Malaysia Flight 370 missing

[Maximus]

The mobile phones for some of the missing passengers were ringing when relatives tried calling them over the last couple days...that's weird.

Mobile phones of missing Malaysia Airlines passengers rang when the families called them, according to the Chinese media reports.

Family of an onboard Chinese passenger dialed his mobile phone number and found that it was ringing. However, nobody answered the call. A Beijing television news channel shows a man phoning his elder brother. The call connects but nobody answers. He reported it to Malaysia Airlines and said he called his brother thrice.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 carrying 239 passengers and crew members vanished from the radar, Saturday.

Another family member of a passenger also said the phone of their relative rang when they called before it rang out.

"This morning, around 11:40 [am], I called my older brother's number twice, and I got the ringing tone," said Bian Liangwei, sister of one of the passengers, reports USA Today. She called again at 2 p.m. and heard it ringing once more.

 

[kookoo]

The mobile phones for some of the missing passengers were ringing when relatives tried calling them over the last couple days...that's weird.

Can't they track the location of the phones if they're switched on?

 

[Pyro]

So I guess the oil slicks they found weren't from the plane at all.

So basically we have a missing plane. We don't even know if it crashed.

 

[Chardon]

Can't they track the location of the phones if they're switched on?

Most likely those people left their phone at home/got phone stolen at airport/put phone in checked bag and got that bag put in different plane etc...

So I guess the oil slicks they found weren't from the plane at all.

So basically we have a missing plane. We don't even know if it crashed.

So it is just up in the air...still flying? Idiot.

 

[Numbers Guy]

Most likely those people left their phone at home/got phone stolen at airport/put phone in checked bag and got that bag put in different plane etc...



So it is just up in the air...still flying? Idiot.

No, it was supposed to land at 6:30 a.m. They had enough fuel to stay in the air for 2 more hours after that.. this was 3 days ago.

 

[KCOTT]

Holy shit!!! Read the bolded part. I had no clue it would be that expensive.

Why Do Airlines Keep ‘Black Box’ Flight Data Trapped on Planes?
By Justin Bachman March 10, 2014


The flight data recorder from the 2009 Air France flight that went down in the mid-Atlantic, found in 2011
To solve the mystery of what happened to Malaysia Airlines (MAS:MK) Flight MH370, investigators need the airplane’s data and voice recorders. In an airplane tragedy, however, the information stored in the so-called black box inevitably ends up inside a wreck. This seems like a terrible place to keep the clue you need to find most.

As investigators scour the Gulf of Thailand and waters as far north as Hong Kong for debris from the Boeing (BA) 777-200 that vanished en route to Beijing on Saturday, there’s almost no indication yet of what doomed the flight and the 239 passengers on board. So far, at least, no wreckage or jet fuel has been found. Without recovering the black box, there’s little way to know what caused a plane cruising at 35,000 feet to disappear from radar.

Why not transmit this flight data off the plane so it’s accessible almost instantly? Airlines, after all, track each of their flights everywhere in the world and can advise crews on course adjustments, security alerts, quick weather changes, and a host of other situations. Passengers are routinely offered in-air Wi-Fi and live television these days. So why keep vital data trapped on the plane?

The answer is mostly about one issue: cost. Sending all the data from each flight in real time via satellite would be enormously expensive. A 2002 study by L-3 Aviation Recorders (LLL) and a satellite provider found that a U.S. airline flying a global network would need to spend $300 million per year to transmit all its flight data, even assuming a 50 percent reduction in future satellite transmission costs. And that’s just a single airline. Commercial airline disasters, meanwhile, are becoming even more uncommon as technology and techniques improve—in part thanks to lessons from past crashes—so there’s little incentive for investing heavily in real-time data.

Businessweek last explored this question in July 2009 as French and Brazilian authorities searched a wide section of the Atlantic Ocean for a missing Air France (AF:FP) flight. The data recorders aboard the Airbus (AIR:FP) A330 remained missing for almost two years, some 2 miles beneath the surface, before searchers finally recovered them.

If the Malaysia Airlines flight did go down at sea, as searchers believe, waters in the suspected crash area are much shallower than in the region of the Atlantic where the French jet went down. In both cases, meanwhile, the flight data and cockpit voice recorders were made by Honeywell (HON) Aerospace. Despite the conventional term “black box,” the Honeywell recorders and most others in use are actually bright orange in color.

Of course, there remains the possibility that a powerful enough calamity could have obliterated the data boxes on the Malaysia flight, leaving investigators without their best hope for discovering what went wrong. No data recorders were ever recovered from the two Boeing airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center.

SATCOM via INMARSAT is one of the few ways to interact with the rest of the world as if it were a 4G network...but it is ridiculously expensive per minute

I've patched a phone call via INMARSAT for a few minutes in flight before and I don't even want to know how much that cost...and am glad that someone else was paying for it

 

[Chardon]

No, it was supposed to land at 6:30 a.m. They had enough fuel to stay in the air for 2 more hours after that.. this was 3 days ago.

I realize this. I was responding to pyro who said that "We don't even know if it crashed."

 

[KI4MVP]

are the planes always within radio contact of some flight controller somewhere? Of so, instead of trying to transmit all black box data over satellite, why not just automatically broadcast the current flight number, location, direction, altitude every minute or 5 minutes. It wouldn't give all of the data in the black box, but would presumably make it easier to find the plane in a case like this.

 

[BlueSeats626]

are the planes always within radio contact of some flight controller somewhere? Of so, instead of trying to transmit all black box data over satellite, why not just automatically broadcast the current flight number, location, direction, altitude every minute or 5 minutes. It wouldn't give all of the data in the black box, but would presumably make it easier to find the plane in a case like this.

Most modern airliners (and many general aviation aircraft) are equipped with technology called ADS-B, which essentially does just that. Its partly how air traffic controllers receive information on aircraft, how pilots are able to see weather, other traffic, terrain, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillance-broadcast

In the case of Malaysia 370, the transmitting information abruptly stopped. Whatever happened to the place caused the immediate cessation of information such as altitude, speed, heading etc. This could be for any numbers of reasons such as complete electrical failure, in flight breakup etc. The big mystery here is that the aircraft hasn't been found on its intended route of flight, so its incredibly difficult to know what happened, which is why investigators are investigating the possibility that the aircraft somehow deviated for from its original flight path.

 

[Maximus]

Not sure I understand any of this...but it adds to the strangeness of this story. Looks like there's a plane trailing it in the 2nd video. I wonder if China knows what happened...maybe they shot it down...or escorted it somewhere. Whole thing is bizarre.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/hNZtz-HVy6c" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[BlueSeats626]

Thats wrong Max. That's a flight from a different day.

The plane that crashed had a registration of 9M-MRO. This one is 9M-MRQ. In fact, if you look on that site you can see that Flight 370 actually took place the last two days uneventfully. That's what he's tracking. He's just some internet neckbeard looking for YouTube hits.

Edit-

http://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/mh370

 

[Nicky]

Not sure I understand any of this...but it adds to the strangeness of this story. Looks like there's a plane trailing it in the 2nd video. I wonder if China knows what happened...maybe they shot it down...or escorted it somewhere. Whole thing is bizarre.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/hNZtz-HVy6c" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

So, what you're saying is-- Something is fishy here?

Conspiracy!

 

[KCOTT]

I have a hard time believing it was shot down. It's so easy for nations to pick up fire control radar and make the connection.

 

[The Oi]

I have a hard time believing it was shot down. It's so easy for nations to pick up fire control radar and make the connection.

How so? How do they pick up the radar?

What are you expecting it to be based on what you've seen so far?

 

[Maximus]

Crowdsourcing the search - http://www.tomnod.com/nod/challenge/malaysiaairsar2014