Malaysian airliner feared lost..

[JRS]

The Australian PM has announced that two objects spotted in the southern Indian Ocean might be part of the plane. Aircraft from the Australian Air Force have been dispatched to investigate.

Indeed, its all over the news now. Seems like a very credible lead.

http://my.news.yahoo.com/australia-...ssibly-malaysian-plane-035148517--sector.html

Lets hope the plane(s) are able to locate these objects soon, though they did say its difficult for sure.

 

[Starkers]

The BBC posted an article re Goodfellow's theory as well.

Interesting infographic detailing where the search is currently focusing

It seems hard to counternance this being an accident, especially if the plane was on a direct course for the South Pole as has been suggested. Of course even if the wreckage is of the plane, and even if the flight recorder is recovered the full truth of the matter may be hard to piece togeather. I see the FBI are now working with the authorities in Malaysia to see if they can reconstruct deleted data from the pilot’s homemade flight simulator.

 

[EmoBorg]

Background stories of some of the passengers and crew on board the missing airliner.

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/passengers-crew-board-missing-malaysia-plane-115644869.html

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

Fox News host Bill Hemmer explains missing plane: ‘It took 2,000 years to find Noah’s Ark’

have to wonder how long it would take to find anything resembling intelligence on fox news.

It could be the subject of a journalistic investigation, just not by Fox

 

[Captrek]

Even if the black boxes are found we may never know what happened, because the cockpit voice recorder holds only the last two hours of audio.

In a day when an iPod Nano can hold hundreds of hours of high quality audio, why can't a cockpit voice recorder hold cockpit chatter over the length of a typical flight?

 

[Peach Wookiee]

Maybe those last two hours will tell us something...

 

[B.J.]

Even if the black boxes are found we may never know what happened, because the cockpit voice recorder holds only the last two hours of audio.

In a day when an iPod Nano can hold hundreds of hours of high quality audio, why can't a cockpit voice recorder hold cockpit chatter over the length of a typical flight?

Maybe, but your iPod can't survive 3400 Gs, fire, deep sea pressure, and sea water immersion. Not to mention that there are several different FDRs, some of which are recording things other than audio and for much longer (17-25 hours).

 

[Finn]

^Yeah, perhaps the last 5 minutes goes something like "Alright, it looks like this is it. Seven hours gone by, and we are somewhere west of Perth. Here's what happened. It all started when *insert the answer to the billion dollar answer*".

 

[Kirby]

I was amazed to learn it wasn't until the early 2000s when they finally stopped using audio tapes in the FDR to record the cockpit conversations and switched over to digital audio recorders. It's probably too costly to keep up with ever changing technology, but you would think that they would be able to record the entire flight by now, but yeah, only the last several minutes of the flight are all that they really need.

 

[Trekker4747]

Even if the black boxes are found we may never know what happened, because the cockpit voice recorder holds only the last two hours of audio.

Yeah, what could the last two hours of audio possibly tell us?!

Wait.... What?!

I do agree in this day and age one would think the black box would be better capable of recording several hours worth of audio and data and would have better homing devices.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Fox News host Bill Hemmer explains missing plane: ‘It took 2,000 years to find Noah’s Ark’

CNN is giving the idiots at Fox a run for their money:

Is it preposterous to think a black hole caused Flight 370 to go missing?

Yes, Don. Yes it is.

As bad is the former Inspector General of the Department of Transportation saying that a "small black hole would suck in our entire universe" I know her job doesn't really require knowledge of Junior High level astrophysics, but seriously?

 

[Scout101]

Yeah, what could the last two hours of audio possibly tell us?!

Wait.... What?!

I do agree in this day and age one would think the black box would be better capable of recording several hours worth of audio and data and would have better homing devices.

You were trying to be snarky, but the whole point on this one is that they may have been unconscious/dead and flying on autopilot for some time prior to crash, right? So, if they flew for more than 2 hours that way, the only thing on the entire recording will be the crash bit, with lots of silence (or just ambient noise) prior.

Since an iPod nano the size of a quarter can now hold 128GB, and regular flash drives are even smaller than THAT, seems like a 2 hour limit is pretty stupid, and may cause us to miss the reason for this crash. No reason it couldn't be increased to, say, 18 hours or so (or whatever the max flight length is), and you'd always have the ENTIRE flight recorded. Maybe something minor at takeoff was something that turned out to be important later?

For example, the last space shuttle crash. If you had the last couple hours of the flight, you'd just see a quick blip and then death. Since we've got the entire thing, video and audio, we can identify that something at takeoff a week prior was what really doomed the flight...

 

[chrisspringob]

Well, even if the cockpit voice recorder has nothing on it for the last two hours, that in itself would be a valuable piece of information, as it would suggest that there's a strong possibility that no one was alive in the cockpit during the final two hours, thereby strengthening the probability of it being some kind of massive accident.

On the other hand, if it was a hijacker / suicidal pilot or whatever, then they might have been alive during the last two hours, and presumably would have made some noise before the plane went down.

 

[Starkers]

Even if the new search area is the location where the plane ended up, finding the black box won't be easy. It's taking search planes 4 hours just to reach the area, the waves are incredibly high and the water very deep.

 

[Gov Kodos]

Fox News host Bill Hemmer explains missing plane: ‘It took 2,000 years to find Noah’s Ark’

CNN is giving the idiots at Fox a run for their money:

Is it preposterous to think a black hole caused Flight 370 to go missing?

Yes, Don. Yes it is.

As bad is the former Inspector General of the Department of Transportation saying that a "small black hole would suck in our entire universe" I know her job doesn't really require knowledge of Junior High level astrophysics, but seriously?

What do you think they keep in that black box?

 

[Marc]

Well, even if the cockpit voice recorder has nothing on it for the last two hours, that in itself would be a valuable piece of information, as it would suggest that there's a strong possibility that no one was alive in the cockpit during the final two hours, thereby strengthening the probability of it being some kind of massive accident.

that's where the devices like the flight data recorder would come into play.

they would retain records of control inputs, system settings, aircraft performance.

For example there was a recent case where a pilot in Africa deliberately crashed his aircraft killing all aboard. The voice recorder captured the sounds of the co-pilot trying to re-enter the flight deck, the flight data recorder captured the setting of the altitude for the autopilot to below sealevel for the region.

 

[Trekker4747]

If I'm not too much mistaken the data recorder holds information stretching further back into the flight (if not for the entire flight.) But it's pretty nuts that the voice recorder only holds two hours of information when an iPod can hold 200 hours of audio.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Cockpit Voice Recorders only record the last two hours before overwriting the previous recording, but it's two hours from numerous different audio sources within the cockpit (I think there was something like nine or ten different mics), so it's not just a single audio recording. It starts adding up quickly in terms of memory storage. It's ten simultaneous synchronized recordings being saved rather than just one. Which is not to say there's no room for improvement.

It's easy to just introduce the next generation iPod when you want to improve data storage there, not so much when it's a black box that has to survive horrific conditions, has to meet standards of a bunch of worldwide agencies, airlines, and manufacturers, and has to be worth the multi-billion dollar cost of making the massive change when incidents that require more than two hours of voice recording time are extremely rare.

There are plans to increase the recording time and to add video in the cockpit however.

 

[Marc]

Cockpit Voice Recorders only record the last two hours before overwriting the previous recording, but it's two hours from numerous different audio sources within the cockpit (I think there was something like nine or ten different mics), so it's not just a single audio recording. It starts adding up quickly in terms of memory storage. It's ten simultaneous synchronized recordings being saved rather than just one. Which is not to say there's no room for improvement.

It's easy to just introduce the next generation iPod when you want to improve data storage there, not so much when it's a black box that has to survive horrific conditions, has to meet standards of a bunch of worldwide agencies, airlines, and manufacturers, and has to be worth the multi-billion dollar cost of making the massive change when incidents that require more than two hours of voice recording time are extremely rare.

There are plans to increase the recording time and to add video in the cockpit however.

The CVR is also very useful in investigating non-crash incidents as well but there have been a number of cases where the required recording was overwritten because the circuit breaker wasn't pulled after landing.

So n increase in recording time can only be a good thing.

Not sure about video though - you'd have to massively increase the storage capacity yet still remain within the confines outlined above.

 

[Captrek]

Cockpit Voice Recorders only record the last two hours before overwriting the previous recording, but it's two hours from numerous different audio sources within the cockpit (I think there was something like nine or ten different mics), so it's not just a single audio recording. It starts adding up quickly in terms of memory storage. It's ten simultaneous synchronized recordings being saved rather than just one. Which is not to say there's no room for improvement.

Do you know what kind of quality they get from each source? I'd think that recording cockpit noises which are mostly voice would require a lower bit rate and be more compressible compared to music; then again I would not have thought that ten microphones are needed to cover a room as small as the cockpit. I infer that, despite the name, they must be designed to capture a heck of a lot more than just speech.