At least they know where THAT is
Yes?
MH-370 search loses sharpest-eyed robot deep beneath the waves
The ongoing search for Malaysian Airlines flight MH-370, the 777 that disappeared in March 2014, has suffered a very significant setback with the loss of its main instrument for scanning the seabed. The “SLH-ProSAS-60 towfish” is a sonar device that can operate 6,000m below the surface of the sea, but still churn out images …
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Thursday 24th March 2016 07:48 GMT Adam Foxton
Re: At least they know where THAT is
Quite possibly. If they're towing it subsea it'll have a USBL beacon on it, hopefully rated to the full depth of the water column they'll be in.
For some reason no-one fits this sort of thing to aircraft flying over huge water masses, though. It's a shame as we'd have been able to find at least part of the plane in no time at all.
The question with the tow fish is 'would it be worth recovering?' though. SAS kit is expensive, but then so's hiring in a 6000m rated ROV, vessel, etc before the battery runs out!
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Thursday 24th March 2016 16:04 GMT notowenwilson
Re: At least they know where THAT is
The plane does have beacons on it, not USBL, just pingers on the FDRs. Only problem was that they spent too long searching the South China Sea for the plane before Malaysia felt the need to mention they'd seen it on radar turn left and head out over the Indian Ocean so the pingers went flat before they could find them.
And yes, the towfish will have a beacon. The australian ship lost their towfish and mob'd an ROV to go pick it up, but that wouldn't have been deeper than 3000m which is standard depth for most big ROVs. If this one is deeper it will indeed be interesting to see whether they go get it.
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Thursday 24th March 2016 07:21 GMT wolfetone
Waste Of Time
All of this pain and heartache could've been avoided 2 years ago if the international community just owned up and said "look our satellite spotted the plane going in to the sea at this point". But no, no country wants to let on what they can see of their neighbours. Meanwhile its the poor innocent folk who, yet again, get screwed over by the games played by politicians.
What's more, all that will happen is that they'll find the black box and voice recorder, and through some minor miracle it'll be working. Only to then find that either the pilot or co-pilot turned off the voice recorder and black box shortly before the aircraft made the turn. Then the game turns to why would the pilot do it. So, in reality, this mystery will never be solved - or it'll have a very poor solution to it.
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Thursday 24th March 2016 07:26 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: Waste Of Time
All of this pain and heartache could've been avoided 2 years ago if the international community just owned up and said "look our satellite spotted the plane going in to the sea at this point".
Much citation needed!
I agree that the Murricans likely know who REALLY was manning that BUK that go the other MH, but why would anyone monitor the arse of the earth / the middle of nowhere just because?
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Thursday 24th March 2016 08:01 GMT wolfetone
Re: Waste Of Time
"Much citation needed!"
Can't spend a lot of time searching for the citations at work, but if you read this article it talks about the different satellites that could have been available.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25221-did-us-spy-satellites-track-malaysia-flight-mh370/
Thing is, they are spy satellites. No one is meant to know that there are spy satellites, and they are definitely not meant to know where they are or how they operate. America isn't the only country to have them either.
And I 100% agree with you on the MH17 BUK missile. From what I've read about it the Russians asked the Ukrainians why they had ground to air missile batteries in the area when the Pro-Russian groups don't have aircraft. I don't think this was ever answered either.
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Thursday 24th March 2016 17:37 GMT manchesterj
Re: asked the Ukrainians why they had ground to air missile batteries ...
That would be why the Pro Russian rebels who had shot down planes in the weeks before with missiles tweeted that the they'd done it (later deleted when they found out it wasn't a ukrainian plane) and the photographic/video evidence of a buk launcher in rebel territory - but we should discount that and the half arsed russian explanation that it was brought down by a ukrainian jet whose service ceiling was lower than the commercial jets altitude - but apparently its a western plot...
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Thursday 24th March 2016 10:17 GMT wolfetone
Re: Waste Of Time - satellites
"Did you actually read the New Scientist article? There are only a limited number of satellites, and even the NRO ones are going to be looking elsewhere. Why would they watch a random bit of the Indian Ocean?"
That we know of or are told about.
And why wouldn't they? A bloke I used to play rugby with served as a submariner for 15 years, and he told me once that when a Russian submarine goes underwater a UK and US submarine go down at the same time. No one trusts anyone, so if you're that paranoid you'll look at every single little bit of the world no matter how arse end out of the way it is.
It's that thinking of "ah no one will go there" that allowed Japan to bomb the crap out of Pearl Harbour without being detected.
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Thursday 24th March 2016 10:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Waste Of Time - satellites
> It's that thinking of "ah no one will go there" that allowed Japan to bomb the crap out of Pearl Harbour without being detected.
They did know that attack was coming, they were slow getting the warning through.
The horse's mouth:-
https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/center_crypt_history/pearl_harbor_review/pearl_harbor.shtml
Perhaps some people have a poor conception of just how big the ocean is?
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Thursday 24th March 2016 13:07 GMT werdsmith
Re: Waste Of Time - satellites
If one nation's security services did know where MH370 entered the water, then I am pretty sure they would be quite capable of inventing a cover story so that they could help the search without divulging how they truly came by the information. (i.e. triangulated estimation from sensors on board two submarines/survey vessels in the area).
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Sunday 24th July 2016 12:39 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Waste Of Time - satellites
"when a Russian submarine goes underwater a UK and US submarine go down at the same time"
The difference being that the subs are watched continuously and play a constant cat-and-mouse tracking game. It helps that they're not moving at 600 knots.
NRO satellites have high resolution but they have to be told where to look. Osama Bin Laden could have been sunbathing naked in a field, waving at the satellites, but unless they knew which field, they'd never see him.
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Thursday 24th March 2016 14:17 GMT SkippyBing
Re: Waste Of Time
'the Russians asked the Ukrainians why they had ground to air missile batteries in the area when the Pro-Russian groups don't have aircraft'
Or possibly the Pro-Russian groups weren't putting their aircraft where they knew the missiles were? You know, to avoid them being shot down...
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Thursday 24th March 2016 10:43 GMT rh587
Re: Waste Of Time
but why would anyone monitor the arse of the earth / the middle of nowhere just because?
You don't get a choice. Any satellite in a polar orbit is going to pass over the arse end of nowhere on a fairly regular basis. You can't just park it permanently over Tehran or Moscow. Orbital mechanics doesn't work like that.
Given the number of spy satellites whizzing round from a variety of nations, odds are that at least one was over the Indian Ocean at the time (plus, it may be ocean, that doesn't mean there might not be objects of interest bobbing around - foreign naval assets, etc). Whether any orbits happened to actually overlap with MH370 and capture anything of use is quite another matter. Releasing that imagery however could reveal information about your secret satellite's imaging capabilities.
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Thursday 24th March 2016 20:10 GMT Cynic_999
Re: Waste Of Time
"
You don't get a choice. Any satellite in a polar orbit is going to pass over the arse end of nowhere on a fairly regular basis.
"
However the cameras that have enough resolution to make out an aircraft have a narrow field of view, and so only plot a very narrow section of the orbital path. If a particular geographical location becomes of interest, then the cameras of successive satellites are panned & tilted by command to keep that area in view almost constantly, but that does not mean that everywhere is under constant view, only that everywhere is *capable* of being viewed if the cameras are so commanded - in fact the chances are high that the cameras of all the satellites within view of the oceanic flight path will all have been deliberately angled toward more interesting land areas.
Additionally, if the aircraft was flying under cloud cover, satellites would not have helped.
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Thursday 24th March 2016 20:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Is it really that hard to use secret satellite data for the location?
You don't need to make it public, or show the pictures. If you know where it went in, grab a couple of seat cushions that would be used on the airplane and drop them in the ocean at that location, and make sure they get found. Then they will start looking in the right spot, without anyone know your super secret spy satellite is why.
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Friday 25th March 2016 01:55 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Waste Of Time
"Releasing that imagery however could reveal information about your secret satellite's imaging capabilities."
If anyone had that imagery I'm sure they could work out a way to "suggest" where might be a good pace to look without actually handing out photos. Or give position and time plus vector if known. They could even "fuzz" the date to hide their true capabilities. But we are likely talking about ultra paranoid state spy agencies, so they may well, as others have stated, prefer to sit on that data rather than admit to even having a spy sat in the area at the time.
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Thursday 24th March 2016 14:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Waste Of Time
"All of this pain and heartache could've been avoided 2 years ago if the international community just owned up"
Actually, it is a waste of time only in a different way.
We as a global society have, in recent decades, become obsessed with recovering wreckage and bodies, we can't seem to let go of things, and simply accept the plane and all people on it most probably ditched into the south Indian sea, with no survivors and that we will most probably never know what actually did happen.
As for thinking about the 'families', well my family has it's share of people who's ship was sunk with the loss of all hands, but then they were only trawlermen doing their job...
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Thursday 24th March 2016 16:00 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: Waste Of Time
Actually, it is a waste of time only in a different way.
Mr Anonymouse,
It's not a waste of time to try and find out what happened for the families, and/or recover bodies. Though admittedly there should be limits on how much time and effort you spend on this. The Chinese are putting in a lot more than they normally would, because this has become a political issue.
However, the real reason to do this is air safety. Air travel is even safer than train travel. Which is an amazing achievement considering that trains don't have to rely on both wings and engines working to avoid crashing - and don't even need steering.
This has not happened by luck. But by dint or hard, and continuous effort. It means investigating every accident, and trying to learn the lessons from it.
As an example, that Air France crash in the South Atlantic. I believe the plane was lost for 5 years? Or was it only 3? Anyway they did lots of searching, and found the wreckage. Got hold of the black box and learned some extremely valuable lessons about pilot confusion - and the way that modern fly-by-wire planes can sometimes dump control on the pilots in an unexpected mode that they're not expecting. Basically they're trained to assume that you can't stall a fly-by-wire plane, because it won't let you make those control inputs. But if the flight computers have totally lost track of the situation, there's a failure mode where they'll just exactly follow the pilot. Hence some retraining is needed.
There was also an issue with both pilots trying to use the stick at once, again a total breach of training, but that's resulted in Airbus redesigning their controls to stop it happening again.
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Thursday 24th March 2016 16:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Waste Of Time
Though admittedly there should be limits on how much time and effort you spend on this.
Precisely my point!
In my family's case, the other boats in the area did a search, confirmed no survivors (an almost guaranteed outcome in the seas off Iceland) and returned to the fishing...
Yes we can learn lessons from the wreckage, however, as you and others here point out, the main lesson is actually understanding that planes will from time-to-time ditch in the sea and hence perhaps it might be beneficial to implement systems that make locating the remains in 6000m of water after a few months of immersion a little easier...
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Thursday 24th March 2016 17:10 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: Waste Of Time
Last year there was a fire onboard a plane. It was the batteries of the emergency beacon on the top of the plane that goes off if it crashes. Few planes ditch. Even fewer ditch in unknown areas. But if you make all planes carry a transmitter, then you've made all planes slightly more complicated, and slightly more dangerous. With another high-capacity battery (i.e. fire risk) required.
What the balance of safety is, I don't know. But there are arguments on both sides.
Now in this case, the satellite comms remained functional. Something you wouldn't expect in most crashes. So had they paid extra for real-time tracking they'd have a far better idea where the plane was when it ran out of fuel (still leaving a reasonably big search area).
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Thursday 24th March 2016 17:19 GMT Roland6
Re: Waste Of Time
So had they paid extra for real-time tracking they'd have a far better idea where the plane was when it ran out of fuel (still leaving a reasonably big search area).
Additionally, I suspect our understanding of how a modern composite airframe behaves, both when it crashes into the sea (at speed) and as it sinks, is lagging. given the amounts of money being spent on the search, it might be cost effective to run an experiment and crash a composite airframe into the sea...
But then we have to balance the finding of the plane against all that we are learning about the south Indian ocean and its currents...
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Sunday 24th July 2016 12:57 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Waste Of Time
"So had they paid extra for real-time tracking they'd have a far better idea where the plane was when it ran out of fuel (still leaving a reasonably big search area)."
A far better idea than you might think. When fuel runs out, the ram-air-turbine drops out of its hideyhole to power the electronics. MH370 was transmitting a ping as it hit the water.
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Sunday 24th July 2016 12:55 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Waste Of Time
"the main lesson is actually understanding that planes will from time-to-time ditch in the sea and hence perhaps it might be beneficial to implement systems that make locating the remains in 6000m of water after a few months of immersion a little easier..."
These lessons have been heeded, however most aircraft are flying with the black boxes that were fitted when they rolled out of the factory. Type approval takes time and retrofitting even to the "at risk" aircraft takes even longer.
Bear in mind that MH370 _could_ have been phoning its location home constantly, but Malaysian Airlines switched that option off to save money. One of the changes that's already taken place is that virtually all airlines flying over water now have that satcom feature enabled regardless of cost (and inmarsat reduced the charges for this facility). That may not prevent a recurrance but at least it'll vastly reduce the SAR area if it happens again.
Malaysian Airlines itself was in deep trouble well before both crashes. Dispirited workforce, massive layoffs, a major fire caused by a cigarette - in maintenance areas where smoking is prohibited, etc. This event (as with virtually all crashes) didn't happen in isolation and as usual the blame can usually be attributed to management decisions long before people died.
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Tuesday 29th March 2016 15:38 GMT Vic
Re: Waste Of Time
as I recall, one of the conclusions of the enquiry was that pilots needed more training on the backup flight control modes
Indeed.
And that's investigation-speak for "why didn't these pilots know what they were doing?"
Just before they hit the storm, they were discussing the fact that they were glad they were in an Airbus, as it would do all the flying for them. This is direct contravention to their documented training. Hence there is a need for the airlines to make damn sure their pilots don't assume the plane will do their jobs for them...
Vic.
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Sunday 24th July 2016 13:05 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Waste Of Time
> And that's investigation-speak for "why didn't these pilots know what they were doing?"
Yup.
On the other hand the aircraft could (and should) have noted the pitots were blocked and the fact that it was in full manual command mode should have been flashing in inch-high red lettering on the glass cockpit displays.
It wasn't just the pilots being complacent. Airbus could have done more to warn of corner cases instead of adopting the philosophy of "that will never happen" - similar to the ones they did of "pilots will never try _that_", where 'that' was something every pilot did in a new aircraft to ensure it was safe, or a low speed, low altitude, full fuel+pax flypast over an airshow with a forest at the end of the runway...
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Thursday 24th March 2016 16:19 GMT notowenwilson
Re: Waste Of Time
Recovering planes is more than just about bringing bodies back. How do we, as a society, improve if we can't learn from our mistakes? And how do we learn from them if we don't thoroughly investigate?
When the BOAC and SAA Comets were falling out of the sky they pulled them up, checked them out and discovered a whole heap about fatigue an stress concentration. Good thing too otherwise we would never have gotten to where we are. I, for one, quite appreciate the fact that it's unlikely that I'll ever be on a plane that falls apart due to that sort of failure.
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Sunday 24th July 2016 12:46 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Waste Of Time
"obsessed with recovering wreckage and bodies"
The primary objective is recovering the black boxes to find out WHAT happened and ensure there are no repeats. That's _how_ aviation safety has improved so much over the decades.
My money is on an oxygen-fed fire in the cockpit or forward avionics bay, causing the crew to switch everything off (standard procedure for a fire) and divert to the long-runway military field which it flew directly over. After diversion they were probably overcome by smoke/anoxia and once the plane hit its waypoint it just kept flying "straight and level", buffeted around by upper atmosphere winds.
The slow climb to 40,000+ feet and rapid descent to ~23,000 indicates an uncontrolled aircraft - "deadmans corner" means that once a plane gets high enough it can't go fast enough to avoid stalling and when the stall happens it will lose a _lot_ of altitude before the wings can regain lift. A pilot would never deliberately fly into this zone because there's a major risk of pulling the wings off before recovery.
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Monday 25th July 2016 17:42 GMT Vic
Re: Waste Of Time
My money is on an oxygen-fed fire in the cockpit or forward avionics bay, causing the crew to switch everything off (standard procedure for a fire) and divert to the long-runway military field which it flew directly over
That doesn't fit the evidence we have.
We know the aircraft flew through a sequence of waypoints that were not on its expected path. From the look of the radar, those legs were not hand-flown. But that matters little: what we know from the track is that someone in the cockpit deliberately flew the aircraft off-course without declaring any sort of emergency and without taking any obvious actions to deal with an emergency.
We can surmise that there was a bad actor in the cockpit. We do not know who, nor why.
Vic.
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Thursday 24th March 2016 15:43 GMT Velv
Re: Waste Of Time
Even if such satellites were operating over the ocean at the time, the data will probably have been dropped instantly.
They weren't looking for the plane, so the chances of catching the incident by accident are minuscule, and given the vastness of ocean with nothing happening there wouldn't be analysts wasting time to look for anything in the footage, so it would just get dumped.
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Sunday 24th July 2016 12:29 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Waste Of Time
"But no, no country wants to let on what they can see of their neighbours. "
Jindalee is well known to be able to see aircraft landing at Changi.
The problem is that it costs so much to run that it's only run for a couple of days a week. If the Australians had been given a heads up early enough they'd have been able to track it fairly well.
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Thursday 24th March 2016 10:51 GMT james 68
Re: Plane goes missing, search robot goes missing…
“Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.” - H.P. Lovecraft
Kinda fits how topics go on these forums eh?
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Thursday 24th March 2016 16:03 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: Plane goes missing, search robot goes missing…
Didn't the Aussies also lose one of their nice deep-scanning sonar doohickeys in January? I seem to remember one of their survey ships having to run back to Freemantle for a new bit of kit, just as that Chinese ship was turning up last month.
As you say, clearly a conspiracy.
Watch out for those Old Ones.
You'd be mad not to...
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Thursday 24th March 2016 10:19 GMT Alan J. Wylie
Is this the second time they've lost a towfish?
They previously lost a towfish when it crashed into a volcano on or about the 24th January
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Thursday 24th March 2016 13:12 GMT werdsmith
Presumably a neutrally buoyant towed submarine vessel with drag would be trying to rise to the surface because of the tendency for the tow cable to go horizontal straight out behind the towing boat.
So they would use either planes and/or ballast to keep it deep. Maybe it didn't have a system to force out water ballast as it is just a sensor pod, and therefore would just sink.
I'm sure if it can operate at 6000 metres depth and it was still attached to a few kilometres of steel cable, and the "connector failed" maybe it couldn't detach and that heavy cable won't help buoyancy.
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Thursday 24th March 2016 16:11 GMT I ain't Spartacus
We can. But it costs money. Satellite bandwidth is not cheap. And most of the time, planes are operating under ATC in controlled airspace. So the location is known. In most accidents the crew have time to get a radio message out. Plus, if you crash in the deep ocean, everybody's dead anyway, so it's only a matter of finding the wreckage.
Remember there was a plane a couple of years ago that had a fire in their emergency radio beacon. So there are reasons not to want any more electrics on your aeroplane than you absolutely need. And none of these things are ever "a few hundred quid", because they have to be certified. So they cost mucho dinero.
On the other hand, most planes have a satellite uplink. Used for the passenger phones (horribly expensive), passenger internet (also horribly expensive) and for data communications. So they can report back to maintenance if they're having mechanical glitches, and get the plane booked in for repairs on give diagnostic info. Many airlines also pay for extra data, and use this uplink to give course, location and speed info to their control centre, so they know exactly where all their planes are. Malaysian were losing money (as many airlines do) so hadn't gone for that expense.
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Friday 25th March 2016 10:02 GMT Bob Rocket
Low tech tracer
a bunch of tiny fluorescent plastic balls (that float) in a container that cracks open if submerged to more than say 500 metres.
Micro etch the tail number and container number on each ball.
This could create an identifiable 'oil slick' that would give a clue as to where the plane went down.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
