pilot's union. not much
 

your recollection is correct.

Not only a radio mike, would he stand where he does when he is making his speech, his voice goes so quiet when answering questions, 1/2 the time all you can hear is cameras firing away.

KLN94
You can't, it seems, directly. They obscure it on purpose to prevent people picking and choosing and leaving coverage gaps. Maybe also to make clients pay who must choose.
There is a way to find where a map is, once you are looking at it.
This was posted here by some smart person whose name I have forgotten, sorry:
Incidentally, before anyone sneers at Tomnod, it is run by the very same Digital Globe company that supplied the images which are so central to the current Aussie search.
For all we know these very images were found by the crowd ! Probably not, though, the finder would be shrieking, and the publicity would be good for Tomnod, not just Digital Globe.

Someone asked why focused search near extreme end of the arc. I would say because this location fits with two hypotheses. 1. A deliberate plan to make the plane as hard to find as possible 2. Some mechanical problem and then the plane flew with autopilot until fuel exhausted (seems unlikely to me, but the location they are searching is consistent with this hypothesis).. Anywhere short of this location is arbitrary. It is also possible the pings were detected by a 2nd satellite, which would considerably narrow down the arcs.

We have been told that primary radar tracked something in the middle of the night. This was without any advance notice ie they did not really know what was happening. By the time if the last ping, it was morning and they knew they had a big problem. Every primary radar would have been looking hard. Surely this is the reason the central part of the arc was discounted. Could possibly be because the Pacific satellite didn't see the pings, but as Ana explained there are other reasons why pacific may not have seen. Indian seeing is more reliable than pacific not seeing. So I suspect more likely this area was discounted because they had lots of primary radar looking by time of last ping.

Still don't buy the theft theory. Too many variables, need other people involved, and probably couldn't set it up by the time you knew you had valuable cargo.

The only explanation making sense is that of someone who wanted to die, but wanted to disappear and for the world to never know where or why or how. Internally this individual was very rational - could not have managed this if irrational. But incomprehensible to others. There have been plenty of these throughout history.

Debris question
 

Assuming the fuel ran out and it crashed into the sea from high altitude, would a bit of aircraft 24m long really survive the crash intact?

So, Greta, (fox news) is now going to explore the possibility that MH 370 could have made a successful water landing in the southern Indian ocean,
just like Sully did in the Hudson.

right Greta, why not fly 7 hours to the open ocean to attempt yr tricky water landing. Lucky for us. She has a NTSB expert who doesnt expect that theory would occupy much of the sar peoples time.

greta points out the the cvr "keeps looping every two hours" so, she figers, we arent going to get much......apparently greta expects all we will hear off it is, glug, glug, glug...

thankfully after this " breaking news" analysis, greta is moving on to a discussion of the olympic ice dance team: putin and obama.

Regarding radar coverage, either military or civil, you can bet your bottom dollar that Singapore would have information that they would not make public, ever.


SLFplatine asked about FDR/CVR being ejectable, yes of course they can and Martin Baker, if asked would be happy to produce a unit that under pre set conditions would eject from the aircraft and float. Now the problems, it would have to be a removable self contained unit as regulatory authorities would require a function test now and then, so spare units would be needed and a test rig would be needed, (possibly run by MB), the zeros behind the $ sign just get longer! A unit located in the horizontal stabilizer, designed to eject at an angle, so avoiding fouling the sinking wreckage, which may, by now, be inverted, should suffice, these days many of the electronic boxes are connected via multi pin bayonet type connectors and secured by conventional means to prevent the unit vibrating or being shaken out, back to Martin Baker who specialise in perfecting systems where conventional securing can be breached when required.


Short answer, yes, an ejectable and floating CVR/FDR is quite feasible.

AF447 beacon again
 

It seems necessary to specify:
one of the ULB (FDR) was not found (dolphin/shark/ E.T /other).
The second one (recovered) was out of duty.
BEA declared the CVR ULB (S/N ST24703) [cvr.ulb.examination.report]

Friday morning AMSA media release
 

Here.

This lists the planned search aircraft departure times.

Any idea who the civil Gulfstream just launched to the search area would be?

Yes, this is all very nice and all that but you must meet the following:

Number of channels ................. 4
Impact tolerance ...................... 3400 Gs /6.5ms
Fire resistance .......................... 1100 deg C /30 min
Water pressure resistance ........ submerged 20,000 ft <<< 8900 psi

That's just the executive summary.

SSD for CVR / FDR
 

Markdem.

CVR do use SSD e.g. (Aircraft Data Recorders | Rugged Solid State Drives | CWC-AE) selcted as it was one of the first results on Google.

However, beware when lookiing at the data you have for that SSD you use for logging. There is a difference between MTBF and drive endurance. SSD are only guarenteed to be written to a certian number of times. Enterprise grade drives are typically specified to endure 5 years of being written to a certain number of times per day. So you buy different endurance levels for different applications.

It is also not as simple as assuming because you can have 100k programme / erase cycles you can expect to write to the entire avaliable memory 100k times, short verison, you cannot write to individual memory cells, you have to write in blocks of cells, so even changing one wears many cells (Write amplification) of course there are clever flash memory management algorithms in the SSD controller working to reduce these effects and extend life.

@rigbyrigz
 

I posted the original instructions and had that problem too until I worked out why. I'll wager that the reason why you're ending up over mainland China is because you've missed out the comma separating the 2 co-ordinates or left an erroneous character in. To get the correct location the co-ords should be 4.607861, 90.746107.
Hope that helps ;)

This wouldn't be the first time that a privately owned aircraft has joined the search in Australia.

Abby Sunderland and Tony Bullimore are examples of this.

There are some very generous businessmen in Australia and they would likely not charge for their services as they have not charged in the past.

The first item is software - not related to storage device (except for recording length)
Item 3 and 4 have to do with the CVR\FDR it self, not the storage device. (I have never seen a PCB that can withstand anywhere near 1100C).

Item 2 - Honest question. Why would you need to withstand acceleration\deceleration for 6.5ms? Besides, proper shock absorption will take care of it anyway. How do you think they do it now?

Day 4 search area is narrower than day 3.

http://i.imgur.com/h4L9ram.png

SSDs are actually easier to recover erased data from than magnetic based drives, a little appreciated truth. However, because of the way that consumer SSDs are designed this recovered data tends to be less contiguous making it more difficult to extract coherent information. Overall, I wouldn't be optimistic but if they pass the CVR along to the NSA I wouldn't be entirely pessimistic about their chances either. I'm sure they would find it a nice challenge.

Evey: "I posted the original instructions and had that problem too until I worked out why. I'll wager that the reason why you're ending up over mainland China is because you've missed out the comma separating the 2 co-ordinates or left an erroneous character in. To get the correct location the co-ords should be 4.607861, 90.746107.
Hope that helps"

Thank you Evey for providing this useful API info to me and many others!

Turned out the problem is NOT the punctuation (takes the comma, or ignores it) but if you Google the Lat + Long, you get China, if you Google-MAP it, you get the ocean off Indonesia. Google is a bit quirky here if you don't specifically choose MAP function there. Cheers.

Gulfstream
 

The Japan Coast Guard has been flying a Gulfstream:

Sailors looking out windows trump technology in jetliner search | Malaysia | The Malay Mail Online

But the press release says civilian.

From a year ago:

Second chance at life comes at a cost - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

"Along with the Orion, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority had at various stages of the rescue mission five planes in the air. Two of those were chartered commercial jets - a Bombardier global express and a Gulfstream 550."

Sea currents
 

Neogen's map

The consecutive search areas show a pattern of a large swirl - probably following data of sea currents in that area.