Originally Posted by
opsmarco
Well, since a lot of people here doesn't seem to understand what's going on regarding the ACARS/SATCOM stories in the press, let's recap what's going on regarding the new information from the US.
- MAS ACARS comms only work thru VHF since they chose not to pay for the extra fee for ACARS SATCOM link
- That 777-200 is SATCOM equipped
- What was found by US Government services (NSA, or maybe they asked Iridium directly to check the logs) is that, since the a/c ACARS system was out of VHF coverage, the system tried to connect thru SATCOM. But since MAS doesn't have a contract for that, connection was rejected, but remains a trace in their logs.
- That means that what they actually found is the log indicating every time the aircraft ACARS system tried to log in thru SATCOM and failed due to the lack of contract for that. Since the ACARS system onboard that specific aircraft tried for 4 hours after its disappearance to connect via SATCOM to the ACARS network, it means the aircraft was, at least, powered on and, since not found anywhere yet, probably flying.
I think that is reasonably accurate but for one item.
It is possible that NSA satellites detected the VHF pings by the ACARS/RR systems, not any attempted satellite pings.
Your summary assumes the pings were for satellites rather than VHF ground stations.
You may be right, but it seems to make more sense for it to have taken this long because NSA needed to sort through many, many radio events rather than just look at satellite logs.
YMMV.