News and theories about the missing Malaysian plane

The recorders are typically mounted in the tail on the theory that the rest of the fuselage can protect it. Some are designed to break away in the event of a crash. I don't know how accessible they are during flight, could be they are accessible only by ground maintenance staff.

 

So this is a question for an expert, to see if anything of my wild theorie could be possible . . .

 

Angelique, that's an awful lot of speculation don't you think?
I mean the possibilities are endless.
An ELT (Emergency Locating Transmitter) is located outside of the pressure vessel and not accessible during flight or even from inside the cabin.
The typical response time to these types of incidents is usually so delayed that by the time an effective search team is on scene the battery has been sitting at 4 degree Celsius for almost it's full 30 day service life. That 30 days is under optimum conditions: good state of health for the battery, ELT which includes it's triggering device.
THEN, you need to find the GD thing on an ocean!
The number of variables are mind boggling.
Backscatter, attenuation, crew fatigue, politics, this list approaches endless as well.
Then there is the remote possibility the plane it is parked somewhere on land...
I don't mean to attack you by any means but my point is speculation is very, very inaccurate, misleading and can really do nothing accept confuse the facts which are hard enough to track in the first place.
The only hope is that time will tell and even then, maybe not.

 

Waaaay down on the Ocean floor, among the Caverns and Valleys, the current is rolling the Tail of that airplane through some gully's.
Sometimes the Beep can be heard, because the Tail is Horizontal, and then it's rolled along to the southern end of the Marianas Trench.

This Mystery is going to last forever.

 

Here are some simple non-rigourous counts I made at some web pages listing plane crashes.

I found 639 commercial plane crashes from 1965 to date listed at Commercial Air Crashes
I found 21 crashes where the recorders were not recovered listed at List of Unrecovered Flight Recorders , of which 38% were crashes into water.
I found 243 air crashes listed by location at Crashes by Location. In this list I found 31 crashes into water with a quick search but I could only confirm about half the crashes listed in the List of Unrecovered Flight Recorders.

So what can one make of these numbers?
From the first two lists recorders were unrecovered in 21 of 639 crashes, approximately 3.3%
From the first list 38% of crashes with unrecovered recorders are into water.
From the third list 12% of crashes are into water.
Possibly one can deduce from the last two numbers that it is 3 times (38/12) less likely for recovery of recoders from a crash into water.

note that the numbers do not match between the lists, the lists are long and not particularly well organised for such counts, and I didn't print them out for careful counting. So one should not read too much into these numbers, but it seems that failure to recover recorders is around 4 times more likely if the crash is into water: fairly close to the x3 figure above considering the poor quality of these data and the hasty analysis.

This is actually better than I would have expected and IMHO an indication of the determination of the search teams.

 

Good stuff AK, I am curious about the FDR not recovered?
Were the Plane and Passengers lost also?

While fising in Cook Inlet AK, I pulled up a very corroded tail section of a Super Cub.
The Coast Gurad never found any more info on it though. Too many Cub's went missing in AK.

 

State Trooper plane?

 

This disappearance gets stranger all the time, now three acoustic signals said to correspond to flight recorders frequencies have allegedly been detected hundreds of kilometres apart. Ripley's tales seem mundane by comparison.

 

In most cases the plane was lost and there were fatalities but there is a wide range of situations, some were merely hard landings.


Mostly I wanted to get an overall picture of how useful the beacons were; it seems they do a decent job in aiding recorder recovery even for crashes into deep water. It's not just recovery from deep water that is the problem, some of the unrecovered recorders have been in mountainous or heavily forested areas. The 9/11 recorders were never found, but in that case the cause was known.

In the Malaysian Airlines MH370 case the biggest problem is the mystery surrounding the whole thing, and the total mistrust from the passengers' families of everything coming from the Malaysian officials, who seem to be doing their fair share of spawning conspiracy theories. I've been to Malaysia a couple of times but that was long ago so I don't know a great deal about the local situation and the reasons for the suspicious attitudes on both sides. Most of the planes' passengers were chinese, and Malaysia was threatened by chinese communist insurgents around the time of independence.

 

It seems plausible to me that both the robustness of the FDRs and the sensitivity of the sonar search equipment has greatly improved since the lists you've found were initially compiled. Thus, the probability of finding the FDRs is probably much better than your statistics suggest.

 

Yearly numbers of unrecovered recorders and commercial plane crashes don't vary much from year to year from 1965 to 2013 despite huge increases in air traffic. So, while the recorders are remarkably durable I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion. What has changed the most is the detail and reliablity of the data, and the safety of the planes and air-traffic control systems.

The FRDs and CVRs, the sonar search equipment and deep sea recovery equipment are awesome 20th century achievements. However, for the 21st century we should demand the elimination of loss of data and problems even locating a downed plane, and immediate retrieval and analysis of data at need. The families of the passengers have had zero actual information for a month, that is an unconscionable situation.

These targets have been within our reach for years; it seems odd that, in a vaste high-tech industry to which millions of lives are entrusted every year, the only useful information on the loss of MH370 has come from a system designed primarily for the convenience of the engine manufacturer.

 

I worked in this industry for many years. This is because of costly regulations on existing technology, getting something new approved is very slow and tedious, so they stay with the obsolete technology. there is no requirement to have remote engine monitoring so that is wide open to any innovation, for now anyway. When that gets bogged downed innovation killed with new conforming regulations they will have to switch to some other system to get flight information, like a system to monitor the amount of food and beverages on board to have replacement ready at their destination.

Safety regulations kill innovation, and competition. There used to be many large commercial airframe manufacturers, in the US there is now only one (and they write the regulations that keep all other out).

 

Very true statement, but unfortunately this argument can be used by cowards and sharp tacticians alike. In the army both categories can get court-martialed when disobeying orders. One for the right reasons the other for the wrong reasons. Alas the outcome of such a court-martial is uncertain because if the order came from the highest level often those who gave the order must be kept out of harm. So the brave tactician who dares to disobey a wrong order is at risk to be sacrificed by a court-martial.

 

Yes, that's why I said.. ‘‘wild theorie’’

Yes, because this seems to have started deliberately much more is possible than with a ‘‘normal’’ accident.

 

Mr E, the reports are coming in via the media who inadvertently word it (out of ignorance) misleadingly leaving one to surmise different pings when in fact they are two or three different pings (the ELT, FDR, and the third recorder the name of which completely escapes me at this time), being detected hundreds of kilometres apart. The same devices but from three different locations which is brilliant in reality when it comes to locating.
With any luck, we COULD see some meaningful progress on this recovery in the next few days.