Ontopic Flight 370

Amstel said:
The point I'm making is that long before we tracked iPhones it's been important to know where planes are.

I may be of the misconception that people who fly planes, design planes, and passengers on planes expect that someone knows within a few feet where the plane is because the technology is there.

A long time ago, someone did come up with the idea of implementing a black box to help understand wtf happens post accident.

I can't comprehend 'we just don't do that' when the lives and a plane are at stake.
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The technology is indeed there but if a plane disintegrates in mid-air due to an explosion it's highly possible that the device may not survive. Even if it does it may not survive slamming into the ocean at terminal velocity. Even if it does it may not survive sinking into the ocean if it sprung a leak or is simply too heavy due to the weight of the batteries it has to maintain. And even if it survives all that the batteries may have just gone out, sending a signal to a satellite takes a significant amount of power.

The reason we can track cell phones is because they are in a cell network of towers. If you go off into the mountains we can't track your iphone either.

The black box is not invincible either, in many cases they are destroyed or the data is irretrievable.

As for the "we just don't do that" when the lives and plane are at stake, well that's the free market for you. It took government regulation to force US carriers to employ the black boxes in the first place. A lot of these countries just don't force their airlines to comply with any kind of standards. Fortunately there are international aviation regulations that they have to meet in order to fly to numerous other countries but even then if the home country isn't doing the inspections then the planes might not have what we expect them to have.

It's why I do a lot of research into which middle east airlines I fly out of here.
 
123 said:
This is all provided that the plane actually exploded, which we don't know. It could have been forced to land somewhere. f*ck it could have nose dived into a volcano.
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There aren't very many places you can land a fully loaded 777, and certainly not secretively. Unless someone hacked out and paved a two-mile stretch of jungle unnoticed. They require anything from 5,000-15,000 feet of runway, depending on payload, pressure altitude and precipitation/moisture conditions. (Max. takeoff weight of a 777 at 660,000 lbs. would require a dry landing runway length of about 11,000 feet at sea level, for example).

http://www.boeing.com/assets/pdf/commercial/airports/acaps/7772sec3.pdf

I'm 99.9% sure all of those people are dead.
 
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Floptical said:
Dude go to Vietnam and tell me they have the same level of rules and technology that we do. Your just trolling in hopes you can somehow turn this into Obama's fault
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how is it when your logic fails you call trolling & obama?

It's irrelevant that you bring up Vietnam. They don't have to provide anything. We already have technology to accomplish this without any input from them.
 
Amstel said:
how is it when your logic fails you call trolling & obama?

It's irrelevant that you bring up Vietnam. They don't have to provide anything. We already have technology to accomplish this without any input from them.
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Well since it was in their airspace yes it's important. And who cares what tech we have since we weren't tracking the thing it doesn't matter. All I'm saying is there are many regions of the world that are super effen shady and a few dollars can get you passed just about thing including faking stuff for inspections or paying someone off. I've gone through most of the countries in Asia and Africa and I know how easy it is to the customs guy a $20 and you just walk on through. When I lived in Turkey and were either shipping your car in or out you would have to go down and give the guy a bottle of whiskey and a hundred bucks and he would let you go through customs. If not then they would hold onto your car for months. In most of those areas if you get hassled by a cop for say speeding or something they say you did you pay them a fine directly and on the spot. They keep the money and just move on. So don't tell me those regions over there are up to the same standard with everything as we are. There is a reason the 2 (possibly 4) passengers bought their tickets in Thailand and had the flights going to the home regions as their passports so that way they didn't have to get VISAs through China who would have called BS on it.
 
Floptical said:
Well since it was in their airspace yes it's important. And who cares what tech we have since we weren't tracking the thing it doesn't matter. All I'm saying is there are many regions of the world that are super effen shady and a few dollars can get you passed just about thing including faking stuff for inspections or paying someone off. I've gone through most of the countries in Asia and Africa and I know how easy it is to the customs guy a $20 and you just walk on through. When I lived in Turkey and were either shipping your car in or out you would have to go down and give the guy a bottle of whiskey and a hundred bucks and he would let you go through customs. If not then they would hold onto your car for months. In most of those areas if you get hassled by a cop for say speeding or something they say you did you pay them a fine directly and on the spot. They keep the money and just move on. So don't tell me those regions over there are up to the same standard with everything as we are. There is a reason the 2 (possibly 4) passengers bought their tickets in Thailand and had the flights going to the home regions as their passports so that way they didn't have to get VISAs through China who would have called BS on it.
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You are absolutely correct with this. I have a close friend who works for the FAA and they specialize in doing inspections of planes and hubs that fly and host international flights. There are certain airlines in various parts of the world that are not allowed to fly into the United States because they refuse to meet FAA regulations. It has nothing to do with the age of a plane it has to do with everything you just gave examples of and more.
 
If you've ever been to the 2nd or 3rd world you know how shady most of the planet is. I've spent time in central Asia (former Soviet republics), and boy howdy. American cigarettes and any kind of liquor will get you in and out of anything. Diplomats even tell you that going in. "Bring two cartons of Marlboros when you come. Not for yourself. For the cabbies and the cops." My dad used to give his employees American toilet paper as gifts (among other amenities). They would cry with happiness.
 
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yeppers said:
You are absolutely correct with this. I have a close friend who works for the FAA and they specialize in doing inspections of planes and hubs that fly and host international flights. There are certain airlines in various parts of the world that are not allowed to fly into the United States because they refuse to meet FAA regulations. It has nothing to do with the age of a plane it has to do with everything you just gave examples of and more.
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A few more examples of this. When I lived in Ankara in the late 90's we had two earthquakes that left around 40,000 people dead. Most of the deaths were due to the completely shady construction of the buildings in the cities. They had a rule that if a building wasn't completely built you didn't have to pay taxes on it. So they would build these 1/2 and 3/4 completed buildings where the top few floors were just open frame and leave them that way so they didn't pay. Of course when the quakes hit they all feel like nothing because they weren't structurally sound. It was complete devastation. Of course on the base and at the embassy where the buildings were built by us there was very limited damage.

2nd when we first took the airport region in Iraq I remember doing the initial walkthroughs on Saddam's super nice palaces there. They were all complete crap. It was mainly chicken wire around a framed shape then spackled to look all fancy. You could hit it with something hard and break right through the walls no problem.

I'm just using these examples to show that there are alot of shady practices in other regions of the world and we can't just assume they are working under the same set as us with everything.
 
My friend has given me numerous examples over the years of plane crashes / accidents that have happened in other countries because of their lack of regulation and procedure. I remember a story of a large plane crash in the old Soviet Union because a child was in the cockpit and hit something that caused the plain to crash. What's worse is the plane was way over capacity, people were standing in the isles because there weren't any seats available.
 
I flew an Air Argentina flight from Fiji to New Zealand a couple of years ago. It was a normal airframe but they had take all of the seats out and replaced them with these lighter framed thin seats so they could fit a few more rows in. It was like sitting in a lawn chair.
 
Amstel said:
The point I'm making is that long before we tracked iPhones it's been important to know where planes are.

I may be of the misconception that people who fly planes, design planes, and passengers on planes expect that someone knows within a few feet where the plane is because the technology is there.

A long time ago, someone did come up with the idea of implementing a black box to help understand wtf happens post accident.

I can't comprehend 'we just don't do that' when the lives and a plane are at stake.
Click to expand...

I'm not convinced that we do "have the technology". GPS is one way - from the satellites to the receivers. The satellites themselves accept no incoming communications, save from the military operators of said satellites, and then only from certain uplink locations around the world.

So, what kind of alternative means do we have of data uplink? Iridium sat-phone links, I suppose, or whatever the brandy-new planes are using to sell wifi access. I'm unaware of any other data links to planes in the air (comms are surely still analog, since the infrastructure for shortwave comms has to accommodate everything from the last 4 decades still extant). Surely things like 3G or 4G cellular access are pretty much out of the question, over the ocean.

It's basically the "last mile" quandary writ large, since you can't exactly string fiber or copper to an airplane.
 
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