Is this really hacker news worthy?
The Crimean crisis is a good example of a news-worthy story that is absolutely not Hacker News-worthy.
I am interested in this, I'm interesting in the technology, crowdsourcing and stuff to find the plane.
All I got was a jpg link to a person's dropbox, with no information about today's finding / sighting as opposed to yesterday's. Just a picture of a blob.
(I don't know if I'm kidding)
I don't want to forget that this is a tragedy for the families involved. But I think it is more technically interesting story than a javascript text editor or the latest crypto currency news.
to my knowledge, we've seen one arc (from the last ping) that has been split into two parts based on assumptions of maximum and minimum ranges of straight flight at even speed.
that's a lot of assumptions.
I´ve read that the telephone ping was just every hour or so, that gives you at least 5 or 6 pings during the flight, some of them when the aircraft was at known positions.
It´s a pity because with a ping every 5 min it would have been possible to obtain a pretty narrow route.
The ping arc error zone it´s quite wide (about 100NM) but maybe it could be possible to correct it somehow comparing the ping string with the last known positions.
Of course it´s just going to give wide probable routes, but there is a possibility that they give additional indirect information, like some branches overflying radar zones, or airways on the general direction of the probable route that could be used to narrow the search again. Even if it just works for reducing the actual search surface it´s worth looking at it. I suppose that the SAR teams are trying to do something similar, but after seeing last´s week response it´s difficult