"trader_4" wrote in message
news:6255a7fa-6db9-47d1-b318-
On Friday, April 25, 2014 3:29:22 AM UTC-4, Robert Green wrote:

At a recent DoD social event I attended with my wife, a retired special
ops
type said some things I haven't yet run down but were intriguing
nonetheless. Apparently, while not generally known, that model airplane
has
a number of emergency locator beacons along the fuselage that activate
only
during a normal crash landing and not a deliberate nose dive into the
ocean
at 500mph. Maybe you heard something about that since you've followed
the
case closely on CNN. (BTW, the simulator "expert" they used got fired
for
portraying his company in a bad light!)

Yes, those are the EPIRBs and that issue has been discussed in
the media. Similar to the AirFrance crash off Brazil, where the
EPRIBs were of no use, because the plane went straight into the sea.

So that gives us another little clue to the puzzle and strongly implies a
very quick terminal event. It also suggests that airlines need to rethink
their technology quite a bit because when these events occur, millions of
dollars are wasted in huge search efforts. I am not sure how the MH370
crash will percolate through the system, but I hope that at least
long/lat/altitude will eventually be reported every 10 minutes or so to
satellites or ground stations.

Today CBS has been reporting that a possible wreck has been found in the Bay
of Bengal, which is on the southern route.

Australian land and sea survey company GeoResonance said in a statement
sent Tuesday to CBS News that it had discovered materials "believed to be
the wreckage of a commercial airliner" about 100 miles south of Bangladesh
in the Bay of Bengal using proprietary technology which scans vast areas for
specific metals or minerals.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/malaysia...irliner-found/

You will recall that route had been decided to be unlikely based on Doppler
analysis. You'll just love this error:

When the decision to focus on the southern Indian Ocean was made, CBS
News' Pegues reported that Inmarsat had also contributed one more piece of
evidence which helped guide the move: the so-called Doppler effect.

By measuring the sound waves from the plane's final pings, engineers from
Inmarsat were able to determine the aircraft's location relative to the
satellite; it's the same effect that makes an approaching vehicle sound
different to the human ear than one moving away. The analysis of this data
from Inmarsat suggested the plane had travelled south, reported Pegues.

Sound waves? Unsound reporting is more like it.

More importantly, though, he said that although that plane *could* land
on a
very short runway, not very many of the alternates proposed as landing
sites
would actually accommodate that model of plane without collapsing the
landing gear. All airstrips, apparently, have a rating that indicates
how
much weight they can support.

That's true and one of the big problems with the theory that some
terrorists flew it off to some remote landing strip in the desert.
It has to be long enough and strong enough to land the plane. But it's
a major problem for the fire theory, because Kota Bahru had a suitable
runway, they passed right by it 140 miles before contact with ATC was lost
and it was the logical place to divert to for a sudden extreme emergency.

Not if you believe that everyone aboard was already dead from asphyxiation .
.. . I think the intent was to put the aircraft down at Kora Bahru but when
the plane got there, no one was left alive to do it. That's based on there
being all these altitude and course changes within a very short span of time
and then nothing. Just a long, lazy flight to nowhere.

In the years I spent as a reporter, one of the worst things that can happen
to people is to lose a loved one amid such uncertainty, whether it's a
combat MIA, a mine collapse, a missing person or a crash victim.

I remember seeing a video piece about a woman whose son was killed on the
Lockerbie flight. She spent hours each day sitting in his football jacket
out in the woodworking shop he had built behind the house, crying. I can't
imagine how the parents of all those kids killed on the Korean ferry feel.
I know I choked up when I saw a piece about the recovered cell phone videos
and one kid saying "Mom, this looks like the end of me." I wonder if any of
the cell phones on the Malaysia flight have recoverable data and what that
data would say?

When "stuff goes down" nowadays everyone whips out their cell phone to make
a video. Recently, when someone fell onto the subway tracks, the platform
was full of people holding their phones over theirs heads trying to get a
video. Fortunately one man jumped onto the tracks and saved the person that
fell.

--
Bobby G.