Do the bleeding-edge underwater robots still even have depth limits?
If a robot can get to it, the black boxes will be retrieved.
I always thought the last transmission being “Good night” was a bit off…
Any realistic chance that that the missing plane landed safely & all the passengers are still alive?
Some suggestion just in the last few hours that the latest “pings” may have come from the plane while on the ground…
Ah, the fog of war. Even if that is true, it’s unlikely any passengers are still alive. What happened to all their cellphones?
Not if they were able to get to the Marianas Trench, once. In 1960.
So maybe it crashed on the ground somewhere? The Andaman Islands are very remote and some of them uninhabited although it is hard to imagine something like that happening without the Indian military detecting it on their radar. And someone would have had to have seen or heard the crash. Maybe the locals heard it, but didn’t see it or find the source of what they heard and since they’re so isolated are unaware of what happened therefore haven’t reported it?
Of all the terrible things James Cameron has done in his life, perhaps the worst was breaking the Mariana Trench meme for us in 2012.
They… were taken? I make no reference to passengers being alive, or to anything else beyond the map I sourced which shows how many possible landing spots there could be and the latest reporting that communication may have come from the plane while back on ground.
Not necessarily. Pilots often use that phrasing to indicate their last transmission to a particular ATC segment or controller. So you might hear something like:
“Pigfucker 9, contact Boston Center 121.55, goodbye.”
“Boston Center 121.55, Pigfucker 9, goodnight.”
Of course, if the pilot operating the radio said “goodnight” after he knew he was hijacked and probably flying to his doom then it does have a degree of poignancy, but it’s not inherently suspicious.
But the map you linked to showed landing spots in heavily populated countries with modern technology such as radar to detect any planes. I mean, spots on the coast of Australia were marked. There is absolutely no way such a large plane could land undetected in Australia. And India is a modern country with modern military technology not to mention tons of people- how on Earth could they have missed a giant plane landing? All the other locations on the map are also heavily populated. Even crashing in a Vietnamese jungle would have been noticed by someone.
The only possible location where an undetected crash could have happened- as far as I’m aware- would be the Andaman Islands as some are uninhabited and the people there are mostly disconnected from the outside world therefore may not have been able to determine that it was a plane crash if they only heard it, but didn’t see it, and may not be aware that there is currently a search for a plane occurring.
If he said it like that then I agree it is quite normal, but from what I’ve read he didn’t read back the frequency which is not normal.
Okay. You may be right that one or even none of those dots is a possible. I don’t know about all of them.
Actually the parts of Australia marked are desolate and relatively unpopulated with no radar coverage apart from Darwin which is the group of northern most spots.
The aeroplane could have got to most of those spots without being detected by radar. It only takes one person to spot an aeroplane though so someone would’ve noticed a B777 arriving. The least unlikely possibility would be Curtain which is a large Air Force base that is only used for temporary deployments. Curtain would still have a skeleton crew of caretakers though who would notice the presence of a B777 and 240 odd people.
Well, on another note someone I know on Facebook posted that it’s “So weird that contestants for the amazing race are flying to Kuala Lumpur.” Uhh…nothing happened in Kuala Lumpur and as far as I’m aware it’s a relatively safe city, right? I don’t think I’ve ever even heard that much about Malaysia until now. And of course nothing happened there aside from the plane taking off. I pointed that out to her and said it’s not any different from people continuing to film shows and movies in New York post 9/11 except there was serious damage and loss of life in New York.
I’m starting to think the pilot (yes, the pilot, not hijackers unless they were trained pilots themselves) was a lone nut and what happened is in no way a reflection of Malaysia itself aside from their somewhat evasive responses to what’s happened, but I’m guessing that’s out of embarrassment, not malice.
Ok- although I did look at a map of Australia and there are cities and towns all along the coast in that area although I have no idea how many people live there.
I just find it strange that Australia wouldn’t monitor their entire coast, although as you pointed out, at least SOMEONE probably would have seen a B777.
Maybe it was a dot somewhere other than in Australia. From what I see there (though I make no claim to comprehensive knowledge of such a vast area and… so many dots), I wouldn’t want to claim it has to be that one set of islands or nothing.
I don’t think this is necessarily true at all. The US Navy no doubt has good sonar but it doesn’t have magical sonar. A plane isn’t that big to begin with and if it hit at speed in deep water it will have broken up.
The fog of war is such that about 90% of everything currently being said about this incident will be BS. Nonetheless at least at this point it does not appear that they have any clear fix on where the aircraft was when it crashed, and it may have been flying at many hundreds of miles an hour (or not) for many hours.
So it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, only the haystack would be millions of square miles in size.
Perhaps once everything calms down and all the electronic (and perhaps other) evidence is gathered they will be able to pinpoint a flight path and a time of crash.
Otherwise, some buoyant bits may turn up sooner or later but finding the wreckage just based on searching with sonar is unlikely to be successful.
Neither do I. I just think that’s the most plausible place for a plane to crash undetected aside from the ocean. I could be wrong though.
Fair point. What I can’t see is what that last message was in response to. Was it issued for no apparent reason?
Along the coast from the bottom dot to the top dot there is Exmouth (pop 2200), Onslow (pop 660), Karratha (16,000), Port Hedland (15,000), Broome (12,000), Derby (3000), Kununurra (3800), Port Keats (1600), and Darwin (129,000). The road distance from Exmouth to Darwin is about 1800 miles. Out of those towns the only one with a radar is Darwin. The rest is a vast desert wasteland with tiny isolated population centres. The cost/benefit equation doesn’t support covering the area with radar. They do have ADSB ground stations which is a relatively new technology but it relies solely on having the correct transponder fitted to the aircraft and having it turned on.
This is a picture of Australian radar/ADSB coverage. The orange area is covered by radar while the red area will be covered by ADSB once all of the ground stations are operational.
Something not well understood by many foreigners is that Australia is about the same size as the continental United States but only has 6% of the population and the vast majority of Australians are compressed along the relatively fertile eastern coast (which happens to be where most of the radar coverage is.)
I haven’t seen the report where his last message was described in detail myself but I gather it was in response to a frequency hand-over to the next FIR.
Thanks for the explanation, Richard Pearse****.
To those of us who live in the cities and/or suburbs and travel between them via major highways, it seems that cellular coverage is ubiquitous. But, unfortunately, the entire earth is not yet covered by cellular phone service. I was reminded of this just the other day while driving along a small road through a forest just south of San Francisco. Despite being located next to a densely populated first-world metropolis, there was no cell phone coverage for several miles of road. At another point, I spoke to a woman who lives further south (near Monterey) in a more rural area. She has no cell phone reception at her house. There seems to be a local dispute between a group of neighbors who would like Verizon to put up a cell site and others who don’t want their area despoiled with antennas and dangerous radiation and Verizon is staying out of the dispute.
At 40,000 feet, it’s not highly probable that they can make contact with a cell phone antenna. And there are vast stretches of land and sea that are not covered by cellular service.
While satellite (not cellular) phones may work in those areas, not many people carry those.