Search on after Malaysia Airlines flight vanishes

[mistermack]

I still can't understand why they don't make black boxes that float.

Anyone?

MM should design one.

There's absolutely no need.

Just design one that doesn't sink.

[rainbow]

Just design one that doesn't sink.

How would that work?

[PsychoSerenity]

I still can't understand why they don't make black boxes that float.

Anyone?

How would you plan on making something less dense than water that can also survive a plane crash?

It could sort of be done, but it would have to involve a system that automatically ejects the flight recorder before the crash.

[Warren Dew]

It could sort of be done, but it would have to involve a system that automatically ejects the flight recorder before the crash.

Apparently Navy planes have been doing this part for years.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati ... s/6338397/

[rainbow]

$3.5 million to study this?

I could've told them it was a good idea for half of that.

[mistermack]

The thing is, even though the black boxes and their pings leave a lot to be desired, they do the job in 99.9 percent of the cases.
I believe in the Air France incident, the black boxes were so damaged, they weren't able to ping at all, but that's rare.

If they improved the tracking of the planes, so that they knew exactly where to look, then the current system, poor though it is, would be good enough. It wouldn't be thirty days, before they started searching the right spot. It would be just a few days. So that's what I would fix first.
They have the satellites, they have the systems. How hard would it be for the pings to the satellites to include a gps fix? And design it so that it can't be over-ridden.

In this case, they could have sent the sensitive equipment straight to where the plane crashed, on day one, not a vague location, on day thirty.

I think they could do that sort of stuff very quickly, without having to re-design the black boxes, or the planes.

[macdoc]

The tech was already on the plane
It costs $10 per flight for the software licence - Malayasia AIr decided to skip that cost.

[mistermack]

The tech was already on the plane
It costs $10 per flight for the software licence - Malayasia AIr decided to skip that cost.

I think they could soon get that cost down, if they made it obligatory, and put the software job out to tender.
If you know you will be getting a fee from every plane in the sky, you're going to make a pretty competitive bid.

[macdoc]

some good news

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: 2 new signals in search area buoys hope
By Ed Payne and Greg Botelho, CNN
April 9, 2014 -- Updated 0413 GMT (1213 HKT)

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/09/world ... ?hpt=hp_t1

[Faithfree]

We need a hungry Pavlov's whale. A cetacean that has been repeatedly fed delicious krill after following the sound of a 'black box' pinger.

[macdoc]

Don't think even sperm whales make it that deep but a dolphin could certainly hear it easily I would think.

Seems they feel they are within kilometers now

[mistermack]

There is one whale that goes deeper than Sperm Whales, nearly 10,000 feet.
Not Pavlov's, it's somebody's beaked whale. I would use whatever they use on the drug dogs for a reward. They go mental for it. Maybe they give em a little sniff of cocaine ?

[mistermack]

It's looking like the batteries on the pingers have run out. They haven't heard a ping for about a week now.
When you look at the size of the black boxes, it's amazing that they have settled for a thirty day life of the batteries. How much bigger would the boxes be, if they gave them sixty days battery life?
Probably just a few inches each way. The whole box is about the size of the average cool box, and a lot of that is insulation and padding. The batteries must actually be a pretty small part of the box.

The other thing that I would have thought that they would have done, would be to design the boxes to only ping at certain times. If they only pinged at midday and midnight, UTC time, then the batteries would last much longer, and there would be greater certainty about the signal actually coming from a black box.

If they were picking up signals at 2:45 UTC, then that would tell them that there was something else, making a false but similar ping.
If the ping that they heard started dead on midday or midnight, then it's a strong indication that it's the actual boxes.

[Hermit]

The other thing that I would have thought that they would have done, would be to design the boxes to only ping at certain times. If they only pinged at midday and midnight, UTC time, then the batteries would last much longer, and there would be greater certainty about the signal actually coming from a black box.

If they were picking up signals at 2:45 UTC, then that would tell them that there was something else, making a false but similar ping.
If the ping that they heard started dead on midday or midnight, then it's a strong indication that it's the actual boxes.

If pingers only transmitted at restricted times, searches would be limited to just those times. That's because their range of transmission under water is 25 kilometres at best. Search vehicles would have to stop sweeping an area until the next time pinging is expected to occur.

[JimC]

The other thing that I would have thought that they would have done, would be to design the boxes to only ping at certain times. If they only pinged at midday and midnight, UTC time, then the batteries would last much longer, and there would be greater certainty about the signal actually coming from a black box.

If they were picking up signals at 2:45 UTC, then that would tell them that there was something else, making a false but similar ping.
If the ping that they heard started dead on midday or midnight, then it's a strong indication that it's the actual boxes.

If pingers only transmitted at restricted times, searches would be limited to just those times. That's because their range of transmission under water is 25 kilometres at best. Search vehicles would have to stop sweeping an area until the next time pinging is expected to occur.

Perhaps ping all the time, but also double the rate for half an hour at the times mm suggested?

Best of both worlds...