I've heard that story before.
Posted on 03/25/2014 8:43:24 PM PDT by Praxeologue
Recovering the black boxes from the Malaysia Airlines jet that crashed into the southern Indian Ocean is a Herculean task, even with the wealth of sophisticated equipment being deployed.
Any hope of finding survivors from the missing plane was extinguished yesterday when Malaysia's prime minister announced satellite data showed MH370's journey had “ended in the southern Indian Ocean” off the west coast of Australia.
Seventeen days after the Boeing 777 disappeared, distraught relatives were forced to accept what they had long feared ― that the 239 passengers and crew on board were never coming home.
The plane's two black boxes are key to solving the mystery of why the plane veered so far off course and its final fate, but experts say that the search for them will be long and difficult.
In theory, the black boxes containing flight data and cockpit voice recordings will continue emitting tracking signals for about another two weeks, with an average audible range of two to three kilometres (nearly two miles).
But with no debris in the remote search area confirmed as linked to the plane, it is still a case of looking for a needle in a haystack.
“Picking up a signal from the beacon seems an outside chance,” said a member of the team that hunted the black boxes from Air France flight AF447 that crashed in the Atlantic in 2009.
Vast search zone
The investigator, who asked to remain anonymous, noted that in the Air France case the signals were not heard at all. One transmitter had failed and the other had fallen off on impact and was never found, he said.
“So I'm fairly pessimistic about this approach,” he said, recommending that the immediate priority should be to catalogue every piece of debris that is discovered.
“Then, ideally, data buoys should be deployed,” he said. These instruments, commonly used for meteorological data, are tracked by satellite and give an idea of ocean currents in the area to help confirm mathematical models.
But he warned that the 17 days that have elapsed since the crash and the “uncertainty associated with these models will combine to make the search zone quite vast”.
Commercial airliners are obliged to carry two black boxes ― the Digital Flight Data Recorder which logs the speed, altitude and direction, while the Cockpit Voice Recorder keeps track of cockpit conversations and other sounds and announcements.
Even before the official announcement that the plane had crashed, the US navy said it was flying a black box locator to Perth. The Pinger Locator, weighing 35 kilogrammes (80 pounds), is attached to a cable and towed by a ship.
It is equipped with a listening device that can detect the signals of a black box at a depth of up to 6,000 metres (20,000 feet).
Scouring the sea floor
If a signal is not picked up, the next stage would be to deploy lateral scanning sonars after determining the variations of the sea floor to pick up any anomalies.
All the experts who spoke to AFP believed the search operation could last a very long time ― months or more.
In the Air France crash it took 23 months to locate the main wreckage and retrieve the black boxes at a depth of 3,900 metres.
“An underwater phase to try to locate the plane from flight MH370 can only be started if the activity under way allows us to define a search zone more limited than the current search zone,” France's air accident investigation bureau (BEA) said yesterday.
Once such a zone is set, if it is over a flat and sedimentary seabed, investigators can use “towed sonars and get a good coverage”.
If, however, the zone is over a broken, irregular seabed, they could call in the Remus submarine drones used for the Air France search plane.
Remote operating vehicles (ROVs) could also be used in a later stage to check topographical anomalies with high-definition cameras.
“These remote-controlled robots, which have a cable linking them to the surface, move forward slowly and thus have a more reliable coverage,” said the investigator, who was formerly with the BEA.
“But there as well, a very precise position is needed to use them at depth.”
And even if the black boxes are found, there are no guarantees they will be in a state to give up their data.
The Malaysian authorities have said a deliberate act made MH370 disappear from civilian air control radars ― and the big question is whether the Cockpit Voice Recorder was immobilised.
“You only need to pull the breaker that is by the pilot's seat and it is taken off-line electrically,” explained one aviation expert.
MH370's disappearance has prompted a major debate over inflight communications, including the benefits of live streaming black box data.
There has been speculation about this for the past week. The SOSUS system has been largely declassified and its capabilities reduced since the end of the cold war. Why would the U.S. not have announced it if it had detected a water crash?
Spending the money to find the plane is worth it if it can remove the possibility of any continuing terrorist threat relating to the plane.
Interesting tidbit in all of this. There were 154 Chinese on board. The number 154 is an extremely unlucky number in Chinese culture.
Live streaming block box data? Why not live streaming audio and video too.
I've always wondered why every 711 in the country has video but they always have to resort to a black box what happened to a plane during a crash.
Think of it as national R&D. It will have ancillary benefits that will advance our technological capabilities.
I've heard that story before.
I miss the jars of Tang. Could anyone stomach the non orange flavors of it, though? I tried grape when a kid thinking it would be neat. Yuck.
FYI
But orange Tang made the neatest cake frosting. A cup of it in place of the powdered sugar in a normal cake butter frosting recipe and it was in-your-face orange. All the food I could scarf down when a kid and it didn’t add a pound. Now I must diet, diet, diet to keep fitting in my pants.
“The plane’s two black boxes are key to solving the mystery of why the plane veered so far off course and its final fate,...”
I doubt much will be learned from the black box.
Narcissistic hegomaniac control freaks like the pilot of this aircraft, won’t leave a recorded voice to explain why he did it. He did not say much while the plane was still up in the air, and I’m sure the coward did not leave a recording.
We’ll find the black boxes just as soon as NSA, or whoever, finishes constructing & planting them, and not a minute sooner.
I hate it when people start these kinds of stories. It is not on a runway in Pakistan, it is in a hanger in Pakistan.
Was that the one that blew up when they tried to nuke Hawaii?
The black boxes won’t tell us much, but we’ll end up knowing a lot more about deepwater salvage techniques.
A possible aircraft fire protection bottle washed up in the Maldives.
Good one!
>> the Malaysia Airlines jet that crashed into the southern Indian Ocean
Is that a fact up to this point?
There are the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), which records the last two hours' worth of audio, and the flight data recorder (FDR), which records a whole bunch of stuff about the airplane for the duration of the flight.
Unfortunately, the FDR will tell us what happened, but the CVR will likely be unable to tell us why.
The CVR will have almost two hours' worth of engine noise, followed by some minutes of relative quiet, followed by a final SPLASH! The critical, interesting words will have been overwritten and lost to history!
It seems to me likely that the plane was hijacked. Why else to turn off the transponder at such a vulnerable point? The probable intent was to fly it to some airfield in the 'stans, followed by who knows what fate for the passengers.
But then there was a fight to retake control, which somehow resulted in incapacitating all aboard who could have flown the plane or radioed for help.
What resulted was a modified Payne Stewart scenario: fly on autopilot until the fuel runs out, then go in!
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