10 Years On, Is the World Any Closer To Finding MH370? (cnn.com) 90
An anonymous reader shares a report: For the past 10 years it has remained one of the modern era's greatest mysteries. A commercial airliner with a strong safety record carrying 239 people vanishing from the map, spawning a wide variety of competing theories, books and documentaries and leaving the families of those left behind asking themselves every March 8 -- what happened to those aboard Malaysia Airlines flight 370?
In an era when black boxes have been successfully hauled up from the very depths of the ocean and whole chunks of a downed airliner painstakingly pieced back together to determine what caused a catastrophe, the fate of MH370 remains infuriatingly elusive. It is a plane crash without a plane. A disaster without conclusive proof of what happened to its victims. A story that anyone who embarks on a commercial flight can instantly relate to but one that, for now at least, doesn't have a closing chapter.
[...] This week, many loved ones of those missing returned to Malaysia to urge local authorities to relaunch a search ahead of Friday's anniversary. [...] Aviation experts tell CNN that improved detection technology will likely bring families closer to the missing plane than they ever have been, if a search were to be relaunched. But that will not be cheap. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent scouring more than 710,000 square kilometers of the Indian Ocean until 2018, but nothing transpired that moved our understanding on from that already available since the very early days.
In an era when black boxes have been successfully hauled up from the very depths of the ocean and whole chunks of a downed airliner painstakingly pieced back together to determine what caused a catastrophe, the fate of MH370 remains infuriatingly elusive. It is a plane crash without a plane. A disaster without conclusive proof of what happened to its victims. A story that anyone who embarks on a commercial flight can instantly relate to but one that, for now at least, doesn't have a closing chapter.
[...] This week, many loved ones of those missing returned to Malaysia to urge local authorities to relaunch a search ahead of Friday's anniversary. [...] Aviation experts tell CNN that improved detection technology will likely bring families closer to the missing plane than they ever have been, if a search were to be relaunched. But that will not be cheap. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent scouring more than 710,000 square kilometers of the Indian Ocean until 2018, but nothing transpired that moved our understanding on from that already available since the very early days.
Duh (Score:1)
It's not not closer.
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It's not not closer.
Score another one for Betteridge's law.
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It's not not closer.
To be more accurate: If we don't even know where it is, we can't know how close we are to finding it.
I humbly suggest a British Museum search [wikipedia.org] of the World.
good documentary (Score:2)
I watched a great documentary on this (NOT the Netflix one that is full of conspiracy theories): https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I prefer Clinton's uprising on Jan 6th.
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A date that will live..not in your memory, apparently.
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I hope so... (Score:4)
MH370 is something of a modern mystery. It's also been a significant 'wake up' call to remind us that we don't know everything - even in something as heavily monitored and tracked as an airliner. That it seems to have disappeared so completely, and even after this much time hasn't given up its secrets is really the stuff of conspiracy novels.
I really do hope it is found - but my guess is it'll be found by accident now, rather than because anyone was specifically looking for it. By then,
Re:I hope so... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I hope so... (Score:5, Interesting)
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15 minutes? What year is it? J.C.
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Aviation is very conservative in regards to new technology. Many airliners still fly with CRT displays.
Re: I hope so... (Score:2)
Modern enough to require satellite communications, but primitive enough not to require meaningfully frequent reports?
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Hardly any airlines paid for tracking a decade ago, it was expensive and wouldn't save them any money. Modern standards have every boat or plane caring automatically activated beacons incase anything happens, they save thousands of people a year.
The new technology is a plan by an academic at Liverpool university to sift through 15 years records of ham radio transmissions hoping to find degradation caused by signals bouncing of planes. Then trying to find one plane MH370 in that. It is totally untested and l
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Hardly any airlines paid for tracking a decade ago, it was expensive and wouldn't save them any money. Modern standards have every boat or plane caring automatically activated beacons incase anything happens, they save thousands of people a year.
Airlines have the option to pay for ACARS [wikipedia.org]. The primary function of ACARS is not tracking but satellite datalink to send information to and from the airplane via satellite; however, ACARS can be used to locate and track the plane.
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Re:I hope so... (Score:4, Interesting)
but by now it could have drifted so far, would that even help to locate the 'black box' and get some answers?
Potentially. If the debris had some type of polyp or barnacle or something similar which someone recognizes and says, "Hey, this stuff comes from this part of the ocean," that might point toward an area to look into. Doesn't mean that's where the wreckage is, only that that particular piece was in that area long enough to acquire the critter.
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https://nymag.com/intelligence... [nymag.com]
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What can I say, great minds think alike. :)
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the black box does not record the whole flight, only the last hour or so. By that time, everybody on board, including the pilot, were dead of hypoxia. The only thing you might find in the black box is silence and the altimetry data of an airplane that runs out of fuel and slams into the ground.
The pilot did it. Case closed. The only thing we'll never know, because either they don't know or those who do won't tell, is why.
Re:I hope so... (Score:4, Informative)
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The pilot had a flight simulator that showed a flight over the Indian Ocean. The final report concluded that there was no evidence the pilot was suicidal and the flight simulator didn't prove anything.. Based on the fact that the plane's signal stopped, it turned 180 degrees to fly over a lowly populated part of Malaysia before flying over water and away from radar into the Indian Ocean, and the flight simulator, led the more cynical to conclude it was a pilot suicide from the beginning. Most pilot suicides
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Indeed not - the idea of taking 200+ people with you when you commit suicide is definitely not rational. The obvious difference here is (assuming the pilot suicide story to be the truth) that the pilot went to extreme lengths to hide what he was doing and what happened to the plane. I expect he figured something might float ashore at some point.
As regards the simulation on Shah's computer, it was withheld from the publicly released report, for whatever reason. I would just refer the curious to the sepa
Re:I hope so... (Score:5, Informative)
You're talking about the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), which are only required to record 2 hours of data in US aircraft. In the US, the flight data recorder (FDR) is required to retain 25 hours of data about flight control inputs and sensor readings.
For years now the NTSB has wanted the CVR mandate to be 25 hours just like the FDR. With only two hours of recording, after an incident it is vital for the pilot to pull the CVR circuit breaker to preserve information about "crew resource management" (how the pilots worked together in face of the problem). But this frequently doesn't happen and even when it does it does two hours is not always enough to understand what the pilots were doing and why (e.g. whether they checked weather information about the destination and briefed problems that could present, or in this case for example whether the second pilot got locked out of the flight deck by the first pilot).
But the NTSB doesn't make the rules; the FAA does. The FAA only this year has proposed a CVR extension to 25 hours, but when it goes into effect airplanes already in service will be grandfathered under the old rules. It's kind of ridiculous on a $125 million dollar airplane to be concerned about the cost of 20 gigs of flash memory, but that's regulatory capture for you.
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Some debris did wash ashore: on Reunion Island, Madagascar, Mauritius. But when you smash an airplane into the ocean, there isn't a lot of floating debris: almost all of it will sink. That portion of the Indian Ocean is deep - 4000-5000 meters - and poorly mapped to begin with. That they couldn't find it is not surprising, although they might someday.
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Finding pretty much ANY debris at this point would indeed help find it, if only by reaffirming the area to search.
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Finding pretty much ANY debris at this point would indeed help find it, if only by reaffirming the area to search.
After 10 years of drift, the location would not be that helpful. If some debris was found inn the Western United States, I doubt they are going to scour off the coast of California.
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Thing is, we know the tides and such. We can backtrack 10 years fairly easily, actually. It's going to have large error margins, but it's still something we didn't know previously.
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There is nothing to be found except fragments (which have been found). The germanwings disaster has shown what happens when an airliner slams into a mountain at cruise speed. Water is no different at those speeds. It's not a ship that sinks. It's a can of aluminium and plastic that slams at almost supersonic speed against a dense material. It pulverizes on instant. It does not sink. It just explodes.
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Out over international waters, airplanes weren't routinely tracked at that time. Most tracking is implemented either by (ground-based) radar, and by aircraft transponders (assuming anyone is close enough to listen). MH370, far out to sea, didn't really have either, although some satellites got a few pings almost by accident [theguardian.com], which is how we even came up with a search area.
That's one thing that MH370 has already moved the needle on: more and more airlines
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Flights between London and Tokyo for example often fly over the North Pole, because the most direct route over Russia is blocked at the moment.
I did that flight last year. The outbound flight headed south to Turkey, then across the Stans and China, and then north to Japan.
The return flight headed up the Pacific coast towards Alaska, then across the Arctic Ocean to Greenland, Iceland, and Scotland, then headed south to London.
Mandatory Gify (Score:2, Funny)
I'm not saying it was Aliens, but [giphy.com]...
The lack of debris is surprising, but the Pacific is a very big place.
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Indian Ocean, actually. The currents in that area tend to move east-to-west, scatting any debris farther from shore. And it is deep - upwards of 5 km.
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Unfortunately it did not disappear over Nevada (Score:2)
Otherwise we'd have had the explanation rightaway.
Eh (Score:1)
To be closer to something, you must be doing something to get closer to that something. Reality may be about magnets, but humanity and some random event from the past are not magnetically attracted to one another.
And we haven't been meaningfully looking ever since we terminated the search. There have been some half-assed efforts to get some money from victim funds and government funds to pretend to look, but considering the area that needs to be covered and the tech needed to scan that deep, those were prob
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And we haven't been meaningfully looking ever since we terminated the search. There have been some half-assed efforts to get some money from victim funds and government funds to pretend to look, but considering the area that needs to be covered and the tech needed to scan that deep, those were probably less than half assed.
At this point, what are the chances that anything would be found and with what technology could be used? The best chances were right after as if it crashed in the ocean, there might be floating debris. 10 years later any debris is unlikely to be close to crash site.
Shame that Paul Allen died. R/V Petrel would've been great for this, though Allen was mostly interested in historic wrecks of military vessels, not looking for modern aircraft. But it did find a lost C-2A in Philippine Sea, so it has track record of finding aircraft much smaller than Boeing 777-200ER at the bottom of the sea.
No, the C-2A's location was known [maritime-executive.com] as 8 crew members were immediately rescued after the crash by the US Navy. Paul Allen did not "find" the C-2A. The US Navy contracted Allen's company to survey and map the wreck for possible recovery efforts as i
Re: Eh (Score:2)
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Nearly 100% if you had a massive search with multiple oceanographic vessels using modern sonar of the kind we use to map oceans already. When aircraft dives down, it typically has the main fuselage act as a tube. Namely it fill with water and sinks. Maybe in a few pieces, but it's a large and distinctive tube overall, so even if it's in several pieces, it's distinct enough to stand out against the background on the kind of sonar that is used for mapping the ocean floor. Because metallic surfaces have a fair
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The point of Petrel getting C-2A is that it has demonstrated clear capability to look around a target area, find and identify a specific aircraft sitting on the bottom, and then go take a look at it to make sure. C-2A is a much smaller aircraft that Boeing 777-200ER.
Again, the C-2A's location was known. Where it was under water was not known. That is very different than looking in an entire ocean for a plane.
Search would not be very different: you take a target area, have an approximate understanding of shape of 777-200ER and how it would potentially look on the bottom, as a whole or in pieces, and then you go over the area scanning it.
No. The Petrel was not SEARCHING for the C-2A. It was mapping the area around the C-2A because they knew where the C-2A was. Specifically details on what the debris like how many parts and how deep would be the salvage. The Petrel was not contracted for search.
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Both of these are distinctions without meaning for the purposes of this discussion. Both are presented as "we know approximate area where aircraft hit the water. Find the remains on the bottom of the ocean".
The only difference is in two factors that affect success rate: size of the approximate area (negative) and exact nature of the aircraft we're looking for (positive). The main problem as I note above is that negative multiplier is extreme, while positive multiplier is small. So while this is proven to be
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Both of these are distinctions without meaning for the purposes of this discussion.
There is a HUGE difference between asking a company to 3D scan your product for a website, and asking a company to find your product that you have lost somewhere in a huge warehouse. It might be somewhere on the west side of the building, amongst the tens of thousands of other objects in piles.
. Both are presented as "we know approximate area where aircraft hit the water. Find the remains on the bottom of the ocean".
And by "approximate" you seem to ignore the distinction that the US Navy had the GPS coordinates where they picked up the C-2A survivors vs. finding an aircraft somewhere in tens thousands of square miles and not know
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>There is a HUGE difference between asking a company to 3D scan your product for a website, and asking a company to find your product that you have lost somewhere in a huge warehouse. It might be somewhere on the west side of the building, amongst the tens of thousands of other objects in piles.
We are in agreement. You appear to continue to think that I'm contesting this point, when I'm continuing to impress on you that I'm contesting a completely different one.
I will once again, for the n+1st time empha
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We are in agreement. You appear to continue to think that I'm contesting this point, when I'm continuing to impress on you that I'm contesting a completely different one.
We are not in agreement. You seem to fail to understand what "approximate" means. You seem not to understand the difference of a 3D scan vs a search.
I will once again, for the n+1st time emphasize that we are in an agreement on this specific point. I have no idea how to make you grasp this part considering several attempts made so far, but I'll try again regardless
No we are not in agreement. You said: "Both of these are distinctions without meaning for the purposes of this discussion." That is untrue. A detail underwater survey of a wreckage is not the same mission as an oceanwide search for the LOCATION of a wreckage.
It doesn't change the underlying fact that process of finding MH370 doesn't meaningfully change.
What kind of idiotic statement is that? Not knowing where MH370 seriously undermines all investigations
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"We disagree, we disagree, we disagree so much, oh my god how wrong you are".
Followed by an open admission of an agreement:
"And on top of that you are proposing an extremely inefficient method of locating the wreck."
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Followed by an open admission of an agreement:
What part of WE DO NOT AGREE is hard for you to understand? WE DO NOT KNOW THE LOCATION OF MH370. You seem not to understand that. You keep saying that we have coordinates to start a search using Petrel and we do not. The starting point of the Petrel is the Indian Ocean. At this point, you are just lying about that.
Second, the active search was not "a few weeks." Military aircraft were used the first 6 weeks to find the plane. After that, a search for the data recorders began. After that an underwater sea
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It's hilarious, you just keep repeating it. Expression of "we don't agree" in all caps, followed by agreement and then again generate a strawman and go absolute ham on it.
Have you considered just going to the gym to beat on a sandbag instead of this? It's good cardio on top of being able to actually argue the points and just the points.
Try it, you might like it.
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It's hilarious, you just keep repeating it. Expression of "we don't agree" in all caps, followed by agreement and then again generate a strawman and go absolute ham on it.
FINALLY you admit we do not agree. You keep repeating that "we agree" and I keep saying we do not.
Have you considered just going to the gym to beat on a sandbag instead of this? It's good cardio on top of being able to actually argue the points and just the points.
Have you considered that LYING about the facts of MH370 means your points are worthless? They did not spend "a few weeks" searching for MH370. They spent years. Why you would lie about that simple fact undermines your points?
Try it, you might like it.
If you want to discuss points, don't lie about easily verifiable facts. Try it. you might like it.
I favor the pilot suicide theory (Score:5, Interesting)
...the plane's route was "probably very accurate flying rather than just a coincidence", and noted that the aircraft's turn toward the north-west over the Malacca Strait allowed a clear view of the captain's home island of Penang: "Someone was taking a long, emotional look at Penang... there were actually three turns, not one. Someone was looking at Penang."
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But why take out a whole plane-full of innocents? Suicide is a very personal choice, mass murder doesn't fit.
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Suicide MAY indeed be very personal, but... (Score:2)
it's also supremely selfish and self-centered. The person killing himself often either gives no thought at all to the life-long misery the act will inject into the lives of the people left behind, who are often left with no answers and a desperate sense that they should or could have done something [youtube.com]. I personally think some very evil people kill themselves with the INTENTION of making those left behind suffer a lifetime of misery.
Sadly, it's rather common for suicidal people to want to kill others before ki
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Mental illness is a huge problem. And the way it's treated until VERY recently by the FAA meant it basically was better to hide it than jeopardize your career. (The FAA is undergoing a restructuring in how it handles mental illness cases because they realize the current rules are encouraging pilots to hide their mental illness, which is not something you want to affect the safety of flight). Unfortun
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Wrong issue. (Score:3)
The world did find it, the problem was the speed at which the world found it.
We humans probably never will.
Yes, We are Closer If Only People Would Listen.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Richard Godfrey, retired Aerospace Engineer, using a radio prorogation blocking technique (that he totally admits he did not invent and he gives credit to the original idea person) claims that he has used this technique to accurately track and find the crash area of MH370. All his claims, evidence and back up information is in a peer reviewed scientific paper. All this information is found on his website: https://www.mh370search.com/ [mh370search.com]
I've read over Richard's paper and the way he claims to have tracked MH370 appears plausible. The technique uses the vast network of WSPRnet radio signal prorogation beacons and shows how MH370 changed these beacons Signal to Noise ratio signals as MH370 traveled down it's path. Richard shows where he has used the same technique to accurately track other planes in the air. At the very least, I think this paper deserves a stronger look at by the searching authorities.
Re: Yes, We are Closer If Only People Would Listen (Score:2)
Another one! (Score:2)
An interesting website, but I was unable to locate a peer reviewed paper by Richard Godfrey.
Unable to locate? You mean it's gone missing too?!
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For people interested, here is the link to the paper: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi... [dropbox.com]
That link is included in Richard's Case Study Story found here: https://www.mh370search.com/20... [mh370search.com]
There are also other links by interested parties in the comments. My apologies for not posting the links before.
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I've read his reports (which I would not categorize as being "scientific papers") and they are utter rubbish. He has no understanding of basic radio physics and has yet to produce a coherent explanation of how his method works. He has proposed three different flight paths for MH370, and the endpoints differ by over 600 km, yet each time he claims the accuracy is between 10 and 30 km.
Big Spend (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yes, we can't undo history and bring the passengers of MH370 back to life, that's assumed by everyone (I hope). There is a point in learning about an incident we don't understand in order to avoid it happening again. Aviation investigators have a budget to do just that, investigate. And it is part of their mission to find the answer, so it is rather difficult for these organizations to simply drop it and move on.
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Where in the world is ... (Score:2)
Other possibilities:
North Korea took MH370
Vladimir Putin hijacked the plane
The plane was shot down by the US military
Life insurance scam
Alien abduction
A 9/11-style false-flag hijack mission
Rothschild Patent Conspiracy Theory
Faked Flight Plan
Itâ(TM)s in Pakistan
Supernatural Forces
Electronic warfare experiment
Diego Garcia military base theory
Acquisition of Freescale staff
a small black hole
Or maybe a meteor hit it?
Why bother? (Score:2)
I know that humans, being a curious species, whose only close competitor in that genre being the common pussycat, love a mystery but I really wonder why good money is being thrown after bad in trying to find the wreckage of this plane. There is no rational reason for it.
First, we know that the plane was destroyed on impact with the Indian Ocean given that parts have washed up on beaches.
Second, the people on that plane are dead, will remain dead, and their bodies will, almost certainly, be not retrievable
Not likely (Score:3)
We still discover entire cities just off the coast that were lost due to sea level rise or subsidence. I don't think we're going to find a plane we haven't had a sign of in a decade.
Boeing hasn't made reliable planes in years. (Score:2)
787, 737 Max are just the most visible.
Getting into a Boeing is sort of like getting into a DC 10. It's probably fine but you can count on every QA corner being cut that the regulators would allow.
Is it? (Score:2)
Is it? No. Next question.
Yes, by definition (Score:2)
Eventually we will have mapped every square foot (or meter, if you prefer) of the Earth and all shipwrecks and plane wrecks will be found unless every last scrap of them has disintegrated before that time (unlikely). This being the case, with each passing moment we are closer to having the answer to each and every mysterious vehicle loss than we were in the previous moment.
Why have we not found it yet? First, because that aircraft had a long range and the planet is mostly covered by water, and second: If yo
Here's a brief summary of guesses (Score:5, Informative)
1) Murder-suicide by pilot. Pilot supposed had a personal flight simulator at home that had a suspicious flight path on it. Malaysia Airlines refuses to agree to this, but most investigators think it's what happened.
2) Some kind of decompression event happened and the plane continued on autopilot until it crashed although everybody on it was already dead.
3) US military supposedly shot it down for getting too close to Diego Garcia. But absolutely nobody has provided any evidence to support this. Seems hard to believe the US would actually do this after the 1980s uproar when the Soviets shot down a civilian Korean Air jet.
4) One guy is convinced the plane was hijacked and flown to Kazakstan. But he has no explanation for the parts of the plane that washed up and no real explanation as to why it was hijacked beyond Russia did it for some unknown reason. His best wild guess is that Russia wanted to capture 20 employees of a chip manufacturer, but 8 of the 20 were Chinese citizens. Hard to believe Russia would kidnap Chinese citizens.
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The Diego Garcia does not make sense as the plane may not have had the fuel necessary to get close to Diego Garcia. Also if MH370 headed west to reach Diego Garcia, Veer Savarkar International Airport located on Andaman and Nicobar Islands would have picked up the plane on their radar.
Flying to Kazakstan would be unlikely as the plane would have to fly over India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Or near Thailand, Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal. All without being caught on any country's radar. I would not put it past R