Where is the Debris
 

While the Australian effort has been focused on an area of 36,000 sq km, the area seen by French satellites that showed 122 objects is 400,000 sq km - that's pretty big, about the size of California.

I don't hold much hope for radar being used to search for debris in that environment. Surface borne India-band would be the only real option and that would need to be within say ten miles at the most to detect small pieces of debris. Sea clutter can be managed to a certain degree by adjusting gain / pin attenuation but that comes with the expense of loss of range.

Radar IMO would only be of any use once the debris range location has been already identified.

Causes and explanations
 

IanW: Actually they did mention the turbulence and told the rear crew that the pax should be strapped in. However, it is always like that flying through the ITCZ. The CVR and DFDR showed the LOC was almost certainly due to lack of experience/practice in limited panel manual flight at altitude with unreliable speed indications when in Alternate Law.

Yes yes but a passenger advisory is routine and not a notable comment of concern between pilots. Subsequent focusing on inadequate pilot experience/practice is too often an expediency by event reconstructors with competing agendas, and as an explanation misleads from or ignores possible airline system (et al) inadequacy and the other workload increases you mention which are all cumulative inside a time crunch. You are suggesting that 100 or 1000 other airliners, crews, instrumentation, and identical conditions (which we don't really know) would result in 99 or 999 flight completions with only AF447 failing because of the pilot inadequacy. My point regards the other 99, or 9999. Most accidents wouldn't occur if the aircraft remained completely intact and there was adequate time, altitude, and information to figure things out. AF447, and perhaps MH370 may not have had either. So were those two outcomes singular or more systemic in nature? If the latter, we should all be interested in understanding the situation as much as is possible and promoting necessary changes to prevent repetition. If in the future major loss of flight instrumentation with the most up to date systems were to occur again in the same weather situations, would it again be the pilots fault?

French Satellite pictures
 

This picture is visible on this site here:
Boeing disparu : 122 débris flottants repérés par satellite - France Info

http://i61.tinypic.com/rkpl08.jpg

The pictures were taken by a Satellite owned by Airbus Defence and Space.
As we know these debris are not positively identified as MAS370 ones yet.
The pictures were published today Wednesday.

Before the FDR/CVR stop calling us?
 

How do you 'confirm' a primary radar return (possibly 200nm WNW of Penang VOR) being that of flight MH370?

Together with all the cavorting about (FL45, FL295, 45,000 feet, FL120, etc etc), was that confirmed as being MH370?

If you take the left turn at the FIR boundary as its Last Known Position; if you believe that a crew in trouble is most likely to turn off the airway and head for 'home' if only 40 mins out from KUL; and if you use the data from all Inmarsat 'ping' arcs (do we have them yet?); and using all Capt Kremin's good works with isogonals etc, do we not then get as likely an impact point as they are hoping to obtain by backtracking 18-day old debris?

Especially if the 'final' arc is used as the impact arc - the partial ping at 0019hrs UTC (was it?)

It would be a good place to start trailing your TPL-25 towed array, whilst waiting for a better spot...

Covered in detail days ago. It may have been deleted but the short answer is that an air defence system maintains a recognised air picture. A tracker places a Track Number against a contact, in this case MH370, and the system will then associate the track label with the aircraft.

Where the aircraft goes dark the tracker may have to re-associate the track. Admittedly it is possible to re-associate to the wrong track but, assuming other aircraft and track labels remain associated and only MH370 lost tracking then re-association should not be questioned.

The Dutch navy aircraft had the following damage though during the ditching (in rough sea):
Lost one wing, other wing snapped off near engine, tail section and part of the rear fuselage detached. All 12 crew got out though but 3 didn't make it to the life rafts and drowned.

Source: Flight International

Re comms precautions: maybe time to consider a battery backup satellite phone in the cabin for cases where the flight deck is for some reason closed off to the crew etc. You'd need to have safeguards against sabotage of course.

How Inmarsat Hacked Their Data to Find Flight MH370
 

Detailed scientific explanation of the complex mathematical puzzle solved by Inmarsat engineers surviving on pizza for 6 days/nights while working on the problem.


Physics Buzz: How Inmarsat Hacked Their Data to Find Flight MH370

Visual/Radar Search
 

A question for any ex-Nimrod guys on this thread, and forgive me if this has already come up but I'm not going to go through 8300 replies to find out!
Watching the TV reports of the P-3's and others flying the search, some of the pictures seemed to show the aircraft flying pretty low, maybe 500' ish. This struck me a little odd in that unless you flew almost directly over an object you were cutting down everybody's field of vision and that a search from a higher altitude would let you see more area. This, I presume, would also limit a radar search. If the initial objects they were looking for were about 75' in length and possibly semi-submerged I would have thought a search from a higher level looking vertically down rather than horizontally would have made life easier and given more time for the searchers.
What were the recommended procedures when the UK had aircraft that could actually do this kind of thing.

It has, recently.

First consideration is to stay below cloud.

A low radar look angle might be better at a longer range.

The media show the aircraft flying low - this makes good video. The aircraft may already have made faster passes at greater heights looking for the larger object - doesn't make good video.

For the small objects Dai Farr explained how they establish best range for a visual and radar detection and the height to fly.

Pontius Navigator
Long endurance not long range

True, however a Predator Sea Avenger of a ship with approx 20 hours endurance could be useful with the right sensor equipment fitted.

Passed out pilots don't switch off systems.

Soundman

I'm not an ex Nimrod, but ex 771 819 Seaking SAR.

The reason is that it is really really difficult to spot things from the air at any distance.

We used to carry out Royal Navy Sea Drills in Falmouth Harbour for training aircrew in sea survival once a week. The "casualties" would be in single seat life rafts. These are coffin sized and dayglo orange sitting up about 60cm above sea level.
Even in smooth inshore waters it is astonishing how close you have to be to see them. We would fly out from RNAS Culdrose looking for them but often had to just fly towards the tender that looked after them just to get close enough to ID. This was on smooth inshore water.

Yes, if you flew higher in the P3 your horizon would be greater, but the cleared swath of sea checked would be no wider, and slightly less well checked.

To give an idea, in a Seaking I would expect to be flying a 60kts or less and 200ft or less if looking for small objects

LoneWolf_50

Predator Sea Avenger, but as Pontius pointed out what assets are available in that area to launch it, only a thought for more on station search time.

Do you really think there's a TV crew out there 4 hours off shore taking pictures of the aircraft while they are searching?

I reckon they are both pretty much spot on to be honest.

No counter argument for either against the other.

Improving the inmarsat data.
 

To improve the precision of the inmarsat data two things could be done:

1. Hand the data over to some radio astronomers. Their toolset for dealing with signals is outstanding.

2. Fly a calibration flight. Charter a long range bizjet with the same class of sat terminal fitted. Communicate over the bird throughout the flight down the calculated MH370 path. Capture this data and process it. Refine the MH370 calcs based on this.

Strictly the A321 did not end up in 1 piece, the lower aft fuselage was pretty much torn off.

However, I am not sure the question is whether it can be in "1 piece" or not. It is whether it will remain intact enough to sink without much trace, or whether it will disintegrate to such an extent that light debris, even bodies, will remain floating to be found.

I have little doubt that a 777 could be ditched without the cabin (where the light stuff is) disintegrating, and thus sinking without trace. Whether that happened here ???

RE: Improving the Inmarsat data. by UnreliableSource
 

From TMF Associates MSS blog which is one of the links previously posted.

"Last week Inmarsat performed an analysis of pings received from other aircraft flying in the Indian Ocean region to confirm that this effect is consistent across all of these planes and therefore concluded that MH370 must have been to the south of the satellite at the time of the last ping, not to its north."

So, I think this in essence "calibrated" the data and the mathematical analysis.

How big is an escape slide?
 

I'm not connected with the aviation industry other than as a frequent passenger and a fascination with anything aeronautic so please excuse what may be a basic question.

How big are the escape slides on the 777 and similar aircraft when fully inflated?

Just wondering if perhaps these may be what is being seen from the satellites and they are getting blown about making them hard to locate from the surface.