my money was on they would never find it, unless they have some info that has not been reported.

Unbelievably poor reporting...based on satellite information.

They have heard the pings, they have not found any airplane debris, really sad.

There has been so much dis-information until the plane is found they should stop saying anything.

Don't even get me started on CNN's "breaking news" of nothing other than speculation.... :rolleyes:

^^^Bob- Agree with you on the CNN b.s..

24/7 milking a tragedy for ratings and $$$. They even had experts in on 'black holes' and the Bermuda triangle. I'm surprised they haven't spent for a new dramatic music score to go with the fancy graphics. Loony.

The "listening buoys" are only in important areas worth protecting.

Radar use electromagnetic radiation(light) and looks for reflections back. Radar can only accurately track altitude and size out to the horizon unless considerable energy is employed so that signal strength can remain even through the ground.

Long distance radar relies on using modulating wavelengths tuned to bounce of the ionsphere. The accuracy of such a system is greatly reduced as it is dependent on calculating the reflections the return signal followed both out bound and in bound - given the changing nature of the sky, it has difficulty being accurate as a slight exageration its like trying to see your reflection in the surface of white water rapids.

The ocean is very reflective to radar, so use of these systems over the ocean adds an extra degree of difficulty. In fact - a perfectly stealth craft from above would be plain as day over an ocean to a look down radar as it would appear as a large "hole" in the ocean's reflection.

I guess this will be the truth if the Black Box is actually attached to the airplane......
I still am a little skeptical .

If crashed into the ocean then the plane would definitely break up, but the debris field should be somewhat localized.

i understand.........But to throw the "boxes" in the ocean..might be a sure way to stop the search ...for awhile, or even forever.

Good point................

Get a few black boxes, beat them up a bit after programming some crazy info into them, put in new batteries, toss them off a vessel............make a big show out of it, come up with some crazy story and you end it. I am sure Tom Clancey came up with this idea years ago; it just never made it into one of his suspense novels.

Crazy? You betcha. Bit until someone lifts a huge piece of wreckage with the correct markings its still anyones game.

Not sure about the 777, but in most aircraft they are not accessible in flight. Further, I doubt there are any doors on the 777 that can be opened in flight. It's an interesting conspiracy theory though - land airplane, hide it, throw black boxes into a remote location of the ocean. It would definitely divert the search efforts.

Yes.
That is what I am thinking.......

If nothing else, novelists and screenwriters are getting some great fodder for airplane based suspense novels and movies.

everything on those planes is serialized, we will find a serial number long before we find the black box anyway.

I do not go see or pay for gooloish movies.
The titanic, Worst Storm, and a 100 others never make a penny on me.
Anyone can guess a 100 scenarios what goes wrong......why pay them to guess for you?
Why pay them to make money on the dead?
Seems wrong.

Never seen a Vietnam flick?

If someone really wanted to steal a jet this way they could. Maybe even toss a few phony serialized pieces of junk into the ocean near the point where the phony black boxes are.

Airplane serial numbers are easy to obtain. Publicly available actually.

Just Forest Gump...
But i am a Viet Vet... sort of not dead

The SN of the airframe is easily obtainable. The SN of the individual parts are not so easy to obtain by John Q. Public. If they find a flap actuator, PN 20183, SN 1090507, made by Parker, then they will go to Parker and trace it to the buyer, then to the maintenance logs. If this 777's maintenance logs don't show that part ever being installed, then they have a mismatch discrepancy that must be explained. Etc.
Knew you were. Surprised that you have never watched The Deer Hunter, The Great Santini, Apocalypse Now, Air America, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, etc.

I understand the parts pedigree.
All i am saying.......is there parts to a plane attached to the box?
Never had a interest in those movies.
However I LUV Forest Gump.
Its a humorous, sad ,funny, luv story with parts of viet nam included .
A well made movie..
As for the rest of them........I kind of do not to see it again.

Too late:

Aussie Flight Disaster Film 'Deep Water' Shelved Over Eerie Resemblance to Missing Malaysia Flight - The Hollywood Reporter

im not talking about aircraft serial numbers. :rolleyes:

you don't put together a wide-body airliner, all with one serial number on every seat, every electrical assembly, every engine part ...

Even easier - all a prospective bad guy needs to so is buy a few airplane junkyard parts and scatter those in the ocean. Or have someone swipe a few from a maintenance facility. Not far-fetched for a motivated and / or well-funded bad guy operation.

I think the point being made is anything and everything that goes in a plane that has a serial number is recorded / registered / logged as being in / on / a part of that specific aircraft.

what basic concept are you missing? :rolleyes:

if you throw junkyard parts into the ocean ... when we pick them up and trace the serial numbers it will say "was removed from X aircraft on such and such date and thrown away" wopp dee do.

what about the threat of terrorism, mixed with a paranoid propensity for conspiracy theories, makes everyone lose there ****?

this is basic stuff.

Cash nailed it. Everything with airplanes is serialized, which is to say the the SN of component 123XYZ was installed on airplane SN 123. So it is exactly known the SN of each major component installed on EVERY airplane built. This goes all the way down to single engine part 23 piston airplanes. But worth noting - you have to retrieve that part from the bottom of the ocean to verify the SN.

A minute ago you were saying unique IDs weren't on parts, now you're saying they are. All I'm saying (since you obviously missed it) is that a motivated terror group could orchestrate an aircraft theft like this by tossing some ELTs (programmed to match the target aircraft's ID - maybe even the actual ones FROM that aircraft) into the sea along with whatever other debris (or even bodies / parts) as "proof" the aircraft crashed, then wait a couple of months and then use the still-perfectly-functional aircraft for whatever nefarious purpose they've got in mind... Maybe it's a bit Tom Clancy-ish but if I could think of it, I'm sure the bad guys could too.

I'm not saying at all it'll happen, but it could. I'm sure your type would've dismissed the whole "hijack airplanes and use them as weapons" tactic as a nutty manifestation of paranoia too -up until about September 10, 2001.

There are an awful lot of crazy people in the world with vendettas, political agendas and scores to settle. Never underestimate how resourceful a truly motivated, crazy enemy can get.

The CBC has reported a news conference with Malaysian PM Najib in which he stated a new method of analysing data has indicated Flight 370's last position was in the southern Indian ocean.

"In a sombre breakthrough in a weeks-long search, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 “ended” in the southern Indian Ocean.

Najib said searchers used a new form of data analysis — never used before in a search for a missing plane — to determine the aircraft was lost in a remote area of the Indian Ocean west of Perth, Australia.

The area where the plane is believed to have gone down is far from any possible landing sites, Najib said. "
The families have been informed the plane is officially lost.

God speed to all aboard
Les

This all sounds pretty fishy.............

Malaysia Airlines sent this text message to the family members of the MH370 passengers.
“Malaysia Airlines deeply regrets that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived. As you will hear in the next hour from Malaysia’s Prime Minister, we must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean.”

"a new form of data analysis — never used before in a search for a missing plane — to determine the aircraft was lost in a remote area of the Indian Ocean."

Who had the new technology, Malaysia?

Lateline - 24/03/2014: Greatest challenges in search for plane are remote location and weather

David Mearns the Director of Blue Water Recoveries discusses what's involved in finding and salvaging wreckage from the sea floor.


Very informative interview with an actual subject matter expert.

The magnitude of the task here....Air France 280 seconds from loss of contact to impact. MH370- 7 hours over ocean. Possible search area even if debris is confirmed, is thousands of sq nautical miles, black box acoustic pinger- 3-4000 meters. Battery ~30 days. The most inaccessible corner of the planet.

I just read that the our subs heard the plane hit, which seems like no surprise to me.

Also, that the pilot demanded that Malay ruling party release opposition leader (who has been sentenced to five years for supposedly being gay) else...

Did you mean to put this is green type?

Immarsat, the UK satellite company, did the analysis. According to some not very detailed articles I read.

Thanks, interesting. "The US is the largest government client, generating up to a fifth of its revenues of about £1bn annually."

Analysis by the British satellite company Inmarsat and the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) was cited on Monday by the Malaysian prime minister as the source of information that has narrowed the location where the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have crashed into the southern Indian Ocean to a corridor a couple of hundred miles wide.

The analysis follows fresh examination of eight satellite "pings" sent by the aircraft between 1.11am and 8.11am Malaysian time on Saturday 8 March, when it vanished from radar screens.

The prime minister, Najib Razak, said: "Based on their new analysis, Inmarsat and the AAIB have concluded that MH370 flew along the southern corridor, and that its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth.

"This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean."

He added that they had used a "type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort".

The new method "gives the approximate direction of travel, plus or minus about 100 miles, to a track line", Chris McLaughlin, senior vice-president for external affairs at Inmarsat, told Sky News. "Unfortunately this is a 1990s satellite over the Indian Ocean that is not GPS-equipped. All we believe we can do is to say that we believe it is in this general location, but we cannot give you the final few feet and inches where it landed. It's not that sort of system."

McLaughlin told CNN that there was no further analysis possible of the data. "Sadly this is the limit. There's no global decision even after the Air France loss [in June 2009, where it took two years to recover the plane from the sea] to make direction and distance reporting compulsory. Ships have to log in every six hours; with aircraft travelling at 500 knots they would have to log in every 15 minutes. That could be done tomorrow but the mandate is not there globally."

Since the plane disappeared more than two weeks ago, many of the daily searches across vast tracts of the Indian Ocean for the aircraft have relied on Inmarsat information collated halfway across the world from a company that sits on London's "Silicon Roundabout", by Old Street tube station.

Using the data from just eight satellite "pings" after the plane's other onboard Acars automatic tracking system went off at 1.07am, the team at Inmarsat was initially able to calculate that it had either headed north towards the Asian land mass or south, towards the emptiest stretches of the India Ocean.

Inmarsat said that yesterday it had done new calculations on the limited data that it had received from the plane in order to come to its conclusion. McLaughlin told CNN that it was a "groundbreaking but traditional" piece of mathematics which was then checked by others in the space industry.

The company's system of satellites provide voice contact with air traffic control when planes are out of range of radar, which only covers about 10% of the Earth's surface, and beyond the reach of standard radio over oceans. It also offers automatic reporting of positions via plane transponders. It is possible to send route instructions directly to the cockpit over a form of text message relayed through the satellite.

Inmarsat was set up in 1979 by the International Maritime Organisation to help ships stay in touch with shore or call for emergency no matter where they were, has provided key satellite data about the last movements of MH370.

Even as the plane went off Malaysian air traffic control's radar on 8 March, Inmarsat's satellites were "pinging" it.

A team at the company began working on the directions the plane could have gone in, based on the responses. One pointed north; the other, south. But it took three days for the data to be officially passed on to the Malaysian authorities; apparently to prevent any more such delays, Inmarsat was officially made "technical adviser" to the AAIB in its investigation into MH370's disappearance.

Inmarsat's control room in London, like some of its other 60 locations worldwide, looks like a miniature version of Nasa: a huge screen displays the positions of its 11 geostationary satellites, and dozens of monitors control and correct their positions. A press on a key can cause the puff of a rocket on a communications satellite 22,236 miles away, nudging its orbit by a few inches this way or that.

More prosaically, Inmarsat's systems enable passengers to make calls from their seats and also to use Wi-Fi and connect to the internet while flying.

If the plane has its own "picocell" essentially a tiny mobile phone tower set up inside the plane then that can be linked to the satellite communications system and enable passengers to use their own mobile phones to make calls, which are routed through the satellite and back to earth.

After its creation, Inmarsat's maritime role rapidly expanded to providing connectivity for airlines, the media, oil and gas companies, mining and construction in remote areas, and governments.

Privatised at the end of the 1990s, it was floated on the stock market in 2004, and now focuses on providing services to four main areas: maritime, enterprise (focused on businesses including aviation), civil and military work for the US government, and civil and military work for other governments. The US is the largest government client, generating up to a fifth of its revenues of about £1bn annually. The firm employs about 1,600 staff.

Can someone photoshop an overhead of a 777 on top of that Iranian barge/aircraft carrier for me?

:D

These guys from Inmarsat who plotted this course were the same that identified the Air France location based on the same procedures. They were interviewed recently on NPR and were then in the process of reviewing the Malaysian Air data before they came up with this conclusion. They claimed that they would have a 95% confidence level.

Still skepticism goes on; "show me a napkin or cup that was floating and has the Malaysian Airways logo and I will be satisfied" said one executive.

So far nothing regarding salvaged debris of any kind has been collected. The world is still waiting for some evidence and until that napkin or cup shows up, the dance keeps going on.

Dang Gogar - You do realize the Maylay 'vestigators get their reports from this thread?! ;)

Don't say that out loud. There are US submarines in the Great Southern Ocean that can hear you.

It was big and red and looked like a giant Tylenol

How 'bout some coffee, Johnny?

Many sailors who take on the challenge of circumnavigating the glode either in races or solo personal desires ususally takeon the "roaring forties" in the southern oceans. This is where we hear of de-mastings, lost sailors, etc. You can be the greatest skilled sailor with the best equipment but if your takingon the "roaring forties", you have to have a horse shoe up your butt as well..................

This is where the search for the Maylasian Airlines is focused. I can imagine the multitude of seasick sailors caoming that area right now.

THE ROARING FORTIES

The world’s largest hunt for a missing airliner has zeroed in on one of the most desolate corners of the planet, an area of ocean nearly two miles deep, swept by huge rolling swells and buffeted by strong winds known as the Roaring Forties,” begins a Post story on the extreme weather conditions in area some 1,500 miles southwest of Perth, Australia, where a satellite may have spotted debris.

The Roaring Forties refers to the belt of ripping westerly winds, aided by the Earth’s rotation, between roughly 40 and 50 degrees latitude in the southern hemisphere. Winds rage in this region as it sits in the transition zone between the more tranquil, balmy subtropics and frigid polar vortex zipping around the South Pole. Pressures and temperatures change rapidly here, driving the winds frequently over 30-40 mph, and give rise to storms.

Not the place you want to search for a missing aircraft.