Originally Posted by
toaddy
Did they establish just 'what' the partial ping consisted of ? I was under the impression that the 'normal' scheduled pings were the satellite sending out a query to the plane and measuring the time it took to get the response; that time corresponds to a distance (the circles). If the partial ping was initiated by the plane, did the satellite respond and get a further response from the plane? If it did that would seem to be MORE than a 'normal' ping (3 transmissions instead of 2); certainly not a 'partial' ping. What gives ?
From what has been said the last transmission from the aircraft SATCOM was not a standard hourly 'Are You Still Here' transmission but the initiation of a logon sequence. The 'partial' presumably means the full logon transaction was not completed - there may be more transmissions involved than just 3 and presumably this would need to include the hardware ID of the aircraft.