Yep. It wasn’t necessarily caused by the weather but there is a fair chance that it was a contributing factor. Thunderstorms are not something to be taken lightly. That said, some of the “aviation experts” are saying odd things, with a couple suggesting that the crew should never have planned through an area of forecast thunderstorms.
A forecast is a forecast and may or may not accurately predict the conditions. If I avoided planning through areas of thunderstorm activity I’d never leave the ground half the time I went to work. Thunderstorms are relatively small and can be fairly easily avoided by deviating left/right of your planned route as you get to them. I would suggest that planning through the storm areas while taking enough contingency fuel to allow for deviations is a perfectly acceptable way of dealing with the problem.
It will be interesting to find out what happened to these guys. Hopefully we can learn from it and avoid similar accidents in the future. Not good for the families, but at least they know the outcome.
Yes, how sad but the not knowing can be so much worse.
Surface weather conditions seem to be pretty bad for the recovery effort but apart from that it would seem there’s a good prospect for location of the wreck and retrieval of the recorders.
And you’re right, of course, the whole idea is to plan contingencies for the situations you may encounter. Their last transmissions apparently *were *requests to deviate.
Reports indicate that the water depth in the area of the wreckage recovery is 25 to 30 meters. Assuming the wreckage is in similar depths then this should be much easier to locate the hull.
Or said another way, about 1 minute’s flying time at cruise speed. And depending on the distance & geometry between the radar antenna and the aircraft, the radar’s position uncertainty could be 5-10 km itself.
Given that most enroute radar scans at 10-15 second intervals, they probably went pretty much straight down from wherever the last paint was. It’ll be interesting to see if the radar had altitude data showing a descent or if the last transponder hit was at cruise altitude.
Which makes a good case for satellite-based position tracking not tied to any other aircraft system and not under the control of anyone on board (IOW, always on in flight). The fact that this sort of technology is fully developed and absurdly cheap makes the case stronger.
The cost of equipping every airliner in the world with this would be comparable to the cost of one search for a missing airliner.
You need to be able to turn things off when they malfunction so they don’t start a fire. The question is, is the risk of another MH370 high enough to offset the risk of having an always on unit in every airliner in the world?
Well, the search for the Air France 447 flight data recorders cost around $100 million.
To be fair, much of this was due to the fact that they were in deep water. But knowing just where the plane hit the water would have been extremely helpful.
And these included a precise crash position? I wasn’t aware of that. My comments were based on reports that the search took as long as it did (almost 2 years) because the area that had to be covered was so large.
The area of the impact was known from the start - wreckage and bodies were picked up in the first week after the crash. Even knowing that, it took two years to find the black boxes because of the depth of the ocean and the rugged underwater terrain.
At the time MH370 disappeared, news services reported that the technology that enabled them to find AF447 so quickly is called Swift. Airlines subscribe to the service and the amount of data transmitted from the flight is dependant on which level of subscription they choose. MH370 had only the basic subscription, and the minimal amount of information that came from the aircraft after it disappeared was transmitted by Swift. Had they had the higher level of coverage, as is mandated on flights across Europe but not Asia, they would have had as much information as Air France did when AF447 came down. Malaysian Airlines had opted not to upgrade the service to save $10 per flight.
Yes, within 5 days – the search area was considered “large” in the sense of it necessarily accounting for margins of error and ocean flows in each direction, but the ACARS reported a latitude/longitude reading down to the minute of arc within 5 minutes of transmissions ceasing.
What we have are several distinct issues, at the least (1) that of a tracker for when the airplanes are beyond Radar coverage (in effect, one that’s independent of the ground-tracked transponder protocol); (2) that of a tracker that simply cannot be deactivated in flight; (3) what does this tracker relay; (4) is it actively controlled/monitored in real time. Item (1) need not absolutely comply with (2) or (4) to exist.
The public may feel that with the technology around we should be able to track every airliner to within a mile at every point in flight, and to immediately notice when something goes wrong and launch the response teams right to the point. The first part I believe to be plausible, but the latter IMO is a trickier one.
According to some reports, US Navy’s sonar has located what appears to be aircraft ‘debris’ underwater about 60 miles from last known location of airplane. I’m sure that it will be more definite soon enough, but there have been big waves/stormy weather, etc, slowing the search, AIUI.
Out of edit time - it’s also reported that due to the weather, it is somewhat expected that bodies are likely to wash ashore, likely upon Borneo. Debris is being found as far as 30 miles from assumed debris site.