watching the news they said the plane was beyond commercial radar and that military radar “may” have seen it veer off course. So the idea that it dropped off radar was one of distance (out of range) and not because of a reduction in altitude. Still haven’t heard a good report on what the ACARS system reported.
Can ACARS be turned off, like a transponder can?
I also understand they did not have the very latest and greatest tracking option from Boeing. Don’t have a link at my fingertips, but it was in one of the news reports.
what is ACARS, please?
There are now reports that the Malaysian military tracked the flight to the other side of the Malay peninsula, far to the west of where it should have been. This just gets weirder.
Please Google it. Something about automated comm, that’s what I found when I searched it.
Yet to be confirmed.
I can’t see any reason it wouldn’t. Missing is missing, not dead.
“Bejing deploys 10 satellites to help in search, says state media.” What does “deploy” mean in this case? Surely they didn’t just launch 10 new sats for this purpose. Do they mean that they will direct existing satellites to look at the area more closely or more often?
Cecil says otherwise here
[QUOTE=Cecil]
When someone is exposed to “imminent peril” (for example, a plane crash) and fails to return, courts will generally assume the person was killed even though the usual presumptive death period hasn’t elapsed. Sentell says, “the element of peril accelerates the presumption of death.”
[/QUOTE]
Essentially only used for technical data, so ground maintenance personnel can be ready when the plane gets there. The AF447 crash was pretty much solved just with the series of fault warnings ACARS had transmitted. Crew can send texts with it, too.
ACARS is an acronym for Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System. It’s a radio or satellite-based datalink that sends short burst of telemetry from an aircraft back to a ground location providing updates about the aircraft and its performance while in flight.
Almost commercial aircraft transmit a signal and it is logged by the airline which owns the aircraft both for maintenance purposes as well as in cases of emergencies.
Reference:
This explains in very simple terms
This article says that the Chinese erased the original programming for the satellites and sent them new programming to look for the downed airplane.
Just got a ‘breaking news mail’ - this would explain why they can’t find it -
[QUOTE=http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/11/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/index.html?hpt=hp_t1]
Malaysian Flight 370 was last detected flying over a small island hundreds of miles from the flight’s usual route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, according to a senior Malaysian Air Force official. The official declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media.
If the new data is correct, the aircraft was flying in the opposite direction from its scheduled destination and was on the opposite side of the Malay Peninsula from its scheduled route. Previous accounts had the aircraft losing touch with air traffic control near the coast of Vietnam.
[/QUOTE]
So, hijack? Is the plane in Aceh under rebel control? And how’s cell reception there?
thanks for the info on ACARS, guys.
CNN is now reporting that plane took off North and then made a U-Turn one hour North of Kuala Lumpur (in the Gulf of Thailand) and then heads SW, goes across the Malay peninsula into the Malacca Strait.
If this scenario is correct, wouldn’t radar from Malay Peninsula pick up the plane as it flies over?
It would appear that the mystery passengers with stolen passports have been identified as two Iranians trying to get to Europe.
Apparently you can enter Malaysia on an Iranian passport without a visa, once there they got the stolen passports and were going use those to get into Europe.
So it would seem that those two were a case of human smuggling and not terrorism.
Looks like the terror angle isn’t going to bear fruit. Seems to me that these are just a couple guys that wanted to get out of Iran and had no terrorist connections.
NOW the Malaysian Air Force says they have it tracked crossing the peninsula? Where have they been the past few days? So it looks like the search heads west.
That seems to be what IS the latest allegation: that after the transponder signal was lost to ATC, military radars tracked what is supposed to be the same flight (presumably now as an anonymous blip) doubling back.
Exactly. This happened 4 days ago. How many millions of dollars have been spent searching the Gulf of Thailand.
Apparently they even got cruise ships making detour to their routes to search.
A huge SNAFU and FUBAR.
So the claim would be that it took three days for someone at the RMAF going over their radar logs to figure out “unresolved bogey from early Saturday morning” may have something to do with this.
And there could still be a terrorist angle, just not one involving these two guys. A Flight 93 type situation, for instance. But still impossible to know until it’s found.