Savage reported today that the engines on that plane are equipped with transponders separate from the plane’s and are activated to log the engines hours of op. I don’t recall who Savage said manufactured the engines but a spokes person on the receiving end of those engines signals verified that the plane flew for 4 more hours following the time the plane’s coordinate transponders were turned off.
RR engines ... the same variety that have been having “containment” problems for the last several years.. makes sense RR would want to keep close tabs on them.
At this time,,,, I am giving credence to the oil derrick worker. He sounds like a serious guy, not an attention seeker, but probably an engineer on the derrick.
Rolls Royce
I believe what I heard today was the the plane is capable of transmitting performance data and maybe even GPS location data to a satellite and that data is then used to evaluate the performance of the engines and other equipment. Apparently this is an “up sell” feature and Malaysia Airlines declined to pay for this additional service (or so claimed the person on TV).
It sounds like they don’t actually turn off the capability, but rather don’t allow upload of data. So the plane contacts the satellite and identifies itself, and the satellite says “thanks - but I won’t accept any upload of information from you because you haven’t paid”. This interaction was being described by some on TV as a “ping” (like an IP ping). It sounds like the plane continued to contact the satellite for hours but nothing more then identification information was exchanged. It kind of makes sense as the service could be enabled as soon as a payment is received or turned off if payment is late - all without having to have physical access to the plane.
I can believe that it is the satellite that controls whether to accept the data or not, rather then the plane simply pushing data and the satellite accepting it, then throwing it away or otherwise rejecting it if not a subscriber. Data communications are too dangerous to just accept input without verifying the identity of the sender - too easy to inject bad things into the data stream, overflow buffers, etc. etc. as we know from many computer viruses and trojan horses.
I didn’t hear if this “pinging” could help localize the plane in any more then a very general position (range of the signal, movement of the plane and the satellite could give you a very rough idea of movement I’d think, but without triangulation of some type from multiple receivers, just very general).
Never considered that the sales guy for a jumbo jet would be out there trying to up sell the customer!
I don’t know about the internals of a 777, but could believe that the antennas used to communication with a satellite up above would be more on the top of the plane and the antennas used to communicate with ground stations would be more on the bottom of the plane. A hull breach that took out the ground antennas might then not take out the satellite antennas - but just speculating on that.