And some planes are never found.....

Malaysia flight reawakens pain of MacDill plane disappearance

Yep. IMO, there has been massive dis-information surrounding this story.

That is a very moving story.

With ours or others' sub based listening abilities, do u think there r a bunch in the area looking for the 777. And do their methods increase the range if the ELTs etc? How close would they have to get to detect them? And what about towed arrays-I used to read naval thrillers by peter Robinson (anyone?) and they seemed able to find anything with some contraption they drug behind the ships.
I guess it's obvious I think, and have thought a along, it's in the water. But I'm a nobody in this department so I'm curious what the pros think?!!

^^Yes, this^^

"Failed" includes all possibilities, human and mechanical. Personally, my greatest fear in not finding the plane at all is never being able to determine if mechanical failure was involved. Human intervention is strongly suggested and highly probable but that intervention as a result of a mechanical failure cannot be dismissed. Never finding the plane means every flight of every 777 will forever be at risk unless or until something similar happens again. No one wants that.

When this finally sorts out, a lot of these experts are going to be looking like Karl Rove on election night. Milk it while you can...

As someone else stated, there's more expertise here than on any cable news channel. Keep them watching, by any means necessary......

http://kansas-railroad-job-insurance.../2011/08/5.gif

Currently the FAA requires a *minimum* of 30 minutes record time for CVRs.
Some record longer. This one has 2 hours of voice record time:
http://www.uasc.com/documents/products/CVFDR.pdf

It would be really easy to record even longer with SSD technology.

Assuming a month passes without a trace, and if the black box batt. pitter out etc., will some of the investigation back out or lessen the effort? It has to be costing millions and some governments may not feel to continue or in their best interest.

No doubt everyone feels for the loss of those on that flight but this event might go farther into the fear for all.

As of now released reports, Boeing cannot point blame on human error OR mechanical. Unless there is something bigger than what they could guess but never able to answer, is troubling. If the scenario, I vision the entire air industry will have marketing experts clouding us sheep. I'll bet Boeing is re-strategizing for the 'what-if'.

I'm still not ruling out government cover-up of a massive screw-up by military. The accidental US shooting down that civilian Iranian airline was for awhile denied and covered-up. Is there some wicked secret weapon that god-forbid any country would be foolish to disclose? One has to consider this.

New generation CVR's are hard drive based not taped loops, and have much longer recording times, some hold 24 hours of recording. 30 min is just the requirement, and was made when CVR's ran 12 track tape recorders.

In the search, whats up with the 'wild goose chase' sending teams in entirely different directions? Is some government purposely creating diversions? Hell, it could even be any of the goodwill efforts duped by their very own government making them look like the goodguys.

Why did it take so long for the US military to release the radar data? One would think the moment it was learned the plane disappeared, including most of the world on the next day, the US would have said - look at this data!

That is the equivalent of saying, "hey China and Russia - look what we can see!" along with, "hey China and Russia, look what we can't see!"

No good can come from either of those...

I hope this has prompted some Boeing planning/maintenance meetings...there are some pretty damn simple measures that could be taken to help "find" planes if nothing else.

Agreed with an earlier statement: fare more brain-power on this forum than in all news channels combined: Pilots, engineers, military. ALLLL Porsche enthusiasts too!

Nostatic ^^^ And what a waste of resources along with precious time. That makes the humanity of it all meaningless to some country(s). This is why I wouldn't rule out a cover-up.

We're well aware of including the US admitting the submarine cat and mouse games with Russia off of our shores and that's fine with me.

I'm more concerned IF the possibility of them covering up a tragic situation of CIVILIAN's.

Engineering on aircraft is always a compromise...there are several systems as described in this thread designed to help locate a downed aircraft. I seriously doubt Boeing is looking at anything to make them easier to find, they meet all requirements as is and further efforts are not necessarily economically viable.

How often does a modern aircraft get "lost"? Millions of flight hours a year for decades, and this one event should revamp aircraft location systems? This is a highly unusual situation, and may in fact be a situation wherein someone was trying to make this aircraft dissapear. If it was a willful act then what can be done, pilots must retain the ability to control all aircraft systems to ensure safety. If we make it impossible for a pilot to deactivate transponders etc on board in flight, the next accident we will be discussing may be how a shorting transponder burned an aircraft in air due to the pilot being unable to de-power the system.

Always compromises.

The government would never tip its hand about any "secret" capability we might have over JUST 200 civilian lives. Think like the government does for a moment. Suppose we have Program X that can look at anything, anywhere, any time. This is wonderful for defending the 300+ million citizens of our country. If our enemy knows we have this program, they can start devising ways around it. 200 civilians vs. 300+ million is a no-brainer...

I can only speculate on the use of subs. From what I heard from one expert, the deployment of a sub requires a lead time--the implication being, they are deployed on crucial defense missions and to divert would take a planning stage or an extreme emergency. Don't know if the loss of a commercial airliner rises to that emergency level, especially if it's at the bottom of the ocean.

As far as the use of towed arrays, we're back to location. Can you tow arrays across a nearly 3 million square mile area? Can you tow arrays across an area the size of Arizona? Without wreckage and back-tracking to approximate location, the use of arrays (which move at approximately 2 knots) would be a waste of assets.

Especially if the plane is known to have gone down and a few days would make no difference in saving lives already lost.

subs take months to get on station. :rolleyes:

the fundamental problem here is wide body passenger aircraft go 600 mph, give or take, and ships go 30 mph give or take. that means it takes a ship 10x the time to travel the same distance, or 100x the time to search a given area that the aircraft passed through. and you search at even slower speeds then you can travel at ....

for example:

we knew within about 10 miles where the titanic sank, took months and months of searching to find it.