'Contact lost' with Malaysia Airlines plane

Django x2 said:
Last thought from me....There was a CT nut job who questioned why they needed the Ocean Sheild to tow such a small tiny Pinger Locator.
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Well the Ocean Shield is designated as a humanitarian and disaster relief vessel by the Australian navy, & ide certainly consider the finding of flight MA 370 a humanitarian mission, hence why it's probably there.
 
Presumably, the Ocean Shield would be able to do clever stuff like making dynamic adjustments to the the depth of the ping locator based on the topography of the ocean bed as the ship moves around.
 
Django x2 said:
Last thought from me....There was a CT nut job who questioned why they needed the Ocean Sheild to tow such a small tiny Pinger Locator. Whilst I admit, it's pretty chunky vessel, I assume that an object of relative size so far down being pulled would create an immense amount of drag which a smaller boat would struggle to overcome?
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Well these ships are made to go to sea for weeks if not months at a time so need to be a decent size to support the crew and carry supplies and the southern ocean has some the most mountaneous waves on earth

they're not going last long in a dinghy are they?
 
Blackjack Davy said:
Well these ships are made to go to sea for weeks if not months at a time so need to be a decent size to support the crew and carry supplies and the southern ocean has some the most mountaneous waves on earth

they're not going last long in a dinghy are they?
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IIRC it's also designed to work with sub sea stuff and support ROV type operations I think, and the heli pad it has looks big enough to probably allow big copters to land on it, which could be handy.

Although it's not really that big a ship compared to a lot of other ships, it's only about 100 meters long, freighters that wish to pass through the Panama canal are limited to about 250-300 meters I think (and ones that don't can be much larger).
 
Django x2 said:
Send the sub down already!!
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Send it down where?
They need to have a fairly accurate fix on the signal before they bother sending anything down.

Look at the pictures of the Air France debris on the bottom - visibility is around 10metres, and that is not quite as deep.
It would take hundreds of times longer to do a visual search with a sub compared to an audio search with a sonobuoy.
 
It doesn't need to have visibility. If the ROV is fitted with an acoustic listener and it's roughly in the vicinity of the "pings" it surely can only help to enhance the search, listen for the pings and narrow down the field further.
 
Django x2 said:
It doesn't need to have visibility. If the ROV is fitted with an acoustic listener and it's roughly in the vicinity of the "pings" it surely can only help to enhance the search, listen for the pings and narrow down the field further.
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In that case, how would the sub be doing anything different from the acoustic listeners that they are already using?

I'm sure that the Australians know what they are doing. If the submarine could help, they would already have it down there (maybe they do?).
 
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touch said:
Send it down where?
They need to have a fairly accurate fix on the signal before they bother sending anything down.
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We've had so many ping detections now that we could trace it down to a single atom. :p

This is yet another incident that shows how badly the black box technology needs updating, 30 days is not enough of a guaranteed minimum battery life!
 
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Energize said:
We've had so many ping detections now that we could trace it down to a single atom. :p

This is yet another incident that shows how badly the black box technology needs updating, 30 days is not enough of a guaranteed minimum battery life!
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Technologies are in place on about 30% of the Boeing planes already due to regulation. It is just luck this one has not been fitted yet due to the time frame given to the manufacturers.

I might be wrong on this one, but I am sure they are also suppose to increase ping battery life to 90 days (after Atlantic Air France), but again there is a lead up time to do this and MH370 has not be updated.
 
Catanonia said:
Technologies are in place on about 30% of the Boeing planes already due to regulation. I am not sure of the details, but it is to do with enhanced live data feeds from the plane. It is just luck this one has not been fitted yet due to the time frame given to the manufacturers.

I might be wrong on this one, but I am sure they are also suppose to increase ping battery life to 90 days (after Atlantic Air France), but again there is a lead up time to do this and MH370 has not be updated.
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Devlish said:
I thought the range of the pings was about 2.5 km - surely if theyre hearing them we can at least say roughly where the sub should head.
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If you look at the inset at the top-right of the image here you can see that the distances between the spots where signals were recorded are themselves at least ten kilometres apart.

We discussed earlier in the thread how the ocean is stratified and, as a result, can behave in a non-linear way in terms of propagating acoustic waves.
 
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