Ah, but did you know, “one of our submarines is missing.”?
Is it even credible the that US military is not able to track every single aircraft on the planet right now?
- The tech wouldn’t be too hard, once you have global satellite coverage. Tracking a few thousand, or even a few tens (hundreds?) of thousands would probably be possible at this point.
- They might not be able to identify what is happening or happened, but I would be shocked at this point if they couldn’t pinpoint the location.
Which leaves them in the position of knowing what happened (or at least where), but not willing to admit they are tracking air traffic that closely.
Of course, I could be full of BS - does anyone with actual knowledge of the computer or technical challenges of such tracking have a more knowledgeable POV?
I’m not sure I want to know. Air France 477 crashed just because the pilots failed to keep it at speed in instrument black-out. That scares the bejezus out of me, all they had to do was keep flying straight. I can rationalize horrible weather or terrorism, that was unfathomable to me.
I definitely want to know…that information changed training rules and made it less likely in the future.
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If the phone system if configured correctly, it should either go straight to voicemail or give an error message along the lines of “The number you are trying to reach is not in range”. One of the phone companies in the area probably doesn’t properly unregister phones when they go out of range or something.
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Plenty of terrorist acts go unclaimed (eg, Pan Am 103).
My phone frequently misleads the people who call me into thinking that I’m already on the phone or I have the phone shut off. It’s gone to voicemail when the caller was in the room with me, and I had my phone on and in front of me. I always figured they’ve oversold their capacitry, and my phone really isn’t connected to anything for much of the time.
Given the poor performance when there’s no emergency, I have a hard time believing that the phone system might know something that air traffic control doesn’t know.
Yes. In the USA, it’s practically impossible, as ever since people have been flying, the nation has become more adept at tracking aircraft. And lots of areas don’t have lots of coverage - e.g. Steve Fossett’s disappearance a number of years ago - albeit in a small aircraft.
Point is, SE Asia has nowhere near the combination of military and civilian radar coverage that the USA / Western Europe have. The plane, in the position they indicate on the CNN etc maps, would seem to be right in between where you might find radar installations, hence the inability to precisely determine what happened - it would have been on the edge of both Malaysian and Vietnamese capabilities.
Add in the mix that aircraft operation and co-ordination won’t be at the same level as the USA and Western Europe - not that it’s duff, it’s just not at the same level of ultra-professionalism - and it kind of adds up how it could disappear quickly.
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447 crashed because a storm lightning terror-struck pilot pulled back on the stick into a stall until the very end. Reality is stranger than the Twilight Zone:(
Wired on the incident - ‘how a plane can disappear’
It bugs me that modern aircraft don’t have multiple little automated transmitters for ‘bad things seem to be happening’, that would initiate in this kind of incident.
In the United States, almost all planes are required to be equipped with Emergency Locator Transmitters. That is the result of an airplane that crashed in Alaska in the 1970s that killed two U.S. politicians…the crash site has never been found.
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I could understand that 10, 15 years ago, they were expensive - but they cost a couple of hundred bucks now!
C’mon airlines and manufacturers!
BTW, if you want to learn more about why planes crash and why they’re sometimes hard to find, there is a great documentary series called Mayday/Air Crash Investigations. Each 45 minute episode focuses on a single famous crash and explains in detail why it occurred. Most of the episodes of the show can be found on Youtube.
The interesting thing to me is that airplane crashes are symptomatic of technological failings in general. Typically there’s some big mystery, as with the Malaysia airlines crash now, but ultimately most crashes seem to be a result of several small errors that by themselves would not have been fatal but in conjunction at the right time pretty much guarantee disaster.
For example, the Helios 522 crash is a good example of a 737 doomed by a series of small errors:
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It’s an excellent show, really gives detail and understanding. I’ve always been so impressed when an aircrew get a stricken plane down, especially if they do it with minimal injury.
Oh no - lax cockpit arrangements in the co-pilot’s history … I’ve heard this stuff before.
That’s because we’ve spent a lot of effort engineering out most single points of failure for aircraft. There are enough redundancies and backups now that any one failure is unlikely to cause a disaster. It takes several problems compounding to actually bring a plane down now.
One of the more interesting contributing causes of disasters is cockpit culture. Is the captain the absolute authority of the aircraft and everybody else his duty, or is it more egalitarian with everybody having a say in how the aircraft is operated. The former has cost several lives, including Tenerife’s collision of two 747s, because it removes the redundancy factor that is built into the pilot/co-pilot arrangement.
Mr. Ambassador, you’ve lost another submarine?
Indeed. KLM tried to get hold of their chief pilot after that accident, to get his advice, only to discover he was flying the one that caused it.
The latest updates regarding the people who boarded the plane with the stolen passports seem to indicate they were Iranian nationals trying to escape and get asylum in some other country. It would be surprising if they were responsible for the loss of the plane.
Yep…and then there’s Aeroflot 593:
Cockpit voice and flight data recorders revealed the presence of the pilot’s 12-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son on the flight deck. The children apparently had unknowingly disabled the A310 autopilot’s control of the aircraft’s ailerons
while seated at the controls. The aircraft had then rolled into a steep
bank and near-vertical dive from which the pilots were unable to regain
control
