Satellite firm which was used in search for missing plane offers low-cost tracking system

Daily Mail ^ | 5/12/2014 | MATTHEW BLAKE

[logi_cal869]

The British firm whose satellites helped track the final route of missing Malaysian Airlines airliner MH370, is to offer a free, basic tracking service to prevent other flights from disappearing. Inmarsat said today that the service would be offered to all 11,000 commercial passenger aircraft which are already equipped with Inmarsat satellite connection, comprising virtually 100 percent of the world's long haul commercial fleet. It's launch comes two months after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went missing without a trace on March 8 with 239 passengers on board.

It still has not been found despite a multi-agency, international search effort, including fruitless analysis by Inmarsat's own network of satellites.

[logi_cal869]

Full title: No more MH370s: Satellite firm which was used in search for missing plane offers low-cost tracking system to prevent another flight disappearing

Most brilliant product launch in history. /s

Tagline:

When you really, REALLY want to be gone: Inmarsat

or

We can track you, but being found is your problem

or

Close Encounters of the (ping) Kind

</sarc>

[justlurking]

It wouldn't have helped flight 370.

If it's connected to the aircraft electrical system, it can still be turned off. There's a breaker somewhere, accessible to the pilots.

I read an analogy elsewhere that I thought was appropriate: Would you want an electrical circuit in your house that you couldn't turn off, especially if two rooms were full of jet fuel?

[Uncle Chip]

Notice how the meme here has shifted. The problem has shifted from the hijacking of the jet to the locating of the jet.

The crime of diverting the jet and murdering 238 people has taken a backseat to the technological issue of tracking the jet — as if the tracking of the jet would have prevented the hijacking.

Until they are willing to deal with the criminal hijacking part of this and what the criminal hijacker had in mind they may never find that plane.

[FreeAtlanta]

The black boxes need to be redesigned to up load their data every few second when communication is available.

[Irishguy]

well to be fair no one knows what happened. its all speculation until the black boxes are found. then all hell will break loose.

[PLMerite]

“The British firm whose satellites helped track the final route of missing Malaysian Airlines airliner MH370...”

They should hold off on the bragging until it’s been proven they actually got even close to the real route.

[Uncle Chip]

The problem with the black boxes is that they won’t tell you much about the hijacking part 8 hours earlier — they will only tell you about the ditching/crashing part at the end of the joyride.

[bigbob]

Just accelerate implementation of ADS-B

[LibertyOh]

Real time tracking information will not stop a determined hijacker/pilot, but would at least eliminate a “missing” airliner. The route and final location will be known, preventing the lengthy anguish of not knowing what’s happened and the immense expense of just trying to find the plane.

[PapaBear3625]

If it's connected to the aircraft electrical system, it can still be turned off. There's a breaker somewhere, accessible to the pilots.

These satellite trackers are not high power. They use the same satellites that carry satellite-telephone traffic. So give the device a small battery which is kept charged by the aircraft electrical system, but which can maintain pinging for several hours without outside power. Then put it in the upper tip of the tail, where it can't be gotten to by hijackers during the flight, and where it won't bother anything else.

At the very least, a tracker which pings every minute or two will immediately indicate to the airline when the plane departs from its flight plan, and where it crashed to within a few miles. Add a software instruction to the GPS, which makes it ping outside of schedule when the unit's altitude changes by more than 5000 feet from the last ping.

[DCBryan1]

Ham radio APRS or SATGENIE II

[Uncle Chip]

Before Inmarsat tells us how good it is at tracking planes, it needs to release its raw data and explain how they arrived at that flight path to the current search area.

Their graphs of the arcs and flight paths don’t seem to match their numbers or the search area.

They claim that the plane averaged 375mph from 3:11 through 8:11 — that’s 1875 miles over 5 hours.

But its graph indicates its speed to have been about 500mph from 3:11 through 5:11 on primarily a north south axis before turning east south east.

If it flew 1000 miles south during those 2 hours then it only needed to fly 875 more miles to reach where it ended up at 8:11.

875 miles from there is Christmas Island just south of West Java.

So then why are they looking 700 miles south of there???

[Uncle Chip]

Inmarsat arcs here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3135643/posts?page=28#21

Note on the chart how far they have the plane flying from 3:11 to 5:11 — that’s a distance of about 1250 miles over 2 hours @ 625mph.

That’s not possible since it’s max speed is about 550mph and it was travelling before that at about 450mph.

From that point to where they are searching is then about 1035 miles — that’s an average speed of about 345mph.

If they would correct the 3:11 to 5:11 speed and distance they would find that the plane intersected the 8:11 arc about 500 miles north closer to Christmas Island.