I wish the media would stop comparing this to MH370. It will most likely be entirely different in terms of cause.
Right. I remember that the one thing the media kept stressing during the first days after MH370 went missing was how calm the weather was. This immediately made that incident “mysterious” in a way this new one is definitely not.
Until they find this plane, the comparisons to MH370 are not going to stop. From a high level perspective, its absolutely incredible that they have not found any evidence of this flight.
I look at the Flightradar24 website and I can see literally thousands of planes in flight…with their positions updated constantly.
I know the devil is the details, but if I can see these planes on my $500 laptop with no special software, its astounding that trained people with sophisticated software cannot determine where this plane crashed.
Tinfoil hat time: What happens if they do not find this plane? IIRC, 36 hours after the disappearance of MH370 they were looking in Gulf of Thailand for the plane, which is similar in size to Java Sea. A lot of resources were searching in the Gulf of Thailand. It was days after when they started looking at new data that they determined MH370 was somewhere on this huge arc extending from the South Indian Ocean, to the Tibetan Plateau in Southwest China.
Flight tracking depends upon radar and other devices. When a transponder receives a radar interrogation, it transmits a signal in response. It basically says, 'Here I am! 
’ When an airplane has a discrete transponder code it can be specifically identified, so you can track individual airplanes. If the airplane descends below radar coverage, then radar operators don’t see a ‘skin paint’ and the transponder doesn’t receive an interrogation signal. All searchers can say with certainty is that a given airplane was at a specific place at a given time. That’s called the Last Known Position. The target aircraft can be anywhere within a 360 degree radius of the LKP, at a distance determined by endurance, weather, etc. It could have crashed right at the LKP, or it could have made a 154 degree turn to the right and flown for an hour before running out of fuel, or it could have made a 90 degree turn to the left and flown for 18 minutes before turning 50 degrees to the right and so on.
So the details can be quite devilish.
I am going to take my "Spot Locator"™ and tape it to a window.
With almost half the sky to work with, getting a position every 10 minutes will work just fine.
If I know we are in trouble, I can press the emergency button for an automatic location right then & it will notify help.
If I get caught too suddenly, the wife will see that the next location did not come up and she will call the airline and tell them to go get me as I don’t swim well anymore. I should be within 10 minutes flight distance + maybe a glide of the last check point. About $55 a year after buying the unit. $150 max with no sale discount.
Since the airlines can get a satellite unit for free I saw someone post, any airline who sends a bird across 10 or more miles of open water or out of constant RADAR coverage should be fined big time and make it apply to all airlines over the world & they no longer get landing privileges in other countries until they have complied… Period. Dot.
With the low cost Tech available today, cheaply, it is criminal that over water aircraft are not so equipped. :smack:
Something that small, light & so needed should not have the FAA all up in bureaucrat mode. :rolleyes:
YMMV
This from CNN
Before the plane, an Airbus A320-200, lost contact with air traffic controllers, one of the pilots asked to change course and fly at a higher altitude because of bad weather, officials said. Heavy thunderstorms were reported in the area at the time.
Heavy thunderstorms and airplanes don’t mix well at all. I’m pretty sure the passengers experienced a terrifying flight in those last few minutes.
I hope I die peacefully in my sleep, like my uncle; not screaming in terror like his passengers in the back of the plane.
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It’s really not uncommon for an airliner to “go missing” when there is a crash. Typically it drops off the radar, stops communicating and burns or smolders. Hence, it’s gone missing. Usually they find it in short order if it this happens on land. Not so when it hits the ocean, where it’s hidden.
Planes can even disappear over land in the U.S. In 1996, a Lear Jet disappeared on its approach to the Lebanon, New Hampshire airport and could not be found. Literally thousands of people looked for it for months with no luck so the official search was called off. Some people theorized that the pilots stole it and took it into Canada and then elsewhere. It wasn’t until 3 years later that someone stumbled across it by accident in the woods on the side of a small mountain. The area where it was found was less than 20 miles from the airport and had been well searched but it couldn’t be easily detected until someone walked right up to it. A Lear Jet isn’t nearly as large as a full-sized airliner but they have the same basic equipment as airliners and are hardly small planes.
Airplane crashes often do not look like airplanes, and crash sites don’t always look like crash sites.
Now I’m starting to think that some sophisticated group is targeting and shooting down Indonesian commercial aircraft and not claiming credit because … I got nothin’.
A couple of misconceptions here.
First, the free satellite unit isn’t free, the data transfer is free but the box in the aeroplane is not. Having said that it is simply an ADS-B signal relay and many if not most airliners already have ADS-B. The free satellite uplink is not operational until 2017 and airliners are already equipped to use it, so it’s not the airlines that are lagging.
Second, ADS-B coverage probably wouldn’t have made a difference to this search or MH370. QZ8501 was within radar coverage. We know nearly as much about it as we would know about you with your spot detector. We know where it was when whatever happened to it happened. If it had ADS-B coverage or radar coverage to the surface then maybe we’d have a few more seconds of position data but I’m not convinced that would help the search. On MH370 the transponder was turned off or failed, the ADS-B unit is part of the transponder and would’ve stopped transmitting at the same time as the transponder did.
This happened in the tropics during the local wet season with heavy thunderstorm activity. I don’t know exactly what the weather conditions are in the search area but the reports from day 1 of the search was that it wasn’t good. Having flown search aircraft around the tropics I can tell you that on a good day the radar will pick up a breaching whale, a pod of dolphins, a cooler box, tree trunk, and many other small floating objects within about 30 NM, but on a bad day you can’t pick up much of anything. A visual search is incredibly difficult and you can fly over something multiple times and not see it.
My feeling is that this aeroplane is pretty close to its last known position and that we shouldn’t be concerned about not being able to find it until they have a few days of searching in very good conditions.
Adam Air 547 took over a week to find.
Point taken.
I’m so glad no one posted “terrorism”. A far more commonly held horrid stereotype about the region.
Its almost 48 hours since the plane crash.
It was more than 48 hours before investigators determined that MH370 turned around halfway across the Gulf of Thailand so search crews were still combing the Gulf of Thailand for MH370.
Its seems like we know as much about QZ8501 as we did at a comparable time after the disappearance of MH370.
Indonesian searchers say they have spotted debris at sea in the hunt for Flight QZ8501
That’s about it. Breaking news posted at the link at 01:32 EST.
10km from the position of the last radar contact.
Breaking news updated at 3:00 AM EST: confirmed wreckage of AirAsia Flight QZ8501.
Six bodies have been retrieved in the vicinity of the wreckage: AirAsia Live: Both black boxes found, one still stuck under heavy wreckage -World News , Firstpost
(Warning: there’s a picture of a floating corpse in the link)
Confirmed. Guardian link, (they’re not including the floating corpse image.)
Over 40 bodies recovered so far.
Expected, but how sad. In a way I suppose this must be better than never knowing for sure what happened to the plane and all those poor people aboard…but still, shit.
Aw, damn… 
They were flying near some really bad weather. This is heartbreaking.