News Contact lost with 777-200ER of Malaysia Airlines

[ISProgram]

Somewhat interesting...since it shows why and why not those black box signals could actually be black box signals. It actually made a few points that you guys have discussed already.

Especially, since, as the article says, the Chinese vessel also had a SPARE pinger on the boat and how this could possible contaminate their results. Why would the Chinese even have a spare pinger? What's the benefit in that?

Also from the passage, and my view on the investigation and these leads thus far...

We'll give the final word to Angus Houston.
"This is an important encouraging lead, but one which I urge you to continue to treat carefully," he told reporters. "We are working in a very big ocean and within a very large search area, and so far, since the aircraft went missing, we have had very few leads which allow us to narrow the search area."

That being said, too few leads to be sure (even though we all hope they are and will be) that these are the black boxes.

 

[TMac3000]

I'm glad some of you find all of this amusing.

What a pathetic display.

You're right--this isn't funny. But that 2010 thing was kinda trippy tho:lol:

 

[mojoey]

I'm glad some of you find all of this amusing.

What a pathetic display.

I find it hilarious. Almost as hilarious as Apollo 1.

ಠ_ಠ

Seriously though. If you can't find at least the tiniest sliver of humor in something, maybe you take life too seriously. Seriousness is bad for your health, you know. Everyone that was serious at one point died. Seriously.

 

[Hielor]

Different people have different ways of coping with tragedies. Humor is a perfectly valid response.

 

[ISProgram]

Different people have different ways of coping with tragedies. Humor is a perfectly valid response.

I agree with this statement, though I think everyone should still try to be as not insensitive as possible. Because people died in this tragedy (as it looks now), and we all know how it feels to lose someone close to us. Now multiply that by 239 and...well, you know.

In other news, those black boxes seem to be playing hide-and-seek with us...

Also relevant:
http://time.com/53298/submarine-hunt-on-hold-until-fresh-pings-received-from-missing-jet/

 

[Keatah]

This is still one big joke. And if it isn't known, let it become known, the aviation industry is 20 years out of date.

Why not track a flight real-time, you know, uplink operational parameters continuously to base. Transmit the black box data (or a subset of it) to the nearest satellite. They say it can't be done. BS. You got teenagers sending megabytes upon megabytes of useless facetime video cross country. You've got thousands upon thousands of commercial fleet vehicles doing this. Get with the program!

Why not have the black box pinger modulate itself with the data stored within? Better yet, when an aircraft deviates or gets in trouble, have it do a memory dump. This isn't rocket science.

Why not have the back box use a signal this more readily distinguished from other noise? Have it transmit a simple code nowhere found in nature. After all, the news just said they weren't sure if it was a real genuine signal they found. A simple matter of programming.

Have a camera in the cockpit that transmits real-time, or at least records all activity. Just one more way to reduce the cost of investigations.

 

[Urwumpe]

Have a camera in the cockpit that transmits real-time, or at least records all activity. Just one more way to reduce the cost of investigations.

The pilots don't want it and they have the law on their side. Monitoring your employees with cameras is forbidden with only few exceptions.

Still, only a poor excuse to not have a real-time telemetry stream to your airline HQ. A single satellite could today handle all telemetry of all aircraft in the world at once. There it is only about costs. Its cheaper to wait for a crash and let the public pay the investigation, than to spend money that way. If RollsRoyce wouldn't sell their telemetry stream for the engines as cost-saving effort to limit engine inspections to the minimum possible, they wouldn't use it as well.

 

[Quick_Nick]

Sooo... you want to tow a long wire from every plane to the ground. And from the black box many kilometers up to the surface? Because otherwise I don't think the things you're saying are as possible as you think they are.

---------- Post added at 05:11 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:11 PM ----------

A single satellite could today handle all telemetry of all aircraft in the world at once.

Seriously?

 

[garyw]

This is still one big joke. And if it isn't known, let it become known, the aviation industry is 20 years out of date.

Is it?

Why not track a flight real-time, you know, uplink operational parameters continuously to base. Transmit the black box data (or a subset of it) to the nearest satellite. They say it can't be done. BS. You got teenagers sending megabytes upon megabytes of useless facetime video cross country. You've got thousands upon thousands of commercial fleet vehicles doing this. Get with the program!

Cost. It is still expensive to send data to satellites then relay it to a base. Yes, you can do this but it's an option and not requirement.

Why not have the black box pinger modulate itself with the data stored within? Better yet, when an aircraft deviates or gets in trouble, have it do a memory dump. This isn't rocket science.

Correct, and this already exists. It's called ACARS and helped determine what issues AF-447 had before it was found. This was turned OFF on MH370. No doubt you demand that this not be allowed to be turned off, the reason it an be turned off is because the circuit breakers are accessible to the crew. The reason for that is due to fire. Check out swissair-111 and see what happens when you can't turn things off.

Why not have the back box use a signal this more readily distinguished from other noise? Have it transmit a simple code nowhere found in nature. After all, the news just said they weren't sure if it was a real genuine signal they found. A simple matter of programming.

It already does. 37.5Khz is not emitted by anything else. Signal drift is caused by some weird properties of the depth.

Have a camera in the cockpit that transmits real-time, or at least records all activity. Just one more way to reduce the cost of investigations.

Already suggested. Pilots don't like the idea due to privacy. Would you like a camera watching what you do at work all the time?

 

[Urwumpe]

Seriously?

Sure. We are talking about kilobytes per hour there. Remember working for a metrology company once, which sold mostly data loggers, that you lost in a underground tube for months and then used a GSM! connection (9600 bits/second, a few Euros per kilobyte fee around the year 2002) for downloading all recorded data once per day - and that with simple lossless data compression, that only saved the first sample with full accuracy and then only saved the differences from that sample. Many movie formats in the internet work the same way. Those guys had been doing really epic stuff, international customers, pretty good market share - and still the company was really like three men and a dog. Etching dozens of electronics boards in front of the company building for keeping the acid smell out.

...well, I was drifting away.

Your internet connection today sends already much more data in that time for purely administrative reasons, without any payload getting transfered.

A satellite instead can handle Gigabytes per second - and that for every of the dozens of subbeams, that its antenna has.

 

[fred18]

I think that all this does not happen because statistically aviation is the safest industry ever made, it's like there is no need to improve safety in a field where hundreds of thousands of flights happens every day and the accidents are so rare.

But still I also see it like a gamble: when you take a plane you bet your life on that 0.00000000...1 % of probability...

Anyway back to the Keatah comment I think that this accidents simply set a new level of mistery where no one ever thought we could arrive. The AF447 was really an incredibly difficult riddle to solve, maybe the most difficult, but this... this is far beyond that... So this incredible situation was not meant to happen, that's why the level of that kind of data sharing is possible, but not implemented.

 

[garyw]

Sure. We are talking about kilobytes per hour there. Your internet connection sends already much more data in that time for purely administrative reasons, without any payload getting transfered.

A satellite instead can handle Gigabytes per second.

Only if sized for it and only if the planes have the necessary SATCOM kit which can also be turned off.

The AF447 was really an incredibly difficult riddle to solve, maybe the most difficult, but this... this is far beyond that... So this incredible situation was not meant to happen, that's why the level of that kind of data sharing is possible, but not implemented.

AF-447 was quite easy to solve. Once the plane was declared overdue and the ACARS messages were seen (http://countjustonce.com/a330/acars.html) it was obvious that it had stalled and almost certainly crashed. The plane was found after just 5 days, confirmed as AF-447 after 9 days. Sure, it took two years to get the CVR and FDR which both revealed a tale of staggering pilot incompetence but overall the cause was simple, stall due to pilot error.

 

[fred18]

Sure, it took two years to get the CVR and FDR which both revealed a tale of staggering pilot incompetence but overall the cause was simple, stall due to pilot error.

I was meaning that before hearing the black boxes a lot of people where wondering if it was possible that trained pilots could do such a series of wrong moves.

Even the reason for MH370 crash is pretty easy: the plane for some unknown reason was flying southward, the fuel finished and the plane crashed into the ocean, but we need to hear the black boxes to understand what happened

 

[Screamer7]

I watch the documentary of the Qantas A380 that had an engine malfunction.
In that documentary, they use real time telemetry.
They know there was something wrong with the A388 even before they could talk to the pilots.
I think something like that must be made monetary for all airlines in the future.

 

[Urwumpe]

I watch the documentary of the Qantas A380 that had an engine malfunction.
In that documentary, they use real time telemetry.

Rolls Royce engine health monitoring. The Malaysia Airliners also uses that package to let Rolls Royce analyse their engine data.

http://www.rolls-royce.com/about/technology/systems_tech/monitoring_systems.jsp

 

[Keatah]

About having cameras in the cockpit. A simple rule, the footage is never made available unless a catastrophe like this mh370 happens. And hopefully it wouldn't be recorded locally, but streamed to a satellite. Simplistic? Idealistic? Sure.. But it needs to happen.

For anyone complaining about cost. Already this investigation is over 30 million USD. And it's only going to get more expensive in the weeks ahead.

One more rant. Why can't FDR and CVR store more data? I see no technological or cost reason.

I wonder what the industry will do if FDR & CVR are blank, had been turned off, or overwrote themselves for whatever reason..?

 

[Screamer7]

I was meaning that before hearing the black boxes a lot of people where wondering if it was possible that trained pilots could do such a series of wrong moves.

Even the reason for MH370 crash is pretty easy: the plane for some unknown reason was flying southward, the fuel finished and the plane crashed into the ocean, but we need to hear the black boxes to understand what happened

I think the data voice recorders will be useless in this investigation.
I'm not sure about the data recorders, and what the recycle time frame is for them.

 

[Urwumpe]

I think the data voice recorders will be useless in this investigation.
I'm not sure about the data recorders, and what the recycle time frame is for them.

Wrong - I think they will show much more interesting data, because the FDR will likely only confirm, what we already suspect from other observations.

---------- Post added at 12:33 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:31 AM ----------

I wonder what the industry will do if FDR & CVR are blank, had been turned off, or overwrote themselves for whatever reason..?

You can't turn them off. They are always on and record as long as the aircraft has electricity to measure something. They don't overwrite themselves... they are rather acting like a closed tape loop, that contains the data for the last 25 hours.

They can be blank, when damaged. But that requires a lot of punishment - even after the plane flew into the Pentagon, there was still a black box wreck left to recover.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americ...ight_Data_Recorder_and_Cockpit_Voice_Recorder

 

[Keatah]

One more thing, prior to turning critical recorders and telemetry off, a packet burst could be sent. Containing some immediate past history, pictures, short video, air data, stuff like that.

---------- Post added at 10:36 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:34 PM ----------

You can't turn them off. They are always on and record as long as the aircraft has electricity to measure something.

And they're not a fire hazard? Let us do the same thing with a satcom module of a sort.

 

[Screamer7]

Wrong - I think they will show much more interesting data, because the FDR will likely only confirm, what we already suspect from other observations.

O.K., let's hope they find them.