AirAsia Flight Goes Missing Between Indonesia and Singapore 275
iONiUM (530420) writes As reported by many news sources, yet another plane has lost contact during a trip. This comes on the heels of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 which is still missing, and Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down. From ABC's coverage: Sixteen children and one infant were among the passengers. At a press conference this morning, Indonesian officials said the plane was several hours past the time when its fuel would have been exhausted.
The six-year-old aircraft was on the submitted flight plan but requested a deviation because of enroute weather before communication with the aircraft was lost. The plane was under the control of the Indonesian Air Traffic Control and had been in the air for about 42 minutes when contact was lost, AirAsia said.
who cares how many children (Score:4, Insightful)
were on the flight, as if adult lifes did not matter just as much.
Re:who cares how many children (Score:4, Informative)
Try watching it on the news.
In Italy: "There were no Italians on board" x 5 within the space of a 2 minute news article.
In England: Even BBC News has a headline "Only one Brit onboard".
The crash isn't news if they're foreign or old. Same as everything else they portray on the news. War in the Middle East that involves no European/American countries? Barely mentioned. The US says something about a war in the Middle East? News article. The US is IN the Middle East, can't move for "news" of it, down to deaths of individual soldiers (an unprecedented coverage of a war).
TV News doesn't care about the news. They care about making you go "Oh my God!" when you see it, so you keep watching through the adverts.
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Why shouldn't the news to targeted to what is of greatest interest to the viewers of that particular newscast? Italians should be interested to know if any Italians were on board, and that interest doesn't necessarily indicate that Italian lives are of greater worth than non-Italian lives. If my friend or family member might have been on that flight, the importance of that piece of information trumps all other facets of the situation.
I find this type of sentiment to be fairly common, for example, when Eur
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The wording in TFS implies that adults don't matter at all. If it had said something like "5 crew and 116 passengers, including sixteen children and a baby", that'd be cool. It would acknowledge all lives lost, with some additional description for human interest.
I haven't looked at news reports, so I don't know if TFS is unusually egregious here (not unusual for /., really).
Re: who cares how many children (Score:2, Insightful)
Children have more time left to live. So, children's lives ARE worth more.
Now, when they say WOMEN, that's where there's an obvious sexist bias. Women's lives AREN'T worth more than men's.
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Re: who cares how many children (Score:5, Interesting)
No. Children are underdeveloped and require a considerable amount of investment before they create value. Compared to adults where the investment has already been made and who now cannot pay it back, children are worth less.
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No. Children are underdeveloped and require a considerable amount of investment before they create value. Compared to adults where the investment has already been made and who now cannot pay it back, children are worth less.
Children have potential and with considerable investment may create value, compared to adults who have already proven that they lack potential and will never do anything more significant in their lifetime than pollute.
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That's an interesting take on the idea. There may be, almost certainly is an "optimal" point of view where the balance of future carrying cost, productive potential, experience and future work expectancy.
If you value experience the highest, then older people are the most valuable. Children have highest carrying cost, least experience, but the highest adaptability and future earning potential.
Now you could take a *market* approach to valuing lives by holding an auction to see how much people will contribute
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True. But now we run in to the problem with all economic models, they rely on assumptions of an ideal standard, whether is be a standard market, standard competition, or in this case a standard person. The GP could have been right, maybe all the adults on the plane were worthless unemployed drains on social security and all the children were potential future Einsteins. Or maybe it's all reversed. That's the problem with potential.
The market approach does not determine the value of something to the general w
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Re: who cares how many children (Score:5, Funny)
What's the value of an asshole that spends his evening judging the value of others he has never met?
You mean, like you're doing right now? Good question.
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Now, when they say WOMEN, that's where there's an obvious sexist bias. Women's lives AREN'T worth more than men's.
History and evolution would say you're wrong.
After a disaster where a large percentage of your tribe/village are wiped out, who is more valuable among the survivors? Women capable of childbearing would be the most valuable, because you need to replace the dead people with new babies.
You can still see this in action today in endangered species management. Ask the wildlife experts which is more valuable, the male or female Siberian white tiger. Kill the male and you're killing one white tiger. Kill the female
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So we miss vital information - how many lawyers were on the missing plane. I can imagine, that in not so distant future the news on such sad occasion would look like this: A plane X from Y to Z went missing with N people on board of which M were lawyers. If M were close to N (conference in some nice brothel in Prague etc) there would be additional info about an official day of mourning.
Mourning? I think the situation works out that as M approaches N, the amount of partying increases, and if M happens to equal N then a national holiday is created.
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Sorry, but I've never heard "get fucked" uttered by someone from the USA. You appear to be an Aussie, mate.
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(Looks around. Seems wetter and colder than Australasia usually is.)
It's popular up here in Alaska. Not sure just what that means, but there you have it....
Developing Story (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Developing Story (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot - News for nerds, stuff that matters.
So... airplane crashes and other huge international events is not what matters to a nerd ? To a nerd the only thing that matters is C, Linux, ASM and Stephen Hawking ? Talk about narrow mindedness.
Why is there one of you commenting every time airplane crashes ?
Re: Developing Story (Score:2)
What is the relevant 'slant' here?
Better computer tracking (Score:2)
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Use GPS, radio the info. (Score:2)
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Stephen is currently Director of Research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) and Founder of the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology (CTC) at the University of Cambridge. He has been Principal Investigator of the COSMOS National Cosmology Supercomputer since 1997. Stephen is also the Emeritus Lucasian Professor for Cambridge.
In other words, he is probably smarter than every single numbered account on this website combined.
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Yeah, you can tell how unknown he is by the fact a movie was just released about him.
I wish contrarianism didn't beocome so popular on this site. I mean, really, taking a shot at Hawking?
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All of the examples you've given here are relevant, pressing issues, but they aren't news.
Re:Developing Story (Score:5, Insightful)
I read it on the BBC and came here for the discussion - as with any story, if you don't like it, skip it. Nothing is forcing you to read or take part in comments, so why bitch and moan about Slashdot covering something you personally don't like.
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I read it on the BBC and came here for the discussion - as with any story, if you don't like it, skip it. Nothing is forcing you to read or take part in comments, so why bitch and moan about Slashdot covering something you personally don't like.
People bitch and moan because that is what the internet has devolved to. Look at any forum or discussion site and you'll see the same thing, day in, day out.
The Internet was supposed to be one of mankinds greatest achievements - yet looking at it now, it makes me want to punch random strangers in the face. Social media constantly reminds me how dumb people are, and forums how arrogant humans can be.
Air disasters always have technical angle (Score:2)
Why is this on Slashdot?
I think a story like this belongs, because it can bring together knowledgeable people who can speculate on possible technical issues that may have been the cause of a problem...
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In a word? Timothy
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Ever considered the possibility of a software bug that strikes under certain input conditions at the very moment a plane crosses the equator? I know there was a similar issue caught early in the development of the F16 (under simulation), but is there a possibility of such a bug making it into production if the input conditions were rare enough?
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Because Airbus makes shitty Angle Of Attack probes
It was iced pitot tubes that caused problems for AF447. Thales was the manufacturer of the pitot tubes, not Airbus. No modern transport category aircraft come equipped to display AOA anymore. It is no longer relevant in digital flight displays as the quality of flight parameters and method of display is so much better for pilots. However, AOA is still measured and provided to flight control computers.
...controlled by a computer that can't be overridden when it suffers from bad data input.
Completely incrrect. When the computers suffer from lack of information or "bad data" they revert to a fail
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Sixteen children and one infant (Score:4, Interesting)
Why is that so important? Are the other passengers just some randoms we shouldn't give a shit about? Not that we truly do, anyway.
Re:Sixteen children and one infant (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or in simpler language: "Think of the children!"
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The children I know are full of mischief ... not sure if that counts as innocent ;D
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Re:Sixteen children and one infant (Score:5, Insightful)
Adults have lived some of their life. Kids have missed out on things most believe everbody should be able to do before they die, like their first kiss.
Everybody here actually understands this, I have no idea why you all picked now to suddenly act like you're Mr. Spock.
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Kids have missed out on things most believe everbody should be able to do before they die, like their first kiss.
Apparently there are organizations [wikipedia.org] that would like to do something about that...
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That's only because we have a rosy view on what should be the best experiences someone should have. Yes kids may have missed out on first kisses, but they have also missed out on a lot of other hateful things that happen in the world. Being a child was the best time of my life. Being an adult now with girlfriend, house, mortgage et al. I wish for nothing more than to re-live my childhood over and over again.
Being young and carefree is the ultimate experience in my view. The GP may come across as Mr Spock, b
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I'll be a 40 years old virgin, and people still think I still look like a kid (not a baby goat). :P
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Your argument is illogical. Whether you ever kiss another person is irrelevant.
I heard your entire post in my head in Seven of Nine's voice.
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We don't feel that way due to some justification, we just do feel that way because we can't help it and then we rationalize that.
Actually... It is being rationalized on both sides of the debate, not one. Logic is being used, but only for one set of values, leading to a mistaken impression that one is right, as opposed to just having an opinion. Nobody is on any higher ground than "I have buddies here that agree with me". The reason for that is that this article was never about choosing which lives to save. The poster I replied to, in order to pose as a 'smarter than the rest of us' person, attempted to pervert it into that. But
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Coffin Corner? (Score:5, Interesting)
The pilot tried to ascend over a cloud. My guess is that he hit the coffin corner [wikipedia.org], stalled, and crashed.
Re:Coffin Corner? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Coffin Corner? (Score:5, Insightful)
The moment you stall, you lose altitude, and you're no longer in the coffin corner.
The moment you stall, you are outside the flight envelope which includes that corner. You remain outside until you recover from stall. Losing altitude is not a stall recovery technique. Restoring laminar flow over the wing is. That may involve sacrificing altitude for airspeed, assuming you still have enough elevator authority to reduce AOA. Another method is to use excess thrust, assuming it is available at that altitude (the higher you are the, less available.)
A simple stall recovery, and you're back in normal flight.
Stall recovery in large swept-wing aircraft at cruise altitude is anything but simple. It requires a great deal of patience and energy management to avoid secondary stalls. Once recovered, you remain in alternate or direct law- no more normal law until on the ground and reset.
The A320 in particular is designed so the computer will automatically recover from stalls if the pilots simply release all controls.
Untrue. When you stall an A320, you revert to alternate law (hopefully with speed stability), as normal law will not let you stall. If you stalled, something went wrong. The flight control computers are saying essentially that "I cant fly the plane anymore- you the pilot must do it." It will not recover without pilot intervention.
...one of the pilots on AF447 kept directing the plane to pitch up without telling the other pilot what he was doing, as the other pilot was trying to pitch it down to recover from the stall
This did happen, and they were disoriented but not stupid, just poorly trained. The aircraft also gave them a "dual input" aural warning and averaged their inputs. The first sense to disappear when under stress is hearing. They were under stress and poor training in stall recovery left them unable to prevent secondary stalls. This was one of many other factors to this particular accident as well as all accidents in general.
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mentil has a point, according to this report:
"A radar screenshot leaked from AirNav Indonesia shows the aircraft had turned left off the airway and was climbing through FL363, the speed over ground had decayed to 353 knots however."
http://www.aeroinside.com/item/5119/indonesia-asia-a320-over-java-sea-on-dec-28th-2014-aircraft-went-missing-believed-to-have-impacted-waters
slowing could be related to a stall
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That site appears to have just copy / pasted the story from The Aviation Herald, and they didn't even bother to link to the images. Here's the original article with the radar images:
http://avherald.com/h?article=... [avherald.com]
Does that radar indicate ground speed or airspeed? If ground speed then of course that will drop as the aircraft climbs, although the airspeed may stay the same.
Reddit live thread (Score:5, Interesting)
Reddit live news thread: http://www.reddit.com/live/u5b... [reddit.com]
Honestly, compared to most news sources these days, it's probably the best one to read.
"Now Everyone Can Fly" (Score:2)
Three words: Fly by wire (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:2)
Don't let people run things remotely (Score:2)
This is why the people on location know better about how to run things than do people elsewhere. Hear that, Washington, DC? Here that, U.N.?
Re:Note to Self.... (Score:5, Informative)
Point of information - this wasn't Malaysia Airlines, it was AirAsia.
Re:Note to Self.... (Score:4, Informative)
Point of information - this wasn't Malaysia Airlines, it was AirAsia.
More precisely it was Indonesian AirAsia, which is a separate company to AirAsia BHD as Indonesia prohibits majority foreign ownership on airlines. Indonesian AirAsia has its own staff, management and maintenance.
It should also be noted that AirAsia BHD practically owns Indonesia AirAsia as they completely funded the holding company that owns the other 51% of the stock.
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Just a question, if there was a black hole in the air at 25000 feet, that just materialised there, would the gravity of the Earth cause it to fall to the ground and into the planets core? Say if it was the size of a marble? Just a hypothetical.
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No, why would it? ... but obviously darker.
I mean think about it: what if a stone materializes 'just like that' at 25000 feet? It certainly would not fall down to earth by gravity. After all the earth does not know the stone is there and the stone likely just vanishes milli second later in a flash. I guess a hypothetical black hole would simply vanish in a bigger flash
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Re:Don't take airplanes piloted by the Malays (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't take airplanes piloted by the Malays (Score:5, Informative)
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It is always the pilots responsibility.
Regardless what the owner or someone else says.
Define "off course". Off from the filed plan? As far as I understood the pilot wanted to change course because of weather conditions. Or do you mean he was "off" from the course he changed to? If he really was "off" it is ofc his fault as well.
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The airline should have re-routed it, but that's not entirely the pilot's call.
The route and safety of flight are shared responsibilities between the dispatcher and pilot. The final authority rests with the Captain per regulation. Were the captain to feel deviation or complete re-route was necessary, he had full authority and responsibility to do so. Where ATC is not accommodating, he can exercise emergency authority to preserve safety of flight.
...it was the one the owners of the plane he was flying told him to take.
Point of information: The "owners" explicitly do not have that authority.
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it's a fucking war zone, daily flash should have (would have) alerted EVERY civilian airline to that fact, general sensibility is to AVOID civilian overflights of war zones. Missiles are NOT picky. They go where they're told, and generally SAM systems are not equipped with transponder readers.
MH17 would NOT have happened had the person responsible for pointing the nose of the aircraft not done so in such a way in an attempt to shave five minutes off the flight and/or save a gallon or so of kerosene.
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check your sources: US airlines (and most if not all European ones) studiously AVOID Syria AND Ukraine AND Iraq PRECISELY BECAUSE THEY ARE DESIGNATED WAR ZONES. Malaysia, AirAsia and other Far Eastern airlines which generally seem to have saving as much fuel as possible as the pimary profit motive, IGNORE war zones and yes, they do fly over them regularly.
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This isn't 100% true. I recently flew on a United flight from Atlanta to Dubai, and the nifty map showing the flight path displayed us flying right through the middle of Iraq. Perhaps it used to be true that we wouldn't fly over Iraq, but we do now. I'm sure that there are still altitude restrictions, but I'm just guessing.
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Is it not he captain of the plane that has the ultimate power to go for a safer route?
He is Captain, but not God. He knows what he's told. No more. He was told "this is safe" so acted on that. It you are a pilot and presume your airline is lying to you every day, you should find another job or another airline.
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He was authorized to be flying there. Planes fly over conflict zones all the time, because non-idiots know the difference between civilian airliners and military planes, and no-one gives SAMs worth millions of dollars to imbeciles, and the cheap ones cannot fly 10km.
As it turns out, that was no-one except Vladimir Putin, so now the game has changed.
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Yes the game has changed, now the House of Saud is kicking Russia's economic ass up around their ears; and if Da`eth's funding is collateral damage so much the better.
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Not really, it's US shale oil that is kicking the Russian's economic butt. Wasn't planned, won't last all that long, but what the hell, take it.
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uh... bollocks. The missile that brought down MH17 was not a shoulder fired job, it was a serviced phased-array RADAR guided system with a hundred seventy pound warhead housed in a twenty foot tube. The track left the ground at a range of more than twenty miles, after the system had been actively tracking the target from over 100 miles range (over the horizon). Also, war zones are generally out of bounds for civilian traffic, whether ground based or air, or even water based. You take your own life into your
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You just said bollocks and repeated my point: it was not a shoulder fired missile that any guerilla soldier can get, it was a SAM system previously only available to nation states.
Conflict zones are not out of bound of civilian traffic in general; have a look at a map and see how that would make a lot of routes impossible.
MOD PARENT UP! (Score:2)
"08:45 PM
In a separate incident later Sunday, an AirAsia flight carrying more than 150 passengers experiences a technical problem about 10 minutes after taking off from Penang, Malaysia, and has to return to the airport, AirAsia says. The flight takes off again for the short flight to Langkawi island and safely reaches its destination."
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Russian media is reporting the plane was downed by a US Navy missile: http://www.pravda.ru/news/poli... [pravda.ru]
If this is true, this is an unconscionable provocation.
Seems legit...
Re:Russian media reports flight downed by US missi (Score:4, Informative)
It's doing nothing of the sort. The linked story appears to be a Pravda op-ed piece quoting Foreign Minister (?) Alexei Pushkov to the effect that Russia isn't really isolated internationally despite the efforts and claims of President Obama to this effect. A native speaker could provide more detail, but that's the gist of it. As for the missing plane, I don't see a single mention of it anywhere on Pravda's main or Asian news pages.
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What does that have to do with the price of borshcht in Belgorod? The AC made an easily refuted false claim, end of story.
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Re:Because No One Ever Said (Score:4, Funny)
Right. Since it's a well-known fact that children of most travelling parents are transported via shipping container to join Mom and Dad at their destination.
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His point was that MH17 was shot down in Ukrainian airspace, half a world away from Malaysia or Indonesia.
Re:Escort (Score:4, Insightful)
> I wonder how viable it would be to just quietly escort flights in that region with stealth aircraft for a while to determine what's actually happening.
With thousands of flights a day, there aren't enough military jets and support crews to do that.
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Re:Escort (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/... [planecrashinfo.com]
Commercial aircraft go down anything up to 20 times a year, even in modern times. Back when you were a kid, likely 30 times a year or more.
Already we have this lot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
That's one every two weeks. One of the ones you hint at was, what, July and over an entirely different continent anyway.
Learn some statistics. You soon find that people have selection-bias on what they see in the news, what they perceive as a "close fact" (being a plane heading TO Malaysia crashing in another continent, instead of one heading from Malaysia that crashes near Malaysia... very different things), and what they want to lump together to form some kind of extraordinary circumstance.
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It doesn't take much wondering to figure out how viable that idea is.
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