RWA
My question was, could the fact that (as far as I can tell from the transcripts) the ACARS (sorry for the acronym
) messages appear to have come in batches about one minute apart mean that the aeroplane was bucking about a fair bit and the aircraft antenna kept 'losing its line' and having to line up and' re-connect again?
I am sure others may have mentioned this before, but it is probably worth mentioning again, that the timestamps on the ACARS messages relate to the event time and rather than the transmission time over the satellite. The messages may indeed be batched if they have the same transmission priority and the interval between batches will depend of the data rate the A/C is using (600, 1200 or 10,500 bps). From the incomplete data that I have seen, it is clear that SATCOMS transmissions are regular and consistent with an A/C that is tracking the satellite reasonably well up to the last transmission at 02:14