On Thursday, July 30, 2015 at 2:56:40 AM UTC-5, trader_4 wrote:
On Thursday, July 30, 2015 at 12:06:26 AM UTC-4, Uncle Monster wrote:

Bobby G.

I heard about the discovery of the part of a wing and there must be serial numbers on something that could indicate which plane it came from but how many 777 have crashed in that area? I just heard on the radio that a French team is headed there to examine the piece. 8-)

[8~{} Uncle Crash Monster

Only MH370. They've only lost about six 777 in the two decades
they've been built. The first fatal crash was just last year,
when that Asian airline ran one into the ditch in San Francisco.
One was lost in landing short in London, all survived. Couple
others had fires on the ground I think. Then you had the one
deliberately shot down over Ukraine. None of them could have
been the source.

One very interesting additional possibility will be what they
can learn from the damage to this flap. It's likely that they
can determine something about the likely speed of the impact at
least. A more intriguing possibility is that they might also
be able to determine if the flap was retracted or deployed at
the time of the crash. If it was deployed, that will raise
all kinds of new questions, theories, etc.

Another focus will be on whether that flap could have floated
all the way from where they think the plane went down to where
they found it. You wouldn't think it would be that watertight,
but most likely it did.

Another thing I don't understand why they don't do with searches
like this is to use long term buoys to aid with the search.
I think they actually do, to some limited extent, but I
don't think they track them for long. But with
MH370, if they had released some buoys near the likely crash
area, even a couple weeks after the crash, and track them by
satellite, then they'd know where to look for stuff washing up
a month or a year later. If you knew the buoys showed up in
the area of this island, then we'd have further supporting
evidence and more importantly, people there could have been
alerted to look for stuff. Could be other stuff, passenger
items, etc are there too, but in small amounts, look like
just other random things you find washed up, etc. You can
bet there is a lot of focus now on what else they've picked
up there.


Same thing with those missing 14 year olds.
I think in some of those cases they do release tracking buoys
of some kind. Didn't hear what they did in that case.

PS: Why didn't RG just start a new thread instead of revive
this ancient and long one?

Drain Bamage always strikes unexpectedly but the disappearance of the jetliner is a topic of current interest. There was a story on TV this morning about the improvements to ELT's, Emergency Locator Transmitters for small private planes going on a NASA. It seems to me that commercial jets that fly over the oceans should be equipped with a buoy that ejects upon the crash of the aircraft which contains a record of the GPS position of the plane when it goes down. It could use off the shelf technology and also contain an ELT beacon. One thing that really bothers me about the inability of naval vessels from several countries to locate the crash is the capability of government agencies like the NRO which has satellite eyes on everything all over the world including aircraft traversing the world's oceans. Perhaps some intelligence agency knows damn well where that plane went down but is keeping quiet about it in order to conceal their top secret capabilities. o_O

[8~{} Uncle Secret Monster