back to article MH370 'pings' dismissed as false positives

A US Navy official has gone on the record as saying that the “pings” first thought to have come from missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 probably weren't from the aircraft's black box – and has almost immediately been spurned by his bosses. Back in April, Australian prime minister Tony Abbott held a press conference in …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Perhaps it never crashed?

    It is obviously an alien abduction......

    1. TheVogon

      Nothing natural makes Pings on the frequency these things use. Seems rather unlikely that it wasn't the crashed jet.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        unlikely

        Almost everything in the MH370 picture seems unlikely. Some claims seem extremely unlikely,

        1. itzman
          Black Helicopters

          Re: unlikely

          Yes. The whole thing is massively so unlikely as to almost guarantee that it was planned. The questions are of course, Why? By whom?

          Of the two questions, the second is most easily answered. Occam's razor has to have it that the pilot or co-pilot did it.

          The search is really to confirm that and eliminate as far as possible mechanical failure - and to provide closure for the relatives of those on board.

          WE may never know why. It is and extraordinarily complex way to commit suicide...none of the tinfoil hat theories of geopolitical conspiracies make any sense either. I love a good tinfoil hat hypothesis as much as the next man, but there simply aren't any good ones in this case.

          1. Steve Knox

            Re: unlikely

            Yes. The whole thing is massively so unlikely as to almost guarantee that it was planned.

            Actually, when people plan things out, they tend to fall into common lines of thought. When something happens that is not within those lines, it is more likely that it is an unplanned event than a planned event.

            In other words, this whole thing is so massively unlikely as to almost guarantee that it was unplanned.

      2. Desk Jockey
        Childcatcher

        @TheVogon

        Actually this theory put forward by the naval officer is highly credible. What you have to remember about underwater acoustics is that they are heavily influenced by currents and warm/cold water layers and so pings can bounce between the layers for a very long way. With several ships and subs in the search area, presumably using their active sonar to try and find the wreckage, the pings are likely to get transmitted a long way and distorted so someone else could pick them up thinking they were the jet's black box.

        When they announced nothing had been found in the promising search area I did think to myself that I bet it was a case of the search ships and subs running interference with each other.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: @TheVogon

          Agreed. When I heard about the "detection" of the pings I was a bit doubtful, it was the fleeting nature and the detection of only a few pings that I thought was a bit odd. If the black box is pinging away you'll detect it and you'll keep detecting it.

          I studied underwater acoustic systems as part of my degree way back in the early 90's

      3. P0l0nium

        a) Or someone chucked a pinger over the side saying "Lets just check that OUR pinger locator works".

        b) Or the people who stole the 'plane put a pinger there as a distraction after falsifying the satellite data.

        c) Or its simply sitting in a crevasse covered in mud.

        My money's on "a".

      4. Psyx

        "Nothing natural makes Pings on the frequency these things use. Seems rather unlikely that it wasn't the crashed jet."

        As the article states: The suggestion is that the false positives came from equipment on the ship, or were generated by the systems's electronics.

        That aside, we didn't even know how deep the search area was, so I'm fine with the concept that something else could have caused them that we didn't expect.

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    1. Timmay

      Re: Surprise!!!

      It'll be in the last place they look. Always is.

      1. Norman Hartnell

        Re: Surprise!!!

        @Timmay "It'll be in the last place they look."

        Of course it will be - they won't carry on looking after they've found it, will they?

        1. Steve K

          Re: Surprise!!!

          Whoosh.......

        2. Goldmember
          Facepalm

          Re: Surprise!!!

          "Of course it will be - they won't carry on looking after they've found it, will they?"

          See icon.

        3. Timmay

          @ Norman Hartnell

          No, you're absolutely right, silly me.

    2. Psyx

      Re: Surprise!!!

      "So many people will be so embarrassed it wont be funny...my 2 cents."

      It won't be funny because the families of the missing have likely had their best hope for resolution and closure taken away, mate.

    3. Tom 13
      Trollface

      Re: Surprise!!!

      My money is on they don't find this plane, but they will eventually find Amelia Earhart's lost plane.

      1. The Mole

        Re: Surprise!!!

        That has (probably) already been found: http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Overview/AEhypothesis.html

  3. Florida1920
    Holmes

    Easier than doing real journalism

    Get ready for another month of mindless speculation by CNN.

    1. Shrimpling

      Re: Easier than doing real journalism

      Haven't all the news media got bored of MH370 and forgotten about it? This is the first article I have seen for ages.

    2. Crazy Operations Guy

      Re: Easier than doing real journalism

      No, CNN is too busy covering Donald Sterling. Who cares about 250 people when a celebrity did something?

      1. BristolBachelor Gold badge

        Re: Easier than doing real journalism

        I thought that CNN was busy telling everyone that global warming doesn't matter because we're all going to be killed by the largest asteroid ever seen, and it's coming straight to Earth.

  4. chivo243 Silver badge
    Pint

    What’s that sound?

    It’s either a ping or the price of tin foil going through the roof!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Frequency

    "detected was at 33.3 kHz rather than the design frequency of 37.5 kHz"

    Giving a beat frequency of 4.2KHz, which is audible... so it is quite likely to be the local oscillator in a detector intended to mix with the incoming signal and beep in someone's headphones.

    If it'd been announced at the time that the detected signal was 11% off frequency, I would've immediately ignored it!

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Re: Frequency

      I hope there is someone on that search mission who has fscking system diagram of all of this!

      1. Vladimir Plouzhnikov

        Re: Frequency

        It was massively red-shifted as the ELT was falling into a black hole previously created by the LHC experiments before the Illuminati shut it down "for maintenance".

  6. Arachnoid

    Someone playing a game of blindmans bluff

    Theres mud in the water and someone is manipulating the data trail......now who do we know with enough technical knowledge to do this?

    Oh and has access to a submersible that can emit transmitions of certain frequencies.......

    1. BristolBachelor Gold badge
      Joke

      Re: Someone playing a game of blindmans bluff

      Oh, oh it's on the tip of me tongue..... Wassis name..... You know, the one with the fluffy white cat.....

    2. Vladimir Plouzhnikov

      Re: Someone playing a game of blindmans bluff

      "Theres mud in the water and someone is manipulating the data trail......now who do we know with enough technical knowledge to do this?

      Oh and has access to a submersible that can emit transmitions of certain frequencies......."

      Oh, no! ... Jake???!?

  7. Mark Jan
    Black Helicopters

    It Landed

    This plane will never be found but not because it's lying on the seabed.

    The plane landed on terra firma. Neither the plane, crew or passengers will ever be seen again.

    All that is happening here is theatre.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Re: It Landed

      > terra firma

      What planet is that?

      1. Mark Jan
        Facepalm

        Re: It Landed

        Terra firma is a Latin phrase meaning "solid earth" (from terra, meaning "earth", and firma, meaning "solid"). The phrase refers to the dry land mass on the earth's surface and is used to differentiate from the sea or air.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It Landed

      It's in DiegO garCia.

      It was uSed for extraodinary rendition sO is already set up to haNdle people.

      IT has a large runway, large enough to be nOminated as an emeRgency landing site for the space shuttle.

      Some remoTely located mAldivians said they saw the flight at a veRy low heighT, close enough to see the malaysian airlines logo, heading south, i.e. to diego garcia.

      Maldivian military saId they have no Record on radar, however it is expeCted that their neighbours at Diego Garcia would have full knowLedge of their raDar capabilities and how to keEp off their screens, the Reason for the ridicuLously low flight path.

      It landed There. Where is it nOw? Ample TimE to have taken whatever people or Cargo they were after, refuelled iT and dumped it Into the oceAn in a very remote location of the worlD.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: It Landed

        DOCSONITORSTARTMRCDGDERLTWOATECTAD

        Really?! I thought so, too! ;)

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    as someone developing the Ultimate Undetectable Underwater Supervillain Lair

    I always worried how to keep my minions' trips to and from the Lair from being monitored by Control/CIA/MI5 etc. Now I realize all I have to do is mark them as civilian aircraft and send them somewhere not expected by traffic control and the filed flight plan, and I'm golden.

    Should work for disguised Stealth Bombers bringing in nuclear/biological/chemical payloads (all three at once! no petty evil here!) as well as keeping our Submarine Propaganda Infiltrators completely invisible to SOSUS and other first world submarine detection equipment (We're really proud of that system! Canadian baby bands and skanky Disney girls were but the first experiments).

    Makes me wonder how hard it is to hide something of aircraft mass intentionally if it's apparently possible to make it disappear accidentally...

  9. Arachnoid

    If it takes 3 hours to dismantle a car

    Then how long to do the same with a plane

  10. Bod

    Go back to the start

    Still convinced the radar contacts (which are secondary so not even confirmed they are the plane) are rubbish. They have all along been reluctant to release the data and I smell something fishy there. Though I suspect it's more plain incompetence they are covering up than anything more sinister.

    Which would mean the plane still went down somewhere on its original course. Which fits more in line with the sighting by the guys on that rig of flames in the distance.

    Yes they searched that area before, but I have zero confidence in the Malaysian authorities to have done a competent search there.

    And yes there are the Doppler shifted pings back to Boeing etc, but I'm convinced these may be misleading, misinterpreted or just based on false data. Everything else has been.

    Now we know the ACARS and transponder were probably lost at the same time after all, and if you treat the radar contacts with suspicion, and other non positional data as speculative and potentially misinterpreted, it all fits with a simple theory that the crew became incapacitated, possibly by fire/smoke, which took out the cabin equipment, signals lost, and the plane flew on and simply ditched. Either in the ocean or in some jungle.

    1. Vic

      Re: Go back to the start

      the radar contacts (which are secondary so not even confirmed they are the plane

      No, the radar contacts are primary radar. SSR relies on the transponder - which was switched off.

      Vic.

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