MH370 flew as low as 1,500m to avoid detection, says paper
my.news.yahoo.com
my.news.yahoo.com
My point is that even if those capabilities exist, it's not clear that they would be able to help in this particular case.
If not, I'm wondering why people like Skybox [1] didn't deploy resources immediately to start covering ground. It seems like that approach would be much more effective than ships in the ocean?
http://www.disasterscharter.org/web/charter/activation_detai...
Skybox is also contributing and has this visualisation of the Search Efforts with Satellites to date including those that are needed to cover the expanded search area http://www.skyboximaging.com/news/in-search-of-malaysia-airl...
China has been venturing in the Indian Ocean, and the United States probably wants to keep an eye on their activities.
And they don't even to acknowledge their existence. "By chance, a satellite overflew the area. Here's what it saw" plus a blurred picture could be enough.
"Experts said flying a Boeing 777 in such a way would be dangerous, stressing the airframe and possibly causing those on board to be air sick and suffer from spatial disorientation."
This truly meets the definition of incredible. How could you be that good, but then end up crashing the plane? If you are that good, then you are not going to crash that plane.
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However, flying a mile high is only slightly different from flying 6 miles high in terms of stress experienced or skill required.
The pilot had a fancy flight simulator at home.
Now, there are plenty of legitimate reasons that a pilot would have a simulator at home, so we can't pin too much to this discovery. Lots of pilots buy small planes after they retire because they still love flying and he might have built this simulator because it was fun. Other articles describe him as a hardware geek and mention his YouTube videos demonstrating his homebrew simulator consoles. Still, it seems suspicious to me, especially in context of the recent revelation that the transponder and tracking systems were disabled prior to MH370 signing off with Malaysian ATC.
Four days ago, I thought that a Central Asian hijacking scenario was next to impossible. Today, I'm not so sure.
Total cost should be less than 1000 bucks.
If one picks a random similar flight, what's the probability of having people flying with fake IDs/of having a pilot who runs a flight simulator at home?
For me, the Malaysian 777 story is an interesting potential seque into the future of terrorism. Personally, if the airliner is in tact and ever is identified in the air again, I think it will be shot down. That said, the story has been one of mystery and mismanagement.
Someone with technical skill to fly a Boeing 777 in such a capacity is the stuff the make movies out of. The slight possibility that the plane has actually landed makes it extremely captivating.
But this is getting qute off topic.
As it turns out, only the headline suggests that the plane descended to an altitude of 1500m, not the article body, which always says the aircraft descended 1500m. The headline includes the words "MH370 flew as low as 1,500m to avoid detection" [emphasis added], but this language is never repeated in the article itself.
It's important also to say this article may have been translated from Malay, which could affect its readability.
> A newspaper should at least have sufficient grammar standards to clearly convey the main point of a story.
Fair enough, but I think the headline didn't originate with the source of the article.
The article was from the New Straits Times, which is an English-language newspaper. The initial report may have been written in Malay though.
I've listened to a fair amount of air traffic control[1] and a phrase like that, especially when signing off of a frequency, is not at all unusual so I don't know why they're focusing on its informality.
[1] thanks to United offering it on one of their inflight entertainment channels
Indeed, informal greetings like the one mentioned in the article are not at all rare. Real life ATC communication is not the robot-like mechanical talking you might be used to from video games or movies.
As for the fantastical, mysterious theories, there are plenty of real conspiracies hanging around with verifiable support, that we don't need to make up bullshit ones.
As for whether or not this one is a conspiracy, we must refrain from pontificating until we get more evidence. The default belief must be disbelief.
No, let's take the entire god damn airliner! /sarcasm
Do conspiracy theorists even think their theories through before they say them?
I'm guessing no.
The actual article states that the plane "dropped 5,000 feet (1,500m)" and later that the "twinjet descended 1,500m or even lower". This simply means that the plane descended by a relatively small amount compared to 35,000 - 40,000 foot cruising altitudes, not that it was skimming the ground at 5,000 feet.
"There are reports around in the last hour or so, claiming new information that the plane dropped <to> an altitude 5000 feet"
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/17/mh370-contact-m...
Kuala Lumpur: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 dropped to altitudes as low as 1524 metres (5000 feet) using a dangerous flying technique called “terrain masking” to avoid radar in at least three countries, investigators believe.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/missing-malaysia-airlines-jet-ma...
"to evade commercial (secondary) radar coverage after it turned back from its flight path en route to Beijing."
Secondary (used by ATC) radar is based on transponders responding (the very thing that was switched off).
Primary radar is usually military and does not need any device being on or off.
[0]- http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/interactive/2014/03/world/malays...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/new-twist-in-the-hunt-fo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Communications_Addres...
These systems were manually disabled.
it isn't a type of the system i was talking about as ability, in flight, to disable a system excludes the system from the "security" category. Just for the sake of example, placing a battery powered device like always-connected satellite phone into unreachable in flight part of the plane (end of wing for example) would be like something alone the lines of "a security satellite system"
Li AAs... without a means of isolating them from the circuitry?
How many aircraft are you prepared to lose through in-flight fires for this 'benefit'? Reference: Ethiopian Airlines 787 fire at Heathrow originating from lithium cells in the ELT.
Who is going to check the battery status at regular intervals?
Who is going to certify and sign-off those checks?
Who is going to be qualified to change those cells?
What interfaces will there be with the aircraft avionics to relay data such as call sign and flight code? How do we protect those connections from overload? There's a reason every single electrical circuit on an airliner can be isolated.
$100 is, frankly, a laughable estimate.
The larger point is that any "real situation" that would need the transponder turned off (power/fire/corruption) would have almost no bearing on the operability of such a simple system.
FYI the imarsat pings are not all that different, are they? Its just a simple ping with some data that including headers is going to be very minimal payload...like SMS text type level of data.
my mistake, meant the CVR [edited above to conform]
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/world/asia/series-of-error...
Planes are massive powerhouses of technological wonder, adding something new into such a machine would take considerable amounts of time and even then once you've got it installed, who is going to maintain it? You've got to pay for access to a satellite for the data to be tracked, where is the data stored? Is the data encrypted? How do you make sure only the eyes intended to see the data see it and nobody else? What kind of redundancy is there if the satellite security system fails? Does the plane need bigger batteries to power such a device, where does the power come from?
There are rules and processes to follow in the aviation industry and they're very strict. And that's just the hardware, then you've got to write the software, make sure it doesn't interfere with anything else on the plane, then you've got to make it work for different planes, planes wired differently, different hardware/software, controls. You're testing two different halves that make a whole.
One does not simply just install a new piece of technology into a plane. There's no DIY kit you can buy from Tandy.
Then there is a cost vs risk calculation thrown into the equation here. How often does a plane just vanish like this? It doesn't happen very often and probably not enough to warrant spending hundreds of millions of dollars implementing a terrorist proof tracking/data collection system. Cars are stolen everyday, it's a common thing, for planes it is not.
If things were that easy, they would have already done so, trust me. Nobody wants to see their planes return more than the airline who paid for the plane, paid for the maintenance, paid for the staff & fuel and need it to help recoup the costs and make the business money.
Are we also not forgetting planes have quite good data capturing and positioning systems already? The transponder was disabled which was the easy one (a flick of a switch) but the ACARS maintenance tracker was also disabled and as already highlighted, without advanced knowledge of the planes internals, isn't something you can just disable with the flick of a switch. Other advanced fall-back tracking methods were disabled, this isn't something your standard pilot would know about.
<quote> Then there is a cost vs risk calculation thrown into the equation here. How often does a plane just vanish like this? It doesn't happen very often and probably not enough to warrant spending hundreds of millions of dollars implementing a terrorist proof tracking/data collection system.
Somebody gotta tell that to the nsa.
Why isn't this a concern with ADS-B, which allows anyone with the right equipment (or access to a flight tracking website) to track planes in real time?
And cost-versus-risk has been decided in favor of increasing cost (and safety) in numerous aircraft systems already.
Also, if one factors in the cost of one more huge deep ocean search, a few more cents per ticket won't seem so bad. Who pays for these searches and investigations anyway - the airlines or governments (privatizing profits and socializing losses)?
from time to time planes crash over ocean and search for black boxes may take years like Air France 447 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Underwate...)
Yes, and in that case, they knew within narrow limits where the plane went down -- the crew were doing what they could to let their position be known. No effort to sneak away with an airliner, as in the present case.
Fallacy by analogy. It's a fair question (off hand), but it falls down when other factors are considered (cars don't normally drive for hours over water, for example).
or may be you just saw in my post an analogy to the fallacy by analogy
>cars don't normally drive for hours over water, for example
how that would affect the satellite communication?
The short answer, as I understand it, is: 1) Most communications technology, including satellites, is focused on where most people are communicating - ie, on land; ie, on 1/8th of the earth's surface 2) As you correctly point out, satellites over water aren't as obvious a problem as, say, mobile phone towers in the Indian Ocean, but the cost to retrofit existing aircraft is considered prohibitive given the rarity of this type of situation (ie, existing communication systems work well, and in this case seem to have been deliberately turned off anyway - so a different system is likely to have proved no more helpful).