Archive for Technology - page 5

Today, Malaysian Authorities officially declared Flight 370 lost at sea with no possible survivors.  Based on close analysis of the attempted communications between the plane and satellites it was determined that the flight was on the southern of the two possible courses and this would have put it 1500 miles west of Australia in the Indian Ocean when it’s fuel would have been exhausted.  Since there are no possible landing sites, the lost at sea declaration was made.  The search continues though now as a recovery effort.  Conditions in the area are such that it is believed no one could survive for what has now been two weeks even if they had survived a crash or ditching.

Still unanswered are the questions of how or why this happened.  Authorites have all but ruled out an accident because of the circumstances surrounding how the plane “disappeared” from communications and radar, and because the flight’s behavior afterward indicated that the deed was done with purpose and some skill.  There is speculation as to who was responsible and as to whether one or both of the pilots may have been involved, though to what end is not known.

Since all the new reporting on Malaysian Airways Flight 370 seems to be speculation, I am not going to post about it again until some new concrete information comes out.  All that is known for sure is that that plane is missing and presumed crashed.  The who, what , when, where and why are all unknown.

As I stated in my first post, the simplest explanation is usually correct, and that is that the plane has crashed.  Though I believe there is a strong possiblity that this was an attempt to “steal” the airliner, IMHO the likelyhood of a successful undetected landing is very slight.  What is also unknown is if the mystery will ever be solved.  And so, continuing prayers for the passengers, crew and their families.

This is now officially a criminal investigation, as reported in The Washington Post.  The Airliner’s ACARS system initiated periodic “handshakes”with comm satellites approximately every 30 minutes for an additional seven hours after civilian radar contact was lost.  The plane’s location could not be ascertained from the signals and it is not known whether the plane was in flight for the duration of that time or if it had landed, nor is it clear whether it crashed or was landed and shut down when the system stopped communicating.

The exact amount of fuel on board is not known, but it would  have been sufficient for the scheduled six hour flight to Beijing and common practice is to carry a minimum 1 hour reserve.  Authorities have several working theories, mainly falling along three lines.  First is that the plane was hijacked either by the crew or terrorist passengers and then crashed intentionally into the Indian Ocean as an act of either terrorism or suicide.  Another theory is that the plane was hijacked by either crew or passengers with the intent to divert and land at an unknown location, but then ran out of fuel and crashed.  The final theory is the same as the second theory except that in this scenario the plane was successfully landed at an unknown location.  This third theory is deemed the unlikeliest, since authorities believe that for this to happen, the plane would have been detected entering either Indian or Pakistani airspace and as of yet there is no indication that this occurred.

Additional information:

ABC News (autoplay video)

CNN

UK Daily Mail

All bets are off now.

Reuters reports: Radar Data Suggests Missing Malaysia Plane Deliberately Flown Way Off Course: Sources

Associated Press:  1 US Theory Is Someone Diverted Missing Plane

New York Times: Satellite Firm Says Its Data From Jet Could Offer Location

How Can An Airliner Just Disappear?  The same way your Porsche disappears from your driveway.

Someone steals it.

In the continuing saga of Malaysian Airlines flight 307 there was a bit of a bombshell dropped today when the Wall Street Journal reported that the Boeing 777‘s on board telemetry system continued to operate in a sort of “standby” mode for approximately 4 hours after the last confirmed radar contact with the jet.  The initial report was that monitoring systems embedded in the plane’s Rolls-Royce Trent 800 engines were emitting data, but the article was corrected to say that the plane’s satellite communications link was the origin of the signals.

Rolls-Royce Trent 800 High Bypass Turbofan engine on a Boeing 777

Modern aircraft are equipped with a digital datalink system called the Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) whereby the aircraft sends packets of information about flight systems autonomously to ground crews.  The Wall Street Journal’s anonymous sources say that according to investigators the plane’s ACARS system, though not sending data, did send signals attempting to establish a link to communication satellites and this leads investigators to believe the plane was intact and still flying.  Official sources, however, denied the report.

Post title cribbed from this Popular Mechanics article:  “‘How Can An Airliner Just Disappear?”  Of course the answer to that question is “it can’t”.  But even something that large can be very hard to find.

Missing

In this case, as in almost all cases, the simplest explanation is the correct explanation.  So, in this case that explanation is that the plane crashed into the ocean.  But there are a couple questions that make me wonder:

Why no debris?  Even if the plane broke up at high altitude there should be some flotsam and jetsam (no pun intended).  Though the search area is large, there should be a debris field of some kind.  To my knowledge there has not been a shred yet recovered.

And second, why hasn’t the ping from the black boxes been heard?  Even when Air France 447 went down in mid-atlantic a few years ago the boxes’ ping could be detected though the wreckage was under 13,000 feet of water.  In the current case the water’s depth is in  the range of hundreds of feet, not thousands.

Currently, modern aircraft (the Boeing 777 is among the most modern) do communicate autonomously with ground crews, but the system used has insufficient bandwidth for large amounts of data such as that collected by the black boxes.  That may change in the future, as a new satellite communication network is under development, written about by me here.

I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination.  And as I said earlier, the simplest explanation is probably correct.  All we can do now is pray for the passengers, crew and their families.

“However, it said unarmed”.  That is the google translation of this title which you may recognize as “gibberish” text that sometimes randomly fills text boxes when you are viewing theme examples in various publishing applications.  It is a real language, Latin,  the language of the Romans and it is often termed a “dead language”.  Yet it persists in many areas of our modern lives – science, law and medicine to name a few.  Some of our modern languages are derived from it.  Since wordpress autofilled it into a sample text box I thought it fitting to retain the title and use it for a blog post.  Inspiration is where you find it, am I right?

Guess I’ll play it by ear…

The title of this blog is also in Latin.  Ego Vero translates roughly to “I Seek Truth”.

Ideas and language go hand in hand.  Without language, ideas exist.  But without ideas, language serves no purpose.

I intend to use this platform to practice the expression of my thoughts and ideas regarding various topics of interest to me through the use of the written word.  I believe that Ideas are the puzzle pieces that make up our lives and make up the human experience.  As each idea is expressed another piece of the puzzle falls into place – another pixel is illuminated.  Eventually the truth emerges and God’s idea comes into focus.  If you should choose to look into my little world I hope you may be entertained, informed or perhaps stimulated toward an idea or thought of your own.  And since you may be walking around inside my head, please wipe your feet first.

So… off I go.  Please join me if you will.  However, it said unarmed.