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Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Discussion in 'Serious' started by Strudul, 12 Mar 2014.

  1. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    [​IMG]

    Very unlikely. Not only is it not a very mediapathic terrorist target; nobody has claimed responsibility. And what else is the point of terrorism if not publicity?
     
  2. Strudul

    Strudul ~

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    I'm sure we will find out eventually. But it could be months / years before we do.
     
  3. Pookie

    Pookie Illegitimi non carborundum

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    They are all marooned on a mysterious island with a giant robot lurking in the jungle....
     
  4. NIHILO

    NIHILO The Customer isn't always right!

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    Yeah, this is just a publicity stunt for east asia's new primetime series "Rost"


    My guess? Catastrophic failure cause the cockpit to burst into flames, preventing the crew from sending a distress call?

    I dunno. This looks like a mystery for Scooby and the gang.
     
    suragh likes this.
  5. Strudul

    Strudul ~

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    I laughed too hard
     
  6. rainbowbridge

    rainbowbridge Minimodder

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    Its not aliens, there is way too much prevention and surveillance for that to occur now, although its possible but very unluckly.

    Back in 1952 is a different story altogether, we lost a lot of military aircraft with our shoot them down policy, which had to be updated.

    The plane was not brought down by Aliens.
     
  7. samkiller42

    samkiller42 For i AM Cheesecake!!

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    I do believe all aircraft are fitted with BlackBox equipment in the factory, I.E, Boeing fitted it. I would also assume that simply unplugging it would trigger a few alarms in the cockpit and would be noticed during the pre-flight checks.

    Sam
     
  8. Cthippo

    Cthippo Can't mod my way out of a paper bag

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    TWA 800 exploded in mid-air due to an electrical arc in the fuel tank, so that is a possibility.

    Air France 447 crashed following a loss of aircraft attitude information from the static pitot system and the crew of three pilots was too busy trying to control the aircraft to send a distress call.

    These sorts of aircraft crashes without distress calls are certainly not unheard of in the modern era. Pilots are trained to "Aviate, navigate, communicate", in that order. If they were busy trying to get the aircraft under control then it is very possible that they would not think to send out a call. Staying alive is more important that telling people where to find your body.

    Cockpit Voice Recorders (CVRs) and Flight Data Recorders (FDRs), the so-called Black boxes, are extremely durable, but have no way to signal their location over long distances while underwater. Ones built for international flight will have a low powered beacon that will respond when "pinged" by sonar, but that only works over a distance of a mile or less. If you read the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) or Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) accident reports you'll see that CVRs and FDRs are not 100% reliable and often when investigators go to retrieve the data it's gone due to human error or equipment failure.
     
  9. TheBlackSwordsMan

    TheBlackSwordsMan Over the Hills and Far Away

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    The chinese just released pictures of what they think might be debris. It concord with course of the aircraft and petrol worker who saw it burning in the sky.
     
  10. Cthippo

    Cthippo Can't mod my way out of a paper bag

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    [​IMG]

    This is an emergency procedures checklist for a different aircraft type (CASA 212) that was involved in a crash resulting from both engines failing in flight. Note that making a Mayday call to Air Traffic Control (ATC) and activating the rescue beacon (Sky Trac) are the last two steps in the procedure. It's relatively easy to imagine a situation where the crew is too busy trying to keep the aircraft flying that they don't get that far down the list before they run out of air.
     
  11. rainbowbridge

    rainbowbridge Minimodder

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  12. RTT

    RTT #parp

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    There's some new info that allegedly the plane may have flown for a further 5 hours from its last reported location, this comes from info sent from the engines to Rolls Royce, but it's totally unconfirmed. If that turns out to be true it makes things properly weird :confused: A further 5 hours would put it within range of Pakistan and the horn of Africa
     
  13. Guest-16

    Guest-16 Guest

    Yea that's properly weird and makes me wonder how an aircraft can drop off radar and not cause an alert on military radar in E-Asia region.
     
  14. RTT

    RTT #parp

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    I think that's the point, it isn't really possible for it to go completely undetected unless it dropped to ~500 feet or so, especially if it went in the direction of India or further towards SE Asia (and/or Australia). The simplest explanation is that it's in the sea. Those grainy images spotted by Chinese satellites showing 3 objects floating in the sea were objects which were 20m across...

    Edit: Malaysian authorities have said the engine data reports are inaccurate and that the Chinese satellite images were NOT of aircraft debris and were released by mistake!
     
    Last edited: 13 Mar 2014
  15. Corky42

    Corky42 Where's walle?

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    Something that has been bugging me. In this day and age why do aircraft rely solely on radar when we have accurate GPS ? isn't it possible to track things that have GPS systems in them ?
     
  16. AlienwareAndy

    AlienwareAndy What's a Dremel?

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    That's exactly what I was thinking. If something as simple as a mobile phone can get its location quite accurate what the **** must be going on for a plane to disappear without bloody trace?

    In fact, people aboard supposedly had mobile phones that rang after the disappearance so why the **** can't any of those phones be loosely located for a clue?

    This is all very, very weird.
     
  17. Krazeh

    Krazeh Minimodder

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    No, it's only the GPS satellites that transmit info. The plane receives the signals and uses them to determine it's location. It doesn't transmit anything.
     
  18. mrbungle

    mrbungle Undercooked chicken giver

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    Need to see if anyone on the plane had google map tracking enabled on their phones!
     
  19. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    As krazeh says: GPS satellites transmit data by which the GPS receiver orients itself. It does not communicate back to the satellites.

    Planes very easily can go missing without a trace, even big ones. Telecommunication makes this world seem small, but it is still a whopping large place with most of its surface unexplored and uninhabited.

    Because their phones weren't ringing. When you dial up a mobile phone the cell network needs to locate it to strike up communication through the closest cell tower. While this hunting process, which can last multiple seconds, goes on, the cell network transmits a ringtone to your phone so you don't hang up while the network was trying to find the other mobile because you heard silence and assumed that the call out didn't work.

    If after a certain time the mobile cannot be located, the network either goes to voicemail or simply tells you that the other mobile isn't available right now (there appears to be no standard protocol amongst networks for this).

    In practice this means that you think the mobile at the other end rang for ages while its owner heard only one or two before picking up, or heard no rings at all and remains blissfully unaware that you are calling them. Their phone may not even be switched on and you'll still hear it ring out.


    When something terrible happens, it is natural for people to experience a grief reaction:
    Denial: "This isn't happening!"
    Anger: "How could this happen? The airline/pilots/government must be incompetent! Why can't they find those people?!"
    Bargaining: "Why don't they tap into the mobile phone 'find my phone' system? Why don't they retask satellites to look for them? Why don't they try to find the black box?..."
    Depression: "It's no use... it's all hopeless"
    Acceptance: "We may find out what happened, but this may not happen anytime soon. Such are the risks of plane travel, I'm afraid".

    This is not a weird, spooky, unusual event. This sort of **** can happen. It is fortunately rare, but it's not impossible. The people that are trying to find this plane are really knowledgeable experts with a truckload of technology at their disposal that we don't even know of. There is nothing that we can think of that they haven't already.
     
    Last edited: 13 Mar 2014
  20. Guinevere

    Guinevere Mega Mom

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    Earth has a surface area of 510,000,000 square kilometres (ish)

    If you want to record it at a rate of 1 pixel per meter, (Which is pretty low res) you need to record it with 510,000,000,000,000 pixels. Or to put it another way over 22 trillion Canon 5D MK III SLRs.

    You want one image per hour? So that 168x510,000,000,000,000 = 85,680,000,000,000,000 pixels. 16bits (why skimp now?) b per pixel and you're looking at collecting 1,370,880,000,000,000,000 bits of data per day before compression. Multiply this by three if you want colour. Did you want colour?

    We'll use a lossless compression algorithm that give us a 99% saving. No such compression exists but we've got to get these numbers down somehow and assuming such a 99% saving can be saved we can lose 2 of those 19 digits. TWO WHOLE DIGITS!

    So now we only need to get 137,088,000,000,000,000 bits of data recorded.

    This is only 15,959,143 gigabytes so we can store this on under 4,000 4TB hard drives (Again assuming we can invent a method of compressing down to 1% of the original size). We can't use jpegs (or similar)as square aeroplane doors will look very much like compression glitches..

    Of course these numbers could be wrong, I'm working quickly now. This isn't an XKCD What If!

    Problems with actually doing this?

    Satellites are complicated things. They are expensive to build, expensive to launch and expensive to run. They have limited power output and are generally built using at least 10+ year old tech. They have VERY limited bandwidth for their telemetry, so getting this data down to earth is going to mean a lot of engineering tech to resolve. It's going to cost a lot. A LOT!

    Is it still possible? Probably if you really REALLY wanted to. But there's many good reasons why high res imaging satellites cover the earth in tiny little chunks and take ages to come back round and image that area again. You'd need a lot of sats to do it though. How many?

    Well the 'flock of doves' as 28 nano satellites is able to image at 1px per 9-25 square meters. So maybe up to 784 based on a similar angle of view. Or just build larger sats.

    Is it really possible though?

    Yeah if there's a will to do it. Look at this the KH-9 HEXAGON spy sat that carried 60 miles of 6 inch wide photographic film! They could get the film back to earth in capsules and capture them mid air by hooking their parachutes. One pod was missed and had to be retrieved from 3 miles of ocean depth. This was 1972, at the height of the space age.

    These guys where bad ass when it came to this sort of stuff! They put guys on the moon remember!

    http://www.space.com/12996-secret-spy-satellites-declassified-nro.html

    And if this sat flew then, we could sure do something impressive now.

    Have we? Not yet.

    Sources:

    Wiki, Google, http://www.scientificamerican.com/a...tes-to-capture-high-res-views-of-whole-earth/

    Also, living with the gf who is an astro physicist working at one of the UKs space science labs and spends some of time number crunching the data from the globalbedo (Global Albedo) project which is funnily enough... about collecting and processing bitmap imaging data of the entire planet.
     

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