Odd to get downvoted for suggesting this is interesting.
1) If China feels it necessary to fabricate sightings in order to mollify its population (also note the way it has tried to manage the bereaved families and focus their anger on Malaysia including providing coordinated t-shirts etc.) then that's interesting.
2) If China, not usually noted as outstanding in air, naval, or orbital surveillance capability is able to outperform Australia (which is both very experienced with ocean searches and is operating on its doorstep) and the US then that's interesting.
3) If China is more willing to reveal its capabilities than the US or Australia that's also interesting. (E.g. I suspect the reason the Australians were so willing to commit to the current search area based on one satellite image is because they actually tracked the flight via Jindalee, but were unwilling to reveal that system's capabilities given there weren't going to be any survivors.)
I assume this search is coordinated and everyone knows the area one ship can cover. That way the same area isn’t examined twice. Wouldn’t it then be simply up to luck as to who finds something?
You can always argue about who sent the most ships and who covered the most ground, but some nation’s ships finding this is not direct evidence for this. I would assume it would be better to determine this directly, not indirectly.
The Chinese also spotted debris on satellite imagery (on an area that had been thoroughly searched) as well as a "sea floor event" (a week after the claimed event) in the South China Sea. I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that this newest finding is an instance of effectiveness just yet.
How effective have they been? So far China has found absolutely nothing.
If anything, they have been overly enthusiastic to quickly report partial results based on incomplete or bad analysis, which then turned out to be nothing at all.
I'm not sure you can generalize that. It was a Chinese agency that "mistakenly" posted those misleading satellite images, while the U.S. was the first to draw a connection between satellite data and the Indian Ocean as a possible crash area.
There have been mistakes, false leads, and promising revelations across the board.
I'm aware the satellite firm was from the U.K.; I was looking at this timeline: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101485972 which implied the White House was the first to reveal it. But other timelines cite the satellite company itself.
My point was that "effectiveness" should be measured by results, given there has been a pattern of false leads thus far. We can hope, but don't know for sure, that this new lead won't end up another red herring.
That's just post hoc fallacy. There are a lot of vessels searching from a lot of different countries. Whoever gets lucky is going to seem more effective, but luck is probably a majority factor in this case, given the size of the search area.
Aside from this announcement, Chinese have also (apparently) seen more stuff from planes and satellites than anyone else, despite -- for example -- lacking the P3 Orion and the P8 Poseidon, and not having much blue water navy experience, and it not being just off their coast.
We had big fanfare over the number of P3s the US and Australia were committing to the search, and the addition of the P8, and the deployment of a special US Naval vessel with dedicated sensor array. Since then the only nation to report positive sightings (more than once) has been China. Interesting no?
These same tow sensors and underwater autonomous vehicles are used for submarine hunting. Guess which country has a large number of nuclear submarines? US does. Its expected China would try search for our subs.
Is the Chinese search part of the Australia-led search effort (i.e. the Chinese vessels are searching areas they are being tasked), or are they doing their own independent search?
Yes, it should have been translated as "once per second."
Perhaps the "每秒一次"(once per second) was abbreviated to "每秒"(per second) somewhere in the news report.
No, it's an acoustic wave. Salt water is a good conductor of electricity, as such only ultra low frequency radio has any chance of penetrating more than a few feet, and the antenna needed to pull that off is prohibitively large for an aircraft.
I think it's time for the FAA/JAA to make a regulation that blackbox batteries have to last 3 months or longer. Should not be too much of a cost to retrofit, compared to stuff like live FDR transmission via satellite.
It's hard to design for outlier data. This is the most unusual search in modern aviation history. It is the outlier. With a couple of exceptions, all crash zones are found within days.
What makes you think that increasing the battery by a couple of months will deal with the next extraordinary case? What you're suggesting isn't even an order of magnitude more, though 30 days is already a couple of orders of magnitude more than what is needed 98% of the time.
Or just automatically eject floating GPS beacons on impact. You only need one good ping to the satellite to define the crash area.
This is not the first time this has happened. After Air France there should have been some added location method, it took two years to find the black box.
I'm sure the plane had some ELTs. Perhaps the impact was just too great? The liferafts contain them as well, but since they're stowed in bags it is unlikely that one would be freed and remain on the ocean surface.
I live in an airport approach corridor. The noise is nuisance enough, don't drop crap on my house or my head because a nut job pilot decided to drop an airliner in one of the most remote ocean areas on the planet.
This. It's crazy that it doesn't already work this way.
Don't even wait until impact... it should just be the first part that (intentionally) falls off the plane when a critical sink rate threshold is crossed.
Are you seriously suggesting that a passenger airliner deliberately eject an object from itself based on nothing more than the rate at which it is descending?
Hazard to people or structures below? Hazard to the airplane if it impacts a control surface? Hazard to the airplane caused by a misfire of the eject mechanism? Inherent danger of the eject mechanism (I'm assuming it would have to be a chemical explosive due to the need to get it far away from the airplane so it doesn't cause the second hazard above)?
Ejection seats have the same problems, but at least their deployment is pilot-actuated.
Sinkrate is a bad indicator. If this thing flew until it ran out of fuel, it could have had a reasonable decent that would fall into acceptable sinkrates.
Similarly, I've heard that the cockpit voice recording only keeps the last two hours. While that deals with 99% of the cases, here it will miss out on all conversation near the point that the flight began to go off course, and indeed hours after that.
What would be the cost to simply bump the recording time up closer to the maximum flight time possible on a full tank?
You wouldn't necessarily need to increase the battery capacity. You could increase the time between pings. First week after activation, ping at the rate they do now. Then start increasing the interval.
The idea would be to have some pings still happening even after a very long time, because if it gets to that point it is clear no one knows where to look and the thing is only going to be found by accident, when something that listens for other reasons (submarine, research vessel) happens to pass near it.
There already are such regulations on the way. The European Aviation Safety Agency and the FAA are both likely to start airlines switching over to 90 day batteries within a year or two. The EASA is also looking at increasing the range of the locator ping (by adding an additional lower frequency pinger for planes that do long trans-oceanic flights, I think), and extending the voice recording time from 2 hours to 15 hours - perhaps the FAA is planning something similar.
You're just patching a specific bug by adding a special case for it. That's no way to engineer anything. Also, you use the typical fallacy of a fix being just a minor bit of work. If it was low cost and easy to do it'd be done already. Batteries are big and heavy. Increasing the size and weight of the black box is a tricky proposition because it would make it more vulnerable to damage, so you'd need to re-engineer the whole thing to make it stronger. That would make it much heavier and much larger than it's been. And because of such major engineering changes you have to completely redo every aspect of testing. Then you have to begin manufacturing new ones and replacing them in every single plane out there. And every single plane now needs to be extensively retrofitted and updated.
I wonder if they could fit them with auxiliary saltwater batteries. So they have N days of power from the main battery, then an additional M days if they land in the sea. Given that it takes a lot longer to find crash sites at sea, that's the main place they need extra energy.
That said, i have absolutely no idea if a saltwater battery actually has a higher energy density than some other kind of battery. Probably not.
Ok great idea philosopher king, let's make the regulation to demand 90 days ping endurance.
Just one caveat, make sure you open your checkbook for this one, not the rest of us who don't want to pay for yet another trivial feature creep crap every time we buy a flight ticket.
Please don't make aggressively sarcastic comments on Hacker News. It goes against our two most important values: signal/noise ratio and personal civility.
Better pay for the fact that in case my plane crashes into the ocean, the plane will be found instead of paying for useless magazines/newspapers I don't read anyway...
Dukane Seacom... is that the same company that made the filmstrip projectors that we dreaded so much in elementary school? Maybe that's where they got the idea for the beep from.
I would suggest to the regulatory/FDR/CVR manufacturers a change to the black box spec, which causes the pinger to only begin pinging 7 days (or some threshold) after the crash.
The first few days of pinging are generally useless anyway, because I have not seen any search where a sea vessel was remotely prepared to search in the right area or with the right equipment.
Incorporate this delay period (in the absence of anything else), and at least you get an extra week out of the search potential time window.
Your assumption is false. There have been a few notable cases of flight-over-water crashes in which the correct zone wasn't found quickly, but in the case of flight 137, ships were over the presumed crash zone within hours of the aircraft turning up missing.
In other cases, particularly where the crash itself was visually observed (US Airways 1549, Ethiopian 961, and others) where a multi-day delay in starting pingers would have been counterproductive.
It's also useful to realize that any change you make on flight recorders applies to all equipment, needs to be replace on existing aircraft, and concerns a system which has to work with very high reliability.
In some cases a delay in starting the pinger would delay finding the recorders, but does that actually cause any noticeable harm?
It is important to find the crash site quickly, in order to help any possible survivors, but the pingers do not help with that, do they? Aren't survivors found visually or by the emergency locator transmitter?
It could delay the forensics investigation, but that usually takes years to reach a conclusion anyway and depends on inputs other than the recorders, so it is not clear that getting the recorders is even on the critical path for that investigation.
On a different note, I wonder if it would make some sense to have echoers instead of pingers? That is, instead of automatically sending out a periodic pulse, they would listen for a pulse and then respond.
At best you might want to delay the system by a few hours. Which in the extreme case doesn't buy you much time.
You've also really complicated the system, as it now has to determine how it's crashed and where and when to start the pingers. All parts that might fail.
Simpler to either resolve the time component by 1) installing a larger batter (or more efficient pinger), or 2) by creating a jettisonable independent locator beacon, or possible a set of scatterable data recorders.
In the latter case (say: a set of microsd cards), the problem still becomes "how do you find them*. The size, color, and beacons on existing data recorders all assist in their recovery.
I haven't seen this construction since the early 1960s, when the new SI units came into use and people were still confused about the meaning of "Hertz". "KHz per second" literally means "thousand cycles per second, per second".
Ever since it became clear that MH370 fell through a gap in the civilian air traffic control system. This has been a story where various nation states cautiously disclose surveillance capability in order to satiate public demand for information.
"The pulse signal with a frequency of 37.5 kHz is the standard beacon frequency for both so-called black boxes -- the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, CNN quotes Anish Patel, president of pinger manufacturer Dukane Seacom, as saying. "They're identical.""
It is extremely unlikely. They only have enough power for about 30 days, and they are generally only on reasonably large, commercial, aircraft, or on military aircraft.
If they picked up a black box, and it is not from MH370, then it would mean that another large commercial plane went down there within the last 30 days and either no one noticed it was missing or it was somehow kept secret, or that some military lost a plane there within the last 30 days and kept it secret.
