The MH370 tracking problem is unfortunate but what I'm most fascinated by in all of this is the continuing reminder of how powerless we are as a civilization when it comes to the oceans.
A plane crashes in an area with no landmass and we lose it. We've overfished many species to near-extinction because we completely failed to understand exactly how many fish there actually are. The sea acts as a natural eraser for human habitation, sometimes wiping out all evidence of entire communities within hours. We lose all kinds of cargo into the ocean and haven't the faintest clue where it goes. We're only beginning to figure out how to convert seawater into potable form effectively. The majority of our planet is covered in something we can't even figure out how to build habitats on top of without piling up dirt underneath.
The belief that we have any mastery over this planet seems to humbly disintegrate when looking at our relationship to our oceans
I live by the Atlantic, people go missing every so often. It seems tragic but normal to the locals. The sea is the sea. It'll slurp you out and kill you.
Tourists seems quite shocked that there isn't more that could be done. Everything in a city is very safe, it's pretty hard to accidentally kill yourself. It stands to reason that we should put up some more signs, or have someone stop them from doing something silly.
We had storms last week. A car was found in a car park next to a beach. The guy was working somewhere near the beach. He was never seen again. No one knows what happened. The search and rescue do a days search, but where do you look?
Same thing happens here along the Northern California coast. With El Nino this year, the waves are bigger and more powerful than a typical winter and catch people unaware. There are occasional "sneaker" waves that break on the beach and knock people down.
There was a story from last week, in France. The guy filming is apparently handicapped, but there was a fifth person who entered the scene afterwards and saved all of them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSgSMZsMh4A
We have a beach in Iceland that people go to take photos, and tourists get sucked out into the ocean all the time because they ignore the signs, tour guides, and common sense.
Just last week there was a lot of fuss in the news about how reckless the tourists are becoming, and then the very next day after the news hype, a tourist was sucked out into the sea and drowned.. and this happens despite there being lots of other people nearby.
It's gotten to the point that some tour guides have just stopped going there because people just don't listen to warnings or understand the danger.
A few weeks ago a couple of people died after BASE jumping off of Bixby Bridge near Big Sur. After the first jumper successfully landed, she was swept out to see by a series of big waves. Caught on the second jumper's GoPro, he followed her down, jettisoned his equipment, then dove into the water to save her. So far only his body has been found.
> the continuing reminder of how powerless we are as a civilization when it comes to the oceans.
That is symptomatic of our child like relationship with the environment. We are deeply dependant but have little understanding or agency.
It is obvious that high fish stocks will allow more catches than near extinction levels. Catching 1% of 1 billion is better than 40% of 1 million. Yet we continue to treat fish as a short term commodity to be exploited.
We may lack mastery of the planet, but that is no excuse for burying our head in the sand. We have a huge impact and we cannot just opt-out of that.
We can and we do to some extent. The problem is that on the high seas it is the country of registration that you need permission from to board. It wouldn't cost much to offer the poor countries that register the worst offenders to either stop registrations or be more permissive with boarding rights.
It doesn't even have to be governments, Sea Shepherd do some good work and show what can be achieved.
The other problem is poor countries not able to secure their own territorial waters and Exclusive Economic Zones. For instance in West Africa many navies and coastguards have ships with endurance measured in days. If you're up to no good you just wait for them to come alongside. RUSI are currently floating the idea of giving them proper offshore patrol vessels paid for from the aid budget to enable them to actually patrol and secure their waters.
On the other hand, when you actually spend a night awake, with that electric terror running through you at these thoughts you can at least understand why most people do NOT accept what you're saying. I wish that I were one of those people sometimes.
I was mostly drawing a comparison with the one sentence The majority of our planet is covered in something we can't even figure out how to build habitats on top of without piling up dirt underneath.
A town of 5,000 people that is situated on land will usually also import loads of fuel and food. So a cruise ship isn't really the same thing as a town, but it has quite a bit in common with it if you look at the town as a habitat.
I grew up in Kansas but lived on Oahu for six years. I will never forget the first time my squad leader took me body surfing at Sandy's. That is the interface of the most powerful force on our planet.
Another case of a rambling article burying the lede.
I skimmed the article and still can't figure out why we're weeks away from a point of no return. Is the search going to be called off? Is there a transponder that's going to give out? Why can't the journalist just put the important information up front, instead of a bunch of irrelevant crap about someone's sleep deprivation?
In the fifth paragraph, it says "Without fresh clues, the hunt should end about June, when four ships are due to finish combing the seas off western Australia." I imagine that the news would be quite boring if every article were written as a bullet-point list of points. Sometimes people enjoy reading a story, not just a two minute summary.
There's nothing wrong with long form journalism if you have a complex story to tell with lots of information to convey. The problem is not with the format, it's with journalists trying to pad out a tweet's worth of information into a long-form article.
I'm much less forgiving of the format. Every example I've seen has been a colossal and seemingly deliberate waste of the reader's (my) time. Even when it is reasonably skillfully written and contains information on a subject I'm interested in, I vastly prefer the writing style of, say, Wikipedia.
When they combine these god-damned long form articles with clickbait titles it's that much worse.
At least clickbait spam content has the class to let you off the hook after 5 seconds.
You click on an article about MH370 or the Paris attacks or something, and the fourth paragraph is "Jean-Denis lives in a quiet suburb of Orlean with his two children and their dog, a basset hound golden retriever mix named Harmonie." Good god! It's the slow, lingering death by a thousand cuts.
Haha so true. And then the mix of chronology just to mix things up...
"But Jean-Denis didn't always live a comfortable life in the suburbs. The first seven years of his life he grew up with his grandparents in Transylvania. The potato crop wasn't always good, and the long winters taught him about patience. A trait he's been needing in the search for the MH370."
Why not just read for the pleasure of it? Do you every read anything from The New Yorker, or Esquire, or The Atlantic, etc.? There can be great stories that are enjoyable to read, while still being nonfiction.
No, I think GP is right. Compare a typical long-form piece to e.g. a textbook. A well-written textbook has much more information, but still organizes it in such a way so that you can quickly understand what you're getting into. By comparison, I find that long-form journalism typically buries this information so that even if there is a meaningful summary, you have to build it yourself (and obviously you can only do this after having spent the time to read it in the first place).
My point is that long-form journalism isn't pleasurable to read. The writing style is incredibly belabored, and I am fairly convinced that this is the intention of the authors. It clearly works for many readers, but not for me, and I wish there was always a clearer upfront distinction between traditional news articles and long-form articles.
English is my second language, and while I'm able to skim and read text very quickly, increased use of literary vocabulary puts me off very quickly. It feels like pulling the hand brake. These articles are that much more tiresome to read. Also the longer, convoluted arguments force me to read the thing word by word until I can get the gist.
Once I discover it's in fact a long-form article, I will space bar-skim to see if there is any merit, and stop reading in 99% of cases.
I read lots of novels for the sheer pleasure of it. But reading the news is different. I don't read it for the same reason I read novels; I read it because I want to find out what's going, and because learning interesting things is fun. I too find writing styles that don't optimize for those purposes in the news to be infuriating, and I agree with baddox that I would much rather read Wikipedia articles (of which I have read many, for hours on end) than meandering news stories.
Would it help if you think of it as a form of literature, rather than a means of devouring information by the most efficient means possible? It may still not be for you, and this may not be a good example of it, but it is a genre with purposes other than what you are assuming.
I'm probably a bit old-fashioned, but I think that the set 'literature' does not intersect with the set 'bounces a giant angled magenta byline in my face' (the "find a $100 smartphone" bit)
Actually, one question I used to like to ask people: "In bookshops, what qualifies a book to move from 'fiction' to 'literature'?" (yes, you can get poetry and whatnot in the literature section, but it's primarily fiction-based)
Well, sure. 'Literature' is used for all kinds of things, from classic novels to poetry to scientific papers. But in (non-specialist) bookshops, it's primarily 'classic/good fiction' with some other stuff thrown in. Those shelves are usually marked 'Literature', not 'Literary Fiction'...
Yes, that's true, one definition of literature can be anything that is written. I'm not trying to have a semantic argument with you though. Use whatever words you want, but if you think of this long form journalism as a form of... let's call it art writing, then maybe it would make more sense. If you want to say that having magenta pull quotes makes it not art then I can't help you.
Do you really don't see any value in a long form piece like you'd find in The New Yorker? I'm not saying that's all gold - it's easy to screw up and some topics simply don't need it, but if well done, I often find myself not being able to stop reading.
So what? This isn't a newspaper article, it is a nonfiction story. Bloomberg contains sections of their magazines written in your format; I always skip them. I prefer the long-form stories.
Honestly, why? After reading a few of them, I was completely sick of this format. It appears to me as information-free fluff, written in a very generic style.
What do you like in this format? I genuinely don't understand how it can sell, but if it does, there must be something?
It can also be fun to read something that just isn't parsed down to the bare facts. For example, in my opinion, [0] would be much less interesting without the benefits of long form journalism.
It seems that most often the pieces that try to be too literary (or too story-esque) tend to distort the facts to best fit the narrative (or rather the narrative fallacy).
Doesn't that worry you?
It's the business model. The longer you are on a web page the more ad cycles you see. I agree with you, its' not good writing, but I think that is where it comes from.
Good point. There's new requirements on writers now.
In the old days, they'd buy your paper if they could scan all the stories and get information easily. Now, the reader is only looking at one story referred by a search engine or blogpost or link farm.
But the more you annoy the reader that's just looking for the reason the search is going to fail in 30 days. And the more you do that as a business, the more a bunch of readers (those who prefer that you not waste their time) get inoculated to you, and quit clicking on links to you. That's bad business.
> I imagine that the news would be quite boring if every article were written as a bullet-point list of points. Sometimes people enjoy reading a story, not just a two minute summary.
This is exactly what I've wanted but never known how to express it ... is there such a thing? I would love to browse a list of news stories distilled to factual bullet points. Sigh. One can dream :)
I thought there was some technological reason (ie battery dead), but it seems like it's just a funding thing. The batteries only had 30 days of life anyway.
Isn't there an add on or an app or something that summarizes articles via NLP? It would be nice to have an interstitial pop up with the article summarized and the ability to click out and read the full thing for more color.
I believe the "weeks" figure is related to this quote: "Without fresh clues, the hunt should end about June, when four ships are due to finish combing the seas off western Australia, Dolan said."
"I was pretty uncomfortable when I found that mayday calls were being charged at the highest rate - £8 per minute if I recall correctly - even though Inmarsat itself explicitly carried those calls for free. I remember the manager I asked about that, when I found those calls in real logs, not meeting my eyes as he talked distantly about why that was."
It's complicated. One of the complications is requiring anything. Most trade agreements now in place defer major standards compliance in aviation to ICAO, and ICAO ends up being lowest common denominator when it comes to rules. Simply, less rich countries don't want to pay for every possible feature.
Another complication is there's almost no such thing as a "backport" in aviation. The equipment a particular plane model is certified for is the equipment it has for life, save for some software updates. And this isn't in the category of a software update, it's new physical equipment. The easiest part is a new weight and balance for every airplane getting the new equipment. Harder is wiring the thing in, and getting it space in the cockpit - that's often quite difficult. If it requires integration of any sort, very difficult. There's extremely low willingness to substantially alter certified aircraft. There are individual systems that make up a whole, change any one part, you change the whole. The liability is too high for the return, these kinds of lost plane events are rare.
Actually, your mistaken. Cockpit avionics upgrades are relatively common, even in small aircraft like Cessna 172s. Considering a new Cessna 172 is around $250k, and a refurbished aircraft, with new glass cockpit is around $50k (and sometimes significantly less).
Aircraft have whats known as a Supplementary Type Certificate, which permits changes to a certified aircraft. Even a major upgrade from radial engine to turboprop has been authorized for some aircraft, including DC-3 transports made in the 1940s.
Another example is Southwest Airlines. The 737-300 series jets have glass cockpit upgrades for a common configuration between a 737-300 (Classic) and a newer 737-700 (NG).
If the ICAO mandates upgrades, it will happen. It might not be cheap, but its quite doable.
I wonder if the cost to Malaysia and Malaysia air at ~250 per month would have been more than all the monies they've had to pay for this two year long search :-/
I was thinking about this on a motorcycle trip to Alaska. For $250 one can buy a consumer device that updates my location via satellite every few minutes to display on a web page. $35/month, and they have cheaper plans. Were I to have been eaten by a bear, or splattered by a semi on the Dalton Highway, my wife would have at least known where to recover the body.
Any yahoo with $250 and a shipping address can have one of these, yet two years later we still don't know where this Malaysian flight went to?
This is exactly what Immersat are now offering. Almost all wide-bodied jets already have the senders, and Immersat will stop charging for it, so everyone will hopefully start enabling it.
Isn't that a good thing? £8 is not that much if you are really in distress, and it is enough to keep spurious distress signals from clogging the channel.
It's not £8 per call, it's £8 per minute. I don't know the protocol for satellite calls, but I'd been taught that for both 911 calls and VHF-Marine distress calls, you're supposed to stay in contact with the dispatcher, to update them as the situation changes and to help guide the responders to your location. E.g: "The fire truck is at Smith Street, they can't find you." "No, I'm on Smith Lane, not Smith Street". Or "I can hear the helicopter, it sounds like they just flew by south of me, can you have them fly back 1000 yards further north?" For satellite distress calls, I would imagine this could take a while, though I imagine they'd set up a schedule where you'd only call back periodically.
I find it hard to understand how we can be justified spending so much money and effort trying to find the wreck. What is there to gain? The only benefits I see are:
- Giving family members (maybe a few thousand people) closure.
- Understanding what happened, and potentially making a few improvements to plane safety as a result.
Given the very slim chance of them even finding the plane and learning anything useful out of it… I don't see how the search justifies a 9-figure price tag. (I don't mean to be insensitive)
> Understanding what happened, and potentially making a few improvements to plane safety as a result.
Well Wikipedia says a Boeing 777-200ER costs $261.5 million[1]. That's about double the cost for the search. If it's possible to prevent even one future mishap as a result of learning anything the cost is justified.
Besides closure is important for the families and friends of the passengers. Especially with crazy articles saying the plane could have landed in Kazakhstan[2]. Imagine the suffering people must be going through thinking their loved ones are 95% dead but 5% possibly maybe caught up in a crazy conspiracy. Even if it's 1% or 0.001% likely it could be enough to keep one awake at night.
I don't care about the cost of the tin can. It's worth far more than that to find out why the accident happened, and if it was an equipment failure, do something to the rest of the tin cans so that it doesn't happen again.
If they can find the wreck, they have a decent chance of debugging the cause, and implementing corrections to prevent it from happening again. Depending on the cause, that can be worth a lot.
That's Bloomberg's comment not mine. Not sure where the sudden need to downvote is coming from. My point is that it's now a free service to track planes. It was possible to track MH370, for example, but it required a fee.
Yeah, I know what quotation marks mean... My point is that the quote makes it seem much easier to track an airplane than it actually is. It's great that Inmarsat is providing the service for free now, but the quote makes it seem like the service is trivial to provide when it really isn't.
Hyperbole in the news happens all the time. At any rate, the quote is also inaccurate because according the May 2014 article that I posted, we have been able to track a jet for free for almost 2 years. I wasn't trying to start a discussion about how easy or hard one of them is.
The "need to know your position" is a consequence of how they measure signal strength to allow handoff between cells, so you get overlapping coverage and each tower has a signal measurement for the same device.
A post I saw here a couple of weeks ago suggested a simpler method of reducing location tracking than ones I had been thinking of:
You would add extra RF spectrum overhead and a little bit of latency for making and receiving calls.
In general the basic thing that should happen to recover location privacy in mobile services is completely decoupling payment, device identifiers, and routing. Right now they are all linked or trivially linkable (your carrier sees you register with your IMEI and IMSI, and it assigns you a phone number -- rather than registering with a random per-session IMEI, paying for the service with a blinded digital payment token, and getting a phone number, if you want one, from a third party VoIP provider).
Great. Here's your next phone. It puts out 2,000 watts and comes with a free tinfoil helmet. Battery life isn't great, but at least you're not being tracked by local cell sites.
no tower.. you need a satellite and they have been checking even since and no information. The most weird was, nobody in penang tower or langkawi tower detect the oddness. And also army radar. Next time, tower must be on 24 hour
It could be found in a few years or in a few decades. Although reading the flight recorders by then could be problematic.
It's not the first time anyway, a British plane disappeared on the Andes in 1947 (after sending a cryptic Morse message BTW) and was found 50 years later, so I wouldn't despair.
Andes are dry and cold and will preserve things. People hike the Andes. People can see things from above in the Andes.
The ocean is deep. Sediment drifting down from above layers the debris. Ocean currents disperse the light aluminum fragments that remain from the ocean impact.
An undersea landslide covers the fuselage or it slides down into an underwater canyon, separating and breaking apart.
"forever". What hyperbolic drivel. Ultimately we will find the plane, be it by deliberate searching action, or accidental discovery as we further map the oceans or whatever else draws us below the waves.
Rest assured that this mystery will be solved. Petabytes of data? Please give it to Google so they can add it to Google Maps. The fact that we can't successfully crowd-source this search is indicative of our having very incomplete maps of the ocean floor.
Eventually (could be a hundred years but I expect less) there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans. They will find all kinds of interesting things - including MH370.
>Please give it to Google so they can add it to Google Maps.
What do you think "add[ing] it to Google Maps" would accomplish? What makes you think the data analysis is easily crowd-sourced? I.e, what makes you think that analyzing the data requires no special experience or expertise?
>there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans
Why? What would be the economic case for doing this? Building machines that work at the extreme depths of the sea floor is incredibly hard. The search for a single lost airplane (and it really is just the one, not a single other commercial airliner is unaccounted for) certainly isn't going to fund this pipe dream.
> What do you think "add[ing] it to Google Maps" would accomplish?
Give us better publicly-accessible seafloor maps for that bit of ocean?
>> there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans
> Why? What would be the economic case for doing this?
Immediately? Who knows. He did qualify his statement with an "eventually/100 years," though. I can imagine such robots would be useful for environmental monitoring, mineral prospecting, and defense reasons. Especially if the cost decreases.
IIRC, there already are automated scientific buoys that drift with the currents, do programmed dives, and transmit their measurements by satellite.
In a hundred years I expect the wreckage to be found, even by accident. That's a moot point though, as in a hundred years, the relatives will be no longer alive and noone will care too much.
The obvious difference being that Tomnod is focused on actual imagery of the surface of the Earth, something that most people are already familiar with thanks to Google Maps et al., and even so AFAIK the project produced many false positives and no actual hits.
I have no idea what format the sonar data is in, but I highly suspect that it is not in the form of familiar imagery in which parts of a commercial airliner would be readily identified by untrained observers.
Last year I sailed my 30' boat from Oakland to Hawaii. I went three weeks with no sign of life aside from Albatross and flying fish. None. I couldn't even get my sat phone to work 90% of the time. I covered, roughly, the distance from Oakland to about Massachusetts. My boat was much smaller, and had very little as far as safety equipment on a passenger jet. While both might be exceptionally hard to spot -- even a 1000' vehicle with 1000' span would be hard to find on solid ground somewhere between CA and MA, add deep water, and that piece of wing was not attached to the plane when it hit the water. I know this as it still was shaped like a wing. I'm also a pilot and can only guess as well as other pilots, but when you over-stress the airframe from a loss of control, you can fold a wing. No life jackets floating as they're still in the plane which likely hit well before that chunk of wing fluttered down into the water. I doubt we'll ever really know. Seems unlikely to have been a bomb, as shit would be washing up.
I would hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but Malaysia's politics are quite a spectacular bowl of spaghetti. You have Saudi "donations" of billions, a Prime Minister who stands accused of using the country's Speciall Forces team for blowing up a Mongolian woman involved with a billion dollar French defense company purchase of Scorpene submarines. The accused murderer now resides in Australia. You literally have the financier of the Wolf of Wall Street movie, parties with Paris Hilton, squandering of billions of Malaysia's taxpayer funds. You have bankers being murdered in broad daylight. You have attorney generals being fired and prosecutors being found dead inside barrels of cement. You have Deputy Prime Ministers being kicked out. You have ex-Prime Ministers raising a 5 alarm fire demanding that the Prime Minister be arrested. You have apartheid policies being increased in the country. You have sudden import of millions of foreign workers, who have been accused of being used as false vote banks. So.... when they write "keeping secrets forever", that almost seems like what was intended for this flight.
The evidence that the pilots were deliberately masking their flight path shortly before the flight's disappearance, was pretty compelling. I've always felt that the plane was intentionally maneuvered somewhere, but clearly the destination was not dry land.
So we assume for a moment that some organized group deliberately did something to this aircraft. Who has the motivation to execute such a scheme?
Government agencies I rule out - because of lack of a cover story. It does a government no good to leave a massive mystery open to the court of press speculation, especially for so long. It grows distrust in the populace and gives the perception of incompetence, which undermines power. Plus the political risks of being uncovered are too great. There needs to be a cover.
I'd rule out corporations or business moguls for the same reason - leaving mysterious loose ends is not in their best interest. Too much risk to reputation.
Terrorists I rule out as well - they are motivated by public gestures that further the cause. They'd have claimed it immediately and even if the plot was steal the plane and use it later, they'd have done it already.
So what nefarious organization is left? What group would be OK with leaving a mysterious unsolved disappearance out in the open? Criminal syndicates.
Professional criminals are in the business of doing bad things and getting away with it without a trace. To a career criminal, an unsolved mystery is a point of pride.
If there was someone or something of extremely high value aboard the plane, perhaps being smuggled, organized criminals would have the motivation to extract it, far away from law enforcement or even satellites, and bury the evidence without a trace.
But they would have a difficult time landing an aircraft of that size anywhere on land without detection. Eventually it would turn up.
So how about on water? Ditch the plane gently on the ocean, Captain Sully style, extract whatever is in the cabin and then let it sink slowly. Disappears without a trace. Do it far enough away from civilization and nobody will find it.
Pretty elaborate heist, and absurdly risky. But criminals aren't known for being overly risk averse. And even if they botched the job, we'd never know about it.
So that's my theory over who would be responsible. Definitely backed up by what you're saying about the level of organized crime in the Malaysian political world.
That plane was carrying some person or thing that a highly corrupt, well financed individual or group wanted very badly - either to take for themselves or destroy. And so far, they've gotten away with it.
I'm live in Malaysia . There's a lot of weird information in few years. Some even not logical.The airline strike hard twice in a year and now changing hand to new company. Anybody here can downvote me here but we need agent Mulder And Scully to solve this issue. Eistien and new agent can help also :)
hard to believe they have all this satellite pointing back at us and they can track anyone anywhere seemingly but they can't find a giant several hundred ton airplane? Either that or we underestimate just how large the body of oceans are.
And likely more scary is the fact that once a nuclear submarine submerges, nobody knows where it is. We can't even find this plane. A moving submarine beneath the vast body of ocean even more so.
I wonder if it's possible to develop xray vision that sees through the earth's ocean.
The simple answer to the "mystery" is a scenario about a "lone wolf" with the determination and the capability to direct the plane to the middle of the ocean and die with the plane.
We saw a confirmed example of such a guy almost exactly one year later (8 March 2014, 24 March 2015):
> I'm sure Find My iPhone probably has a limited range or something
Either I missed the sarcasm or this is the understatement of the century. There's no cell service in the middle of the Indian Ocean, several thousand miles from Australia. Not to mention the fact that radio waves travel extremely poorly through water.
The problem is that water is an excellent RF attenuator. Even if the phone was working, it would be useless even under a few metres of water. For this reason submarine communication is only one way and requires kilometre long ELF emitters (which everyone in the world can pick up). Above 20m depth you can use VLF, but it's still only one way.
The second problem is that phone location relies on there being a cell tower nearby (or a few so you can triangulate). You don't get a good reception in the middle of the Pacific, I'm guessing.
Not to mention the third problem that we're told to put our phones into airplane mode anyway. Even if the phones had WiFi or Bluetooth on, it's a higher frequency than GSM and has an even poorer range underwater.
The article's line, "In a world where a $100 smartphone can be tracked for free..." is dishonest. Services like Find My iPhone only work if:
1. The phone can determine its location via GPS, cell tower, and/or wifi positioning.
2. The phone has Internet access. (Cell or wifi.)
As you might suspect, the south Indian Ocean doesn't have many cell towers or wifi hotspots. GPS signals don't penetrate water, nor do the frequencies radiated by cell phones. Even if you had an unobtainium phone that survived the crash and depth, it couldn't be tracked.
It's only a little off. Services like Spot [http://findmespot.com/en/] offer satellite tracking with updates every 5 minutes while moving for $100 for equipment and $100/year for service. Spot doesn't quite cover the whole world, but Delorme InReach does [http://www.inreachdelorme.com/] for like $250 for equipment and $150 per year.
Given how easily available this technology is to anyone with a credit card, it's hard to understand how a $250M airliner doesn't have something similar.
The "$250M airliner" has the equipment, the issue is that Malaysia Airlines didn't pay for the service, no doubt they didn't imagine really needing it.
Well when the person who ultimate trust is placed in violates that trust it isn't something many consider there any viable counters too. GermanWings suffered a loss from what likely was a similar reason, the difference being that this pilot didn't send the plane into the sea.
I am not sure there is a viable means to guard against suicidal pilots except to speed up the acceptance of full automation
GPS works pretty much anywhere in the world, even in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It would not penetrate water or survive the crash, which means it couldn't be tracked NOW. Nonetheless, you could know the position a few minutes (seconds?) before the crash, which would make finding the aircraft MUCH easier.
I'm not sure why a plane wouldn't have at least a few such devices on board in case of crash (there's no monthly fee or anything). Just under the skin perhaps so they'd only automatically deploy during something catastrophic? I'm sure someone knows.
Even if it were water proof, it would only be so at a certain depth. The pressure asserted by the ocean would render it useless...and the density of the ocean above it would probably make the signal too weak.
While that's true at the very least (assuming that there really is a cheap worldwide GPS tracking available) the last known position would be much more accurate than in MH370.
That would make unnecessary the attempt to extrapolate the existing data (the pings) in order to infer the plane last location good location.
A plane crashes in an area with no landmass and we lose it. We've overfished many species to near-extinction because we completely failed to understand exactly how many fish there actually are. The sea acts as a natural eraser for human habitation, sometimes wiping out all evidence of entire communities within hours. We lose all kinds of cargo into the ocean and haven't the faintest clue where it goes. We're only beginning to figure out how to convert seawater into potable form effectively. The majority of our planet is covered in something we can't even figure out how to build habitats on top of without piling up dirt underneath.
The belief that we have any mastery over this planet seems to humbly disintegrate when looking at our relationship to our oceans