Twenty passengers on missing flight 370 worked for Freescale Semiconductors

[EEVblog]

The presence of lithium ion cells in the cargo should have raised some red flags a long time ago.
http://biz.maxell.com/en/product_rechargeable/?pci=6&pn=rb0013

We don't even know what type they were. And it seems they are allowed and common anyway provided they met some international standard?

[Wytnucls]

Yes they are allowed, but they may not have been packed properly, according to the latest regulations. The consignment should be investigated thoroughly. Were they defective cells being returned to China?
I'm not saying the batteries caused the accident, but the possibility should be way up there, with the rest of the stuff being considered.

[SeanB]

Shades of the Valujet 592 incident, and a similar vanishing act.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ValuJet_Flight_592

[Psi]

I know the range of the pingers is usually quite small when underwater but cant they just get super high sensitivity receivers with high gain antennas?

[Wytnucls]

About the AF 330 accident:

Within five days of the Air France Airbus 330’s plunge into the Atlantic, search teams found the first major wreckage from the airplane — a seat, a barrel, an orange buoy and what were described as “white pieces.”
Within two weeks, 50 bodies had been recovered in two groups, separated by more than 50 miles. Twenty-five days after the crash, Brazilian officials ended the search after collecting 640 pieces of debris.
But no black box. It took almost two years, until May 2011, for the box to be located on the ocean floor.
The hunt for that box was exhaustive.
It was begun by a French nuclear submarine five days after the plane went down. The sub, the Emeraude, worked with a mini-sub, the Nautile, and sonar was used to listen for the flight recorders’ pings.
Though the ocean depths in that part of the Atlantic could be much deeper and the underwater terrain was quite jagged, the searchers took hope from the 1988 recovery of a black box that was 16,100 feet deep.
The two French submarines were able to cover 13 square miles of the Atlantic each day.
Two French surface vessels towed “pinger locator hydrophones,” borrowed from the U.S. Navy, that could pick up signals almost four miles below the surface.
By late July, it was calculated that the 30-day battery life powering the pingers had expired.
With the black boxes located in the tail section of the plane, searchers hoped that the recorders might be lodged in a large piece of debris that could be picked up by sonar. A research vessel towing sonar worked an area with a 47-mile radius from the plane’s last position without success, until late August 2009.
Oceanographers from several nations were brought in for the third phase of the search in 2010. They covered 2,400 square miles of ocean and came up empty-handed.
The next year, a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, using autonomous underwater search vessels, discovered a large debris field from the flight on a relatively flat section of ocean bottom at depths between 12,500 and 13,100 feet.
On May 2, 2011, a remotely operated vehicle found the flight recorders and carried them to the surface. By June of that year, 154 bodies, of the 228 people on board, had been recovered. The search ended with 74 bodies unrecovered.

[EEVblog]

Interestingly, it's likely the Australian Navy will drop some Barra sonarbouys that I helped design and build back in the day.
http://www.engineeringicons.org.au/engineering-icons/australian/barra-sonobuoy-system/ImagesVideosAudio/design.pdf
Oh wow, some old photos there and a couple of familiar colleagues.

[SeanB]

Nice to see your old design work is still in production and is being used actively.

I have a sheet of card I roughed out a circuit change which was laminated and incorporated as a design alteration ( still on the cardboard piece just with a stamp and engineer signature) in a lift where I used to stay. Simple change that did not involve anything other than a single wire moving to another connector, but as it is a safety circuit it had to be signed off as an alteration and they were too cheap to have a new page drawn up for this simple change.

[Wytnucls]

I'm sure it is being discussed in high places right now .
At the moment, they are lots of ways to monitor a flight in remote places, but they all assume that the crew is in control and able to operate those systems.
HF, ACARS, SATCOM, CPDLC, ADS, ELT, to name most of them.
The Emergency Locator Transmitter doesn't need aircraft electrical power and can be activated at anytime by the crew from the cockpit. It will also transmit after a high-G impact, but is unlikely to survive a high energy event.
Nobody placed a telephone call from the cabin through SATCOM, pointing to a sudden event, assuming the 777 was equipped with such a facility.

[Kjelt]

So do these planes now also have buoys that automatically deploy when hitting the water and transmitting SOS or something like in submarines that are stuck on the seafloor ? Would be nice with a planet with such big oceans

[EEVblog]

So do these planes now also have buoys that automatically deploy when hitting the water and transmitting SOS or something like in submarines that are stuck on the seafloor ? Would be nice with a planet with such big oceans

The black box does, but you've got to be close to hear it ping.
I could easily picture a device (floating bouy) that automatically deploys from the plane a few moments before impact. Wouldn't be hard to have an autonomous pod that detected rapid descent and impending crash (like those emergency parachute deployment devices), and then jettisoned itself (to avoid being smashed to bit along with the plane) and started transmitting.

[SeanB]

They are there, but really only deploy if it lands on water slowly. Will be destroyed if it goes in vertical, as it has to float and any float is by definition fragile. CVR and FDR are a lot more rugged, but sink. The outer cases as well do not have to survive for them to be useful, just the inner data vault.

funny thing is the parts of a rocket second stage that are most likely to survive mostly intact are the engines, because they are rugged, and the pressurisation tanks because they are light and are released from the disintegrating structure very early so they do not get burnt up too much. that and large plates that break away and drift down relatively slowly at terminal velocity. see the Skylab debris.

[pickle9000]

Longer battery life for the recorders was one of the things implemented from the Atlantic Air France crash. There has been a fairly big push to get cockpit cameras in, that has met a great deal of resistance. I always thought an automated radio/text that reported extreme cockpit warnings (stall, fuel low, speed) to flight controllers with GPS would be beneficial. 

[Sionyn]

have you seen cnn laest theory battery fumes from the plane turned them into zombies
http://www.examiner.com/article/zombie-plane-did-missing-malaysia-777-mh370-become-a-zombie-plane-of-the-dead

[pickle9000]

I have to say that the Wiki is the most sane.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370

The zombie story is basically a pressurization loss story.

I think a fire that self extinguished or smoldered for a long time is far more plausible. 

[Sionyn]

sorry here it is
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/21/us/malaysia-airlines-flight-370-theories/

[Kjelt]

Now the latest news from Malaysia Airlines is that the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean west of Perth.
No hard evidence yet though just new data from satelites or ??

http://www.malaysiaairlines.com/my/en/site/dark-site.html

[pickle9000]

The info is from the satellites radio comms/pings, I'm thinking they have a bit of overlap with another satellite and that is what will give the direction (north/south). Assuming they are just timing using the signal transmissions from a log file then it could be thousands or millions of log events to look at? Certainly seems solid even if it does not pinpoint the location.   

[Sionyn]

maybe just maybe dave using his telepathic powers landed the plane in his backyard read for teardown tuseday

[pickle9000]

Crap, they dopplered the location. Could they have not just said that in the first place? That has been bugging me.

[echen1024]

Crap, they dopplered the location. Could they have not just said that in the first place? That has been bugging me.

I think Malaysia knew about what happened well before this.

[EEVblog]

I think Malaysia knew about what happened well before this.

Of course they have known for some time. The Australian search crews went straight to this location and found and reported stuff straight away. It was in the middle of bloody nowhere and well outside of the "arc" with it's error bars.

[pickle9000]

Saving face, conspiracy or stupidity. I vote stupidity.

[Kjelt]

or perhaps cautious not to release another unconfirmed story to upset the families.
Anyway it is about time to find some real debris and know for sure.
Unfortunately it looks like the search is abandoned due to bad weather. 
 
Side note to myself: If the pilot didn't want the plane to be found he couldn't have picked a better location.

[EEVblog]

or perhaps cautious not to release another unconfirmed story to upset the families.

You mean like they just did telling the families without having found any actual confirmed debris yet?

[Kjelt]

You mean like they just did telling the families without having found any actual confirmed debris yet?

  you think the "experts" mis-dopplered?