Do you have a source for that or are you just guessing?

I am most likely wrong here, but there is a picture on Unconfirmed report says Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 black box has been found | News.com.au posted 20 minutes ago showing the BlueFin-21 being lowered from the Ocean Shield at sea (I am guessing its Ocean Shield as its a red ship).

its interesting and maybe it has been deployed, but then again the photo may only mean there getting it ready.

@bobstay, its not moving and hasn't for a while and they said it would be used to listen at one of the PC

Unless she has a very long anchor rode then she is certainly underway. There is no AIS navigation status code for 'stopped', so presumably that is the website filling in the details from the SOG rather than a real status change. I wouldn't read too much into it.

Ocean Shield
 

No need to guess about the TPL as the JACC afternoon update says Ocean Shield is continuing with more focused sweeps with it.

Putrajaya starts investigating...
 

@Recc

It is doing under 0.1kn its basically stopped, it most likely has engines shut off and is slowly moving with the current.

I have seen the status stopped numerous times on various vessels when they are basically engines off but not anchored and a lot of fishing vessels show this.

For example, http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/ind.../direction:asc this is history for a NZ fishing vessel.

I believe they are certified and tested to 6,000m.

If the FDR & CVR are revered: just a hunch
 

Just a hunch: if the boxes are ever recovered they will show that the pilots were overcome by some sort of toxic fumes, that the origin and nature of these fumes will remain a mystery. Malaysian Airlines and the way whatever cargo aboard was handled will be blameless. Ditto for Boeing. Ditto fort the pilots, who will be remembered as professionals who attempted to save their jet, and the passengers, in impossible circumstances.

Will this be the truth? Perhaps. But, given the various reputations and commercial interests at stake, the question merits asking.

Remember Habsheim. http://www.crashdehabsheim.net/CRenglish%20phot.pdf

@CUTiger78

Your source is??

According marine traffic this drill rig is currently in Bay of Bengal stationary and has not moved since 4/4/14

Live Ships Map - AIS - Vessel Traffic and Positions - AIS Marine Traffic

I wouldn't expect many changes considering what a rare occurrence this is , the recorders do there job well .
If they end up being switched off then it was a deliberate act , case closed.
Nobody will spend money on Satellite bandwidth for storing what would mostly be useless information.

HMS Echo new location
 

As of 14:17(UTC) AIS (via Orbcomm) is showing HMS Echo on the move at 0.9kn / 16°, somewhat to the East of the Eastern search area.

"If they end up being switched off then it was a deliberate act , case closed."


They cannot be switched off.


They run automatically from the point at which the aeroplane is capable of moving under its' own power to the moment it cannot.

I'm not entirely sure how they will show anything of the sort.

Even if the CVR recording from the initial phase of the flight could be recovered, short of lots of coughing or someone within range of a microphone actually mentioning toxic fumes I can't see there being any definitive evidence of this at all.

Smoke detector should be a FDR parameter. Certainly if it appears on ecam.

rampstalker . . .
 

...But it's hard to conceptualize any credible combination of mechanical failures which would produce such a deceptive, cunning, bizarre flight profile.

Cost would not be an issue. With current state of the art compression and quite simple adaptive technology that problem can easily be solved. Amount of bandwidth and storage consumed will depend on various status indicators. It would not be too difficult for software to recognize some basic ones: "normal", "fault", "serious fault", "possibility of imminent disaster". For at least 99% of the time only the very basic flight parameters will be transmitted in the form of single, highly compressed and very short packet. If there is something unusual to report, it would go immediately, and amount of transmitted data will grow. In a highly dangerous situations separate high capacity link would automatically open, and every scrap of available data would be uploaded, together with all available compressed voice recordings. That way both the average cost and additional satellite bandwidth requirement would be quite modest.

The cost is not the data storage, it is the satellite bandwidth required.

I did a very rough calculation on the AF447 thread (here, but didn't not post the numbers: http://www.pprune.org/tech-log/37643...ml#post4993622).

Back of the envelope, to transmit the FDR and CVR data it would take the equivalent bandwidth of several continuous satcom voice calls (continuous for the flight). The cost of this is roughly comparable to the pilot's salaries for a flight (order of magnitude anyway).

If broadly deployed, there might be quantity discounts. And you could undersample the data _somewhat_. But it would still be expensive.

So then... no price too high for safety, right... but look at it from a different perspective. If you have that amount of extra money to spend on enhancing safety, does live downloading the blackbox data give you the best safety improvement for the money?

Not with the Boeings I fly. The CVR now runs anytime there is power on the aircraft and for ten minutes after power is removed. :eek:

At least that is what we are now told.

Until quite recently the aircraft manuals had the customary boilerplate language about a 30 minute recording. Now it is at least two hours and there is definitely still a circuit breaker in the cockpit to disable the CVR. In fact, if the crew is involved in a reportable event, we are required to pull the CVR breaker and notify maintenance so that the recording can be harvested.

Hmmm. Wonder if the CVR still runs for ten minutes after you pull the breaker? In a commuter plane overrun into the EVAS they did the shutdown checklist down to the CVR breaker, got interrupted and the cell phone calls to ops and the union were both in the NTSB transcript.

Discussions here and elsewhere leave doubt in my mind whether the legally mandated erase function is any more effective than in the analog CVR days. 'Erased' or overwritten CVR conversations in the past were sometimes 'recovered' using some closely held forensic techniques.

I agree that there might not be much on the MH 370 CVR if it is recovered. However the idea that non-volatile memory chips in cameras, tablets and phones of the pax and crew could yield clues certainly has recent precedents in accident investigations.

See for example:

http://dms.ntsb.gov/public%2F55000-5...7%2F550800.pdf

Yes. A 10TB RAID6 with a hot spare (so three of eight disks have to fail before you lose data) costs about $5,000. That should hold all the data from all an airline's aircraft for multiple flights before you have to overwrite them.

10TB of satellite data bandwidth costs $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.

And a bad guy could still turn it off.

The simple solution would be to add a simple location transmitter like the ones used for cargo containers, which could report position to the airline every few minutes from its own GPS. But a bad guy could still turn it off.