I'm still praying they find something soon. At least that would ease some of the pain of the families involved.
Some answers for the aviation community would be a very good thing as well.

What I don't get is how is it possible for a plane of that size to just just disappear.

There must be a lot we are not being told for various reasons but that doesn't necessarily mean an official cover up.

The way the Malaysian government has been handling this makes me suspicious that they are hiding something. Their lack of transparency may only be CYA for their own incompetence at handing this, or maybe they know about some kind of plot that would be embarrassing to them if it were known.

It's not hard. The Indian ocean is huge, the plane is tiny by comparison and you can't see the bottom from the surface. Not hard to understand at all, really. They have very little real data to go on. The fact that the search areas keep moving isn't hard to accept either, if you think that they probably continue to analyse and refine what data they have, what the winds and the currents may be doing, etc. Couple that with Bayesian search theory and the fact that if they don't find it in one place, they have to look somewhere else, and the fact that they don't feel the need to inform the public of every facet of the investigation ahead of time, and you get what you are seeing in the media.

Or, perhaps they just think and do things differently in their culture and those that haven't lived there may not understand this. Look at how the Chinese are intereacting with the rest of the search effort. Not the way we would do it...

JR

I think this should be a humbling reminder that our technology remains limited and the world is still a large and wild place. Kind of refreshing really - not to those involved of course.

Fantastic!

Corruption, incompetence and restricting access to information are not cultural values. Certainly I don't see a refusal to accept them as being somehow culturally intolerant.

Some good hits from a "ping" for the Aussie Navy today but it's about 300 miles from were the Chinese detected one (some) yesterday.

You've never lived over there, have you?

Since I have exactly zero first-hand information about this mystery, I can't really make any judgements about how they are handling the search. Since I have no relationship to the flight, it's passengers, or anything else remotely related, I have no justification to climb up onto a soapbox and ***** about it. Since I was born before the advent of video games, I have the patience to wait and see how it unfolds; unlike those that demand that the mystery be solved right now.

JR

The Oz navy pings seem to be more credible than the Chinese pings. I'm optomistic that they will prove to be vaild.

JR

Not for our culture. But don't expect our form of cultural, government, and business ethics to be adhered to by the rest of the world. Lying, bribery, and deception are quite accepted in some other cultures.

I wrote about this earlier, but not specific to "pings". The links below are a very good primmer on anti-submarine warfare, which is very germane to find the lost aircraft.

Tactics 101: Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) - Part 1 - General - HarpGamer

Tactics 101: Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) - Part 2 - General - HarpGamer

Tactics 101: Anti-Submarine Warfare - Part 3 - General - HarpGamer

So, the BB is sending out active pings, which will be heard by passive sonar systems and then hopefully triangulated and located. In the 3rd link, the discussion on how passive detection ranges are impacted is very important. Also look at CZ issues: it is possible for sound to travel at great distances if CZ is formed, which could explain the distance deltas between the Aussie folks and the Chinese.

News conference last night, Oz navy picked up pings twice--once for over two hours, and again for about 15 minutes. Takes over three hours for ship to turn around and go back over area where search is conducted. Two hour reception included audio and visual records of ping. Ping was strong and gradually faded, as to be expected as ship passed over target area. Everything reported was consistent with pings from the black boxes.

Essentially, the head of the search stated as strongly as he could that the pings were from the boxes without actually saying so, lacking absolute verification. He ended the press conference by stating that another reception of the pings would trigger the underwater deployment of the robotic search equipment which, according to the pings' depth, would be operating at its maximum depth.

This is definitely the most encouraging information since the disappearance over a month ago. Still, all authorities are talking of a months long operation from this point, even if these are the signals from the boxes.

If these are the boxes, the anomalies of this case are ubiquitous. Finding the boxes without having a debris field of any size is unprecedented. If these are the boxes, it is a salute to forensic investigation of data that was never intended to be used for such a purpose.

^^^ CNN talk for hours on this.

Perhaps its time for CNN to start a new channel just for this tragedy :rolleyes:

He didn't say "Vast" Hillary.

It is however human nature to hide incompetence, weakness... and militaries don't like divulging what they know or don't know. ...saw, or didn't see.

Every SNAFU has CYA coverups spinning about.

So if they find the plane at 15,000ft and it had a soft landing similar to the Sullenburger ditching or even the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961. I can't imagine the recovery effort that would take to retrieve the black boxes at that depth. Do they have robots that can cut into a plane at that depth?

Isn't it the crash news network already?

Here's an idea....

CHANGE CHANNELS AND WATCH SOMETHING ELSE. :rolleyes:

JR

It may be time for the Glomar Explorer to cast off.

can a single ship with a towed array do phase detection for direction location?