real story at this point.
 
RacerDeac said:
I'm sorry you don't get that capturing meta data about existing communications over existing mobile and wired infrastructure is almost nothing like streaming and storing terrabytes of high quality audio from 60K+ flights moving at hundreds of miles per hour at most any point around the globe via satellite connections. Never mind that no one has said it can't be done...only that it would require massive expenditures on infrastructure that make no sense given that, well, there's no actual problem it would solve. Besides, if that's the example you want to use, you do understand that monitoring and storing all of that data costs billions upon billions of dollars, right?
Click to expand...

what i understand is that you throw out numbers to emphasize your point. i'd like to see your info on that piece of the assumption
 
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