Contact lost with Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777

[scotty123]

Glenn Miller didn't die in a plane crash.

Do tell

Official status is MIA according to Wikipedia.

True, never thought of it that way though

 

[Wio Gumflapdinand]

Just popped back and am absolutely shocked and not a little disappointed that Bluemoon has yet to come up with a location and cause of the incident.

What the fcuk? Get on it!

Or, you could wait a bit and see where they find the aircraft and THEN information will come MUCH FASTER.

BTW, it appears pretty safe at this point that the pilot(s) probably had something to do with the disappearance. Hard to see how t(he)y couldn't given what appears to be the distillation of latest information.

Tick tock....

And, yes, VERY tongue in cheek after being chastised for saying people need to be a little patient. Very few people realize how difficult it is to find something in the ocean when you have an idea where it might be, or just how big the ocean really is, or just how small an aircraft is compared to the big blue.

I can fully understand how difficult it is to locate this plane, ever drop your soap in the bath it's a proper **** to find

 

[scotty123]

This gets more bizarre by the minute, saying now it was tracked by radar flying towards the Andaman Islands, a quick google shows they are on the way to India
Transponder switched off by hand and flight direction point to a highjacking they are now saying

 

[dronefromsector7g]

This gets more bizarre by the minute, saying now it was tracked by radar flying towards the Andaman Islands, a quick google shows they are on the way to India
Transponder switched off by hand and flight direction point to a highjacking they are now saying

Or the pilot fancied an authentic chicken biryani

 

[pominoz]

This gets more bizarre by the minute, saying now it was tracked by radar flying towards the Andaman Islands, a quick google shows they are on the way to India
Transponder switched off by hand and flight direction point to a highjacking they are now saying

Or the pilot fancied an authentic chicken biryani

Aren't the Andaman Islands where the tribesmen kill any fucker that goes there?

 

[Gelsons Dad]

With the greatest respect GD, I have to ask, do engines have their own transponders? I doubt it somehow (where would the antennas be installed, for example (777 engines are mounted on pylons below the wing so no line of sight to a satellite), do they have their own battery supply?). If the onboard communications systems were disabled then how the ferk could Rolls Royce know how long the engines were running? Perhaps Rolls Royce could offer a GPS upgrade option so that they could be reporting the location of the engines independently of the rest of the aircraft?

I would assume that several different performance indicators from the aircraft systems would be aggregated into a common data stream (telemetry) that would then be sent as a burst of data over the available satellite link? HF is an option but would only allow low speed data transmission.

Your last assumption is correct. The data is sent via satcom where it piggybacks on the ACARS network to various end users. However, if you haven't subscribed to the service when your system tries to handshake with the satellite it is rejected. The term "ping" is being used by the media to describe the handshake signal transmitted from the aircraft.

Thus the cheeky Malaysians are not lying when they say no more acars data was sent. But what they are not admitting is that the aircraft was trying to but they didn't pay for the service so the data wasn't sent.

There are lots of multi spectrum receivers which will have heard the "ping" the military term for the assets that listen for this is ELINT.

I would expect the satellite to still be 'transponding' the data whether the owners have paid for a subscription or not, the aircraft would still be transmitting data within the uplink frequency and, again an assumption on my part, the header data containing the originating aircraft's identifier would still be processed. The satellite itself is a 'dumb' device, whatever appears in the uplink will be translated into the downlink, processing of the data is a ground based function after the data arrives at an earth station (in satellite communication terms).

To put it another way, a mobile phone can still make an emergency call even if the owner hasn't paid the bill; the satellite system will still be transferring data whether the aircrafts owners have paid for a service or not, so there should not be a situation where only Rolls Royce are receiving data from the satellite. To do this, the data would be transferred across the terrestrial fibre network from an earth station to the data processing centre. For example, the data could be going through Inmarsat Indian Ocean which is out of line of sight range from the Rolls Royce processing centre (Chester?) and would either need to be transferred through another satellite (Atlantic Ocean East?) or more likely in the fibre network.

There are lots of ways to receive data from an aircraft in flight, but unless the 'multi spectrum receiver' is within line of sight range of the aircraft it has to be listening on the downlink frequencies from the satellite.

Satellites are linear devices, whatever goes in on the uplink comes out on the downlink, all the clever stuff happens later. If the smart stuff was in the satellite itself it would soon become obsolete, it costs too much to put these things in orbit to be replacing them every time someone comes up with a more advanced data transmission scheme.

I'm trying not to get too technical here but for example, the satellite could be launched when 64QAM is a common modulation scheme but within it's 15 or so years anticipated lifetime it would be expected to handle 128, 256, 512 QAM modulation schemes, these are all schemes that are around now and the higher level schemes weren't in common use even 5 years ago. If the satellite wasn't a linear device then it wouldn't be a lot of use after say 5 years. I'm not saying these schemes are in use on the civilian satellites, or even the military for that matter but I hope I've got the concept across here. What happens is that 64QAM can transmit say 100Mbit/s in an available satellite (RF) bandwidth, 128QAM would allow 200Mbit/s in the same bandwidth, 256QAM 400Mbit/s and so on, doubling the data transfer rate each time the modulation scheme increases.

I have to say that although I have worked on satellite systems I haven't done so recently, I work on terrestrial microwave links that do use the modulation schemes I am referring to (and higher). On those systems the higher modulation schemes need a more robust transmission system so eventually the technology does go beyond the capability of the older 'state of the art' devices and they do need replacement.

Or to put it another way, we have technology that allows a consumer to watch movies on his / her phone whilst on a tube train, I'm quite sure we could identify data from any aircraft if it appears in the uplink of a communication satellite (what goes up must come down).

Time for bed, 55 today.

Sure I follow that.
Key points are:
1) What information is included in the "Handshake"?
2) Where is that information processed and the decision to reject the handshake done?
3) Where is this recorded?
4) Who else records these transmissions?

Inmarsat have global coverage with a quite small constellation of satellites. It's very probably that the DOD has similar assets recording the same data.

 

[aguero93:20]

Think that's the Aran islands mate.

This gets more bizarre by the minute, saying now it was tracked by radar flying towards the Andaman Islands, a quick google shows they are on the way to India
Transponder switched off by hand and flight direction point to a highjacking they are now saying

Or the pilot fancied an authentic chicken biryani

Aren't the Andaman Islands where the tribesmen kill any fucker that goes there?

 

[SamCity123]

Think that's the Aran islands mate.

Or the pilot fancied an authentic chicken biryani

Aren't the Andaman Islands where the tribesmen kill any fucker that goes there?

I heard it's only if you go as a couple. A woman Andaman together.


Coat.

 

[Tuearts right boot]

The Mrs and I were just having a chat about this plane,and,thinking on my feet I resorted to BM only to find out that the plane is still missing and not one BMer has a clue as to it's whereabouts.We have pilots, lawyers, airport workers, mad axe men and an general assortment of perverts on here,surely someone knows. Sort it out, I'm off shopping.

 

[dazdon]

The Mrs and I were just having a chat about this plane,and,thinking on my feet I resorted to BM only to find out that the plane is still missing and not one BMer has a clue as to it's whereabouts.We have pilots, lawyers, airport workers, mad axe men and an general assortment of perverts on here,surely someone knows. Sort it out, I'm off shopping.

The MCcanns and canal prodders alike get short shrift here and 'evidence' isn't repressed.

Viva the interpol section of BM ;-)