Personally I don't think the wreckage will be found in our lifetimes. Even AF447 was very hard to find, and in this case they have much poorer information on location of the plane. Nope, I don't think this one will ever be solved. :frown:
Will MH370 ever be found?
- Thread starter nottyboi
- Start date
Would you build a house without circuit breakers? If not, why would you think it's a good idea to build an airplane without them? Even if you eliminated every on/off switch on the aircraft, you wouldn't eliminate the ability to disable electronics via fuses and circuit breakers, and sometimes the ability to turn something off quickly without needing to start ripping panels open or crawling into an electronics hatch saves precious seconds to avoid catastrophe.
Explain why we should jeopardize safety to make up for the one in a million chance a plane goes missing and we don't know where.
In any case, MH370 will absolutely be found. Sure, Amelia Earhart was never located, but her Electra 10E was nowhere near the size of a 777 nor did the search effort have as many resources or the technology we have today. It may take a year or two, but MH370 will indeed be located.
If it landed in the Southern Indian Ocean, no. The area is the engine room of the planet's oceanic currents, the remains and debris have been dispersed over a wide area. Maybe they'll find small parts but not enough to figure out what brought it down.
How deep do the currents go? If this thing is 4km down, are there currents that deep? I saw a topograpic maps and where they are looking now is the base of a massive plateau. I also read somewhere that there is no way the pings could be MH370 as the ship heard them for 2 hrs while moving at 2 knots, so they were most likely wildlife trackers. The fact that the signature is not unique blows my mind... is this 1940's tech we are still using? Unreal. But of course MH370 will create a billion$ business introducing real time tracking for planes.
Real-time tracking already exists. Malaysian Airlines didn't pay for the service.
They did not pay for ACARS service which is very different. All that does is send engine performance data and monitor engine operation so that RR can proactively maintain the engines to maximize reliability. Not that many airlines pay for this. It is only from these data bursts that location can be roughly obtained. Air France had ACARS operating and it was still not found for 2 years. It is not a location service. A good real time locator system will send location, speed heading data every 5 minutes. If the plane falls below 2000 feet, it will continually send data in a steady stream until impact... something like that may help.
Air France wreckage was found relatively quickly... the black boxes weren't found for 2 years.
that one needs to be triggered by pilot or ground. Not good. It needs to be wired into the avionics, and needs to have triggers based on altitude. Also it needs its own antenna and power supply so if it gets no data feed (in air break up for example) it starts sending until it is destroyed.
" FLYHTStream automatically transmits four-dimensional GPS-based position and flight data recorder information when automatically triggered by an airborne event, initiated in the air by the pilot or on the ground by the airline. "
Based on that quite from the web site it meets your requirements.
ACARS allows more than just engine data to be transmitted and it extends beyond Rolls Royce. Many aircraft receive Air Traffic Control clearances through ACARS, weather data can be received via ACARS, aircraft status update messages can be sent and received by ACARS. It's a long list. Aircraft engine data is the primary use for manufacturers, airlines use it usually sparingly for basic information (when you leave the gate/when you arrive at the gate). It's not being used to it's full potential right now, but the system is in place for a wealth of data, and with satellite service, ACARS would've continued to transmit data regularly.
Air France was located by a systematic review of the data that had been received, focusing on ACARS data. Instead of looking at where they found the wreck, they went back to the last known position and worked from there. In the case of an aircraft in trouble, that last known position is often either a transmission from the pilot or ACARS data transmitted automatically.
Yes and in the end it still did not do much more then MH370 in helping them locate the plane. In the end it was a statistical model based on last known position that was used to find the plane. I am not sure if they used this same type of analysis to locate MH370, or if it would be useful given the lack of any precise location info. The path of the plane was calculated based on the time it took the pings to reach the satellite. I am not sure what the probably error is based on this.
It did a lot more.
Investigators made a crucial mistake with AFR447 - they assumed the surface wreckage was where the plane went in. They ignored they ACARS data they received and scoured the area where the debris had drifted to in order to search. More than a year later after they were waist deep in studying ocean currents, an engineer reviewed the ACARS data, determined the aircraft was in such a critical state that it didn't likely crash where the wreckage was found because that would've meant the pilots had recovered only to crash later. When they went back to the location ACARS last reported, the recorders were located fairly quickly.
ACARS found AFR447. In the wake of AFR447's boxes being found, multiple airlines changed policies and immediately subscribed to full-time ACARS monitoring and upgraded to the satellite package despite the cost of retrofitting the fleet. There were a lot of suggestions about making ACARS a "real-time black box" but studies found the amount of data streaming required was excessive while using satellites and, hoping investigators had learned from AFR447, they figured it wasn't worth making such sweeping changes. Do you know how long it took to find Air France's black boxes once investigators moved the starting point to the last known position as largely determined by ACARS? Less than a week (just over 6 days).
Here's the changes that are required to make a disappearance like MH370 a lot less likely: legislate ACARS with satellite monitoring as part of the MEL (Minimum Equipment List) for commercial air operators. That's it.
In 2011, over 19,000 people went missing in Canada. I guess every square inch of the country, including your work places, should be equipped with 24/7 surveillance. We should all have RFID's embedded in our brains so our movements can be tracked. That's really what this is like. We have 1 plan go missing and because we don't instantly locate it, the public who have no idea how flying works suddenly think that every word that's said in a cockpit should be listened to by someone and all data transmitted in real time.
Seriously, get off the bandwagon. The public wants curiosity satisfied, that's all this is. If the plane had been located in 2 days there would be no public push for any changes, if the plane is located tomorrow the whole thing will be forgotten in a month. This is a public who sees a mystery and because there's no conclusion to satisfy their "need to know", they want to institute sweeping legislation that will strip aircrews of their privacy and bankrupt many airlines. Sorry John Q. Public, your curiosity isn't a good enough reason. Make ACARS a requirement so that there will always be a "last known position" and accept that if someone really and truly wants to disable all communications and electronics they can, even if you implement 24/7 monitoring, even if you take away toggle switches and fuses, someone can always cut a wire. We have exactly 1 case of a pilot making a plane go dark and flying it miles off course to crash it so that it can't be found, and even that case is still pure speculation, in over 100 years of aviation. Quit knee-jerking and keep your noses out of my workplace.
I would say ACARS can have a battery backup, so when disabled it send an emergency signal and transmits for a few hours to allow intercept by military. or perhaps it just send an emergency call before shutdown do fighters can be scrambled. Not gonna help when the plane is miles from no where though. But I guess you are right. If a pilot has intentions to bury the plane, with enough fuel he cannot really be stopped today. Unless you force the plane to return to closest airport when locator is shut down. That is a future possibility
