Missing flight Malaysian Arilnes 370

[kujo]

Two weeks since the incident and the search is still ongoing.

Sad situation, made worse by the reluctance of countries to share their military satellite images and / or radar data.
The lone ping, emitted once an hour and the resulting angle of reception is all we got - until the recent Australian and Chinese Sat images.

Even when they find the wreckage and black box, cockpit voice recorder would have erased the initial part of this flight - when route change happened. Since it only stores past 2 hours, while aircraft seems to have flown for another 7 hours!

[sameerph]

Yes, it is quite strange that in today's age of communication, a whole big plane goes missing for more than 15 days now with no trace or clue.

[Tolamu]

Moderators. Pliz correct Kujo's Arilnes.

[gbelday]

Why aren't the contents of flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder downloaded to the ground on a periodic basis? Is it cost prohibitive or we simply don't have the technology to do so?

[suresh]

Why aren't the contents of flight data recorder and the cockpit data recorder downloaded to the ground on a periodic basis? Is it cost prohibitive or we simply don't have the technology to do so?

Interesting suggestion. I suspect that the current protocol is dated and needs to be revisited.

[kujo]

The aircraft communication to ground stations is either VHF or Satellite.

Satellite communication costs are higher than VHF and I don't believe we have the bandwidth in VHF to download such a volume of data.

More over, all of this (flight data, cockpit voice) is secondary - primary task is the on-air / on-ground flight management and resulting communications - this cannot in any way be neglected. Hence the need to keep these communication channels dedicated for that....

[gbelday]

Thanks kujo. I started to do some searching online after I posted my comment and I did find some articles on this subject. This one article mentions a few other options - enhancing the current ACARS transmission, floating recorders, streaming to the cloud etc. All good. I am hoping (as are many others) for some changes after this incident.

http://www.businessinsider.com/black-bo ... ata-2014-3

[kujo]

Make no mistake, there will be changes because of this incident, to airline industry regulations.

Like the article says, ACARS is the best possible, cost-effective system and they will add additional data to it's regular transmission, along with increasing the frequency of it - possibly.

[sameerph]

Finally there seems to be some trace of the plane.

Missing plane plunged into Indian Ocean: Malaysia PM

Still it is only a statement. Lots of questions still need to be answered.

[kujo]

Chris McLaughlin, senior vice president of external affairs at Inmarsat, explains how the British company provided vital information on MH370’s final journey

See the video from 1:40 mark, linked to this article.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... plane.html


There you have it folks $1 per hour for couple of additional pieces of data (GPS position and speed). Though, for that cost, he didn't say how frequently this data will be collected through Immarsat network!
If it is done once an hour - like the pings, that wouldn't help as much as getting it, say every few minutes (probably costlier than $1).

[kujo]

122 floating objects were spotted by Satellite, further south east of existing search areas.

Read this article which highlights the lack of sharing of vital data, among these rival nations:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/27/world ... s-jet.html