EgyptAir 804 Disappears Over Mediterranean | Hacker News Reader

EgyptAir 804 Disappears Over Mediterranean

nytimes.com

35 pointsakshayn26 comments

Starting my 48-hour media blackout around this topic. If I've learned one thing from trying to follow aviation incidents, it's that almost everything popularly reported in the hours after the incident is either wrong or lacking important context.

Reddit's live page on this is a surprisingly good source for up to date infos on this.

https://www.reddit.com/live/wy0st0j6out0

AvHerald is always a good source for factual information that doesn't include rumors and speculations http://www.avherald.com/h?article=4987fb09&opt=0

As always - never read the comments.

Why is it that we can track boats with satellites but not planes? In fact we have a complete image[1] of boat activity in the area at the time of disappearance.

It seems as crazy to me as how we can offer in-flight satellite-based wifi but not GPS tracking.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/XYvC5gI.jpg

Boats are tracked by their AIS beacons on board, not passively by radar. The beacons can be switched off or stop working just the same as the beacons on planes.

Like another commentor here I don't have a huge amount of trust in early media reports but what I read was that it was within radar range when it disapeared.

Those boats are presumably sending a signal that allows them to be tracked. When we "lose" a plane, it stops sending its tracking signal.

You have a complete image of flight activity in the area as well (see flightradar24). No doubt the plane crashed.

lets also not forget that there is a substantial presence of military fleets in the area, all equipped with radars etc if it was anything other than a crash they'd have noticed.

The article says it disappears from radar. When tracking aeroplanes there are two kinds of radar primary and secondary. Primary is actual radar, secondary isn't really radar at all but instead radio transmission of telemetry such as position, altitude, speed etc. This is equivalent to AIS, the system used to track boats that produced your image.

So we were tracking the plane but then the plane stopped transmitting tracking info for some reason (no idea if they even had it on primary radar). Someone could have turned it off or the plane could have crashed.

There is no need for a pilot to be able to disable tracking on a commercial plane.

They should position the tracking hardware outside the plane making it relatively tamper-proof mid flight.

Unless its on fire? Isn't that always the reason for having all the kill switches on aircraft?

> Why is it that we can track boats with satellites but not planes?

Satellites don't track either ships or aircraft, except for huge nuclear-powered RORSATs that watch the fleets of rival superpowers.

However whilst many trans-oceanic aircraft do have VHF / UHF datalink uplinks through the Inmarsat satellite network the majority use line-of-sight UHF transponders ( beacon-tracking ) to supplement radar ( skin-tracking ):

https://fr24.com/2016-05-19/00:28/12x/MSR804/9c0b766

Transponder interrogation is often referred to as "secondary radar" but that's a misnomer that unfortunately took hold in the industry. It relies on 'squitting' a generated response, not on reflections from the aircraft structure.

Someone on reddit pointed out this happened exactly 804 days after Malaysia Airlines 370 vanished. Weird coincidence.

A volunteer to take BA 1 flight LCY to SNN departing in 3 hours?

What is the significance of 804?

It's the number of this flight that just vanished.

The Mediterranean is more of a small lake compared to the Indian ocean. So this one will be found.

Look at the size of the search regions in the Indian Ocean and along the Australian coast in response to Malaysian 340's disappearance. Those are relative small lakes compared to the entire Indian Ocean, but they're still massive swaths of water.

Don't underestimate the difficulty of a SAR operation, especially at sea.

Lets wait for a few days before coming to any strange conclusions.

I could have missed something, but wasn't it 803 days? https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=days+between+8+March+2...

MH370 was March 8 Malaysian time but March 7 UTC.

Please stop.

Oh wait. Flight number is 804: 8 + 0 + 4 = 12

66 people aboard: 6 + 6 = 12

Must mean something!

12 / 2 = 6

str('66') + str('6') = '666'

it's the devil.

Could someone have moved the Bermuda Triangle? Or find another one?

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