Malaysia Air Flight 370

[Hobbes]

It's all a question of bandwidth. Your iPhone needs a wifi connection to back up to the cloud. An airplane "black box", and all the information they store, would need a similar data connection.

In flight, that connection can only come from a satellite. At any given time, there are 100's of thousands of aircraft in the sky. There aren't enough satellites, satellite channels, or satellite bandwidth to handle that amount of simultaneous upload.

That's assuming you wanted to stream everything the boxes record to the satellite.
In practice all that needs to be sent to satellite/cloud are a limited subset of the data recorded in the recorder.

All that needs be streamed to satellite is:
latitude, longitude, speed, time, and flight number.

The recorder could send a data packet every 15 minutes containing only those data parameters and using that the plane and recorder could be found and the rest of the data retrieved from the black boxes.

latitude -data type float ( 4 bytes )
longitude -data type float ( 4 bytes )
speed -data type int ( 2 bytes )
time -data type signed int ( 4 bytes )
flight number - data type int ( 2 bytes )

Using those parameters each plane would only be sending 16 bytes every 15 minutes, 64 bytes per hour.
That's easily doable. Those engines are already probably sending back more diagnostic info than that already.



So, China media is claiming that a chinese search ship has detected pings on the same frequency as the ping beacons of the recorders.
I'm skeptical.

 

[Nraman]

So, China media is claiming that a chinese search ship has detected pings on the same frequency as the ping beacons of the recorders.
I'm skeptical.

That's the latest, 26S 101E, they think it is the orange colored black box.

 

[criticalbass]

Maybe the Chinese have something. I doubt it.

Here's what could have happened:

Captain incapacitates or kills first officer with flight deck door locked.

Captain goes on oxygen and depressurizes aircraft. Goes to 45,000 feet long enough for all the emergency oxygen generators to run out. Only lasts long enough for an emergency descent--maybe around ten minutes. Everybody dies.

Captain restores pressurization and descends to a flight level and course to his liking.

As fuel gets close to running out, captain ditches 777 skillfully enough to keep it in one piece. Goes down with the ship, or decides to swim for iit.

If it's whole on the ocean bottom, it will be somewhere between difficult and impossible to find.

A nosedive into the water would break up the aircraft and would likely leave some floating pieces.

This supposition seems to fit all the information I have. All my early theories were wrong, and this one may be too.

 

[Hobbes]

Well now the story from the Chinese has changed somewhat.
They only claim to have heard two "pings". Also, they are supposed to be from microphones held overboard from a dinghy instead of a towable listening device.

Honestly, I think the Chinese authorities are doing whatever they can to project the appearance of being a player in the search when they really aren't.
The passengers were mostly Chinese citizens and the government probably feels some pressure to demonstrate their participation for public relations purposes.
It would be most embarrassing if all Chinese citizens saw were American and Australian ships and planes conducting searches in the S. China sea.

 

[Junior Bonner]

Well now the story from the Chinese has changed somewhat.
They only claim to have heard two "pings". Also, they are supposed to be from microphones held overboard from a dinghy instead of a towable listening device.

Honestly, I think the Chinese authorities are doing whatever they can to project the appearance of being a player in the search when they really aren't.
The passengers were mostly Chinese citizens and the government probably feels some pressure to demonstrate their participation for public relations purposes.
It would be most embarrassing if all Chinese citizens saw were American and Australian ships and planes conducting searches in the S. China sea.

The Australians have verified what the Chinese are saying. They did it acoustically, but I don't really know what they mean by that.

 

[Hobbes]

The head of the multinational search being conducted off Australia's west coast confirmed that a Chinese ship had picked up electronic pulsing signals twice in a small patch of the search zone, once on Friday and again on Saturday.

On Sunday, an Australian ship carrying sophisticated deep-sea sound equipment picked up a third signal in a different part of the massive search area.

http://news.yahoo.com/more-ships-rush-probe-signals-plane-search-073214198--finance.html

 

[Oklahomabassin]

At this point, I wouldn't put it past one of the parties involved with the search to sink debris and a spare pinging device just to help end the search.

 

[ConstitutionCowboy]

If it is as deep as they suggest, thermal layers and underwater currents can dissipate and/or deflect any sound. Whole submarines can "disappear" between and under thermal layers. I've seen it happen. I doubt they are hearing a black box pinger. Many strange sounds and other phenomena occur in the ocean.

Woody, USN ASW '66-'70

 

[Hobbes]

Prolly a randy whale or two.

 

[Junior Bonner]

The head of the multinational search being conducted off Australia's west coast confirmed that a Chinese ship had picked up electronic pulsing signals twice in a small patch of the search zone, once on Friday and again on Saturday.

On Sunday, an Australian ship carrying sophisticated deep-sea sound equipment picked up a third signal in a different part of the massive search area.

http://news.yahoo.com/more-ships-rush-probe-signals-plane-search-073214198--finance.html

What I heard them saying on the news when I was at work last night, was that the Australians confirmed a signal "near" where the Chinese did, about 300 miles away. The British or Australians have a ship on the scene right now, it's called the Echo. I think it is in 14,000 feet of water. I hope if there are survivors, they can get them up.